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alt title(s): Raise Your Own Wife 
"You think of that girl as a child, Roger! All your intercourse with her is intercourse between a man and a child! [...] So how can you possibly view your advances to her with anything other than embarrassment and disgust?!''"
— Paul Montague (Cillian Murphy), TV version of 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 girl often decides she is in love with the man, or vice versa.
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. This makes it less creepy, in that he didn't plan it in advance, and it is what she wants as well (though doesn't make it not creepy).
A source of Values Dissonance in older works, because it used to be common practice for noblemen to marry younger women from friendly families, so this trope would have occurred a lot both in fiction and real life.
Compare Pygmalion Plot, Parental Incest and Incest Is Relative. When successful, usually leads to a May December Romance.
Examples
Trope Namer
- 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.
Anime and Manga
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.
- According to rabid anti-fans of Magneto , he apparently did this to Rogue in the Age of Apocalypse, as they initially had a surrogate father-daugther relationship when he mentored her after she accidentally permanently absorbed the powers and part of the psyche of his own secretly long-lost biological daughter Polaris , who was even older than her .
- What rabid fans of Ao A Sabretooth and Blink wish he had actually done to her in canon (supposedly, since they're still both currently single though separated, hope springs eternal) .
Fan Fic
- Apparently there is a camp of fanfiction writers for Fate Stay Night that use this angle on Archer and Rin.
- This Troper has seen some Axis Powers Hetalia fanworks where either Japan or China (specially the first) have these plans towards their adoptive sister, Taiwan.
Film
- In "The Professional/Leon" Natalie Portman's 13 yr old character Matilda asks a hitman named Leon to train her to be a hitperson, to revenge her younger brother killed in a drug deal gone wrong. He reluctantly takes her under his wing and she grows to have sexual feelings for him, which he never returns, but she does confess her love to him as he does. Leon goes from being teacher and protector to a love interest for the young girl. Averted by the ending
- 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. It still fails not to seem creepy, mostly because he became her unofficial adoptive father sometime when she was one year old, and she went with unnerving speed from regarding him as "Papa" to thinking of him as "husband on the hoof" once she learned he wasn't any blood relation.
- In the latest adaptation, Lagardère (2003), he marries her widowed mother instead.
- 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. The aforesaid old guy may be portrayed by Ken Watanabe, but still...
- Inverted in Merlins Shop Of Mystical Wonders, when a man accidentally turns himself into a baby, and his wife is left to raise him.
- The movie/play Gigi is about an adolescent girl raised to be a wealthy man's ideal mistress (not wife, just mistress), but he ends up falling in love with her and marrying her.
- Inverted in the 2009 movie [[Orphan]]- the titular character is actually a thirty-something year old adult who tries to come on to her legal guardians, and kills them when they refuse.
- Narrowly averted at the end of An American In Paris.
- The film (and presumably the literature it's based on) Portrait of Jennie does an odd variation on this when an artist meets a mysterious, too-young girl. Jennie promises him that they are meant to be together and that she will grow up for him... and does. Very quickly. Of course, she's already dead. Despite this description, it's a beautiful film.
Literature
- Averted in the early 19th century novel Belinda. Clarence Hervey raises Virginia St. Pierre and gives her an education ala Rousseau's Emile. Then, after some particularly contrived coincidences, he figures out that she is incredibly insipid, due to his teaching, and instead falls for the titular Belinda
- Robert Heinlein did this a lot:
- Played disturbingly straight in Time Enough For Love. Lazarus Long ends up not only marrying his adopted daughter Dora, whom he raised from a very young age, but naming his spaceship's ridiculously human AI after her, and giving it a young child's personality. Then again, the second part of that may be read as him missing her, and keeping the ship at a young age so it WOULDN'T grow up and fall in love with him.
- Dan in The Door Into Summer marries Ricky, who said she wanted to marry him ever since she was ten years old. She becomes aged to maturity while Dan's in Cold Sleep.
- Lazarus Long has sex with his Opposite Sex Clones, also in Time Enough For Love. Uses the version where the girls initiate it. This one really is incest, by many definitions, and it's not the most incestuous thing he does in the story, either.
- How is it not?
- Wasn't Time Enough For Love the one where Woodrow Wilson Smith went back in time and had an affair with his own unsuspecting mother? (Yes, it is. We find out in a subsequent book that the notion of incest does not trouble Maureen in the least. One of her few admitted regrets is failing to seduce her own father.)
- The romance is in the future (it is a kid's book), but Have Space Suit Will Travel sets up a similar situation with 18-year old Clifford "Kip" Russell and 12-year-old genius Patricia Wynant "Peewee" Reisfeld.
- Time for the Stars ends with the spacefaring Tom Bartlett returning to earth to marry his great-grandniece, whom he's been in telepathic contact with since she was a toddler. What's more, she's descended from Tom's identical twin brother, so in genetic terms Tom is marrying his own great-granddaughter.
- 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 and not as a wife.
- Happens via time travel in The Time Travelers Wife in a Stable Time Loop: When the Time Traveler Henry meets Clare for the first time, she immediately starts a relationship with him. Only after this does he begin to time travel to various points in 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 And 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.
- Being raised in a culture where your goddess is the ultimate Demonic Spider, you're encouraged to get ahead by murdering people, and your general life is a heady cocktail of fear, arrogance, and raw animal cunning, this is hardly surprising.
- 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. Adaptations 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. Of course, he wasn't really planning to wait that long... And didn't have to, thanks to Charlotte's fortuitously timed death.
- Taken even further when it's revealed that he was planning on impregnating Lolita so that by the time she's aged beyond his interest, he will already have the next 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. The major case is the future Colonel Aureliano Buendía, who falls for Remedios, the major's youngest daughter — who was around 10 years old, while he was in his early 20's. She was wise beyond her years, yeah, but even then...
- It pops up in other books by Gabriel García Marquez. One case was in Chronicle of a Foretold Death, where the narrator affirms that during a wedding party he proposed marriage to a girl who was still in Elementary school; he did not raise her, but they eventually married. By the way, the girl has the same name than García Márquez's wife...
- 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 The Thorn Birds 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. He didn't use a "position of trust", though — he tried to force her so he can inherit her and her siblings' money.
- The novel Fire and Hemlock has a variation: while Tom is not involved in raising Polly per se, he is her moral support when her parents aren't there for her. She befriends his at age eleven or so and when they discuss what she should call him, she suggests "Uncle Tom." It also stresses the angle that she is the insistent partner, writing what amounts to a self-insert romance novel about them as a tween, while he tries to distance himself by dating a woman his age.
- An odd version occurs in Kushiel's Dart: Anafiel Delaunay adopts two children and believes that both will eventually come to see him as a father/mentor figure. Both of them, however, fall in love with him, and one of them eventually finds the courage to make a move.
- In Tamora Pierce's Immortals Quartet, Numair is Daine's teacher and while not exactly a father figure, certainly a much older man who is in a position of power over Daine. It's made pretty clear that he fancies her in Emperor Mage and in Realms of the Gods, they kiss. Numair then tries to explain all the reasons why they shouldn't be together but Daine isn't worried by any of them and they (eventually) get married.
- In Anne McCaffrey's "Damia", the titular character falls in love with Afra, her mother's best friend and advisor, who is thirty years older than she is and literally helped raise her from the day she was born. McCaffrey's a good enough writer that, at first, you think it's really sweet... and then, if you're like me, about a week after you've read the book, you think about it, and the eeeeeeeeewwwwww hits ya right in the face.
- Twice in the same series: In the prequel Pegasus books, Tirla marries Sascha (thirty-something) on her sixteenth birthday, or pretty much the instant she was legally allowed to. Although he hadn't raised her since birth, he had taken on a protective, father-figure role in her life since she was about age twelve.
- The plan of the Duke in James Thurber's The 13 Clocks, having kidnapped the Princess Saralinda as child and raised her. He's under a curse, but on her birthday, he will be able to force her to marry him.
- The story "The Education of Betty" from L.M. Montgomery's Further Chronicles of Avonlea. Best friends fight over girl. The one who marries her quickly dies, so the other becomes a sort of unofficial godfather to his best friend's daughter. He falls in love with her, but knows how inappropriate it is, so he tries fixing her up with his nephew. She'll have nothing of it, and marries him anyway.
- In P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles Of The Kencyrath, villain Gerridon takes in the abandoned Jame at age seven with the express plan of bringing her up to be his replacement bride and replacement sorceress. Unfortunately for him, his retainers subvert his brainwashing intentions ... Made somwhat more squicky by the fact that Jame's mother is Gerridon's sister, Jamethiel and that Gerridon sent her there explicitly to ensure the birth of his future bride. Of course, Jamethiel is also Gerridon's wife... the Kencyrath have no problems with incest. In fact, due to their magically robust genes, incest is a good way to create more powerful children.
- In one of the later Oz stories by Mr. Baum, a bit of backstory (about the enslavement of the Winged Monkeys) mentions this trope. In the past, the Witch of the North couldn't find a suitable husband, so she picked an attractive little boy and had him raised to be her ideal husband.
- Robin McKinley has so many May December Romances that it was inevitable that a few would fit this category. Notably Aerin/Tor, and Rosie/Narl from Spindle's End, but the most straightforward example of this trope is in Touk's House, a modification of the Rapunzel story. After a woodcutter steals herbs from a witch's garden, the witch Maugie requests a baby girl in exchange. But in this case, it's so she can raise a wife for her half-troll son. (Who is, yes, around, older, and helping to raise the child.) Needless to say, Erana's not too happy when she grows up and figures it out. But it works anyway.
- In The Last Of The Mohicans, Nathaniel tries this with Alice Munro, a girl he essentially raised, but it backfires.
- The villain in Sandra Brown's novel Fat Tuesday. And after his bride figured out just how crooked he was, he threatened to replace her with her little sister.
- In S.L. Viehl's StarDoc series, this turns out to be exactly why Grey Veil created Cherijo in the first place.
- The second book in the Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant nearly goes there- Covenant's daughter (from his rape of Lena in the first book), Elena, repeatedly makes advances at him; he refuses, because... well... squick.
- As I recall it she doesn't tell him she's his daughter until after they have sex. From her viewpoint it's okay because she was raised by another man and so doesn't think of him as her father.
- So really, it's the reverse of a Hikaru Genji Plan, since he's her father but not a father figure - and what with the screwy time stuff, the age gap ceases to be an issue - and it's not exactly a plan. Still squicky, but not for quite the same reasons.
- In Junichiro Tanizaki's Naomi, Joji tries this with the fifteen-year-old of the title, rationalizing that it gives him time to scope out his potential bride.
- In A Song Of Ice And Fire, Littlefinger's feelings towards Sansa seem to be like this (he was in love with her mother, they're pretending she's his daughter, and he's been blatantly flirting with her in the fourth book), but she's Squicked by it.
- Jorah Mormont feels this way about Daenerys Targaryen. Dany only loves Jorah platonically, and she eventually ends up banishing him from her presence when he admits he was spying on her for Robert Baratheon, the man who usurped her father's throne, and he will not concede that he was wrong for deceiving her.
- Something akin to this happens in Sundays at Tiffany's by James Patterson. The main character, Jane, had an imaginary friend named Michael when she was eight. He was much older than her, and it's established that he doesn't know how he came to exist, just that he takes care of children by being their imaginary friend and has been doing this for quite some time now. As the story progresses, they eventually meet again when Jane grows up and fall in love. Toward the end Michael gives up his immortality to be with Jane. A bit disturbing, considering Michael is, in all probability, extremely old.
- In PG Wodehouse's Jeeves And Wooster novels, Roderick Spode and Madeline Basset come close to this sort of relationship, although Spode was merely a friend of her family's, and not her actual guardian.
- When Sarek appears on Star Trek The Next Generation, Picard mentions in passing that he had attended "your son's wedding" some two decades earlier. So...whom did Spock marry? The EU novels come to the rescue: Spock married Saavik, to whom he had been a surrogate parent.
- In Ezekiel 16:8, God himself uses this as a metaphor for how His relationship with the Israelites was supposed to work out.
- A series of '70s spy/mystery stories had Jeff Pride become the guardian for Anglo-Japanese Cherry Kobayashi when she was six. The stories are set somewhere between ten and twelve years later, she's grown to be very beautiful and sexy, and he's horrified at her romantic feelings toward him. One of the funnier parts is his outrage when told that the counsellor at her school approves of her intentions because he's not blood-related. The series ends with the situation unresolved.
- In G. K. Chesterton's story "The Vanishing of Vaudrey", this is Vaudrey's motivation for adopting Sybil Rye. She's horrified when he proposes to her, and her refusal is what motivates him to plot the revenge that leads to his own death.
- In Sidney Sheldon's Master of the Game, as a child Kate MacGregor vows to marry David Blackwell (who is about twenty years older than her); as her father died while she was a baby, he's one of the few adult men in her life and by far the nicest to her. She eventually succeeds at this plan once she's an adult, even though he does all he can to discourage it.
- Mercedes Lackey's Heralds Of Valdemar series has a particularly odious variant of this as a character's MO, as Hulda raises Prince Ancar of Haldorn to not only be her lover but her catspaw in an usurpation of his own nation, and then tries a variant of this on Elspeth (Though planning to hand her off to Ancar in a kind of Xanatos Gambit, expecting either Elspeth to take the throne (Not quite getting it through her head that in the state Hulda's training put her in, no Companion would even touch her, therefore disqualifying her for the throne), or removing her from the line of succession, therefore putting said line in doubt. This troper admits it's been a while since I've read that far in the series so details may be a bit off, but either way, it takes the already inherant Squick and ramps it up to eleven, considering how much the two's tastes into the perverse were.
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.)
- Also lampshaded in the series:
" Angelus: She's practically your mother. There should be a play."
- If you think about it, eventually inverted on Farscape: In the time-travel episode "Kansas", 16-year-old John Crichton loses his virginity to Chiana, and gets his memory of the event muddled. Years later, he meets her for, from her point of view, the first time and rather quickly takes her as a little sister or occasionally even daughter figure, which works really well to her benefit, considering he has little reason to trust her at their first meeting otherwise. Yeah.
- One sided version: In the Murder She Wrote episode A Murderous Muse, the manager Byron has been pressuring his student Leslie to marry him, the twist is that she isn't quite 18 yet and Byron has raised her like a father since she was 8 years old.
- In an episode of Friends, Monica dated an avuncular (read: like an uncle) former neighbor.
- In Carnivale, Jonesy was a surrogate father/uncle figure to Sofie when she joined the troupe at a young age, and by the time the series is set (where she is around 18 or 19) it's quite clear he has feelings for her.
- The relationship between the immortal vampire Mick St. John and the girl he saved from a fire as a child looked quite a bit like this.
Theater
- Judge Turpin tries to pull this with his ward Johanna Barker in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, since she reminds him so much of her mother Lucy, whom he had a major lust for and eventually raped. It doesn't work because Johanna hates him and seeks to elope with Anthony the sailor. When Turpin finds this out, he is furious enough to have Johanna thrown into a madhouse, where she is eventually rescued by Anthony. And her real father, the title character, eventually catches up to Judge Turpin and takes very bloody revenge upon 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. He doesn't get to, though.
- The weird version, deliberately contrasting with the authors' other "straight" examples. The Chancellor is portrayed as a sympathetic rather than manipulative figure, didn't exactly raise Phyllis (being the legal guardian for orphans in the region is part of his government position), isn't specifically interested in her, and has to be convinced by the indifferent Phyllis and the rest of the House of Peers to marry her to prevent violence. Even his self-stated "susceptibility" to teenage girls ends up oddly justified... he's unwittingly been married all this time to an immortal who's physically a teenager and whom he's reunited with at the close. (And becomes Phyllis's father-in-law, incidentally.)
- And in The Pirates of Penzance (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.
- In HMS Pinafore, little Buttercup, the captain's nursemaid, ends up marrying him.
- In The Sorcerer, the middle-aged vicar Dr Daly considers himself too old to interest the 18-year-old Constance — though her mother doesn't think so, and Constance secretly loves him. In the next act Constance is enchanted to fall in love with a very old man, which is again presented as unsuitable. In the end, however, she marries Daly.
- 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, as the girls confront their patrons and earn their freedoms. By the way, in School for Wives, the man's definition of "perfect" is "as idiot as possible".
- Ironically, while the husbands are the butt of the comedy in both plays, Molière himself did end up marrying a girl who had been a young member of his theatre company, and was rumoured to be the daughter of his long-term mistress (scholars now think she was probably her niece).
- 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. His best friend, however, is.
- 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.
- The plot to Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge. However, Eddie Carbone cannot admit to himself or anyone else that he has romantic feelings towards Catherine, his wife's sister's daughter. Every time someone hints he might have "too much love" for Catherine, he says he isn't that kind of person. Tragedy results.
- Done in Sondheim's A Little Night Music, but partially averted. One of my favorite lines {paraphrased}: "Just imagine, a few years ago, you were Uncle Frederick. And now, you're Darling Frederick." *Giggle* *Cue squirming and uncomfortable audience.* The girl discovered that it was just a crush and Frederic discovered his true love in a former mistress. His 18-year-old ex-wife ran off with his son, who was the same age.)
- In the 17th-century play The London Cuckolds, one of the title characters has a girl raised in the country to be so much of an idiot that she'll believe just about anything anyone tells her(except that she does know trees don't have rats on them), and when he brings her to town to be his wife, Hilarity Ensues (no, really). Though initially he doesn't plan to consummate the marriage, telling her instead her "wifely duties" are to guard his nightcap in full armor, but the two main characters of the play end up interfering with that plan.
- In most of the renditions of the Phantom of the Opera, the Phantom is depicted as being several decades Christine's senior, and has been her voice instructor for most of her life.
Video Games
- Bakumatsu Renka Karyuu Kenshi Den. Heroine Shizuki Rin is adopted by male lead Iori, who was in love with Rin's mother.
- 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 from age 10 on, sometimes if she also has a low moral score.
- This is also somewhat of a subversion. Unlike many other examples, it is very frowned upon in the game itself, and only allowed by the Gods because other than that, the girl has been raised quite well.)
- In Soul Nomad And The World Eaters, Hawthorne is revealed to be a serial perpetrator of raising, sexually abusing and 'disposing of' female children, his daughter Tricia being the latest victim. Although he is killed before this happens in the normal storyline, in the Demon Path, 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.
- It's quite possible in The Sims 2. Basically, it involves taking a child-Sim away from its parents, and sending it to live in the same house as an adult Sim, who from then on takes care of it and acts as a surrogate parent. When the child grows to be an adult, the relationship score should be high enough for them to fall in love and marry.
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.
- In Daily Grind
 between Howlett and Jolene. Even with as many mitigating circumstances thrown in as one can possibly imagine, it is still creepy. A man serpent of Howlett's obvious moral qualities ought to have rejected Jolene's advances rather than declare that reaching a certain chronological age magically makes her able to make her own decision. To his credit, it seems that he is creeped out a bit by the whole thing too, but just hasn't figured out how to defuse it without someone getting hurt.
Real Life
- Film maker Woody Allen and Soon-Yi, the adopted daughter of his then-girlfriend Mia Farrow. Cue MASSIVE wank and squick in the media.
- Incidentally, Frank Sinatra was Mia's friendly ex-husband and offered to have a few associates... talk to Woody. When Mia was asked about the rumor on a talk show, she smiled and said, "Frank is so sweet."
- 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 alleged relationship with his own half-niece, Angelika Maria "Geli" Raubal, which led to a massive underground conspiracy theory after her demise under suspicious circumstances. In some versions of the story, she had become less enamoured with him due to his interest in politics superseding time spent with her.
- The notorious Chinese pirate Ching Shih took over the pirating business after her husband died, and then married her adopted son Cheung Po Tsai. Supposedly, Cheung Po Tsai was also the lover of both Ching Shih and her husband after they adopted him at the age of 15.
- Note: Mistress Ching of the Brethren Court in Pirates Of The Caribbean is based on Ching Shih. However, it isn't clear if she did the same thing as her real life counterpart.
- Due to the infamous one-child policy in China, there are now people who do this so their sons can have wives. It's pervasive enough that there are now detectives whose entire careers are dedicated to finding people's daughters and bringing them back... just as there are people who make livings kidnapping and selling girls for wives.
- Charlie Chaplin often "mentored" very young actresses and later began relationships with them. He met Lita Grey when he was 26 and she was 13, and impregnated and married her when she was 16.
- Muhammad married his best friend Abu Bakr's daughter, Aïcha, after his first wife, Khadija, died. Aïcha was six years old at the time, and the marriage was consummated two years later. Khadija herself was a reverse Hikaru Genji: she took Muhammad as a subordinate in her trade business (caravans, shipping, import-export), developed a deep and trusting relationship with the 20 year old man and ended up marriying him. The fact that he was orphaned at an early age makes it even more likely that she was something of a mother figure to him. This is incontrovertible, historical, documented fact, not flame fuel.
- Interesting fact: recently, in Morocco, an Islamic scholar stirred up a spiky debate when he used the aforementioned precedent to justify the marriage of a child (I don't quite remember if it was a marriage between teenagers or one between an adult and a child). This raised quite the scandal, since, after a century-long exposition to Western values, most Moroccans found the idea absolutely repulsive. The most entertaining part is how difficult it was for His Majesty's appointed official state Islamic counsel to counter that declaration: the precedent was so incontrovertibly clear they had to use every rhetorical trick in their repertoire to justify the negation, in a fashion even the Hassidim would be proud of! This is a snarky comment on recent political and religious events, and Flames are WELCOME!! HAHA!!! COME ON! WHO'S FIRST?! AHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
- "Incontrovertible, historical, [and] documented"? No - at least not in the sense we usually use those words. The historicity of all accounts of Muhammad's life has been called deeply into question, with traditional Muslim scholars unable to offer anything better than circular reasoning in their defense. What is incontrovertible, however, is that this story comes not from someone trying to discredit Muhammad, but from his own followers.
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