Big Screwed-Up Family/Playing With

Basic Trope: The Dysfunctional Family, Turned Up to Eleven

• Played Straight: The Tropers, a well-known Blue Blood family have all sorts of issues, including (but not limited to) incest, patricide, fratricide, alcoholism, and drug abuse.
• Exaggerated: The Tropers have a Tangled Family Tree, and are always Feuding Families with each other. A member of this family is lucky to survive past puberty.
• Justified:
  • Because of their status, there was a lot of internal power struggle within the family (it also doesn't help if there was a long history of inbreeding; inbred lines have been known to show increased aggression).
  • The Tropers are part of a Proud Warrior Race Guy that places Honor Before Reason.
  • The Tropers are members of a Deadly Decadent Court
• Inverted:
  • The Tropers are a perfectly normal family, or at worst a Quirky Household
  • The Tropers are the quintessential "perfect" family.
• Subverted: Dysfunctional Family
• Double Subverted: What at first seemed like a mere dysfunctional family or perfectly normal one is revealed to have some skeletons in the closet (literally or figuratively).
• Deconstructed: The Tropers develop serious Freudian Excuse and Mommy Issues, possibly leading to a Start of Darkness (and if they are inbred, that doesn't help any; see Justified). They will eventually kill themselves off this way.
• Reconstructed: The Tropers stop marrying within their family line, which reduces genetic problems and aggression over time. They also learn to resolve problems constructively and peacefully. The next generations are better adjusted, and their legacy lives on.
• Parodied: The Tropers celebrate the birth of a new Troper by killing a relative.
• Lampshaded: "You guys have a lot of problems..."
• Zig Zagged: Some royal/noble families are like this, others are very well-adjusted.
• Averted: The Tropers are a perfectly normal family. Sure they have problems, but nothing serious, and they really care about each other.
• Enforced:
  • Darker and Edgier
  • Also, this is the logical extreme of the Dysfunctional Family
• Invoked: Several generations worth of power struggles and marriages between close relatives.
• Defied: The Tropers resolve power issues fairly, without bloodshed. And they don't promote or condone things like incest, drug use, etc.
• Discussed: "How is that family going to survive all those issues?"
• Conversed: "The same way they always have. It's a Vicious Cycle living in a family like that."
• Played For Laughs: Dead Baby Comedy
• Played For Drama: Almost always is.

---

Back to Big Screwed-Up Family