Door Step Baby: Difference between revisions

** In one of the many parallels between {{spoiler|the mortal enemies}} the same happened to {{spoiler|Voldemort}} except he was left with an orphanage.

* This trope applies to the novel ''[[The Hunchback of Notre Dame (novel)|The Hunchback of Notre Dame]]'', in which Quasimodo is abandoned outside Notre Dame and Frollo takes him in out of kindness.

* [[Keith Laumer]] did this, although in his version the baby was a huge insect- or crustacean-looking thing and it took the army with lots of artillery to kill it—and ''then'' they decoded the message which read, "Please take good care of my little girl." Somewhere between [[Tear Jerker]] and [[Squick]] there.

* The [[Jacqueline Wilson]] novel ''[[Dustbin Baby]]'', about a Doorstop Baby (actually found abandoned in a bin, as the title suggests) who sets out to trace her past on the day of her 14th birthday.

* Inverted in a short story in ''[[Highlights]]''. A man who has recently come into a large amount of money discovers that it has been cursed, and the only way to lift the curse is to give the money away. He leaves the money, wrapped in a cloth, on the doorstep of an orphanage. The orphanage matron, upon seeing the bundle, assumes it to be a baby before she gets a closer look at the contents.

* In [[Christopher Moore]]'s ''[[Fool]]'', Pocket is left on the doorstep of an abbey as a baby.

* In [[Poul Anderson]]'s ''[[Three Hearts and Three Lions]]'', Holger Carlsen.

* In the book ''[[The Children On The Top Floor]],'' a television personality makes a Christmas Eve speech in which he says he envies all the families out there with children... and in the morning he finds ''four'' babies left on his doorstep.

* In [[Poppy Z. Brite]]'s ''Lost Souls'', Nothing is left on the doorstep of a human couple.

* Astronomer Carl Sagan's book "Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors", sets this up as [[Book Ends]], the idea of ''humanity'' as a doorstop baby, an orphan raised by the laws of the universe and growing up to [[Ontological Mystery|wonder about its origins and how it got there]]. Only fragments of a note remain - the fossil record.

* Annabeth Chase from [[Percy Jackson]] is one.

* This is Otto's backstory in the [[H.I.V.E. Series]], being left outside an orphanage. The narrative mentions the staff are used to dealing with this kind of situation.

* The title character of the [[Cat Royal]] series was left on the steps of the Theatre Royal as a toddler. She mentions that the theatre owner, Mr Sheridan, probably only took her in because he was a bit drunk at the time.

* Milton from ''[[The Destiny Of Milton Gomrath]]'' was left on the steps of an orphanage as a baby.

 

== Subversions ==

* This was already an established film trope in 1921, when D.W. Griffith subverts it in ''[[Orphans of the Storm]]''. Just before the French Revolution, a starving peasant couple in Paris decide to leave their baby at the church, since they can't feed her. The father takes the baby, but when he arrives at the church, there is already a baby there. Seeing the other baby not only makes him rethink abandoning his own, but he ends up going home with both of them. They grow up to be played by Lillian and Dorothy Gish.

* ''[[The Three Stooges]]'' took a baby off someone else's doorstep when they thought nobody was home to find it... The mom was only gone for five minutes, and [[Hilarity Ensues]].

 

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