''I hate my parents. They're so mean and and they never understand me. I'll bet they're not my real parents...one day my real parents will come save me. They might be royalty, or magical...''

A trope with its base in RagsToRoyalty. It takes an OrdinaryHighSchoolStudent (or elementary school student) and whisks them off to meet their real family, whose lives are always more glamorous, dangerous, and full of adventure than the dull foster family the hero has been living with, and [[ThickerThanWater delighted to meet this stranger who happens to be a blood relative]]. This may involve going DownTheRabbitHole if not hopping cities or countries.

Or, more rarely, they have been living with the [[ObliviousAdoption unusual parents]] all along, who are pulling off an elaborate {{Masquerade}} to keep the truth from them until the [[BrokenMasquerade time is right.]]

If the two families are not the same, the foster family is usually a cartoonishly abusive and unloving bunch. They tell the hero that they'll never amount to anything, and they had better not think about [[RoyalBlood royalty]] or magic. Most shows won't even bother revisiting the foster family after the first episode, except (maybe) to have them show up as minor dupes of the BigBad later. The plot has obvious appeal for any teen who has ever felt unloved. (Piling on the {{Glurge}} is optional.)

In both television and other media, this is an increasingly SubvertedTrope. The most common subversion is for the adventures to be so dangerous that the hero decides IJustWantToBeNormal. The second most common is for the real family to be unpleasant people, possibly even the BigBad.

Perhaps this is due to the greater acceptance of adoption today. It used to be extremely taboo and "shameful" to discover that one was adopted. Nowadays the ChangelingFantasy is evolving into dualism; with the main character having one foot in both worlds. Yes, they have a fantastic lineage; but it's their down-to-earth family that ultimately shaped their values.

Often overlaps with MosesInTheBullrushes and/or SwitchedAtBirth and sometimes with IJustWantToBeSpecial. In terms of characterization; it's similar to being a HalfHumanHybrid.

----
!!Straight Examples:

[[foldercontrol]]

[[folder: Anime and Manga ]]

* The heroine of ''TheTwelveKingdoms''.
* In the manga version of ''MermaidMelodyPichiPichiPitch'', Lucia has been living with Nikora all along, but hasn't been told she's a princess.
* MartianSuccessorNadesico: [[LittleMissSnarker Ruri Hoshino]], after having lived the bulk of her life as a lab experiment, discovers her real family - who are the CloudCuckoolander royalty of a ThemePark-based {{Ruritania}}. She ultimately decides that her biological family is completely irrelevant to her life.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Comic Books ]]

* ''[[AmethystPrincessOfGemworld Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld]]''.
* ''{{Superman}}'' values both his Kryptonian heritage and his foster-parents. However, this perception varies from medium to medium or even from [[DependingOnTheWriter writer to writer]].

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Film ]]

* ''ThePrincessDiaries'' films.
* [[StarWars Luke Skywalker]].
* ''PansLabyrinth''. Although Ofelia rather loves her human mother, and seems to have loved her long-dead father, it's presented as an unambiguously better thing to live in the underworld full of magic. Mostly because dad is dead, mom is very weak-willed, and new stepdad is a zealous fascist. Unlike most examples, Guillermo del Toro actually takes into account [[HumansAreBastards the implications of such a statement]].

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Literature ]]

* The ''HarryPotter'' series, of course... then again, both of Harry's parents are dead -- and most of the other parental figures he acquires either abuse or betray him, or are killed. And the Dursleys who raised him get slightly sympathetic by the end.
* This is the entire point of the new book series ''The39Clues'' in where two children find themselves to be heirs to the most powerful family on Earth!
* [[spoiler: Kaye]] from Holly Black's ''{{Modern Tales of Faerie}}'' is a literal changeling, swapped as an infant for a human baby. She later meets the child she was switched with, who has aged only a few years in the Seelie Court.
* One of the stranger examples comes completely out of left field in JudyBlume's ''Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing'', to which ''Superfudge'' is the more famous sequel. Peter has an argument with his mom, storms off to his room, and practically recites the page quote above. "I'll bet my ''real'' mom is a beautiful princess" and everything. The thing is, this (as mentioned below) is... not ''exactly'' a trope associated with the male psyche.
* Subverted heavily in the ''VorkosiganSaga'', when Elena finally meets her mother. [[spoiler:Turns out she was raped and wanted nothing to do with Elena]]. Then [[spoiler:she killed Bothari]].
* ''OliverTwist'' by CharlesDickens is a low-rent version, where the missing parent turns out to be middle-class -- but given that the title character was thoroughly poverty-stricken, it's a major leg up.
* In Eva Ibbotson's ''The Star of Kazan'', the main character, Annika, a [[MosesInTheBulrushes foundling]], despite having a loving family, endlessly dreams of the rich woman who will sweep into the house one day and tearfully ask for the baby she abandoned in a church years ago. Of course, when such a woman really does appear, Annika finds that she does not like life as a [[AristocratsAreEvil noblewoman's daughter]] and, at the end of the book, [[spoiler: is perfectly willing to accept that the woman is not her real mother, as expressed by her ''jumping off of a boat'' to get away from her.]]
* In CSLewis's ''[[{{Narnia}} The Horse And His Boy]]'', Shasta turns out, in the end, to be a prince. Unusually, this is revealed only after the climax; he went through the entire book believing himself to be a commoner.
* In AndreNorton's ''Scarface'', at the end, Captain Cheap reveals that he has his RevengeByProxy: Justin Blade is the son of his old enemy Sir Robert Scarlett and will hang as a {{Pirate}}. Whereupon he learns that Justin's case had been remanded on new evidence even before they learned this.
* Ham-handedly done in Christopher Paolini's ''[[TheInheritanceCycle Eragon]]'', the plot of which was largely [[strike:plagiarized]] adapted from ''StarWars IV: A New Hope''.
* In the sixth book of L. J. Smith's ''Nightworld'' series, ''Soulmate'', Hannah learns that she is an olld soul, and emotionally related to Thierry.
* In JamesThurber's ''The13Clocks'', at the end, the [[AristocratsAreEvil Wicked Duke]] reveals that the Princess Saralinda is not his niece; he had kidnapped her.
*The Baudelaires from A Series of Unfortunate Events: their normal lives as heirs to an 'enormous fourtune', are turned epically into running away from Count Olaf. [[spoiler: After all this, they abbandon themselves on an island for a year or two, for no apparent reason]].
* ''Extremely'' subverted in {{Coraline}}. The Other Mother is, in fact [[spoiler: an evil faerie]] and the Other Father is [[spoiler: her creature. And, of course the other world is a horrible place to live.]] In the end Coraline is very happy to have parents like she has.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Live Action TV ]]

* Connor, from ''AngelTheSeries''. The [[AWizardDidIt son of two vampires]], he was abducted as a baby and raised in a Hell Dimension by a fanatical demon hunter, eventually returning to Earth as a teenager. His memories are later replaced with an elaborate web of fake ones, allowing him to live an ordinary teenage life... until a demon tied to his past comes looking for him...
** Thankfully, he at least gets to keep his elaborate web of fake ones, thus making him not AxCrazy.
* Odo in ''StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'' discovered that he was actually a member of a dangerous race of [[VoluntaryShapeshifting shapeshifters]] who were also the leaders of [[TheEmpire The Dominion]], the BigBad of the series. Bonus points here, because his species was (due to their powers) actually ''called'' "changelings". This was presumably an intentional joke.
** Subverted by the fact that it's evident from the beginning that Odo is from another species (its more the revelation of what place his species occupy in the Dominion that comes as the shock) and by the fact that Odo's adoptive culture is friendlier then his home culture.
** The more regular explanation for the name "Changeling" the the Founders' ability to impersonate humanoids and use this for infiltration - that's what the Changelings did in legends (pretended to be human and corrupted others).
* Inverted by ''{{Lost}}'': Alex learns she's not really the daughter of the leader of the Others, but that of a crazy woman who lives in the jungle. She's still happy about it, though.
* This was [[BigBad arch-villain]] Sylar's StartOfDarkness on ''Series/{{Heroes}}''. It was further played with in Volume 3, with two wealthy [[EvilGenius Evil Geniuses]] each gaining his loyalty by claiming he really ''was'' adopted, and that they were his ''real'' parents (when he found out that it was all complete BS, he killed one and almost killed the other). In Volume 4 they have Sylar's ChangelingFantasy actually turn out to be ''true'', in that he really was adopted, and his biological father turns out to have been a powerful supervillain.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Video Games ]]

* Cecil in ''FinalFantasyIV'' is adopted by the [[AllThereInTheManual King of Baron]]. His mother was a normal human, of whom blissfully little is said, his dad was an alien from the moon. In a subversion. we later learn that his adoptive father-figure, the King of Baron, was not a human either, but the Eidolon Odin.
** A similar tune with Terra in ''FinalFantasyVI'' except her dad was an Esper. She also wasn't so much adopted as ''"brainwashed"'' and mind controlled. For someone who spent most of her life that way, she takes it surprisingly well.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Webcomics ]]

*In ''GirlGenius'' Agatha didn't know that she's the last in the line of a dynasty of {{Mad Scientist}}s, or that her adoptive parents were their iconic assistants Punch and Judy (she did know they were Frankenstein-esque "constructs"). Though she preferred her normal life.
** In a subversion of sorts, [[spoiler: her mother was a CompleteMonster... and has tried to possess Agatha, partically succeeding.]]

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Web Original ]]

* WhateleyUniverse example: introverted Bill Wilson has no idea that he's about to manifest as a mutant, or that his parents are not only mutants themselves, but ''they work for the CIA as mutant superheroes''. Or that his older brother and younger brother are actually mutants themselves (they don't know this yet either). This family is about to have a lot of 'splainin' to do.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Western Animation ]]

* In a nearly forgotten cartoon series called ''{{Wildfire}}'', an 'ordinary American cowgirl' named Sara turns out to be the princess of a realm from which she was removed in infancy for her own safety. Later in the series she discovers that [[spoiler: the man she lives with as her 'adopted' father is her true father the Prince, exiled for his own safety and brainwashed to forget his heritage, presumably to keep him from trying to return.]]
* Don Bluth's {{Anastasia}} is a long-lost, amnesiac Russian princess. (With an interesting twist: prior to her discovery of her true heritage, she plans to ''pretend'' she's the princess and takes appropriate lessons in history and protocol. Then she's in for a surprise when the BigBad, who swore to destroy the entire royal family, comes after her...)

!!Subversions and Parodies:

[[foldercontrol]]

[[folder: Anime and Manga ]]

* Deconstructed in ''{{Berserk}}'', where a young girl named Rosine offers up her parents' lives to the Godhand to become a fairy (or rather, a demon that takes the shape of a fairy). She then makes the same offer to other children, transforming them into insectile pseudodemons that can ''look'' like fairies (to the disgust of Puck, an actual elf). Her mistake is [[spoiler:trying to make the offer to her former best friend, Jill, because said friend happens to have just met Guts]].
* ''SailorMoon'' meets her mother from a past lifetime (her parents were still her parents in this life) and turns out to be the heir to a magical kingdom. Of course, [[IJustWantToBeNormal she just wants to be normal]].
* ''AyashiNoCeres'' has the real parents using the {{Masquerade}} -- and utterly evil.
* {{Bleach}} has the protagonist grow up in a relatively normal, if somewhat wacky, household. Well, except for that whole "ability to perceive ghosts" thing. What Kurosaki Ichigo doesn't know is [[spoiler: that his father is also some sort of shinigami himself and has been so from the beginning. That raises a lot of questions about his true purpose and origins.]]
* In AshitaNoNadja, [[spoiler: Rosemary]] likes to think she'll somehow find herself in the middle of this. When [[spoiler: her best friend Nadja]] is revealed to be a lost noblewoman... [[GoMadFromTheRevelation she]] [[FreakOut snaps]]. [[BodyDouble Big]], [[BitchInSheepsClothing BIG]] [[ManipulativeBastard time.]]

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Comic Books ]]

* Ditto with the comic book ''{{Runaways}}'', with the added punch that the evil parents [[KnightTemplarParent committed all their crimes to help their children]].
* Also parodied in Mark Millar's comic book mini-series ''Wanted'', where the real family is evil and the "hero" decides he wants to become just like them.
* Rather savagely parodied in ''TheSandman'', in which a dream-avatar cuckoo sums up this trope with the line "Girls' fantasies are much simpler — their families aren't their families, their lives aren't their lives. Little cuckoos."
* Subverted in {{Bone}} by [[BadAssGrandpa Badass Grandma]] Rose Ben being a member of the young [[TheMessiah Thorn's]] real family as well. Thorn wasn't so much adopted as she was stolen away by her grandmother for her safety, who's just as much a hidden royal as Thorn is. As Thorn goes through the story and returns to her rightful position, Grandma Ben is right alongside her (for the [[IJustWantToBeNormal most part]]), returning to her royal position also.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Film ]]

* Subverted in the Belgian film ''Toto Le Héros'', where this is a children's fantasies returning again to him on his senile dementia against his rich neighbor.
* Inverted in ''The Prince of Egypt'': Moses believes himself to be Egyptian royalty until he bumps into a Hebrew slave who fiercely insists that she is his sister, and that he's Hebrew as well. When the woman he thought to be his mother confirms this to be true, and that she first found MosesInTheBullrushes, he [[HeroicBSOD doesn't take it very well.]] In [[TheBible the source material]], his real mother served as his wet nurse, and he grew up knowing the truth.
* In DavidLynch's ''The Elephant Man'', the title character occasionally expresses a wish to find his real mother, on the hope that she could "love me as I am." What makes this so tragic is the subtle implication (which is historically true, by the way) that she clearly abandoned him for being... [[TheGrotesque well, you know]].

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Literature ]]

* ''[[CosmicHorrorStory The Shadow Over Innsmouth]]'', by [[HPLovecraft H.P. Lovecraft]], features a young man who travels to New England to explore his genealogy and who ultimately learns that his great-grandmother was the queen of a race of amphibious fish-people, and that he is destined to eventually metamorphosize into a fish-person himself. But once you actually ''are'' a fish-person, you think it's totally awesome.
** ''Tales of Innsmouth'' is a collection of stories by various authors, one of which raises the point that said fish-people will be Very Vengeful about their city being torpedoed thanks to his running to the authorities- the protagonist finds the perfectly preserved flayed skin of the original character. He is still alive as a skinless fish-man though.
* ''GreatExpectations'' by CharlesDickens parodies the entire trope.
* For an unusual (and very Byzantine) subversion, see Caroline Cooney's teen novel ''The Face on the Milk Carton'' and its sequels.
* Several of Caitlin R. Kiernan's novels feature "the Changelings": human children who have been abducted from their birth families and inducted into a cabal of subterraean monsters as servants and soldiers. A few of the so-called "Children of the Cuckoo" express longing for normal, human lives.
* In ''TheHunchbackOfNotreDame'', Quasimodo's birth parents are glamourous and exciting gypsies, but they abandoned him on the steps of a church, where BigBad Archdeacon Claude Frollo - about 16 at the time - took him in ''[[AntiVillain out of kindness]]''. Naturally, Disney couldn't cope with all this moral ambiguity, and in their version, Quasi's birth parents were very loving, and Frollo killed them, taking the child in out of guilt, and not even raising it himself.
* Harshly deconstructed in the ''Family Trade'' series by CharlesStross. All the elements are there: Miriam Beckstein discovers she is the daughter of a powerful noble family with seemingly-magical powers from a medieval kingdom in another world, where she is engaged to marry a prince. But her family turns out to be an amoral organized-crime family that uses their magical powers for drug smuggling; the other world is by modern standards a squalid hellhole, where women have no rights; the prince is mentally retarded, and she is expected to marry him with no argument for the political advantage of her family, regardless of whether she wants to.
* In EdgarRiceBurroughs's ''Son of {{Tarzan}}'', the [[DamselInDistress heroine]] Meriem is the kidnapped daughter of a French general, and reunited with her parents in the end after being raised by an Arab who kidnapped her out of {{Revenge}}.
* Neal Stephenson's ''The Diamond Age'' is an interesting subversion. Nell is ''actually'' the biological child of Brad and Tequila, but over the course of the novel she comes to believe that her true mother is the woman who she can feel speaking to her through her Primer. [[spoiler: And to some extent, she is correct: Miranda does behave far more like a parent to Nell than either Brad or Tequila, notably by sacrificing her own career and freedom to make sure Nell will be safe.]]

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Live Action TV ]]

* Tossed, seemingly at random, into Quinn's backstory for the SciFi Channel seasons of ''{{Sliders}}''.
**Although, originally, this was planned to be a complicated ruse engineered by the [[Big Bads]], that would be revealed at the end of the season.
* Subverted in ''KyleXY'' at the end of the first season where the main character supposedly found his real parents. In fact, [[spoiler:Kyle was grown in a lab, the parents are actors, and Kyle goes along with the plan to protect his adoptive family, a situation which lasts a whole episode and then requires Kyle to make up another story for why he's returned.]]

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Real Life ]]

*The African dictator Jean-Bedel Bokassa tracked down his long-lost illegitimate daughter, who was living in poverty, and brought her back to live with him. Which makes the "evil real family" subversion an example of TruthInTelevision.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Theater ]]

* Subverted by Calderon's ''Life is a Dream'', where Segismund grows up in a prison, because it was prophecied that [[OedipusRex he would one day kill his father, the king.]] When he is reunited with his father and discovers that he's a prince, he's too angry to be overjoyed.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Webcomics ]]

* Direct [[InvertedTrope inversion]] in ''Rêveillerie'': Emelind is a literal changeling, but she considers the universe where she was raised to be her true home.
* In ''TheInexplicableAdventuresOfBob,'' Rocko Sasquatch is shocked to learn he is actually [[spoiler: a [[BigfootSasquatchAndYeti Sasquatch!]] (Did that really need a spoiler tag? Oh well.) His tribe abandoned him because he was born bald.]]

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Western Animation ]]

*''{{WITCH}}'' uses the "evil real family" subversion, with a surprising lack of GenreBlindness -- the BigBad is aware of this trope and exploits it.
* Disney's ''{{Hercules}}'' TV series had the lead's dull foster parents turn up to a parent evening, rather than his divine parents like he expected.
*''{{Rugrats}}'', "Princess Angelica": Angelica convinces herself she's really a princess, and when the "Home Office King" comes to fix her mother's fax machine, stows away in his truck.
* ''The Adventures Of SonicTheHedgehog'' had Tails adopted by a loving fox family who later turned out to be robots created by Dr. Robotnik to capture him. Sonic, of course, is completely unaware of the ruse, and spends most of the episode debating whether or not letting Tails go was the right thing to do.
* ''{{Futurama}}'': Leela, who only has one eye, believes she's an orphaned or abandoned alien, and dreams of meeting her species; later in the series, she discovers that her parents are mutants. Since mutants are [[FantasticRacism second-class citizens relegated to the sewers]], her parents figured their relatively normal-looking daughter would live a better life if everyone believed she was an alien.
* In the ''BattleTech'' animated series, Franklin Sakamoto is kidnapped [[spoiler: by his second-in-command, who had been secretly watching over him the whole time. It is revealed that Sakamoto was the illegitimate son of the Coordinator of the Draconis Combine. With the legitimate heir captured by the Clans, a group of hard-liners decide to use him as a figurehead, so they could remove the aging Takashi Kurita. Franklin escapes them, and in front of both the hardliners and the Combine agents sent to kill him, renounces his claim on the throne. Double-subverted in the game itself, as, after the events of the series, the Coordinator and his family accept him anyway.]]

----
<<|OlderThanDirt|>>
<<|{{Plots}}|>>