"Verity, I am aware that you have had an even more idiosyncratic upbringing than I did, and that for you, this sort of thing is perfectly normal, even mundane. Please let me be the first to inform you that bringing one's boyfriend to the family murder house to be lectured by one of an assortment of dead aunts is distinctly abnormal."
— Dominic De Luca, InCryptid, "Swamp Bromeliad"
Have you heard about a regular human being raised by peaceful magical creatures from fantasy movies you watched as a child or from a Fairy Tale you have read in your life? These creatures can be fairies, elves, dwarves, friendly giants, nymphs, or if possible, gods or angels.
Sometimes, this human has to leave the magical nest and go to the human world and blend into society.
Compare Changeling Fantasy, where a character is raised by someone not their biological family without their knowledge and Changeling Tale, where an unsuspecting family's child is swapped with a fairy. Other variations are Raised by Wolves, where the human is raised by benevolent wildlife, Raised by Natives, where someone is raised by people of a distinctly foreign culture, and Raised by Orcs, when someone is raised by an evil species or culture. See Muggle Foster Parents for an inversion of this trope, and Muggle in Mage Custody for a more generic version when an ordinary person is a ward or a slave of a supernatural being.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- The Boy and the Beast: Well, a humanoid bear with some help from a pig and a monkey, but still. It turns out that Ichirouhiko is actually a human that Iouzen found abandoned as a baby and raised as his own.
- Delicious in Dungeon:
- The minor characters, human twins Kiki and Kaka at first seemed to be bodyguards to the elderly gnome couple Mr. and Mrs. Tansu. The author's artbook, however, showed the twins to be the gnomes' adopted children.
- In Kabru's backstory, he was raised by elves after his homeland was destroyed by monsters. He didn't exactly like it, since the long-lived elves tend to treat other races as children.
- Digimon Data Squad: Keenan Crier was sucked into the Digital World when he was just a baby. He was found by a kindly Digimon, Frigimon, who decided to care for him and raise him as her son.
- Fairy Tail: All first generation and third generation dragon slayers were raised and taught dragon slayer magic by dragons, with each dragon slayer being raised by a different dragon. Natsu was raised by Igneel, Gajeel was raised by Metallicana, Wendy was raised by Grandeeney, Sting was raised by Weisslogia, and Rogue was raised by Skiadrum.
- Mermaid Saga: Mana was raised by cannibalistic mermaids.
- The Girl from the Other Side: The story centers around a little girl named Shiva who's being taken care of by a monster known as an "Outsider" she calls Teacher, who has troubles fundamentally understanding her because of their differences. For example, since he has no mouth, his cooking skills are terrible, and he can't directly touch her without risking her turning into an Outsider too, which could prove fatal and would destroy the likelihood of finding other humans she can safely live with.
Comic Books
- ElfQuest: Little Patch is a human raised by elves.
- Superman: Inverted; Kal-El (aka Clark Kent) is a Kryptonian raised by humans on Earth. Because Kryptonians look so much like humans, he didn't know he was an alien for years.
Fan Works
- Happens offscreen in Child of the Storm: While Piotr Rasputin was coerced by the Red Room into working for them, his younger sister - previously abducted by the Red Room as leverage - was spirited away in the Nevernever (the world of the Fae). Since time passes faster there, when Piotr finally found her, she was already a grown woman with a bad case of Blue-and-Orange Morality who didn't really recognise him anymore.
- Harry Tano: Harry, a wizarding human, is raised by Ahsoka, an alien (specifically a Togruta) since meeting her when he was four. The biggest problem the two and their found family face is getting the Wizarding government to acknowledge Ahsoka as a being and thus make her Harry's legal adoptive mother.
- If Wishes Were Ponies: Zig-zagged in every direction. First, Harry Potter is a wizard child (though he doesn't know it yet) being raised by normal humans. Then, after he escapes his abusive foster home, he ends up turning into a unicorn and being raised by a unicorn (later alicorn) and her magical pony friends.
- In chapter 1 part 2
of SlifofinaDragon's Sengoku Basara fanfic Finally Home, we learn that sorceress Kyogoku Maria has kept Date Masamune and Sanada Yukimura's grandson Tsukitora (mothered by their son Masa (at the age of thirteen, no less) and fathered by the late Oyamada Nobushige) for six years, until his seventh birthday.
- Quite often tends to be a Fandom-Specific Plot in Undertale fanfics, with Frisk being raised by a kingdom of monsters Made of Magic after the events of the Pacifist Ending.
Films — Animation
- Eggs from The Boxtrolls, is a Cheesebridge orphan raised since infancy by the eponymous Boxtrolls, to the point he considers himself one of them... up until he meets Winnie, that is.
- Kristoff from Frozen was raised by rock trolls far away from Arendelle.
- Maui in Moana was abandoned by his human parents as a baby, then raised by the gods, who gave him semi-divinity and a magic fish hook that gave him Voluntary Shapeshifter powers. The knowledge that his parents abandoned him is what drives him to seek validation through feats of supernatural prowess.
- In Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town, the title character was a Doorstop Baby raised by a family of toy-making elves named the Kringles. As an adult, he's about twice their height. They named him Kris, while "Claus" was apparently his birth name, left on his Orphan's Plot Trinket.
Films — Live-Action
- Elf: Buddy the Elf is a human who accidentally crawled into Santa Claus' toy sack and ended up in the North Pole. One of the friendly elves takes in the baby to raise him.
- In the Spanish horror film Mama, two orphaned girls are raised in the wilderness by a ghost who will kill anyone who tries to take away her children.
Literature
- In The Boy Who Thought He Was a Teddy Bear, a baby is found in the forest and adopted by three walking, talking teddy bears who name him "Pinky-Blinky-Dinky". When he's about six, his mother finds him and takes him back into her custody, where he realizes he's a human and starts going by his real name Edward again.
- Discworld:
- Carrot is a human raised by dwarfs who found him as a toddler.
- I Shall Wear Midnight has a situation where a teenage girl, who gets pregnant outside wedlock, is beaten up so badly by her drunken father that she loses the baby. Witch Tiffany Aching, who arbitrates the situation and ensures the right sort of justice is meted out to the father, places Amber Petty in the care of the Nac Mac Feegle. The nearest thing the Chalk has to fairy folk look after her kindly and help Amber out of a catatonic trance. Returning to check on her welfare, Tiffany discovers Amber has effectively been "reborn" as a result of her time with the Feegle; the clan leader, the Kelda and mother of her people, advises Tiffany that things are awakening in Amber that she never thought possible in a human. Amber is now developing an awareness and ability in the "hidden things" as a result of her near-death and symbolic rebirth. It is significant that the Feegle are later accused of taking away the real Amber and replacing her with a fairy changeling.
- Ysabell is adopted by Death after being orphaned as a child.
- Snuff has a young girl raised by goblins... and when found by humans, is taken away, the goblins slaughtered, and she herself was beaten whenever she didn't act "properly".
- In The Lives Of Puppets: Vic is the only human in a world populated by robots, having been found and raised by his robot father, Giovanni, for the last twenty-one years.
- In The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, Bod Owens is a human boy raised by ghosts, a werewolf, and a (very noble) vampire. They give him an amusing education, including copperplate handwriting, ghostly abilities, and first-hand history lessons. They tried to send him to human school for a short time, but that didn't end well.
- In The Faraway Paladin, Will was found and raised by Blood, Mary, and Gus, who are a skeleton, a wight, and a ghost respectively, after his parents were killed when their carriage crashed.
- Downplayed in Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?. The protagonist, Bell Cranel, was raised by the god Zeus, who treated him as his adoptive grandson. Aside from growing up among fairy tales of heroes saving princesses and getting some suspect motivations to become an adventurer, he's culturally the same as any other human his age.
- L. Frank Baum's The Life & Adventures of Santa Claus: Santa Claus was a human baby found and raised by immortals of the magical Forest of Burzee.
- In the original Peter Pan novels/plays by J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan was left by his birth parents in Kensington Gardens when he was a week old, where he was taken in by the birds and fairies there. They are the ones who taught him how to fly, and likely led him to Neverland.
- Tolkien's Legendarium:
- The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn, a human coming from a royal bloodline with elf ancestry, was raised in Rivendell by the elf-lord Elrond (his great-uncle, about 32 generations removed), after his father was slain by orcs when he was two years old.
- The Fall of Gondolin: Baby Tuor (Human) is adopted and raised by Annael (Elf) and the Grey Elves of Hitlum until he is separated from his adoptive family by an Orc ambush at the age of sixteen.
- In InCryptid, Evelyn Baker is a human raised by a cuckoo (a species of telepaths of whom only two, the aforementioned Angela Baker, and her adopted daughter Sarah, are not Always Chaotic Evil). Her adoptive father is a revenant. Her own children, as well as her husband, sister-in-law, and mother-in-law, grew up with a Cute Ghost Girl for a babysitter and a colony of sapient mice that worship them, and are raised with full knowledge of the cryptid world.note
- In Team Human, Kit was left on the doorstep of a vampire house. Rather than eating him, the vampires took him in and raised himnote . He gives various anecdotes about growing up in the vampire section of town, and while friendly, occasionally shows his inexperience with human social cues.
- Not Quite a Mermaid: The protagonist, Electra, was found by mermaids as a baby floating in a lifeboat after a storm. She was given sea powder to let her breathe underwater and was adopted by a mermaid named Maris. Electra thinks of herself as a mermaid, even though she's the only one with legs.
Live-Action TV
- The Magicians (2016): Fray is Eliot and Fen's infant daughter who aged to a teenager during the few months she spent in the Land of Faerie as part of Margo's deal with the fairy queen. As a result, she's mercurial and a little bit unsettling, professing loyalty to the faeries instead of her parents and the other protagonists. It turns out that she's not actually their daughter, but was still raised by fey.
- The Munsters: Marilyn Munster is the token human raised by a family of vampires, werewolves, and Frankenstein Monsters.
- On The Gates, vampire couple Claire and Dylan Radcliff have a human daughter, Emily, who's adopted. Her birth parents were killed by Claire and Dylan when she was a baby.
Myths & Religion
- Arthurian Legend:
- In some versions, Percival was found and taken in by a witch coven, who taught him to master different forms of weaponry. Subverted, however, when he eventually learns that they were responsible for the death of his cousin, and comes back to kill them.
- In most versions, Lancelot and his cousins, Lionel and Bors the Younger, were all raised by The Lady of the Lake in her underwater palace.
Tabletop Games
- Magic: The Gathering: Tana, the Bloodsower, was raised by saprolings, ferociously defending her fungal family from other parties entering her forest.
- Warhammer Fantasy: Bretonnian children born with magical ability are taken by the Fay and raised to serve the Lady of the Lake. At least, the girls are, returning as Grail Damsels, no one knows what happens to the boys.
Video Games
- In Final Fantasy IV, Rydia was raised by the Eidolons of the Feymarch between the time of her apparent drowning caused by Leviathan's whirlpool (he was actually coming to take her to the Feymarch) and when she shows up as the Big Damn Hero to save Cecil and co. in their battle against Golbez in the Dwarven Castle. In-game, that only takes about a week or so, but time flows more swiftly in the Feymarch, allowing her to go from 10-year-old Red Mage to a fully-grown Ms. Fanservice Glass Cannon.
- Link in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was born a Hylian (who are like humans), but raised as a Kokiri in the Kokiri Forest by the Great Deku Tree. What makes the Kokiri different from Hylians is that they stay children forever and each has their own personal guardian fairy. This explains why Link was the only "Kokiri" without his own fairy and the oldest-looking one.
- Shantae: Risky's Revenge: The grey person at the top of the second layer of Scuttle Town after Squid Baron's defeated, talks about their childhood being raised by "squids" who can teleport:
As a child I was raised by a family of squids. I never learned to warp though. That's a power they have that I will never understand.
Web Comics
- Dominic Deegan: Dominic's father Donovan was brought up by elves.
Web Original
- A DeviantArt story, Amani, has this as a major element by having the titular character be found by the goddess Anput as a baby and happily raised by the death gods. She even forms a sisterly bond with Anput and Anubis's biological daughter, Kebechet.
