Feuding Families: Difference between revisions

 

If the families of the first perpetrator and victim are [[The Clan|large enough]] and roughly equals in power and resources, this can go on for a long, long time. So long, in fact, that it's rather easy for them to forget what the original cause of their fighting was. [[Big Screwed-Up Family|A feud usually doesn't help the mental health of the individuals and the wisdom of their family culture.]] This can lead to three most obvious conclusions:

# One family yields and flees the area. This rarely happens, because people are stubborn like that and it's also anticlimactic. Plus, the other family might just chase them.

# They make peace. Sometimes they even intermarry to strengthen their arrangement. This has been known to happen in real life, surprisingly enough. In real life, there was also a practice to pay blood money to appease the family of the dead and end this vicious cycle. This rarely happens in fiction, though.

Many depictions of Feuding Families show a [[Grey and Gray Morality]], as the feuding parties are not evil but full of grief and rage, doing cruel things because of it.

 

 

The origin of the feud is sometimes unmentioned or very vaguely explained, as in ''[[Romeo and Juliet]]'' or ''The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn''.

** Even worse, {{spoiler|Madara states that Naruto himself may be a descendant of the Senju clan, making him Sasuke's fated rival.}}

* ''[[Basilisk]]'', another ''[[Romeo and Juliet]]'' between feuding ninja clans who had been in a tense peace until given a reason. And anyone who didn't have a personal reason before, gets one.

* The title characters of ''[[Noir]]'' end up taking a contract on an ex-KGB officer who had ordered genocidal purges on a specific ethnic group some decades before. It turned out that this particular incident was just the last atrocity committed between that ethnic group and the officer's ethnic group in a feud that had been going on for centuries. The ultimate cause of this feud was never mentioned.

 

== [[Comic Books]] ==

* ''[[Lucky Luke]]'''s episode "The Rivals of Painful Gulch."

* A major plot point in ''[[Nikolai Dante]]'' is the feud between the Romanovs and ruling Marakovs. When this erupts into all-out war, Nikolai is forced to fight against his [[Star-Crossed Lovers|lover]], Jena Marakov, due o conflicting loyalties.

 

== [[Film]] ==

* [[Elton John]]'s ''[[Gnomeo and Juliet]]'' The Red gnomes and the Blue gnomes.

* ''Film/Highlander'' The [[Mac Leods]] and Frasers, whose border skirmishes appear to have resulted in the first deaths of both Duncan in the series and Connor in the film . [[Truth in Television]] as seen in the [[Real Life]] section.

*** Its noted that the main reason for Ogg family infighting is because Nanny Ogg deliberately provokes them into feuding with one another, mostly to relieve her boredom between supernatural crises.

* The Starks and Lannisters in ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]''. The only reason they are civil to each other is because Ned Stark's best friend Robert Baratheon married into the Lannister family. {{spoiler|But once Robert dies (and it's strongly hinted at the his wife Cersei killed him), all bets are off and the Lannisters utterly devastate the Starks, though not without suffering some losses themselves.}} It's worth noting that Martin based this feud lightly on the [[Wars of the Roses]].

** In the novel ''Imzadi'', two planets have been hostile--not open warfare, but anger and resentment--for generations, until a window into the past reveals the extremely trivial origins of the hostility. It's played exactly like [[Feuding Families]].

** Q-in-Law featured a pair on massive space ships, literally making Enterprise the man in the middle, trying to provide neutral ground for the intermarriage. Since Q is around, it definitely does not go as planned. A case of [[Hilarity Ensues]] done well.

** So to recap, Peter David really likes [[Feuding Families]].

* One of the ''[[Nightside]]'' books involves a Romeo and Juliet type situation where the couple persuade their families to call a truce and get married, only to both be murdered at the wedding dinner.

* Likewise, Mario Puzo's ''The Last Don'' begins with Don Clericuzio agreeing for his daughter to marry Jimmy Santadio, the son of his rival. {{spoiler|Don Clericuzio then has Jimmy and Jimmy's family murdered on the wedding night.}}

* The short story ''The Interlopers'' is about the end of such a feud.

* In ''[[The 39 Clues]]'', the fued is going on between different branches of the same family, but characters from different branches are only very distantly related. {{spoiler|In the tenth book, there is also mention of another family who wants to gain Cahill secrets, hinting that if a second series is made, there will be a fight between the Cahills and Vespers.}}

* The [[Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke|St. Cloud]], [[Dysfunction Junction|Nast]] and [[The Mafia|Cortez]] cabals in the "[[Women of the Otherworld]]" series by Kelley Armstrong have [[Mob War|vicious rivalries]], and are almost incapable of [[Enemy Mine|uniting against a common enemy]].

* Fred Saberhagens [[Book Of Lost Swords]]:

** In one of the books, two feuding families have been going at it for generations. One side even cursed the other so that female children are sometimes born as mermaids who cannot conceive. This all comes to a crashing halt when one side gets ahold of Farslayer, a sword which does exactly what it sounds like it should do. Most of the two sides are wiped out in one night.

 

== [[Live Action TV]] ==

* Perhaps inevitably, ''[[The Beverly Hillbillies]]'' had one of these, after Sonny Drysdale refuses to marry Elly May in a first-season episode.

* The Ewings vs. Barnes intergenerational feud in ''[[Dallas]]''.

* There's an entire ''[[Super Sentai]]'' based around the concept, namely ''[[Rescue Sentai Go Go Five]]'', wherein the Tatsumis, a family of rescue workers, battle the Saimas, a family of demons who cause natural disasters.

** The Bennet-Givens feud which started during Prohibition when a Bennet thought a Givens had sold him out to the cops and killed him in revenge. Almost a century later there are suspiciously few Bennets and Givens left in Harlan County. The women of the two families had kept a truce going for the last fifteen years since Rylan Givens and Dickie Bennet got into a fight during a baseball game and Dickie ended up limping for the rest of his life. After {{spoiler|Raylan kills Coover Bennet}} the feud starts heating up again and it culminates with {{spoiler|the deaths of Aunt Halen, Doyle Bennet and Mags Bennet}}. It remains to be seen whether {{spoiler|Dickie Bennet}} will be able to come back and try to finish it.

** Season two also had a Crowder-Bennet feud start up when Dickie Bennet threatened Boyd Crowder and Boyd robbed Dickie's dope deal to send a message as to who is in charge of crime in the area. The Crowders make short work of a Bennet attempt at retaliation.

* The Kusanagi vs. Yagami feud in ''[[The King of Fighters]]''. Although they both sealed [[Orochi]], the Kusanagi got more recognition and fame, which provoked the Yagami to cut a deal with Orochi for the ability to wield flames like the Kusanagi.

* As a game revolving around playing [[The Clan|feudal houses]] [[Recycled in Space|in space]], ''[[Imperium Nova]]'' features a mechanic called feud score that regulates family feuds. Feud score is created through spying, attempted assassinations, military attacks, insults, and other hostile actions. Attacking another house without the proper feud causes you to become a renegade and, theoretically, an instant pariah.

* The Montys and the Capps in ''[[The Sims]]'' is based off the Montagues and the Capulets, the reason why they started the feud was due to the Monty Patriarch lost a promising job as an associate with the Capps.

 

== [[Web Original]] ==

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

* ''[[Make Mine Music]]'', from the [[Disney Animated Canon]], had a segment titled "The Martins and the Coys" which featured the popular radio vocal group, King's Men singing the story of a Hatfields and McCoys-style feud in the mountains broken up when two young people from each side fall in love. This segment was later cut from the film's video release due to comic gunplay.

* ''[[The Flintstones]]'' episode "Bedrock Hillbillies" has Fred inheriting a shack in the mountains and getting caught up in a longstanding feud between his ancestors and the Hatrock clan.