This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
From YKTTW Working Title: Deceased Parents Are The Best
Wacky Meets Practical:
- "Kinsey Millhone lost her parents at the age of 5 and doesn't seem to miss them much, and was quite content to grow up with her aunt as a guardian."
I have not read Kinsey Millhone, but based on this description alone, this doesn't look like this trope. This trope is about the fact that the dead parents are always ideal and were a lot more loving and caring than most living parents depicted. If the parents aren't missed and don't have any affect on the child, that would probably fit under Parental Abandonment or Conveniently an Orphan. But, like I said, I never read the series, so I don't know if the parents could be considered Good Parents or not. Could somebody familiar with this check this out and let us know if this example really belongs here, and then adjust accordingly?
Red Wren: IIRC, in A Series Of Unfortunate Events, the children do recall the parents being occasionally angry or something else—essentially, normal parents. The first time they note that (Violet talking about her father yelling at her for going into a part of the library?), I remember the narrator commenting that this was a line none of them had dared cross, and now that they had acknowledged that their dead parents weren't perfect, there was no going back to pretending life had ever been perfect. Am I insane here? Or is it just that, given the world they're in, normal is just that much better than abusive/incompetent?
