Tragic Abandoned Toy

"You never forget kids like Emily or Andy... but they forget you."

— Jessie, Toy Story 2

When you have a kid who loves you, being a Living Toy is so much fun! Every day is a new adventure full of joy and wonder, and your owner's imagination knows no bounds. And every night you go to sleep in their bed, secure in the knowledge that your owner loves you more than anything else.

But all good things have to come to an end when toy and owner are eventually separated. This trope comes in three primary flavors, from lightest to darkest:

• 'The Homeward Journey: The child accidentally forgets the toy somewhere and is unable to find them again. This version is usually (but not always) the catalyst for an adventure where the toy frantically tries to get back to their owner before it's too late.
• Growing Up Sucks: The child grows up and stops playing with the toy as they leave their childhood behind, usually accompanied by a lingering shot of the toy lying sadly underneath a bed or dresser and a Time-Passes Montage.
• We Are as Mayflies: The toy outlives its owner for a reason such as illness or old age, and feels lost without their friend and their life's purpose. This type is rarer due to being darker and sadder than the other two, with no way for the toy to reunite with its owner.

A common ending to the story of this toy is for them to reunite with their old owner, now grown from child to adult, and begin a new lease on life by being passed down to their owner's child.

This trope plays on the pathos of something that happens regularly in Real Life. Children frequently personify their toys and become emotionally attached to them (and toys are usually the first object a child gets attached to in their life), which makes it sadder if they are lost. Many of us can remember losing beloved toys and imagining that said lost toys are just as sad to be separated from us. Even outgrowing a toy without losing it can be sad, making one nostalgic for happier times long gone.

Sub-trope of Living Toys. Sister trope to (and can overlap with) Vengeful Abandoned Toy, and related to Companion Cube, Empathy Doll Shot, I Just Want to Be Loved, and Lost Toy Grievance. The second version is related to Growing Up Sucks, while the third may involve the Death of a Child and/or Unfulfilled Purpose Misery. Contrast Never Had Toys.

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Examples:

Advertising

• An animated television PSA from The '60s urging parents to vaccinate their children has a young boy playing with some toys, including a toy soldier, modeled roughly after a 19th-century French sergeant. The narration states the toy soldier was glad to serve his "general." But the playtime stopped when the boy contracted an illness that turned fatal. From his vantage point on a bureau, the toy soldier watched his general's decline. He remains on that bureau, his post, awaiting orders ... that will never come.

Comic Books

• Quentin Blake's comic book Clown tells the story of a clown doll tossed by a rich family in a trash can along with other toys. He spends the book roaming through the city after a home for himself and his friends, but he's rejected because he is a used toy. In the end, he meets a girl who has to babysit her little brother while their mother is working. Since they're very poor, the kids not only receive the clown well but are also delighted into going with him to fetch his companions; when their mother returns, she is happy, too, because she never could afford giving such expensive toys for her children (also, the clown has helped the kids to clean their apartment).

Fan Works

• In the Calvin and Hobbes fanfic Can You Here Me? (sic), Calvin grows up and leaves Hobbes (who, in this fanfic, is a Living Toy instead of an Imaginary Friend) in the attic. Hobbes is sad and repeatedly yells out, "Can you hear me, you big bucket-head?!".
• Jessica: A video game character variation. When Cameron unintentionally crushes his copy of Pokémon Yellow, he forgets about his old Pokémon team and gets a copy of Pokémon Black. He subconsciously names his Pikachu "Jessica" after his Raichu from Yellow with the same name. Jessica begins acting strangely and reveals to him that she's heartbroken and furious that he accidentally killed her and his team and forgot about them all. However, Cameron tearfully apologizes, and Jessica decides to forgive him and rejoin his team.
• My Maker: Smarty Pants is very sad when Twilight eventually outgrows her and puts her on a shelf, but she gets a new lease on life when Big Macintosh adopts her.

Films — Animated

• The antagonist of the film for Fresh Pretty Cure!, Toymajin, is a teddy bear who was abandoned by his owner. After he moved to the Land of Toys, he began having feelings of sorrow and, after making a suit of armor out of discarded toys, became a dictator.
• Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) by Rankin/Bass Productions has the main characters visit the Isle of Misfit Toys. It's populated by irregular toys that some child rejected, and they await a chance to please some other child somewhere. One is a jack-in-the-box named Charlie, another is a toy train with square wheels, and a third is a bird that can't fly but can swim. During his Christmas Eve flight, Santa Claus stops by this Isle and collects these toys for distribution.
• Steven Universe: The Movie: Spinel isn't a toy, but was designed to be Pink Diamond's playmate. The two used to play in Pink's garden until Pink eventually grew tired of Spinel. When Spinel tried to follow Pink after she was granted her own colony, Pink told her to stand in the garden as part of a new game. Spinel complied and stood waiting alone for six thousand years, even when the other Gem passed away. In the present, hearing of Pink's death via Steven's broadcast and realizing her lies sends Spinel over the edge.
• Toy Story:
  • Toy Story 2: Jessie the cowgirl doll was her owner Emily's favorite toy until the girl grew out of her cowgirl phase and started getting into makeup and fashion. She forgot about Jessie and left her under the bed for many years, eventually giving her to a donation center. Because of this, Jessie has severe abandonment issues in the present.
  • Toy Story 3:
    • The movie begins with the toys complaining that the now-teenaged Andy no longer plays with them.
    • Lotso, Chuckles, and Big Baby had a happy life with their owner Daisy, until one day they were accidentally left behind by her parents on a road trip. They managed to make it back to her house, but by the time they got there, they saw that Daisy's parents had gotten her a new Lotso. In the present day, Chuckles and Big Baby are straight examples of the trope, but Lotso subverts it; his rage at being abandoned turns him into an evil dictator who rules over Sunnyside Daycare with an iron paw, having slid all the way from tragic into purely vengeful.
• The antagonist of Unico in the Island of Magic, Lord Kuruku, was a puppet that was given life after being mistreated and abandoned. He is eventually "healed", but since The Power of Hate is the only thing keeping him alive, he simply reverts to a lifeless puppet. When Unico learns about his backstory, he immediately sympathizes with him and tries to avoid attacking him during the film's climax. After he's forced to stab him when Kuruku is dangerously close to killing him, Unico resorts to peacefully defeating him by expressing how strongly he pities Kuruku and sad that he's filled with so much hatred, especially since Unico understands how Kuruku feels to be abandoned and lonely.

Films — Live-Action

• Christopher Robin: As a boy, Christopher Robin is separated from Pooh and the rest of his friends in the Hundred Acre Wood when he is sent off to a Boarding School of Horrors. He's forced to grow up quickly and loses his imagination and happiness as he grows into adulthood. Meanwhile, as the years go by, Pooh keeps coming back to the door that Christopher Robin would always enter the Hundred Acre Wood through. At one point, Piglet comes up and silently leads him away from the door, but he never stops going back.

Literature

• In Alien in a Small Town, Barney Estragon is an eccentric robot who works as a waiter at the local diner. It eventually turns out that he started out life as a tiny robot toy duck owned by a rich child. The child outgrew and abandoned him, and Barney had to make his way in a world where he was as small as a rodent and had no legal rights, living "literally as vermin." A law (the Velveteen Act) was finally passed, giving robots rights, but he'd gone mad by then. He regained his sanity, got his life together, and got a human-sized body. But to this day, he still loves the memory of that child, now long since dead of old age.
• The poem Little Boy Blue is about a toy dog and a toy soldier who were once the playthings of a little boy until he died one day. Ever since then, they have been faithfully standing in his room for many long years, awaiting his return, as they become covered in dust and rust.
  Ay, faithful to Little Boy Blue they stand,
  Each in the same old place
  Awaiting the touch of a little hand,
  The smile of a little face;
  And they wonder, as waiting the long years through
  In the dust of that little chair,
  What has become of our Little Boy Blue,
  Since he kissed them and put them there.
• The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane: The titular rabbit feels sad at having been dropped off a ship and wants to be with his owner again.
• In the children's book Teddy Bear Tears, a teddy bear gets accidentally left behind when his owner and her parents go to the rubbish dump, so he cries at the dump. Luckily, a fairy takes his tears and uses them to make the girl dream about where he is so she can get him back.
• The Velveteen Rabbit: The titular plush rabbit is thrown out because he was with his owner when the latter was stricken with scarlet fever. He is clearly distraught about being separated from his owner and sheds a Single Tear. He cheers up, however, when a fairy turns him "real" rather than stuffed, and he later comes across his owner (though the latter isn't aware that this is the plush toy he used to have).

Live-Action TV

• Black Mirror: In "Black Museum", Carrie's mind is Brain Uploaded into a stuffed monkey for her and Jack's son Parker, with her only method of communication being the ability to say "Monkey loves you" and "Monkey needs a hug." Parker eventually gets bored of the monkey and forgets about it, and it eventually winds up as an exhibit in the Black Museum with Carrie still conscious inside it.
• Lost Ollie is about a stuffed rabbit named Ollie who wakes up in a thrift store with no recollection of how he got there, and he spends the series trying to get back to his owner, Billy, who he truly loves. He succeeds in the end, but Billy is now an adult and can no longer hear him. However, he can talk to Billy's daughter Suzy.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In "Five Characters in Search of an Exit", an Army major, a clown, a bagpiper, a ballet dancer, and a hobo find themselves trapped in a metal cylinder, without knowing who they are or how they went there. They try to escape, first by forming a tower of people and afterwards with a grappling hook formed by the major. He is the only one to succeed it but tumbles to the ground outside. It cuts to a little girl spotting a doll (the major) on the snow; a woman gently asks her to put it back in the barrel. It is revealed that the five characters are dolls and the cylinder is a Christmas toy collection bin for a girls' orphanage. Some people call this episode "the original Toy Story".

Music

• A possible interpretation of the song "Puff the Magic Dragon", which tells of "little Jackie Paper" going on adventures with his friend, the eponymous "magic dragon". But, unlike Puff, Jackie grows older ("a dragon lives forever, but not so little boys") and eventually abandons Puff ("Jackie Paper came no more"). Puff falls into depression and loses his "fearless roar"; his scales fall out, and he "sadly slip[s] into his cave". Rationally Puff could be interpreted as a creation of Jackie's own childlike fantasy, but it is also possible that Puff is a toy that Jackie puts away as he grows up.

Video Games

• Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass:
  • Turnbuckle, the Optional Boss of Turnbuckle's Mansion, is the leader of the Whispering Valley's toy army. He used to be a toy Jimmy used to play with, but was left forgotten and was on his way to be destroyed to make way for new toys and memories about them. To avert his and his fellow forgotten toys' fates, he built a mansion to serve as a sanctuary for his kind and built an army to claim revenge on Jimmy for stopping playing with him. In the end, as he perishes, he spends his last words expressing gratitude that Jimmy visited his mansion and was willing to play with him one last time, accepting his impending death.
  • Jonathon Bear was Jimmy's favorite teddy bear toy who was locked away by the boy out of guilt over the fact that the boy shoplifted him. As he was revealed to be vengeful over his abandonment, serving as the Grim Echoes' Arc Villain, Jonathonland shows the situation from his perspective, depicting him in a much more sympathetic light: he used to be an obsolete and outdated model of Jonathon Bear plush toy line, but Jimmy liked him more than the newer models. However, he was too expensive, so his mother refused to buy him. As a result, Jimmy decided to shoplift him, lying that Jonathon was his grandmother's gift as an excuse. They used to play together all the time, but the guilt over shoplifting the teddy bear eventually led to Jimmy hiding and locking him away in the closet, and as the story ends, the camera pans on Jonathon Bear's torn-up and ruined body, with Helga expressing sympathy for Jonathon in spite of his past deeds.
• Zig-zagged in TinkerQuarry. Some of the toys have tragic backstories, but almost none of them are upset about being abandoned by the Girl. In fact, many of them dislike her because she played rough with them. Only a few, like Peter and Whiskers, realize that she wasn't really a bad person, rather, she abused them to vent the stress of living with abusive, alcoholic parents, and she didn't know the toys were alive. The only one who really misses the Girl is Staya, who is also a Vengeful Abandoned Toy.
• Die Anstalt has a few of these:
  • Dub, a turtle whose source of trauma was that he fell out of his owner's backpack. He tried to catch up to him, only to be on a moving sidewalk so no matter how fast he ran, the further his owner came.
  • Sly, a snake who was used as a drug mule. When the police pulled his owners over, they chucked him out the window.

Webcomics

• In this Pokémon fancomic, a Banette is sadly wandering in a dark forest at night, calling out for their owner. They come across a Phantump, who asks if it's seen a lost doll around somewhere, and comments that they feel bad for leaving it all alone for so long. The Banette realizes that the Phantump is the ghost of the girl who lost them, and embraces her while crying and saying, "Mama..."

Web Original

• Neopets: The Discarded Magical Blue Grundo Plushie of Prosperity is a very sad Grundo plushie lying all alone in the clouds of Faerieland (or hanging by his butt from a tree after The Faerie's Ruin in 2010). He can be visited once a day for the chance to win a prize, but sometimes, just looking at him can make your active Neopet feel sad.
  Flavor text: Seeing the poor discarded plushie seems to dampen [Neopet name]'s mood. Perhaps you should return a different day.
• SCP Foundation: SCP-1145 is a radioactive teddy bear that begins moving in the direction of the nearest person when it is dark. According to its author, it is not malicious and actually just trying to comfort people when it gets dark, but its radioactivity unfortunately makes it too dangerous to interact with; its previous owner was a Japanese child who was vaporized in the bombing of Nagasaki.
• One comic made by edoosam features a boy named Tomo-kun and his plush penguin Hiyokichi, who was thrown into the trash by the former's mother. Hiyokichi was salvaged, resold, and left forgotten by a more neglectful owner for decades, all while thinking "I want to see Tomo-kun"; this was juxtaposed by scenes of Tomo-kun growing up and raising a family. It wasn't until decades later when Hiyokichi finally sees the now-senile Tomo-kun again after being found in a trash heap by Tomo's granddaughter.

Web Video

• What if Pokémon were SCPs?: SCP-P-354 (Banette) in Episode 6 has, in the rare occasions where it actually speaks to its captors at the SCP Foundation, repeated that it "must return to someone", and that this someone abandoned them. The Foundation have theorized that the doll which P-354 possesses was thrown away by a child beforehand and that it seeks to track down its past owner. They have also speculated that perhaps P-354 would stop being a Serial Killer of children if it did find and kill its original owner (who, based on what little information they have, threw the doll away in California and now lives on the East Coast of America), but the Foundation is not willing to let that happen.

Western Animation

• Averted in the 1947 cartoon The Enchanted Square from Fleischer Studios. It begins with a Raggedy Ann doll being tossed into a trash bin for reasons unknown. A passing beat cop sees this doll in good condition and recovers it from the bin. He later gives the doll to a little blind girl who's quite appreciative of her gift.

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