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... Huh.
"You think of that girl as a child, Roger! All your intercourse with her is intercourse between a man and a child!"
-Paul Montague (Cillian Murphy), The Way We Live Now
A story where a man scores with a woman because the man had a protective role towards the woman when she was a child. She looked up to the man, thought of him as a parent or beloved uncle, a role model, counted on him to be there when she needs him, etc. In the more extreme cases she might have even vowed to marry him when she grew up.
Then, when She Is All Grown Up, the man decides to take advantage of the girl's feelings towards him by using it as the basis for a sexual relationship.
Nothing is ever said about how inappropriate, and even creepy, this is. If the man was a real parent, this would be incest, but of course they're Not Blood Relatives.
Often the story tries to excuse the man's behavior by claiming that he resisted the idea of a relationship but it's the girl who convinced him. Which may be slightly less creepy in that he didn't plan it in advance, but hardly prevents it from being questionable at all.
Compare Pygmalion Plot. When successful, usually leads to a May December Romance.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- More directly from City Hunter II episode 39-41, where Umibozu had taught the girl Miki to fight when she was a child, and protected her for a while. When she's grown up she appears, wanting to marry him. Umibozu doesn't, but they end up running a restaurant together; exactly how close they are stays vague. Ryo Saeba refers to this as the Hikaru Genji plan.
- Also called by that name in Negima where, in a gender inversion, Misa Kakizaki wants to do a "reverse Hikaru Genji plan" by making a good impression on the boy Negi, thus putting herself in a favorable position (er, no pun intended) when he grows up. After all, the age difference is really no more than five years. The reaction of the other girls? "Genius!"
- This almost happens in Mai-Otome between Sergei and Nina, adoptive father and daughter in an attempt to undo the Phlebotinum that could destroy the planet, instigated by Nina but he backs down at the last minute. After the series it's left open to interpretation what happens between them after the series and Sergei loses his memories.
- Rurouni Kenshin has this (sorta) with 16-year-old Misao and 28-year-old Aoshi. Of course Aoshi, being The Stoic, never explicitly returns Misao's affections.
- The relationship between Hagu and Shuji in Honey And Clover can be seen as such. Hagu chooses Shuji to the exclusion of one of the younger boys who are in love with her.
- Reiji from Kodomo No Jikan sees his ward Rin as a replacement of her mother *and* hid dead wife, Aki, and is counting down the days until she's of marriageable age. Rin herself is quite aware of this but remains loyal to him regardless, despite Aoki's efforts.
- A great many Inuyasha fans like to think that this will be the ultimate result of Defrosting Ice King Sesshoumaru's relationship with his Morality Pet Rin, although the series itself gives no indication of it since Rin is still only about nine years old at the finale.
- In Desert Punk, the title character takes on little Kosuna as an apprentice for this very reason.
- Inverted in Kure-nai: while Shinkurou is very protective of the little girl he's caring for, any romantic affection seems to occur solely on Murasaki's side (notice her Meaningful Name). Then again, considering Murasaki's Big Screwed Up Family, this can be seen as played straight from their part.
- Amaterasu & Lachesis' relationship in The Five Star Stories is like this, but since they're more or less the only two Physical Gods in their universe it's excusable. Who else are they gonna be with?
- Gender-swapped in Shakugan No Shana where a female Crimson Lord by the name of Pheles raises a boy named Johan and the two later fall in love after Johan was grown up.
- Utilized in Count Cain with Oscar (19) and Merryweather (10 or so). Initially, Merry finds him creepy and annoying but she likes him much better after he nearly dies protecting her from a bomb blast. Oscar's Freudian Excuse: The wife of Handsome Letch Oscar left him and/or died (it's been a while) and the strong and willful Merry reminds him of her. Bizarrely, Oscar's late wife looks identical, not to Merry but Count Cain. Battle Butler Riff is the only one who knows this, but decides to keep it to himself (as if he knows this series is already weird enough).
- At the end of Kare Kano, Hideaki Asaba takes this to its perverted apex: he decides his true love will be Yukino and Souichiro's daughter... while Yukino is still pregnant with her. As shown in the Distant Finale, it is pretty much set up, although he and Sakura haven't gotten together yet.
- In the Bastard! manga, Dark Schneider rescues a dark elf child and then pursues a sexual relationship with her once she comes of age. (Of course, Dark Schneider isn't exactly meant to be a paragon of moral behavior...)
Comic Books
- Averted in "That Yellow Bastard" in Sin City; Nancy Callahan develops such feelings towards John Hartigan, but while Hartigan is protective enough of her, his sense of right and wrong will not allow him to take advantage — in his mind, taking advantage would make him no better than Junior, the sick paedophilic bastard he rescued her from eight years ago (not to mention the fact that he had to serve eight years of prison time on false charges of raping her because Junior's father, Senator Roark, wanted to make him pay for trying to bring down his son).
- One of the outright weirdest examples of this trope happened in — where else? — a Silver Age issue of Superman's Girl Friend Lois Lane. You see, Superman is turned into a baby by some Red Kryptonite, and both Lois and Lana try to get him to promise to marry them once it wears off. Ultimately they both hypnotize him into marrying them. But it works out fine for Superman — though not our universe's Lois or Lana — because this is actually a Superman from an alternate universe where bigamy is legal. I Am Not Making This Up.
Film
- In The Last Of The Mohicans, Nathaniel tries this with Alice Munro, a girl he essentially raised, but it backfires.
- Huh? Who did what now? Making a movie of Last of the Mohicans would be a great idea; it's a shame nobody ever has...
- Happens in the French movie Le Bossu (a.k.a. On Guard), with the girl having fallen in love with her guardian and him initially resisting.
- And yet it still fails not to seem creepy, mostly because he became her unofficial adoptive father sometime when she was one year old.
- There are overtones of this in the 1989 Canadian film Cold Comfort (not to be confused with the better-known Cold Comfort Farm). Floyd, who lives in a remote rural cabin, tries to set up travelling salesman Stephen with his innocent-but-willing eighteen-year-old daughter Dolores. Complicating this situation is that Floyd is a mood-swinging psychotic who himself has lustful feelings for Dolores. He has her do a strip-tease for Stephen, then nearly kills him for looking at her topless, then calmly praises her "perfect" breasts. It all goes downhill from there.
- This is basically the exact romantic subplot of Memoirs of a Geisha, wherein Sayuri falls for The Chairman, who buys her shaved ice when she is a little girl and he is in his forties. They wind up together in the end, and this is made to seem right and happy. This troper watched the movie version with two girls who thought it was romantic, though he was pretty squicked out.
- To be fair, the aforesaid old guy is portrayed by Ken Watanabe.
- The Professional/Leon almost goes down this road with Matilda trying to force his hand, but is subverted by the ending. Byyy...oh you know.
Literature
- The trope namer is indirectly the Tale Of Genji (Genji Monogatari) from Japan, where Hikaru Genji raises the 10 year old girl Murasaki to be his wife. This makes the trope Older Than Print.
- Robert Heinlein did this a lot:
- In the novel (and anime, and films) Daddy Long Legs, the main character Judy ends up marrying her patron. At least in the novel, Judy's interaction with the titular Daddy-Long-Legs ( aka the eccentric millionaire Jervis Pendelton, her roommate Julia's uncle) is limited to the letters she send to him, so they don't really have an actual relationship until she meets him in person (not realizing he's her patron) and they begin a romance. On the other hand, he does occasionally abuse his authority as her patron to interfere with her relationships with other young men, particularly her best friend Sallie's older brother, Jimmy McBride.
- Subverted in Charles Dickens' Bleak House; while really grateful to him, the heroine essentially tells her guardian that she loves him as a daughter abd not as a wife.
- Happens via time travel in The Time Traveler's Wife in a Stable Time Loop, when Henry meets Clare for the first time she immediately starts a relationship, only after this dose he begin to time travel to Clare's childhood. Henry doesn't really have much choice in the matter, though.
- In David Eddings's Elenium, the queen Ehlana browbeats her protector, Sparhawk, who practically raised her, into marrying her in the third book. Sparhawk seems to realize the inappropriateness of it, as he tries to back out of it several times and feels guilty about it when she's kidnapped in the Tamuli to get at him, but she outranks him, and overrules his objections.
- There's actually a line of dialogue about how she's carrying a Prince Consort coronet for him "around with her like a coil of fishing line."
- Their daughter, age 6, tells her father who she's going to marry; as she's the incarnation of a god, if the prospective husband disagrees, he better have started running right then.
- In the alternate history novel Fortune's Stroke by Eric Flint and David Drake, Rome's spymaster has to bully an Indian Empress into marrying the great warrior assassin who raised her and trained her, even though they both want it.
- Occurs in Emma and, arguably, in Sense & Sensibility by Jane Austen. The inherent creepiness in the premise of the former was a point of contention in this editor's English class.
- Semi-averted and semi-played straight in the Drizzt Do'Urden novels. He doesn't raise her, but Drizzt Do'Urden clearly thinks of the human girl Catti-brie, whom he met when she was about ten, as something like a little sister. However, as she grows up, she seems to have fallen for him, and he doesn't even notice until she's already involved with someone else...at which point, with some more overt hinting from her, he finds himself very attracted to her. Some years later, they finally connect.
- Even more Squicky than a normal Hikaru Genji Plan, on the other hand, is Drizzt's relationship with his sister (though they are actual siblings). She seemed taken with him from the time he was an infant, and did most of the work in raising him. At his graduation from the warriors' academy, he is repulsed by the drug-fueled demon orgy and leaves. His sister follows him, and tries to seduce him. He is about as repulsed as ever, thankfully...kee-rist, drow are messed up.
- Happens in Dumas' The Count Of Monte Cristo between the titular character and his young charge, Haydée. He even has the line, I paraphrase: "Youth is the flower and love is its fruit... happy is the gardener who has seen it grow ripe before picking it." There's also a scene where he worries that in ten years' time he'll be an old man and Haydée will still be young, to which she answers (paraphrased again): "My father was sixty years old but I thought he was more beautiful than any young man I have ever seen." And this is supposed to be romantic and not creepy. Naturally, as far as this troper knows, all adaptations so far have steered clear of this subplot, usually either marrying Haydée off to someone else or just writing her out of the story, and the Count is usually paired off with Mercedes. Interestingly, the anime adaptation Gankutsuou (in space!) presents a familial love between the two, without romantic overtones.
- In the Twilight series, male werewolves sometimes "imprint" (a sort of one-way soulmate-recognition thing) on girls while the girls are still toddlers or even infants (as Jacob does on Bella's baby daughter Nessie). In such cases, the male werewolf becomes a sort of uncle/older brother figure, or even a father figure, to the child, and it's assumed that of course she'll want to marry him once she's of age. To quote the series, "why would she say no?"
- The legendary king Cophetua had no interest in women until he fell in love with a beggar child and decided to raise her to be his queen. This story is best known through Lord Tennyson's poem The Beggar Maid.
- This was Humbert Humbert's motivation for marrying Charlotte in Lolita.
- Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now plays this realistically and tragically: Roger's love for Hetta (who has the added bonus of being his cousin) is portrayed as more pitiable than creepy. She isn't into it, though.
- Shows up repeatedly in One Hundred Years Of Solitude.
- Played somewhat worryingly straight in Mercedes Lackey's and James Mallory's Obsidian Trilogy. The human Wild Mage Idalia and the elven warrior/Dragon Mage Jermayan are in love. Elves, however, marry for life, and only once, and like most elves, Jermayan's people can live for much longer than the healthiest human. After they reconcile themselves to this, Idalia dies as part of a price for a powerful spell she cast. Then the queen of the elves has a child...and the child has most of Idalia's features; apparently reincarnation is something elves believe in. He notes that now they're both elves, "eighteen years is not so long to wait".
- One of the creepier subplots in Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth involves the male protagonist's relationship with Pear Blossom, a girl he allowed into his household as a servant. When they consummate a relationship, she's still jailbait by modern standards and he's at least old enough to be her grandfather. I'm not sure if this counts because the man didn't directly raise the girl as a daughter but took her in as a servant out of pity.
- How has Thornbirds not yet been mentioned? It's the sole plot of the book. Especially awkward since the man in question is a catholic priest.
- In the first book in A Series of Unfortunate Events, Count Olaf tries to marry his young ward Violet. Though he didn't use 'position of trust'; he tried to force her so he can inherit her and her siblings's money.
Live Action TV
- Doctor Who, episode "The Girl in the Fireplace". The Doctor saves Madame de Pompadour when she's a child, and meets her when she's all grown up via time travel. She's been expecting him all her life, and they "dance", which has been used as a euphemism for sex in the series.
- A gender inversion occurred on Angel, between Conner and Cordelia; later lampshaded in the comics with Conner's line about "My first time was with a woman who changed my diapers?!" (Though she didn't actually raise him.)
Theater
- Judge Turpin tries to pull this with his ward Johanna Barker in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, it doesn't work because Johanna hates him and elopes with Anthony the sailor. And her real father Benjamin, alias Sweeney Todd, manages to get his revenge on Turpin and kill him.
- In Gilbert And Sullivan's The Mikado Ko-Ko attempts to marry his ward, Yum-Yum, though by the end he's paired off with Katisha, a woman closer to his age.
- They do it again in Iolanthe, where the Lord Chancellor eventually convinces himself that he can marry his ward Phyllis.
- And in The Pirates of Pezance (notice a trend here?), Frederic's onetime nursemaid Ruth, who is the only woman he has seen in 13 years, convinces him that she is a beautiful woman, and that he should marry her. This plan falls apart the second he sees a group of girls his own age.
- Used in Moliere's comedies School for Wives and School for Husbands, where in both cases a male character has a female ward they plan to marry — this doesn't end up working in either case
- This plot is lampshaded and averted in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, as while Jack/Earnest has his pretty ward Cecily being raised in the countyside like male characters in similar comedies, he is not interested in a romantic relationship with her.
- In Beaumarchais' play The Barber of Seville (and the operas based on it, of which Rossini's is the most famous), Doctor Bartholo plots to marry his ward Rosine (Bartolo and Rosina in Rossini). Count Almaviva and Figaro foil the plot.
Video Games
- The Princess Maker series of video games have this trope as a possible ending if you develop a close enough relationship with the girl you raise, sometimes if she also has a low moral score. (It's often frowned upon in the game itself, however.)
- In Soul Nomad, Hawthorne is revealed to be doing the same thing as Judge Turpin with his daughter Tricia. Although he is killed before this happens in the Normal Campaign, in the Demon Campaign, he succeeds and breaks her utterly. The Nereids' plan for Penn is similar to this since due to their status as a One Gender Race they need a male from another race in order to breed.
Webcomics
- The Dr. Steve/Oasis relationship from Sluggy Freelance has a few overtones of this. After raising Oasis to adulthood and taking control of her brain, Steve's plans include having her give him first hand accounts of a lesbian date and wearing skimpy clothes while she serves him food.
Real Life
- Woody Allen and Soon-Yi, the adopted daughter of his girlfriend.
- U.S. President Grover Cleveland took a major role in raising his goddaughter Frances after her father died. During his administration, rumors abounded that the bachelor president was going to marry Frances' mother. Those rumors turned out to be a generation off.
- Adolf Hitler's relation to Geli Raubel, which led to a massive underground conspiracy theory over her demise, as she had slowly become less enamoured with him due to his interest in politics superceding time spent with her.
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