Social Services Does Not Exist: Difference between revisions

There is an intrinsic understanding throughout most of modern Western society that children are to be loved, nurtured, and protected throughout their childhoods by their parents. Parents are viewed as having a responsibility to ensure their child's happiness and welfare, as a necessary component to their healthy development into responsible and mature adults prepared to face the demands of society.

 

 

Needless to say, these sorts of parents tend to be the sort that would never be allowed to keep their children. At the very least neglectful parents would have to go through a few parenting sessions. But just as [[There Are No Therapists]] in fiction, there are also apparently no social services, either. The helpless kid is just going to have to grin and bear it - and because it's usually played for comedy rather than drama, they usually do. Sometimes they can escape to [[Staying with Friends]].

 

 

There's also the matter of all those kids running around [[There Are No Adults|apparently without any parents at all.]]

 

== Anime and Manga ==

** Soun Tendo of the same series, while not nearly as much of a bastard as Genma, does almost ''nothing'' for his family other than occasionally bursting into tears, leaving his eldest daughter to run things. [[Fridge Logic|However; at the time the series takes place, Kasumi probably could legally have her younger siblings in her care as she's a legal adult]]...but how does she make any money?

** Principal Kuno would regularly shave off his son's hair on a whim (and in hair-trimmer vs. bokken duels) and generally humiliate him. The anime expands this by hinting at physical abuse (flashbacks from the episode where Kuno and the Principal's relationship is revealed include Kuno Senior taking Tatewaki's food while apparently berating him, forcing his head into a sink so he can shave him bald, and tying him up and dangling him from a tree). Already a fan of American culture, he also abandoned his family to live in Hawaii for several years. He came back even worse.

** She also has an arranged marriage she doesn't want. Namely because her fiance Nagisa Shiowatara's father is just as much a loony as her own- upon having a son, rather than raise him as a boy, he deliberately raises him as a girl in order to match the "boy" that Ryuunosuke was raised to be. Unlike her, however, he does seem to know how to act like a guy, and he does realize that he's actually male, but he enjoys crossdressing. What makes things worse for her is that he possesses a number of ghostly powers, due to having died from eating sea urchin ice cream then coming back from the dead... though this also gives him some ghostly weaknesses, like being repelled by spirit wards. He's also, despite his [[Bishonen]] body, an expert sumo wrestler and quite capable of beating her in a fight.

* The parents of ''[[Hayate the Combat Butler]]'' are quite possibly the worst [[Jerkass]] parents in the world. Due to the father's laziness and the mother's gambling habits, Hayate has been the primary breadwinner in his house since the age of eight. In the very first chapter they steal sixteen-year-old Hayate's hard-earned paycheck, lose it all on pachinko, then sell their only son's organs to [[Yakuza|"some very nice people"]] to pay off their 156,804,000 yen ($1,467,504) debt. And just to top it off, this happens on ''Christmas Eve''. The mental scars left by his parents persist for a very, very long time.

* Gendo Ikari, as usual for ''[[Neon Genesis Evangelion]]'', is an example of a normally comedic trope [[Deconstruction|deconstructed]] into something tragic. At least he palms his kid off on someone who ''tries''...eventually. Of course, given that this is [[After the End|post-apocalyptic]] Japan, it's possible that social services actually ''doesn't'' exist; and regardless, given that NERV basically ''is'' the world government, even if they do exist there's nothing they could do to stop Gendo.

** Heck, given that it's post-apocalyptic Japan, they ''could'' exist, but since it's, you know, after the apocalypse, they're really, ''really'' busy taking care of all the no doubt millions of now homeless children and new adoptions. Some people are bound to fall through the cracks...

* Justified in ''[[Runaways]]'': No one ever realized that Chase was being abused because his mad scientist father found a method of beating him that left no marks.

** Also subverted later, after {{spoiler|the Pride were all killed off. No sooner had the kids escaped, than Captain America found them and put them all in separate foster homes. The kids all promptly escaped and regrouped, because they missed each other and found social services ill-equipt to help them get over the trauma of having one's super-villain parents being killed by Biblical giants.}}

 

 

* Children and ''[[Silent Hill]]'' do not mix well. Alessa was emotionally and physically abused by basically everyone in her life, Angela was repeatedly raped by her father, Laura is a (possibly homeless) orphan whose best chance for adoption was a terminally ill, bed-ridden woman who died a few weeks later, the children at Wish House were systematically abused for brainwashing purposes, and the Shepard, Holloway, Fitch and Bartlett families {{spoiler|murder one of their children each generation}}. Needless to say (but it will be said anyway) social services is nowhere to be seen.

* In ''[[The Sims]] 1'', the Social Worker would come to pick up a baby who was starving, but wouldn't do anything about a school-age kid who was orphaned. In ''The Sims 2'', they shaped up somewhat, but they became a little over-responsive. They can take a child if they get a bad grade in school, so it's not much of an improvement. Luckily, Sims 3 seems to have fixed all of the problems with the social workers

* When Miles Edgeworth's father was murdered in ''[[Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney]]'', he was almost immediately adopted by Manfred von Karma, {{spoiler|the guy who killed his father in the first place.}} Did no one object to a ten-year-old being taken off to Germany by a man he'd never met who wasn't even an American citizen?

** And no justification for Trucy Wright. {{spoiler|She's an eight year old who's almost immediately adopted by an out of work disbarred attorney whose only tie to her is that he was her father's lawyer. At fifteen she's helping to support the family by performing magic acts around town. Phoenix mentions that there's no one else to take care of her, as her entire family is dead/missing except for an uncle who's in police custody at the time. He offers to look after her, and she accepts happily, and what with him being a former lawyer could probably get legal guardianship legally.}}