Trapped in Another World - TV Tropes

"Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."

• Adam Strange: An archeologist who accidentally discovered an alien transport system, Adam became the number one hero of the planet Rann. His problem was that the Zeta beams which teleport him are only temporary and he has started a family on Rann. He has since been able to stay there permanently, but on occasion he finds himself on Earth and this trope applies there.
• Birthright deconstructs this premise with the typical teenager from Earth thrown into a fantasy land ruled by the Big Bad whom he must defeat. And to do that, he is put through the grinder, forced to become a Child Soldier and see things first hand what no one else should see. The end result? He pulls a Face–Heel Turn, joins the Big Bad because he offered to return him home in exchange of becoming his enforcer and leaves the fantasy world to rot.
• Whitman Comics produced the official Comic-Book Adaptation of the film The Black Hole and actually continued the series for a few more issues past the end of the film's story, depicting the new universe the heroes wind up in after passing through the weirdness inside the black hole. It contains a parallel counterpart of Reinhardt, Maximilian, and the Cygnus. Reinhardt is a Galactic Conqueror there, persecuting a planet inhabited by Human Aliens and alien wildlife that happens to look like dinosaurs. It's an odd little comic.
• DIE: In 1991, a group of teenagers is sucked into the world of a new RPG that one of them created. It takes two years for them to learn that all they need to do to leave is unanimously agree to do so — unfortunately, as they do so, one of them is grabbed by the Grandmaster and left behind, eventually killing the Grandmaster and taking his place. 25 years after the others returned home, he drags them back into the game and forces them to play again, refusing to agree to leave unless they win. Eventually he's killed, but by this point two of the others have decided to stay for their own reasons, leaving the other three trapped by default.
• Dragonlords: It happens to Donald Duck, his nephews and Uncle Scrooge when a family picnic is interrupted by a magic portal opening right next to them, and the ducks are captured by the dragon-riding Morg and dragged to his fantasy world as slaves.
• Exiles revolves around superpowered beings lost from their dimension, world-hopping until they get to go home.
• The tag line of the late Steve Gerber's Marvel comic Howard the Duck was "Trapped in a world he never made!" A native of a Talking Animal world of anthropomorphic ducks, Howard fell through a portal and wound up in Another Dimension — namely, the Marvel Universe version of Cleveland, Ohio.
• In I Hate Fairyland, Gertrude has been stuck in Fairyland for 27 years, and hasn't aged in all that time. To say she's not happy about it would be an understatement.
• Jinty: The premise of "Worlds Apart" — six schoolgirls find themselves in a series of strange worlds governed by their main characteristics. There's one way out, but it's not a pleasant one...the creator of that particular world has to die.
• The Lapins Crétins: In the Raving Rabbids comic, Luminys Quest'' is a particularly absurd case, as it involves the eponymous Rabbids suddenly being summoned into a fantasy world, believed to be the prophesized guardians who will save the source of its magic from the ambitions of a sorcerer, and are accompanied by retainers to carry out a quest.
• CrossGen's Negation featured a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits trapped in an alternate universe that did not obey the laws of physics. At least one character started out convinced that it was All Just a Dream.
• Shazam!: In Whiz Comics #100 "The Hundred Horrors", Dr. Sivana uses a dimensional raygun to send Captain Marvel away to another world 100 trillion miles from Earth.
• Superman:
  • Power Girl was the Supergirl of Earth-2, but, after the first Crisis, Earth-2 didn't exist anymore, and Kara was trapped into the single surviving universe.
  • When The Symbioship Strikes: Brain Wave uses a teleporting device to trap Power Girl, Flash, Green Lantern and the entirety of Keystone City in a dimensional limbo.
  • The Mysterious Motr of Doov: Supergirl gets pulled by a weird tornado into another dimension, landing in a world called "Doov". In order to find her way back home, Kara and other creatures who have also been stranded in Doov must make her way to the sorcerer Motr.
  • In Escape from the Phantom Zone, a dimensional vortex throws Supergirl, Batgirl and a friend of theirs into a parallel dimension, leaving them with no apparent way to return.
  • In The Supergirl-Batgirl Plot, the titular heroines spend several days trapped in a pocket dimension, fighting an eldritch abomination, until they manage to break through.
  • The Other Side of Doomsday: Linda Danvers, Iris West and Jean Loring are abducted into another dimension by T.O. Morrow to lure Flash and Atom into a trap.
  • "The Phantom Superboy": After learning about the existence of the Phantom Zone, Clark Kent becomes trapped in that parallel dimension when a lizard accidentally pokes the Projector switch on right when Clark is standing in front of the device.
  • Superman Under The Red Sun: A Superman Revenge Squad's scheme causes The Man of Steel to become trapped in the far future Earth: a dying desert world abandoned by humans millennia ago and inhabited by strange hostile creatures, orbiting a red sun which takes Superman's powers away, making him vulnerable and precluding him from returning to his own time.
• The Powerpuff Girls gets sucked into a vortex in their vanity mirror and are transposed into an alternate version of Townsville, called Viletown where their villains, the Powerpunk Girls, are now in Townsville wreaking havoc. Viletown's hero is the noble chimp Jomo Momo. This was DC issue #50, "Deja View" and was intended to be a TV episode.
• Resident Alien features an alien protagonist stranded on Earth with little chance of ever returning to his home planet.
• Sonic is trapped in the Special Zone for about fifteen issues in Sonic the Comic.
• Transformers:
  • In Transformers: Shattered Glass, Cliffjumper finds himself trapped in the titular universe after traveling through a mysterious portal.
  • The plot of King Grimlock sees Grimlock of the Dinobots transported to a fantasy world where a group of humans call on his help. Grimlock, being Grimlock, isn't exactly thrilled about it.
• The Unbelievable Gwenpool stars Gwen Poole, a young Marvel Comics fangirl from what is either our reality or a world very similar to it, who through a Noodle Incident that she doesn't like to talk about and is apparently subject to numerous Cosmic Retcons, winds up on Earth-616, Marvel's "prime" universe. Using her encyclopedic knowledge of the franchise, she sets out to become a mercenary superhero in the hopes that it'll keep her from getting unceremoniously killed off.
• The Warlord: The comic is a deliberate homage to Pellucidar (in setting) and John Carter of Mars (in tone).

• Buck Rogers is about the titular hero who goes into suspended animation and wakes up in the 25th century. It was based on the novel Armageddon 2419, by the same author and with the same premise.
• Flash Gordon is about the titular hero and his friends getting stranded on the planet Mongo. In the original comic strip, they do eventually escape Mongo, return to Earth, and engage in still more voyages to other worlds, but the Mongo arc is the one everyone remembers and on which most subsequent adaptations have been based. The long-running comic eventually brought them back to Mongo and found an excuse to bring back the supposedly-dead Ming because, well, Flash Gordon didn't quite feel like Flash Gordon without them.

• Disney's Alice in Wonderland, as with the book, has Alice be forced into Wonderland. Ultimately subverted when it turns out to be All Just a Dream.
• Manolo's predicament in The Book of Life once he gets to the Land of the Remembered. Because he's dead, he is unable to return to among the living to find Maria, unless he gets help from La Muerte.
• Heavy Metal: Den, originally a skinny, nerdy kid named Dan (voiced by John Candy), gets sucked into Neverwhere, becomes a bald, naked, musclebound hunk (still voiced by John Candy) that every woman in the story (equally naked and buxom) apparently throws herself at, and finds himself in the middle of a deadly rivalry between an evil queen and an unkillable dandy to save the girl he encountered upon arrival (who was also whisked from Earth).
• Spirited Away is about Chihiro, an ordinary human girl, being trapped in a world of gods. She has to get a job at the gods' favorite bathhouse and keep in mind to remember who she is to free not only herself, but her parents (who are turned into pigs as a punishment for eating food meant for the spirits).
• The Super Mario Bros. Movie runs with Brooklyn residents Mario and Luigi accidentally being sent to different fantasy worlds — Mario to the Mushroom Kingdom and Luigi to the Dark Lands. This is a Mythology Gag that references early Mario adaptations like The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! and the live-action film, which also had Mario trapped in the Mushroom Kingdom.

• Adventures in Dinosaur City, a group of three kids are transported to the titular city.
• The French-Canadian film Alice's Odyssey (AKA L'Odyssée d'Alice Tremblay) involves the eponymous Alice, a single mother who gets transported into a fairy tale world while telling a story to her daughter.
• The Chronicles of Narnia: See Literature section.
• In the sci-fi thriller Coherence, once characters pass the dark area they are randomly transported into Alternate Timelines with little hope of returning to their homeworld.
• In Cool World, both Frank and Jack are transported to the titular world.
• Enchanted: Characters from an animated film appear in live-action New York City.
• In the first I Love Wolffy movie in the Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf franchise, Wolffy, Wolnie, and Paddi are trapped in real life and must seek the toy robot that got them there in the first place to return. The second one doesn't count because Wolffy and Wilie go to the real world willingly.
• In Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, the characters are sucked into the Jumanji world once they start the game. Averted with the original movie, however — that only happened if the player landed on a certain square.
• A Kid in King Arthur's Court is a time-travel variant, based on the book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. This time it's a 90's kid being sent to the past.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Ant-Man: Dr. Hank Pym warns Scott Lang not to mess with the regulator on his suit that grants him his Sizeshifter abilities. If the regulator is turned off, the wearer will shrink down to a quantum level, forever trapped in the Acid-Trip Dimension between molecules. How does Hank know this? It's how his wife, a fellow size-changing hero, disappeared, and the sequel revolves around Scott working with the Pym family to bring her back.
  • In The Stinger for the sequel, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Scott finds himself in this predicament. Now equipped with a better understanding of the realm, Scott goes subatomic while the Pyms stay behind as Mission Control. However, seconds before they can bring him back to normal, they are all killed by Thanos, due to the events of Avengers: Infinity War.
  • Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness features this twice. The first time was when Doctor Strange and America Chavez accidentally stumbled into Earth-838, a Techno Dystopia, where they are drugged and arrested by the Illuminati, with Strange standing trial for his 838 counterpart's crimes against the multiverse. Strange, America and 838 scientist Christine Palmer manage to escape after the Scarlet Witch broke in and massacred the Illuminati, but she ends up abducting America and sending Strange and Palmer to a destroyed and ruined universe, where Strange is forced to Dreamwalk in order to escape.
• The Neverending Story 1984: Downplayed in that Bastian isn't physically trapped there, but reading the book and identifying with Atraeu's adventures builds a Psychic Link of sorts.
• Planet of the Apes, with the famous twist that it's actually our world after all, just many centuries in the future. Its sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, follows in the same vein, while the third movie, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, inverts this by taking two of the chimpanzee characters from the scifi world of the previous films and pulling them back in time to the 20th Century.
• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: I Love Wolffy:
  • Wolffy, Wolnie, and Paddi are trapped in the real world and must seek Wolffy's Bye-Bye Machine to return.
  • At the end, Pi Zong is sent to Jupiter by the Bye-Bye machine and is visibly not happy about it.
• At the end of Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), Sonic uses his rings to banish Robotnik from Earth and trap him on the Mushroom Planet. By the time of The Stinger, he's been trapped there for 87 days and gone mad from the isolation, but nonetheless vows to return to Earth.
• Technically Space Jam, in which Michael Jordan gets lassoed down a golf hall into the cartoon world.
• TRON:
  • In an attempt to recover evidence that proves Corrupt Corporate Executive / Cracker Ed Dillinger stole his promotion-worthy ideas for video games, Playful Hacker Kevin Flynn ends up physically digitized into Cyberspace by the Deus est Machina Master Control Program.
  • This has become the franchise staple, as no protagonist gets digitized voluntarily. In Tron 2.0 Jet Bradley gets digitized by Benevolent A.I. Ma3a in a desperate act of self-preservation. Later, The F-Con thugs forcibly shoot Alan in there, too. The rival company exploit and deconstruct the trope by planning to upload an army of mercenaries into that world to steal and control everything from weapons systems and state secrets to the global finance markets and media.
  • In TRON: Legacy Sam learns the hard way that you shouldn't press "yes" at every pop-up dialog on somebody else's system. He looks at the last command given to the computer before him (i.e. Flynn's last command) and then tells the computer to run it again. Then again, he apparently did inherit his old man's copious forethought...
• In the beginning of Warriors of Virtue, Ryan is thrown into the world of Tao.
• The Wizard of Oz: Dorothy from Kansas gets trapped in Oz after being swept away by a tornado. Subverted as it ends up being All Just a Dream, unlike the book. See the Literature section for the book.

• In Infinity Game, a slacker high-school student gets pulled into a world where he is named the "Dungeon Master" and creates a new game world to escape his boring school life. The cast end up trapped in the world after a Computer Virus stops them from escaping.

• I Choose The Emperor Ending: Marina develops a revolutionary VR device that can bring fictional worlds to life and transports herself to Lasnorok, the setting of a novel she wrote, then finds herself unable to get back out. Disguised as a runaway slave boy named Rino, she comes face-to-face with the main character she created, the ambitious Edward Allen Dihas, and now has to help him overthrow the emperor.

• Classical Mythology: Persephone was kidnapped by love-struck Hades and spent an unspecified period of time in the Underworld as his captive bride. Even after Demeter finally got her released, she ate several pomegranate seeds that bound her to the Underworld forever and forced her to periodically return there. This was actually a "Just So" Story to explain why we have seasons: Demeter, the harvest goddess, is too depressed for any crops to grow during the months that Persephone is trapped in the Underworld.
• Many early legends describe accidentally entering a fairy realm, often falling victim to the Fair Folk or arriving back home years in the future after spending only days in the other realm.
• In the 8th century tale of Urashima Tarō, the titular character saves a turtle, who turns out to be the Otohime, daughter of the sea god Ryūjin. To reward his daughter's savior, Ryūjin invites Tarō to Ryūjin's underwater kingdom. Tarō stays for three days but gets homesick, so he asks to leave. Tarō returns to his home, only to realize that three hundred years has passed in his absence.

• Binary Break, being a Digimon podcast, naturally begins with Penny, Sophie, and Cate finding themselves trapped in the Digital World alongside some Digimon Partners.
• This happened to Arnie in Hello From the Magic Tavern, who fell through a magical dimensional portal behind a Burger King in Chicago and found himself in the fantastical, magical land of Foon. Luckily, he's still getting a wi-fi signal from the Burger King through the dimensional rift and so he hosts a weekly podcast from the tavern the Vermilion Minotaur in the town of Hogsface, in the land of Foon.
• Dungeons & Daddies begins with four dads, their sons, and their minivan being pulled into the Forgotten Realms.

• At a book signing, Sam from ElvenQuest is dragged into LowerEarth when a group of heroes kidnap The Chosen One, aka. Sam's dog, and he wouldn't get them go. Naturally the only way to get back is to go on their quest to get the Sword of Asnagar, which will (a) defeat the Lord Of Darkness and (b) let Sam go back home).

• Fire Emblem on Forums:
  • Wonderful Blessing: Parodied with the Revivians, humans taken from Earth by the Goddess Dragons. So many of them have arrived in Generia and been trapped that they have their own nation, Kaisei, with its own, weird culture. Their national stereotype is acting as if they are the isekai protagonist of their own story....while so many others of their kind exist that they're no longer considered even special.
• This setting is currently the most popular for multifandom Journal Roleplay Games. The community has even coined a phrase for games based around this setting—"spooky jamjar". Which has now come full circle- meet Roleplayedingly. A roleplay where the characters are sent to a new world every week- and every world is an existing LiveJournal roleplay.
• After Meowfurryon was killed on NoPixel, he showed up in the NP Public Alternate Continuity and mentioned that his death in the main universe had "isekai'd" him to the new universe.

• The frame story of Castle Falkenstein involves computer game artist Tom Olam being magically summoned into the Victorian-fantasy world of the game. Though as it turns out, it was actually the copy of Leonardo's Sixth Codex in his backpack that his summoners needed...
• The original module of Ravenloft for Dungeons & Dragons has characters pulled from other D&D settings to face The Devil Strahd. This has since become such a traditional setup for adventures in that setting that it took thirteen years for them to write up information as to creating characters who were native to the setting.
• GURPS:
  • A short supplement, GURPS Fantasy: Portal Realms, covers this topic in detail.
  • An even shorter supplement, GURPS Steampunk Setting: The Broken Clockwork World, describes a specific portal fantasy setting.
  • This is also how the world of Banestorm came to be, with medieval and Renaissance humans (along with races from many other worlds) dragged into the fantasy world of Yrth. It's specifically mentioned that the Banestorm is still active and can grab player characters from modern Earth in order to kick off a fantasy campaign.
• Heroine always starts off with the eponymous protagonist's ordinary life in the real world, before quickly bringing her over to the Magical Land, which she can only leave after overcoming her personal flaws and completing an arduous quest.
• Magic: The Gathering: This is part of the process of planeswalker's spark igniting. If a person with a dormant spark faces certain death, experiences a strong emotion (such as betrayal, rage, or elation), or encounters a major revelation, there's a chance that their spark will ignite and awaken their ability to traverse planes, along with an initial uncontrolled planeswalk (the destination isn't entirely random, they always seem to end up somewhere that suits them in some way). Unlike most examples of this trope they can easily return home once they figure out what happened and learn how to use their new power at will, but having realized that there's a multiverse out there and at their fingertips, it's rare for them to not get curious about what else is out there...
  • The Ixalan expansion, set on the titular plane, manages to enforce this trope on planeswalkers. A powerful artifact called the Immortal Sun prevents any planeswalkers that arrive on Ixalan from leaving. It was part of a plot by the planeswalkers Azor and Ugin to trap the latter's evil twin brother Nicol Bolas on a single world so that the rest of the multiverse would be spared. Bolas caught on to the plot, assassinating Ugin elsewhere and leaving Azor trapped on Ixalan with his own artifact. Later, Bolas himself pulls the same trick, placing both the Immortal Sun and the Planar Beacon on the same world to draw planeswalkers in from all over the multiverse, trap them all in one place, and then kill them to harvest their sparks and absorb them restore his lost godhood.

• Most of the Tsukiuta stage plays feature original stories where the idol characters are trapped in another world. The worlds will have a different theme each time, and different fantasy costumes. So far, there have been multiple ''wa-fuu'' worlds, an Alice-in-Wonderland-inspired Rabbits Kingdom, and an upcoming Cyper Punk world.

• NU: carnival: The protagonist, Eiden, is warped from his homeworld into the fantastical Klein Continent after coming into contact with a mysterious gemstone. Given that the Klein Continent has plenty of good-looking men around, he's not complaining about his ordeal one bit.
• YU-NO: The Isekai plot twist that precluded the second act of the visual novel was genuinely revolutionary in 1996. The second act of YU-NO was a Trope Codifier of the Isekai genre.

• A Guerra Final (The Ultimate War or The Final War): In the fourth episode of the first season of this same series (É Mamãe Luigi Para o Junior or Mamãe Luigi, or in English as It's Mama Luigi for Junior or Mama Luigi), after Luigi (from the Mario media franchise) fell from a huge height towards the Forest Maze and met Baphomet Jr. (or Junior, from the Ragnarok franchise), the former quickly realizes that he ended up lost in the middle of that same forest, without spaghetti and without the presence of his brother Mario.
• The Amazing Digital Circus is a Black Comedy take on I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, revolving around a group of humans trapped in cyberspace with a Repulsive Ringmaster AI named Caine who wants to show them a good time but just ends up traumatizing them further.
• Enigmatic Recollection: The story starts with nineteen amnesiac girls getting summoned to the unfamiliar world of Libestal so they can save it from the Stain King. Later, it turns out that the world is a Prison Dimension for a particularly powerful entity that was manipulating them into destroying the one thing that was keeping it trapped.
• RWBY: Volume 8 ends with the implication that certain characters get trapped in another world. Team RWBY, Jaune and Neo fall into the Void Between the Worlds, ending up trapped in the Ever After from the In-Universe fairy tale "The Girl Who Fell Through the World". During Volume 9, they use the story to help them understand the world and travel to the large tree in its middle in order to find their way back to Remnant.
• Magic Mixies: Mixia: In the first season, Sienna accidentally discovers the portal to Mixia on her grandfather's birthday and is trapped in Mixia with no way how to produce the portal back home. After she returns home at the end of the season, she knows the spell so she can freely visit Mixia whenever she wants.
• Tales of the Underworld: Akira lights a candle on an empty grave, opening a portal to The Underworld. Unfortunately for her, the portal back is all the way on the other side, so she has to travel all the way across the underworld before anyone realizes that the portal is open.

• In Accidental Centaurs, Alex and Sam not only get transported into another world, they get turned into centaurs as well (or at least they SEE themselves as centaurs — in reality, they transformed into something so strange that they'd go insane if they knew what they REALLY were).
• The main character of Astray 3, Emily, is transported to another world by walking into a closet. She's not the only one to be magically whisked away like this, either.
• At Arm's Length: A new character was introduced, coming from another reality. Sadly, nobody knows how he got there, aside from him just appearing on a roof top, or how to send him back. In the mean time, he will be disguised as a native, and is technically an Alien Among Us as well.
• Vacationers contend with deadly water in Between Two Worlds while looking for a lost cat.
• The plight of the titular characters in Bob and George, but eventually one character even points out that they are not from any megaman dimension, but nobody seems to care anymore. Given that it was actually a conspiracy to do it to Bob, and he tried to do it to George in revenge...
  • Earlier The Author is trapped in the comic — though, he realizes, this means Stuff Blowing Up.
• Children of Eldair: The main characters are snatched away from Earth and deposited in the world of Eldair.
• Chitra follows the standard isekai plotline — the protagonist, an average 21st century high school girl, is run down by a speeding truck, and a god offers her a second chance at life in a fantasy world. She'll have to complete quests, gain power, and utilize RPG mechanics to level up her skills. Not to mention the harem of beautiful men she can acquire to help her on her journey, which she gains by using the god's exclusive gacha system to summon powerful pretty-boy allies.

  Phobinus, the God of Beauty: The reason why I'm here is to give you a new opportunity — The chance to live a second life! Of course it's not for free. You'll have to complete tasks given by me in your new life.

• In The Dreamcatchers Masquerade, Kai and Vena are both yanked into another world as their own reality falls to pieces.
• In Dubious Company, after Izor's plan goes haywire, the AntiHeroes and AntiVillains are thrown into another dimension and struggle to find a way back.
• El Goonish Shive
• Invoked in Erfworld, with the summoning of the protagonist, Parson Gotti.

  Parson: What's the lesson here? "Be careful what you wish for?" This isn't what I wished for!
  Wanda: Ha! You didn't wish for this world, Parson Gotti. It wished for you.

• Lucco in Fite! though it's actually a Journey to the Center of the Mind.
• Fur Will Fly: The protagonist is trapped in another world populated by furries.
• In Goodbye to Halos the main character was send through a portal to another world by her father, with no idea how to reopen the portal to get back. Played with in that both worlds are equally fantastic, populated by Little Bit Beastly people, and the Ambiguously Human protagonist fits in in neither.
• Homestuck: Anybody who plays SBURB will be transported into the Incipisphere. However, the series is more of a Deconstruction of the trope, as the home planet and eventually the universe of the players is destroyed once they leave.
• Kagerou starts out with this trope, and then does really nasty things to it. It's a long story and involved multiple personality disorder, among other things.
• Sul from Kiss Wood is caught in a fire that destroys his home and blinds him. After a couple of days in the hospital, he loses consciousness and is trapped in a place called Hill. He later learns he's not the only one who has been transported this and left; Ahbon is another person this happened to.
• Kevin & Kell has Danielle, who is an IRS auditor. When auditing a company allegedly dumping garbage at sea, she was thrown through a stray portal, but the people on the boat expected her to bounce back as normal. When she didn't return, they threw in a life preserver, but that was being bounced back because the trampoline was repaired in the short timeframe. She was presumed to be murdered at sea. On the other side of the portal, she was transformed and now is a doppelganger for a character that was previously murdered - although she attempted to return with Nick & Ki during the crossover episode.
• A courier in Kukuburi delivers a package only to find a crazy technicolor world.
• The whole plot of Miamaska, as Amity and Guere are stuck there.
• My Impossible Soulmate centers on Chiaki, a daydreaming Otaku with a crush on her childhood friend, Fumiko. A sudden event sends her to another world.
• Parodied in Nerf NOW!!: Victoire is set up to be the protagonist of an isekai with a typical opening of running late to her job and about to be hit by a truck...only for the truck to be hit by a bigger truck. This ends up making the truck the protagonist trapped in another world.
• In Ocean Labyrinth, Karen is transported to an underwater world after getting lost at the beach.
• This comic from Penny Arcade suggests this type of plot for the in-development Warcraft (2016) film, as well as demonstrating other tropes such as the Jerk Jock, the Cruel Cheerleader, and the Lovable Nerd who chooses to stay behind in the end.
• Pokémon Mystery Dungeon fancomic PMD: Gleaming Hearts has Jake, a semi-amnesiac human-turned-Riolu who appears to have been brought to the Pokemon-populated world by a Diancie whose power was about to be stolen by a crooked Slowking and used to spread The Corruption. Instead she imbued half her power in Jake, including the ability to cleanse the corrupted crystals.
• Reman Mythology starts with a curious young woman who finds herself trapped after following a young man with suspiciously supernatural abilities.
• If you count the "Torg Potter" stories as examples, this happens over a dozen times in Sluggy Freelance.
• In the first chapter of Snarlbear, the main character is pulled into the Rainbow Dimension with no obvious way home — much to her glee.
• The story of Star Trip follows modern-day human Jas on a journey around the galaxy after she's taken by a mysterious alien named Khut. After leaving the system, it's impossible for her to return to Earth for at least a year. After Earth is devastated off-screen by a solar flare, she won't be going back at all.
• Fiona is summoned to an Alternate Universe Earth by Jim and Van in Supernormal Step.
• Surviving the Game as a Barbarian: The main character, Hansu Lee, is forcibly pulled into the world of the game [Dungeon and Stone] after reaching the final room, with his soul being transferred into the body of a Barbarian Hero. We quickly learn that he is not the first player to be pulled in, as the residents of this world are also aware of this phenomenon... and will kill any players they find the moment they're discovered, dubbing them "Evil Spirits" and viewing them as Body Snatchers (which is technically true, albeit more involuntarily than the natives would believe). So Hansu not only has to adapt to living in the city of Rafdonia and fighting in the Labyrinth, he also has to hide his true identity as a player, living under the name of Bjorn, son of Jandel.
• Think Ink: After Zally Alley presses a Big Red Button from an old animation camera station, she is transported into the Tooniverse, where every known animated character who ever existed live out their daily lives.
• A Wicked Tale of Cinderella's Stepmom features the protagonist being reincarnated into the world of Cinderella, not as Cinderella, but as Lady Tremaine, the Wicked Stepmother. Rather than act like the original Lady Tremaine and torment Cinderella while playing favorites with her biological daughters, the protagonist goes out of their way to raise all three daughters with equal loving care.
• Winters In Lavelle siblings find that their father's shiny rock leads to a world with more shiny rocks.
• In The Wormworld Saga, Jonas finds a portal to another world on the attack of his grandmother's house. He's Genre Savvy enough to take a thread of yarn with him to prevent the portal from closing behind him. Too bad their cat Wiggins ends up cutting his safety rope while playing with it.
• Deconstructed in one xkcd strip, in which a teenager gets sucked into a parallel universe, saves the kingdom, returns to the real world ... and realises he now has to spend the rest of his life pretending that never happened, or people will think he's delusional.
• In Yokoka's Quest, Grace travelled from Earth to Cisum via the Mirror Path, located in a Las Vegas museum basement. It didn't appear as though travel back to Earth the same way was possible, though Grace is enjoying her time as the Token Human, and hasn't been shown even trying to find a way back. There has been mention of other humans living within the Metals Clan.
• Zoophobia: Cameron is stuck in the world of talking animals and insane entities when she is unknowingly employed to work as a guidance counsellor there.

• The Mother's Basement's PSA Isekai Anime Survival Guide is a survival guide for people who get teleported to another world.
• Discussed in the "Isekai" episode of Terrible Writing Advice, which lampshades the naked power fantasy aspects of the genre such as female characters being standard harem archetypes, the fact that most protagonists of the genre tend to have generic personalities for the audience to better project themselves onto as well as the hero getting slave girls as part of said harem.

• An episode of Adventure Time had Finn the Human get transported to another world made entirely out of pillows. (The landscape, the wildlife, the people, etc.) He ended up spending the rest of his life there, forming a family and dying of old age, then somehow got sent back to his world a few minutes after his disappearance, with no memory of his time there. It's left ambiguous as to whether or not this actually happened.
• Amphibia is about three girls from Earth who, on Anne Boonchuy's 13th birthday, are transported to the world of Amphibia, a medieval world populated by anthropomorphic amphibians. The show spends a great deal of time showing how the girls all deal with this; Anne tries her best to adjust while maintaining the Series Goal of returning home, being taken in by a kindly frog family. Sasha Waybright develops a main character syndrome and starts treating the world like a playground she can do with as she wants before eventually returning home. Marcy Wu adjusts perfectly to the world, having been a fantasy nerd on Earth and befriending the King, living what she describes as a fun fantasy adventure. Then the season 2 finale, "True Colors", massively deconstructs this: Marcy isn't trapped in another world, she went there on purpose, having tricked her friends into going with her against their will and never told them. She also has a main character syndrome way worse than Sasha, she just expresses it differently. Finally, the reason she adjusted so well is not because she's Genre Savvy; it's because the King is actively deceiving her by playing into her expectations of a fantasy genre for his own villainous goals.
  • The end of Season 2 also flips this concept on its head as Anne and the Plantars are teleported to Earth, bringing her home but leaving the three frogs now being the ones stranded in another world. The first half of Season 3 thus has the overarching goal of trying to find a way back to Amphibia, both to get the Plantars home and to rescue Sasha and Marcy, who were left behind.
• In Animalia, Alex and Zoe enter a mysterious portal in the town library and find themselves in Animalia, a World of Funny Animals. They're not too preoccupied about finding a way home, however.
• Blackstar is about astronaut John Blackstar getting "swept through a black hole into an ancient, alien universe" where magic and science coexist. Filmation had earlier produced a very faithful adaptation of Flash Gordon, itself an example of this trope, and it's clearly an influence on Blackstar.
• Captain N: The Game Master involved the main character Kevin Keene being sucked into "Videoland", a world where Nintendo games were real (and often very misrepresented in comparison to their actual video game counterparts). Strangely Kevin seems to have no interest in going back to the real world and very rarely, if ever, expresses a desire to go home. What must his mother think...
• Centaurworld is about an ordinary horse from a land of dark fantasy who ends up in the colorful, magical Sugar Bowl of Centaurworld thanks to a mysterious artifact. The first season's plot is driven by her quest to return home to her rider, and it is soon revealed that both worlds used to be connected at some point in the past. At the end of the series, both worlds are reconnected, though Horse decides to remain on the Centaurworld half of the portal.
• Da Boom Crew is about a group of kids who create their own video game, but one day, they end up trapped in a world that they claim is identical to the game that they made. Despite this, they don’t recognize a thing that they encounter.
• Dungeons & Dragons (1983): One weird rollercoaster ride later, and the kids are in a world resembling a D&D campaign setting.
• Philip J. Fry from Futurama gets frozen in 1999 and wakes up 1000 years later. However, it's subverted since even with the robots, aliens, mutants, and new technology, The Future isn't really all that different and Fry adapts fairly quickly.
• Goliath and the remains of his clan in Gargoyles are trapped in stone for 1000 years, thus arriving in 1994 New York from 994 Scotland.
• In Here Comes the Grump, Terry Dexter comes from Earth. We never learn how he got trapped in the Magical Land, though.
  • Inverted in The Movie — the Grump's girlfriend Mary is banished to Earth as punishment for helping him and becomes Terry's grandmother.
• In Infinity Train, the titular train is an Epiphanic Prison that picks up anyone who is having issues in their lives and keeps them there with the idea that running through the infinite pocket universes within its cars will eventually help them solve their problems. Progress is conveniently displayed to them via a number on their hand. Improve, and your number gets to zero and you can go home. Do everything possible not to solve your issues, and you can end up with a number so large that no amount of self-reflections and epiphanies will get you off the train before old age (or the train cars themselves) claims you.
• Jumanji: The Animated Series is a spin-off of the original film. Unlike the film, where players Peter and Judy free Alan from the board game's imprisonment in the middle of the plot, the cartoon has them travel to and from the game's world in hopes of helping him escape.
• Kaeloo: At the end of Episode 70, Mr. Cat manages to get all the Alternate Universe counterparts back through the Portal Door and then smashes the door so they can't come back. As it turns out, he got rid of the wrong Kaeloo; now he is stuck with Alternate Universe!Kaeloo and the Alternate Universe main four are stuck with Kaeloo.
• Kidd Video: A teen rock band is abducted by the evil Master Blaster and transported to a cartoon fantasy world. They are rescued by a fairy, and spend each episode trying to find their way home.
• In King Arthur & the Knights of Justice, Merlin needs replacements for King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, who have been captured by the series' Big Bad. His odd solution is to bring a contemporary American high school football team (whose quarterback happens to be named Arthur King) to Dark Age Europe to become Camelot's new defenders.
• Over the Garden Wall is about teenage Wirt and his young brother Greg being trapped in a world called The Unknown.
• In The Owl House, Luz Noceda ends up in a world called the Boiling Isles, a land inhabited by magical beings and mythical creatures. Unlike most examples, however, she doesn't stay stuck there for long; she's got a way to leave by the end of the first episode, but chooses to stay there for her summer vacation in order to learn magic. At least until the Season 1 finale, where she personally destroys the portal back to Earth so Emperor Belos can't use it, leaving her actually stranded. Much like with Amphibia, this ends up flipped on its head at the end of the second season due to her being in the epicenter of the world she was stuck in becoming a Villain World. In "King's Tide", Luz is forced to flee back to Earth with four natives—girlfriend Amity Blight, best friends Gus Porter and Willow Park, and former enemy Hunter—in tow.
  • Interestingly, there was already a fifth native there—Vee, a basilisk who accidentally took over Luz' life upon managing to flee to the Human Realm, and due to her horrific pre-series life, had long since fallen in love with the Human Realm prior to Luz fully stranding her there. Luz is initially furious at being impersonated and Camila is overwhelmed by what is going on, but both accept her as part of the family after discovering her.
• The parents of the eponymous Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero are experienced heroes that are currently trapped in an extremely dangerous dimension and can only communicate with their son via the MUHU, a small hologram-projecting device that Penn keeps with him at all times.
• Samurai Jack plays with this. On the one hand, Jack's still on Earth, but on the other, he's on a far-future sci-fi Earth world populated by countless alien races, and magic and the supernatural aren't uncommon.
• In Shazzan, Chuck and Nancy are transported to an Arabian Nights-esque world, and will only be sent home once they find Shazzan's true owner.
• The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, where Mario and Luigi are from Brooklyn, but were transported to the Mushroom Kingdom through a warp pipe.
• Super Wish: Jesse, Sadie, Xander, and Winnie are trapped in the Happy Land of Birthdays because of Jesse super wishing his birthday party would disappear. They have to find Jesse's super wish to get back home.