Basic Trope: A character has ancestors that have lived across the world.
- Straight: Bob, an American, finds that his grandparents were born in China, Japan, Russia, and Ireland.
- Exaggerated: Bob has at least one ancestor in every country that has ever existed.
- Downplayed: Bob's ancestors come from countries in the same region or continent.
- Justified:
- Bob's family was part of a group of nomads, and some settled down in far-flung places.
- Bob's family has lived in a cosmopolitan city for generations, where people from all over the world settle down.
- If you go back far enough, everyone has common ancestry. Bob's case is unusual because they have the records to prove it.
- Inverted:
- Bob has descendants who were born and raised in different countries.
- Bob is the clone of somebody who lived a millennium ago and whose descendants have lived in the same place ever since.
- Subverted: Bob lives in the country where his parents were born, and no known ancestors were born outside of it.
- Double Subverted: ...Until he discovers a few forgotten family members born in other countries.
- Parodied:
- Bob's notably international ancestors themselves had notably international ancestors.
- Bob's ancestry includes Human Aliens from a planet that's composed entirely of Fantasy Counterpart Cultures of the human nationalities of Earth.
- Zig-Zagged: Members of every other generation of Bob's family have been born in a different place.
- Averted: Bob has a few distant ancestors in different countries, before most of them settled down in one country.
- Enforced: The producer wants to draw as many international viewers as possible.
- Lampshaded: Bob wonders how his family could have been from so many different countries.
- Invoked: Sean married Svetlana and Xin married Yoko, and their respective children, Bridget and Hiro, got married and had Bob.
- Exploited: Bob tracks down his relations across the globe and makes many more contacts than Alice, who can only trace her lineage to one tiny, isolated town.
- Defied: All Bob's ancestors came from one country because they were required or chose to marry only co-nationals.
- Discussed: Bob doesn't know his family background, and fantasizes about his many hypothetical ancestors whom he imagines as having lived in various exotic locations through history.
- Conversed: "Dang, you really have a lot of cultures in your background, huh?"
- Implied: Bob is Ambiguously Brown and claims to have "close personal" connections to many foreign cultures.
- Deconstructed: Because he has one grandparent each from several countries, Bob feels he has no clear "ancestral home" to which to return in case he is exiled from the only country he knows.
- Reconstructed:
- He won't be exiled.
- He styles himself a citizen of the world, with at least four countries open to him.
- Played for Laughs: Alice thinks that because Bob has Chinese, Irish, Japanese, and Russian ancestry, he can speak all those languages. Cue Cringe Comedy when he can't understand a word of any of them.
- Played for Drama: Bob identifies with all the countries that are responsible for his ancestry, so when Trolls (and/or good-faith critics of those countries) call attention to bad things their respective governments do or have done, he's deeply ashamed and confused.
Back to Insanely International Ancestry
