Archnemesis Dad

aka: Big Bad Dad

And you think your Thanksgiving's awkward?

"If you're going to take me on, son, you're going to have to bring your game up to a whole different level."

— Lionel Luthor to Lex Luthor, Smallville

Some fathers just really don't do well by their kids, at all. Some are aloof, remote, and offer scant praise for their children's achievements. Some expect their kids to act like adults from an early age and offer no guidance, whatsoever. Some will abandon their kids. Some will come to betray their children at a crucial moment. Some are just downright abusive. Some will even go so far as to try Offing the Offspring. A select few will go the extra mile to take every action and every opportunity to foil their children's plans and ruin their lives and become an Archnemesis Dad (or a Foe Pa).

This trope is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: a father or father figure who also happens to be a prime candidate for the title of a character's arch-enemy. He could be anywhere on the Sorting Algorithm of Evil, but whether he's the Big Bad, The Dragon, or something else entirely, any story featuring him is likely to be emotionally charged at the least. Normally this will be a case of It's Personal, and may well include offers of We Can Rule Together, but not always: particularly cold-hearted fathers may declare I Have No Son! and treat the child in question as just one more problem to be solved.

Compare Child Supplants Parent, the general archetype of children seeking to ovterthrow their parents—not necessarily because they're archnemeses, but because they're young people coming into their own. Often the result of years of I Hate You, Vampire Dad. Might overlap with Luke, I Am Your Father. See Abusive Parents and Parental Neglect for the more mundane version. See Offing the Offspring and/or Patricide for what this might lead to. This may also explain why someone Hates Their Parent. A common subversion of the trope is the Anti-Climactic Parent reveal that usually shows the father as a rather harmless Sitcom Arch-Nemesis to their child rather than an actual antagonist. Sometimes this happens when the father is a Notorious Parent, as in most wanted by any or every authority.

Generally a Sister Trope to Pick on Someone Your Own Size, due to age difference. Its Distaff Counterpart is the Evil Matriarch, with whom this character type is rarely ever paired up with. The inversion is Antagonistic Offspring. Contrast Daddy's Little Villain and Overlord Jr., where the evil father dotes on his kids who are just as evil as he is. See Evil Uncle for when it's not dad but his brother who goes out of his way to ruin your day. See Cain and Abel when the conflict is between siblings.

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Non-Spoiler Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The 2003 Astro Boy series bumps up Dr. Tenma from a mere antagonistic figure to the Big Bad, who engineers challenges for Astro to face so he can become the king of robots. Not really a spoiler since anyone familiar with the franchise mythos will know that Dr. Tenma creates Astro, but the series makes it so Astro doesn't initially know who his real creator is. He doesn't take The Reveal well.
• Captain Kenny Ackerman from Attack on Titan seems to be this to Levi. He describes Levi as his pride and joy, but also gleefully attempts to hunt him down and kill him since he's a Psycho for Hire in the service of the Government Conspiracy. It isn't clear whether the two are actually related, or he was merely a caretaker to one of the many orphaned children living in the Underground. He's revealed to be the older brother of Levi's late mother, making him Levi's uncle. And he apparently did seem to genuinely care for Levi.
• In Baki the Grappler, Baki's father is the Big Bad right from the start.
• In Code Geass, this is Emperor Charles zi Britannia's raison d'etre. He has children by 108 different wives and believes the best way to choose a successor to the throne is to pit them all against each other, encouraging backstabbing and assassination at every turn, so that the last one standing will be the strongest and most fit to lead. Prodigal prince Lelouch blames the death of his mother and the crippling of his sister on the Emperor's ruthless parenting style, and he launches a worldwide rebellion against Brittania so he can put an end to this system of sibling rivalry forever. Though, for most of the series, the Emperor doesn't consider Lelouch much of a threat and takes a hands-off approach towards dealing with him.
  • The irony in all this is that it's revealed that Lelouch and Nunnally are actually the children Charles loves the most. This is mainly by virtue of the fact that they are the only children he had with the only one of his 108 consorts that he loved: Marianne vi Britannia, who is revealed to be alive (albeit via Grand Theft Me) and in on his Assimilation Plot. However, as pointed out by Lelouch, all his love for his favorite children means diddly-squat since he focused more on his own goals and never once bothered to actually show he cared for them.
• The Big Bad of Count Cain is Cain's father Alexis, who transitioned smoothly from beating his children when they were small to manipulating them into pawns in his Evil Plan now that they're grown.
• A Cruel God Reigns: Jeremy is repeatedly beaten and raped by his step-father, which is the main source of his angst for the rest of the series... but can you blame the poor kid?
• Fairy Tail:
  • Ivan Dreyar to his son, Laxus. Makarov (Laxus' grandfather) is a protagonistic example to his son, Ivan. Yeah, it's complicated.
  • Subverted with Silver Fullbuster - when he and Gray meet, he tells him he's not really his father, but the demon Deliora, who stole Silver's body when he was revived, pissing Gray off enough to fight him at full power. In the end, though, he states that he truly is Gray's father, and lied to him because he wanted Gray to end his suffering as an undead servant of Tartaros. After the fight is over, he and Gray share one final hug before the person who brought him back to life is defeated for good.
• Food Wars!:
  • Subverted with Souma. He considers defeating his dad in a cook-off to be his greatest goal, but otherwise the two are very close (in a Vitriolic Best Buds sort of way).
  • Played straight with Azami Nakiri towards Erina. He's revealed to be the reason why Erina became the Alpha Bitch she is at the start of the story, due to being emotionally abusive towards her in his bid to groom her into his sick idea of a perfect gourmet, to the point he's the only person who can make her shiver in fear just by being around. However, with the support of her friends, Erina gains the courage to stand up to her father, even relinquishing her own seat in the Elite Ten Council to officially join La Résistance against him. We do later learn in the final arc that Azami is a Well-Intentioned Extremist, who has tried to change the world that would allow people with the God's Tongue (his wife and his daughter) to eat food normally instead of relying solely on fluid nutrients like his wife does.
• In Fullmetal Alchemist, Father is a strong candidate for the title of Greed's archenemy.
• Genma Wars had the Maoh King for his twin sons Loof and Gin, whom their mother Non was raped by him. While Gin was ignorant to his true heritage, Loof was raised by him without knowing who his true mother was and gets disowned after failing short of his father's expectations. When the brothers reunite, they join forces with their other half-siblings to dethrone the King together.
• The primary goal of Brad Burns, and later his brother Luke, in Green Blood is to track down the man who murdered his mother: his father Edward King.
• Lorenzo Leonelli from Heat Guy J. When he wasn't leaving Clair alone for extended periods of time, he was being physically and emotionally (and many believe sexually) abusive towards Clair. This went on for years, causing Clair to go insane and eventually kill him.
• Fate defies this in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS. Tre points out that Jail Scaglietti could technically be considered to be Fate's father given that she's the end result of his research into cloning, but she refuses to view him as anything other than a dangerous criminal to be arrested.
• Mazinger Z: In some alternate universes, Kouji has to fight his father or his grandfather, who have gone completely nuts.
• My Hero Academia:
  • Shoto Todoroki hates his father Endeavor for subjecting him and his family to harsh abuse, refusing to abide by his wishes to use the flame side of his Quirk he inherited from him as a way of surpassing All Might. After a fight/therapy session with series' protagonist Izuku Midoriya, Shoto begins to slowly let go of his hate, and finally starts mending his relationship with his father once Endeavor has a Jerkass Realization some time later. This tragically stays the case for Dabi, AKA Shoto's brother Toya Todoroki, who becomes so consumed by hate for Endeavor that he's willing to get other members of his family killed just to spite his father.
  • All For One also qualifies as this for Tomura Shigaraki, having abducted him as a child under the guise of "saving" him, all so he could groom him into a Misanthrope Supreme he'd merge his personality with so they can rule the world. Suffice to say, Tomura isn't happy with this, and comes to hate his adoptive father as much as he hates hero society as a whole.
• The Fourth Kazekage from Naruto. He placed a known dangerous tanuki-demon into his unborn child Gaara to create a Tyke Bomb for his ninja village. He used his own wife as a Human Sacrifice to complete the act, all without her consent. When he couldn't train the aforementioned Tyke-Bomb to control his powers well, he tries to kill Gaara. Ironically, Gaara isn't the one who kills him — Orochimaru is. Though they do eventually have their fight after the Fourth is revived via the Edo Tensei during the Fourth Great Shinobi War, where the truth about Gaara's mother and Yashamaru is finally revealed. The two make their peace before the Fourth is sealed away, entrusting the village to his son and successor.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: The relationship between Shinji and Gendo Ikari is... complicated. Gendo abandoned his son at the tender age of 4 after Yui Ikari, Gendo's beloved wife and Shinji's mother, died. Their relationship only gets worse in the series proper: Gendo acts coldly indifferent to Shinji's suffering and nearly dying in the EVA-01 multiple times. Things finally come to a head in every version during the fight against Bardiel. Shinji refuses fighting the Angel-hijacked Eva because his best friend is inside, so that Gendo orders the Dummy Plug (basically an autopilot for the Eva Unit) to rip the angel apart, maiming Shinji's best friend Touji and killing him in the manga. Shinji gives up all hope of reconciliation after this and only comes back to NERV after finding out that if he does leave for good then everyone else dies.
  • During End of Evangelion, Gendo finally reveals he abandoned Shinji because he was frightened that he would be would be a bad parent to Shinji if he tried to raise him alone, and he did not want to get him involved with his and SEELE's war.
  • Rebuild of Evangelion plays with this one. For a moment it seems that Gendo is actually nicer in this version, actually paying his son a genuine compliment after a tough battle. Shinji looks like he just gained the whole world after this, which makes the revelation that it was all an act hurt that much more so than the original. Gendo is only acting nice with his son to manipulate him into ending the world.
• One Piece: Sanji and his father, Vinsmoke Judge. The man was an Abusive Parent, belittling Sanji at every turn for his weakness and compassion, while turning Sanji's quadruplet brothers into sociopathic Tykebombs with his experiments and enabling their bullying of their brother. When Sanji has his first confrontation with him in the present storyline, he tries to hold out some hope that his family has changed for the better, but when forced to face Judge in battle, he admits to himself that his father has never given him a single decent memory and that he only feels hatred towards him.
  • Vinsmoke Reiju has a similar relationship with their father, though unlike Sanji, she was modified to obey him absolutely. It's very telling that when she is told about a plot to murder her family, she immediately decides to just let it happen, with the only exception being Sanji since he's the White Sheep of the clan.
• Downplayed and Played for Laughs in Ranma ½: In a very real sense, Genma Saotome is responsible for everything wrong in Ranma Saotome's life, and Ranma never fails to remind him of this. Genma dragged Ranma away from his mother as a child to begin Walking the Earth in a decade-plus long Training from Hell regimen so he would become a strong martial artist worthy to take up the duties of his Arranged Marriage to a daughter from the Tendo family — an Arranged Marriage he literally never tells Ranma about until they are an hour or so from the Tendo household. Over the course of those years, he sells Ranma's hand in marriage for food, subjects him to a Dangerous Forbidden Technique that leaves Ranma permanently utterly terrified of cats, repeatedly stole Ranma's food, and ultimately got him cursed to involuntarily turn into a girl when splashed with cold water. Oh, and as part of dragging Ranma away from his mother, Genma promised her that they'd both commit seppuku if they met and she judged he had failed to make Ranma a "man amongst men", which they are initially terrified his curse makes for a de-facto failure. During the events of the series, the two erupt into spontaneous brawls whenever Genma says or does something stupid or causes problems, which is constantly.
• Head, the Big Bad of Star Driver is this to his son Takuto.
• In Urusei Yatsura, within a minute of being introduced to Ryuunosuke and her father, said father has knocked his daughter to the ground with a full-strength punch to the face. The crazed beach vendor Wanted a Son Instead, and has done his utmost to try and force Ryuunosuke to be as masculine as possible, starting with calling her one of the most macho names possible in Japanese and then keeping her from ever expressing or indulging her femininity in any form, from keeping her from learning the feminine pronouns to use to denying her the right to wear feminine clothes, enforcing his will by beating her down in savage brawls. He insistently refers to her as a man, denying all evidence otherwise to the point of literally ignoring her breasts and ordering her to be assigned to the boy's physical education classes at Tomobiki High, acknowledging it only when he can either torment her with promises that he never intends to keep or when he stumbles upon a chance to literally transform her into a boy. Being well aware that she's actually a girl and that her father is a self-obsessed lunatic, Ryuunosuke utterly despises him. That said, their enmity is Played for Laughs.
• Vinland Saga: Now that King Sweyn is sure that his older son Harold will be able to succeed him on the throne, his younger son Canute becomes a liability. Canute doesn't like it.
• Voltes V: Prince Heinel's father is none other than Kentaro Go/Prince Gohl. None of them know this until the Grand Finale, where Heinel cries upon realizing he's been fighting his father all along. According to the Roman Robo Anime Climax Selection, this was done deliberately.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • In the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga, Gozaburo Kaiba is an Abusive Dad and Jerkass whom adoptive son Seto Kaiba disposed of in the backstory. In the anime, he returns as the Big Bad of the Virtual Nightmare Filler Arc to make one final attempt at revenge. Trapping Kaiba and his allies in his virtual world, Gozaburo uses his biological son, Noa, and his former employees, The Big Five, as the muscle in a plot to permanently trap his son and escape back into the world in his body. Defeated by Kaiba, Gozaburo makes a last attempt at Taking You with Me, but is stopped when Noa pulls a Heel–Face Turn and sacrifices himself to destroy them both.
  • Likewise, so far it looks like the Big Bad of Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V is Professor Leo Akaba. The plot is mostly moving forward due to the machinations of his son Reiji, who's trying to stop him from becoming any more of a Multiversal Conqueror than he already is.

Comic Books

• All Fall Down: IQ to his son, IQ Squared.
• Aquaman: The current page image is of Black Manta and his son, Aqualad. Black Manta has vowed to one day gut his own son like a fish just to torment Aquaman.
• Batman:
  • Ra's al Ghul sees Bruce almost like the son he never had, and he actually plans on making him both his heir and his son-in-law by marrying him to his daughter Talia, something both Bruce and Talia are seriously tempted to do.
  • Talia al Ghul herself has played this role in the "Leviathan" story arc to her biological son with Bruce, Damian.
  • Played straight and then subverted in the Black Glove story arc, where it is implied that the eponymous villain is actually Bruce's dad Thomas, who was really an evil psychopath. Neither allegation turns out to be true, though the real Black Glove, one Doctor Simon Hurt, nonetheless claims to be Thomas Wayne to both Bruce and Alfred's face, even though both men obviously knew he wasn't. It is implied that Hurt is actually Satan himself, though for a moment Batman accuses him of being an actor who used to impersonate his father, which would make this yet another inversion. Hurt denies this and claimed to have killed said actor and worn his skin to a party. So it's a triple subversion, with Hurt being a guy pretending to be a guy who pretended to be Bruce Wayne's dad, and pretending to be Bruce's Wayne's dad. Phew!
  • Return of Bruce Wayne suggests that Hurt is Dr. Thomas Wayne. Just not that Dr. Thomas Wayne...
  • The closest thing that Cassandra Cain has to Arch-Enemies are her parents, though they are a very unconventional example of this trope. While her father is responsible for many terrible things that have happened throughout her life, and she has grown to hate him, he cares for her and represents no physical threat to her. By contrast, her mother has been responsible for her death twice and attempted to kill her on several other occasions, but there is a mutual respect between the two of them even if Shiva's far from parental material.
• Doom Patrol: Invoked in Doom Patrol (2016), since Casey's an in-universe comics character brought to life, her dad Terminox is her "archnemesis"... that we've obviously never seen before and gets sorted out quite easily with a Heroic Sacrifice.
• Fables: The Adversary is revealed to be Geppetto, thereby making him Pinocchio's Archnemesis Dad. Though this is less explicit, because his son is conflicted about opposing his father explicitly.
• Justice Society of America: The android superhero Red Tornado and his creator T.O. Morrow have this dynamic. Several storylines revolve around Morrow's attempts to destroy/manipulate/reprogram his prodigal son.
• Lady Death: Lady Death's father is not exactly Father of the Year material, serving as a recurring antagonist and being more or less responsible for her current condition. A corrupt Feudal Overlord who oppressed his peasants, forcing them to fight in the Crusades all while secretly practicing black magic and worshiping demons, as well as having sacrificed his wife (Lady Death's mother) many years ago. When his people rose in rebellion against him, he summoned demons to take him to Hell leaving his daughter behind to be burned at the stake. He would wage war against Satan for control of Hell and clash with Lady Death many times. He is less of this trope in the Avatar continuity, that has follows the same backstory, but places him in a positive light, being a loving father and husband. And it's revealed that he was under a demon's possession, therefore not responsible for his actions.
• Lucifer: The series casts the conflict between the titular character and God (often referred to as Yahweh) as a much more intimate father-son conflict than the usual epic good-versus-evil depiction.
• New Gods: At the end of the war between New Genesis and Apokolips, rulers Highfather and Darkseid exchanged their baby sons as part of the peace treaty. Darkseid's son, Orion, was raised a hero (albeit one with anger issues), who plays this about as straight as possible, sometimes going after Darkseid even against the wishes of his adopted father.
• Prince of Persia: The Graphic Novel: Shirin leaves her home to join La Résistance, and rebels against her father in every sense.
• Runaways: The Pride is made up of six pairs of Archnemesis Dads and Evil Matriarchs. In a mild subversion, The Pride honestly believe that they are doing the best they can for their children: by destroying the world and allowing the Gibborim to remake it, they will be handing their children paradise. With one exception, the kids don't agree, and their interference ultimately leads to the deaths of all The Pride's members.
• Secret Six: Scandal Savage has a hatred for her father of such intensity that even mentioning his name is often enough to drive her to violence. When your dad is the immortal psychopath Vandal Savage, who can blame you?
• Shang-Chi: In the 1970s, Marvel comics created a character named Shang-Chi, whose father just so happened to be the evil Dr. Fu Manchu (although they can't actually call him that anymore for copyright reasons).
• Spider-Man: Inverted, as Spider-Man's Arch-Enemy, the Green Goblin, is not this, but a major development of the last decade or so is that he more or less imagines he is, seeing Peter — a smart, brave, capable self-made man — as a better son than his own child, Harry. On an older level, Peter's search for a father figure is one of the underlying themes of the comic, and the idea that Osborn — as well as other enemies like Doctor Octopus — are twisted inversions of this has been around for a while.
  • This is also played with in Ultimate Spider-Man, where Osborn's military research (including pieces of Peter's parents' research) leads directly to Peter gaining his powers. And Miles Morales, the new Ultimate Spider-Man, got his powers from a stolen spider from Osborn's lab. Osborn keeps unintentionally birthing Spider-Men.
• Strontium Dog: Johnny Alpha's father Nelson Kreelman is a racist politician who abused and ultimately locked his own son up for his mutation, and leads a Nazi-like anti-mutant movement.
• Supergirl: Zor-El becomes this to his daughter Kara in Supergirl (Rebirth) after turning into Cyborg Superman and getting obsessed with getting their world back and setting things "right", no matter the cost. (This wasn't quite the case in his Supergirl2011 appearances, where he was more of a Criminal Amnesiac, and neither of them realised the connection until afterwards.)
• Superman:
  • Lex Luthor is one of Superboy's two clone fathers (alongside Superman) and has regularly tried to control or kill his progeny, at one point successfully turning him against the Teen Titans.
  • Luthor actually tried to invoke this in Superman #170 where, in one of his most brazen Silver Age plans, he travels back in time and attempts to kill Jor-El and marry Lara in his place, for the sole purpose of becoming Superman's dad. He simply assumed that Supes would just be morally unable to go up against his own father and would let him Take Over the World unopposed. Alas, we'll never know if that would have worked, as Lex was outed as a liar when the anti-gravity device that let him pass off as a Heavyworlder malfunctioned, forcing him to flee back to present day Earth.
  • In New Krypton, Superman's father-in-law, General Sam Lane, was revealed as an Absolute Xenophobe and General Ripper out to engineer the extinction of the Kryptonian race. He more or less succeeds, wiping New Krypton, and most of Superman's Kryptonian friends and family out of existence. Lois tended to have issues with her own father post-Crisis (the elder Lane was a bitter man who would have preferred a son to a daughter, and rarely had a nice word for Superman, believing such beings to be "rabid dogs") but it was during Lex Luthor's presidency (where Lex was not fond of the media, which Lois was part of) his displeasure turned outright evil, making threats against his daughter and having her arrested to maintain Luthor's intentions. After War of the Supermen (where General Lane's atrocities include being a willing accomplice in the destruction of New Krypton and the murder of its 100,000 residents) Lois disowns him completely, pointing out he's the monster he always claimed Superman is. After Supergirl refuses to kill him (proving to the public that his own perception of Kryptonians is wrong) he kills himself rather than face trial. (And nobody cares.)
  • The original Brainiac has, at various points, tried to manipulate, control, or kill his clone son, Brainiac 2, his grandson, Brainiac 3, and his great-great grandson, Brainiac 5. Brainiacs 2 & 3 have also made numerous attempts to kill one another, proving this trope is more or less in the blood.
• Teen Titans: Trigon the Terrible, interdimensional demon lord and father of Titans' member Raven. Having raped her mother to impregnate her, Trigon later mounts a series of psychic assaults on Raven, ultimately brainwashing her into serving him and using her psyche as the portal through which he enters the real world.
• Wonder Woman Vol. 2: The series reveals that as in mythology Ares is Hippolyta's father, and given his actions against the Amazons he's also the closest thing she has to an archnemesis besides Hercules. This is also the reason he refuses to kill or allow any other gods to kill Hippolyta or his granddaughter Diana regardless of their arguments.

Fan Works

• Advice and Trust:
  • Gendo becomes this to Shinji. He abandoned him, turned Rei into his drugged-up slave, hurt Asuka and may try to ruin his relationship with his girlfriend.
  • After a while, Rei herself regards Gendo as a threat whose plans would destroy her best friends' relationship.
• David Cain in Angel of the Bat: Times of Heresy is a downplayed example, more mellow than his pre-Flashpoint iteration. As a cold-blooded killer he is put at odds with his heroic daughter, but still isn't interested in killing her and even makes a few smarmy comments about her religious conversion. Cassie herself notes in both stories she wants to be strong enough to forgive him, but isn't sure she can. The two do form an Enemy Mine when attacked by the true villains.
• In the Better Bones AU, Hawkwing, the protagonist of one of the rewritten Super Edition books, comes into conflict with his father Sharpclaw, who sides with Darktail (the cat trying to attack his Clan) due to being dissatisfied with his leader's progressive politics and acceptance of "daylight warriors".
• Children of an Elder God: When Shinji discovered that his parents had used the powers that he and his friends stole from the Elder Gods to create a utopia that gets increasongly corrupted by the eldritch influence, he and the other pilots rebelled and fought Gendo and Yui.
• Doing It Right This Time: Subverted. When he returned to the past, Shinji thought he would have to find some way to stop his father's plans. When he and Asuka arrived at Tokyo-3, though, it turned out that Rei had confronted Gendo and revealed that they were time-travellers and his plans would fail, not matter what. Ergo, Gendo lost his motivation to oppose to them.
• Plenty of them in Earth-27. Jackson Hyde/Aqualad II and Black Manta, Kara Zor-El and Zor-El/Grandmaster, Chris Kent/Lor-Zod/Zenith and Dru-Zod, Cassandra Cain/Black Bat and David Cain/The Swiss, Darkseid and Orion, etc.
• In Heroes story Fearless, Bob is a variation because in the particular universe Elle has never met him but he is very evil.
• Downplayed for Francis in Family Guy Fanon. Since Peter in this adaption is more willing to stand up to his father, Francis is quite confrontational to Peter. But they'll occasionally put aside their differences to solve a bigger problem.
• In From Muddy Waters, Izuku's father is All For One, All Might's Arch-Enemy and the head of the League of Villains. Interestingly, All For One is actually a Doting Parent, but his Blue-and-Orange Morality keeps him from understanding how his wanton murder of heroes to take their Quirks and force-feeding them to Izuku has done a number on their relationship.
• Hellsister Trilogy has Darkseid and Trigon to Orion and Raven, respectively. Orion does not intend to let his father enslave the universe, and Raven attempts to protect her friends from her superpowerful devil of a father.
• More implied in the Hotel Transylvania fic How to Zing. Martha starts out human, but Drac turns her into a Vampire so they can be together. Her father then swears vengeance on all Vampires for what happened. Said father is Abraham Van Helsing.
• The Big Bad of The Immortal Game is Celestia and Luna's father Titan. And his Dragon, General Esteem (who's just as big a monster as he is), happens to be Rarity's father.
• Jonathan Joestar, The First JoJo: After seeing firsthand how evil and malicious DIO truly is, Giorno Giovanna denounces DIO as his father and vows to fight him alongside the other Joestars, including his true biological father Jonathan Joestar.
• In Junior Officers, Deborah's least favourite person is her racist, sexist, implied-to-be-emotionally-abusive father, whom she has all but cut ties with.
• The King Nobody Wanted: Walder Frey's cousin and cohort Lord Shawney has just as many descendants as Walder and delights in emotionally abusing them, getting them to fight each other, arranging marriages they may not want, and mooching off of them beyond what's reasonable.
• In Last Child of Krypton, when Gendo hurts his son's friends and girlfriend, Shinji turns against his father openly.
• In Living The Dream, Frederic and his father Richard have a violent history. Back on Earth, Frederic was forced into joining the Canadian Mob by his father. When Frederic tried to go to the police, Richard had him beaten and executed for his unwillingness to join the family business. After the Rapture, Richard wanted to go to wherever Frederic chose as his paradise, with the sole reason being that he wanted to kill him a second time.
• In Lord of Caer Azkaban, Harry’s very loyal assistant is the daughter of the LeStranges, who was taken from them after Bellatrix gave birth in Azkaban and raised among the island’s society. This doesn't affect her relationship to her master at all, since he only sees her as the cousin to his godfather, and thus some of the only family he really has.
• There are likely humdreds of My Hero Academia fics portraying Midoriya Hisashi, Izuku’s absent dad, as secretly being All For One. This is due to the creator being a massive Star Wars fan and fans feeling it was a good source of fic ideas. It’s common for the stories to involve Izuku ending up in a vault like All For One did to his brother Yoichi.
• On a similar note, in My Little Mages: The Nightmare's Return, The Dragon — the Grand Master of the Shadow Blades Order — turns out to be Pinkie Pie's father Clydesdale. That being said, and despite the fact that they come to blows, they still care about each other, and he wishes she'd stop all this heroic nonsense and come home.
• Subverted in Neon Genesis Evangelion: Genocide. Gendo's goals remains fundamentally opposed to Shinji's, but after the Angel War, Gendo is below Shinji's notice, and Shinji is too busy getting over his traumas and surviving the next battles to trouble himself with his father's schemes. Gendo, meanwhile, has seemingly resolved to stay out of Shinji's way. Later in the story, Shinji even has a major breakthrough in coming to understand his father; realizing that Gendo has never really been mad at him, but rather is still hurting from the loss of Yui. He successfully manages to use this insight to argue in favor of the value of love and hope during a brief conversation with Gendo. His words end up having a profound effect on his father, who for the briefest of moments completely lowers his guard, and admits to Shinji that he might be a stronger person than he ever was. In the end, as Gendo lies dying after pulling off a Heroic Sacrifice, he uses his last breaths to quietly ask Rei to protect Shinji and make sure he makes it out alive.
• Once More with Feeling: Shinji considers his father Gendo one of his primary enemies. Considering they have mutually exclusive goals, and what Gendo did in the original timeline, it's completely reasonable.
• Ash's father in Pokémon Reset Bloodlines is a sociopathic Super Supremacist who seeks to Take Over the World. For that purpose he sired hundreds of bastard children all over the world, and is more than willing to kill them if they're not of use to him. Obviously Ash is not happy to learn about it.
• After returning to the past in The Second Try, Shinji knows what his father is planning ending the world, and he's determined to ruin his plans.
• In Secret War Serghar Kaltos is this to Attelus Kaltos to the empth degree.
• Shinra High SOLDIER has Hojo fill in this role toward Sephiroth.
• The Somewhat Cracked Mind Of Uchiha Itachi: The Fourth Kazekage, Rasa, is hated by all of his children in this fic. Gaara can't stand to be in the same room as him — when they meet in an informal setting, he leaves immediately. As for the other two: Kankuro disrespects him at every available opportunity, while Temari barely acknowledges his existence.
• Another example is the Big Bad of the Tangled Roots Trilogy.'' Babs Seed's father, Bernie Madhoof, is a crime lord, ruthless businesspony and not above trying to kill his own subordinates... that's not all, though... Later on, however, it's revealed that Madhoof is actually Babs' uncle; her real father, Page Turner, is a nice guy.
• At the beginning of Thousand Shinji, Shinji wanted to pay his father back for abandoning him. However, after being taken in by Misato, Shinji forgets about his revenge. Unfortunately, Gendo targeted Shinji's family and friends to hurt his son and bring him back under control, and Shinji decided that he'd got it with his father.

Films — Animation

• In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Frollo takes Quasimodo in after killing his mother, but only to save his own soul and keep Quasi for later use. He raises his erstwhile son to hate himself, teaches him that the world is dark and cruel, and keeps him locked away from sight to prevent being associated with him. When Frollo's atrocities increase, Quasi realizes the man's evil, calls him out on his abusive parenting, and saves Esmeralda from the murderously insane Frollo.

Films — Live-Action

• In the Austin Powers movies, Dr. Evil is this to Scott, and often belittles him for not being "evil enough". They even appear together on the Jerry Springer show, where the topic is "My father is evil and wants to take over the world."
  "You're semi-evil. You're quasi-evil. You're the margarine of evil. You're the Diet Coke of evil. Just one calorie, not evil enough."
• BloodRayne: Kagan is the enemy of his daughter Rayne, seeking to use her for himself. Rayne however wants revenge on him as he had murdered her mother years before.
• Dreverhaven in the Dutch movie Character has such an antagonistic relationship with his son that said son is the prime suspect when Dreverhaven is murdered.
• Hercules (2014): It turns out Cotys is his daughter's worst enemy, because he'd murdered her husband (his son-in-law) to usurp his throne and threatened her son (his own grandson) so she'd go along with his plans.
• Bruce Banner's father, David, in the 2003 Hulk. After performing dangerous tests on himself, some of it was passed on genetically when Bruce was conceived. He attempted to murder Bruce but failed, striking down his wife in the process. Thirty years later, following his release from prison, he tracks down Bruce and attempts to rebuild their relationship while secretly plotting to drain Bruce's powers and alter-ego in order to rebuild his own decaying cellular structure and gain his revenge on the military. A very, very bad dude, though not without his sympathetic moments.
• Alan (Robin Williams) in Jumanji was so terrified of his loving but authoritarian father that when Alan is trapped inside the game, his father becomes the Great White Hunter Van Pelt (both roles played by Jonathan Hyde) who hunts Alan.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Thanos is this to both Gamora and Nebula throughout the whole series, best seen in Avengers: Infinity War. After all, he kidnapped them from their people and planets (before murdering half their people) and abused the hell out of both of them for their entire lives under the guise of "raising them" as his adoptive daughters.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: Peter Quill a.k.a. Star-Lod finally meets his biological father, Ego, a Cosmic Entity and Omnicidal Maniac who Peter and his team have to stop from destroying the universe and turn it into an extension of himself. Oh, and he willingly killed Peter's mom.
  • A common theme with the Guardians, as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 see the Guardians taking on the High Evolutanary, a Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist and Mad Scientist who is responsible for turning Rocket into a sapient racoon.
  • Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings: Shang-Chi's father Wenwu trained him from birth to be a skilled martial artist so that he would inherit the Ten Rings criminal organization. However, Shang-Chi wants none of this and runs away, putting estranged father and son into conflict. Wenwu equally serves as one for Shang-Chi's little sister Xialing who was put aside by his father as a child because she's a girl.
• Sorceress: Traigon is the mortal enemy of his daughters Mara and Mira, since he plans to sacrifice the eldest for power.
• The Trope Codifier, without a doubt, is Darth Vader in Star Wars (originally a surprise twist, not so much in pop culture terms these days).
• Shingen Yashida to Mariko in The Wolverine. Ironically, it's her grandfather who's the real mastermind of the plot, who has a much closer relationship with her.
• Wolves: Cayden is less than thrilled to find out that violent, psychotic Connor Slaughter is his biological father and he himself was conceived through rape, resulting in his mother being Driven to Suicide. Although it's possible the rape part was a lie.

Literature

• The Blood Guard: Ronan's dad is this to him, being the Head of the Bend Sinister, the Arch-Enemies of the Blood Guard.
• The Camp Half-Blood Series:
  • Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Atlas is this to Zoë Nightshade, as she was the only daughter who didn't support him during the First Titanomachy and instead support the Olympians. In The Titan's Curse, she participates in the quest to free Artemis from his grasp, and ends up being mortally injured by him, fulfilling the prophecy about a child being killed by their father.
  • The Heroes of Olympus: Gaea and Tartarus to Damasen, the only Giant who doesn't participate in both Gigantomachies, because he was created as an antithesis to Ares, meaning he strictly abides by peace. Gaea considered him a disgrace and locked him up in Tartarus. In the climax of The House of Hades, he sacrifices himself to buy Percy and Annabeth time to get out of Tartarus, and is presumably killed.
• Cruel Illusions: Lucius is revealed to be Ava's father and is the ultimate enemy of the novel. He's responsible for centuries of draining of others' lifeblood in order to create immortal magicians. Lucius makes Ava an enemy by being responsible for the death of her mother and stepfather.
• Ulcis of Deepgate Codex tried to hang his daughter Rebecca aka Carnival shortly after she was born, then gave her to his henchmen to be raped and tortured. Years later, when she and several others descend into the Abyss, he takes a perverse delight in tormenting her with the memory of what happened, trying to break her all over again.
• In Discworld book The Truth, William de Worde finds out that the plot against Lord Vetinari was masterminded by his father, Lord de Worde, when a Dis-organizer kept by one of the hired thugs repeats the phrase "A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on," which de Worde was known for saying. Even before being revealed as the plotter, Lord de Worde was described as a nasty piece of work who'd treated William horribly (especially after Rupert, the older son, died, because Lord de Worde saw William as a Spare to the Throne and William had other ideas.)
• In I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President, Oliver Watson describes his father as his "archnemesis (a.k.a. Daddy)".
• Journey to Chaos: In A Mage's Power Duke Selen Esrah's Evil Plan drives a wedge between him and his son and they ultimately come to blows. Despite the antagonism, he still feels it necessary to give him girl advice.
• One could hardly be a worse father than Georges Leon, the quasi-immortal gambler of Tim Powers' Last Call. He schemes to live on by stealing other people's bodies, including that of his son and the book's hero, Scott Crane. Scott's older brother Richard has already fallen prey to Georges.
• In The Left Hand of God, Redeemer Bosco is the closest thing to a father figure to Thomas Cale (who was sold to the Redeemers for sixpence when he was little), and eventually even claims to love him... but that's in the sense of "love you as the prophesied embodiment of God's Wrath who will destroy all humanity, and to prepare you for the role, I have to give you Training from Hell and generally abuse you since early childhood." Cale hates Bosco as you can only hate someone who's abused you ten times over enough to ruin your life even afterwards, and Bosco is the primary antagonist in the trilogy.
• Scary Stories For Young Foxes features Mr. Scratch, a depraved fox that serves as the novel's Big Bad and Uly's not-so-dear father. He cements himself as Uly's greatest enemy after he threatens to murder one of his sisters, should his mother not comply with killing Uly for his disabled foreleg. After Uly escapes, Mr. Scratch later tries to have him killed anyway, purely out of disgust over his perceived imperfection and not falling in line.
• In Ship Breaker, Nailer's dad, Richard Lopez, starts out as an alcoholic drug-addicted ex-pit fighter who regularly beats his son and threatens to maim or kill him. As the story progresses, he takes over as the main antagonist, seeking to kidnap Nita, whom Nailer has placed under his protection. This culminates in Richard capturing Nita (and plotting to sell her organs on the black market) and a Knife Fight between him and Nailer, who Richard fully intends to disembowel. In the end, Nailer is forced to kill Richard and is left guilt-ridden over the fact that he doesn't feel bad about it. The story does imply that while he was never a great dad, he was once a better person than he is now, and Nailer does have memories of better times that the two of them had, but his actions in the present far outweigh anything he may have done in the past.
• Numerous examples in A Song of Ice and Fire.
  • The dwarf Tyrion Lannister has a terrible relationship with his father Lord Tywin Lannister, who blames Tyrion for the death of Tywin's beloved wife Joanna, who died giving birth to Tyrion. Despite Tyrion's achievements, Tywin constantly refuses to appreciate Tyrion or name him heir to Casterly Rock, lavishing praise on his older children Jaime and Cersei (even though Jaime being in the Kingsguard and Cersei being a woman means Tyrion should inherit before them). When Tyrion married Tysha, a common woman, Tywin even had his soldiers rape her in front of Tyrion, then forced Tyrion to do the same, claiming she was actually a whore. After he condemns Tyrion to death for the murder of Tyrion's nephew and Tywin's grandson Joffrey, in a Kangaroo Court, Tyrion is broken out by Jaime. However on finding out Tysha wasn't as he was led to believe a whore but did love him, Tyrion murders his father.
  • Aerys II "The Mad King" had an increasingly bad relationship with his son Rhaegar, suspecting they were plotting against him and at times threatening to disinherit Rhaegar in favor of his younger son Viserys. Aerys may have been right that Rhaegar intended to remove him from power, however considering Aerys was becoming more insane and paranoid, seeing traitors everywhere, while Rhaegar was The Wise Prince this may have been justified. Unfortunately Aerys' cruelty eventually led to the overthrow of the Targaryen dynasty, in which Rhaegar then Aerys died.
  • Aerys' ancestor Daeron II, about a century before, had a similar relationship with his father Aegon IV "The Unworthy", another of the worst Kings to sit the Iron Throne. Aegon was a greedy and lecherous man who treated his wife Naerys and only legitimate son Daeron horribly, at times threatening to disinherit them to make one of his bastards heir, and giving his eldest bastard with his cousin, Daemon Waters (later Blackfyre) the Targaryen ancestral sword Blackfyre which was traditionally given to the heir. There were rumors that Daeron was the result of an affair between the Queen and Aegon's brother Aemon, however considering how pious Naerys was and how chivalrous Aemon was this is unlikely, it's even suggested Aegon began the rumors, especially as they started around the time he was having an argument with his son. Even as Aegon was dying he still found a way to trouble his son by legitimizing all his bastards, leading to a series of rebellions from Daemon and his descendants the Blackfyres.
• Tales of the Branion Realm: In The Granite Shield, the sovereign of an alternate England is a God in Human Form who heretically follows a different God. He sires half-a-dozen bastards over the course of the book, the oldest of whom was conceived and raised specifically to kill him and return the royal family to the proper faith. His third-born daughter becomes a Rebel Leader, sets his navy on fire, and shoots him with a flaming arrow. The pain drives him insane, and by the end, his only concern is to off both his traitorous offspring.
• Tigerstar of Warrior Cats is the Big Bad, with his son Brambleclaw as the hero during the New Prophecy arc. However, while Tigerstar seeks to rule the world, Brambleclaw wants to stop him and says he'd rather die than join him.
  • Clear Sky was this for Thunder in Dawn Of The Clans until his Heel–Face Turn in The First Battle.
• In Who Fears Death, Onyesonwu's father wants her dead at all costs.
• The main villain in Book 2 of The Dark Profit Saga, Son of a Liche is the titular liche, Detarr Ur'Mayan, father of the party noctamancer Jynn Ur'Mayan. Their relationship wasn't revealed to the rest of the party until late in Book 1 (Jynn was using a fake surname), but Jynn himself had known that his father was an official F.O.E., just not that he'd risen from the dead.

Live-Action TV

• Arrow:
  • Malcolm Merlyn to anyone he has ever held fatherly affection for.
    • His relationship with Tommy is the least adversial of the three, as Tommy didn't learn how truly evil his father was until a few hours before his death. Nonetheless, their relationship had been strained ever since the death of Tommy's mother Rebecca, and it is only in the latter half of Season 1 that they get anywhere close to reconciliation — once Tommy learns the truth, however, he's absolutely horrified, rejects his father, and heads to the Glades to help out, leading to his death.
    • His relationship with his daughter Thea is a constant rollercoaster before settling on "unfixable". Initially, Thea welcomed him into her life for saving it and teaching her how to protect herself, but it sours when she learns that he used her to kill Sara. They briefly reconcile in the beginning of Season 4, only for their relationship to be completely destroyed after Malcolm's sells out her nephew and Oliver's son to Damien Darhk. Malcolm still cares for her and won't kill her in battle, a sentiment Thea does not return.
    • Oliver Queen, the son of Malcolm's deceased best friend Robert and the best friend of Malcolm's biological son Tommy, and someone who Malcolm outright admitted was Like a Son to Him. Prior to Oliver's return, Malcolm deeply regretted Oliver's "death", and even after they learned the truth about each other, Malcolm still held some affection for him, hence why he didn't kill him at first after finding out his identity. Despite being the only one of his progeny to not share his blood, Oliver is the one who was most alike to Malcolm (something that Malcolm implies he noticed even before Lian Yu), hence why they resonated on that level. Of course, these days that affection is long gone. Unlike Thea and Tommy, Malcolm despises Oliver with every fiber of his being, a sentiment that is returned with great fervor.
  • Ra's al Ghul is a crappy father to his daughters. The older one, Talia, left the League of Assassins years ago because she realized Ra's would never let a woman succeed him as leader, but comes to idolize him after his death. The younger one, Nyssa, has little affection for her father for the same reason, but stays with him until he decides to matchmake her with Oliver while knowing full well about her sexuality, turning the dislike into outright hatred.
• Ashes of Love: Tai Wei to Run Yu and (to a lesser extent) Xu Feng. He emotionally abuses and manipulates Run Yu, who finally snaps and turns against him.
• Burden of Truth: Following unsettling revelations of his past and them representing opposite sides of a case, Joanna's father David turns into her main adversary before his death.
• The Cape: Fleming's daughter turns out to be Orwell, who's worked tirelessly to bring him down.
• Game of Thrones: Lord Tywin Lannister to Tyrion Lannister. Tywin despises his son for "killing" his beloved wife and being a whore-mongering dwarf, while Tyrion despises his father for treating him with contempt.
• Hanna:
  • It's unclear what became of Marissa's mother, though her abusive father is a strong presence in the show.
  • Abbas is a father it turns out, though the mother of his daughter isn't mentioned. She instead lives with his mother, her grandmother.
• El internado: Iván's father is the bad guy the main characters know the best, because he is the one who delivers the threats and the medicines.
• Justified:
  • Crime boss Bo Crowder, towards his son, Vigilante Man Boyd Crowder. It climaxes when Bo has Boyd's entire gang of followers massacred after Boyd destroys one of his drug shipments. Interestingly enough though, Bo still cares about Boyd even despite all of that, and is more disappointed rather than angry that Boyd refuses to partake in the criminal enterprises. Ironically, after Bo's death, Boyd eventually comes back to the criminal world and becomes someone that'd make his old man proud.
  • Bo Crowder's former right-hand man Arlo Givens towards his son, US Marshal Raylan Givens. Unlike Bo and Boyd, Arlo and Raylan never had a good relationship and several times Arlo was willing to sell out his son to other criminals or even kill him for his own personal sake.
• Leverage: Jimmy Ford, the father of team leader Nathan Ford, was a Loan Shark (among other things) who worked for the Three Families that controlled organized crime in Boston. Jimmy raised his son to enter the family business, but as some point Nathan rebelled; he first studied for the priesthood, then became an insurance fraud investigator, and finally emerged as the leader of a group of (more or less) heroic Con Artists who Pay Evil unto Evil to Corrupt Corporate Executives, Just Like Robin Hood. Eventually, Jimmy became one of Leverage's targets, causing Nathan's teammates to worry that he was going after his father with a little too much enthusiasm. This doesn't stop Jimmy from dying to protect his son and Nate from tricking the ones responsible into becoming Self-Disposing Villains to avenge him.
• Lost:
  • John Locke's father abandoned him until well into his adult life, at which point he stole his kidney, re-abandoned him, used him as a courier, abandoned him again, and pushed him out of an 8-story window, causing his paralysis. Locke still can't bring himself to actually kill him when he has the chance, though he's perfectly happy to hand the task over to Sawyer instead.
  • Sun's father Paik Woo-Jong turns her husband into his personal enforcer, putting terrible strain on their marriage. When Sun has an affair with Jae Lee as a result, Paik harshly rebukes her for "dishonoring" him, then tries to have Jin kill Jae Lee. Although Jin shows Jae mercy, he is still Driven to Suicide, and Paik coldly mocks his daughter at the funeral. After returning home from the Island with the Oceanic Six, Sun gets her revenge by using her settlement from Oceanic Airlines to buy out her father's company.
  • Roger Linus is a horribly physically and emotionally Abusive Parent to his son, Benjamin Linus, because he blames Ben for his mother's death in childbirth. Ben eventually murders Roger personally when he defects from the DHARMA Initiative to the Others.
• My Country: The New Age:
  • Nam Jeon for Seon-ho. He tells Seon-ho he should have died instead of his half-brother and forces him to train when he's injured. After Yeon's death Seon-ho has enough and sets out to kill his father.
  • Seong-gye for Bang-won. Seong-gye manipulates Bang-won while Bang-won grows increasingly angry with the situation and finally lashes out.
• Nashville: The Big Bad is Rayna's father.
• Once Upon a Time: Though he's not as much of an antagonist as Regina or Cora, King George certainly causes his fair share of problems in Prince Charming's life. It's fairly complicated, as George got Charming's brother first in a deal with Rumplestiltskin, and got Charming (James) as a replacement because he needed a son to kill a dragon after the first boy died. He did initially want to be a father to James, but couldn't handle it when the boy that he gave "everything" to objects to an Arranged Marriage and runs off with Snow White. He poisons Snow White so that she can't have children (she gets better), kills James's mother, teams up with Regina to wage war on James and Snow, and finally tries to get Charming ousted from his job as Sheriff in Storybrooke.
  • Rumplestiltskin/Gold's father Peter Pan (originally Malcolm) is the main antagonist of season 3 and possibly the most evil character in the series. Gold wants to take him down more than anyone else. His father even threatens to murder Rumpelstiltskin's lover and son just because it would spite Rumple. Peter also tries to take the heart of his great-grandson Henry for immortality, even though this will kill Henry. It'd later revealed Peter Pan/Malcolm abandoned his son so he could regain his youth in Neverland, and later says he always saw his son as a burden.
• One Tree Hill: Dan Scott is this trope in spades, frequently alternating trying to exert control over his sons Nathan and Lucas and his wife Deb and trying to sabotage them. He's also ruthless to anyone who gets in his way including his ex-girlfriend from high school Karen and his older brother Keith whom he later kills after mistaking him for the one who tried to get him killed by drugging him and setting his car dealership on fireand he's also ruthless in acquiring power by catching the mayor in the act of doing drugs and having sex with prostitutes and blackmailing him into resigning so he himself can run and become mayor. Even his acts of kindness are usually about stopping someone even worse then himself(I.E. Nanny Carrie, the thugs that kidnapped Nathan).
• Peacemaker: Auggie Smith, the father of the titular hero Christopher Smith a.k.a. Peacemaker, is introduced as emotionally and physically Abusive towards his own son who also guilt trapped Chris for the death of his brother. Over the curse of the first season we learn Augie is the Neo Nazi-supervillain White Dragon. When his own interests start to clash with the mission of Chris' team, he decides to kill him. Chris eventually gets to kill his father, but is still haunted by visions of him afterwards. While Augie isn't the Big Bad in the series, he's the villain to go directly under the hero's skin.
• Sergio Bustamante is this to Pablo in Rebelde Way. He has come to loath Pablo straying away from him so much, that he has no problem basically going to extremes to ruin his son's life, from harming his girlfriends to even the school he's studying in.
• Revolution: Tom Neville acts as this to his son Jason Neville. Jason reveals in "The Song Remains The Same" that he did everything his father asked him to do, which included hurting and killing people for him... but Tom just kept looking straight through him. The first season finale has Tom taking over the Monroe Republic. Jason is working with him, but he hasn't actually agreed to anything. That's a good thing, because it's already becoming clear that things are going to break down between them sooner rather than later.
• Smallville:
  • Lionel Luthor. His emotional abuse and Social Darwinist views left his son Lex badly screwed up from early childhood. When Lex moves to the titular town Lionel isn't far behind, and begins making life miserable for Lex, his friend Clark, and most of the other residents. He helps to ruin Lex and Clark's friendship, may have tried to have Lex killed in the Season 3 finale, and later attempts to steal his body. Had enough? It gets better. When Lex eventually pulls a Face–Heel Turn and becomes the Big Bad, Lionel pulls a Heel–Face Turn (courtesy of possession by Jor-El), and becomes something of a Mentor to Clark, ensuring that he and Lex remain at loggerheads until his own death (at Lex's hands). Over the course of seven seasons, their relationship managed to encompass Abusive Dad, "Well Done, Son" Guy, Offing the Offspring, and eventually, Self-Made Orphan, to form a beautiful example of this trope at its best.
  • In Season 10, this is revisited when Clark travels to the Alternate Universe of Earth-2 and encounters that world's Lionel, who not only abused Lex and his illegitimate daughter Tess, but also managed to find and raise his reality's Clark and transform him into a Psycho for Hire known as Ultraman, whom he allowed to murder Earth-2 Lex. By the end of the episode he has attempted to beat our Clark (whom he believes to be his Clark) to death for not having killed him already. He later escapes to Earth-1, where he steals LuthorCorp from our Tess and spends several episodes trying to manipulate Lex's unstable clone Alexander/Conner, whom he doses with Red K. When that fails, he kidnaps Tess and tries to cut out her heart for use in resurrecting Lex (though only after discovering that Conner's is unavailable); he is shot by her for his trouble. Interestingly, his last act before he dies is to make a deal with that season's Big Bad, Darkseid, in order to bring the real Lex back, ensuring that he has a proper heir. Phew.
• Supernatural: Lucifer, naturally, becomes this to his Nephilim son, Jack, who chooses to side with the Winchesters and Castiel (whom he looks up to as his real father) against him.
• The X-Files: C.G.B. Spender to both of his sons. He shoots one of them and attempts to foil the other's plans at every turn (and steal his brain, at one point). Not exactly Father of the Year.

Music

• The father in "I'm Bugged At My Old Man" from The Beach Boys' album Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) certainly has a tyrannical streak to him. At first he seems like a typical strict father, since he makes the protagonist stay in his room and he is mad when he comes in a little late. But as the song progresses he almost seems like a dictator. He sells his son's surfboard, cuts off his hair in his sleep, tacked up boards on his window so he can't look outside, jerked his phone out of the wall when his son tried to call up his girlfriend, stole his radio and to top it all off he is out eating steak, while his son just gets some breadcrumbs and a little glass of water for dinner! Though the last line does turn tables as it reveals that all this might just be a severe punishment for the fact that the boy got suspended from school.
• Gallerian Marlon is this to Nemesis Sudou in the Evillious Chronicles.

Myths & Religion

• In Greek Mythology, Cronos had his children fed to him in order to ensure that a prophecy which stated one of his sons would overthrow him would never come to pass. Until Cronos' wife fed a stone to Cronos instead of baby Zeus. Zeus then proceeded to free his brothers and sisters from Cronos' stomach and promptly kicked Cronos' ass.
  • Cronos's father Uranus (the sky) wasn't much better. He feared and hated all of his children so much that he forced them back into Gaia (the earth). Naturally, being forced to keep all of her full grown children inside her at once pissed Gaia off so much that she helped her son Cronos, the youngest and boldest Titan, get revenge on dear ol' dad. She forged a sickle which Cronos used to castrate his own father when Uranus was in the mood for some earth lovin'.
    • In some versions of myth, he did not get trapped and "was not in the mood", but rather hadn't stopped it in the first place.
  • Fear of the new generation overthrowing the old one is a major running theme in Greek mythology, so there are a lot of examples of fathers becoming enemies of their children. In some tellings of the story, the entire Trojan War was a Batman Gambit by Zeus, who wanted to find a way to kill off his demigod children so they wouldn't overthrow him. This is despite the fact that the closest relative of his was either Zeus' great-nephew or his second cousin (Achilles' mother was Thetis the sea nymph, whose father was either Poseidon, Zeus' brother, or Oceanus, Zeus' uncle). Although most of the heroes did have some percentage of divine blood, it was really no more than any prominent person would have.
  • Zeus's son Sarpedon dies fighting for the Trojans, but he seems to be genuinely upset. And Aeneas, the one surviving Trojan, is Zeus's grandson in some versions of the myth. Seeing what happens to Aeneas afterwards...
  • Zeus and Poseidon were unique in that they averted this trope. While they didn't do much in the way of actual parenting, they went out of their way to give gifts and support to their demigod progeny. (Zeus had a lot of children due to his philandering, but he did try to do his best to take responsibility for them.) Poseidon in particular was a Papa Wolf to his son Polyphemus and made Odysseus' journey home a living nightmare for blinding his son.
    • Zeus did eat his first wife, the goddess Metis, (his older sister Hera is his second wife) to prevent their daughter Athena from being born, because she would be smarter than him. It didn't work.
• Egyptian Mythology: Set is this to Anubis, since the former is evil while the latter is a pretty chill guy despite being the judge of the dead. In one tale, when Set tries to desecrate Osiris' body after killing him, Anubis pokes his skin with a hot iron rod, leaving black patches behind, then flays and wears it to warn those who want to desecrate the dead (the story is used to explain how leopards got their spots).

Tabletop Games

• In Sentinels of the Multiverse, Citizen Dawn is a Gender-Inverted form of this to Expatriette. Though Citizen Dawn, Super Supremacist that she is, claims that she has no daughter as Expatriette doesn't have superpowers. They're even considered each other's Nemesis by the game.
  • A non Nemesis and much more tragic example is whenever Iron Legacy and America's Newest Legacy fight. Legacy is, well, a Legacy Character, his powers passed down to his first descendant each generation. In an alternate timeline, Legacy was killed by his nemesis, thus forcing his daughter to become the first female Legacy much earlier than intended. In another alternate timeline, the fight between Legacy and his nemesis instead claimed the life of his daughter. Mad with grief, Legacy became Iron Legacy, a Well-Intentioned Extremist intent on using the time he had left to kill every criminal in the world, and Jumped Off The Slippery Slope along the way, killing everyone who opposed him, criminal or not. Iron Legacy is too far gone by this point, believing his daughter from an alternate timeline to be an imposter. America's Newest Legacy, who had lost her father in her timeline, now gets to see him again, but too far in his grief induced madness to be saved, and has to fight him to save the world...

Video Games

• One of the main villains of BlazBlue is Carl's father and personal antagonist Relius Clover, who turned Carl's sister into the machine known as Nirvana. Relius used the knowledge from that experiment to make a new and improved version of Nirvana, harvesting Carl's mother in the process. When Carl finally finds and confronts him in Continuum Shift's story mode, Relius tries to kill him for calling him out. Needless to say, they aren't on good terms.
• In the Castlevania series, when Dracula's human wife Lisa was burned as a witch, he went on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against humanity. However, their son Adrian chose to honor his mother's last request not to hate humans, and took the name "Alucard" to show his opposition to his father's ways.
• In Dante's Inferno, the protagonist's father, Alighiero, was a corrupt and greedy nobleman that ended up sentenced to Hell upon dying and was turned into a grotesque demon of Greed, who is fought by Dante as a boss fight in the fourth level.
• Destiny 2: Empress Caiatl of the Cabal empire has long despised her father, Emperor Calus, for his venality, corruption, and It's All About Me attitude. In one anecdote, Caiatl describes how Calus killed her dog because he felt she was paying more attention to it than to him. As such, she willingly participated in the Midnight Coup that overthrew Calus for his protégée Ghaul and exiled him far from the empire. In turn, Caiatl is Calus's greatest fear — specifically, his fear that her achievements will one day overshadow his, leaving him forgotten by history.
• Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening has Lady's story arc, where she seeks revenge against her father Arkham for killing her mother, Kalina Ann, to try and turn himself into a devil and gain the power of Sparda.
• Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG:
  • Detritus-11 is an android "son" of President Zazz, but Zazz only created him to act as extra muscle and to make Zetacorp look good. He only sees Detritus as a tool and has already disposed of four other iterations of Detritus for questioning his orders. Naturally, he has Akari kill Detritus for opposing the razing of Pon Pon Village, though Eliza secretly revives Detritus to help Akira defeat Zazz.
  • Prime Minister Morgalia supports Zeta's occupation of Vulcanite in order to gain political power for herself, which puts her at odds with her daughter Chase, who joined Akira's anti-Zetacorp cause. Even before that, Morgalia executed Chase's friends and boyfriend for opposing Zeta.
• Rock Howard, the son of Fatal Fury Big Bad Geese, has a burning vendetta against his father for leaving his mother alone and with nothing while he lived lavishly as the crime emperor of South Town. However this ultimately comes to naught in the canon of Fatal Fury as Geese fell to his death several years before Rock was old enough to get his revenge (instead he grows up around Terry Bogard who hopes to impart a better example for him than his real father). Outside of Fatal Fury canon, where Geese and Rock are able to face each other (be it in-canon, such as The King of Fighters, or a Dream Match Game such as Capcom vs. SNK 2), they are typically given a special pre-fight exchange to highlight their animosity. Hypocritcally, Geese himself has a similar reason to hate his own father (leaving him and his mother to accept his place at the head of a wealthy European family) and even tried to kill him (only to be stopped by his half-brother Wolfgang Krauser, the final boss of Fatal Fury 2).
• Jecht from Final Fantasy X is an abusive, alcoholic Jerk Jock of a dad. The nemesis relationship between himself and his son Tidus was heightened by the fact that both played the same sport, and Jecht went for the Drill Sergeant Nasty method of teaching and was too vain to admit his son might ever be anywhere near as good as him. Later, he was transformed into the Eldritch Abomination that terrorizes the entire world. Surprisingly, the trope is somewhat subverted, because Jecht becomes increasingly sympathetic as the game goes on, especially as Tidus comes to realizes that some of his Freudian Issues are his own problems and not his father's fault. Though Jecht does admit at the end he was a pretty crappy father too.
  • Distilled in Dissidia Final Fantasy, where Tidus expresses nothing but contempt for his "old man", wanting only to beat the crap out of him. When they finally do meet, Jecht has been injured and Tidus could easily defeat him, but instead, Tidus chooses to heal him. They then fight and Tidus wins, causing Jecht to actually legitimately praise him. When they meet for the last time in the cycle, they again fight, but at the end, Tidus ends up crying when he realizes that his father is dying. Ultimately, they admit that the animosity between them was foolish and just a front for their true feelings.
• Final Fantasy XII: Dr. Cid, full name Cidolfus Demen Bunansa, is the father of Balthier, real name Ffamran mied Bunansa. The latter doesn't actually hate Cid, but merely considers him a crazy man after he started to research the nethicites and talk to himself (actually Venat, who is invisible to Balthier).
• Kirby's Dream Land 3: Zero, the creator of Dark Matter, also created Gooey, who became a friend of Kirby and joined him to destroy his brethren from conquering Planet Popstar.
• Lemeza and Shawn Kosugi's relationship before and during La-Mulana is pretty rocky. Shawn essentially dumped his son on his own father to look for the fabled ruins of La-Mulana, and when Lemeza grew up and took up archaeology, they became bitter professional rivals, which was not helped by Shawn poaching Lemeza's work. This animosity manages to get the game started — Lemeza's original main reason for coming to La-Mulana was because his father taunted him about finding the ruins first — and carries on to the ending wherein Shawn waits for Lemeza to do all the hard work involved in getting the greatest treasure of the ruins and then steals it from his own son.
• In Malicious, before the main game proper, the backstory has King Eldrake as one hell of an evil father. He is a corrupt king who imprisoned his own wife, Queen Ashlelei, for being against the turn of their kingdom into a corrupt one, despite the fact she was the one who brought victories and success to their kingdom; their two children, Valeria and Erica. could not stand their father's evil ways, so they freed their mother and plotted a rebellion, only for King Eldrake to ally himself with foreign barbarians and kill his own two children without any remorse, leading to the Queen's madness and the slaughter of the King and his followers by her hands.
• For a series built on parent/creator issues, it's surprising that Mass Effect doesn't have more examples.
  • Urdnot Wrex's father, Jarrod, though Wrex killed him (in self-defense) long before the game started.
  • Miranda Lawson's father is obsessed with creating the perfect legacy through Designer Babies. We don't now how many he's gone through, but Miranda wasn't the first one he made, just the first he "kept" — and he was already working on a replacement for her when she was in her teens. She escaped, taking her clone baby sister Oriana with her. Miranda's efforts to keep Oriana out of her father's reach make up the bulk of her character arc.
• After rescuing Atrus in Myst, he bids farewell and hints that he might need your help later against a "far greater foe". In the sequel Riven, this turns out to be his dad, who's been trapped on the eponymous world after Atrus foiled his plans for multiversal domination.
• In Psychonauts, the final boss of Raz and Coach Oleander's minds are their grotesque antagonistic fathers. In Raz's case, it's all in his head — his real dad shows up and helps him defeat the monster.
• Ivy Valentine in the Soul Series. She despises her demonic father Cervantes (given the fact that her cursed existence is his fault), and he did try, more than once, to consume her soul to gain power. Before the events of V, however, she finally defeated him, not only reclaiming her own soul, but also all the souls he had ever devoured. But he still lives. (Well, not "alive", since he's still an undead being, but he's still around.)
• Every generation of Tekken's Mishima clan, starting with Kazuya, has this issue. Jinpachi was a nice enough guy, but Heihachi hated him anyways, starting a vicious cycle of hate with his own son Kazuya. In fact, the main plot of the Tekken series exists because the Mishimas all hate and fight their fathers until they turn corrupt themselves. So far, the only exception to this rule seems to be Heihachi's bastard son Lars.
• Undertow: Unable to reason with Nemo, his son, Jules, is forced to confront and defeat him to stop his relentless attacks against the Iron Marines.
• Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus introduces Rip Blazkowicz, B.J.'s Abusive Dad and colossal bigot, who regularly mistreated his wife and son. While he isn't a major treat in the world of Wolfenstein, he is B.J.'s worst enemy at a personal and emotional level, representing everything he doesn't want to become, thus motivating him to become a Nazi Hunter and freedom fighter.

Webcomics

• In Blindsprings, Asher Thorne takes on this role, by turning against his wife and daughters because they're witches of the wrong kind. It is questionable whether he ever loved his wife, (the marriage, it seems, was mainly political, to secure peace) there might be Domestic Abuse, too.
• But I'm a Cat Person runs Miranda through multiple flavors of Parental Abandonment, including this one.
• Royce, the King of Asgard in Heart Core and the father of Ame, is not only a horrible parent, considering how he almost killed both Ame and her innocent sister, but he is also the main villain of the series.
• Tower of God:
  • Khun Aguero Agnes's ultimate goal is to defeat his father Khun Edahn and take his place as the head of the family. That's no mean goal considering that the heads of the Ten Families are Physical Gods with Complete Immortality. The background for Aguero's desire to overthrow his father is revealed very slowly, but when Aguero meets a stored memory of his father's younger self, who seems like a broadly all right guy, he tells him that he'd probably run away if he met his older self.
  • The children of the Arie family who used a spell to become one and became the Slayer of FUG known as White were likewise trying to best their overbearing father. FUG is an organisation dedicated to destroying Jahad and the leaders of the Ten Families, and each Slayer targets a particular one of them.
  • Another Slayer of FUG, Karaka, targets King Jahad — and seems to be his illegitimate son.
  • Ja Wangnan, another of Jahad's illegitimate children, holds him responsible for his mother's death and also wants to cut off his head in revenge. It is implied that all of King Jahad's illegitimate children consider him an enemy.

Web Original

• Can You Spare a Quarter?: While his mother didn't help, most of the abuse Jamie suffered from at home (including whipping, rape, belting etc.) was at the hands of his father who almost kills him during the climax of the story.
• In Less Than Three Comics' Brat Pack, Firestorm's father abused him through his entire life, but the rest of the world only knows him as Napalm, one of America's greatest superheroes.
• The Lore of Twitch Plays Pokémon had Alice trying to stop the machinations of Bill, whom the stream had decided was her father.
• Jobe of the Whateley Universe seems to be developing this relation with his father, supervillain Gizmatic, also known as King Wilkins of Karedonia.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender: Prince Zuko and Fire Lord Ozai. And during the eclipse, when Zuko renounces trying to be the son Ozai wants, Ozai reveals that he was willing to kill him when he was not even in his teens.
  • Mai's father becomes this in the comic Rebound when he tries to get her to join his rebellion against the new Fire Lord Zuko.
  • The Sequel Series The Legend of Korra adds Asami Sato and Hiroshi. For an Evil Versus Evil example, there's also Amon and Yakone. Yup, Ozai pretty much started a pattern of bad fathers that gave the world more problems.
• Fanny in Codename: Kids Next Door is the daughter of Mr. Boss, one of the main villains and one of the more staunchy child-haters, although as Even Evil Has Loved Ones he makes an exception with her.
• El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera: Played with with White Panthera and his father Pumo Loco. White Panthera is the only hero to have ever been able to defeat Pumo Loco, is often more mature than his father, and worried about the influence PL has on his son. Despite this, Rodolfo allows his father to live with him and Manny, and they seem to respect each other and not try to change their minds about where they stand on good and evil (thought the same can’t be said for how they raise Manny).
• Big Bad Abraham Kane on Motorcity has no idea that his beloved daughter Julie is a member of the Burners, his arch-nemeses. He is aware, however, that the leader of the Burners is Defector from Decadence Mike Chilton, who he considered to be like a son to him, and was genuinely hurt by him switching sides.
• In The Owl House, Emperor Belos eventually becomes one to Hunter. While Belos is technically Hunter's uncle, Hunter was still raised by him and sees him as a father figure. However, "Hollow Mind" reveals that the feeling is very much not mutual, as Hunter turns out to be a Grimwalker, the latest in a long line of Expendable Clones that Belos created as Replacement Goldfish for his dead brother, only to murder them and start over with a new Grimwalker when they step out of line. When Hunter confronts him about this, Belos sees this as the start of his betrayal and tries to kill Hunter then and there. This forces Hunter to go on the run and eventually culminates in a Heel–Face Turn, meaning he joins the final fight against Belos in "King's Tide".
• Cedric in The Raccoons is the son of the main villain Cyril Sneer, which puts him in conflict often with his father as he's the best friend of his father's enemies and sides with them more often than not. Of course, how evil Sneer is depends on the episode as in some specials he's an Ax-Crazy Corrupt Corporate Executive and in other episodes (especially late seasons) he's just a Friendly Enemy and a Jerkass with a Heart of Gold.
• YAY-OK on Rocket Monkeys has an Omnicidal Maniac for a father who is obsessed with destroying everything in sight and oblivious to his son's desire to be close to him, though he is shown to genuinely enjoy spending time with him.
• Maternal example in Samurai Jack, where Ashi eventually regards her mother this way, the enmity concluding with a battle to the death where Ashi slays her. She might also regard Aku as such, symbolically, seeing as she was raised as one of the Daughters of Aku.
• The Simpsons: Homer Simpson kind of sums it up when he, Marge, and Bart Simpson are about to be digested by a museum display.
  Homer: Marge, I've always loved you! Bart, you've been a worthy foe!
• Sassette in The Smurfs (1981) still loves Gargamel (her creator) as her dad and calls him "daddy Gargamel". She considers herself to have two dads; her creator Gargamel and her adoptive father Papa Smurf. When confronted on the fact that Gargamel is evil, she responds that she still loves him. Gargamel was brought to tears once she told him that, as no one has ever said "I love you" to him before.
• In Teen Titans (2003), Slade becomes an abusive father figure to both Robin and Terra, pressuring them into following in his footsteps and trying to cut them off from their friends. Both turn on him when he goes too far.
• The Transformers; supposedly this is the case with Quicksix, the Autobot's six-changer and son of Six-Shot, the Decepticon equivalent. However, this enmity was only mentioned in the commercial for his action figure.

Surprise Twist Fathers (here be spoilers):

Anime & Manga

• Arachnid reveals that crime syndicate vice-leader Suzume Bachi is the father of main character Alice. He had to suddenly abandon his family upon being promoted by the previous holder of the title, but eventually had his ex-wife assassinated and arranged for Alice to get dragged into becoming an assassin herself and getting put through the grinder to become the strongest of them. Even though Suzume Bachi did give Alice opportunities to get away from the "Arachnid Hunt" set upon her, he doesn't hesistate to thrash her once she finally confronts him.
• EDENS ZERO: Wizard, one of the Four Dark Stars of the Edens One, is revealed to be the father of The Hero Shiki Granbell, back when Wizard was a human on Earth thousands of years ago. While this is the case when they fought in the Lendard arc, neither of them knew it at the time thanks to Wizard having his memories erased and Shiki being a baby when he is taken to be raised by Ziggy. In fact, Shiki only finds out in the final arc after Wizard is defeated by his Amnesiac Lover Witch, who is Shiki's birth mother as well.
• In the sports anime Idaten Jump, the Big Bad of the second half turns out to be Takeshi Yamato, the long-lost father of the main hero Shou and his little brother Ayumu. There's a catch, however: Takeshi isn't doing this willingly but is Brainwashed and Crazy, thanks to the disbalances in the X Zone (which is the same that happened to Makoto's brother Kyouichi and the first baddie Gabu). When he's defeated by Shou in the end, Takashi is de-brainwashed and happily reunited with his family.
• Gender-inverted in Kill la Kill in two ways — first Satsuki, who seemed to be The Dragon to her mother Ragyo, reveals that she was Good All Along and has been planning her downfall since she was a little girl. Ragyo has been known to molest her before and after this relevation. Then, in the more traditional twist, it turns out that Ragyo is Ryuko's mother as well, who had her Death Faked for You by her father.
• Innocent Zero, the Big Bad of Mashle: Magic and Muscles is revealed to be the father of Mash Burnedead, and the goals of both eventually mean defeating each other.
• The Big Bad of Tenjho Tenge is Souichiro Nagi's father Sohaku. The guy stole his ex-wife's (Souichiro's beloved mother Makiko) eye for its power, chopped off her arm when she tried to stop him, and later implanted his own eye into Souichiro as part of his plan to take over Souichiro's body and powers. That's not even getting into his other victims — it's a long list.

Comic Books

• Batman: In Batman/Huntress: Cry for Blood, it is revealed that Santo Cassamento is Helena Bertinelli's real father, and that he conspired with Stephen Mandragora to murder the Bertinellis when Helena was only a child, which is what drove her to become the Huntress.
• Superman: The big reveal of "The Oz Effect" in Superman (Rebirth) is that the mysterious ubervillain Mr Oz, determined to prove to Superman that humanity isn't worth saving, is none other than a crazed Jor-El. (At least, unless the ongoing fallout eventually reveals that he was someone else posing as a crazed Jor-El.)
• Y: The Last Man: Dr. Matsumori to Dr. Allison Mann. After Allison dies, Yorick notes that it was her hatred of her father that drove her to be brilliant, and her post-gendercide clones didn't have that.

Fan Works

• In Conversations with a Cryptid, All for One is Izuku's Disappeared Dad Hisashi Midoriya.
• In the Rise of the Guardians fanfiction Guardian of Light, it's revealed that Pitch is the biological father of the main character, Helen.
• Meg's Family reveals that Zack's real father is Lucifer, who is not only the Devil himself, but had also tried to take Meg away from Zack twice, and made his and his family's other enemies super villains. Subverted when, after this discovery is made, Lucifer spends the day with Zack and ends up treating him better than the man that actually raised him.
• Pokémon Reset Bloodlines has Ash's father. Over the course of several chapters, he had been built as a member of the Seven Brothers of Orre, a career criminal, a sociopath who has no qualms about sleeping with thousands of women to sire hundreds of bastard children, and the more it's revealed about him, the more despicable he becomes. The biggest twist comes in Chapter 34, where it's revealed to the audience (though not to Ash), that he's none other than the Bloodline King.

Films — Animation

• The LEGO Movie: The Man Upstairs is the "Stop Having Fun" Guys father of the little boy who's making up the story (and is the basis for Lord Business) He gets better after a Heel Realization.
• The LEGO Ninjago Movie has the evil Lord Garmadon and his son Lloyd. In this case, Garmadon actually loves his son and doesn't want to hurt him. The real surprise comes when it's revealed that Lloyd is the prophesied Green Ninja destined to defeat him, leaving both parties incredibly reluctant to fight each other.

Films — Live-Action

• Bloodthirsty: Vaughn turns out to be Grey's birth father. He's a ruthless werewolf who tries to mold her into his image. Grey refuses to go along, and kills him in the end so he can't harm anybody else.
• The Devil's Advocate: Milton is actually Kevin's father and actively seeks to corrupt Kevin to recruit him for his plans, even if he has to murder Kevin's loved ones to do it.
• Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare: Heroine Maggie Burroughs is revealed to be the daughter of the Big Bad Freddy Krueger.
• In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Ego seems to be a pretty decent father to Peter at first. Eventually it's revealed that Ego intends to use Peter to help him wipe out all life in the universe and replace it with extensions of himself, having killed his previous children who had failed to inherit his Celestial genes. Ego also casually tells Peter that he gave his mother a brain tumor when he realized that he was actually falling in love with her.
• King Stefan eventually becomes this to Princess Aurora near the end of Maleficent.
• In Shocker, the psychotic killer Horace Pinker reveals during his execution that Jonathan is actually his son and that he killed his mom. For trying to stop him, Pinker has apparently made it his life's goal to destroy his son and brutally murder everyone he loves, including his adoptive family and his girlfriend.
• Sin City: A Dame to Kill For: Johnny arrives in town to beat the corrupt, all-powerful Senator Roark himself in a poker game. We soon discover that Johnny is actually Roark's illegitimate second son, right before he has Johnny's hand broken and his girlfriend decapitated as a warning. Eventually, after Johnny still manages to beat his father fair and square at the table, he shoots Johnny in the head.
• While not really a spoiler any more to anyone even remotely familiar with Star Wars, Anakin "Darth Vader" Skywalker is an archetypical example toward Luke Skywalker, but he does eventually get better.
• Anthony Hopkins' dad to Benicio del Toro's leading character in the 2010 version of The Wolfman.

Literature

• In American Gods Shadow discovers that Mr. Wednesday is his father shortly before figuring out his scheme and resolving to stop it.
• The Beginning After the End: Sylvie is a double example. On one hand, her father is Agrona, the Lord of the Vritra and the one responsible for instigating the Divine Conflict that has led to the ruination of her bond (and Parental Substitute) Arthur's homeland of Dicathen. On the other hand, her grandfather Kezess is a Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist tyrant whose genocide of the Djinn led to the Start of Darkness for Agrona and his clan. And Arthur only learns about all of the above from the second message Sylvia (Sylvie's mother) left for him after Sylvie performed a Heroic Sacrifice to save him.
• Dune: Baron Vladimir Harkonnen turns out to be an archnemesis grandpa to Paul and Alia Atreides. Possibly a more straightforward example with the Baron and their mother, Lady Jessica, given that he tried to kill her and her son, not that he knew she was his natural daughter.
• H.I.V.E. Series: Otto's "father" is Overlord, a homicidal AI who created a human vessel, his own son, to take over so that he would have a strong young body to rule the world with. Otto, for obvious reasons, isn't okay with Overlord's Grand Theft Me, so the two spend books three through six duking it out. Otto comes out on top, albeit with much emotional damage and longing for a family that isn't trying to kill him.
• The Millennium Series has Alexander Zalachenko (a.k.a. "Zala") and his daughter, Lisbeth Salander. How deep does it go? Lisbeth, as a 12-year-old, tried to burn Zala alive in his car with a homemade Molotov cocktail, and she's the good guy.
• Valentine Morgenstern in The Mortal Instruments reveals himself to be Clary and Jace's father at the end of the first book and continues to be their enemy for the rest of the first trilogy. However, it's later revealed that he lied about being Jace's biological father, although he did raise him.
• Toklo's Jerkass father in Seeker Bears appears in Toklo's Story and returns in Forest Of Wolves. He had kicked Toklo and his family out when they were younger, so he fights him for his territory to return home.
• Villains by Necessity: It turns out that Mizzamir's Sam's birth father, the greatest wizard in the world who tries to stop his quest throughout the book. Sam has contracted to kill him, and does so by the end. Neither one knows the other's related to him before The Reveal in the finale though. Even prior to his quest Mizzamir had been the greatest threat to Sam as one of the last criminals, trying to brainwash him into being a good citizen with magic.
• In The Witchlands, Ragnor is shaping up to be one for his son Aeduen, seeing how the latter's currently mid-Heel–Face Turn.

Live-Action TV

• Kamen Rider has so many examples, especially from the second half of Heisei onward, that it's become a running gag in the fandom:
  • In Kamen Rider Blade Shiori Hirose's father unsealed the Undead at the beginning the series and presumably died in the process. He's later recreated by BOARD's chairman as Trial B, though in the end he comes to his senses after protecting his daughter.
  • Kamen Rider Kiva has Fangire's King try to kill his infant son Taiga and his mother in 1986, only to be killed by Otoya. When he gets revived in 2008, Taiga, who just went through Heel–Face Turn and didn't like him to begin with, sends him back to the grave with Wataru's help.
  • Kamen Rider Double has a whole archnemesis family for Philip to deal with, with the ringleader of the Sonozaki crime family being his father. The first movie also invokes this trope, setting up Shotaro's father figure (and Akiko's actual father) as the villain. Ultimately subverted when it's revealed this is a Dopant disguising himself as Skull.
  • Wiseman of Kamen Rider Wizard turns out to be the father of Koyomi and his plan to recreate the Sabbath was to resurrect her.
  • The true villain of Kamen Rider Drive is eventually revealed to be Tenjuro Banno, the thought-to-be-deceased father of secondary Rider Go Shijima. Banno created the Roidmudes and was such an abusive parent to them that he qualifies as this trope to them too. This ultimately leads to all of Banno's surviving children teaming up to stop his plans.
  • Kamen Rider Ghost's secondary rider Specter is infamous for having multiple fathers due to being adopted, which allows him to do the archnemesis dad routine twice. Makoto is revealed to have been created by Danton, one of the creators of the Gamma world and obsessed with perfecting his creations. Makoto hated his presumed father Daigo Fukami with passion before the truth was revealed.
  • Kamen Rider Amazons Season 2's protagonist Chihiro is revealed to be Jin's son, who tried to murder Chihiro at every opportunity for killing his mother and also being the source of the new infection.
  • Masamune Dan to his son Kuroto in Kamen Rider Ex-Aid. Kuroto is no saint either, but he at least wanted to use Kamen Rider Chronicle to resurrect his mother, Masamune just wants to use it to control everyone's lives and Take Over the World.
  • Kamen Rider Build discovers his father, previously thought dead, to have been working with the Big Bad all along. Unlike most examples here, his father turns out to have been using his position to discover the villain's only weakness, but only after several clashes between him and Sento. Said Big Bad Evolt though is revealed to have fused Ryuga Banjo with his DNA while he was still forming in the womb, in effect making Evolt his father.
  • The future overlord Ohma Zi-O from Kamen Rider Zi-O has a father-like role towards his past self, sending his retainer Woz to guide him, trying to direct him into becoming an overlord who believes himself to be loved by all... when he's wiped out vast regions of the planet.
  • Kamen Rider Zero-One has a chain of these as part of its themes of parenthood. The show's central conflict is built around a chain of abusive father figures from Jin to Horobi to the Ark to Gai, and all of those relationships result in at least one father-son battle when someone in the chain does a Heel–Face Turn or just has had enough of their father's abuse. Then in Gai's childhood flashback we learn that his dad was a Fantasy-Forbidding Father, which resulted in said chain to begin with. On top of all this, Aruto's father Soreo Hiden serves as an archnemesis in the show's first movie, courtesy of mind control.
  • Kamen Rider Saber subverts this. The villain for the first quarter of the show is Kamen Rider Calibur, who is known to be Kento's father Hayato. However, it turns out that not only was his Face–Heel Turn to investigate corruption in Sword of Logos, he's actually dead and Daichi Kamijo, the previous Kamen Rider Saber, has taken the mantle of Calibur. Kento very much sees this as a textbook Archnemesis Dad scenario before the truth is discovered.
  • In Kamen Rider Revice, it turns out that Genta Igarashi, the three main Riders' Bumbling Dad, was actually the first Kamen Rider to draw on the power of his inner demon, fighting the results of failed experiments 25 years ago. Long separated, his inner demon returns with a vengeance in the present day to possess Genta and transform into Kamen Rider Vail. Given that Vail is the product of injecting Genta with cells from Giff, and the Igarashis are the only people known to have fully sapient inner demons, it's not Genta who's the Archnemesis Dad, it's Vail, to Vice, Kagero, and Lovekov.
  • Kamen Rider Geats accidentally creates his own Archnemesis Dad when he wishes for the Desire Grand Prix staff to become his family as a reward for winning the first round of the series. When his relationship with said staff turns antagonistic, it's Girori, his new father, who spends the next round of the DGP trying to get rid of him before finally taking the field directly as Kamen Rider Glare so that he can eliminate Geats personally.
• A gender flipped version appears at the end of the first season of The Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nóg with Big Bad Queen Maeve being revealed as the mother of Chosen One Rohan, Mystic Knight of Fire. This causes much angst and a 10-Minute Retirement when Rohan finds out. When she's defeated at the end of the season, she even tells him she's actually proud of what a powerful warrior he's become. Had the series progressed to a season two, it's possible this relationship would have come into play again later.
• Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger: Big Bad Dagded Dujardin is later revealed to have created Gira by magically impregnating his mother, the previous queen of Shugoddam. Gira's status as Dagded's child granted him several powers such as the ability to communicate with Shugods and immortality, which turn out to be important in the heroes' opposition to Dagded's tyranny.
• In Timeless, the highest-ranking Rittenhouse member we see is Benjamin Cahill. He later turns out to be Lucy's biological father. In the Season 1 finale, Lucy discovers, to her horror, that her mother is also a member of Rittenhouse. She's one of the team's antagonists in Season 2.

Video Games

• In Assassin's Creed III, Connor Kenway's father Haytham is the Grand Master of the Colonial Templars and a major antagonist, though Connor considers Charles Lee to be his personal nemesis.
• Baldur's Gate III:
  • In Act 2 you meet previously deceased Barrier Maiden Isobel Thorm, daughter of Arc Villain Ketheric Thorm. He made a Deal with the Devil with Myrkul to bring her Back from the Dead, but as a loyal cleric of Selune, she wants nothing to do with him due to his becoming a monster who is loyal to Myrkul as a result and aids the party in their efforts to end his eternal life (potential kidnapping and brainwashing notwithstanding).
  • Bhaal, if the Dark Urge works against him, since it's revealed that the Dark Urge is one of Bhaal's children.
• Andrew Ryan from BioShock, but it comes as a surprise to him too and he stops trying to kill you when he finds out.
• Father Balder from Bayonetta, who is later revealed to be Bayonetta's father.
• This happens surprisingly often in Fire Emblem:
  • In Fire Emblem Gaiden and its remake, Emperor Rudolf turns out to be this to Alm, whom he had spirited away to Zofia under his old friend Mycen's care. Alm doesn't know anything until after mortally wounding Rudolf, who tells him the truth as he lay dying. Naturally, Alm doesn't take that reveal well.
  • Also from Gaiden/Echoes is Jedah, who is this to Sonya, because Jedah had sacrificed her sisters to Duma. If they clash in Act 4, a special conversation will occur where Sonya vows to kill him and avenge her sisters.
  • This happens to Tailtiu and Lex in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, since their fathers Reptor and Lombard are members of the Ancient Conspiracy led by Arvis. Or better said, by Manfroy of the Loptr Church.
  • Nergal is heavily implied to be this for Ninian and Nils in Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade. And neither of them ever recalled it: Nergal lost his memories because The Dark Side Will Make You Forget, Ninian and Nils because they were too young when they got separated from him.
  • Ashnard was this for Soren in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. He never does find out, though.
  • Validar to Robin in Fire Emblem: Awakening. Unlike the others, Robin does find out midway through the story... from Validar himself.
  • Toyed with in Fire Emblem Fates: Corrin this game is the son or daughter of the Big Bad Anankos, but more exactly, the child of his sane side, which was given a human form for some time and loved Corrin and his/her mother Mikoto enough to summon people from other universes to protect them. Doesn't stop the proper Anankos from being the Big Bad of the game and a terrible dad to Corrin.
    • Played for Laughs with Nohrian knight Arthur and his son Percy in the same game. Percy's so mad at Arthur for not visiting him in the Deeprealms more often that he sics a pack of bandits on him after claiming Arthur's an aggressor. Percy himself is the boss of that battle. Thankfully everything is cleared up after he's defeated; he apologizes to his dad for attacking him, while Arthur makes amends for his absence by taking Percy along with the party when they leave.
    • Then played seriously again in the Heirs of Fate DLC; if the protagonist Shigure is fathered by the male Corrin, Anankos will be his Archnemesis Granddad. In the game proper, however, Shigure may or may not be in this situation.
  • In Fire Emblem Engage, Sombron, the Fell Dragon, is the father of the protagonist Alear, who was adopted by the Divine Dragon Lumera. He is also this to Veyle, who eventually joins the heroes to stop him.
• In Five Nights at Freddy's 3, Springtrap is revealed to be possessed by the spirit of the Big Bad, Purple Guy/William Afton. In Sister Location, William Afton is revealed to have at LEAST two children: Elizabeth, who was killed by Circus Baby and possessed her, and a son, Michael, who might actually the main protagonist of most of the games in this series. Being the one responsible for all the bad things in the entire series, including the deaths of his own children, he is most certainly an arch-nemesis of his kids, and also just kids in general. He might also be the father of the Crying Child from Five Nights at Freddy's 4. It's revealed that Michael has been hunting him for a long time, and in Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator he willingly stays behind in the burning pizzeria to make sure his father dies too. It doesn't fully stick but he at least managed to free his victims so it wasn't All for Nothing.
• Kratos gets this problem at the end of the God of War II when he finds out Zeus is his father. It takes him the whole of the next game to actually kill him.
• In Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, Heroic Bastard Amiti is the son of Hidden Agenda Villain Alex (making him The Smart Guy Rief's cousin). It's never outright stated within the game as his late mother took the secret of his paternity to her grave, but the Hair Color Spoiler makes it fairly obvious. The Professor Kraden knew all along, but kept the others mostly Locked Out of the Loop so the fight against him wouldn't become more complicated for them.
• In Jade Empire, not only is Master Li your character's father figure, it's also possible to find out that he's Dawn Star's father. In a subversion, absolutely nothing changes with his reactions to Dawn Star.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II reveals that Giliath Osborne, the chancellor of Erebonia is the father of the protagonist Rean Schwarzer, who forces his son to become a national hero of Erebonia such that the pressure gets to him to force him to participate in wars he never wanted to. They don't become archenemies till the final chapters of Cold Steel III where Rean has to stop his father from potentially dooming the world because of Osborne releasing the curse of Erebonia.
• Big Boss is the villain of the first two Metal Gear titles and is revealed to the player in Metal Gear Solid to have been Solid Snake's father (though Snake himself seems to have known this much earlier).
  • One of Big Boss's other clones/sons, Liquid Snake, was an Antagonistic Offspring towards him from a young age and resents Solid Snake for (among other reasons) killing Big Boss before he could get the chance to.
• It's been known by those that pay attention that Old Bird and Grey Voice have been surrogate fathers to Samus Aran of Metroid fame. Neither of them count, not even Grey Voice at his worst, and yet, Metroid Dread showed that Samus had another biological donor for her Chozo enhancement: Raven Beak, the game's antagonist and the Greater-Scope Villain of the entire series. His final line before they throw down at game's end is seen by Samus as defiling the memory of the more benevolent Chozo who raised her.
  Raven Beak: You disappoint me... ...my daughter.
• Persona 5: Masayoshi Shido serves as this to his bastard son Goro Akechi, who resents him for abandoning him and his late mother, and plans on taking revenge on Shido by destroying his political career by exposing their connection to the world.
• Leon Bronev from Professor Layton. The antagonist of Azran Legacy, and the indirect cause of Descole's villainy in the two prior games. Later revealed to be the birth father of both Professor Layton and Jean Descole, though only the latter was aware of this.
• Baion takes over as the main villain of Part II in Solatorobo: Red the Hunter, having given his share of genetic material to grow Red into the Half-Human Hybrid he eventually discovers to be. It should be noted that Baion also wants to commit global genocide against everyone on the planet, including Red.
• While not a biological father, the Final Boss in Spellcasting 101 turns out to be the hero's abusive stepfather, who's really an evil sorcerer.
• Tales Series:
  • Kratos Aurion from Tales of Symphonia is this to the main character. Unlike Darth Vader, it results in a much more successful Heel–Face Turn.
  • Tales of the Abyss has two examples. First is that Natalia's biological father is Largo the Black Lion, something she only finds out in the end game. Since Largo considers that part of him long dead, it's a major tearjerker when Natalia fights and kills him personally despite making it clear before she wants to get to know him as a person. Second is much more complicated as it's made clear throughout the game Luke looks up to Van as his Parental Substitute and he's even responsible for his creation. In the end, Luke kills him...and makes it very clear he never got over the fact Van is his father in all but blood.
• Tekken: In the first two games, Kazuya's #1 archnemesis is his father Heihachi. In Part 3, Kazuya "died" and Heihachi was an Archnemesis Granddad to Jin. From Tekken 4 onward, Heihachi is still the archnemesis to both Jin and Kazuya (who is Back from the Dead) and Kazuya is an Archnemesis Dad to Jin, who hates them both.
• Xenogears has a few of these.
  • Miang, revealed to be the mother of all humanity, is also the story's Big Bad. And as a Body Surfer who can awaken in any human woman, one of Miang's incarnations was Fei's own mother Karen. Fei and Karen were not technically adversaries, but Miang's consciousness was in control most of the time. Karen resurfaced in the end to be a Heroic Sacrifice to save young Fei's life. Miang simply surfed to another new body somewhere else in the world.
  • Fei's father got some of this too. Grahf, a mysterious and dark adversary of Fei for most of the game, is not only actually himself from a previous life incarnation who survives as a Body Surfer, but it's Fei's own father Kahn who turns out to have been Grahf's host for years already. Though Kahn and Fei are also not technically adversaries, Kahn does all he can just to stay in control of his own body, though Kahn appeared to have even more periods of useful self-control than Karen did.
  • Rico's archnemesis Kaiser Sigmund is actually his father, and neither of them knew they were related.

Web Animation

• The Freelancer Saga (seasons 9-10) of Red vs. Blue ended with the reveal that the Director, Alison, and Agent Carolina are father, mother and daughter, respectively. As with the last such reveal (the identity and source of the Alpha AI), it changes pretty much everything the audience knew about the preceding storyline.
• In the final episode of the series, is finally revealed that the Big Bad of Broken Saints is Lear Dunham who also happens to be Shandala's biological father.

Webcomics

• Tarquin in The Order of the Stick — although he does the Luke, I Am Your Father so early it's practically his Establishing Character Moment, and most of the dynamic is built on already knowing this.
  • Tarquin wants this for himself and Elan in a bizarre way. He clearly cares about his son and would like him to rule with him, but since Elan won't ignore his atrocities, Genre Savvy Tarquin figures that them eventually fighting to the death will at least make an excellent story that could have them live forever in legends. Elan is... somewhat less keen on this plan.
  • Tarquin and his other son Nale seem to also share this dynamic in an Evil Versus Evil way. They were also former allies, but Nale seems to have betrayed Tarquin at some point, and the two hated each others' methods (Nale being Contractually Genre Blind and always eager to show his superiority). Tarquin still tries to give Nale a chance to be a villain on his side, but it doesn't work out. Finally, Nale shouts that he doesn't want anything from Tarquin, including his favouritism, not realising that with the special favour withdrawn, other motives give Tarquin reason to just kill him on the spot.
• Slightly Damned: It's revealed that the jakkai Moonshade is actually the father of Rhea Snaketail (though she doesn't know it due to jakkai child rearing customs) and he was the one who murdered her and presumably other relatives to gain the power of their ancestor Moku and when he learns she came Back from the Dead, he has zero qualms about killing her a second time.
• Sluggy Freelance: After Riff's long-absent father Wilcott is finally revealed, it's later revealed that he's running a cult of the world-ending demon K'Z'K. His motive is a convincing fake prophecy that makes it seem as though serving the demon is the only way to save his loved ones from the inevitable end... but Riff, who's more into Saving the World, has little sympathy for this and considers it unforgivable nevertheless.

Web Original

• In Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, it's heavily implied that the conflict of the series was caused by Yellow Guy's abusive father, Roy Gribbleston. We only find out in the last episode that he created the setting and evil teachers that the protagonists encounter.
• In the story Heroes and Villains and Scott, Scott's best friend is superhero Ezra Gordon, leader of New York's best super team. His father is the prime supervillain of the west coast.

Web Videos

• Session 12 of Belkinus Necrohunt reveals that "Alter Enoch", the being that was living within Enoch, is truly Thyrmelius Cog, an archangel of Erathis that Nathaniel deduces is Enoch's father.
• In Noob Tenshirock, the hacker that keeps breaking into the MMORPG in which the story is set, turns out to be this to Judge Dead, the MMORPG in question's head Game Master. Tenshirock did this because his son had started hating him for reasons he couldn't understand and thought that getting his son's attention away from the game would make him more open to his attempts to rebuild their relationship.

Western Animation

• As soon as Adventure Time's protagonist Finn the Human defeats his most powerful opponent, the Lich, he tries to establish an emotional connection to his Disappeared Dad, Martin. Finn assumes that he had a good reason for abandoning him. Martin... corrects that notion.
• In Codename: Kids Next Door, Numbuh One/Nigel Uno is quite understandably freaked out when he realizes that Big Bad Grandfather is his grandfather. This also makes Father his uncle. Inverted with his father, who was once the legendary KND operative Agent Zero.
• In the Marvel's Spider-Man storyline "Generations", Swarm is Jefferson Davis, Miles's dad. Notably, he doesn't know this connection either as he took on the Swarm identity to protect Miles from the new Spider-Man bringing supervillain fights to Brooklyn. When he realises the truth, he disappears.
• In Miraculous Ladybug, the Big Bad Hawk Moth is eventually revealed to be Gabriel Agreste, the father of Adrien Agreste a.k.a. his nemesis Cat Noir. Neither of them knows who the other is yet, but both of them have come close to figuring it out, only to be thrown off the trail. For what it's worth, Gabriel is entirely unwilling to knowingly let Adrien get hurt, apart from in the episode ''Cat Blanc'', where he mentally tortures and akumatizes him..
• OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes: In the aptly-named episode "Big Reveal" we learn that Professor Venomous is former hero Laserblast and KO's father.
• In The Powerpuff Girls, it is revealed in the movie that Mojo Jojo, nemesis of the titular characters, was once Professor Utonium's monkey assistant Jojo and it was through his tampering that Chemical X was introduced into the formula that created them. Mojo is left speechless at the realization that this technically makes him the creator of his greatest enemies. Not only that, but due to a time-travel episode from the 1998 series, he inadvertently caused a young Utonium to actually want to become a scientist to "create the perfect little girl" after being saved by the Powerpuffs. This means that Mojo created the means for his and the girls' existence, but also the original desire which lead him to be adopted by the Professor as Jojo in the first place.
• As it turns out, The Daughters of Aku from Samurai Jack are literally the daughters of Aku, spawned from the black essence that the High Priestess drank, including Ashi herself. This, unfortunately, allowed Aku to puppeteer her body against Jack and force the latter to surrender, unwilling to harm the woman he loves.
• In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003), Mikey was sent to an Alternate Universe where the Super Turtles are heroes with superpowers and not ninjas. The Super Turtles' father, Sliver, is their archnemesis which they already knew, but Mikey and the viewers didn't until The Reveal.
• Gender flipped in W.I.T.C.H. (2004) where Nerissa is revealed to be Caleb's mother. Even more: she deliberately conceived Caleb to have a child who'd eventually join her, in what can easily be seen as rape by deception — she used a false identity to seduce Caleb's father Julian and get him to impregnate her.

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