Abusive Parents/Film/Animated Films

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Mother Gothel in Tangled delights in piling on the fear and doubt to keep Rapunzel locked in her tower; she excuses her cruel words with assurances that she's "just teasing," criticizes and diminishes everything Rapunzel does, and casts herself as a victim whenever there's a confrontation between them. This is disturbingly similar to how emotionally abusive mothers behave in real life.
    • In the song "Mother Knows Best," notice how she trips Rapunzel, then tells her she's clumsy (along with the other Jerkass things she says), only for Rapunzel to run into her arms for comfort at the end of the song. What makes it worse is that Mother Gothel has been doing this to Rapunzel for the past eighteen years.
  • Not in the film itself, but heavily implied in the prequel novel to Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs, Fairest of All, that Queen Grimhilde's father caused her to be extremely insecure of her beauty by refusing to acknowledge it, which ultimately drove her insane especially after her sisters created a magic mirror by fusing her father's spirit with it and become the vain maniac that she was in the film.
  • In the Superman: Doomsday movie, an adaptation of the Death Of Superman arc, Lex Luthor makes a clone of Superman that quickly gets into Beware the Superman territory. However, he keeps doing whatever Lex tells him, as he was programmed to do--including, in one of his early scenes, just standing there and taking it when Luthor has him walk into a red-sun chamber and then whales on him mercilessly with kryptonite-knuckled gauntlets while screaming out his frustration with Superman for dying and leaving him. Later he has the classic Abusive Parents line "I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it."
    • This is all especially chilling because it's presumably what would have happened to the comics character Kon-el, Conner Kent, Post-Crisis Superboy, if Luthor's experiments had run a little more smoothly.

Lex: WHO'S YOUR DADDY?

    • The clone is all Knight Templar, so he goes rogue from Lex after that, and the first thing he does is dig the kryptonite bomb out of his skull with laser vision (incidentally, apparently the hemispheres of his brain aren't linked?), and then he saves Lois and Jimmy from Lex...and then rather horribly slaughters Lex's incipient clone army, ranging from oversized fetuses to nearly-mature specimens, with the ironic comment "Evil Supermen? Not on my watch!" The line of clones at the stage of development Conner was when he entered the scene were especially nasty to see die, although it was obvious as soon as they were introduced that they'd all have to be massacred somehow.
  • The incarnation of the Mouse Queen from The Nutcracker Prince is implied to be this around her son. Though she only has one son at the time, she still treats him like he is worthless as well as the fact she belittles his thoughts and slaps him with her glove when he doubts her spells would work.
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