Love Father, Love Son - Television Tropes & Idioms

Yeah, but Monica, do you really want to be in a relationship where you can actually use the phrase, "That's not how your dad used to do it"?

—Phoebe, Friends

Love Father, Love Son is a love trope in which a person who can't have the person that they love for one reason or another winds up falling for their progeny, possibly because there's a strong resemblance in looks or personality, or maybe just because.

This is often a result of a Mayfly-December Romance, Human Popsicle or Time Travel, and it may involve a Jail Bait Wait.

See also Settle for Sibling and Wife Husbandry.

Compare My Grandson Myself, Identical Grandson, Squaring The Love Triangle and Generation Xerox.

Examples

Anime and Manga

In Mahou Sensei Negima!, Evangeline goes from Nagi to Negi.
In Shimizu Reiko's A Million Pound Love, an 80-year-old millionaire asks a 20-year-old playboy to marry her. She is due to die in a few months and says that he will inherit all her money if he marries her. He agrees, but finds himself falling in love with her. On her deathbed, he discovers that it was not him she fell for, but his grandfather.
Kare Kano (His and Her Circumstances), Asaba - a straight male, always had confusing feelings about male lead Arima. At the end of the series he hooks up with Arima's daughter.
In Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru, the protagonist discovers that his dorm is haunted by a Cute Ghost Girl. A little later, it is revealed that she is the ghost of his late mother's underclassman who was in love with her and is utterly smitten by her son.
Implied in Neon Genesis Evangelion that Rei might have had feelings for Gendo at one point. When he turns out to not care for her at all, she starts to get attracted to Shinji instead.
- Gendo with both Naoko and her daughter Ritsuko.
Combined with Reincarnation Romance—in the messed-up, round-about way that only CLAMP can provide—in Cardcaptor Sakura: Yue was in love with Clow Reed. Clow dies, and Yue is sealed in a book. Later, Clow Reed is reincarnated as Fujitaka Kinomoto, and Yue's alternate form Yukito (and later Yue himself) falls in love with Fujitaka's son Touya. Follow that? (For added madness, Clow had intended for Yukito to fall in love with Fujitaka's daughter, the titular Sakura.)
Also combined with Reincarnation Romance as well as Parental Incest in Umineko no Naku Koro ni. After Beatrice Castiglioni dies, her lover Kinzo raises her daughter, convinces himself that her daughter is actually her reincarnated, and has a child with her once she is of age.
In Kodomo no Jikan, this combined with Wife Husbandry and Kissing Cousins, is what Reiji's doing with Rin. He fell in love and was with her mother, but then she died of lung cancer. Now he's raising Rin to replace her.
Fullmetal Alchemist gives us Big Bad Dante, who had planned to trick/seduce Ed into loving her - by taking over Rose's body, as a replacement for Dante's first love, Hohenheim.

Comic Books

The Captain America example below is also in the comics: due to Comic Book Time, Sharon "Agent 13" Carter was originally said to be the younger sister of Peggy Carter, but she's now her niece.
An old EC Comics science fiction tale had an astronaut testing a faster than light spaceship. From his point of view, it works fine. Then he returns home and find that decades have passed. His girlfriend is now an old woman, married to his best friend. He ends up falling in love with their daughter, who is now his age.
The Spider Man: Sins Past storyline infamously reveals that Gwen Stacy slept with Norman Osborn, with whom she secretly had a pair of twins. Though Gwen was primarily Peter's Love Interest, she had dated Norman's son Harry as well.
- For added squick, Gwen's force-aged daughter then developed a bit of a crush on Peter Parker.
- Norman Osborn also had an affair with his son's new fiancee (The new Spider villain Menace). He's not a nice person.

Fan Fiction

Take Evangelion. Add fanfiction. Now make Ritsuko the main character of the fic. About 80% of the time, she'll be (or become) into, you guessed it, Shinji. Around 80% of THAT time, her age won't change, and neither will his. Squick.
A standard excuse for shipping Harry Potter with ~~Severus Snape~~ anyone from the previous generation.

Film

Austin Powers in the first movie falls in love with and marries the daughter of his (married) female assistant from the 1960s, Mrs. Kensington.
In the Captain America (1990), film after Cap woke up in contemporary times he fell in love with the daughter of the girl he was involved with in the 1940s.
A gender-flipped version. In Bicentennial Man, the Android butler, Andrew, comes back after making himself more human and falls in love with the granddaughter of the woman he loved in the past, who looks exactly the same to the point that they are played by the same actress.
In Hook, Peter Pan continues to visit Wendy as she ages. One day he returns to find her an old woman and is distressed that the girl he loved has grown old and forgotten how to fly. She tells him about her own granddaughter, Moira, who is asleep in her old bed. Peter promptly falls in love with Moira and decides to stay and grow up to be with her.
In Drowning Mona Rona is playing wheel of fortune with both Jeff and Phil Dearly.
This is gender-reversed in some adaptations of the French novel Le Bossu (The Hunchback), though not all of them. In the novel and its two major film adaptations, the hero marries his ward or adopted daughter, the natural daughter of his former love interest, who is herself the widow the man whose death he is avenging. In the 2003 French miniseries Lagard�re, the titular character instead winds up with his original love interest after raising her daughter as his own.
Ilsa, the extraordinarily fortunate villainess in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, gets to sleep with both Doctor Jones. Of course she's only using them but who says she didn't enjoy it?
Henry Jones: I'm as human as the next man.
Indiana: I was the next man.
(Awkward silence)

Literature

In A Song of Ice and Fire, Littlefinger, who was infatuated with Catelyn, seems to have this for her daughter Sansa.
Afra Lyon in the Tower And The Hive series by Anne McCaffrey: he can't have the Rowan, so he marries her daughter Damia.
- Discussed in the book where Afra rejects this accusation by saying that he and Rowan were never meant for each other.
Infamously in the Twilight series, when Jacob imprints on Bella's daughter while said daughter was still an infant.
- Arguably inverted; it's implied in his internal narration that he was only in love with Bella because she would be the mother of his true love, Renesmee.
In The Judas Tree by Cronin. Somewhat subverted, though; the man is the one who ditched the first girl in order to marry a rich woman. Years later, he comes back and falls for his first love's daughter. It doesn't end well.
In Pollyanna Grows Up, when Pollyanna and Jimmy discover that Mr. Pendleton was in love with Pollyanna's mother, they believe this is his intention, and Pollyanna feels obligated to marry him if he wants her. Fortunately for Jimmy, he doesn't.
Deerskin, which is based off the fairy tale Donkeyskin, has the heroine's father becoming sexually attracted to her after her mother passes away from an illness.
In Jodi Picoult's Second Glance, a man falls in love with a ghost and ends up with her granddaughter.
In John C. Wright's Golden Age trilogy, Phaethon finds out his wife was trying to make good on a childhood crush on his father Helion, and was originally just trying to use Phaethon to get closer to him. By this time, they've been Happily Married for centuries, though, so it worked out.
The Japanese novel Thousand Cranes plays this straight when the main character sleeps with his deceased father's ex-lover, then Gender Flips / inverts it when he falls for that woman's daughter, leading to a Did They or Didn't They? situation at the end. (For added fun, his father's other ex-lover is trying to set him up with another, unrelated woman while all this is going on.)
In the D�nouement of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Warlord of Mars, Thuvia's hopeless crush on John Carter is showing every sign of being cured by meeting his son Carthoris. (Things go wrong so that she and he get their own book, Thuvia, Maid of Mars.)
The Third Life of Grange Copeland is all over this: Grange was having an affair with Josie, and eventually runs off to the North. Then Josie starts sleeping with Grange's son Brownfield, who also sleeps with Josie's daughter Lorene. Then he marries Josie's niece, Meme, while Grange comes back and marries Josie. The whole family is already completely screwed up, and that's before Brownfield murders Meme.
In Her Fearful Symmetry, Julia has a crush on the married Martin, which he declines. She later goes for his son.

Live-Action TV

In Arrested Development, Kitty towards Gob.
In the French TV series L'amour en h�ritage, the french painter was in love with Maggie (he was already older than she was), and then she left. He married some other girl, but then he met Maggie's daughter and had an illegitimate child with her. She died and he was left taking care of his daughter.
The 4400 had Lily and Richard. When Richard was abducted, he was engaged to a woman named Lily. He was returned many years after her death, only to meet fellow abductee Lily - the original's granddaughter. The two fall in love and marry.
In Friends, Monica is initially attracted to ex-boyfriend Richard's son, Tom. However, their first kiss ends up reminding her too much of Richard and she finds it creepy. Tom is forced to admit that she's reminding him too much of his mother and is equally freaked out. Needless to say, the relationship doesn't progress very far before it breaks down.
On Angel, Cordelia went through seasons of Will They or Won't They? with Angel, only for Angel's suddenly grown son Connor to take an interest in her too. They wind up having a one-night stand, and Cordelia gets pregnant. Played with because Cordelia is secretly possessed by the season's Big Bad, Jasmine, when they had sex, and made creepier because her pregnancy is basically just to give Jasmine a new body, making this Parental Incest, sort-of-maybe, because Jasmine-in-Cordelia slept with Connor in order to make him Jasmine's father.
In Robin Hood, an enemy of Sir Edward's wanted to marry Marian because of her resemblance to her mother, who had rejected him in favour of marrying Edward.
This is a very common occurence on soap operas. A notable example is Erica Kane from All My Children. She was married to Phillip Brent but it didn't last because he was still in love with Tara, the mother of his son Charlie. She then took up with Nick Davis, his biological father. Years later, she was briefly involved with Charlie Brent.

Religion and Mythology

In The Bible, Joseph manages to barely resist an affair with Potiphar's wife. He later marries the daughter of a man named Potipherah, which is similar enough to Potiphar that some believe them to be the same person. (Averted in the Muslim version of this story, where Potiphar's wife is more sympathetic and eventually marries Joseph herself.)
- One Jewish tradition holds that Potiphar's wife wanted to sleep with Joseph because she knew from divination that they were destined to have descendants together—misunderstanding that those descendants would be through her daughter.
- Joseph's brother, Judah, inverts this trope: in accordance with the law of levirate marriage he winds up marrying Tamar, the widow of his two older sons.
Greek Mythology has an odd example: in the Telegony, Odysseus had a son with Circe, Telegonus, who accidentally kills him. Telegonus then winds up marrying Odyseeus' widow, Penelope, while Odysseus and Penelope's son, Telemachus, marries Circe, leading to a Tangled Family Tree.
- Another legend says that Telemachus marries Nausicaa, a princess who at least had some Ship Tease with Odysseus.

Theatre

Agatha Christie's play Go Back For Murder (based on her novel Five Little Pigs) is about a young woman, Carla, who upon coming of age re-opens the investigation on the murder of her father 16 years ago, which was pinned down on her mother Carolina (who has died in prison). The solicitor she goes for help remembers the trial and having a youthful crush on Carolina; by the end of the play, he and Carla get together. (This plot element was not present in the original book, where Carla goes to Poirot instead of the solicitor - as she used to do, Christie wrote Poirot out of the play adaptation.)

Video Games

In Avalon Code, Mayor Georg married the granddaughter of his first love.
In Devil May Cry 3, Dante encounters Nevan the Lightning Witch, a devilishly curious woman whose words sounds like she's a prostitute willingly offering to get into Dante's pants (she's either a succubus or leanashe; the game doesn't clarify). Her dialogue ("Your father was a handsome devil. But you're no slouch yourself") implies that she also had lusted after Dante's father Sparda in the past. Of course, the fans got a bit carried away with all of the Foe Yay/Ship Tease and as a result, Dante/Nevan enjoys a good deal of popularity among Dante's naval fleet.
In Agarest Senki, Ellis is twelve when Leonhardt rescues her from certain death, and doesn't get a chance to grow up before he makes his Heroic Sacrifice. Being a long-lived High Elf, she settles for his near-identical Great Great Grandson Rex.
Bizarrely inverted in the second Shadow Hearts game. Karen is in love with Yuri, but he can never return her feelings because he loves Alice. The good ending sends Karen back in time, where she meets and falls in love with Yuri's dad.
Legend of Dragoon apparently tries to bridge this with a Love Dodecahedron, since Rose, who was involved with Zieg ten thousand years ago begins to fall for Dart, his son and is honest with herself about why. Things only get more complicated when Dart becomes involved with someone else and it's revealed that Zieg is still alive (and was happily married for at least a little while).

Western Animation

The Simpsons: Mr. Burns' illegitimate son was the result of a One Night Stand with the daughter of his old college crush.
Burns flashes back to the outdoors of the 25th Yale reunion feast of his Class of 1914. A much younger C.M. Burns sees his unrequited love of his college years, Mimsy Bancroft, a middle-aged woman staring back at Young Burns. Young Burns becomes wide-eyed as the narration goes on. "Of course, by then, Mimsy had her share of wrinkles and a grey hair or two, but my adoring eye saw past those minor imperfections - to her 21-year-old daughter, Lily."
- In one relatively early episode, Abe had a brief relationship with Marge's mother. Many seasons later he briefly married Marge's sister Selma.
In one episode of The Pirates of Dark Water, and elderly alchemist reveals that she was Ren's father's ex-girlfriend. She never got over losing Primus to Ren's mother. She later used a potion to restore her youth and blackmailed Ren into marrying her in a crazed attempt to reclaim her past happiness. Sadly, the potion backfired on her — likely because she used a drop of Dark Water to make it — and she suffered Rapid Aging. When Ren tries to apologize for his father jilting her, she absolves him and his father of blame saying that she was the one who couldn't let go of the past.
Futurama does this with an Inversion—a night of Pity Sex turned Zapp Brannigan into Leela's Abhorrent Admirer, but a later episode has him go after her mother, Munda, instead. He actually did seem to care about her, but she eventually broke it off after seeing what a Jerk Ass\Manipulative Bastard he could be to other people.
In Gargoyles, Goliath used to have a relationship with Demona, who later begins one with Goliath's clone/"son," Thailog. Who later tries to replace Demona with Delilah, who was created with a mix of DNA from Demona and Goliath's other Love Interest, Elisa.