Generational Trauma

"Generational trauma" is a psychological phenomenon where older generations pass on their horrors, traumas, and angsts to the new blood. Sometimes the older groups aren't even aware of it, perhaps owing to the stigma of therapy and lack of awareness. Read more here.

In fiction, generational trauma is shown to play out over a relatively short time period. The exception may be in intergenerational novels, where you see hundreds of years pass at a time. Usually the person that passed on the trauma has to confront their demons, and the consequences of their actions.

You are more likely to see generational trauma in non-Western works, but it may crop up in Western stories as well, that talk about PTSD. Western works are more likely to shorten the timespan, so that the viewers get a sense of completion.

Anime and Manga

 * My Hero Academia regularly has examples of tragic villains that result from this. You had normal kids that were abused by parents with superpowers, and then lash out when they grow up and have children that gain powers. Tomura is a classic example of this, being abused by his family for the crime of having a Quirk. There seems to be no end to the cycle, except with compassion and a clear understanding to stop the pain.
 * Yona of the Dawn has this play out gradually over time, in regards to both Yona and the main antagonist Su-won. Yona is raised as a naive and spoiled princess who loves her cousin Su-won and thinks that she can persuade her father to let them marry. Then she witnesses Su-won assassinate the king on her birthday, and Su-won proceeds to order her killed as well. She finds out over the course of the series, while on the run with her bodyguard Hak, that Su-won is acting out of the belief that her father killed his father. Hak himself can't believe it, as Yona's father was a pacifist to the point of being an Extreme Doormat and a terrible king owing to his inability to be stern or violent when necessary. Su-won himself is affected by his father's legacy, as well as the consequences of his actions.

Comic Books

 * The comic book Maus discusses this in Part Two, as Art goes to see a therapist after his father dies while pondering that his wife Françoise Mouly is pregnant with their first kid and that the Maus comic is not yet finished. He feels guilty that he had a good life in the American suburbs, with enough food to eat, while his parents endured concentration camps and his older brother Richieu died via cyanide pills. Yet his childhood and adulthood were filled with his father's embarrassing miserly ways and his mother's depression which eventually led to her death by suicide. Art even mentions to Françoise that he thought all parents screamed in their sleep. His therapist Pavel, also a Holocaust survivor, talks to Art through his mixed feelings about finishing the book, and what it means to survive. Nadja Spiegelman would later write her set of memoirs explaining that her parents were decent people, but her maternal grandfather took offense at Nadja discussing French collaborators.
 * Sandman has a few instances.
 * Dream is a butthead, sometimes. He's arrogant, a stickler for the rules, and stubborn. He also has his own traumas that come with being the King of Dreams: having his sibling Desire charm away his paramour merely because Desire thought it was funny, witnessing another paramour throw herself over a cliff when their night of sex caused her village to be destroyed, and having an older sibling walk out on the others. These naturally aren't a good combo for being a father. Dream treats Orpheus cruelly when the latter breaks the rules of the universe to try and resurrect his wife,.
 * Rose Walker, her mother and her brother Jed (offscreen as what he suffers onscreen is much worse) grapple with the fact that Unity Kincaid was raped while suffering sleeping sickness and conceived their mother, who was adopted out to an unknown family. Mrs. Walker takes it well after the initial shock, considering she meets her biological mother when Unity is a dying old lady and tends to her during her last few days. The rape in question made Rose a vortex, an Apocalypse Maiden that.

Film

 * Encanto puts this on full display for most of the movie. Abuela Alma witnessed bandits murdering her husband who attempted to protect her and their triplets, along with a group of refugees. When the miracle happened-- an ever-burning candle caused the mountains to rise and dispel the bandits while creating a safe haven for the survivors, and giving magic to Abuela's children-- Abuela became convinced that the best way to respect the miracle was to make her children useful. Unknowingly, her demand for perfectionism and rigidity causes her to alienate her powerless granddaughter Mirabel who tearfully pinpoints at her Rage Breaking Point that she will never be good enough for Abuela. That's not even going into how she inadvertently turned her son Bruno into the town's pariah, has driven her other granddaughter Luisa to a near-breakdown with how Luisa feels she needs to literally carry the house's burdens on her back, and treats Isabela as the golden child who must never get her hands dirty despite an affinity for plants. It takes.
 * Turning Red has this for the central conflict. Mei has spent her whole life pleasing her mother Ming but her mind and body start to rebel after Ming humiliates her in front of her crush Devon after accusing him of being a sexual predator. Ming in the meantime remains Obliviously Evil that she's emotionally abusing her only daughter while thinking she's helping out and shaming her for the crime of being a teenager...because Ming's own mother did the same to her. It's implied this emotional abuse and shaming runs several generations back. Her mother didn't even approve of Jin, Ming's Nice Guy of a husband, and is quick to berate Ming if Mei appears less than perfect..
 * It's implied in The Croods that part of the reason that Grug and his mother-in-law don't get along is because of this. All of the humans, cavemen and Guy alike, have to work hard to survive in a hostile world. Gran was married off to someone she didn't love and never saw the hunter that she wanted to marry again. She's a good mother to her daughter Ugga and raised her to be a sensible woman, but she hates Grug for the mere fact that he's married to Ugga. Grug was raised to fear everything to protect the ones that he loved. While Gran doesn't hate Grug, and grudgingly admits that he won her respect by pulling a Heroic Sacrifice at the end of the film to save everyone else, she does have it out for him when he's just doing what he's supposed to do: hunt for food and parent.

Literature

 * Like Water for Chocolate shows how Mama Elena's abuse passes to her children and grandchildren. Her baggage is she wasn't allowed to be with the man she loved because he was a "Moor" and lower-class; she married a man who would financially provide for her but died of shock when he heard rumors about the affair, and that daughter Gertrudis may not be his. A single parent and stigmatized, Elena took out her rage on the only person that she could: her youngest daughter Tita, who per tradition would take care of Elena for the latter's days rather than get married. She forbids Tita from marrying her love Pedro, persuading Pedro to marry her eldest daughter Rosaura instead, and proceeded to berate Tita for protesting this decision for years on end. While Rosaura agrees this is unfair, and she and Tita call a truce later in life after Elena dies, she's shocked when.
 * Middlesex is all about tracing this back to Cal's grandparents, who in the first part are revealed to be brother and sister as well as refugees of a war on the Greeks. No one on the American rescue ship knows who they are, so they are able to cover up their relations and their cousin Lina who takes them in also keeps their secret. They also bring their biases with them, with Milton being raised to fear racial integration and value keeping high amounts of money while his son Chapter Eleven becomes a hardcore liberal. Both of these facts end up playing into Cal's conception and birth; even though Cal is born as Calliope and appears to be a girl, Cal is actually intersex thanks to the genetics and does not learn about this fact until they're fourteen. This sparks an identity crisis when a doctor wants to operate on Cal without telling them or their parents the truth, and Cal runs away, cutting their long hair and dressing as a boy.
 * Every problem in the Buendía clan in One Hundred Years of Solitude can be easily traced to founding patriarch José Arcadio Buendía's propensity to violence and inability to actually parent his children and to his wife Úrsula's incest paranoia. Is not just that the traits are repeating and reappearing like their descendant names, is that each new generation is replicating what they had learned from the previous one.

Live-Action TV

 * Brooklyn Nine Nine reveals that Jake Peralta comes from a line of crappy fathers. Each one passed on their trauma to the next generation. It's part of the reason why Jake is scared of having kids, that he will pass on the Peralta garbage.

Newspaper Comics

 * Played for Laughs the few times it's mentioned in Calvin and Hobbes. When Calvin misbehaves at the doctor's office because he hates being sick in the summer and fears his deadpan pediatrician, his mother remarks that she hopes Calvin has a kid one day as bad as he is. Calvin says snarkily, "Yeah that's what Grandma says she told you." Given that Grandma is a Deadpan Snarker as shown by her way of getting Calvin to write thank-you letters for any presents that she sends, it may explain a lot about why Mom is so uptight.
 * If you read For Better or For Worse from beginning to end, this may be a generous interpretation of the Pattersons. Elly and John are old-fashioned by modern standards but believe they are good parents that happen to have mischievous children. When April wanders outside with family dog Farley after asking them for permission, neither of them realizes they should have been paying attention to their toddler daughter. While John was on the phone and had a legitimate excuse, Elly was showing off vacation photos and lacks one. . Their kids are encouraged to settle down in the same town and marry their childhood sweethearts after college, ideally not trying groundbreaking careers. Liz gives up a promising job as a teacher to work in a gardening store after her pilot boyfriend cheats on her, a decision which leads to . When Michael grows up and has two kids, he has moments where he wonders if this was how Elly felt when Meredith becomes overly demanding and if he just became his dad. April is the Only Sane Woman that calls out Anthony for ; she's the only Patterson that breaks the cycle by.

Visual Novels

 * Umineko no Naku Koro ni has the Ushiromiya clan, who all suffer one way or another the consequences of the traumas of current patriarch Kinzo. The man was emotionally abused while growing up, forced to become the head of the family after practically every other male adult died in the 1928 Tokyo earthquake, and roped into an arranged marriage he disliked and only consummated to get heirs, but none of the children he had with his legitimate wife was good enough to him. It's implied that the man joined the Imperial army during WWII less of a patriotic feeling and more to get away from his wife and children. Abroad he met his true love, but because of the times, he couldn't divorce his wife and had to keep her as his mistress until she died in childbirth. His legitimate children were raised under various levels of parental abuse on his side, having to bear western names, and developed several unhealthy coping mechanisms themselves. His grandchildren are sightly better adjusted due to most of them not being outright abused (and the one who actually is has developed quite creepy coping mechanisms), but they still feel under the heavy eye of their grandfather.

Western Animation

 * Avatar: The Last Airbender practically runs on this trope. A hundred years ago, Avatar Roku's death provided a window of opportunity for the Fire Nation to launch global colonialization on the other kingdoms, under the guise of "improving" them. While the instigator Firelord Sozin had good intentions initially, he realized too late that wiping out all the Airbenders in search of Aang was not going to win him any brownie points or spiritual karma. Each generation of his descendants became worse than the last, with Azulon willing to murder his grandchildren to make a point, and Ozai showing no compunctions about scarring his fourteen-year-old son in front of an Agni Kai audience when said son refused to fight him. It's no wonder that Zuko is a Jerkass after suffering that, and.
 * Legend of Korra continues this with the new blood:
 * Avatar Aang was a good person, a cheerful guy, and a doting father, but Tenzin felt immense pressure from Aang since they were the last two Airbenders in existence. Aang couldn't forget that he was the only survivor of the Airbender clans, having found many skeletons where he expected to find friends, and passed that anxiety onto his only airbending child. Kya and Bumi felt that they were ignored in favor of Tenzin, and both resented their little brother while still showing they would protect him with their life.
 * Firelord Izumi and her son General Iroh bear the emotional scars of what their ancestors did. Iroh leads fleets to protect the innocent while knowing the implications of declaring war. Izumi herself refuses to launch preemptive strikes against Kuvira in Season 4, pointing out that decisions like that led to the Fire Nation destroying entire cultures.