Three Wishes ##VERIFIED##
On the 4th of July Party, the titular wishes are being fulfilled. Gunny realizes his wish to fly in the middle of the fireworks, unseen by the public congregated in the park. Tom's wish is fulfilled when his long-lost father is discovered alive, and he returns home after being freed from his imprisonment by the People's Republic of China.
Three Wishes
We are a youth-led nonprofit organization that fulfills small wishes to nursing home seniors. We have fulfilled over 40,000 wishes since Ruby Chitsey's heartwarming story first hit the news in 2019. There are millions of charities but no one quite like us. We are led by kids, founded by a 10-year-old and fueled by the giant heart of a child. We have started a movement and we hope you will make a few more clicks and become a part of our story. Nursing home seniors need us now more than ever. Let us show you how to change the life of a nursing home senior. It just might be the best thing you ever do. Our mailing address is Three Wishes 102 W Stephenson Ave Harrison, AR 72601
The 3 Wishes Program (3WP) is a palliative care initiative in which clinicians elicit and implement final wishes for patients who are unfortunately imminently dying. By celebrating lives and dignifying the dying process, the goal of the program is to improve the end-of-life experience for all stakeholders, including the patient, the family, and the clinicians.
In most fiction, inanimate wish-granting objects (such as wishbones and birthday candles note though a monkey's paw is a notable exception.) tend to grant only one wish. But when you're fortunate enough to find a living creature that can grant wishes, you'll most likely receive three of them.
Related to the Rule of Three. For this to work, the person with the wishes has to not be Genre Savvy enough to know to use the first wish to wish for the knowledge and wisdom to know what to use the last two wishes for. The original version of this trope was a European fairytale with fairies as the wish granters; Djinns in Arab mythology don't a limited number of wishes in folklore. The oldest known case where genies have the "three wishes" rule is probably The Thief of Bagdad (1940).
See Mundane Wish when one of the wishes (typically the first one) is spent on something trivially minor. See also Be Careful What You Wish For, Wasteful Wishing. Can easily become a Story-Breaker Power if restrictions are loose; i.e being allowed to wish for more wishes or being allowed to write out long, elaborate wishes that string together dozens of unrelated things, thus effectively giving yourself unlimited wishes.
Asian Animation Happy Heroes: In Season 2 episode 20, Doctor H. finds a genie who grants him three wishes. Doctor H. immediately wishes to marry his Celeb Crush Miss Peach, but the genie places some unwanted side-effects on the wish due to him making the wish with no effort, and Doctor H. uses his other two wishes to take care of them. He still gets fed up and begs for everything to return to normal by the end of the episode.
Comic Books One strip of The Bash Street Kids in The Beano has the teacher discovering a Genie. He blows his first wish on wishing he wasn't so freaked out. He then wishes for all the kids to be smart. It happens, and teacher hears he's going to be out of job, so he wishes for all the kids to be stupid again.
Misty: The heroine of the story "The Evil Djinn" receives these after saving a Jerk Ass Genie from choking to death. The first two wishes (for legally gained wealth, and for the heroine's sister to be alive again) have negative consequences, so in an act of Laser-Guided Karma she uses the last wish to wish that she had never met the genie, and the genie dies.
Rick and Morty (Oni) Dungeons and Dragons Chapter II: Painscape: In an interesting variation, Rick does this with his second wish, after earning a magic wishing ring and using the first wish to return home from the alternate dimension in which he's trapped. By the time he does get home, his own version of Earth has been taken over by the D&D characters he created and many other monsters, and a large portion of the planet's population has been killed, including everyone in Rick's family. After he defeats his Big Bad OC, he uses wish #2 to return everything back to normal (complete with nobody else even remembering any of it), and tells the reader that the remaining third wish will be a Chekhov's Gun for Chapter III.
In one comic story a kid who's very cocky that he could run the world better than all the current leaders comes across a lamp with a genie that grants unlimited wishes. Every wish he makes ends up undone with another. Wishing for everyone to be a millionaires makes everyone too entitled to work, wishing for perfect health creates an overpopulation crisis and wishing for America to have sole military might leads to infighting with his friends that he realizes makes them too hypocritical to decide who should be in charge. Gaining some humility with the way things are, they give up the genie, which is apparently expected by it, as part of an aesop that everything worth having has to be earned or it'll backfire.
Fanfics In The Mermaid and the Genie, when Ursula steals the Genie's lamp from Ariel when Ariel has only used one wish to become human, Ariel is able to retrieve the lamp from Ursula and use her second wish to undo all of Ursula's wishes. In the same fic, Ursula is able to basically 'draw out' her third wish by wishing that Genie has to obey her so long as she's holding the lamp in one of her tentacles.
In the Invader Zim fanfic Gaz Dreams of Genie, Gaz shatters a genie bottle that Dib found just to spite him, which counts as opening it and frees the genie Azie to serve her. When Dib tries to warn her about using genie wishes, Gaz impulsively wishes he had never been born, erasing him and creating a reality where Zim has conquered Earth and she's a slave. She then uses her second wish to hit the Reset Button and undo this, before trying to figure out how to properly use her last wish. She attempts to get the ability to grant wishes herself, only for Azie to make them switch lives, leaving Gaz trapped in the restored bottle.
Literature In the Endless Quest book Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons, one of the items that the main character uses is a ring of wishes, which is used to stop the monsters that were attacking. There's then a paragraph discussing whether it's a three wish ring or a many wish ring, and trying a fourth from the three wish version will undo the previous ones. The reader is then given a choice whether or not to use another wish, and it turns out to be a three-wish version. Note that the reversal of wishes was specific to the book rather than the D&D ruleset the book is based upon.
The fairy tale the fairies is possibly the Trope Codifier - the wisher wastes the first wish (accidentally) wishing for sausages, then when his wife berates him for this he wishes that her nose was a sausage (again, without intending for it to be granted), and then has to spend the last wish undoing the second.
Used in the fairy tale "The Fisherman and His Wife": The henpecked fisherman catches a fish which says he'll grant him three wishes if he spares his life. The fisherman agrees, and wishes for a castle. The wife isn't satisfied and wants to be the Pope, so she sends the fisherman back to catch the magic flounder and get that wish fulfilled as well. Still not enough. Now she wants to be like God, so the fisherman gets sent back one last time. This wish undoes everything, as the fish interprets the wish in the context, as American Mcgees Grimm points out at the end, that God has no need for material possessions - in short, to "be like God" means absolute destitution, which is no big deal for the divine, but utter hell for the insatiable wife.
In another version, the fish doesn't limit the wishes to three, and the wife progresses up the social status ladder from the shabby hovel to a nice little cottage, then to Burgher to Bishop to King to Pope to God, and the "God" wish causes the fish to become so angry at the wife's greed that he retracts all the wishes, returning her to the shabby little hovel she started with.
In yet another version, the wife progressively makes more and more demanding wishes, and when the wife is about to make the ultimate wish, the fish is annoyed and says to the fisherman "Every time you come here, you bring a wish for your wife. Don't you have any wish of your own?" to which the fisherman replies "I just wish for my wife to be happy" to which the reset button is applied, and the couple are returned to their original poverty, but now the wife is satisfied with her lot in life and no longer seeks to rise in social status nor wealth. Awwww.
Another Fairy Tale that uses this is The Three Wishes, in which a a woodsman is granted three wishes by a fairy in return for not cutting down her tree. He returns home, but is hungry, but dinner won't be ready for hours. He wishes aloud that he had a "link of black pudding," which immediately appears before him. His wife, hearing the story about the fairy, calls her husband a fool and wishes the pudding was stuck to his nose, which ends up counting as the usage of the second wish. Try as they might, they can't pull it off, so they are forced to use the last wish to get the pudding unstuck. This story was remade as a Disney Book called Mickey's Magic Bottle, which revolves around Donald and Goofy finding a genie and being granted three wishes. (In a subversion of the "Three Wishes" trope, Donald and Goofy are each granted one wish, then they must share the third.) While trying to think about what they want to wish for, Goofy gets hungry and wishes he had a fine turkey dinner. He gets his wish, but Donald is angry for "wasting the wish" when they could have wished for enough food for a year, and accidentally wishes the drumstick was stuck to Goofy's nose, which uses his wish. Since, try as they might, they can't get the drumstick off, they're left with no choice but to use their shared wish to get the drumstick unstuck. "The Ludicrous Wishes": While this story is a little obscure, it may be the Trope Maker, as it dates to 1697 at the latest.
In "The Monkey's Paw" by W. W. Jacobs, the characters skip straight to wishing for lots of money. The second wish is then used in an attempt to undo the side-effects of the first wish (namely, the horrific death of their son), and the third wish to undo the side-effects of the second (fortunately without creating any new side-effects of its own).
Partially defied in "The Third Wish" by Joan Aiken; the main character is warned early that he'll likely end up using his third wish to undo the first two. Instead, he uses the second to undo the first, but is still happier than before, and dies with the third unspent.
Goosebumps: "Be Careful What You Wish For". First Samantha Byrd wishes that she would be the strongest member of the basketball team, but everyone else becomes weak. Then she wishes for Judith to stop bugging her, but everyone disappears. After Samantha resets the wishes, Judith accidentally wishes "Byrd, why don't you fly away?", turning her into a bird.
The Dresden Files: Inverted. Fairly early in the series, Harry ends up owing three favors to the Queen of Winter Faeries, Mab. As of Changes, he seems to have paid them all off, but even if becoming the Winter Knight counts as the third favor, he now has to follow her orders anyway.
The implications of this version of the trope are part of the ultimate solution in A Hat Full of Sky. The third wish is the one that undoes the harm of the first two because people don't think things through when they have that much power suddenly handed to them.
041b061a72