Loser Son of Loser Dad

So someone's got it in for your parents. Maybe it's just a certain clique, or maybe it's the entire town. Maybe your parents committed some crime. Maybe they broke a promise or taboo. Maybe they came from another town or country and upset the status quo with their strange foreign ways. Maybe they made a close and personal enemy out of someone in a position of power. Or maybe a bunch of rumors simply got out of hand. Whatever the case, everyone you're likely to meet sees your parents as persona non grata at best and Public Enemy #1 at worst...and as far as they're concerned, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. If at all.

To say people expect the worst of you is an understatement. Someone started a fight? It had to be you; everyone knows your dad had anger issues. Someone stole the proceeds from the charity bake sale? Of course it was you; you're the son of a kleptomaniac. You say the school football team gang-raped you? Well, it had to be your fault; your mother was screwing with everyone in town back in the day. All the adults around you will be nothing short of merciless, and the Generation Gap is no excuse for the kids not to get in on the fun, either: expect to be taunted and tormented by your peers at any age.

If you're lucky, you'll merely wind up an outcast, a loner on the fringe of society. The Only Sane Man might become your friend and ally, even in the face of public opinion, but don't expect support from anyone else: after all, how can a pariah like you be anything but a villain? If you're not so lucky, the years of constant abuse will leave you angry and resentful, a prime candidate for becoming the very villain everyone accuses you of. Not that anyone will mind, of course: some people would rather be right than happy, and if you prove them right by Jumping Off the Slippery Slope, they'll simply applaud themselves while they go and grab the Torches and Pitchforks.

What can you do about it, then? Escape is always an option: run away or find an excuse to leave the town and seek your destiny elsewhere. The only thing the town will miss is their convenient scapegoat. You could also try to change the peoples' minds about you, a quest more likely to end in tears and tragedy than anything: any good deeds you do will likely be dismissed out of hand or turned upside-down. The more proactively vicious will likely go out of their way to see you prove yourself a villain rather than a hero. Try to help an old lady across the street? They'll run the old lady down in cold blood, and you'll be blamed for it. Give blood? Patients with your blood type will start showing STD symptoms. Help out at the local soup kitchen? An inexplicable rash of food poisoning will ensue, and it'll all be traced back to you. (The perpetrators responsible will, of course, never realize that they're the very kind of monster they're hell bent on proving you to be.)

And what about your parents, the cause of the bad blood that's turned your life into a living hell? If you're lucky, they're still alive and all the charges against them just the product of a big misunderstanding. (Not so lucky if their idea of defending you is beating the crap out of anyone who so much as looks at you funny.) Optimistically, Evil Parents Want Good Kids, and they'll help out however they can. ... Or they may be disappointed you aren't living down to your potential.

Compare Sins of Our Fathers and Revenge by Proxy. Contrast Turn Out Like His Father. Subtrope of All of the Other Reindeer and Malicious Slander.

Examples of Loser Son of Loser Dad include:

Anime and Manga

• Satoshi and Satoko in Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, because their parents supported the construction of the dam, which the whole town opposed.
• Wim in Monster - his father is a deadbeat alcoholic, so all the neighborhood kids beat up on him for being "trash."
  • Also Fritz "Son Of A Spy" Verdeman.
• Hayate the Combat Butler is a heroic inversion of this plot. Ayasaki-Dad is always stealing money(he even cops to it), run con businesses and has been stated to have two large debts, one to the 'very nice men' and one to Wataru's video store. But Hayate is the hero of the manga, and his brother is stated to be a hero, even going to rescue Athena from the devil.

Comic Books

• Marvel Comics Runaways suffered many times because of the fact that their parents were all criminals.
• The Astro City "Confession" story arc centers around Brian, a small-town boy who wants to become a superhero to avoid this trope.
  • It being painful to the reader because it's obvious that Brian's dad was never a loser, but a self-sacrificing noble doctor. It's just his patients were ungrateful jerks.

Film

• In Back to The Future Strickland was ready to denounce all McFlys. "No McFly has ever amounted to anything in the history of Hill Valley!"
  • Marty seems to be the only one in his entire family line to break the trend (without help). His son, his dad and his great great great grandad are all meek and nonconfrontational. Marty has the opposite problem.
    • His great great great grandad wasn't meek, he just didn't believe in solving his problems with violence or letting his temper control him. He's played by Michael J Fox after all, so he's more like an older, more mature version of Marty himself (one who understand the responsibility of looking after his family and not getting himself killed by some bandit over being called "chicken"). He warns Marty that he had a brother a lot like him, and his impulsive need to prove himself to anyone who challenged him got him killed.
    • Also, Strickland was kind of a prick and didn't seem to think much of anyone.

Literature

• Andrew Tabor of the Apple Valley books is assumed to be a drunken bum because his father is, and has to leave town forever in order to get rid of that reputation.
• Aedelas Blackmoore of the Warcraft novel Warcraft: Lord of the Clans is the son of a traitor to the Alliance, and the stigma he endured as a result may have contributed to his drinking problem and his resulting plan to train Thrall as a puppet ruler of the Orc clans to turn them against the Alliance and gain control of it for himself.
• Tawnypaw of Warrior Cats is told by an elder that she will become just like her father, the Big Bad of the series, because she did an apprentice task wrongly. This results in her defection to her father's clan.
  • This is made worse when it is revealed in a later book (Bluestar's Prophocy) that the elder, Smallear, is her own grandfather.
  • Firestar subverts this by treating Bramblepaw and Tawnypaw like other apprentices, not discriminating against them at all. However, he is accused of discriminating against the two by their mother, because he couldn't manage to track down Tawnypaw after she ran away.
• In the Dragonriders of Pern series this is yet another source of angst for Jaxom. He's a decent enough guy, but the other Lord Holders are wary of him turning out like his father Fax. Fortunately Jaxom was raised to be a good person by his Warder Lytol.
• This is the reason that Severus Snape hates Harry Potter: when they were students at Hogwarts, James Potter constantly bullied Snape and made his life miserable. James also married Lily, who Snape had loved since childhood. Others continually try to point out to Snape that in personality that Harry is most like Lily, not James, but he refuses to see it, making it something of a subversion.

Live Action TV

• Bud and Kelly Bundy in Married... with Children, although it's completely Justified when you see how they actually behave.
• On Merlin, Morgana seems to attribute this trope to her half-brother Arthur, believing that he's just as bad as his father King Uther, despite all evidence to the contrary.
• Klingon society works under this principle. When a warrior is disgraced somehow, his dishonor hurts his entire family and his sons are also dishonored for seven generations. The dishonored are outcasts in the Empire and are forced to live with the shame of their forefather's actions. Worf in particular had a problem with this, since his father was framed for treason with the Romulans, which led to Worf being cast out from the Empire until he'd cleared his name.
  • In particular, Worf only discovered the existence of his own son after accepting discommendation and dishonor. It weighs heavily on him that even acknowledging Alexander as his son would make it next to impossible for the boy to find any place in Klingon society until Worf could expose the real traitor.

Video Games

• Part of Yukari's Backstory in Persona 3: their father was blamed for a tragic incident several years ago, and they allude to others treating them horribly. This got so bad that their mother finally decided to move away and start over in another town; tragically, they misinterpreted this attempt at protecting them as "turning her back on my father", leading to a long-standing grudge against her.
• Isair and Madae from Icewind Dale 2 got this treatment because their father was the devil Belhifet who tried to open a portal to the Nine Hells and nearly destroyed the Ten-Towns. As cambions—elf-demon half-breeds—they are literally half evil, and Iselore warned their foster mother against raising them because of this. Their foster mother was the only one who ever believed they could grow up to be good people.

Web Comics

• In Shadowgirls Becka suffers because her mom Really Gets Around, and is hated by Misty's mother, one of the sickest examples of the Alpha Bitch in the history of webcomics. In one of the worst examples, Misty made a scheme that almost ended with Becka being raped, and said:

Misty: Serves the little slut right if she gets knocked up... like her mother.

• In Endstone, Cole hears murmurs that she's evil like her father.

Western Animation

• Chester and his dad from The Fairly OddParents, who both suck at baseball. Even though Chester's dad was somehow qualified to be on a professional baseball team in the first place.
  • He must have been a very good baseball player BEFORE he started sucking.
• Referenced in A Bugs Life: Flik moans that if he fails "my children's children will walk down the street and people will say, 'Look, there goes the spawn of Flik the Loser!'"
• A good portion of the In-Universe hate directed at Prince Zuko in Avatar: The Last Airbender is this. After a century of war caused by his father, grandfather and great-grandfather, you can see their point, and to an out-sider's eye Zuko seems to be following in their footsteps. Until he finally gets over his "Well Done, Son" Guy attitude and calls the old man out.

Real Life

• So many to even bother trying make a list.
• We can all name traditional societies where your family reputation is everything, and you can be respected or hated purely because of what a great-uncle did.
  • Doesn't necessarily have to be a traditional society; In some families where the parent(s) were well known drug users/sellers, prostitutes, thieves, or what have you, the kids take all the flack because, of course, they must be following in their parents footsteps. This is regardless of whether or not the children even knew what the parents were involved in. Sad thing is, this social attitude can actually lead to said children becoming antisocial and criminal when they otherwise might not have: said bad parents might be trying to send their children down the legit path, however once the child becomes old enough to make judgments on their own, they might just eschew it altogether, as all of these legit, logical, just people treated them like shit when their only crime was having bad parents, so why bother even trying to fit into their society?