I Can Never Never Never Go Home Again

"Is anything better than finally finding your way home?
Is anything worse than finally reaching dwelling house, and finding that y'all're still lost?"

For some reason or another, one of the chief characters is displaced from their home — be it in the sense of homeland, home planet, domicile universe, or literal house — and unable to return. Often, their attempts to render form a key plotline or focal signal of the serial, merely since Condition Quo Is God, Failure Is the Only Option (until, possibly, the K Finale). If the reason why they can't render is because of a Doomed Hometown or because they are The Exile, then their quest is ofttimes revenge or a new place to stay. Sometimes they will finally return to Where It All Began to challenge the forcefulness that kept them away for so long. Before the character leaves their home, they may give it a final glance before leaving.

This is often seen alongside Fish out of Water, and tends to issue in Walking the Globe or a Wagon Train to the Stars. Trapped in Another World commonly entails this (then nigh examples of that trope are equally valid for this i). When this trope is applied to the entire human race, it'south Earth That Was.

Dissimilarity with I Cull to Stay. Also dissimilarity with Stranger in a Familiar Land, in which you can get home, merely find that you lot no longer fit in there. If you can't go habitation because you've been banned from doing and then, you're Persona Not Grata. The Stateless may also have been expelled from their native state. Compare The Call Knows Where Yous Alive, The Exile, Hated Hometown, Never Accepted in His Hometown, and And so What Do We Practise Now?. A common effect of the "Leaving the Nest" Song.

When this happens, some people may choose to Start a New Life instead.

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• Real Life

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     Asian Animation

• Happy Heroes: Large One thousand. and Little Chiliad. crash-state themselves on Planet Xing Xing and can't render home to Planet Grey.

    Comic Strips

• A series of Peanuts strips followed Snoopy taking Woodstock to the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm where he (Snoopy) was born, merely to find it had been replaced by a parking garage. ^annotation Depending on when this strip was written, it may have been a Shout-Out to Terry, the Cairn Terrier who played Toto, whose gravesite was destroyed by the building of the Ventura Highway. She now has a memorial statue at Hollywood Forever cemetery. This became the basis for one of the Peanuts specials where Snoopy is reunited with his siblings.

  Snoopy: You lot stupid people! You're parking on my memories!!!

• The comic strip Adventures of Gamepro ended upwards like this. A pro gamer finds himself pulled into an Alternate Universe where video game worlds are real. While he eventually makes information technology back to Earth, it turns out the superpowers he picked up while he was there tie him to the dimension, and being away is killing him. This forces a tearful good day between him and his girlfriend back home before he disappears back to the game dimension.

    Music

• The vocal "I Can Never Go Domicile Anymore" by the Shangri-Las is made of this trope. Information technology'south essentially An Aesop most a girl who runs away from dwelling and breaks her mother'southward center to be with a boy, who she forgets about almost immediately, while it'southward implied that her mother dies of loneliness in the meantime.
• "You lot Tin can Never Get Home" by The Moody Blues presents a psychological/spiritual version of the trope.
• Burt Bacharach and Hal David's 24 hours from Tulsa, which is as shut to home as Cistron Pitney gets due to an unplanned encounter at his stop-off, which eventually leads to "I hate to say this to you, but I love somebody new. What can I do? And I can never, never, never go home again."
• The Finnish armed services march Jääkärimarssi (Yeager March). Syvä iskumme on, viha voittamaton, meillä armoa ei, kotimaata (Our strike is deep, our wrath implacable, we have no mercy and no homeland). Makes sense, considering the Yeagers were patriots (or traitors, depends on which side you look at) who during the WWI joined the German Ground forces to get military training for liberation war confronting Czarist Russia. The Czarist Law stated mandatory death sentence from high treason.
• "Gilt Slumbers" on Abbey Road, The Beatles' last album, starts "One time, in that location was a fashion to get back homeward..."
• Pushin' the Speed Of Light, a filksong about crewing an STL ship ends with the line "You've left behind you the world of men, with no manner in space to go home again."
• A number of Jacobite songs focus on this trope since many were either exiled or refused to alive in a state that no longer seemed their own. 2 standards of this type are The Highlander's Cheerio and Information technology Was All For Our Rightful Male monarch.
• "When We Return to Portland" is a song near fugitives who abscond Portland to become pirates. They long for their old city, just the return would be a sure capital punishment, thus "may fate never allow the states return"
• The Trope Namer is the DJ Shadow song "Yous Can't Become Dwelling Once more". Despite being mostly instrumental, the overall feeling of the song can exist described in the but words spoken at the beginning:

  And hither is a story nigh... being free.

• The RuPaul song "Never Go Home Again" is about the prevalence of this trope in the GLBT community, and how queer people often band together and course new families subsequently facing rejection at home.
• Ry Cooder'southward song "How Can Y'all Go along on Moving (Unless You lot Migrate Too)" includes a verse that converses this trope. "I tin can't go back to the homestead, the shack no longer stands/They said I wasn't needed, had no claim to the land/They said, 'Come on, get moving! It'southward the just thing for you!'/Only how can you continue moving, unless yous migrate as well?"
• Lurid's 'Sorted for Eastward'southward and Wizz' has the vocalist, talking about a drugged-up episode at a music festival, imagine calling his female parent and say "Mother, I tin can never come up home again/'Crusade I seem to accept left an important part of my encephalon/Somewhere, somewhere in a field in Hampshire".
• "When Y'all Leave That Way You Can Never Become Back" by Confederate Railroad is from the point of view of a man who'south had a series of these all throughout his life. Information technology starts with him having a bad fight with his begetter and running away from domicile, then getting a daughter in Knoxville meaning and abandoning her at the altar before their wedlock, giving him ii families he can never get back to. Nigh Subverted equally he says in the last stanza that he would like to go back dwelling house anyway, beg for forgiveness, and do whatever it takes to come back... merely and so it ends with an even darker one as he reveals that he got with another woman in Houston and murdered her husband when the man walked in on their matter. He's sentenced to decease and refuses to receive his last rites, with the priest warning him that if he leaves Globe this mode, he'll become a wandering lost soul who can never return home to Heaven.
• Creedence Clearwater Revival'due south song 'Lodi' deals with this. The protagonist of the song is stranded in the titular town because his amanuensis ran off and left him at that place, without enough coin to afford a cross-country bus home. He's forced to perform at dive bars total of customers who don't care (and don't tip) to try and scrape together money then he tin can eat, and for a bus fare home. A year after, he'south non any better-off financially than he was when he arrived.
  • Creedence Clearwater Revival also practice this with their early striking 'Porterville' where the son of the town ne'r do well - who isn't quite as bad equally his father - tin't go home again considering they will hang him high if he tries, just because he's his no-good father's son.
• Lampshaded in the opening line and Played With in 'The House That Congenital Me' by Miranda Lambert every bit the singer's childhood dwelling house is nevertheless standing, but someone else is currently living there. The vocalist nevertheless asks the current tenant if she tin enter to at least reminisce one terminal time.
• Taylor Swift's "My Tears Ricochet": "And I can get anywhere I want / Anywhere I want / Merely not home..."

    Mythology and Religion

• The Bible:
  • In the Volume of Genesis, later on Adam and Eve interruption the rules in the Garden of Eden, they are cast out forever and an angel with a flaming sword guards information technology from them. Hence, they and their descendants spread around the planet. The trope is eventually averted in Christianity, however, when God takes the consequences and penalty for man sin on himself.
  • In the same book, afterward Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed, Lot and his daughters take shelter in a nearby cave. Lot's wife made the mistake of looking dorsum as her hometown was destroyed, and ended up being turned into a colonnade of table salt. And their unnamed daughters' fiances were killed along with their neighbors. They get their father drunk and rape him, and each have a son past him, because they think they're the only people left After the End.
  • Also in the same book, most of Abraham's line falls into this, including Abraham and Sarah themselves. Abraham (then known as Abram) and his married woman/half-sis Sarai are approached by God, given a Meaningful Rename, and told to migrate to the other side of the Fertile Crescent. Abraham has a son named Ishmael by his slave Hagar (who is from somewhere around Egypt or Nubia), and when he and Sarah finally have the biological son they've been waiting for (Isaac), Sarah makes him kicking Hagar and Ishmael out into the desert. They are promised past an angel that everything will be okay, and Ishmael becomes the Hero of Some other Story. Meanwhile, Isaac grows upwardly, and Abraham and Sarah really desire him to marry a girl from the "right" family unit, instead of the local Canaanite women, whom they view as godless heathens. So they send a messenger back to Padan-Aram, and he brings dwelling house a girl named Rebekah as a bride for Isaac, and it's understood that she will never return home again after the marriage (which she accepts). They have ii sons Jacob and Esau, and when Jacob and Rebekah trick Esau out of his inheritance, Rebekah sends Jacob off to Padan-Aram to her brother, where he marries Leah and Rachel. Although he does somewhen visit Esau (who, to his surprise, has forgiven him), he never sees his parents once again. His son Joseph is sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, and ends up in Egypt, where he becomes an important adviser to the Pharaoh.
  • In the Volume of Jeremiah, the titular prophet along with the Judean survivors of the Babylonian invasion of Jerusalem escape to Egypt for fear of the Babylonians, despite Jeremiah's warnings from God not to go down there. Information technology is there where God through Jeremiah tells the refugees that a good deal of them will die in that location and never render to the land of Judah.

    Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons
  • The Deep Imaskari race in the Underdark setting live in a Subconscious 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 past something evil that can read minds, they will be unable to divulge the hush-hush location.
  • Elminster Aumar of the Forgotten Realms. At the outset of his volume series a magelord on a dragon burns downwards his home hamlet to electrocute his begetter, a prince of Athalantar who had abdicated. About a century after, an orc horde destroyed the unabridged kingdom. The present-mean solar day city of Secomber is built on its uppercase's ruins.
• The odds of a member of the Imperial Guard of Warhammer 40,000 making it to retirement age are pretty depression, because that the Imperium is well-nigh continuously at war with some if not all of its neighbors (and quite often itself). Those that make it are by and large discharged on the planet they happen to be on when they retire, and their retirement package does not include a ticket back to their home planet (which could be thousands of calorie-free years away, depending on what events happened during their deployment). As such, at that place is a very skilful chance that anyone who enlists in a Guard regiment volition never render to their habitation planet, let alone their home town, ever once more. Indeed, the lucky ones instead go a commission and some land on the planet they conquered well-nigh recently, substantially condign landed gentry in that location.
  • This applies to the Regiments on a logistical and bureaucratic level. Once a regiment is raised it will likely never see its original homeworld or organisation. With new recruits beingness picked up from planets they pass, or liberate. Only the more than famous and decorated regiments such as the Firstborn or Death Korps of Krieg have the privilege of getting reinforcements from their homeworld.
• Vampire: The Requiem goes to nifty lengths to describe why a fledgling should never become dorsum to its mortal life. Fifty-fifty if its old friends and family can cope with its return as a vampire; even if the vampire has enough Heroic Willpower to keep its Horror Hunger and Unstoppable Rages in check; the dysfunctional, sadistic, and highly lethal vampiric societies will detect out and take a very dim view of mortals learning about their being.
• In Changeling: The Lost, every newly-fabricated Changeling quickly learns that the Fae who abducted and transformed them left a lifelike impostor in their identify. Good luck convincing the family unit that the plain-featured, unhinged version of their loved one who showed up out of nowhere is actually the real person. Even if they manage, Changelings are irreversibly bound to Fate, which tends to turn them into Doom Magnets for mortals they get besides close to.
• 3:xvi Carnage Amid the Stars opens past touching on this trope then inevitably hammers information technology in hard on any Player Characters - all PCs are outcast from the utopian society on Earth, and forced into glorified penal legions sent to "proactively defend" Earth past committing genocide on all other life in the galaxy. Any character who lasts long enough can develop a "Hatred for Home" trait that risks them eventually going dorsum to Where It All Began... to exterminate Earth in revenge for what they were forced to exercise.

    Toys

• The forgotten toy line Snailiens. The heroes are a grouping of mollusc-like aliens who come up to Earth to help salvage a population of oppressed insects. In the process, a homo boy finds their transport, mistakes it for an interesting-looking beat out and puts it on the highest shelf in his sleeping accommodation to go along it out of the hands of his babe brother. It's not destroyed, just information technology'southward so high up the miniscule heroes are resigned to the fact that they'll never go it back.

    Webcomics

• Parodied in MegaTokyo, where Piro and Largo end up in Nihon without any money to buy a ticket back home. They get several opportunities to fix this, yet for whatsoever reason, they never actually go back home.
  • MegaTokyo is an interesting instance indeed... With the plot and Grapheme Development going the manner it is, information technology seems that Piro and Largo feel too tied upward in the personal lives of all the people they've interacted with. Every bit such, even if they were offered a fool-proof method to render to America, neither would probable take it.
    • 1 scene with Meimi and Junpei implies that they may finish up being forced out of Japan at some betoken. Until and then...
• Tower of God: Urek Mazino followed Phantaminum into the Tower, but he discovered he could not exit of it anymore.
• Silver Bullet Nights: The head of Donovan'south family has disowned him for existence transgender, resulting in him living on the mean streets of Toro City. He can't return to the family home or concern; his previous life is over.
• In The Social club of the Stick, information technology is foretold that Durkon will return to his homeland—posthumously. However, he'south actually happy to learn this because he'd much rather exist buried with his ancestors than to die somewhere else.
  • Of grade, he doesn't know the real reason he was sent away from his home in the first place: information technology's prophecized that when he returns, it will result in the land'southward devastation.
  • So there'south Vaarsuvius, whose quest for power cost V's marriage and nearly the lives of spouse and children.
• A minor plot point in Homestuck is that Sburb, a video game which tin manipulate concrete objects, is targeted at players who are entering adolescence and beginning to desire to escape their homes for a life of their own. Sburb likewise enforces this, since playing information technology somewhen sends players to a Pocket Universe while their domicile planet is destroyed by meteors created by the game.
• Zeetha from Girl Genius doesn't know where her tribe is from. Everyone who was involved in her journey to Europa ended up dead one mode or another.
• A plot arc in At Arm'due south Length allowed for the introduction of a new character, 1 that was in their Character contest dorsum in 2012. This character appeared in a flash of lite, and apparently is from another reality. Sadly, nobody knows how he got at that place, or if they volition exist able to send him dorsum.
• In Freefall, Sam Starfall is prohibited from returning to his domicile globe, due to his acquiring knowledge of engineering far above the approximately "Steam Age" technology level at that place.
• In We Are The Wyrecats, K.A. tries difficult to pick up where she left off after coming out of a coma, but reality sets in pretty quickly that the world non simply isn't the same one she left, merely that it's a decidedly worse one.
• Alice Grove: Ardent and Gavia teleport to Globe from the orbital habitat where they grew upward, then find that their requests to return are being ignored. When they go back to space by a different route, they learn that their "habitat" is actually a simulation being run by a titanic, sapient space tree, which won't have them back considering they've been infected by impossibly advanced picotechnology of unknown purpose. Rough mean solar day.
• In Dan and Mab'south Furry Adventures, this trope is why Mab is travelling with Dan but this is played with. What happened was is that the electric current queen of the faerie kingdom, Nutmeg, made a prescript that no one could have a tail fluffier than the queen's, and then Mab, known for her fluffy tail, decided "Screw that" and left. She could go dorsum home and did for a trivial chip merely she chose not to.
  • This happened to Matilda and the reason why she can't get home is considering she ripped off her blood brother's arm and trounce him with information technology. In her tribe, a female going against a male is punishable by death.
• Africa: Chui takes Africa's territory. She returns to effort and repossess it, only to get beaten. She returns to the new place in defeat
• A recurring theme in many webcomics about life in college, at least in late 1990s-early 2000s, possibly in a bit more literal sense. In College Catastrophe Jan visits his parents' home and finds his one-time room no longer suitable for life. In his case, it's used as a junk storeroom.

    Web Original

• Atop the Fourth Wall: The Gunslinger's pocketwatch was fabricated specifically to avert this trope. Nether normal circumstances, travelling to another dimension would either be fatal to him, or it would crusade the dimension to assimilate him, thereby making his ain dimension fatal to him. The pocketwatch prevents these furnishings from occurring. Just then Linkara destroyed the pocketwatch, causing The Gunslinger to be trapped in Linkara'due south world forever, unable to return. When Linkara realizes this, he swears that he'll find a manner to set up information technology.
• The Dimensional Guardians trapped in Creturia in the web fiction serial Dimension Heroes.
• In the Whateley Universe, Phase tin can't become home again. His family are the largest anti-mutant force on the planet.
• qntm'south "Be Here At present" story introduces a multiple-universes arrangement of time travel. Information technology's impossible to time-travel in ane's ain timeline, merely yous can "jump the tracks" to whatever point in any other timeline. The just thing is, the destination timeline is always "the side by side one down the [infinite] chain", then you can never go back home over again once you've time-jumped one time.
• Survival of the Fittest: At the cease of v3, JR Rizzolo manages to return domicile afterwards (ostensibly) being the Sole Survivor, only to find that his family unit has disowned him and completely moved out.
• The premise of Mabaka! Magic is for Idiots! revolves around a novice wizard from another dimension getting stuck on Globe with no way to get back. Naturally, he ends upwards staying with the aforementioned girl whose yard he crash-landed into. At least until a year is upward and he tin can return via a dimensional send organisation.
• The Autobiography of Jane Eyre: In episode 9, Jane has defenseless cold and is really ill, which also triggers her homesickness. It's all the more sad because she doesn't really have her dwelling house. The firm feels empty and isolated, she doesn't take anybody to talk to; she misses university, just concludes that it was only a dorm room.

  "I only desire to go home, except for I don't know where that is."

• Random Assault: Kate will never be accepted by her family unit for wanting to be a female.
• In The Jenkinsverse, Xiù Chang returns to Earth after spending ii years living among an alien species called Gaoians, barely survives the furnishings of a nervejam grenade, spends three years hiding in exile pretending to *be* a Gaoian, and five years stuck in a stasis pod later on narrowly surviving the devastation of a starship. Her experiences leave her unable to chronicle to her family and friends dorsum abode, merely unwilling to render to Gao equally that would put the Gaoians in danger from the Hunters. In the end, the only people she feels at home with are fellow abductees Julian and Allison.
• The first 3 volumes of RWBY are set in Beacon Academy, the boarding schoolhouse that is training the titular team of students and their friends and colleagues. By the end of Volume 3, the girls are budgeted the stop of their first year in a four-yr programme. Withal, the villains instigate an invasion of the school by the Monsters of Grimm, leaving the schoolhouse destroyed, the teachers and students evacuated, the headmaster missing, and a magically-frozen Grimm Dragon passively attracting more Grimm to the school's ruins. The finale ends with the titular squad scattered, and a cross-continental quest offset to endeavor and seek answers to who the villains are.
• In Twig, Sylvester realizes, after he deserts Radham Academy with Jamie, that by killing the Baron Richmond and taking Jamie he's finally crossed the line and fabricated Radham and his fellow Lambs his enemy, and that he can't go home, non alive, at least.
• Murder Drones: Afterwards Uzie'southward father betrays her, and the other robots are all the same cowardly and powerless against the invading killer robots, Uzie decides to exile herself because at that place'due south nil she can do to convince them to fight. Also, Globe is looking similar a much better place to rule over.

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Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouCantGoHomeAgain

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