fantastical reverse culture shock
September 6, 2015 10:14 PM   Subscribe

Which stories deal with the aftermath of someone who had spent time in a magical world but is suddenly thrust into mundanity, and instead of being "oh glad I'm back to normal" they wish to return?

This is inspired by this Tumblr post:
there’s dozens of stories about some kid from our world falling into a different, magical one, being the chosen one or the close companion of the chosen one and saving the world, and then going home where they’re delighted to see their family again and have a new appreciation of their own life. but what about someone who didn’t miss it? what if you save the world and you’re given your medal and stripped of the magic you learned and put back in a world you never missed? and you’re furious.
Some searching revealed a ton of fics revolving around Susan Pevensie, but are there others, fanfic or original?
posted by divabat to Media & Arts (40 answers total) 51 users marked this as a favorite
 
Neverwhere
posted by deanc at 10:20 PM on September 6, 2015 [9 favorites]


The Magicians trilogy, but it's a little more complicated than that; I would say that the tension between the magical and non-magical world (and wanting to be in one or the other, and that desire changing) is one of the themes of that whole story.
posted by jeweled accumulation at 10:31 PM on September 6, 2015 [22 favorites]


The Magicians Trilogy by Lev Grossman. I don't want to spoil things by getting too specific, though!
posted by Omnomnom at 10:31 PM on September 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


Isn't this a thing in the Narnia series?
posted by DarlingBri at 10:33 PM on September 6, 2015 [3 favorites]


Valente's "Fairyland" series is strongly this!
posted by The otter lady at 10:35 PM on September 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant deal with this - every time Covenant returns home, he has to deal with the fact that, in real life, he's a leper.
posted by hanov3r at 10:37 PM on September 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


John Carter of Mars
posted by Confess, Fletch at 10:52 PM on September 6, 2015


The Gemma Doyle Trilogy is like this -- mostly during the second book. A young woman in Victorian England and her friends travel to some sort of alternate world. As young Victorian women, they have to be more restrained in the real world.
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 10:52 PM on September 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm not sure if this is quite what you mean, but Howling Dogs is a rather haunting interactive story (I can't quite call it a game) where you take on the role of a person locked in a small, cell-like place and once a day you can put on virtual reality goggles and experience colorful adventures. But every day you spend escaping into your stories, the real world around you becomes more shabby and broken.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 11:09 PM on September 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


That's close to the story line of the anime Hagure Yuusha no Aestetica. (Which is terrible, by the way, unless you like nudity.)
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:12 PM on September 6, 2015


Agree with the otter lady: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making addresses this issue explicitly, and the other books in the series also grapple with it a bit.
posted by The Elusive Architeuthis at 11:16 PM on September 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


The end of the 9th Doctor season on Doctor Who deals with this pretty explicitly, as does the beginning of the Donna Noble series. Both companions either get sent home or choose to go home, and then have a rough go of it. I guess London in the early 2000s has nothing on all of time and space.
posted by ausdemfenster at 11:22 PM on September 6, 2015


The Song of Albion series definitely falls into this category, with the world of Albion being described as brighter and better than ours in pretty much every way.
posted by Allenthar at 11:24 PM on September 6, 2015


The Fate series by Heather Lyons deals with this subject - especially book 3 (A Matter of Truth).
posted by SisterHavana at 11:42 PM on September 6, 2015


Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce is all about this, from a different angle. The character who is spirited away is something of a cipher, and the story is about how everyone reacts to her changed self when she returns to the mundane world.

(Also, not fiction, but Salman Rushdie's BFI Film Classics volume on The Wizard of Oz explores this idea. Rushdie's biggest objection to the film is that Dorothy goes back to Kansas.)
posted by thetortoise at 12:32 AM on September 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


Jo Walton's short story Relentlessly Mundane is about that interesting topic. If you really expected at any moment to be raptured back into Fantasyland, how would you live the rest of your Earthly life? (People used to ask her to write the backstory to this story, and she'd reply "You know you've already read it.")
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 1:01 AM on September 7, 2015 [15 favorites]


These two short stories/fics about Susan Pevensie (which you may have already found) were, I thought, particularly good examinations of the 'banishment from magic' tropes. They're superb:

Can we talk about Susan Pevensie for a moment?
Susan's fabulous adventures after Narnia.
posted by Happy Dave at 1:18 AM on September 7, 2015 [9 favorites]


Glory Road by R.A. Heinlein. The second half of the book follows the hero as he returns to his normal life.
posted by Marky at 1:22 AM on September 7, 2015


Dorothy, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry settle in Oz permanently in The Emerald City of Oz. Dorothy makes 3 visits back before this.
posted by brujita at 2:13 AM on September 7, 2015


I think the ending of Gulliver's Travels is a good example, it's quite an old trope with several variations. Gulliver can't settle down to live his life because all humans seem like Yahoos to him. (Including his missus.)
As soon as I entered the house, my wife took me in her arms, and kissed me; at which, having not been used to the touch of that odious animal for so many years, I fell into a swoon for almost an hour. At the time I am writing, it is five years since my last return to England. During the first year, I could not endure my wife or children in my presence; the very smell of them was intolerable; much less could I suffer them to eat in the same room. To this hour they dare not presume to touch my bread, or drink out of the same cup, neither was I ever able to let one of them take me by the hand. The first money I laid out was to buy two young stone-horses, which I keep in a good stable; and next to them, the groom is my greatest favourite, for I feel my spirits revived by the smell he contracts in the stable. My horses understand me tolerably well; I converse with them at least four hours every day. They are strangers to bridle or saddle; they live in great amity with me and friendship to each other.
This and many other bits are missing from kid's versions of the book, so if you last read it when you were young, you may be surprised on reading it again.

Another variation of the trope is that to eat or drink fairyland fare poisons you forever against real life and there you are, yearning for fairyland forever: Goblin Market is an example of this. In the poem, the antidote is to get a second dose. And yes, analogies and references to drug addiction pretty well accepted in interpreting Pre-Raphaelite and Romantic material.

Then there's the '100 years passed by in the blink of an eye' theme as in Rip Van Winkle. Unsurprisingly, you get back home after everyone you knew has died, you're not happy.
UP the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl's feather!
etc

They stole little Bridget
For seven years long;
When she came down again
Her friends were all gone.
They took her lightly back,
Between the night and morrow,
They thought that she was fast asleep,
But she was dead with sorrow.
They have kept her ever since
Deep within the lake,
On a bed of flag-leaves,
Watching till she wake.

posted by glasseyes at 2:18 AM on September 7, 2015 [6 favorites]


Oh my god, and Frodo of course. Everyone else is superhappy to get home to the Shire.
posted by glasseyes at 2:22 AM on September 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


Here's the tv tropes page for Stranger in a Familiar Land, which seems closish to what you're after.
posted by glasseyes at 2:39 AM on September 7, 2015


The Guardians of the Flame series. One of the sub plots of the first book is this and then the over arching driver of the series is driven by it.
posted by Mitheral at 3:25 AM on September 7, 2015


The musical episode of Buffy deals with this. When Buffy was raised from the dead she was yanked out if heaven (if I'm remembering correctly. Great episode anyhow)
posted by biggreenplant at 5:01 AM on September 7, 2015 [3 favorites]


See also the TVtropes page for So What Do We Do Now, and the related tropes linked there.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 6:13 AM on September 7, 2015


The UK version of Life On Mars.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:28 AM on September 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


There's no world saving aspect, but this is basically the plot of the movie Star Trek Generations.
posted by telegraph at 7:49 AM on September 7, 2015


Brigadoon!
posted by pecanpies at 8:05 AM on September 7, 2015 [4 favorites]


"Restless in my Hand" is the first one that came to mind. I'm pretty sure I've run across a lot of others. (Hell, I think I've written at least one myself.)
posted by Scattercat at 8:46 AM on September 7, 2015


The Time Machine by H.G.Wells.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 8:56 AM on September 7, 2015


The Secret Country trilogy by Pamela Dean. The kids go home and are determined to find a way back.
posted by OolooKitty at 11:31 AM on September 7, 2015


This is sort of the premise of the comic "Kingdoms Lost" by Boulet. One character wants to go back, others are happy where they are.
posted by teraflop at 5:17 PM on September 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


There's the Japanese folk tale of Urashima Taro, the man who spends three days in the realm of the Dragon King before asking to be brought home, and learning that 300 years have passed in his own world.
posted by ardgedee at 6:40 PM on September 7, 2015


Out of Oz, the last volume in the Wicked series, has this.

Also, if you count manga/anime, Inu Yasha.
posted by LoonyLovegood at 3:58 AM on September 8, 2015


The description from that Tumblr post is Lev Grossman's The Magicians trilogy.

I won't go into spoilers but disillusionment and harsh reality are constant themes in the series that come up again and again.
posted by Snuffman at 2:24 PM on September 8, 2015


Colors In the Dreamweaver's Loom and its sequel: the protagonist goes to a magical world and explicitly does not want to leave, but she's forced to. At the beginning of the sequel she believes that she hallucinated the whole previous book.
posted by cheesegrater at 3:48 PM on September 8, 2015


The Gregor the Overlander series by Suzanne Collins. Life after befriending giant talking cockroaches and riding around on giant bats just isn't the same.
posted by pimli at 7:06 PM on September 8, 2015


The number of Facebook posts from people returning from Burningman might fall here.
posted by talldean at 5:47 AM on September 10, 2015


As mentioned above, season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer deals with this exact thing. The big reveal is the musical episode (Once More With Feeling - S6E7).
posted by meggan at 12:21 PM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


Greg Bear's Songs of Earth and Power is about a man navigating transitions to and from a the realm of Sidhe (caution: not your standard "mainstream" fey). He doesn't really want-to-want-to go back, and it is not a nice place, but he really struggles with making sense of his life on earth after his experiences there, and thinking of those he left behind.
posted by BrashTech at 9:16 AM on September 12, 2015 [1 favorite]


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