I bought a couple of the early seasons of Supernatural on Black Friday, and finished rewatching season one yesterday. During one of the episodes with flashbacks to lil Dean and lil Sam it occurred to me that there are probably a lot of characters like John Winchester in the realms of fantasy/horror/sci-fi*, who try to do the right thing in a fight against a tangible evil but end up giving their kids a hellish childhood in the process. I think this is why so many urban fantasy heroines refuse to have kids, because if they did…
So, besides Supernatural, what book, tv show, movie, and comics can we think of where one or both parents being one of the “good guys” leads to unsettled and dangerous childhoods for their offspring?
I’m sure there are even more in historical or literary fiction, but I’d like to narrow the scope to parents fighting the sort of evils we don’t encounter every day.
Rusty Venture from The Venture Brothers, and in turn his own father are just about the worst fathers you can imagine. They are a pastiche of Johnny Quest and Doc Savage style scientist adventurer characters and live in a sci fi/fantasy universe.
They consider themselves good, or at least lawful compared to the mad scientists and super villains they face.
In a kind of weird way Sarah Conner from The Terminator, John is going to have…a rather interesting childhood that isn’t much fun. He will need that training however later on to survive and save humanity so…
All those parents on the ST:TNG Enterprise. How many times has that ship lost huge numbers of it’s crew, or been in imminent danger of being eaten/infected/exploded into component atoms/absorbed into the Borg collective?
For what it’s worth, though, the final episode reveals that she’s long wanted Malcolm to suffer enough to really give a crap about people like them – prompting him to follow up his fellowship at Harvard by doing public-service work, the better to run for Governor before becoming a good President.
Lord Asriel, in the Golden Compass series. By the end of the series, the chain of events he starts literally puts his daughter through Hell. Though what he did to her friend is worse.