Happy Vampire Family (TV families)

[mindstalk]

One nice thing about the anime "Karin", about a blood-making vampire: it features a complete happy family. Karin has both parents and an older brother and a younger sister and they all live together and they all love her and each other, more or less. For that matter, they all have important roles in the show.

Not that the common pattern of dead parents is unrepresented: Usui's father is missing (I forget why, maybe a runaway), Wiener's mother may be dead, and Maki's just don't show up that I can remember, but at least Karin has a full set. And no, I won't count the parents as dead simply because they're all vampires.

(Context: the observation that TV shows tend to one or both parents of a young protagonist dead or disappeared. Buffy's father was distant and eventually gone, then mom died. Roswell had a single mom and two single dads, though a couple of sets, one even seen. Dawson's Creek had a lot of breakage. Commander Sisko of DS9 was a single dad. Scrapped Princess started with dead parents. Witch Hunter Robin was an orphan. Noein had a divorced and distant dad. Card Captor Sakura's mother is dead. Tsuki-yomi had two dead mothers and a dead father. The list could go on.)

(Hikaru turned out to have a father as well as a mother but this was after three seasons and surprised us all.)

(We never meet Suzumiya Haruhi's parents. I just wondered what they could possibly be like.)

(Thinking of Sisko made me realize one practical reason for killing parents might be to cut on cast size and costs.)

Comments

[lyceum-arabica.livejournal.com]

i always thought the major reason for absent or single parents was so there was an excuse for the child to have some freedom. Otherwise, why are they leaving the house to do -anything- other than parent-supervised/sanctioned innocent activities with friends? They get away with it because the single parent is too busy to keep an eye on what's gong on, or the parents are absent entirely.

...a link back to the 'children's rights' thing, maybe.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know that's the common justification. Parents must be removed so that the children can fly free. I have a feeling anime has less call for that given what's seemed like a trend of less paranoid parenting in general. Sakura ran free to visit an old man in the neighborhood (though admittedly, it turned out her father probably had a clue there); Hikaru ran away for a couple of days to visit Go sites and didn't even get grounded; back in real life, in San Francisco I'd see tiny little Chinese girls scurrying from school to home, all by themselves. Not even in groups for herd safety. Which struck me as (a) the way it *should* be and (b) still surprising today, especially in light of my niblings being driven around everywhere.

Even your question seems telling -- how are the innocent activities sanctioned, unless someone's parent is supervising? Even in today's America teens get to go to and roam the mall, which in places with small distances or public transport (cf. Japan) could turn into teens going all sorts of places as long as they were back at home/pick-up point on time.

[lyceum-arabica.livejournal.com]

good point...
i guess the question then is how much influence there is from western culture in the anime? The missing or busy parents so you can go wandering is a fairly old theme... victorian girls tended to get to wander around when one parent was sick or there was some other family tragedy... and a lot of stories centered around orphans or families so poor that the son had to be sent out in the world. farm kids could just run off of course.
maybe anime is just in the process of catching up to the modern relaxed restrictions... still using old story-archs out of tradition.