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alt title(s): You Cant Go Home Again They called it paradise, I don't know why. You call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye. - The Eagles, The Last Resort
Is anything better than finally finding your way home? Is anything worse than finally reaching home, and finding that you're still lost? - Matthew Stover, Traitor
For some reason or another, one of the main characters is displaced from their home — be it in the sense of homeland, home planet, home universe, or literal house — and unable to return. Often, their attempts to return form a key plotline or focal point of the series, but since Status Quo Is God, Failure Is The Only Option until the Grand Finale. If the reason why they can't return is because of a Doomed Hometown, then their quest is often vengeance or a new place to stay. Sometimes they'll finally return Where It All Began to challenge the force that kept them away for so long.
This is often seen alongside Fish Out Of Water, and tends to result in Walking The Earth or a Wagon Train To The Stars. Trapped In Another World usually entails this (so most examples of that trope are equally valid for this one). When this trope is applied to the entire human race, it's Earth That Was.
Contrast Stranger In A Familiar Land, where you can go home, but you no longer fit in.
Examples
Anime
- In Full Metal Alchemist, Ed and Al burn down their house so they won't be able to give up their mission. Of course, Pinako and Winry's house is always open to them, so they're not as homeless as they'd like to think.
- Yoko spends the first arc of The Twelve Kingdoms trying to get back to her own world. Eventually, she comes to realize that she is needed far more in Kei than she is at home, and reluctantly agrees to become the Glory-King.
- Caro of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha was exiled from her tribe when she was very young because she was too powerful a summoner. Thankfully for her, while she can't return to her homeland ever again, Fate adopts her and gives her a new place to call home.
- Zoro of One Piece sets out to sea to find Mihawk, but is unable to find his way back due to his poor sense of direction.
- In Princess Mononoke, Ashitaka is permanently exiled from his home village to protect everyone from his curse.
- In Record Of Lodoss War, Pan is kicked out of his village in the beginning of the story and from then on he has to go Walking The Earth.
Comic Books
- This trope is the premise of the story of the Silver Surfer. After sacrificing himself to become a slave to a supernatural godlike destroyer of worlds (to save his own homeworld, of course), the hero's memory is taken from him AND his homeworld gets displaced. After he (very quickly into the story) regains his memories, the rest of the plot is largely about finding his home planet again.
- A series of Peanuts strips followed Snoopy taking Woodstock to the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm where he (Snoopy) was born, only to find it had been replaced by a parking garage.
Snoopy: You stupid people! You're parking on my memories!!!
- Occurs to mutant alligator Leatherhead in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles after he is inadvertently left behind on Earth by the escaping Utroms; several stories involve him unsuccesfully trying to reach the Utrom homeworld.
- This is the premise of the Legion Of Super Heroes story Legion Lost. A group of Legionnaires find themselves galaxies away from Earth in a thrashed starbase.
Film
- Variation: In the movie Cars, once Lightning McQueen starts settling in and feeling like he belongs in Radiator Springs, his past life finds him and drags him back. In this case, it's not that you can't go home, it's finding a home, and not being able to stay.
- Also done in The Majestic where the main character's past comes back to disturb his new life.
- A major element in 2007's Transformers movie.
- An American Tail: The reason the Mousekewitz family emigrates to America is because the Cossacks burned their village to the ground.
- In Grosse Pointe Blank, John Cusack's charcter, Martin Blank, return to his home town for a reunion. While there, he visits his childhood home, only to find that it's become a convenience store. This causes him to say the line, "You can never go home again, but I guess you can shop there."
- In Star Trek XI, Spock and Spock Prime both wind up afflicted by this trope: Spock because Vulcan has just exploded and Spock Prime because he's marooned in another timeline...and Vulcan has just exploded.
- And, of course, the Big Bad, Nero, is in the same boat, thanks to the supernova that took out Romulus and his subsequent time-traveling.
Video Games
- Secret of Mana for the SNES kicked off the plot with this, when The Hero is kicked out of his home village for removing a rusty sword from a stone, thus drawing monsters to it. In order to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, he has to find a way to unlock the sword's true potential.
- With a little glitching, he can go home again, but he can't get out.
- Also, in Secret of Mana 2, if you have Duran in your party and try to enter his house in Forcena, he will say that he can't return home until he has killed Koren, and the party will be unable to enter the house.
- For most of Tales Of Symphonia, Lloyd is exiled from his hometown due to a petulant proclamation by an arrogant mayor who scapegoats him for the town's problems.
- To be fair, Lloyd and Genis did provoke the Desians into burning the village. Other bigoted mayors would probably be organizing a lynch mob at that point.
- Averted toward the end of the first disc when The characters must decide which side they stay on when they separate the worlds. Ultimately, this is ruled out as a solution.
- Video game subversion: In Fallout, the player can visit the starting location (Vault 13) freely for the entire duration of the game (and is in fact required to do so at least once in order to progress the story). Once the game is won, however, the main character's "reward" for saving it is to get exiled ostensibly due to his experiences of the outside being deemed a potential disturbance to future social harmony and survival; the sinister real reason behind this development is revealed in the sequel. However, it's possible to get revenge for this exile through the use of violence if one plays an evil character.
- Or an easier way to get the additional revenge ending would be to get the "Bloody Mess" perk.
- And again in the sequel, for most of the story you can return home at any time... until the Enclave decides to swing by, shoot all the men, kidnap the women and children, and burn whats left to the ground.
- After the end of the game, you carry out the objective that you had originally been sent to do, you rebuild your town with the survivors.
- And in the third game, you can go back to your Vault during a certain quest... but you can't stay.
- Another video game example: in Homeworld you can't return to Kharak because The Empire has annihilated all life on the surface. Everything works out fine, though.
- In Wild ARMs as well, Rudy is exiled from his adopted hometown by the town's mayor for releasing monsters into the village, after said mayor orders him to go into a dank cave and poke random things with a stick until something interesting happens.
- Made stranger by the fact that not even an hour later he is in the company of a knight and a princess, both of whom could have easily stood up for his character and cleared his name.
- A slight subversion occurs in Golden Sun, which generally plays out like the Secret of Mana example above: the heroes accidentally ignite a major incident, and it's strongly suggested that they go fix their mistake. The subversion comes in that you actually can return to your home village, and the villagers will even ask how things are going. However, the main character's mother will ignore you until your quest is finished, in a sort of twisted encouragement to both grow into manhood and to finish your quest as fast as possible. Thus, you are still barred from going back inside your actual house, until your mother gets sick, anyways.
- The main characters of Golden Sun: The Lost Age, Felix and Jenna, cannot return to their hometown, but for a different reason: the geography only allows them to return home by passing through a country in which they are (justly) wanted. At the end, Alchemy's returning to the world destroys the hometown just before the characters return, although everyone survives.
- There's a small "glitch" that allows you to go back to Vale in Golden Sun: The Lost Age, although you can't enter the town.
- Half Life Opposing Force's Adrian Shepherd can't go home again because he was trapped by the G-man in an alternate dimension to preserve him. All in the name of "discretion". Which ultimately is made more depressing by the fact that Earth is now a Crap Sack World under the jackboots of the Combine.
- What about Final Fantasy X? Tidus spends most of the game looking forward to returning to Zanarkand, which he discovers is pretty impossible seeing that it's been in ruins for the past thousand years and wasn't even really his Zanarkand anyway because he had been living in a literal dreamworld.
- Final Fantasy VII has it too. Cloud and Tifa can never have their home town back because it was burned to the ground by Sephiroth. Although The town is rebuilt by Shinra and stocked with actors to cover up the event later in the game, the implication is still the same.
- Might Be the fate of the crew of The Spirit Of Fire From Halo Wars
- Rath from Fire Emblem 7 was casted away from the Kutolah tribe at a very young age, due to a prophecy that said he'd have a great future if he saw the world on his own. In his solo ending, he returns to the tribe after the end and his tribesmen welcome him back warmly; in his paired ending with Lyn, Rath comes back alone but some time later Lyn joins him and they have a daughter, Sue
- Your fate in the Wing Commander games if, on timed missions, you don't land before your carrier jumps out.
Literature
- The premise of The Odyssey, making it Older Than Dirt.
- Throughout the latter half of the Wheel Of Time series, Rand al'Thor has the ability to open a teleportation gate pretty much anywhere in the known world, and yet the closest he comes to going home is when he gives someone a lift there. He refuses to stick around, knowing that that part of his life is gone.
- Arthur Dent and Trillian in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
- Except, uh, Arthur does. Trillian did not because for this troper the last book did not happen.
- In A Song Of Ice And Fire, leaving your home of Winterfell is really not a good idea. You may end up dead, on the run from people who want you dead, held captive, or in sworn service of the Night's Watch. If you ever do make it back, Doomed Hometown.
- In a subversion, Frodo Baggins, in Lord Of The Rings, finds it easy to physically return home once the quest is over. But when he gets there, he finds it's not as he remembered it, and that he can't return to the simple pastoral innocence of his previous life. He leaves for the Grey Havens with the Elves and departs the world of Men forever.
- In The Scar, stand-alone sequel to Perdido Street Station, Bellis' primary objective is to get back to New Crobuzun, until her plans change when she realizes that she can't escape Armada.
- The titular Ghosts of Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40000: Gaunt's Ghosts earned their nickname in part because their homeworld of Tanith was destroyed by Chaos on the day of their Founding. Later, after the novel Necropolis, thousands of survivors from Vervunhive join the Tanith after their home hive-city is so badly damaged in a battle against Chaos that the whole hive is rendered uninhabitable.
- The Homeward Bounders by Diana Wynne Jones makes a feature of this trope, with the titular characters traveling from world to world (unwillingly, unagingly) hoping that eventually they'll end up back home and stop. the main character discovers that "you can never go back" when he finally manages to get to his world. Decades have passed; his 'home' no longer exists anywhere in the multiverse.
- Not surprisingly, the entire premise of You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe. George Webber, an author, literally can't go back to his small-town home because the residents think his debut book gave them a bad name and threaten to kill him over it, and the recent development boom has made the town almost unrecognizable compared to how George remembered it as a kid. Plus there's the deal with the Nazis taking all the magic out of 1930's Germany, and the whole Great Depression thing.
- Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. Richard Mayhew no longer exists to his "London Above" life and most of his adventure helping Door avenge her family's deaths is because he thinks that when he does that, he'll find a way to go home. He doesn't fit in anymore when he ends up home in the denoument, so he returns to London Below.
- In Star Wars, Alderaan is blown up. This is mined for much drama and angst in the Expanded Universe, with the various Alderaanians who were offworld at the time.
- Spader and Gunny from the Pendragon series ends up like this after Bobby tries to pull his Acolytes through the flume from Eelong to Zadaa, causing the Eelong flume to collapse and trap Spader and Gunny on a territory surrounded by catpeople for months (and like four books).
- Everyone in Discworld knows wizards can never go home. Evidently after you've summoned a few creatures from beyond mortal planes and dabbled in the occult, the village you left behind just isn't home anymore.
Live Action TV
- Farscape, John Crichton. Eventually he does make his way home, but he can't stay because he's changed too much...among other things, he's killed, a lot. While he's there, though, an assassin tortures and kills his best friends, and wrecks his family's house. On Christmas. Later, after he leaves, he's forced to close the wormhole for good, to protect Earth from the Scarrans.
- Paul Bremer, a German soldier in World War One, returns home from the front in 1918 only to find he no longer understands civilian life in Germany.
- Stargate SG-1, Teal'c
- An episode called 100 Days plays with this trope. A meteor shower during a mission strikes the Stargate, burying it and leaving O'Neill stuck on an alien planet, with the rest of SG-1 having made it back to earth. O'Neill the following months trying to find the gate, hoping that rescue will come. As he finally gives up on the idea of traveling through the stars and going back to earth, he begins to make a life for himself with the people still on the planet with him. That is until his 100th day there when SG-1 finds a way to make contact with the gate and dig it out. O'Neill's having to choose between his new life and his old one is something of a Tear Jerker.
- Stargate Atlantis, the entire cast in the first season.
- Battlestar Galactica combined this with a Doomed Hometown to form the series premise. In addition, the fifth episode of the first season is also called "You Can't Go Home Again", and involves Kara Thrace attempting to escape a barren planet to return to the Galactica, which (surprise, surprise) she does manage to do at the end, by using a crashed Cylon fighter to get off the planet.
- Sliders for the entire run. They eventually combined this with Doomed Hometown in order to give the series a Big Bad.
- Although one episode ended with them briefly (a few minutes) ending up in a world that looked a lot like theirs, only to end in disappointment when Quinn sadly noted the fence gate at his home didn't squeak, as it did in their world, so they jumped into the next vortex that appeared. Only, after it vanished, to have a local guy come out of the house with Quinn's mother and mentioning he'd finally fixed the squeaky gate hinges.
- Star Trek Voyager, series premise.
- In Star Trek Deep Space Nine Garak was exiled from Cardassia, and is only permitted to return after the entire planet has been carpet bombed.
- Star Trek Enterprise. In "Home" the crew of NX-01 Enterprise return to Earth after three years in space, only to find that while they've learnt to accept aliens, xenophobia has increased as a result of the Xindi attack. T'Pol returns to Vulcan to discover that her mother's career has been destroyed because of her loyalty to Archer, while Archer has difficulty relating to his Starfleet superiors and friends who haven't shared his experiences.
- Lost In Space, series premise.
- Likewise in Life On Mars. Sam finally returns from the grey-brown-orange world of 1973 and decides the modern world lacks colour.
- Gilligans Island, in a comedy example.
- Quantum Leap, in which not only can Sam Becket not go home, he can't even stay where he is, and must live moments from other people's lives, his leaps inevitable, finding himself in a new stranger's shoes each time.
- The Doctor in Doctor Who is unable to return to his home world of late, ever since it kind of got destroyed.
- In the old series, where the Doctor couldn't reliably control the TARDIS, most of his companions couldn't go home until it randomly ended up back in their home place and time again. Most of them didn't mind so much, but there were a couple of plot arcs in which the Doctor was actively trying get a character home, invariably without success; variations included "exactly the right place, but three centuries early" ("The Visitation"), "exactly the right time, but several lightyears away" ("Four to Doomsday"), "the right place and the right time, but due to a technical fault we're all only an inch tall" ("Planet of the Giants"), and "the right place and time, but the wrong universe" ("Full Circle"), not to mention the ever-popular "despite the Doctor's confidence that he's succeeded at last, both the wrong place and the wrong time" ("The Reign of Terror", passim).
- Also in the old series, the Doctor couldn't return to Gallifrey because interfering in the histories of other planets was considered a heinous crime. When he was forced to reveal his location to them ("The War Games"), the Time Lords captured, tried and exiled him.
- And Torchwood's Jack Harkness.
- Space Cases, a thinly disguised ripoff of Star Trek Voyager... which was, itself, a ripoff of Lost In Space.
- In Three In Three, the main character spends most of the plot trying to get back to the spreadsheet she lived in, only to discover in the end that she doesn't really belong there anymore.
- Sid And Marty Krofft Productions are notorious for using this one (HR Pufenstuf, Lidsville, Land Of The Lost, The Lost Saucer, Far Out Space Nuts).
- In Firefly, neither River nor Simon Tam can return to their home on Osiris, because doing so would get Simon arrested and River sent back to the Academy. On a more blunt note, Malcolm Reynolds can't go back to his home on Shadow because the Alliance virtually destroyed the planet during the Unification War, rendering it uninhabitable.
- Part of the premise of Lost. Subverted in the third season finale, when they finally do get to go home, only to have Jack convinced it was a big mistake to leave.
Web Comics
- Parodied in Megatokyo, where Piro and Largo end up in Japan without any money to buy a ticket back home. They get several opportunities to fix this, yet for whatever reason, they never actually go back home.
- Megatokyo is an interesting case indeed... With the plot and Character Development going the way it is, it seems that Piro and Largo feel too tied up in the personal lives of all the people they've interacted with. As such, even if they were offered a fool-proof method to return to America, neither would likely take it.
- One scene with Meimi and Junpei implies that they may end up being forced out of Japan at some point. Until then...
- This trope is the premise of Earthward-Ho!
 .
Western Animation
- Re Boot for most of the third season.
"I live in the games. I search through systems, people, and cities, for this place: Mainframe; my home. My format? I have no format. I am a renegade, lost on the Net."
- For Samurai Jack, it was his home time.
- Part of the series premise for Transformers: Beast Wars. Everyone was stranded on a strange planet far from their homeworld of Cybertron; at the end of the first season, this was Planet Of The Apes Ending, far from their home time, which would be about three hundred years past our present day.
- Avatar The Last Airbender: One of the things that makes Aang and Zuko Not So Different is that neither can go home again — Zuko because he's been exiled, and Aang because it's not there anymore.
- Subverted when Zuko betrays Iroh and is allowed to come back. Then subverted right back to straight when Zuko realizes it wasn't worth it and makes a Heel Face Turn. And subverted again in the finale when he not only goes home, but he owns the home.
- Mario and Luigi in Super Mario Bros Super Show.
- One episode did focus on the duo finding a way back home, but they opt to stay in order to protect Princess Peach.
- A conversation between Wonder Woman and Hawkgirl in an episode of Justice League notes that this trope applies to so many of them — Superman and J'onn are each the Last Of His Kind, Hawkgirl is stranded light-years from home, Batman is an orphan, and Diana has just been exiled from
Paradise Island Themyscira — that they should call themselves the "Just Us League".
- Danielle in Danny Phantom can't return to Vlad's manor where she was cloned and raised on the virtue that the owner is willing to kill her in order to make a better clone! She spends her time constantly on the move.
- For a while in The Fairly Oddparents, Mark Chang was unable to return to Yugopotamia, since it would force him into an Arranged Marriage with Princess Mandie.
Tabletop Games
- The Deep Imaskari race in the Dungeons And Dragons Underdark setting live in a Hidden Elf Village. If anyone decides to leave, they automatically have the location of their home erased from their memory so that in the (highly likely) chance they are captured by something evil that can read minds, they will be unable to divulge the secret location.
Web Original
- The Dimensional Guardians trapped in Creturia in the web fiction serial Dimension Heroes.
Real Life
- In the late 1990s, numerous US Army, Air Force, and Naval bases throughout Europe and the United Kingdom closed down - often becoming the property of the home militaries of those countries in which they were located. You want depressing? Try this: the children who grew up on some of those bases would be turned away by armed guards if they tried to visit their old home-towns.
- The children that grow up in most Army, Air Force, or Naval bases will get turned away by armed guards if they try to visit their own home towns; you need a current military ID, or an escort with current military ID, and simply being the offspring of an Enlisted or Officer individual won't get you a current military ID past the age of 21.
- Many people find themselves displaced from their homes due to political turmoil. One noteworthy case was Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian who ended up having to live in an airport terminal lounge for 18 years because his refugee papers were stolen.
- When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961 to complete the "Iron Curtain", those who found themselves in East Germany had to stay there. Not that it stopped some of the more determined ones.
- This is considered a major cause of the Palestinian opposition to/hostility towards the Israeli state. While the argument is valid (there are villages laying abandoned to this day), millions of others from the Sudetenland to the Punjab have been similarly displaced and gotten on with their lives elsewhere instead of stewing in refugee camps for generations, including roughly 1 million Jews kicked out of Arab countries, most of whom ended up in Israel.
- This troper thinks that's a really simplistic way of looking at it, and you should probably avoid bringing politics into this.
- For many Americans today, the concept was an abstract or something that happened in other countries... until Hurricane Katrina left tens of thousands with no homes (or jobs) to return to.
- This troper recently watched The Last Days, a film that featured interviews with concentration camp survivors from Hungary who revisit. For one of the women interviewed, it was especially painful coming back to the town where she had lived and seeing her old house. She and the other survivors had moved elsewhere, often to America, after getting out of the camps.
- It used to be a common thing in American culture where parents would kick their children out of the house as soon as they turned 18 (by law, hitting 18 legally makes you an adult) since they were supposed to face the world on their own and survive on their own. People even scorned others that chose to live with their parents, believing that they were freeloading or just lazy. While this mindset is still around, it is almost rare now thanks to a changing economy and prices on everything always going up, which has forced people to either find roommates or stay home with the family.
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