Family Relationship Switcheroo

"Boy, things have really changed since my day. Back then, if a girl got in trouble, her family would send her away to relatives in another state, and if anybody asked, just lied and said she went to Europe. Then when she came back, they'd raise the baby as a little sister. Not like today -- we had morals and values back then."

—Martin, Frasier

Many secrets are kept both in Real Life and fictionland. One very popular trope is orphans, especially ones which turn out not to be orphans; the most famous example of this is the Luke, I Am Your Father situation wherein a thought-to-be unrelated character (often a villain, usually the Big Bad or The Dragon) turns out to be The Hero's parent. But sometimes these parents are hidden closer to home, sometimes, for some reason or other they pose as a different relative—aunt, uncle, etc. and play a part in bringing up the child.

An "older sister" who is actually a mother may do so when her parents are alive and let her kid believe that they are their parents too, rather than their grandparents. This was something that was not too uncommon at one time, before premarital sex was as accepted as it is today. In fiction set in the past this may still be the reason, modern settings sometimes may have this occur if the mother was really young, raped or both. It should be pointed out that sometimes the focus of the story is the "older sister" and not the child, or the focus is on both equally.

What effect this has on the child varies from story to story, and how The Reveal happens.

See also: Luke, I Am Your Father, Luke, You Are My Father, and Stigmatic Pregnancy Euphemism. Compare Cain and Abel and Seth.

Examples of Family Relationship Switcheroo include:

Anime

• In Air Gear Akito is Kaito's son, not his brother.

Comic Books

• In Wildstorm comics' Wild CATS it was recently revealed that Zealot, who has looked out for her 'little sister' Savant since she was born, is actually Savant's mother. (And that Majestic was her father). However the Reset Button was pushed on the entire title the issue after this was revealed, so God only knows if it's still in-continuity.
• Subverted in Transmetropolitan. Not only is the child entirely unwanted when it shows up - it also has no head, which fails to surprise anyone who knows the alleged father. And then it turns out to be a walking humanoid bomb.
• Kelly O'Hare, title character of the 1983 (or so) comic Cutey Bunny has a dependent, Taffy, who both have enough youthful appearance to have characters remark: 'sister, huh...?'

Film

• Chinatown, though here they were both sisters and mother and daughter; the father, Noah Cross had raped his daughter, and she gave birth to a girl.
• Shara: A teenage girl's mother tells her she's actually her aunt.
• In Cookie's Fortune, Emma (Liv Tyler) finds out her mother is not Cora (Julianne Moore), but her "aunt" Camille (Glenn Close).
• In Tromeo and Juliet, the title characters find out they are, in fact, brother and sister. They decide to continue their romantic relationship anyway. It is a Troma movie, after all.
• In Digging to China, the protagonist learns that her sister is really her mother after her grandmother (who she thought was her mother) dies.
• In the book and film versions of Devil In A Blue Dress, White Daphne and Black Frank are assumed to be lovers when they are spotted meeting in secret. In reality they are half-siblings, sharing the same mother but with different fathers.
• In Jumping the Broom, Sabrina, the protagonist, learns that her Aunt Geneva is actually her mother, having become pregnant as a teen and abandoned by a man who turned out to be married. Sabrina was adopted by Geneva's older sister Claudine and her husband.

Literature

• The Codex Alera has Tavi's "aunt", Isana, who hides their real relationship from everyone (including her son). She had a damn good reason to do so, though, given that the boy's father is the presently deceased heir to the realm, meaning that he's now the sole legitimate heir to the throne. Since Septimus was assassinated, she felt that the only way to protect Octavian was via obscurity; as part of this she suppressed his growth to make it appear that he was born too late to be Septimus' offspring. Unfortunately, this accidentally suppressed his Person of Mass Destruction-level Elemental Powers as well, leaving him as the only person in the country with absolutely no powers.
• In His Dark Materials Lyra's "Uncle" Lord Asriel was actually Lyra's father, her mother was Mrs. Coulter, making Lyra have a case of both this trope and Luke, I Am Your Father. This masquerade was to cover up an affair.
• The Alex Delaware novel Blood Test by Jonathan Kellerman.
• A slightly confusing example occurs in the novel A Yellow Raft In Blue Water: Christine is really the daughter of Ida's father and her aunt Clara on her mother's side, making her technically Ida's three-quarter sister (or something like that) but Christine was raised to believe she was Ida's in order to cover up the affair that created her. This is made even weirder by Ida's insistence that Christine call her "Aunt Ida." In the end only Ida and the reader knows this.
• On a similar line, in 'Travels with my Aunt', the aunt turned out to the mother, while his 'mother' really was his aunt taking responsibility for her sister's mistake.
• In A Suitable Boy Saeeda Bai was raped at a young age by the Nawab Sahib of Baitar, resulting in a daughter, Tasneem. To protect the Nawab Sahib's reputation, they pretend Tasneem is Saeeda's sister. This comes back to haunt the Nawab Sahib when his son falls in love with Tasneem.
• Probably inverted in A Song of Ice and Fire: everyone thinks that Eddard Stark is Jon Snow's father whereas there is a lot of evidence that he is in fact his uncle. The Reveal remains to be seen, though.
• This is one of the main plot points in Catherine Forde's Fat Boy Swim Jim Kelly's Aunt Pol is his mother, and "Mum" is his grandmother.
• A very traditional example: in the first book of the Stravaganza series, Arianna discovers that her "parents" are actually her aunt and uncle, and her mother is really the Duchessa of Belezza.
• In the Maeve Binchy book Evening Class, a character is stunned to realize that her older sister is actually her mother. Ironically, she is told this by someone who was completely unaware of the secret—she merely saw the two together and assumed. When the girl confronts her "sister" and asks her point blank if she's her mother, the woman's silence is of course, her answer. Between the Irish/Catholic setting of Binchy's books and the time period the book is set during, this trope is unsurprising.
• In Torey L. Hayden's Beautiful Child, it is revealed that one of a poor mother's large brood is actually the product of her boyfriend and her mentally retarded teen daughter. The child herself is unaware of this. This is a true story.
• When visiting her "older sister" who is comatose in hospital, Kit, the main character of Maureen McCarthy's When You Wake and Find Me Gone, receives a letter written by her "sister" which reveals that she is really Kit's mother and that her father is somewhere in Ireland.
• Inverted in To Hear a Nightingale by Charlotte Bingham. Cassie grows up being abused by her grandmother and told what a slut her mother was. When her grandmother dies she finds out that her "grandmother" was really her mother. The woman had had an affair when in her 40s and hadn't ever accepted having a child. This nearly destroys Cassie.
• Maximum Ride: Jeb Batchelder is Max's biological father as well as her guardian, and Dr. Martinez is her biological mother.
• In Shanghai Girls, which takes place in the 1920's, May's daughter is raised by her sister Pearl as her child, since even though May was married, she had never had sex with her husband.
• Inverted in the Wildflowers series by V. C. Andrews. Cat is raised as her sister Geraldine's daughter. She is initially led to believe that she is Geraldine's biological daughter, then her adoptive daughter. It turns out neither is true - Geraldine's mother gave birth to Cat, and they are half-sisters.
• Chris Crutcher did this in two of his stories. In Deadline, Dallas is really the mother of her younger brother; this is kept a secret because he was the result of being raped by her uncle at a young age. In Ironman, Stacy Ryder's younger brother is really her and Preston's son.
• Jayfeather, Lionblaze, and Hollyleaf of the Warrior Cats series are raised as Squirrelfight's and Brambleclaw's kits. However, Leafpool, the sister of Squirrelflight and Jayfeather's mentor is their real mother. When this is revealed to the three, Hollyleaf doesn't take it well.
• In Great Expectations, Molly and Abel Magwitch are revealed to be the parents of Estella.
• In Sabatini's Scaramouche, Mme. la Comtesse de Plougastel to Andre-Louis.
• In Ishq And Mushq, Sarna's illegitimate daughter, Nina, was raised by Sarna's mother as her own daughter.

Live-Action TV

• The Doctor Who two-parter "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" is the former Trope Namer. It involved a young woman who was haunted by a little boy zombified-by-nanotech, who turned out to be her son. He was only healed of his zombification after Nancy admitted to him that she was his mother, and the nanogenes recognized the literal 'mother genes' and heal him and everyone else based on their new knowledge. Prior to this he'd been walking around spreading The Virus and calling out "Are You My Mummy?" (and being pretty damned creepy while doing so), hence the (former) trope name.
  • Bear in mind, this "zombie" had a soulless gas-mask-face, as did every single person who was contaminated. It literally sprouted from their face, leaving them as hypnotized drones who wandered around repeating the former trope title.
• Desperate Housewives : Bree hides the pregnancy of her teenage girl and pretends to be the mother of her grandson.
• Eastenders has the following famous interchange between the Slater "sisters" (though The Reveal for the audience had happened a few months before, this was when Zoe found out). This was due to rape, Kat had been raped by her uncle at 13.

Zoe Slater: You can't tell me what to do, you ain't my muvver!
Kat Slater: (Zoe's "sister") Yes I am!

• Similarly on Playing The Field, a BBC TV drama series about a women's football team. Because there's only so long you can get women to watch a series about football, it fairly quickly wound up as a series about sex, relationships, and Aren't Men Awful, and this trope naturally turned up in due course: two of the team members were actually mother and daughter and not sisters as the younger one thought. (The mother wasn't raped, except in the statutory sense; she had an under-age but fully consensual affair with a much older man, and refused to identify him when she fell pregnant. Naturally, he's about the place in the series too.)
• Happened in an episode of Millennium.
• The Janitor in Scrubs claims to have made several traumatic discoveries along these lines. He's a compulsive liar, though.
• Occurred in the CSI episode "Blood Drops," although the child in question is not privy to The Reveal.
• At the end of the first season finale of Pushing Daisies, Chuck's aunt Lily claims to be Chuck's mother. Chuck herself becomes aware of this early in season 2.
• In the final season of The Sopranos, it is revealed that Paulie Walnuts has been raised by his aunt his entire life, because his mother was a nun who broke her vow of chastity with an American soldier.
• Subverted in Rome. When Niobe's husband comes back after years of absence to see her holding a baby she has some explaining to do. She claims it's the son of their 13 year old daughter. Given how well the secret was kept it seems they must have kept the neighbours in the dark too and planned the substitution from the start, or invoked this trope.
• An episode of Numb3rs revolving around a polygamist cult featured a pair of women who were sisters and mother and daughter (unknown to the daughter until some way into the episode).
• The 1990 TV miniseries version of Phantom of the Opera, with Charles Dance. In it, it is revealed that the operahouse's old manager is Erik's father, but he has pretended to be a more distant relative, 'out of cowardice'. Towards the end, he reveals the truth to Erik, who in a slight subversion says he'd known it, and wondered when he would tell the truth. The same thing happens in the Yeston-Kopit musical version, which had the same writer.
• Oddly enough, Played for Laughs - sort of - in Thirty Rock's Valentine's Day episode, as the capstone to the worst first date ever.
• On Veronica Mars, Jackie's 'younger brother' is revealed to be her son—a fact he is not aware of, as he calls his grandmother 'mom'.
• In the Australian soap Home and Away, Charlie is revealed to be Ruby's mother, born after Charlie was raped. Charlie's parents raised the baby as their daughter. When Ruby finds out, she goes ape about it, before finally forgiving Charlie for the deception.
• A major arc on Moesha involves Dorian discovering that his uncle, Frank, is really his biological father, born from a relationship he had while he was separated from his first wife. His mother was thus really his aunt.
• On The Parkers (a spin-off of Moesha, above), Nikki is shocked to discover (on a family trivia Game Show, no less) that she was adopted. Her biological mother turns out to be her aunt.
• Occasionally encountered in Law and Order Special Victims Unit.
• Original Law and Order had it in the episode "Merger" in 1999, where the teenaged murder victim was the daughter of the wealthy family's older child, and not a sister
• In Neighbours, Lyn Scully discovered that her Aunt Valda was actually her mother, who had gotten pregnant with her at a young age and been forced by her family to give baby Lyn to her older, married sister.
• Godiva's: A secondary character named Chantal shows up to stay with Simone, her estranged older sister. Turns out Simone is actually her mother. (Coincidentally, Simone "deflowers" a young busboy named TJ in a much earlier episode—the same TJ that Chantal now starts dating.)
• Frasier discussed this trope when Roz got pregnant and decided to raise her kid on her own.
• On The Vampire Diaries, Elena learns that her uncle is actually her biological father; she was born when he was a teenager, and after the mother left town, he gave his daughter to his much-older brother and his supposedly infertile wife to raise as their own child.
• On One Life to Live, Destiny Evans was raised by her paternal grandparents, but believed they were her parents. She later learned that her real father was her "older brother" Greg, who accidentally killed her mother Charlene, the girlfriend of his brother Shaun, and then gave Destiny to his parents to raise.
• On General Hospital it was revealed that Claudia Zacchara was not actually Johnny Zacchara's sister but his mother, making Anthony Zacchara his grandfather (his real father was Gino).

Theatre

• A variant in Top Girls by Caryl Churchill: Angie is really Marlene's daughter, but was raised as the daughter of Marlene's sister Joyce. Poignantly played upon in the last scene when Angie calls for her mother and Marlene responds "No, it's Aunt Marlene."

Webcomics

• In Drowtales, it turns out that Ariel is not really Quain'tana's daughter, but is actually Mel'arnach's, who she's been raised to think of as a sister. And just to further complicate matters, Ariel's father is Zhor, a dark elf who was transformed into a frickin' giant spider.
• Homestuck: Dave's brother is actually his ectobiological father. Jade's grandfather is actually her ectobiological father. Inverted with John: his long-dead grandmother is his ectobiological mother and his father is actually his half-brother.
  • And then after the scratch, we have the original kids swapped with their ectbiological parents. Jane Crocker is raised by Dad, who is now her grandson. Jake was adopted by his daughter, Jade. Time fucking shenagins.
• In Dragon City, Beatrix's case is a little different. She and her "older sister" Erin traveled back in time to when Beatrix's egg was laid. It was at this point that Erin lays Beatrix's egg, though she ends up getting raised by their mother of that time period (who mistook it for one of her own eggs).

Western Animation

• One episode of The Simpsons has Bart (pretending to be older) date a fourteen-year-old girl who turns out to be pregnant. After being assured he can't be the father ("Wow, you are only ten") he agrees to marry her anyway to hide the truth. When the girl's parents find out the mother announces that she's pregnant too, and the family (with sort of creepy cheerfulness) agree to pretend the mom has twins.
• The Venture Bros has the reveal that Dermott is the son of Rusty Venture and the fifteen-year-old president of his fanclub, and was raised by the mother of his biological mother.

Real Life

• Jack Nicholson's "older sister" was really his mother while the woman who was allegedly his mom was actually his grandmother. His real mother did it because she had sex with a man [both were unmarried] who ended up leaving her and she didn't want anyone to know that she was an unwed mother (both Nicholson's grandmother and mom died before he found out this family secret). In a height of coincidence, he learned this just as Chinatown—in which he starred—was about to open in theaters. According to Mr Nicholson himself, "She never realized the irony of calling me a son of a bitch."
• The same was true for:
  • Eric Clapton
  • Bobby Darin
  • David Campbell. His real father was Jimmy Barnes, who would go on to become an Australian rock icon.
  • Ted Bundy though there is dispute as to when he learned this.
  • Lina Medina's first son, necessitated by her being the world's youngest mother at the age of 5. He found out at age 10.
  • Bayard Rustin.
• The Guinness Book of Records refuses to accept many well-known historical claims for "oldest mother to successfully carry a child to term" out of suspicion that they were examples of this trope.
• Jaycee Lee Dugard's two daughters,(ages 15 and 11) by her rapist and kidnapper Phillip Garrido believed their whole lives that Jaycee was their older sister and that Garrido's wife was their mother. They had to find out the horrible truth after the police finally caught and arrested Garrido.
• Upon the announcement of her candidacy for Vice-President of the United States in the 2008 elections, rumours began to circulate that Gov. Sarah Palin was actually the grandmother of her youngest son, and that his oldest sister was actually his mother. Subverted, as the rumours were soon proved completely unfounded, but it did lead to the announcement that Palin's eldest daughter was pregnant out of wedlock.