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Run my baby run my baby run
Run from the noise of the street and the loaded gun
Too late for solutions to solve in the setting sun
So run my baby run my baby run — Garbage, "Run Baby Run"
The Runaway is a child or teenager who runs away from their home and parents or guardians. They can do this for a variety of reasons, but there are three motivations commonly used in fiction:
- The Circus Runaway: a child wants to run away to the circus (or some other "exotic" location) because they feel they are not appreciated by their parents or given enough attention. If successful, becomes a Circus Brat or The One Who Made It Out. Probably a Discredited Trope (or perhaps a Dead Unicorn Trope) by now, especially the "circus" part.
- The Abused Runaway: a child or teenager who runs away from a truly abusive or unloving parent. Much more serious than the first reason, but if done in sitcom, can lead to a Very Special Episode.
- The Orphan Runaway: a child or teenager who runs away because they have no one left, nowhere to go. Often the most tragic of runaways and can sometimes lead the story to Grave of the Fireflies territory.
- The Vagrant Runaway a child who realizes that they need a good old fashioned soul searching and decides to pack their bags and see if the world is that cold of a place and hopefully open their eyes up.
The Runaway may be going to a Run Away Hide Away.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Ruby in Pokémon Special ran away because his father wouldn't let him compete in Contests. Turns out Norman was going to let him do it anyway.
- Grave of the Fireflies, a mix of abused and orphan runaways, with tragic results.
- Elfen Lied
- Mayu. Abused.
- Lucy. Orphan Runaway.
- Lucy in Fairy Tail runs away to join the eponymous guild. It's later reveled she was also emotionally abused by her neglectful father.
- Miyuki from Tokyo Godfathers ran away from home because she couldn't face her family after stabbing her father out of anger.
- Androids #17 and #18 from Dragon Ball were implied to be this when Dr. Gero first encountered them as humans.
- Sabo from One Piece is possibly tragic example of the abused runaway; after his boat his destroyed by a Celestial Dragon, his final fate is left vague.
- Fruits Basket:
- Yuki, running away from an abusive home.
- Kyo, running away from a home where everybody hates him.
- Isidro from Berserk. It isn't exactly clear which type he is but from what is shown, he is probably a rare case of Circus Runaway.
- Maria does this in episode 3 of Season 2 of Boku Wa Tomodachi Ga Sukunai. Kodaka is understandably confused at first when she shows up, but when he asks her how she knew where he lived, Maria says the "old hag" (her sister, Kate) showed her where she lived. Kate constantly calls to check up on her, and after spending the night Maria goes back, largely because Kobato telling her running away the night before was childish.
- In episode 9 of Hoshizora E Kakaru Hashi, Hina runs away from her father after the latter refuses to allow her to go to a university in Tokyo. She ends up staying at the inn Kazuma lives at, and after hearing about her reasons for wanting to attend school there to learn about business so she could help her father's brewery out, he has a tug of war contest with her father to force him to listen to her.
Comic Books
- All the Runaways start out being on the run from terrible parents. After the first arc, they are orphans.
- All versions of the backstory of Rogue in Marvel's X-Men comics have her running away from home as a young teen or pre-teen, although no two issues have been able to agree on whether she ran away after her mutation activated and left a boy in a coma, or had already run away from home before that because of an unstable and/or abusive home life.
- Megan McKeenan from Local has a history of running away, not only from her parents, but from boyfriends, roommates, and bad jobs. She even knows this is bad and resolves to stop running...some day.
- Shazam: Young Billy Batson was essentially a runaway, living on the streets; except in his case his miserly uncle threw him out at the age of 8 after getting his hands on Billy's parents' estate.
Fan Works
- Rosy the Rascal from Always Having Juice has run away from her parents along with her cousin Rob O' the Tyrants. It is currently unknown why they ran away, but they apparently saw fit to change their names from Amy Rose and Robin Rose, respectively.
Film - Animated
- In Aladdin, Princess Jasmine meets Aladdin when she runs away to avoid being forced to marry. It doesn't last long.
- We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story features Louie, a Circus Runaway, joined by Cecila and the dinosaurs.
Film - Live-Action
Literature
- The title character of the novel Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli is an orphan who runs away from his aunt and uncle because he is tired of being caught in the middle of their cartoonish marital problems. His subsequent adventures turn him into a larger-than-life folk hero who ends up inspiring racial tolerance in an inner city neighborhood.
- Older Than Radio examples from from Mark Twain:
- Tom Sawyer briefly runs away from home with a couple of friends to play at being pirates.
- Huckleberry Finn fakes his own death to escape his alcoholic father and rafts down the Mississippi with an escaped slave.
- Oliver Twist. After the orphanage where he grew up sells him to an undertaker as an assistant, he runs away to London where he is taken in by a gang of pickpockets before being reunited with his charming, modestly wealthy relatives.
- The Whipping Boy by Sid Fleischman is about the spoiled and arrogant Prince Brat who runs away from home out of boredom, dragging with him his poor, much-abused servant Jem (the titular Whipping Boy, whose job, it being illegal to strike the prince, was to take his beatings for him when he misbehaved). The two boys come to respect and eventually befriend each other before finally finding their way home.
- From The Mixed Up Files Of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsberg: a brother and sister run away from home to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the end, they return home.
- The title character of Bud Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis runs away from an unpleasant foster family to track down the man he suspects may be his father.
- In the book The Mysterious Benedict Society, three of the four main characters are runaways. Constance's situation is never explained in detail. Sticky ran away from overbearing parents, and Kate joined the circus after her father disappeared. In the end, Constance gets adopted, Sticky goes back to his very worried parents, and Kate's Disappeared Dad gets a Luke, I Am Your Father. It has been revealed that Constance was an orphan who ran away from the orphanage in order to avoid the Ten Men.
- In Steven Gould's book Jumper, the main character soon runs away from an abusive father once he discovers his ability to teleport.
- Pinocchio runs away from his creator/father, Geppetto. The book version is actually far more disturbing than the Disney movie, featuring the puppet being hanged and then nursed back life by the Blue Fairy, before he goes on the run again, and eventually, turns into a donkey, gets swallowed by a whale, and etc.
- In Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy, Paul Dempster runs away to join the circus.
- Harry Potter:
- Harry runs away from the Dursleys after he blows up Aunt Marge in Prisoner Of Azkaban.
- In Goblet of Fire, Harry briefly considers running away from Hogwarts rather than facing the First Task.
- Sirius did this as a teenager.
- In one of the Smallville novels, Clark runs away to Metropolis. This is similar to an plotline that occurs in the TV Series, except that in the novel, Clark doesn't put on a red kryptonite ring and go insane.
- In Dinoverse, Janine Farehouse tries this. She and three other eighth-graders were cast back in time and put into the bodies of prehistoric beasts, a Quetzalcoatlus in her case. She was happy. Eventually she abandoned the others to try to live as a pterosaur, feeling like she wasn't valued at home and wouldn't be missed. One of the others had to go and talk her into helping them.
- after the quake. Landscape with flatiron. Junko ran away from home in her third year of highschool. Her reasons weren't mentioned.
- The protagonist from My Side Of The Mountain has a perfect relationship with his parents and a nice life, still decides to run away to the Catskill Mountain and live in a hollowed out tree for the pure adventure of it all.
- Warrior Cats examples:
- Hollyleaf runs away at the end of the Power of Three arc after learning a shocking secret that leaves her feeling betrayed by her family.
- Crookedstar was a runaway as a kit, but he didn't mean to stay away from his Clan for a long time. By the time he gets back, he soon becomes an apprentice rather late.
- Halt from Ranger's Apprentice ran away from his native Hibernia when his brother tried to kill him.
- Portia of Wonder Show joins the circus partially to escape a Boarding School of Horrors and partially because she believes it will help her find her Disappeared Dad.
Live Action TV
- The Brady Bunch: "Every Boy Does It Once," even youngest son Bobby, who wants to leave the family in this early first-season episode because his stepmother and stepsisters are "evil." "Evil stepmother" Carol convinces Bobby that such is not true. This fits the "circus runaway" trope.
- Little House on the Prairie:
- Albert, a street urchin introduced in the Winoka episodes to open season 5, is a runaway orphan who is ultimately adopted by the Ingalls.
- In the final season, the folks of Walnut Grove meet Matthew, a deaf and mute boy who is "The Wild Boy" (after having run away from the circus to escape a cruel master). Mr. Edwards adopts him for awhile, until Matthew's biological father shows up.
- Buffy runs away at the end of season two, not because her mother was unloving, however, but her mother found out she was the Slayer, she had killed Angel, and she was wanted for murder.
- And in the first episode of season 3, she meets Lily/Chanterelle, a Sunnydale teen who had also run away to Los Angeles. It's heavily implied that she was abused at home.
- Pushing Daisies: Emerson was once hired to find a girl who had run away to join the circus.
- Jenny Humphrey ran away from home in season two of Gossip Girl (and kind of did it again for one night in late season three).
- Carmen runs away in an episode of The George Lopez Show. George finds her in a hotel in Hollywood as a groupie for the rapper Chingy.
Music
- The aptly named Soul Asylum song "Runaway Train" has this as its theme. The video even went so far as to post the pictures of people*
At least some of who were runaways who were missing at the time it was made, with at least a couple or so updated versions.
- Rapper Ludacris has a song called "Runaway Love" about an abused runaway.
- The second verse of Cowboy Troy's "If You Don't Wanna Love Me" is about one.
- Referenced by the name of the 1970s rock band "The Runaways" featuring a group of teenage girls, led by Joan Jett and Cherie Currie.
- Tatu's "They're not gonna get us" song.
Music Videos
- The video for the Pat Benatar song "Love is a Battlefield" has the main character run away from home after a fight with her parents. She ends up dancing at a sleazy club (in the original concept for the video, she was a hooker). Sadly, the boy who played Benatar's kid brother in the video later ran away from home in real life; no word on what happened to him.
Newspaper Comic
- Linus, very
 briefly.
- One Far Side comic inverts the circus runaway, showing 2 circus boys running away to join corporate America.
- In Little Orphan Annie, Annie hears Mrs. Warbucks tell "Daddy" Warbucks that she'll leave him if he keeps Annie, so Annie runs away from home to save his marriage.
Tabletop Games
- In the Mystara setting's kingdom of Karameikos, it's an unspoken tradition for human youths to run away from home and live under an alias for a few months, to prove to themselves and their families that they're capable of taking care of themselves. Hard feelings aren't usually involved, and the runaways often find jobs with distant relatives who know exactly who they are, but play along with the ruse that they've hired a stranger. An even more lighthearted variant of the Circus Runaway.
Theater
- In the musical version of Spring Awakening it's implied that the character Ilse ran away after being sexually abused by her father.
Video Games
- Psychonauts has Raz running away from the circus to attend psychic summer camp.
- Mr. Driller has Ataru, who ran away from home after getting in an argument with his father.
- Selphie from Rune Factory Frontier. While she never outright states it, she couldn't be more heavy handed in hinting that she's the princess of a small kingdom who ran away from home. Another character will even mention that there's a small kingdom in turmoil because its princess went missing. He motive for fleeing seems to be that she wanted to just find a quite place to read rather than always be in the political spotlight.
- Prince Ironfist runs away to the circus in Might And Magic VI. It's not because he feels unappreciated or not given enough attention, he just decided that he wanted to have a closer look at the circus (being the crown prince of a kingdom whose king is missing and whose regent is a paladin, he wasn't about to be given permission, so he took matters into his own hands after being inspired by having snuck out with you for a quick visit to the circus). He's quick enough to return to the castle once you catch up with him (the circus moves around).
Webcomics
- Rachel, from Tower of God, who fled from her previous life into the Tower.
- Jae-min from Orange Marmalade ran away from home for two years. He says this is because his mother abandoned him but she claims this isn't the case - what really happened has yet to be revealed.
- Helen of Penny and Aggie, bitter over her parents' favouritism of her sister and her (largely self-caused) social outcast status, runs away to Boston to apply for a phone sex operator job, leading directly into a Cross Over with Something Positive (ongoing as of mid-March 2010).
- In Strays Holland's Back Story.
Web Original
Western Animation
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