"There and Back" Story

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It's not the destination that matters, it's the journey!

The "There and Back" Story is a common form of plotline also referred to as a "home-away-home", centered around a form of (usually) heroic journey undertaken by a small group of characters from starting point A to destination B. The intermediate stops made along the way are usually tangential to the journey itself, and the ensemble of interesting characters that the group almost inevitably meets have their own varying levels of relation to the central plot. The trope is named for The Hobbit, which was subtitled "There and Back Again".

The journey is usually treated as a major plotline, if not the main plot itself, and the secondary and tertiary locations and characters that our group encounters are at most a source of smaller subplots, which are usually resolved shortly before that location is left - after all, it's about the journey, not the destination. That said, if a specific subplot isn't resolved immediately, expect them to come up sometime down the road.

Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots calls this "Voyage and Return".

This plotline is a key fixture of many works of Children's Literature and Coming of Age Stories. The Big Race is a frequent form of this, as is many a Vacation or Road Trip Episode (including the movies). Expect "Are We There Yet?" to be asked quite often.

Tropes Are Flexible, and this one is more flexible than most. (It is one of The Seven Basic Plots, after all.) This can overlap with Orphean Rescue, if the people doing the rescuing encounter beings or wonders (or both) during their rescue mission. Yet Another Christmas Carol tends to have the trip take place through time, rather than through space. Fantastic Voyage Plot and Journey to the Center of the Mind send the travelers into somebody else (one way or another), fully expecting to make their way out at the end of their trip. And so on.

If you go "there" but can't get "back", then you're Trapped in Another World.

For other uses of the phrase "there and back again", see the disambiguation page.

Examples of "There and Back" Story include:

Anime and Manga

• Most Digimon series have the characters Trapped in Another World, doing their best to find a way home.

Fan Works

• The Drunkard's Walk fanfic cycle is clearly intended to be a "There and Back" Story -- but hasn't yet reached the point where the protagonist actually returns home.

Film

• The baseline premise of Mad Max: Fury Road fits this trope, with the starting point being the citadel and the destination being the "Green Place"; it also mixes in many elements of The Big Race.
• The 1965 film The Great Race is about a road race that takes the cast from New York to Paris.
• Labyrinth: Sarah's ill-considered words force her into a journey through the Goblin King's labyrinth. The trip back is much easier.
• The Devil Wears Prada is a more metaphorical version of "There and Back". The heroine enters a new world (her new job at the magazine), where she finds her normal behavior patterns won't work - she successfully adapts, but discovers that the job is making her a bad person and quits.
• Inception shows the joyful exploration of the dreamworlds in flashbacks of the fifty years Cobb and Mal spent in limbo, and Cobb is certainly a different man at the end of the movie than in the beginning.
  • Don't forget the training of Ariadne where she got to romp around in Cobb's dreams, an adventure that produced the now iconic image of a city being folded in half.
• The Where the Wild Things Are movie is a good modern example, with Max running away and then returning home.

Literature

• Around the World in Eighty Days is The Big Race and a Race Against the Clock on a global scale, with the participants tasked to circumnavigate the globe from London in under eighty days.
• Tolkienverse:
  • The Trope Namer The Hobbit covers Frodo's journey from his home of Hobbiton to the dragon's lair, and Frodo even writes his own book about the journey afterward.
  • The Lord of the Rings covers a several-volumes-long journey from Hobbiton to Mordor in search of a way to destroy the One Ring.
• Dorothy's journey from Kansas to Oz and back, in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the versions of The Wizard of Oz that don't claim it was All Just a Dream.
• The Phantom Tollbooth tells the story of Milo's journey.
• If it wasn't All Just a Dream, Alice in Wonderland reveals Alice's journey through Wonderland.
• A Christmas Carol takes Scrooge on a journey through time rather than space, and he returns to his home a changed man.

Live-Action TV

• Tin Man, which is based on The Wizard of Oz... only in that, the ending differs.

Western Animation

• Dora the Explorer does this Once an Episode, with Map detailing the path Dora and Boots will take. The path always includes two primary landmarks prior to the destination itself, and at least a couple of subplots (often involving one of Dora's friends) occur that requires their assistance before they can continue.
  • The spinoff series Go, Diego, Go! operates much the same way, with Click acting as the guide, and Diego saves any endangered animals he meets along the way.
• Teen Titans Go! episode "Road Trip" (which provides the page image) has Cyborg egging the other Titans into going on a road trip to... wherever. It's about the journey, after all. Subverted at the end of the episode when the "back" never happens - the other Titans refuse to repeat the experience and instead build a new B-shaped tower right at their destination.