Parents as People: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

Jim and Joan are nice. You'd like them if you met them. Jim's the boss of the big advertising company down the street, and Joan's a physics teacher at the nearby high school. They were [[High School Sweethearts]], and are still clearly in love. They play tennis together on a Saturday, but on Sunday Jim goes fishing while Joan goes white water rafting. They're always busy, but always friendly. Nice folks.

They'll also be pretty hopeless as parents.

 

 

If you're a protagonist, and your parents are given lots of witty one liners, lots of characterisation and inhabit the [[Competence Zone]] to some degree, expect to suffer [[Parental Abandonment]] as they pursue their hobbies and relationships at your expense. If mum and dad are still together, you'll be a living example of the phrase "the children of lovers are orphans," as the parental units will be too wrapped up in each other to spend much time with you. On the other hand, if they're fighting constantly, they'll be too busy yelling at each other to notice that you haven't eaten in three days.

 

{{examples}}

* The Hirasawa parents in ''[[K-On!]]'' are usually away on romantic hijinks, leaving younger sister Ui to serve as a surrogate parent for [[Cloudcuckoolander]] Yui. In the manga, the rest of the main cast finally meet them ''on the day of Yui's entrance exam to college'', and only because they came over because they were worried she might sleep too late.

* Prof. Yumi from ''[[Mazinger Z]]'' sincerely loved and cared for his daughter Sayaka, but he was too [[Married to the Job]] and busy trying to save the world to take care of her properly, and often Sayaka missed her father.

 

 

* In the ''[[Katawa Shoujo]]'' fic [http://ks.renai.us/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=5361 Weekend at Hisao's], Shizune's father and Hisao's parents are seen in this light. Shizune is frustrated with her father's persistent attempts to get her to speak (in the fic, it's indicated that she can speak but sounds terrible), but sees that he wants her to succeed and appreciates that he doesn't treat her any differently from her non-disabled brother. Hisao says he didn't like his parents' frequent absences from his life due to working, but realizes that they worked so hard so that he could grow up in a nice house that they never had in their childhoods, and were willing to sell that house if it was necessary to cure his condition.

 

** [[Jacqueline Wilson]] is diligent in depicting her Parents as People. Often likable, these characters don't fall into stereotypes...but the reader still wouldn't want to be related to them. In ''The Illustrated Mum,'' Marigold, a manic-depressive single mother, ''adores'' her two children, but feeds them cake rather than cooking them a proper dinner. In ''The Suitcase Kid,'' Andy's divorced parents marry new partners who already have families of their own. Her parents are so involved with their new lives that they don't realize they're using Andy as a pawn to "get back" at each other. In ''The Diamond Girls'', the heroine and her sisters have lived in continual disorder all their lives, with their mother frequently changing boyfriends and moving her family to new homes. ''Amber'', an early novel, was about a girl who rebels against her traveller mother and struggles to live a normal life.

* [[Judy Blume]] uses the trope as well.

** Another one from [[Judy Blume]] is ''Tiger Eyes'', about a teenaged girl named Davey whose father, a convenience store clerk, was shot during a robbery and, it is eventually revealed, died in her arms. Davey's mother turns into pretty much a space cadet for most of the novel, unable to function, and transplants Davey and her brother Jason to the opposite side of the country. The three live for most of the story with the dad's sister and her husband, who ''try'' to act as substitute parents for the kids, but do so in the most ham-fisted manner possible.

** There's also the stories about Peter Hatcher (the ''[[Fudge]]'' series). His parents are nice, but often butt heads with their sons over various things (moving temporarily to Princeton, having a third child, etc).

* [[Diana Wynne Jones]], as noted below, wrote her nearest thing to an autobiographical novel and called it ''The Time of the Ghost;'' it is about this sort of family. The father is a towering professor known to his children as Himself, who runs a boys' school, where the lead and her three sisters live, and the mother spends all her time keeping the school in order, and all four girls are really ''shockingly'' neglected. Getting food regularly involves raiding the school kitchens and doing their bet to get away with it. Both parents, however, despite fairly limited page time due to their disinterest in their children, are highly realized characters with internal lives of whose shape we get a sense.

* ''[[Dresden Files]]'': Maggie LeFay, having the best intentions, skirted the bounds between white and black magic, falling in with what one might call "the wrong crowd", one of whom {{spoiler|murders her in childbirth}}. Her son inherits one hell of a legacy.

 

== Live-Action TV ==

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Characters As Device]]

[[Category:Parental Issues]]

[[Category:Example as a Thesis]]