Parents! Pesky narrative roadblocks when writing books centred on young people. Common, garden-variety parents want to make sure their offspring are healthy and happy, which is a problem for writers who want to send young protagonists off into danger. Authors can, of course, dispatch parents to a location too distant for them to interfere or simply kill them off—both very popular choices—but there is another alternative: Simply have the parents themselves (or their equivalent) be part of the problem.
The Silver Metal Lover (1981) by Tanith Lee
Tanith Lee was the queen of, among other things, vanished or dead parents. Of the forty-eight Tanith Lee novels I read in 2016, no less than forty-four had dead or missing mothers, and thirty-seven had dead or missing fathers.1 Parents who figure in Lee’s oeuvre would have been very poor insurance risks. But the orphans might have been the lucky ones, because Lee’s fictional parents could be downright monstrous.
In The Silver Metal Lover, for example Demeta wants a daughter who is timid, compliant, and (most important) less attractive than Demeta herself. To that end, Demeta does her best to turn her daughter Jane into a fashion accessory. Jane is forced into unflattering fashion and health choices, so that she can function as an ugly foil to lovely mom. It is no surprise when Jane eventually flees in the company of an attractive lover. It’s somewhat more surprising that Jane’s perfect man is an android. It’s downright tragic that the company that constructed him wants him back.
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Flying in Place (1992) by Susan Palwick
Twelve-year-old Emma appears to be a normal girl from an unremarkable home. In reality, she is being sexually abused by her father. Her mother is unable to protect her and the authorities would never take the word of a young girl over that of a reputable surgeon. Escape appears impossible. There is just one person in all the world to whom Emma can turn: her older sister Ginny.
Ginny can offer Emma companionship and support, not to mention hope that Emma will eventually escape to a world beyond the house in which she’s trapped. What Ginny cannot do is intercede with the authorities, because Ginny died before Emma was born. If the cops won’t listen to an abused girl, they’ll certainly won’t pay attention to a ghost.
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Roses and Rot (2016) by Kat Howard
The Fair Folk who founded the elite Melete artists’ colony are merciless predators. The potential cost of study at Melete: indentured servitude to the Fair Folk, if selected. By human standards, the Fairies are monsters. They are not the worst monsters in the novel, however. That honour falls to the parents of the young people who attend Melete, parents so dreadful that risking slavery to eldritch beings seems an attractive opportunity.
Imogen and Marin’s mother, for example, has no use for daughters who are confident or mutually supportive. She has done her best to crush Imogen and Marin’s confidence and to convince each girl that their sibling is their worst enemy. It’s a wasted effort because in the end, Marin is still willing to risk everything to save her sister from eternal servitude.
***
Dreadnought (2017) by April Daniels
Fifteen-year-old Danny, the latest bearer of the Dreadnaught powers, has been gifted with abilities ranging from combat skills to nigh invulnerability. She can be killed—she acquired her powers when the previous Dreadnaught died—but killing her won’t be easy.
But skin that can shrug off artillery rounds affords no protection against emotional abuse. Before Danny was Dreadnaught, she was a closeted teen hiding her transgender identity. When Danny became Dreadnaught, she morphed into the female body she had always known to be her true self. Her transphobic rage-monster father in no way supports this change. What Danny wants is immaterial. Her father wants a son. (There is a sequel, 2017’s Sovereign, in which Danny’s parents are even worse.)
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Kakuriyo: Bed & Breakfast for Spirits (a manga published from 2015 onward) by Midori Yuma
Aoi Tsubaki didn’t have to endure abusive parents, as she was abandoned when she was very young. Her grandfather rescued her. He was a doting parental figure who could see supernatural beings, a gift that she shares. So far so good.
When the old man dies, Aoi discovers that her guardian was a compulsive gambler who has promised Aoi as security for his gaming debt. That’s bad enough; it’s worse that he ran up debts with an ayakashi, a supernatural being from a Hidden Realm. Poor Aoi is taken to the Realm and told she must marry the ogre who holds the debt!
Aoi is as ingenious as her grandfather when it comes to sidestepping inconvenient payment. She convinces her ogre groom to let her work off the debt by running an inn in the Hidden Realm. The ogre agrees. Why not? It’s not as if any ayakashi would purchase food from a mere human. Surely, his human bride will fail to repay the debt and be forced to marry him…
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Not doubt you have your own not-so-fond memories of horrific parents in SFF. Feel free to mention them in the comments!
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Plus one Tanith Lee novel in which the missing guardian was an aunt and another one in which the guardian uncle was missing.
Mark Vorkosigan’s terrorist father didn’t even give him a proper name, while using abuse to try and make Mark into a weapon to destroy Barrayar.
When I read the RAH juvies, I noticed he tried various solutions to the parent problem. Moms are (Dr. Stone aside) generally irrelevant non-entities but there are a number of actively obstructive dads.
Yeah, there’s a reason I haven’t re-read those books. I can handle dystopian fiction, but I don’t like dystopian reality intruding.
Gendo Ikari from Neon Genesis Evangelion. That’s the obvious one. Though most adaptations make him even worse.
Then there’s the multitude of abusive parents and relatives in Fruits Basket. Seriously nearly every character in the Sohma family has at least one terrible parent from Kyo’s dad who sees his son as a inhuman monster and blames him for his wife’s death to Rin’s parent leaving her with horrific mental scarring from their abuse. Fruits Basket is really depressing at points.
Father from Fullmetal Alchemist. A god-wannabe who see his “children” as pawns in his grand sceme. Also Dante and Hohenheim from the first anime.
@2,
My first thought was Heinlein parents!
Mothers in Jo Walton’s novels tend to be pretty nasty. Mori’s mother in Among Others is trying to control the world; IIRC the narrator’s mother in The King’s Peace and The King’s Name poisons her “for your own good” kind of thing, and so on. Walton has mentioned that her own mother was very abusive.
One wonders about Carrie Kelley’s parents from Frank Miller’s take on Batman….
Maia’s shitty dad in The Goblin Emperor did his least loved son a big favour by not inviting him on the flight of the Doomed Voyage of Certain Death Total Party Kill but it was purely inadvertent. The emperor was trying to snub Maia, not hand the empire to him.
@8 It might not have crashed if Maia had been on it.
Mercedes Lackey is another who likes characters with terrible parents.
This year’s Lodestar finalists had a couple of good ones – the father in Catfishing on CatNet, and, hmm, the father in Riverland, the stepfather in The Cruel King…. Not a good year for fathers, really. (And parents AWOL in Deeplight.)
I’d like to nominate Shallan Davar’s parents from Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive – don’t want to spoil too much from an active series but, wow, both the mother and father were seriously problematic and caused serious long-time issues for Shallan.
Diana Wynne Jones had some horrible parents in her novels. Fire and Hemlock being a particularly good example.
@2:
It was the protagonist’s sister who poisoned her.
That being said, the sister was a mother – just not homicidal towards her own offspring.
Zero for five here. And I thought that one of the Heinlein’s was going to make it in, such as “Have Space Suit, Will Travel”. Or “Starman Jones”.
In The Chronicles of St. Mary’s by Jodi Taylor, Max’s father is a horrifying predatory pedophile, and her mother enables him.
I’d put Kiryūin Ragyō from the Kill la Kill anime as one of the worst mothers ever. She had children so she could use them to further the Primordial Life Fiber’s goals and conquer the world. She went so far to create an entirely artificial daughter from Life Fibers. Let’s say she’s not a very nice person.
Of course, the show inverts this with Mankanshoku Sukuyo, a very motherly figure and matriarch of the Mankanshoku family. She’s literally everyone’s mother and is famous for her mystery meat croquettes.
The creatively named Father in Scott Hawkins’s The Library at Mount Char is a supernaturally bad daddy.
@@.-@ I have to agree with Fruits Basket. Not only does it have quantity of terrible parents, it also has quality and variety. If you’re searching for a terrible parent, I’m sure you can find your flavor in Fruits Basket.
The White King from the Dresden files also definitely fits the role of terrible parent. The Lightbringer series has Andross Guile, who also competes for the role of worst grandparent ever.
And how about that Jules-Pierre Mao from The Expanse? What a guy!
I have this nagging feeling about Kakuriyo, that I’ve seen a Ghibli or Ghibli-adjacent anime film with something close to that. (No, not Spirited Away.) Does this ring any bells with anyone? Not Okko’s Inn, which is far sweeter. Or am just I cross-connecting with James’s previous longer review at https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/bon-appetit?
I just want to say that Flying in Place is just a wonderful, wonderful novel, and that Palwick is undeservedly ignored. Thank you for including her in the top post. Also, go read her stuff. It’s always strange and humane and powerful.
@21 Second that.
DWJ had some horrible parents in her *life*. If you ever read her autobiography you’ll see that much of Time of the Ghost is lifted from her own childhood, and I’ve long since suspected that a lot of Fire and Hemlock is – maybe not the specific incidents, but the general behavior of the parents must be true to her life.
Except that in those books the kids get rescued by kindly grandparents, and in her real life that never happened. I’m honestly amazed she and her sisters all made it to adulthood.
@14: Just the two Heinlein parents I was thinking of.
Menolly’s parents in Anne McCaffrey’s Harper Hall Trilogy are realistically drawn, and also horrible. Their actions range from crazy-making (her mother forcing people to go around at night covering up lighting fixtures that aren’t disturbing anybody and don’t actually have an “off” mode, on the grounds that the light would be “wasted” otherwise) to just plain evil (Problem: Daughter is playing music, which is not on our checklist for her life and also What Would People Say; solution: refuse medical care for an injury to her hand). They aren’t dramatic about it; they are at about the same bland yet authoritative level as lots of real-life horrible parents. That’s what makes them so memorable.
Of course, there’s the added punch that if these particular parents decide to kick you out of your home, the possibility that you will die horribly is high. And they’re the bosses of the entire community, so they can kick anybody out of their home. So Menolly can’t count on anybody for help.
GoT’s Tywin Lannister wouldn’t win father of the year. Nor would Stanis Baratheon (Nor Stanis’s mytholgical prototype, Agamemnon.)
Gotta give you an unusual example from Gerry Anderson’s “Supermarionation” productions – Joe 90 is a 1968-1969 British Series created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson.
It follows the exploits of nine-year-old schoolboy Joe McClaine, who becomes a spy after his adoptive father invents a device capable of recording expert knowledge and experience and tranfering it to another human brain. Armed with the skills of the world’s top academic and military minds, Joe is recruited by the World Intelligence Network (WIN) as its “Most Special Agent”.
This (apparently single as far as we can tell) guy adopted a ‘son’ to be a science experiment and then a superspy!
Somebody call social services!
A third book in the Dreadnought/Sovereign series has been in development for a while; I do hope it is published soon.
I wonder if there were Joes 1 through 89?
The main character’s parents in Ferrett Steinmetz’s The Sol Majestic are part of a political cult which almost dooms him to severe poverty.
Denethor.
Just sayin…
I guess PKD’s “The Father Thing” doesn’t really count.
Fitz in Robin Hobb’s books is a Bad Dad. And Fitz’s various surrogate parental figures are also not great. (Patience tries, but she’s Patience, soooo).
Not a novel, but Firelord Ozai from the Avatar series is up there. When his teenaged son simply points out his current plan is kinda evil, he publicly humiliates and disfigured the boy. And then exiles him to find the mythical figure of the Avatar, who hasn’t been seen for a century.
In Andre Norton’s Ice Crown, Clio’s uncle and guardian, while not overtly abusive, regards her not so much as a relative, but as an occasionally somewhat useful piece of equipment. It says a lot that when given the choice she chooses to stay on a medieval planet with no flush toilets, rather than return to galactic civilization.
Robin McKinley’s Deerskin for sure.
His Dark Materials might count as well.
She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named had the boy raised by an aunt and uncle who tried very hard to prevent him from becoming who he needed to be. As someone pointed out, the boy’s entire first year at school should have been just people giving him hugs, to make up for 10 years of abuse.
There’s bad, and then there’s Fiorinda’s parents in Gwyneth Jones’s Bold as Love and sequels. Not to mention her aunt…
Harry Dresden’s adoptive parent tried to kill him when he was a teenager.
I can’t decide if Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb tells us of awful parents or great ones… either way sacrificing even one child to create another feels wrong (no matter the intention)
As grandfather figures go, Dumbledore is a epic fail, grooming first the Marauders and then Harry to die in his war. For the Greater Good, right?
Damaya’s parents in The Fifth Season are pretty awful, giving her away to a stranger because of her unusual powers.
In the Expanse, Amos’s mother is a call girl made pregnant so as to service perverts who want specifically to sleep with pregnant women (a rarity on Earth due to population control). His father is one of her clients who never even bothers to find out about his kid. His mother abandons him on the street as soon as he is able to feed himself.
Then there is Filip, Naomi’s son, whose terrorist and mass-murderer father (Marko) separates him from his mother, makes him a terrorist and mass murderer and blames him for an unpredictable failure of his plan. When the plan accidentally succeeds, Marko takes all the credit.
And there’s Duarte, who treats his daughter as purely a dictator in training. But at least he cares for her.
Come to think of it, practically all the Greco-Roman gods are terrible parents.
The father of the girl in IT (don’t remember the name) is a pedophile and abuser. And the town’s other adults blame her.
@35 His Dark Materials- most definitely. Both of Lyra’s parents are tools.
@34: And Toph’s parents! They pre-emptively decide that she is their poor helpless little waif daughter who must forever be managed for her own good and protected from the big bad world, because blind, and completely fail to notice her enormous earthbending talent–or even give her anything to do besides dress up and wander around in a walled garden. And then, when their tween daughter leaves home in order to help the Avatar save the world, they hire a couple of frighteners to bring her back, because apparently the only two things she can be are “our little waif” or “dangerously out of control, must be hogtied.”
Warhammer 40K’s Emperor is in a,class by himself. Fortunately. No wonder the Primarchs are a mess.
A Song of Ice and Fire has a gallery of horrific fathers. Along with Stannis and Tywin, there’s Randyll Tarly, Lord Walder Frey, Balon Greyjoy, Craster, and probably some Targaryens. That’s not even counting the fathers who ruin their childrens’ lives without meaning to. Mothers are not always great either, but most of the standout bad parents are fathers.
Chester and Serena in Down Among the Sticks and Bones are also among the worst parents I’ve read. They thought they wanted children, actually wanted perfectly controlled dolls of an idealized masculine son and feminine daughter to be their admired accessories, and did their merciless best to force these roles on their unloved twin daughters.
Gail Carriger’s books have a lot of terrible parents. Alexia’s mother is horrid, Sophronia’s mother isn’t that great, Agatha AND Preshea have awful fathers, let’s not mention Faith’s parents…there’s more, I’m just done for a moment.
@48, Book!Stannis is an emotionally distant father because he’s incapable of being anything else, yet under the seeming detachment is a fierce devotion to his only child. If he can he’s going to give her the iron throne. It’s her right as the only Baratheon heir. He couldn’t save her from the stone disease but he’ll make her a queen.
@50 And yet look at what was done with him in the TV series….
Mel @@@@@ 39: I’m surprised you have to phrase that as a question. These parents certainly qualify.
To quote the child in question: “if I made my whole life a monument to those who died … Of course I woudn’t be worth it. I’m an abomination. … I am a war crime.”
Also recall what they had wanted their child to do for penance once they discovered her transgression.
Steve @@@@@ 17: “Father” just might be the worst of all those listed here, despite the stiff competition. There’s the Bronze Bull. There are the disciplines he wanted his “children” to learn. Then there are the number of times he was prepared to retry to get the result he wanted.
P.S. to James on spelling – I haven’t read the book, but it looks like it spells the word/name “Dreadnought” whereas the descriptive paragraph has “Dreadnaught”?
Lee and Miller’s Scout’s Progress features Aelliana Caylon and a very abusive brother. Tacitly supported a manipulatively abusive mother. Who shows her child-devouring colors in the sequel, Mouse and Dragon.
@51, I know. I hated that. It’s very clear that Book!Stannis would never harm his daughter, he is doing this in part at least for her. And she’s his only heir. You don’t sacrifice your heir!
This article says the Game of Thrones Season 5 commentary says Martin says it was “always his intention” for Stannis to burn Shireen. https://www.cinemablend.com/television/Game-Thrones-One-Show-Heartbreaking-Moments-Should-Books-124437.html The circumstances will be different from those in the show, but the ASOIAF analysts I follow take it as a given that it will eventually happen in the books.
Book-Stannis doesn’t currently make my list of Worst Fathers in Westeros.
In Diana Wynne Jones’ Dogsbody, mother Duffy forces poor-relation Kathleen to play Cinderella. Do all the housework; accept all the blame.
The exiled Dog Star tries to play Fairy Godmother.