Penny Among Diamonds

"I toldja, it's like a turning an old lamp into a chandelier."

— Spencer, Half & Half

A commoner (or poor person) is thrust into rich culture for whatever reasons, but without becoming rich themselves. Most commonly, it will be a poor student who receives a scholarship to a prestigious school, a commoner hired to work as a butler/maid for someone rich, or they enter a romantic relationship with someone who is rich. Usually the story is portrayed from the view of the commoner. Contrast Rags to Riches, where the commoner becomes rich but may still face taunts and derision from those with Old Money. A classic of the Culture Clash trope, contrasted with Slumming It when jumping from the opposite side of the fence—especially when doing the Prince and Pauper routine. Expect Fish out of Water aspects in both this and the inverse trope.

This is a Super-Trope of Princess for a Day and Scholarship Student. Sub-trope of Fish out of Water. Also see Mock Millionaire, Cast Full of Rich People. Contrast Token Rich Student, who is more of a Diamond among Pennies.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• BanG Dream!: Mashiro Kurata is a student of Tsukinomori Girls' Academy, which is a highly prestigious girls' high school for wealthy families. Compared to the other students (including her own bandmates), She's a normal girl amongst them, which adds to her self-esteem issues.
• In Black Clover, Yuno joins the Golden Dawn, which aside from him is comprised of aristocrats who look down on him due to his peasant background. He doesn't seem to mind their opinions much, and usually spends time with the kind Mimosa and Klaus, who warm up to him eventually.
• Boys over Flowers: Makino's parents force her to attend a school for rich kids so she may get a rich husband.
• Yukihira Souma from Food Wars! can be considered this, as the majority of the students at Totsuki Academy are from VERY well off families. Played with in that his father is actually a famous chef and former Toutsuki student, but chose to work as the owner of a small restaurant while Souma was growing up.
• Fruits Basket:
  • Tohru Honda ends up living with several members of the very wealthy Sohma family. The family members that she hangs around with tend not to come across as the Old Money family they come from, but they do occasionally treat Tohru to things like vacations at family-owned resorts or beach houses.
  • A much darker example would be Ren, Akito's mother. She was a maid before marrying very high into the family (specifically Akira, the then-head of the household) and many members of the family never forgave this. Ren didn't exactly seem to try to ingratiate herself to the family, but classism is apparently the main reason other maids accuse her of "seducing" her husband and claiming she tricked him into marrying her.
• Rosehip from Girls und Panzer stands out in St. Gloriana as she comes from a poor, low class family and has trouble keeping up with the elegance shown by her upperclassmen such as preventing her tea from spilling. Also, her manner of speaking is rough and loud, in contrast to the soft and refined way the others speak. Further, she favors the speedy Crusader tank in contrast to the heavier tank selection favored by the elites^note Though this does help the school fit in line with British World War II armor doctrine; having slow, heavily armored 'infantry' tanks for the main assault alongside fast, lightly armored 'cruiser' tanks for high speed flanking attacks.
• Hayate the Combat Butler: Hayate is left with a huge debt from his parents, and works to pay it off as a butler under a small rich girl.
• He Is My Master: Two sisters are forced to work off a very large debt to a filthy rich kid, and become his maids.
• Miyuki Shirogane from Kaguya-sama: Love Is War is lower middle class and attending a school for the children of nobility, politicians, and businessmen. Unlike most examples, he is the Student Council President and is respected by his peers. How respected, you say? The entire student body is a Shipper on Deck for his not-quite-relationship with the very Blue Blood Kaguya. Flashbacks reveal this wasn't always the case: he had to work his ass off hard to rise to the top academically and gain the respect of the student body.
• In Kakegurui, Mary Saotome is a scholarship student attending Hyakkaou Private Academy, a school for Born Winners and children of the obscenely wealthy. Her insistence on being treated as an equal is partially responsible for her descent into gambling addiction by the time the main series starts.
• In My Hero Academia, Ochaco Uraraka is from a poor family from Osaka, when several of her classmates are fabulously wealthy, especially Momo Yaoyorozu. Uraraka tries to defy the trope of being The Idiot from Osaka by speaking standard Japanese instead of her native Osaka dialect and not telling anyone about her poor family life, but earning money for her parents from hero work is her motivation.
• In Ouran High School Host Club, Haruhi is from a lower middle class family who managed to earn a scholarship to Ouran Academy, a private school for the most elite and wealthy students. The Host club members all assume her to be "poor" and marvel at all the little things "poor people" come up with to get by in life, making poor Haruhi the Only Sane Man in a school where almost everyone is Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense.
  Haruhi: These damn rich people...!
• In Special A, Hikari Hanazono is the daughter of a working-class family attending a very prestigious school - her friends and peer group at school consist of three heirs to multinational conglomerates (Kei, assorted businesses; Akira, an airline; Ryu, sporting goods), two children of a pair of cross-culturally famous performers (twins Jun and Megumi), the son of the extremely rich school's director (Tadashi)... and the daughter of a carpenter (Hikari herself).
• Alpha Bitch Satomi Ozawa and later protagonist Shiina of Shadow Star attend the prestigious Banda Academy despite being from poor and middle class families, respectively. Satomi's descent into villainy is mainly fueled by her obsessive need to prove herself superior to everyone in spite of her humble background as a result of her difficulties fitting in at such a fancy school, where by contrast Shiina's cheerful and friendly personality wins her plenty of decent friends who don't care about her background and she doesn't really take popularity or social status seriously, anyway. Which, of course makes Satomi resent her even more...
• Anya from Spy X Family is an orphan adopted from a shady orphanage by the super spy Loid Forger aka. Agent Twilight for the explicit purpose of infiltrating Eden Academy, the most-prestigious and upper-class school in Ostania. While their faux-family actually presents as upper-middle-class (Loid works as a psychiatrist when not engaged in espionage, while wife and mother Yor has a job at City Hall when not out slaughtering villains), Anya's classmates include the heirs of some of the richest and most powerful people in the country, including Anya's best friend Becky Blackwell (whose father is the CEO of one of Ostania's biggest military manufacturers) and Damian Desmond, the son of Loid's target Donovan Desmond, former Prime Minister of Ostania and leader of the powerful National Unity Party. Anya is often looked down on as a "peasant" by her classmates for not being from a stinking rich background.
• In Sword Art Online, during the Alicization arc, Eugeo and Kirito are among the very few non-nobles who attend the Imperial Swordcraft Academy, despite having been a former woodcutter who'd accomplished his Calling and an outsider who's thought to be an amnesiac, respectively. In their second year, they take on Teise and Ronye as their pages, and both girls come from low-ranking noble families. All four of them, especially the first pair, are the target of cruel treatment by Raios and Humbert, both very high-ranking nobles.
• Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs: Most of the students in the Holtfort Kingdom Academy are from noble families, with Olivia standing out as the only one who comes from a commoner family (thus making her an easy target for the nastiest ones). Her being allowed to attend the academy is in fact the first step of a long term plan of the Holfort Kingdom to educate the common people and dilute the power of the nobility. As such in her second year Olivia is dealing with newcomer commoner students.

Films — Animated

• In the film Nimona, knighthood is the sole province of the nobility, with all knights for the past thousand years being descendants of the original crop... until Ballister, a street kid, broke into a training exercise and was allowed to join their ranks by a progressive queen. By the time period of the film, he's top of his class, but also wears visibly clunkier and older armour than everyone else, and he's looked down on by most of his classmates for not being of noble blood.

Films — Live-Action

• In Hoi Polloi, a professor attempts to teach The Three Stooges to be gentlemen.
• James Bond:
  • In Casino Royale, Vesper sizes up Bond by stating that he doesn't come from money, and was put through school on the charity of others, despite having no money of his own. He neither confirms nor denies this, and his background remains ambiguous.
  • Skyfall ultimately reveals this not to be the case. He does come from a wealthy family, but he was orphaned at a very young age. Vesper might have instead been picking up on discomfort/guilt over the wealth he inherited.
• In Love Me Tonight (1932), Maurice the tailor spends a few days in a castle full of aristocrats who think he's one of them. Lampshaded when he wears his everyday casual suit, turtleneck, and flat cap to a costume ball.
• In Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, the eponymous Miss Pettigrew gets this treatment, pretending to be an upper-class social secretary in order to find work.
• The title character of Ophelia is presented as such. She's not nobleborn and her father is a counsellor to the king, rather than a lord. Queen Gertrude makes her one of her ladies-in-waiting, but some of the courtiers, in particular the other ladies, still treat her as something of an outsider and don't let her forget she's not truly 'one of them'. This is reflected in her clothing; she tends to wear plainer-looking gowns and no jewellery because her father can't afford finer things.
• In The Skulls, the main character has a blue-collar background and is working a succession of odd jobs in order to pay his way through Harvard law school. He sees his association with the eponymous secret society as just one more step up the ladder.
• In The Getting of Wisdom, Laura comes from a working-class background, in sharp contrast to her fellow students at the all-girls' boarding school where the story takes place. This causes a great deal of tension between her and the other girls.

Literature

• The Black Magician Trilogy: Sonea is the first non-noble student in Imardin's Wizarding School, and is only recruited — to many aristocrats' displeasure — because she has far too much magical power to leave untrained. She works herself to the bone to prove she's not just coasting by on her innate strength.
• In the Bloody Jack series Mary "Jacky" Faber, a ha'penny at best as a former London street urchin and ex-Royal Navy ship's boy, is a very rough fit in Boston's Lawson Peabody School for Girls.
• In A Brother's Price Jerin saves the life of a princess, and as a reward the royal family offers to sponsor his coming out in society, which will enable him to find rich brides. He and the sisters who accompany him are given expensive clothes, so that they don't have to spend more money than they can afford, or look poor. Some of the nobles who do know who they are do look down on them, but all in all it goes rather well.
• Rachel in Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich Asians is a Chinese-American professor who is shocked to discover that her boyfriend, Nick, is the scion of one of the wealthiest families in Singapore. When they visit for a wedding, she is forced into a world in which she is unfairly pegged as a Gold Digger who knows nothing of social cues that Nick navigates with aplomb.
• Cécile Revel of the Girls of Many Lands series lived her whole life in the poor village of Rileaux before being elevated at her father's request to serve Madame Elizabeth Charlotte (whom she simply calls Madame) at the court of Versailles, caring for the Madame's pet dogs. She is shocked by the decadence of the court early on but connects with other servants and bonds with the young dukes Bretagne and Anjou, who love to see the dogs she cares for. She later learns that she was in fact born at court and her late mother was a fallen noble.
• The Great Gatsby: Gatsby was this in his youth, before he made a fortune bootlegging and became Nouveau Riche. He's still struggling to rub elbows with the Old Money, however.
• In Jo's Boys (the second sequel to Little Women) musician Nat goes to Europe for school. Due to having wealthy and influential friends everyone thinks that he's wealthy and influential as well. Too bad he's an orphan who spent a number of years as a street musician, and thus has little idea of how to handle money. Cue the nineteenth century version of a Credit Card Plot.
• In My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!, Maria Campbell, the heroine of the otome game Fortune Lover, was one of the few commoners to get into the magical school where the game takes place, by virtue of having a rare talent for light magic. Maria ends up getting bullied by some of her noble schoolmates who are jealous of her talent and/or closeness with certain young noblemen or princes, and Catarina (the main antagonist of the game) is one of her worst tormentors in the game. After Catarina's personality gets altered during her childhood and she befriends Maria in the canon series, Maria's life greatly improves.
• Richard Papen, the main character of Donna Tarte's The Secret History, is a young man from a modest background who ends up attending a prestigious liberal arts school in Vermont. He is surrounded by wealthy pupils who can produce huge sums at the drop of a hat, and feels the need to fabricate a more appealing background for himself in order to fit in.

Live-Action TV

• In the ninth episode of season one of Burn Notice, the client is Nick Lam, whose fiancee has been kidnapped for ransom. The problem is that Nick is just a house sitter who has stopped correcting people who assume he lives in the houses he watches. He never actually said he was rich, but it became very easy to let everybody assume he was because of his surroundings. Of course, it turns out this includes his fiancee, who's not very pleased to learn the truth after Team Westen save her life from that harrowing ordeal.
• In the first season of Chicago P.D., Lindsay tells Halstead that when the Voights took her in, they transferred her to a private school full of rich kids who were only friendly until they learned the truth about her background.
• The Dropout: New lab worker Erika Cheung comes from a lower-middle class income, making her perspective unique compared to the well-off professors, board members, and nepotism hires around Theranos. It also raises the stakes when she notices all the improprieties going on; unlike her colleague Tyler Schulz, who can afford to Resign in Protest, she really needs her job.
• The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air revolves entirely around a West-Philadelphia-born-and-raised hoodrat named Will catapulted into his rich Aunt and Uncle's Bel Air community, resulting in many humorous moments as he finds himself at odds with the townspeople and characters, socially and financially.
• Gilmore Girls: Rory goes to a private high school and Yale thanks to some funding from her wealthy grandparents, but her family remains rather poor.
• The initial basis of Gossip Girl is Dan and Jenny Humphrey's entrance into the world of the super rich who attend the Constance Billard-Saint Jude's schools alongside them. Not as extreme as some other examples as the Humphreys are certainly not poor, they just seem that way in comparison to their super rich peers, but the financial and social disparity between the Humphreys and the rest of the Upper East Side drives many actions of both Dan and Jenny, including Dan's creating the Gossip Girl website, because he wanted to be a part of the story.
• As revealed in Season 2 of H₂O: Just Add Water, Rikki lives with her divorced father in a trailer on the outskirts of the Gold Coast, while Cleo, Emma, and Lewis are from upper-class families, and Zane comes from a rich family. Rikki pretends to be upper-class until her father meets Zane and accuses him of being a thief.
• The Heirs: The protagonist, Cha Eun-sang, is a poor girl who is admitted to Jeguk High School, the most prestigious high school in South Korea. It mainly admits rich kids from rich families, and although there are poor students like Eun-sang, they are immediately singled out as part of the "social care" group and routinely bullied.
• In an episode of My Name Is Earl, Joy and Darnell (plus Dodge and Earl Jr.) are relocated as part of Witness Protection after Darnell's identity was accidentally revealed. Joy keeps outing the family so she'll be able to live in a gated community, and eventually gets her wish. But she doesn't fit in at all with the other women, and her family is not actually wealthy. Earl has to help her fit in.
• The Nanny: The entire show revolves around Fran Fine leaving Flushing to become the nanny for a rich Broadway producer's children.
• The Sex Lives of College Girls: In comparison to the other girls, who all have comfortable backgrounds (Bela comes from a middle-class family and her father is a succesful restauranteur, Whitney's mother is a senator, and Leighton's family is wealthy enough to have donated a building to the school), Kimberley comes from a lower-middle class small town in Arizona and got into Essex College on a scholarship. She has to work at the on-campus dining hall to pay off tuition, has an old smartphone with a limited data plan, and freaks out over buying a nice dress that's too expensive for her.
• Succession: Even though he's related to one of the richest families in America, Greg grew up middle-class and feels incredibly out of his element when he's thrust into the Roy family's inner circle. To a lesser extent, this also applies to Tom, who is implied to have come from money but is far from being as obscenely wealthy as the Roys are. They both form a bond due to shared outsider status from the rest of the family, and an episode in the first season contains a subplot where Tom tries to get Greg to enjoy his newfound wealth by taking him out to fancy restaurants and VIP sections of clubs.
• You (2018): Joe Goldberg didn't grow up well-off, but finds himself in several elite social circles anyway: New York socialites in season 1, Los Angeles beurgousie in season 2, rich suburbia in season 3, and London aristocrats in season 4. He's often uncomfortable in these groups and internally derisive (but a bit envious) of them and their wealth.

Roleplay

• The titular Oldport in Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues is a Rhode Island city predominantly home to the upper-class, but there are a few characters in the main cast who are much further down the economic ladder:
  • Ciro lives in a non-gentrified neighbourhood and, along with his father, works multiple jobs to support them and their small apartment. This has led to him getting bullied in school, and almost resulted in his siblings dying to a monster after one of the richer students used his neighbourhood as a testing ground for a monster, figuring that poor people were disposable.
  • Destiny's parents came into riches with her father's best-selling novel, allowing them to buy a comfortable home in Oldport, but afterwards they fell on hard times once the money ran dry. She also works multiple jobs to make up for it, and in general has become very self-sufficient in contrast to her peers.
  • Patty, a member of Nadine's gang, comes from a low-income household where most of her father's expenses go towards alcohol. She was attracted to Nadine's gang because they offered her a better life than the one she had previously.

Tabletop Games

• The core book for Hunter: The Vigil mentions that Ashewood Abbey will, once a year, take in a vagrant and give them the good life. If they prove decadent enough, the Abbey extends membership - and, presumably, keeps them buoyed.

Theatre

• In Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, working-class Eliza Doolittle becomes the subject of an experiment by two upper-class linguists to see whether they can pass her off as a member of the upper classes by teaching her better speech and manners. For the duration of the experiment, she gets her accommodation, meals and clothes provided, but once the experiment ends she's faced with the fact that she hasn't the means to continue living the life she's been taught up to and no longer fits comfortably in the life she used to live.
• My Fair Lady, the musical adaptation of Pygmalion, has the same situation.

Video Games

• The Torifune Military Academy in the BlazBlue series is host to many of the higher nobility the Library has to offer, with the Duodecim families practically obligated to have their children attend; the same applies to their many stewards. That does not mean that it is only for people of money and power; there are the occasional students who are allowed to attend on scholarship, Makoto Nanaya the most notable among them.
• Final Fantasy XII: Vaan and Penelo are poor orphans who go on an adventure with Ashe (The queen of Rabanastre, who's on the run) and Balthier (formerly a Judge of the Arcadian Empire). Given that the former is a government-in-exile and the later is a sky-pirate, the usual aspects of this trope are minor indeed. Indeed, they have little bearing even in motivations.
• Delita starts as this in Final Fantasy Tactics, becoming Ramza's comrade in the academy despite being from a lowborn family. Delita's younger sister Tietra also goes to school alongside Ramza's sister, Alma, but ends up being bullied for being a commoner.
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses:
  • Dorothea is the only commoner in the Black Eagles house (Petra, despite being considered a commoner in the Empire, is the princess of Brigid), having grown up as a street urchin before being discovered by the Mittelfrank Opera Company. Because of this, she's a bit hostile to nobles who flaunt their status, and one of her motivations for joining the academy in the first place is to find a rich spouse.
  • Downplayed with Ashe: while he was born to commoners and lived in poverty for much of his life (and his starting class is Commoner), he was adopted into nobility by Lonato, a lord of the Kingdom. Because he came from nothing, he sympathizes with the less fortunate, and wishes to become a knight so he can protect those who can't protect themselves.
  • Dedue is the only member of the Blue Lions house who isn't related to a noble family, although he is Dimitri's retainer. Ashe, as mentioned above, had been adopted into Lonato's family, while Mercedes is a former Adrestian noble.
  • While Leonie is not the only commoner in the Golden Deer house, she's by far the poorest, being a hunter from a poor village rather than the child of merchants like the other two commoners in her house. As such, she had to borrow quite a bit of money to even attend the academy, and tries to live as frugally as possible.
• Fire Emblem Engage
  • Louis is the only commoner among the Firenese retainers.
  • Lapis, one of Prince Alcryst's retainers, is the daughter of potato farmers, so she feels out of place among Alcryst and Citrinne- Alcryst's cousin and Lapis' fellow retainer- considering that the latter is extremely wealthy.
• Gianna Parasini, an Internal Affairs undercover agent you can assist in Mass Effect and again in Mass Effect 2, reveals that she grew up poor among rich kids. She therefore knew how to be invisible. Gianna was also a Scholarship Student and in her own words was “middling at the science but was very good at extracting information from rich people”. This led to her career as an undercover agent investigating white collar crimes.
• In Omega Labyrinth Life, Hinata Akatsuki is the very first transfer student to the prestigious and absurdly rich Belles Fleurs Academy. It's both a plot point and a frequent source of comedy that she's not from a rich and privileged background like everyone else.
• In Purgatory 2, protagonist Ebel Alfie is a commoner who is able to attend the elite Ten Judges Academy for the children of nobility because of his exceptional skills, such as his sixth sense that lets him read people's emotions and act as a Living Lie Detector. He has very little friends because of this, and it isn't until he meets and befriends the shy Enri that he starts building up a social life.

Visual Novels

• Chiho Sagisawa in Princess Evangile, in contrast to most other Vincennes students, is from a middle class family. Because of this, she's often looked down on by most of the other, wealthier students of the school, which partially motivates her into joining the White Lily Society and helping to reform the school's policies.
  • This also applies to Masaya as well, at first. It's only thanks to Rise and her grandmother that he is able to study in Vincennes under scholarship. Thankfully, in Chapter 3, he manages to recover his lost winning lottery ticket, and by the 4th is already possessing millions of yen.
• In Shinrai: Broken Beyond Despair, Runa is the poorest of the teenagers who attend Rie's party, being the daughter of a fishmonger and a cleaning lady. Rie herself is the daughter of a family that owns several resorts, while the protagonist's family owns their own home (something that's much more expensive in Japan than in the west).
• Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: Makoto Naegi is an average middle-class with no talent of his own, but he's accepted into Hope's Peak Academy thanks to winning a lottery, allowing him to attend as the Ultimate Lucky Student.
• Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair: Much like Makoto above, Hajime Hinata is an average guy who managed to get accepted into Hope’s Peak. However, unlike Makoto, he doesn’t even have an Ultimate title, being from the school’s Reserve Course program for talentless students. The only reason he’s on the school trip at all is due to his involvement with Ultimate Despair as Izuru Kamukura.

Web Animation

• RWBY:
  • Ilia Amitola was able to pass for a human and earned a scholarship into the Atlas Academy, and tried to 'blend in' as a snobby socialite. When her parents died to a cave-in, she had a mental breakdown, and her friends called her 'ugly' for accidentally showing her Faunus attributes. She beat up her 'friends', quit the academy, and joined the White Fang terrorists.
  • Cinder Fall is revealed in Volume 8 to be this; as a child, she was 'adopted' into a rich Atlas family. Said 'adoption' meant being Made a Slave with a subtle shock collar, so the head of the family could flaunt her charitable hospitality while secretly treating her own stepdaughter like trash. She spent six years between obeying the whims of her stepmother and bratty step-sisters and training to become a Huntress, until she finally snapped and killed her family and mentor.^note This backstory is the core of her narcissism, as she believes the world owes her a debt, but other villains are quick to call her out on her Stupid Evil tendencies from an inability to realize the world doesn't just hand things out to people who suffered.

Western Animation

• Family Guy
  • One episode has Chris sent to a prestigious school with some influence from his grandfather, but he is teased as he still doesn't actually have any money. The rest of the family all take on part-time jobs to pay for his tuition.
  • In one of the first episodes, Lois inherits a mansion from her aunt Margurite. Peter becomes insecure about not fitting in with the wealthy people in Newport, but he cultures himself. He becomes really arrogant and sells the Griffin family house so he and the family can continue to live at the mansion. Peter comes around in the end, though.
• The Simpsons:
  • When Marge Simpson buys a designer dress at a discount and gets invited to a country club.
  • One of Homer's male relatives in "Lisa the Simpson" hopes to be this trope.
• Steven Universe: Sheer irony of the trope name aside, Pink Diamond, being a Diamond, is essentially part of a ruling family for Gemkind, and are revered as goddesses and matriarchs by their people (and are each shown to be Physical Gods themselves through their sheer power). Unfortunately, Pink being the smallest and lowest of the Diamonds means she didn't even have one single world to her name in the beginning. Not being allowed to have one while the other Diamonds had so many to themselves, combined with never winning Yellow's approval, frustrated her.

Real Life

• Go to any high level high school as a poor student. The disparity is quite clear.
• Also true to a lesser extent at universities. Especially in certain degrees like finance or law.

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