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Answerman - Why Are All The Parents Dead?


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Top Gun



Joined: 28 Sep 2007
Posts: 4566
PostPosted: Fri Jul 03, 2015 9:09 pm Reply with quote
Polycell wrote:
You're clearly forgetting the possibility that her father's always around, regularly on camera and constantly coming up with crazy excuses for Kagome's absences.

That's true, but I think everyone always said it was her grandfather constantly calling her in sick. You'd think at the very least that the guy would have bothered to show up for the birth of his first kid. Razz
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Paulo27



Joined: 22 Jan 2015
Posts: 400
PostPosted: Fri Jul 03, 2015 9:46 pm Reply with quote
Gotta love when an anime starts with the MC's parents leaving them without telling them beforehand to go on a business trip or vacation by themselves.
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WingKing



Joined: 27 Apr 2015
Posts: 617
PostPosted: Fri Jul 03, 2015 11:35 pm Reply with quote
Zalis116 wrote:
Paiprince wrote:
Usagi Drop and Aishiteruze Baby both beg to differ (for the former, let's stick with the anime shall we? Razz )

John Thacker wrote:

In general it's easier without good parenting (another option is the total buffoon parent), but there are some shows with pretty good parenting that are also interesting, like Hime-chan's Ribbon. The exception that proves the rule, since the problems, even with magic, are for the most part fairly mundane and not the crazy action of other shows.
Intact parents definitely seem more common in Magical Girl and other shows aimed at a young female audience, such as the Precure and Pretty Rhythm franchises. And even with some shows from the genre aimed at otaku, like Madoka and Nanoha. But as others have pointed out, missing parents are far from an anime-only feature; take the Western animated show Gravity Falls, where the protagonist twins are effectively orphans able to have all kinds of adventures under the unwatchful eyes of their cantankerous con-artist great uncle.


Nanoha's actually a great illustration of just why parents are so often dead or absent. The biggest problem by far that I have with the first series is Nanoha telling her mother around episode 8 that she needs to take a leave of absence from school for a while, leave home, and go off who knows where to hunt jewel seeds with this nice lady she just met, and Mom's just like, "Of course, dear, whatever you need to do!" Like, seriously? What kind of mother in her right mind would just cheerfully let her third grade daughter leave home and school for who knows how long to go stay with a complete stranger because of a story like that? It may be a show full of magic and sci-fi stuff, but that's always been the hardest thing for me to suspend my disbelief over. No parents makes the storytelling easier because you don't have to deal with that issue and any awkward/unbelievable scenes of that kind (and when they retold the story in the first Nanoha movie, they smartly skipped that part completely).
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Lili-Hime



Joined: 05 Jun 2014
Posts: 569
PostPosted: Sat Jul 04, 2015 12:23 am Reply with quote
There's also not a whole lot of siblings in anime... maybe because they have fewer kids in Japan??? It's kind of a missed opportunity not to include the protaganist's family. Some of the funniest parts in Urusei Yatsura was Ataru's poor parents. On the drama side, I enjoyed in Kare Kano how Miyazawa had a big, crazy family and how it contrasted with Arima's colder more formal situation.

As for Sailor Moon, Mamoru's parents were both dead too, and they never mentioned Haruka or Michiru's parents... Then ofc there was Hotaru's family... lol. So there were still a ton of dead parents there.
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fuuma_monou



Joined: 26 Dec 2005
Posts: 1816
Location: Quezon City, Philippines
PostPosted: Sat Jul 04, 2015 1:09 am Reply with quote
Shiroi Hane wrote:
Didn't ADV once distribute something unlikely like Farscape?


I remember they used to distribute Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda.
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Joe Carpenter



Joined: 29 Oct 2011
Posts: 503
PostPosted: Sat Jul 04, 2015 1:21 am Reply with quote
Darkness! No parents!
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Tenchi



Joined: 03 Jan 2002
Posts: 4463
Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer.
PostPosted: Sat Jul 04, 2015 1:26 am Reply with quote
One of the more blatant examples of dead and/or missing parents is seen in Minami-ke: not one but two families named "Minami" composed of presumed orphan siblings. I say "presumed" because they barely even broach the subject of parents having ever existed, let alone what happened to them. Haruka mentions that Kana's classmate Fujioka reminds her of their father and that's the most I can remember off the top of my head.

The mysteriously absent parents extend to most of their classmates. I think Makoto is one of the only supporting characters who even mentions his father occasionally (he's a real manly man, apparently, just to contrast his son being able to effortlessly masquerade as a girl).

Minami-ke is kind of like what Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Nobody Knows would have been like had it been a feel-good movie where parentless families aren't dysfunctional wrecks.

I rather like imagining that the final chapter of Minami-ke has the Minami parents reunited with their daughters after being rescued from a desert island where they raised three more sisters for Haruka, Kana, and Chiaki.
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Hameyadea



Joined: 23 Jun 2014
Posts: 3679
PostPosted: Sat Jul 04, 2015 12:42 pm Reply with quote
There is also a third option beyond "present & nagging" and "dead/missing/overseas" - there are also the laid-back parents, where they know that their kid is partaking in dangerous activities and they'll say "so, you'll be back for dinner, right hon?" Shirahama Ken'ichi's parents from Shijō Saikyō no Deshi Kenichi are a good example of this behaviour.

Last edited by Hameyadea on Sat Jul 04, 2015 3:41 pm; edited 1 time in total
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EricJ2



Joined: 01 Feb 2014
Posts: 4016
PostPosted: Sat Jul 04, 2015 12:46 pm Reply with quote
fuuma_monou wrote:
Shiroi Hane wrote:
Didn't ADV once distribute something unlikely like Farscape?


I remember they used to distribute Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda.


There were two halves of ADV (not counting Kidz), one that distributed anime, and one that briefly tried branching out into cult-TV.
The anime one released the subbed Sailor Moon/R, while the cult-TV one released the DiC dub.
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SejinPK



Joined: 22 Dec 2013
Posts: 129
PostPosted: Sat Jul 04, 2015 2:51 pm Reply with quote
Top Gun wrote:
Polycell wrote:
You're clearly forgetting the possibility that her father's always around, regularly on camera and constantly coming up with crazy excuses for Kagome's absences.

That's true, but I think everyone always said it was her grandfather constantly calling her in sick. You'd think at the very least that the guy would have bothered to show up for the birth of his first kid. Razz


I could be wrong, but I think Polycell was implying that Kagome's grandpa is her dad, which...just no. It also makes no sense in canon because there's no way a show like Inuyasha would have something like that, implied or otherwise.
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Touma



Joined: 29 Aug 2007
Posts: 2651
Location: Colorado, USA
PostPosted: Sat Jul 04, 2015 3:30 pm Reply with quote
SejinPK wrote:
I could be wrong, but I think Polycell was implying that Kagome's grandpa is her dad, which...just no. It also makes no sense in canon because there's no way a show like Inuyasha would have something like that, implied or otherwise.

I agree with you, about what is being implied and that it would not fit the show.
But that still leaves the question of why Kagome does not have a father. It is not just to get him out of the way because the grandfather does the things that a father would do, so it does not really make any difference that the father is missing.

I wonder if maybe Ms. Takahashi originally had a plot line that involved the reason for the father being missing but she changed her mind about using it for some reason.

The father is also mysteriously missing from the Hinata family in Sgt. Frog.
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ninjamitsuki



Joined: 15 Sep 2007
Posts: 589
Location: Anywhere (Thanks, technology)
PostPosted: Sat Jul 04, 2015 3:48 pm Reply with quote
Lol, I sent in the first question. Didn't expect to get a thorough answer. [url]This was the Tumblr post in question[/url]. More an image spam than a "discussion".

I was curious about what other non-Japanese properties ADV dealt in.


Now that I think about it, I just remembered that Lady Death movie they made themselves, too. It was on Anime Network for some reason.


Last edited by ninjamitsuki on Sat Jul 04, 2015 8:53 pm; edited 1 time in total
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DmonHiro





PostPosted: Sat Jul 04, 2015 5:31 pm Reply with quote
WingKing wrote:
Nanoha's actually a great illustration of just why parents are so often dead or absent. The biggest problem by far that I have with the first series is Nanoha telling her mother around episode 8 that she needs to take a leave of absence from school for a while, leave home, and go off who knows where to hunt jewel seeds with this nice lady she just met, and Mom's just like, "Of course, dear, whatever you need to do!


That is not even close to what happened. Did you even pay attention? They dedicated a half of an episode to that. Nobody went "Sure, do whatever". Way to either not pay attention, or just make stuff up. First off, Nanoha's family has the same background they had in the original Triangle Heart: they are a family of martial artists/mercenaries. Nanoha has trained in their dojo, even though she doesn't know about said background. What her parents said after half an episode of talking about it was that they trusted her enough to let her go, like most likely THEY did when they were younger. It was a matter of absolute trust, even though they did worry. Seriously, it couldn't have been more clear.
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Mr. Oshawott



Joined: 12 Mar 2012
Posts: 6773
PostPosted: Sat Jul 04, 2015 7:10 pm Reply with quote
If there's one thing about the initial season of MGL Nanoha that I think makes it special from most other shows concerning parental presence, it's its huge potential of being able to relate to certain people somehow...

...like how Mr. Takamachi was so severely injured as a bodyguard, he had to live in the hospital for months while Mrs. Takamachi was forced to work longer hours at the Midori-ya Café, leaving Nanoha to look after herself all the while. There are people out there that were unfortunate to find themselves living at home with one of the parents being forced to be at work longer because the other was disabled due to a severe injury at work.

Hayate Yagami's case is more extreme, in which she was somehow left as a wheelchair-bound orphan...perhaps her parents died of a mysterious death?
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LiteKnite



Joined: 04 Jul 2015
Posts: 25
PostPosted: Sat Jul 04, 2015 7:22 pm Reply with quote
Not ALL the parents. Though the ones that are alive teach their children through tough love, and/or just neglect their parental responsibilities.
Here's to Goku, One Piece's Dragon, and HxH's Gin.
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