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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 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, and delighted to meet this stranger who happens to be a blood relative. This may involve going Down The Rabbit Hole if not hopping cities or countries.
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 and sometimes with I Just Want To Be Special. In terms of characterization; it's similar to being a Half Human Hybrid.
Straight Examples:
Anime and Manga
Comic Books
Film
- The Princess Diaries films.
- Luke Skywalker.
- Pans Labyrinth. 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 the implications of such a statement.
Literature
- The Harry Potter 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 The 39 Clues in where two children find themselves to be heirs to the most powerful family on Earth!
- 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 Judy Blume'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 Vorkosigan Saga, when Elena finally meets her mother. Turns out she was raped and wanted nothing to do with Elena. Then she killed Bothari.
- 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.
- 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.
- In CS Lewis's 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 Andre Norton's Scarface, at the end, Captain Cheap reveals that he has his Revenge By Proxy: 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 Eragon, the plot of which was largely
plagiarized adapted from Star Wars 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 James Thurber's The 13 Clocks, at the end, the 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. 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 an evil faerie and the Other Father is 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.
Live Action TV
- 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.
- 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 arch-villain Sylar's Start Of Darkness on Heroes. It was further played with in Volume 3, with two wealthy 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 Changeling Fantasy actually turn out to be true, in that he really was adopted, and his biological father turns out to have been a powerful supervillain.
Video Games
- Cecil in Final Fantasy IV is adopted by the 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 Final Fantasy VI 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.
Webcomics
- In Girl Genius Agatha didn't know that she's the last in the line of a dynasty of Mad Scientists, 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, her mother was a Complete Monster... and has tried to possess Agatha, partically succeeding.
Web Original
- Whateley Universe 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.
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 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 Big Bad, who swore to destroy the entire royal family, comes after her...)
Subversions and Parodies:
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 trying to make the offer to her former best friend, Jill, because said friend happens to have just met Guts.
- 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.
- Ayashi No Ceres 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 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 Ashita No Nadja, Rosemary likes to think she'll somehow find herself in the middle of this. When her best friend Nadja is revealed to be a lost noblewoman... she snaps. Big, BIG time.
Comic Books
- Ditto with the comic book Runaways, with the added punch that the evil parents 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 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. Little cuckoos."
- Subverted in Bone by Badass Grandma Rose Ben being a member of the young 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 most part), returning to her royal position also.
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 Moses In The Bullrushes, he doesn't take it very well. In the source material, his real mother served as his wet nurse, and he grew up knowing the truth.
- In David Lynch'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... well, you know.
Literature
- 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.
- 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.
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens 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 The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, Quasimodo's birth parents are glamourous and exciting gypsies, but they abandoned him on the steps of a church, where Big Bad Archdeacon Claude Frollo - about 16 at the time - took him in 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 Charles Stross. 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 Edgar Rice Burroughs's Son of Tarzan, the 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. 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.
Live Action TV
- Tossed, seemingly at random, into Quinn's backstory for the Sci Fi 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 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.
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 Truth In Television.
Theater
- Subverted by Calderon's Life is a Dream, where Segismund grows up in a prison, because it was prophecied that 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.
Webcomics
- Direct inversion in Rêveillerie: Emelind is a literal changeling, but she considers the universe where she was raised to be her true home.
- In The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob, Rocko Sasquatch is shocked to learn he is actually a Sasquatch! (Did that really need a spoiler tag? Oh well.) His tribe abandoned him because he was born bald.
Western Animation
- 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.
- 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, 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 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 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 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.
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