And You Thought Your Family Was Screwed Up

One of the truly annoying things about the holidays is having to spend a large amount of time around one's family. Sure, some people have families that get along and treat each other with respect and with love. Most of us call those people strange though. The rest of us have families that are nominally dysfunctional at best. Whether it be the annoying uncle who gets drunk and tells you what he really thinks of your dad, the cousin who just got out of jail from the drug charges he spent time for or the mother who can't stop pestering you about when you're going to give her some grandchildren, at some point you're going to wonder why your family is so screwed up and why you can't have a normal life.

 

Well, feel better because things could be a lot worse. Just imagine how bad life would be if your parents were super scientists or superheroes or secret government agents. Having to sit through a boring turkey dinner with your cousins is nothing compared to having hitmen bust into the house during dinner or wild experiments down in the basement breaking loose leaving a trail of chaos in their wake.

 

To make you feel better about your family, IO9 has posted up a great list about Sci-fi's Most Dysfunctional Families.  In it you'll find examples of families so screwed up that they'll make you and your relatives look like the Brady Bunch by comparison.  Case in point, the Venture family from the TV show The Venture Brothers.

 

Rusty Venture is a walking dysfunction all on his lonesome. Unable to live up to his father’s impossible example, Rusty turned into a pill-popping, underachieving neurotic with a shaky moral center. And it doesn’t help that his brother JJ (who played Abel to Rusty’s Cain in the womb) is successful in the very areas where Rusty fails. Conversely, Rusty treats his own children with less than benign neglect, cloning replacements whenever they are killed (which is often) and leaving their emotional care to the ultra-violent, highly promiscuous spy Brock Samson.

 



  

And that's only one example.  Another great example of messed up families are the Petrellis from the once cool and now totally crappy show Heroes.  Talk about dysfunctional, not only are they finding long lost relatives every other day, but the dad was so concerned that his kids wouldn't have powers like he did that he had them injected with synthetic powers.  And that's just the beginning of their deeply rooted family problems.

  

 

The Petrellis are generally marked by three characteristics: they all have superpowers; they all have secret parents, siblings, or offspring; and they are constantly trying to kill one another. Claire shoots her uncle Peter. Peter shoots his brother Nathan. Patriarch Arthur plans to murder his son Nathan. And brothers Peter and Sylar are constantly trying to kill each other. Only matriarch Angela Petrelli (wife of Arthur and apparent mother of Nathan, Peter, and Sylar) stays out of the attempted murder racket, though she’s pulling most of the other family members’ strings.

 

The article has a number of other great examples of screwed up Sci-fi families, including shows like the X-Files, The Sarah Connor Chronicles and more, so be sure to check it out. 

 

And the next time your grandma scolds you for wasting your life playing video games and reading comics, or your aunt tells you you're a loser just like your brothers, remember that it could always be worse.  At least you aren't a Petrelli, be glad for that.