Welcome To The Real World - Television Tropes & Idioms

Ed and Hohenheim towards the end of Full Metal Alchemist; they never meet Hiromi Arakawa, but she has confirmed that they really did end up in our London, and World War One and World War Two were at least partially the result of all the alchemy that was going on in their world.
- This turns into the entire plot for The Movie, Conqueror of Shamballa. They end up in Germany in that movie.
Sonic X would probably count. At the very beginning of the series, Sonic, Robotnik and a whole menagerie of characters from their world are pulled into the explosion of Chaos Control (in the English dub) and end up in what is, for all intents and purposes, the real world. It gets progressively less "real" as the show goes on, however.
Played fairly straight in most Digimon continuity— mostly Tamers, and subverted in Savers. The Digimon that appear in the "real world" often suffer a loss in power, but they somehow manage to exist despite being made of data. Also, they can still use special attacks and evolve. It's really up to the viewer to decide just how "real" the Real World is.

The whole premise of Fables, in which Public Domain Characters from folklore and fairy tales have decided to emmigrate to our world.
The DCU, prior to Crisis On Infinite Earths, had Earth Prime, a world that is in fact our world, with no superpowers or anything. Superman and The Flash occasionally ended up here. Earth Prime got its own version of Superboy shortly before being destroyed in the Crisis.
- Recently, Earth Prime was recreated, and the aforementioned Superboy wound up being dumped there after he punched himself. He seemingly lost his powers and did nothing there other than reading the very issues you were reading, trolling DC message boards and making his parents cook for him. Recently though, the Blackest Night somehow managed to breach into Earth Prime; he regained his powers shortly afterwards.
An early issue of Grant Morrison deservedly famous run on Animal Man builds to a climax in which the title character (a.k.a. Buddy Baker) freaks out because he can see the reader(s). At the conclusion of a long Mind Screw Story Arc (which involves one of the few characters who can remember Crisis On Infinite Earths, as well as the Silver Age version of DC continuity), Buddy has a long metaphysical conversation with Grant Morrison in person, who says that, at this point, he can't think of anything else to do with the comic than hand it over to somebody else.
A borderline example would be a crossover comic, where the characters from The Simpsons end up in the world of Futurama. Both series share the same creator.
The comics of Marc-Anthonie Mathieu explore the (two-dimensional, black-and-white) protagonists occasionally becoming aware of such things as "three-dimensionality" or "four-colour offset". These are implied to be dreams of the protagonists.
The Doctor Who comic in Doctor Who Magazine had a story entitled "TV Action!", where the Eighth Doctor and Izzy travelled to our reality. Tom Baker, who had played the Fourth Doctor, defeats that month's alien by merely talking to him and rambling endlessly.

The Star Trek fanfic Visit to a Weird Planet had Kirk, Spock, and McCoy accidentally being beamed onto the set of Star Trek The Original Series. A sequel had the actors beamed onto the real Enterprise. Indeed, this is a common plot for fanfiction.
Notably used in a Back To The Future fanfic, where accidental interaction with the creators and actors changes them to earlier drafts. Interference with Michael J. Fox's audition causes Marty's appearance to change to that of Eric Stoltz, and bumping into Robert Zemeckis causes the DeLorean Time Machine to revert to a refrigerator.
The Xanadu storyverse, in which at a fairly large convention called "Xanadu" all of the costumes become real. While most stories focus on weirdness and some on furries, naturally a number of cosplayers were featured, with varying levels of mental change, from "Whoa, suddenly my costume is perfect!" to "Where is this place? Where did my Nakama go?" Two stories have characters and such from fictional fiction; Slinx, a Pokemon Expy, and The Perils Of Voice Acting, a pastiche of He-Man, She-Ra, and other cartoons from that period.
Way back in 2002, someone wrote a story called the Fanfic Lounge. It took place in a lounge made for fictional characters so they could relax between fanfics. While I'm not sure how many spin offs were made, this one was about the Lordofthe Rings cast, along with Elijah Wood and Orlando Bloom, being gathered in the lounge in order to find a solution to the problems plaguing LOTR fanfiction. IIRC, this is where the LOTR cast discovers their fictional status, and Orlando Bloom and Elijah Wood are just as weirded out at meeting their fictional counterparts. The story featured the culture shock scenario for the LOTR cast was, and contained such gems as: Boromir trying to open a can of Mountain Dew with a dagger, the cast becoming confused at references to future events in the books/movies (the cast was taken some time before the splitting of the Fellowship), and perhaps the best part, the cast being informed of the existence of Yaoi slash fiction, and being informed of who is frequently paired with who. The two Real Life actors also experience their own variant, when Elijah Wood is nearly torn apart when he accidentally walks into a room used to hold Mary Sues (and then later identifies Sailor Moon as being among them), and Orlando Bloom becoming horrified when he's told that the body he's currently inhabiting was pulled out of an NC-17 fic, explaining why he was missing his shirt (hard to explain, you'd have to read it).

This is pretty much the whole point of The Truman Show.
This is the premise of the live-action Fat Albert movie.
The Rocky And Bullwinkle movie did this.
An early (and fortunately rejected) Sam Hamm script for a film version of Watchmen written in 1989, ended with Dan, Laurie and Rorschach inadvertently finding themselves in real-life New York City, where a young kid recognizes them as characters from the comic book. (Of course, in the real 1989, children generally didn't read Watchmen.)
Inverted and lampshaded in Galaxy Quest, wherein the cast of the titular Show Within A Show is transported to the spaceship of a race of aliens who believe the show is real and have based all their technology off of it. Naturally, they expect the hapless actors to save them from a genuine alien threat.
The Arnold Schwarzenegger film Last Action Hero is chock-full of both Refugee From TV Land and This Is Reality.
The movie Wes Craven's New Nightmare uses this trope straight, but turns the Antagonist into the one doing the world-corssing. In this, the real-life cast of the Nightmare On Elm Street movies (including Robert England, who played Freddy) are attacked by a demon who takes on the persona of the fictional Freddy Krueger.
In Crank: High Voltage, one of the characters says that Chev Chelios, the main character in Crank, looks like "the guy in those Transporter movies". Chev Chelios and the "guy from the Transporter movie" are the same actor, Jason Statham.
Howard the Duck.
The 1987 movie Masters of the Universe.
The Matrix Morpheus says this word for word.
The League Of Gentlemen's Apocalypse.

Occurs in The Dark Tower by Stephen King. In fact, Stephen King himself appears in a later book in the series.
Happens briefly in the first Discworld novel.
- Then in The Science of Discworld spin-off, the wizards at Unseen University manage to create a planet called Roundworld, a world free from magic and narrativium; it is, of course, Earth. In the second and third SoD books, the wizards discover that the elves and the Auditors respectively have interfered with human history, requiring them to set things right by influencing the writing of A Midsummer's Night's Dream and The Origin of Species.
- The early Terry Pratchett short story "Final Reward" has a barbarian hero, following his death, arriving in the hall of his "creator"; that is, the fantasy writer who invented him.
- The fan film Run Rincewind Run! - created for the opening of Nullus Anxietas (the 2007 Australian Discworld convention) - features Rincewind being hit by a spell that sends him to "meet his maker." (Which he does, at the convention.)
The end of the novel Sophie's World involves the characters realizing that they are characters in a book and deciding to escape to the real world. which is still within the book and therefore not our real world.
Bernard Werber's Le mystère des dieux also ends like this: the characters actually hit the end of the universe... which turns out to be the page of a book.
In the novel My Hero by Tom Holt, fictional characters clock out between chapters and negotiate with their agents for choice heroic roles, all the while actively bitching out their authors for shoddy plotting. Much of the book revolves around the misadventures of characters pulled into the real world, but since this vision of the real world is one in which mad Cornishmen build footballers from body parts and a literary agent turns out to be planning the End of the World, the "this is reality" effect is rather diluted.
In Diana Wynne Jones's Chrestomanci books, this happens at least twice (so far). In The Lives of Christopher Chant Christopher decides to escape to "World Twelve B" which is very similar to his (12A) but with no magic. He decides against it after nearly being squashed by a Routemaster London bus. And at the end of Witch Weekthe protagonists' world, which has magic, is combined with World 12B, which it had previously split off from (the cause of the split? Guy Fawkes.) The implication is that our world may regain some magic, but not in the same concentration as in the split-off world, and the magic-using characters will have non-magic talents instead.
- There's some sort of connection to the real world in nearly all her books. The Merlin Conspiracy, Power of Three, Howl's Moving Castle...
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke. The sequel pulls it in reverse, where characters from the real world enter the fantasy world.
[1] In Part II of Cervantes' Don Quixote -published in fact many years after Part I-, the titular character meets fans of Part I, and even takes the opportunity to bash another Part II of dubious authorship that had been published before the real thing. In fact, Don Quixote swears that he precisely will NOT go to the tournament in Aragon described in "Avellaneda's" Quixote, even though this had been foreshadowed in Part I.
Jasper Fforde's Lost In A Good Book series pulls this all the time, in as many ways as you can think of. It starts with Thursday Next's reality being the "real world" for the fictional characters she meets when she ventures into fiction (kind of like the Inkheart sequel that way). It's even possible to go behind-the-scenes in any work of literature (to the backstory, the frontispiece, etc) which makes it seem even more staged. Then it gets more bizarre when Thursday is offered a way to un-eradicate Landen by hopping along to another world, which sounds even more suspiciously like our world. She eventually decides against it, since the price for both her and Landen being alive was that they would not remember or have ever met each other.

Marshall in an episode of Eerie Indiana, in which everyone starts calling him Omri Katz, the name of his actor.
An episode of Diagnosis Murder had Amanda Bentley, played by Victoria Rowell, win a trip to the set of The Young and the Restless, in which Victoria Rowell also starred. Other regular characters from within the show and real actors from The Young and the Restless playing themselves, plus actors playing fictional The Young and the Restless crew, commented on how much Amanda Bentley looked like Victoria Rowell.
The Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode "Far Beyond the Stars", where Sisko wakes up as a Science Fiction writer in the 1950's, and Deep Space Nine is just a story he's been writing. Of course no one wants to read a story where a black man commands a space station...
In an episode of Growing Pains, Ben Seaver wishes his life were more like TV, and wakes up to discover his entire life is a television show called Meet the Seavers. All the actors are referred to by their real names, and members of the production crew feature prominently. At one point Kirk Cameron, who usually plays Ben's older brother Mike, confides to Ben that he actually is Mike, and has been trapped in the real world for years.
Happens to the video game characters in Ace Lightning.
The premise of the Red Dwarf Reunion Show. Unlike most examples, no one they run into in the "real world" mistakes them for their actors: everyone fairly easily works out what they are, and doesn't find it especially outlandish that a group of fictional characters might pop out into the real world. Of course they ARE Science Fiction fans. As it turns out, the "real world" is a drug-induced hallucination.
A Meta-version takes place in the finale movie of The Famous Jett Jackson: Jett, an actor in the show's world, switches places with Silverstone, his character on the Show Within A Show.
In an episode of The Bold And The Beautiful, Donna and Pam go to a taping of The Price Is Right and one of them is told to "Come On Down".

The Final Destination stage in the Super Smash Bros series is said to travel between the fictional world where the characters live and the real world. This is evidenced as the scenery changes as the time passes along the level, from space, to a wormhole, to a realistic sea.
The "Game Over" scene of the Sega Genesis game Comix Zone shows a comic book villain, having successfully traded places with his author, go on to do comic book villainy in the real world. (The game itself follows the adventures of the author, who is Trapped In TV Land and has to be the comic book hero.)
Late in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, the protagonists discover that the creators of their world are going to destroy it, so they go up a level in reality to 4D space, and find out their world is a video game, and their creators are the company that developed it. Inverted in that the world where this game company exists isn't the world of our Earth- the game world is.
In Morrigan's ending in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars, she travels through the dimensional rifts caused by the main villain... and ends up outside the video game.

In the guest story "The Sluggite Koan" in Sluggy Freelance, Bun-bun, after being thrown out of time itself in a previous canon story, emerged from the computer screen of a fan of the comic. Being who he is, he proceeded to thrown the guy in in his place and left to menace his own creator.
In Real Life Comics this occurred during the Plot Hole Arc. It was played for laughs due to there being No Fourth Wall and solved relatively quickly.

Spider-Man, towards the end of The Nineties animated series. Spider-Man met Stan Lee, voiced by Stan Lee.
- Speaking of Marvel, the title Earth-1218 was recently used to designate our world.
In Darkwing Duck episode 'Twitching Channels', Megavolt invents a device that allows him to travel through electrical wires, appliances, and broadcast signals. He proceeds to use television sets as warp gates to enable easy theft and getaway on a crime spree, which Darkwing must of course put a stop to. In hot pursuit, the two go on a chase scene across the channels of TV Land, and ultimately stumble out of a television set into a world where St. Canard is merely the setting of a popular TV show, and the locals are ~~weird beakless mutants~~ human beings. It seems a corrupt animation executive has a device that lets him see alternate universes, from which he steals plots for his own shows. Darkwing is (after a little comical blackmail) welcomed with open arms and made a star of the stage, but he ultimately grows bored and wants to go back to where he has real villains to fight. Eventually he goes home, but the device gets damaged. When the animated executive inspects it, it is now fixed to the world of Chip N Dales Rescue Rangers.
A Simpsons Halloween Special had Homer being sucked into The Third Dimension (dun-dun-dun!). He eventually destroyed that universe and wound up in our world.
- Specifically the erotic cake store at 13567 Ventura Boulevard in Los Angeles.
The third season finale of Super Robot Monkey Team Hyper Force Go had The Dark One opening a worm-hole that lead to his next meal: Earth. Neither him nor the Hyperforce actually land on the planet though.
In Chaotic, the episode Chaotic Crisis involves the Underworlders reverse-engineering human technology to create portals linking Perim, Chaotic, and Earth. (It was All Just A Dream, however.)
About half of the episodes of The Adventures Of Super Mario Bros 3 had the characters visiting Earth in some way. They always referred to it as "the real world", implying that they were somehow aware they were just video game characters, yet none of the Earthlings they encountered ever seemed to recognize them as such.
- This was a Mythology Gag referring to the earlier Super Mario Brothers Super Show, in which the brothers explicitly came from Brooklyn in a world like ours.
The tv series (blending CG I with live action) Ace Lightning featured a group of videogame characters trying to exist in the real world.

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