The Ragtag Bunch of Misfits needs a ragtag home to call their own.
The Island of Misfit Everything is a haven for the strange, the odd and the downright misunderstood within the community that spawned them. Such a place is usually kept a secret from The Outside World. Sometimes it is kept a secret by society's government, while other times it is kept a secret for fear of what society might do should they find out about them.
Misfits are known for their oddities, their curiosities and their hodgepodge nature compared to "normal" society. Because of this, such places are often patchwork in nature, with various clashing landscapes, cultures and fictional elements.
Examples of its residence include the Exiles, The Grotesque, Non-Malicious Monsters, the Legion of Lost Souls and the Flying Dutchman.
Examples:
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Film — Animated
- Trope Namer; the Island of Misfit Toys from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) is a place where toys, made strange and unlike other toys for one reason or another, are granted a home by flying lion and the island's ruler King Moonracer. When Rudolph, Hermey and Yukon Cornelius arrive at the island, they beg for sanctuary, reasoning that they too are misfits. Reluctant, Moonracer agrees. Later on, Santa Claus comes and takes the toys to new homes.
Live-Action TV
- The Land of Untold Stories, introduced in the last episode of season five of Once Upon a Time, is a magical world where those whose stories they do not wish to see through to their ends go before Mr. Hyde brought them to Storybrooke.
Tabletop Games
- The underhives and sewers of Imperial cities from Warhammer 40,000 often end up as the only refuge for mutants, criminals, giant spiders, rogue psykers, and the less subtle Chaos cults (and subsist on isolated people, occasional raids on higher levels, and each other). Genestealer cults, being able to pass for human, keep their more monstrous members down there.
Video Games
- Dark Souls:
- The Painted World of Ariamis is found hidden within a painting found in the castle of Anor Londo. This painted world resembles a northern snowy keep with a ruined castle. All manner of forlorn souls escape here, whether it is to escape from something or simply a place to call home.
- The Dark Souls III DLC Ashes of Ariandel features the Painted World of Ariandel. Like Ariamis, Ariandel is a snowy realm created to house forlorn souls. In fact, it's the same Painted World, countless recreations after the Chosen Undead visited it. The big issue is that a particularly dangerous Unkindled, Sister Elfriede, has convinced the land's restorer, Father Ariandel, to keep prolonging its existence and decay rather than allow flame to consume and recreate the world, subverting its original mission and keeping the forlorn alive and suffering.
- The Cartoon Wasteland from Epic Mickey is a world created by Yen Sid for toons who have become forgotten and left behind, with Oswald as its chosen ruler. After Mickey accidentally creates the Shadow Blot and drops Yen Sid's bottle of thinner into the world, the Wasteland becomes a nightmarish world overrun with monsters and destroyed by the thinner. Because of this, Oswald, the Shadow Blot and various other entities seek to use Mickey's heart (symbolic for the love and attention others give him) and escape the Wasteland.
Webcomics
- The Society of Arcane Science from The Glass Scientists is a haven in London built by Dr. Henry Jekyll to house and support people who stock and trade in eclectic Magic-Powered Pseudoscience (like Steampunk engineering, crypto-biology, ectoplasmic pathology, experimental confectionism, etc.), the world outside too hostile towards "rogue science" after the events of Frankenstein occurring.
- Chapter 10 of Headless Bliss has the realm of Lasceral, Another Dimension for "broken" characters such as a tone-deaf siren and a blind and voiceless centaur to take safe refuge in.
- Skin Horse:
- The basements of Annex-1 are or were home to a complex ecosystem — and by "complex ecosystem", we mean "they were all preying on each other" — of particularly weird intelligent non-humans who even the Black Ops Social Services didn't know about until Tip accidentally discovered them in "The Borrowers".
- Skin Horse is somewhat this itself, as it works to find nonhumans a place in a society that doesn't entirely recognise they exist, and most of the staff are ex-clients (and their Token Human was also put there because he didn't fit in anywhere else).
Web Videos
- Pirates SMP: The Faction Isles have long been established as a place to call home "for those that had nowhere else to turn to", and several members of the cast who settled on the Isles are indeed misfits who don't have anywhere else to go. That being said, some other cast members are from families who have long settled on the Isles, to whom piracy or adjacent activities are part of the Family Business.
Western Animation
- In the Futurama episode "Obsoletely Fabulous", Bender is left obsolete by a new robot model, where he then refuses to get the upgrade that would make him a-okay with being obsolete. He runs away from society and winds up on an island populated entirely by other robots who refused to get upgraded, each out of date even by Bender's standards and in various states of disrepair.
- In one episode of The Simpsons, Homer offers his dad a kidney, but chickens out at the last moment and flees. He finds himself on a boat of "lost souls" who all have Noodle Incident stories that led them to self exile (jilted love, tiger stabbing, being banned from car washes), who kick him overboard in disgust when he tells them why he's fleeing.
Homer: Well that's the last time I trust the strangest people on Earth.
