Good Morning, Crono

She used all those instruments to try to wake him. Even the minigun.

"I know how much you like to sleep in, so I'm guessing this letter will be your alarm clock this morning. Did I guess right?"

— Zelda, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword ^note (She did)

Heroes usually don't start their adventure out in the thick of combat. That would just be cruel, unless they're being forced to undergo Training from Hell. In many cases, if the main character is no more than sixteen years of age, they'll likely start the game in bed, sleepy and bleary-eyed. A sibling, parental figure or, if it's a more romantic genre, Patient Childhood Love Interest will usually be the one to awaken the hero, informing him/her that they're Late for School/an audience with the king/a date with their love interest.

In Video Games, it very often begins with a dialog box on an otherwise empty black screen, which fades in to reveal the hero in bed after the person speaking has yelled at him to wake up a few times.

Depending on how connected the character is to what is to come, there may be a prophetic dream as a form of prologue beforehand.

This is an easy way to get the character into their Morning Routine, giving the audience a tour of their daily life. It may not look good for the character if they wake up and find out they can't remember a thing about themselves.

Related to what the Turkey City Lexicon refers to as "White Room Syndrome," which is symbolic of the author starting the story without any idea of the plot or characters.

A form of Easing into the Adventure. May be the "wake up and go to school" in Wake Up, Go to School & Save the World. Compare Morning Routine. Not to be confused with Dream Intro.

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Example subpages:

• Video Games

Examples

Anime and Manga

• 21 Emon: Episode 1 begins with 21 Emon waking up. He's told multiple times to wake up before he finally falls out of his bed and wakes up.
• Attack on Titan also starts with a prophetic dream, though the content of the dream differs between the anime and the manga.
• Bleach: Isshin Kurosaki tries this on Ichigo a few times but is foiled by the fact that Ichigo is already up and doesn't like being kicked in the face
• Cardcaptor Sakura wakes up from a prophetic dream at the beginning of the first episode, as well as many others before the end of the Clow Card Arc.
• Chrono Crusade starts this way as well, although with a bit of a twist. In the manga, Chrono is sleeping in a car when Rosette gets a call to go on a mission. When he's slow to get up, Rosette (literally) kicks him out of the car. In the anime, both Chrono and Rosette are asleep in their car when they get the call—Chrono wakes up first and gently wakes up Rosette, since he's worried Sister Kate won't want to speak to him.
• The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan: The first scene involves Ryōko waking a sleeping Yuki in a painful fashion.
• Excel♡Saga episode 4, in its parody of Dating Sims, has this: Excel looms over the bed telling the player to wake up, or they will be Late for School. In the game, Il Palazzo kills Excel before even leaving the room because she lied to force him out of bed, earning a bad ending.
• Haibane Renmei starts with a dream the main character has immediately before hatching from her cocoon, and spends most of the first few episodes having the world of haibane explained to her, as she has no memory of who she is or where she's from.
• Imaizumin-chi wa Douyara Gal no Tamariba ni Natteru Rashii: ~DEEP~: The manga starts with Imaizumi waking up with Reina holding his bulging pants.
• Jewelpet: Magical Change: After the prologue with the 7 years old Airi, we meet her 14 years old self waking up to her alarm clock.
• The borderline Kid Hero of Last Exile, Claus is introduced to us under this guideline. He's a hell of a pilot but it takes multiple strikes on a battered sheet of steel/iron to get him awake so he can inadvertently change modern warfare as Prester knows it.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha's first scene has Nanoha being woken up by her cell phone, which apparently has a built-in alarm clock, and her father, notes he’s impressed that she’s able to get up on her own.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion:
  • Spoofed in the final episode of the series. Shinji is shown a vision of an alternate life for himself, in which his life is more like a typical shounen series — including being woken up by Asuka because he's late for school.
  • This is exactly how the Neon Genesis Evangelion: Angelic Days spin-off manga starts. Which makes sense, as said manga takes place in the same alternate universe—which is explicitly stated to be a real alternate universe.
• Parodied in Oreimo. Kyousuke gets woken up by his mildly tsundere little sister in a stereotypically cute fashion; but he immediately realizes this is implausible and, right after a Title Drop, he wakes up for real, having fallen out of bed while dreaming about his little sister waking him up.
• Pokémon: The Series: The anime begins this way, with Ash oversleeping and being late to get a Pokemon from Professor Oak, although missing the first three is how he ended up with Pikachu.
• Pokémon Adventures: Gold's introduction in his arc, being woken up for some errands.
• Parodied in the first episode of the Pop Team Epic anime. Popuko wakes up and hurries to school, only to crash into Pipimi. Pipimi lends her a hand while the background turns into Your Name's poster but Popuko ruins the mood and a nuclear bomb goes off, resetting her back to bed. This time Popuko crashes into Pipimi right outside her house and gets killed for refusing to hand back her pendant. Popuko then wakes up yet again but she's now in a hut in the wilderness all of a sudden and...
• Princess Tutu opens with Ahiru having a nightmare and tumbling out of her bed.
• Project A-Ko starts with just this trope. Moreover, because she has superpowers, she does a lot of collateral damage rushing to school.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica starts with an Action Prologue, which turns out to be All Just a Dream and becomes a Good Morning, Crono. After a few episodes, it switches to Or Was It a Dream?.
• Sailor Moon.
  • The whole series begins with Usagi Tsukino waking up from a weird dream.
  • When Minako got an episode centered on her during the first anime's R season, it also started with her sleeping in.
• The Twelve Kingdoms begins with Yoko having a dream about a strange man, an important character who continues to taunt her for much of the first arc.
• X1999 also begins with a "prophetic dream" really a few moments of the dreamer's next day at school.
• YuruYuri begins with Akari hitting the snooze button and going back to bed, until Kyoko abuses the doorbell, jarring her out of bed and making her realize she's going to be Late for School

Comic Books

• Superman:
  • Bizarrogirl starts out with Supergirl waking up from a nightmare.
  • The Unknown Supergirl begins with Linda Danvers waking up and noticing the first sign of trouble.
  • The Phantom Zone: In the first page, Charlie Kweskill, the story's tritagonist, is awoken up by his chief Perry White's shouts.
• Super Metroid begins with Samus waking up from a nightmare and going about her routine patrol before picking up a distress call coming from a space station.

Fan Works

• Worm/The DCU crossover Echoes of Yesterday starts out with Supergirl coming around and noticing she's lying on a dumpster instead of sleeping in her bed.
• Funeral for a Flash opens with Wally West being awakened from sleep by someone knocking on his door.
• Hellsister Trilogy's second story arc starts out with Dev-Em being awoken by his girlfriend.
• Kara of Rokyn: "Kara and the Dreamsmith", the chapter which kicks off the proper Fan Verse, begins when Dream of the Endless wakes Kara Zor-El up.
• Kirby Of The Stars The After Story: After the prologue, the story opens with Kirby being woken up by Fumu and Bun.
• The Legend of the Princess starts with Princess Zelda waking from a nightmare.
• The Legend of Zelda: Book of the Traitor: Chapter 2, the chronological start to the heroes' adventure, starts with Link waking up from a nightmare.
• Second Bloom starts when Sakura gets out of bed.
• The Second Try: Shinji and Asuka's time-travel adventures begin when they wake up and realize that they’ve gone back to the past.
• Chrono Trigger Self-Insert Fic A Step Onto Chronos starts when the main character's alarm clock sounds.
• In Thousand Shinji, the story's second half begins after a Time Skip when Shinji wakes up from a coma and Rei informs him that everything has gone to Hell in his absence.
• Warp begins with Victoria Dallon waking up on her bed in his old room, four years in the past.
• You Are (Not) At Fault starts with Shinji waking up and finding himself lying on a beach right after the Apocalypse.

Films — Animation

• "A dream is a wish your heart makes/When you're fast asleep..."
• Kung Fu Panda starts out with Po awakening from a kickass, awesome dream (complete with the amusing touch of his father's voice coming out of the Furious Five's mouths) to find out he's late for work in the noodle shop. We then get to see his daily life, from his struggle to get out of bed and the posters and action figures he's collected, to his clutziness that prevents him from throwing a throwing star (and topples him ignominiously down the stairs) and the mess he makes of the dining area with his large size. And, of course, the boring, ordinary life that he longs to escape from.

Films — Live-Action

• Apocalypse Now: "Saigon. Shit! I'm still only in Saigon."
• Attack of the Killer Donuts: John's first scene in the movie is being woken up from sleep by his alarm clock, which he pushes off the drawer. Then his mom calls him, to which he responds that he's up.
• Being There opens with Chance the gardener being awakened by his television set, and as the opening credits roll we watch him as he gets up, tends to the garden (where there is a TV in the greenhouse), watches TV back up in his bedroom, and then goes down and waits for breakfast, watching TV while he does so. As Chance is a middle-aged man, this also serves as a good introduction to exactly what kind of person he is. And then the plot kicks in when the maid tells him the master of the house is dead.
• Don't Look: After the title, we see Nicole sleeping in the back of the car with some of her friends, one of whom (Lorena) wakes her up.
• Ghost Lab (2021): The movie begins with Dr. Wee being woken up by his cellphone ringing. He then sees he's surrounded by a bunch of scary-looking figures and lets out a scream... then his vision clears up and he sees that they're all mannequins.
• Horrorvision: Near the start of the movie, Dez is woken up by his girlfriend. First she tries talking him awake, and then smacks him in the butt when that doesn't work.
• Skammen: The film starts with Jan and Eva waking up to start a new day.

Literature

• Afterglow (2015) begins with Josie waking up from a nightmare, a few hours before she's supposed to.
• The Death of the Vazir Mukhtar begins with the main character waking up in his family's house in Moscow, having arrived there from Persia the day before. He then goes on social calls.
• The introduction to 10-year old Harry Potter, in both the book and film version, involves him being woken up by his Aunt banging on the door of the cupboard he sleeps in, demanding he make breakfast for his cousin. Even before that, when we are first introduced to Harry, he is happily sleeping in Hagrid's arms, ending up woken by Aunt Petunia's shriek when she opened the door to put out the milk bottles.
• Mother of Learning: Zorian's loop always begins with his little sister jumping on top of him and shouting "Good morning!" repeatedly.
• Phantastes: The story starts with Anodos waking up:
  I awoke one morning with the usual perplexity of mind which accompanies the return of consciousness.
• Sid Stills' Blues (Three-Quarters in the Bag in Alphabet City) begins with Sid being woken up by a phone call from his agent wanting him to watch a YouTube video of a musician named Nathan Vaughn doing a cover of one of his songs.

Live Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer wakes from dreams about monsters and rivers of blood to her mother Joyce yelling for her to get up before she's late for her first day at Sunnydale High.
• The pilot of ER begins with Dr Greene being woken up by a nurse. Several episodes in the first season (and, as a deliberate callback, the Grand Finale 15 years later) used this opening again, but with characters who had already been introduced.

Theater

• Dream Girl begins with Georgina being woken up by an alarm clock, followed by her mother calling her to get up. She then briefly listens to a radio program that drives her into another daydream, which ends with her mother calling her again. (Her age is 23 going on 24, however.)
• Pokémon Live! begins with Ash sleeping in and Pikachu shocking him awake.

Visual Novels

• Dōkyūsei starts with Cold Opening where the Player Character is awoken by a phone call from his friend, Kazuya, on the morning of the first day of his summer vacation.

Webcomics

• Like every other console RPG trope, it makes an appearance in Adventurers!
• In The Demon Archives, at the beginning of Chapter 1, Tenzin gets woken up early by his AI assistant for an urgent mission.
• Parson Gotti of Erfworld is introduced this way. Except that it's not his mother, but his alarm clock getting him up at 5:18 pm to work the graveyard shift at Kinko's. Is it any wonder that he wanted to be summoned to Erfworld?
• At the start of Homestuck Act III, Jade is properly introduced while sleeping as part of an Establishing Character Moment, so the narrator and the reader have to wait for her to wake up for a few pages. Luckily, she's written some notes for the reader in advance, e.g. a chastisement of the reader for attempting to name her "Farmstink Buttlass".

• In The Order of the Stick, Durkon's segment in "Origins of PCs" starts out with the high priest of Thor waking him up.
• Owen wakes up from a weird dream in the first scene of Project 0.

Web Original

• Season 3 of Red vs. Blue opens with Tucker waking up in the middle of the canyon after having been seriously injured and knocked out at the end of the previous season. Donut wakes him up out of boredom, and catches Tucker up on the events of the season 2 finale, helpfully giving the audience a recap on what the characters are doing now.
• Stellar Ranger Dark Star Series One starts with June in bed as her older brother tries to wake her up before she is late for her first day as a Stellar Ranger.

Western Animation

• The Legend of Zelda animated series began its first episode with Link waking up, in true Link fashion.
• The pilot episode of Rick and Morty had a Cold Open featuring Rick barging into Morty's room in the middle of the night to wake him up.

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