Fannish Fathers

[lea_hazel]

So, apparently it is Father's Day or something because fannish5 is asking about fathers, good and bad. This list could basically go on forever because the pop culture I'm immersed in is obsessed with the father-son relationship, and to a lesser extent the father-daughter relationship as encapsulated by daddy's girls. Me, I pay more attention to mother-daughter relationships, for various complex reasons. So this list could also be very short.

• Honorable mention: Game of Thrones ensemble. Even the ravens are probably shitty dads.


• Similarly Runaways was devoted to bad parents, although Chase's dad has got to take the cake. Looking back at the first story arc, it's sort of hard to believe that he agreed to the Pride's deal.

1. Keith Mars in Veronica Mars was somehow a great and an awful dad at the same time. The relationship between him and Veronica was incredibly close, she loved and admired him, and looked to him as a role model. She also lied to him a lot and they kept a lot of secrets from each other. He was always there for her in times of need, he saved her life more than once, and he taught her everything she knew about being a detective. But he had this certain level of emotional ineptness that led to him refusing to confront certain things, over and over again. Whenever Veronica and Keith were going to face off against each other I knew the episode would be particularly fraught.


2. Bill Compton in True Blood is such a shitty sire vampire-dad, his entire arc with Jessica can be rewritten as a preachy treatise on the evils of teen pregnancy. Instead of feeding the babyvamp, he obsesses over his juvenile love life, he goes gallivanting out-of-state and leaves his mom the neighbor lady Pam to babysit. At this rate I fully expect Jessica to develop some sort of vampy attachment disorder.


3. Eugene Greenhilt from Order of the Stick. Oh man. He's a shitty dad, a shitty husband and an all-around shitty human being. He was absent and neglectful, he took up a soul-binding blood oath and then stopped trying to fulfill it and just left it to his children to take care of. He got his comeuppance, though. The funny thing is, you can see some of his most obnoxious traits manifesting in Roy now and then, but Roy manages to make up for it.


4. The mysterious dad is Anthony Carver in Gunnerkrigg Court. He left his only daughter alone at a boarding school, albeit surrounded by his oldest friends, and hasn't made any contact with her for two years. The story structure promises that he had an excellent reason for this that will make perfect sense in retrospect, but I've seen promises like that not be lived up to. Right now I'm not sure how I feel about giving him the benefit of the doubt. By contrast, Anja and Don Donlan are great parents to Kat and surrogates to Annie. She needs them too, because every other adult who takes an interest in her has a weird relationship with her mother. Possibly a sexual obsession. It's true, I don't trust Eglamore, although I can't pinpoint why he makes me nervous.


5. In other mysterious dad news, Lost Girl. Bo's father is an unknown Light Fae, although I am bracing myself to be very mad at Trick, since he's the mentor figure and the chances of him turning out to be Bo's deadbeat fairy dad are about 2:1 for, in my estimation.

Strangely, Homestuck fandom has a lot of memetic stuff going around about fathers. There's almost nothing in canon though so I'm not including that. I mean, all the human guardians give extremely vague impressions to me, even though everyone else seems to have made up their minds about them.


Why am I writing this instead of studying?