Changeling Fantasy - Television Tropes & Idioms

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...

One of The Oldest Ones In The Book with its base in Rags To Royalty. It takes an Ordinary High School Student (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. Or, more rarely, they have been living with the unusual parents all along, who are pulling off an elaborate Masquerade to keep the truth from them until the 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 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 Big Bad 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 Subverted Trope. The most common subversion is for the adventures to be so dangerous that the hero decides I Just Want To Be Normal. The second most common is for the real family to be unpleasant people, possibly even the Big Bad.

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 Changeling Fantasy 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 Moses In The Bullrushes and/or Switched At Birth. In terms of characterization; it's similar to being a Half Human Hybrid.

Straight Examples:

The Harry Potter series, of course... then again, both of Harry's parents are dead -- and every other parental figure he acquires either abuses or betrays him, or is killed.
The Princess Diaries films.
The novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens 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.
The heroine of the anime The Twelve Kingdoms.
Comic book example: Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld.
Luke Skywalker
In the manga version of Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch, Lucia has been living with Nikora all along, but hasn't been told she's a princess.
Superman values both his Kryptonian heritage and his foster-parents. However, this perception varies from medium to medium or even from writer to writer.
Connor, from Angel The Series. The 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 Ax Crazy.
Odo in Star Trek Deep Space Nine discovered that he was actually a member of a dangerous race of shapeshifters who were also the leaders of The Dominion, the Big Bad 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.
In Eva Ibbotson's The Star of Kazan, the main character, Annika, a 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 noblewoman's daughter and, at the end of the book, 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.

Subversions & Parodies:

In Berserk, 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 trying to make the offer to her former best friend, because said friend happens to have just met Guts.
The Shadow Over Innsmouth, by 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.
Sailor Moon 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, she just wants to be normal.
WITCH uses the "evil real family" subversion, with a surprising lack of Genre Blindness -- the Big Bad is aware of this trope and exploits it.
The anime Ayashi No Ceres has the real parents using the Masquerade -- and utterly evil.
Ditto with the comic book Runaways, with the added punch that the evil parents committed all their crimes to help their children.
The novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens parodies the entire trope.
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.
For an unusual (and very Byzantine) subversion, see Caroline Cooney's teen novel The Face on the Milk Carton and its sequels.
In the real world, 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 Truth In Television.
Tossed, seemingly at random, into Quinn's backstory for the Sci Fi Channel seasons of Sliders.
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 Sonic The Hedgehog 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 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 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.
The anime 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 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 the Battle Tech animated series, Franklin Sakamoto is kidnapped by his second-in-command, who had been secretly watching over him the whole time. It is revealed that Sakamoto father 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 Pretender to the throne, so they could remove the aging Takashi Kurita. Franklin escapes them, and in front of both the hardliners and the Coordinator's agents, renounces his claim on the throne.
Subverted in Kyle XY at the end of the first season where the main character supposedly found his real parents. In fact, 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.
Rather savagely parodied in The Sandman, 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."
Direct Inversion in Rêveillerie: Emelind is a literal changeling, but she considers the universe where she was raised to be her true home.

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