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A standard plot /Myth Arc for Speculative Fiction: The Ordinary High School Student, frequently his friends, and sometimes his enemies are all transported (often summoned) to another world — distant planet, a Magical Land, Alternate Universe, the past, The Future — where they find they have an important role to play in Events of Significance that are occurring at the same time as (or sometimes because of) their arrival. Usually there is no hope of their finding a means to return home until after the great threat facing them has been defeated; occasionally, they will then question whether they even ''want'' to leave (they typically do).
A blend of Fish Out Of Water and Failure Is The Only Option, with a large dash of heroism. The inverse of Alien Among Us. Often overlaps with Down The Rabbit Hole and You Cant Go Home Again. See Magical Doorway.
Examples
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Anime
- Abenobashi Mahou Shoutengai: After the first episode, the heroes fall from world to world, each one based on one of the main characters' geekish hobbies.
- The first and fourth seasons of Digimon.
- El Hazard The Magnificent World
- Full Metal Alchemist: Used in The Movie; in a subversion, they are trapped in our world, having originated from another, where
magic alchemy is fairly commonplace.
- Fushigi Yuugi: Miaka and Yui get pulled into a mythical world inside a magical book.
- Magic Knight Rayearth
- Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure
- The Twelve Kingdoms: Youko and her friends Asano and Yuuka get dropped in the middle of a mostly hostile fantasy world by a White Haired Pretty Boy/Mysterious Protector. Though, this is apparently common enough for the locals to coin terms ("Kaikyaku" for Japanese people, "sankyaku" for Chinese) and for the government to have a regular policy in dealing with them. For example, The Kingdom of En has a standard naturalization/citizenship process while Kou just tries to round them up and kill them.
- Vision Of Escaflowne: A rare example of the other world not being treated as another dimension of some sort — they get stuck on an invisible moon, just past the actual one.
- Aura Battler Dunbine, but then it twists it by having all the people from the other world get sent to Earth.
- Monster Rancher
- Kyou Kara Maou: Though Yuuri isn't really trapped, and can go back and forth between the two worlds with relative ease, he only considers himself trapped when he returns to his native world.
- Season 3 of Yu-Gi-Oh GX
- Now And Then Here And There (aka Ima Soku Ni Iru Boku). This is an exceptional example of this trope because the creators threw out every convention associated with it from episode 1. Shu sees a strange young girl sitting on a smokestack on his way home from school and goes to meet her. As he is introducing himself he and the girl are attacked by people teleporting in from the distant future in pursuit of that girl. True to the genre Shu picks up a stick and fights to defend the girl. He immediately gets his ass handed to him and both he and the girl are dragged forward billions of years where Earth is a dying desert planet orbiting a sun in the early stages of nova. What follows is a relentless six episode trip through the ninth ring of Hell.
- Kagome from Inu Yasha in the first few episodes. Afterward she's able to go between the other world and her own at will.
- Subversion: Yukinari from Girls Bravo gets trapped on the planet Seirun in the first episode, but is returned to Earth in the same episode.
- Spirited Away.
- In Death Note, Ryuk is stuck in the human world until the Death Note he dropped in the human world is destroyed or the owner dies. However, this was intentional on his part, since his Shinigami Realm was so boring.
- The Mahou Sensei Negima manga has Negi and a group of his student get stuck in the Magic World after Fate destroys the gateway between worlds.
- Those Who Hunt Elves do so because the elves hold the secret to the spell that will return them to Earth.
- In Zero no Tsukaima, the male protagonist is "accidentally" summoned to another world by the female protagonist in a summoning ceremony.
- Long-runnning shoujo series Red River and Ouke no Monshou both feature this trope, a girl from modern day trapped in Ancient Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt respectively.
Comic Books
- The tag line of the late Steve Gerber's Marvel comic Howard The Duck was "Trapped in a world he never made!" A native of a Talking Animal world of anthropomorhic ducks, Howard fell through a portal and wound up in Another Dimension—namely, the Marvel Universe version of Cleveland, Ohio.
- Cross Gen's Negation featured a Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits trapped in an alternate universe that did not obey the laws of physics. At least one character started out convinced that it was All Just A Dream.
- This is the raison d'etre for the Marvel comic series The Exiles. Superpowered beings lost from their dimension, world hop until they get to go home.
- This was Adam Strange's origin in DC Comics. An archeologist who accidentally discovered an alien transport system, Adam became the number one hero of the planet Rann. His problem was that the Zeta beams which teleport him are only temporary and he has started a family on Rann. He has since been able to stay there permanently, but on occasion where he finds himself on Earth and this trope applies there.
Film
Literature
- The Fionavar Tapestry. The five main characters are transported to Fionavar at the beginning of the first book, The Summer Tree and return to their own world at the end of it; then they go back nearish the beginning of the second book, The Wandering Fire, and stay there through to the end of the third, The Longest Road, when their various fates are resolved. At the end of the trilogy the score stands with two going back to our world and marrying each other, one choosing to stay in Fionavar, one dead in a heroic sacrifice, and one sailing off to eternity with Lancelot and King Arthur as she is, in fact, Guinevere. The books are somewhat eclectic.
- Alice In Wonderland: One of the earliest and most famous versions of this trope and a template for many later stories.
- CS Lewis's Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe; a slight twist here is that the characters age significantly during their stay in Narnia, then are returned to their original ages when they leave. The other Narnia books tend to follow this pattern as well, except for The Horse and His Boy.
- The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz. Most of the first six-odd "Oz" books by L. Frank Baum fell under this trope, with Dorothy finding her way back to Oz only to get back to Kansas by the last page, though eventually Baum just had Dorothy (along with Uncle Henry, Aunt Em, and Toto) move to Oz full-time and continue her adventures there. Whenever another human came to Oz from the outside world after that point, they generally ended up staying (Oz after the Wicked Witches being a much more utopian place to live, occasional monsters and baddies notwithstanding).
- More important than the Witches dying was Ozma taking the throne.
- Of course, it's implied even pre-Ozma that Oz was a much better place to live then Kansas; and Dorothy only kept going back home because she didn't want to ditch her family. That certainly is her only reason after meeting Ozma, whom she has a very close relationship with.
- The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant are based on this.
- Stephen R. Donaldson is fond of this one - it's also the premise of the Mordant's Need novels, where a woman from the 'real world' is trapped in a fantasy realm where any reflective surface can access another universe.
- Un Lun Dun by China Mieville
- Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
- The "John Carter Of Mars" series and the "Pellucidar" series, by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
- Mike Grell's DCU comic The Warlord, a deliberate homage to Pellucidar (in setting) and Barsoom (in tone).
- "The Merchant Princes" series, by Charles Stross
- In The Dark Tower, Roland draws his ka-tet from New York City at various points in time to his own world.
- In Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger series, the main character is summoned by a powerful wizard looking for another powerful wizard. Apparently, an engineer would be the closest thing to the alternate world's wizards. Unfortunately, the summoning spell latched on to the main character's job title...sanitation engineer. Fortunately, he does turn out to have magical abilities in that world.
- Similarly, in L. E. Modesitt Jr's Spellsong Cycle, the main character is summoned because of her skills as a singer.
- The author seems to like this trope, since in his Recluce Saga series this combined with Lost Colony is used in two books.
- In Diana Wynne Jones's Charmed Life this is what happens to Janet and her eight analogues in the other worlds in Series Twelve - when Gwendolen escapes from World 12A, she pulls Janet in from World 12B, and so on all around the circuit. Janet is the only one who doesn't find the change to be an improvement, and when she realises this, decides to stay in 12A for the sake of the others. Janet's parents don't notice the change.
- In Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the aforementioned Connecticut Yankee, Hank Morgan, gets whacked over the head with a crowbar and finds himself in Arthurian England.
Live Action TV
- Life On Mars: Though we are Left Hanging as to the true nature of the world; is it Time Travel, an alternate reality, or All Just A Dream?
- Doctor Who: Rose is trapped in a parallel world, but returns with knowledge of "the Darkness" threatening to destroy the multiverse (as her universe is ahead of ours). She is then forced to remain in her parallel world to take care of the clone-Doctor, despite wanting to stay with the real one. Former boyfriend Mickey, however, decides to leave the parallel world for the real one.
- A staple premise of series by Sid and Marty Krofft such as The Lost Saucer, Liddsville, Dr. Shrinker, Land Of The Lost and H.R. Puffnstuff.
- Farscape, where Crighton travels through a wormhole to another part of the universe. His overriding goal for most of the series is to get back to Earth...but when he finally does, he leaves very shortly to go back to the other side of the universe.
- The Time Tunnel - two guys trapped in the past (or occasionally the future).
- Likewise Quantum Leap
- The Sterling family in the short-lived series Otherworld
 .
- Fat Guy Stuck in Internet is about...a fat computer programer trapped in a surreal cyberspace world.
- The first season of Stargate Atlantis — trapped in the Pegasus Galaxy. This is a variation, because the expedition went to Atlantis knowing full well that they might be stranded there.
- Stargate Infinity — generally trapped away from Earth and the rest of polite galactic society since their iris codes had been revoked.
- According to early reports, Stargate Universe is taking this tack as well, stranding the heroes on a space ship headed away from known space
- Star Trek Voyager — Trapped in the Delta Quadrant.
- While Gilligans Island may not really count as "another world", the island of Lost is sufficiently weird that a case could be made.
- Polsih/Australian children's series Spellbinder.
Video Games
- Dragon Quest III. Combines Alternate Dimension with Time Travel, as Your hero turns out to be the legendary Roto, heroic ancestor of the Dragon Quest 1 and 2 Heroes. This also means that 90% of the game is the prologue.
- Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. And its sequel.
- Final Fantasy X. However, it's revealed that Tidus's world wasn't even real to start with.
- Another World, where the story starts with the protagonist accidentally teleported to an alien world.
- The Dig involves a group of astronauts who get transported to an alien world.
- Outcast, with a lot of Time Travel causing the issue.
- The Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games combine this with Involuntary Shapeshifting, turning your human character into a Pokemon and stranding them in a world full of other talking Pokemon.
- Nox, with the protagonist's character class affecting (among other things) whether or not he returns from the titular fantasy world back to present-day Earth, or stays there.
- Zan Zarah is a subversion: its protagonist Amy is tricked into traveling to another world (which she is, of course, supposed to save) but among the first things she finds there is a magical rune that teleports her back to London. Not that she wants to, since her home is a very dull place, constituting one bleak location among hundreds found in the game.
- This is the entire premise of Myst, in which the player stumbles across a mysterious series of worlds after accidentally using a Linking Book. In the opening of the sequel, Riven, Atrus promises that, if all goes well, he might be able to send the player home. Subverted in Myst III and IV, where the player willfully returns to visit Atrus.
- In Brutal Legend, roadie Eddie Riggs winds up in a world based on Heavy Metal album covers after injuring himself and spilling blood on his belt buckle. Turns out that it's a really important belt buckle.
- In the Ultimata series, the Avatar is apparently a normal human from Earth before he or she is summoned over.
- In Half Life, Gordon Freeman is trapped in a hellish alien dimension until he can take down the Nihilanth.
- In the first Persona game, the party ends up spending a good deal of the game in an alternate version of their city. It eventually becomes a non-subversion: they were actually trapped in Mary's mind (they've just defeated Guido in the real world when they learn this). Now, Mary herself has been acting strangely since the whole crisis began, and even told the group she was from the Alternate Universe they were in- oh, crap.
- Harukanaru Toki no Naka de has the main character and her two friends summoned into a place that looks quite like Kyoto in the Heian period.
- The expanded backstory of the Mario franchise indicates that Mario and Luigi are actually from Brooklyn, and accidentally ended up in the Mushroom Kingdom. It's unclear, however, whether they can't get home or just choose to stay.
Webcomics
- Parson Gotti in Erfworld
- If you count the "Torg Potter" stories as examples, this happens literally over a dozen times in Sluggy Freelance.
- Fur Will Fly: The protagonist is trapped in another world populated by furries.
Web Original
- While their trip to Creturia was intentional, the Dimensional Guardians from the web fiction serial Dimension Heroes find themselves trapped in the world until they can find the objects they need to both save the world and return home.
Western Animation
- And after all those examples, let us just say that Fan Fic writers LOVE this trope when they do crossovers.
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