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alt title(s): The Un Favorite What kind of father has a favourite daughter? And if you do, you should label them: favourite and un-favourite!
—Dave Foley in The Wrong Guy
Hank Hill: You can't call him Good Hank, that will make people think I'm Bad Hank!
Cotton Hill: Well, you burnt my burger, didn't you, B.H.?
The nasty end of Parental Favoritism. Where there's an Alpha wolf, there's got to be an Omega — someone at the bottom of the pecking order, the family Buttmonkey. This is the child who's an embarrassment to their parents, the daughter that was supposed to be a son, the child the parents had when they'd already decided the family was complete and really didn't need another mouth to feed.
Frequently, being The Un-Favourite is a Freudian Excuse for a character who's a particularly pathetic loser. If the Parental Favoritism was garden variety, PG-rated Wangst, this is probably being played for comedy, a weak excuse for being a failure. If the favoritism was particularly vicious, however, up to and including abuse, The Un Favourite becomes a more tragic character — most probably The Woobie. Sometimes, however, the Unfavourite is almost suspiciously well-adjusted.
A variant is where The Un-Favourite is actually highly successful and dutiful, but can never get the approval of his parents, simply because their sibling will always be "better" in their parents' eyes. ("Hey look, dad, I won the Nobel Prize for Physics!" "That's nothin' — your brother won Employee of the Month at Shop 'n Go last April!")
The audience's attitude towards the un-favourite is often based on what age the character is. There's a common perception that an adult character should really have gotten over this by now, even if the viewers/readers empathize with them. A child character, on the other hand, is likely to get the audience's unreserved support.
Age notwithstanding, this is usually a sympathetic character, because we're supposed to root for the disadvantaged; expect the favorite either to be rubbing their status in their sibling's face, be an Aloof Big Brother, or completely unaware of the situation.
Can easily escalate into a Cain And Abel. May be rooted in a Death By Childbirth. May cross over with Well Done Son Guy if The Un Favorite wants some recognition.
Examples
Anime
- Jun Manjyome of Yu-Gi-Oh GX, disowned by his brothers for his inability to live up to the family name.
- Variation: In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, Dark Magical Girl Fate is a clone of Precia Testarossa's deceased daughter, Alicia. Fate has Alicia's memories of Precia being a loving and kind mother, but Precia is abusive to Fate and sees her only as a tool for bringing Alicia back to life. The Lotus Eater Machine in season two reveals that Fate sees Alicia as the parental favourite older sister.
- Hinata Hyuga from Naruto starts off as The Un-Favourite of her family, due to her apparent 'lack' of talent and how her little sister Hanabi apparently had it all.
- I'd argue that Neji has it just as bad. Hinata may have been kicked out of her family dojo, but Neji was never allowed in because of second-class status in his family.
- I'm not entirely sure why people say Hinata was "kicked out" of the family. In context, Hiashi just says, in response to Kurenai's concern about her, as the heir to the family, being in danger of dying, that it would not be a problem if she died, as she would be replaced by (in his view, the more worthy) Hanabi.
- Sasuke feels treated that way compared to his aloof - and psycho big brother Itachi when their parents still lived. The situation reverses after Itachi is suspected (correctly) of murdering Shisui.
- Gaara, because everyone in his family (and his entire city) is scared of him, or at least of the demon sealed inside him. He was conceived only to be a container for the demon and be a living weapon, and his mother hated him and his father, the Kazekage because of this.
- Seta Sôjirô from Rurouni Kenshin is a particularly tragic example of this trope. So much that his siblings try to kill him. He kills them instead.
- Sakura in Fate Stay Night was The Unfavorite for blood family, leading her to be given away to another family. Then her adoptive family's treatment of her was somewhere south of "holy shit" on the abuse scale. Can't blame her for going batshit on them all.
- Machi Kuragi from Fruits Basket is such an unfavorite that her parents automatically assume she attempted to kill her little brother, despite her (more or less believable) claim that she was just trying to keep him warm.
- Somewhat averted in Digimon Adventure 02. Ken Ichijouji is revealed to have originally been the butt of this trope, but when his more-liked and more-talented older brother was killed in a car crash it began a chain of events that lead to him turning to the dark side, becoming more skilled than his brother ever was (thanks to evil powers), and becoming the series' Big Bad temporarily before joining the team.
- Subverted in The Prince Of Tennis. Yuuta Fuji feels he's the unfavorite since his middle brother Shuusuke is talented, handsome and popular at their school, so he leaves and transfers into another school and its dorms. But that genuinely hurts Shuusuke, who really loves and cares for Yuuta and just didn't know what his brother was going through, becoming a huge Stepford Smiler out of the hurt he feels upon Yuuta abandoning him. It'll take more than a year to reunite them.
- Subverted in Code Geass. Lelouch Lemperouge spends a good portion of his life believing that he and his sister Nunnally are their father The Emperor's unfavorites, since their mother was the Emperor's only consort who wasn't of noble blood; only much later on does he learn that their father was truly in love with their mother, and he wanted Lelouch to help them with their plan to make the world a better place... Only that, since both parents were Knight Templar Parents *and* Well Intentioned Extremists , they thought that "making the world a better place" involved a huge Xanatos Roulette leading to an Instrumentality project.
- In Gundam 00's second season, there's an unfavourite that doesn't even need a family (they got killed by terrorists several years ago) to feel this way. Lyle Dylandy thinks that several of the Celestial Being members expect him to be just like his deceased twin older brother, Neil "Lockon Stratos" Dylandy. Lyle doesn't like it, logically, so he decides to downplay his own and considerable fighting and piloting skills to make himself look different from Neil.
- Jigoku Shoujo episode 16 features a disturbing twist on this trope. The episode revolves around a pair of twin girls in a traveling circus — one is praised and doted upon by the ringleader, the other is kept locked in a back room and frequently abused. Initially, the audience is led to believe that the Un-Favorite has summoned Enma Ai to exact revenge upon the ringleader, only to find out too late that the real target is the other sister. Ai takes her to hell, giving the other twin her chance to be the favorite.
- Played with in G Gundam. It's implied that, due to being much younger as well as Book Dumb, Domon felt inferior to his Badass Bookworm older brother Kyouji in the eyes of their father, The Professor Raizou Kasshu. Unlike other cases, though, Dr. Kasshu doesn't seem to show deliberate cruely towards Domon, who finds another father figure in his martial arts teacher Master Asia and leaves home to train with him... Fast forward 10 years and Domon finds himself with a Broken Pedestal of a mentor, a dead mother, a cryogenically frozen father, and an evil Aloof Big Brother who's become a wanted criminal... Or are things REALLY like this? .
- In the recent Dragonball Z special it is revealed that Vegeta has a younger brother, who was exiled from their homeworld because he was too weak to be any good as a fighter.
Comic Books
- In the Spider-Man movies and The Spectacular Spider Man cartoon, Harry Osborn is a rare example of being The Un Favorite as an only child, with his father preferring fellow intellectual and friend Peter Parker to his own son. This is in contrast to the portrayal of Harry and Norman's relationship in the comics: originally, Norman was portrayed as a loving, but absentee father who tried to make up for his utter lack of time for his son, via spoiling him rotten. This in turn led to Harry becoming a drug addict, as he used his dad's money to avoid working, and spend his days partying and buying drugs from his neighborhood drug dealer. Of course years later, the relationship between Harry and his father was retconned into a "Kickthe Dog" scenerio to make Norman (then dead and buried, with Marvel dead set on not resurrecting him) an evil person who physically and emotionally abused his son throughout his entire life. When his son died, this led to Norman seeking out a replacement heir, ultimately settling on Peter Parker largely due to editor Bob Harras's demand that Peter and Norman's rivalry be changed to be more like Professor X and Magneto's rivalry, complete with Norman wanting Peter to join with him the same way Magneto is forever harping on Xavier to join forces and conquer humanity.
- Magneto's relationship with his kids is equally screwed up, with Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver being the Un-Favorite in both the regular and Ultimate Marvel Universe. In particular, in the Ultimate Marvel Universe, Magneto is quite open with with his disdain for Quicksilver/favoritism towards Wanda, by "punishing" Wanda for betraying him by way of making her watch him kneecap her brother, who Magneto berated for going to work for the Ultimates.
- When his older brother Chad is visiting from college, Jeremy from the strip Zits seems to fall into this.
- This wasn't helped by early depictions of Chad, which gave him a gleaming, god-like countenance (god-like in that you couldn't see it for the gleaming, not because he looked like an old bearded guy) to go with the notion that he could do no wrong. More recent depictions make him look...like Jeremy with a beard.
- On a planet where twins are the norm, Mekt Ranzz (Lightning Lord), older brother of twins Lightning Lad and Lightning Lass of the Legion Of Super Heroes, felt like he was everyone's unfavorite. Which is why he eventually became a supervillain who terrorized his younger siblings.
- April in For Better or For Worse. Her parents behave as if it's her fault she's a teenager and still living at home when they're ready to be retirees, her brother and sister-in-law frequently use her as a free baby-sitter and her sister casually dismisses her problems in favour of a narcissistic focus on her own romantic issues. However, the tone of the strip implies that April is an ungrateful brat who deserves this treatment.
- Considering that the strip is largely viewed as having totally gone off the rails in favor of the writer's somewhat twisted personal views of how family life should be, fans often consider April the last sane person in the Foobiverse.
- The strip has started over from the beginning again. According to Johnston, this was to get rid of unnecessary baggage. Considering that its now running from before April was even born, it can be safely assumed that she too was considered "baggage".
- This troper thinks you're seeing things that weren't there. She was frequently the focus of the strip, had big dreams that she was apparently justified having, the seemingly favorite presence of her grandfather...
Film
- The Lord Of The Rings movies, especially the 3rd, hit this trope pretty hard for Faramir. It's text, not subtext, in his father's dialog. This factor, combined with some deleted scenes present in the extended versions, helps explain why Faramir initially decided to capture Frodo and the Ring, which is the opposite way he chose in the book. It's also notable that the favorite, Boromir, actually admires and defends Faramir.
- It's the same way in the book.
- Film/Real Life example: Johnny Cash. As the movie Walk The Line showed, Johnny never could quite match up to his dutiful dead brother in his dad's eyes.
- Spoofed in Walk Hard, where Dewey Cox's father shouts "The wrong kid died!" even in completely inapplicable situations.
Literature
- Tyrion Lannister of A Song of Ice and Fire: his mother died giving birth and he is a dwarf. No, not the fantasy kind.
- Ron of Harry Potter, the youngest of six boys, feels like this, though it's not true (his family never shows him anything but the utmost unconditional love). And, of course, Harry himself is constantly compared unfavorably to his cousin Dudley by his aunt and uncle; this becomes one of the ways the book shows Harry growing up, as "not being liked by parental figures" becomes less important than "war between good and evil".
- Ron eventually gets everything he wants, anyway: In the first book we see that his heart's desire is to win the Quidditch Cup and be Head Boy, surpassing all his brothers: He does indeed win the cup and probably would have gotten to be Head Boy if he'd stayed at Hogwarts for his seventh year. As if Fate's trying to make up for it, he gets the girl of his dreams instead while his best friend marries his younger sister.
- It's implied that Tom Riddle was one of these in his youth: the woman running the adoption agency was glad to see the back of him. Possibly justified in that it's also implied that he was a Damien-esque nightmare even as a child, but whether this was a cause or an effect is left to the reader.
- Many a Grimms' Fairy Tales heroine with a wicked step-mother and step-sister. Men sure had rotten taste in women back then.
- Central to the plot of Katharine Paterson's classic teen-angst novel Jacob Have I Loved. One sister is beautiful and feckless and adored; the other is smarter but plain and quiet, hence taken for granted.
- Matilda has parents that are completely unappreciative of her superlative brilliance. Her father cares far more about son Mikey, a total nonentity, and the mother is more interested in bingo.
- Tamora Pierce's Circle Of Magic series had Tris. She was disowned and disposed of by her parents, who sent her to live with various relatives who used her as a live-in servant while constantly berating and bullying her. Particularly strange was that she seems to have been an only child — it was when she was moved away from her own parents that she encountered a "sibling rivalry" situation (her cousins, who got preferential treatment from their parents — Tris' aunts and uncles).
- In Pride And Prejudice, Elizabeth is her father's favorite, Lydia and Jane are their mother's, and Mary is almost universally ignored, but the second-youngest Bennett daughter Kitty is perpetually told to shut up and stop getting in everyone's way.
- Similarly in Persuasion, plain, sensible and sensitive Anne is ignored and dismissed by her family while her beautiful but vain sister Elisabeth is admired by all.
- Taken to new and extreme heights of Southern Gothic in Gillian Flynn's debut novel, Sharp Objects; the narrator, Camille, is her batshit mother's Unfavorite, which is how she managed to survive to adulthood as nothing more than a self-harming, self-destructive alcoholic. Her more tractable younger sister died in childhood as the end result of their mother's Munchausen's by proxy, and her much younger half-sister is a sex-and-death-obsessed psychopath after thirteen years of the same treatment. Fun book.
- The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things. Despite it's odd title, is a great insight of being the Un-Favorite. The narrator is a chubby, brown-haired, high-schooler with average grades living in a glamorous upper-class family of beautiful slim blond people.
Live Action TV
- Arnold Rimmer in Red Dwarf is a powerful example of an Un-Favourite. His brothers were all high-flyers in the Space Corps; Arnold was a technician, the second lowest in rank on a mining ship. While he's a comedic character, some of the abuse he goes through would reach Woobie standards, and goes a long way to explaining why Rimmer's such a git. Unfortunately, it's still difficult to side with him, given the frequency with which he uses his screwed-up past as a carte-blanche excuse for being a jerkass. In some of the darker moments of the books, the tragic side does become clear.
- Not least in the story which shows just how small the difference in history between him and Ace Rimmer is.
- Possibly the example most familiar to American TV viewers, Robert from Everybody Loves Raymond. With the slight reversal that Robert is actually the elder brother himself.
- Robert was originally going to be cast as shorter then Ray and being forced to literally look up to his younger brother. The actor being taller took the gag from funny to hysterical.
- Similarly, no matter what Det. Goren does for his mother (including taking care of her while she's in the hospital) he still can't measure up to his brother, a homeless drug addict with an illegitimate son - or were there two brothers? Either way, Goren gets no respect.
- Monica on Friends is treated like this by her mother, while her brother can do no wrong. Possibly why she is so screwed up.
- Though when her dad realises that they've been doing this, he gives her his Porsche to make up for it, so, you know, "every cloud".
- This troper recalls an episode of Judging Amy where a large, loud, and boisterous family did not know what to make of their youngest(?) child, a quiet, apparently unathletic, and introverted kid. Apparently, forcing him into dog piles and over-enthusiastic games of football constituted abuse so the family had to learn An Aesop about different personalities. Or something.
- Supernatural: Even though Dean's Daddy issues are a lot more obvious, you could say that both of them fit this trope. The only affection Dean ever gets from John is when John is possessed or about to die, a regrettable incident that happened when he was 9 gets hung over his head for 17 years. And as for Sam, he gets disowned when he wants to be normal, John is actually blaming him for his brother's impending death in In My Time Of Dying and he gets two utterly dismal goodbyes while Dean at least gets an apology and a smile. And the worst thing? He told Dean that he might have to kill Sam if he goes bad, and Dean thought he had to basically commit suicide (just not right away) because John gave him an order and he failed and, as shown by Long Distance Caller is still devoted to his father. Oh, John. You might have been a good man but you failed at being even a halfway decent father.
- Young Dracula: Despite being the child that most takes after him, Ingrid is consistently ignored and humiliated by her sexist father.
- Kara "Starbuck" Thrace of the new Battlestar Galactica was The Un Favourite and apparently an only child. We learn that Starbuck's mother was in the Colonial military and Starbuck joined up largely to win her approval. When she graduated Viper school and earner her commission, her mother berates her for becoming an officer, rather than an NCO like she was.
- In an episode of 3rd Rock from the Sun, it's revealed that Mary's sister Renata was the favorite of the Albright family:
Mary: The minute she was born, my life changed. I mean, she was showered with attention, she was given everything, she was supported endlessly and I had to stand by and rinse out her things!
Nina: [astonished] Wow... so you're the good sister?
- Marcia, Marcia, MARCIA!
- An episode of Lois And Clark featured the mother of a deceased criminal known as "Bad Brain Johnson". To try and get her attention, her Un Favourite second son built a fully functional mind control machine, to offer her the whole world as a gift. Not only was he met with equal disdain as usual, but not even the machine at full power could force her to tell her son she loved him.
- Mohinder Suresh of Heroes is his father's Un-Favourite, as compared to his Ill Girl older sister Shanti. This is due to having been conceived expressly in order to be a cure for her, but born too late; Chandra half-hated him for the failure, half-didn't want to get emotionally attached again.
- Nathan could also be said to be the Unfavorite of his family. Angela actually told Peter he was her favorite compared to Nathan. Especially since it's later revealed in season 3 that Nathan was the only one in the family to be born without powers and had to be given powers via a formula. And now that Sylar was revealed to be a Petrelli brother, Angela seems to be manipulating him by claiming he was her favorite despite giving him away as a baby.
- Although Arthur Petrelli does claim that Nathan is his favorite, but given that he previously tried to have Nathan killed, the truth of this statement is debatable.
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer 40000 backstory has strong vibes of this in the Primarchs-while Horus was clearly the Emperor's favorite, Perturabo, Alpharius, and to a lesser extent Angron and Magnus all suffered from this trope.
Video Games
- This is the motivation of the Big Bad of Drakengard, Manah. Her mother showered her brother Seere with love but abused Manah, finally culminating with abandoning her in a monster-infested canyon for a cult to take. After that, she decided that the only way she could make her mother love her was if the gods themselves loved her. And since God Is Evil, this entails being infused with their power, ascending to the head of the cult, taking control of The Empire, and destroying the world. All at no older than six years of age. The moral of the story: don't abuse your children, or they'll destroy the world.
Web Comics
- Roy Greenhilt from Order Of The Stick. His father's epitaph reads "Devoted Husband - Mighty Wizard - Passable Father", and his ghost keeps showing up to harass Roy about his choice in Character Class.
- Although it turned out his father wasn't likely the favorite either.
- Albeit almost entirely by his own choice. Roy's grandfather reveals that he tried numerous ways to try and relate to his son (Roy's father), both to get him interested in more physical pursuits Grandfather Greenhilt enjoyed or to in some way understand his son's more intellectual pursuits, but that the middle Greenhilt always insulted and dismissed him. Let's face it, Roy's father was just
chargenned born a Jerkass.
- Eugene harasses Roy chiefly because he doesn't get to go to Lawful Good Heaven until Roy (or another Greenhilt descendant) fulfills the blood oath Eugene made as a younger man. The middle Greenhilt is then supremely incensed when he learns that he's Lawful Good Heaven's Un Favorite because he abandoned the oath for other pursuits.
- Wally from Zebra Girl is a subversion — while he's at the bottom of his pack of werewolves (and explicitly referred to as the Omega), and constantly teased and berated by his pack-mates, Doyenne, the pack leader, confides in Jack that she feels he has the most potential out of any of the pack, and derides the others as brutish murderers who use their animal sides to excuse the evil in their all-too-human hearts. Of course, in her next breath, she matter-of-factly states how she's going to have to kill them...
- Rayne for Least I Could Do, says that he was look in a cage and fed newspaper as a child. However his roommate, John does says to their friend Mick "You do realize he making this up right?" To which he replies "I know but his stories amuse me so."
- Played with in Narbonic. Dave's brother Bill is actually a pretty boring, ordinary guy, but Dave is stubbornly convinced that Bill is cooler, better looking, and otherwise superior to him in every way. There's no indication whether this is related to parental favoritism.
- Dominic Deegan: Miranda Deegan has pretty much disavowed any knowledge of her oldest son Jacob. Her reasons aren't entirely unjustfied, though; Jacob took up necromancy after one of her oldest enemies attacked her home and gravely wounded her youngest son, Gregory, whom Jacob would use as a guinea pig for several horrible experiments - one of which almost killing Gregory in the process. And, uh...yeah.
- Liquid Snake, in the AU Metal Gear Solid fancomic series "Les Enfants Terribles."
 Solidus gets this treatment too, but to a lesser extent.
- Black Mage from Eight Bit Theater, apparently
- Red Mage too, although technically that was entirely concocted and implanted in his mind by Thief.
Western Animation
- Zuko of Avatar The Last Airbender: "My father says [my sister] was born lucky — he says I was lucky to be born..."
- Azula, Zuko's little sister, is also an example, at least in her own mind: "My own mother...thought I was a monster." She tries to laugh it off at the time, but this perception of her relationship with her mother contributes heavily to her Villainous Breakdown in the series finale.
- Ozai himself, father of both of the above, used to be this too. After his older brother Iroh's son died, his father ordered him to kill Zuko to let him know what it feels like. To put this into perspective, though, Fire Lord Azulon only ordered this after Ozai tried to use his nephew's death as an excuse to steal his brother's birthright, and after he openly scoffed at Iroh's grief for his lost son causing him to abandon the siege of Ba Sing Se. Still...ouch! Let's face it, that whole family is a mess.
- Helga Pataki from Hey Arnold! is the poster child for this trope, with her older, more intelligent, and away-at-college older sister Olga. Ironically, Olga herself says she'd rather be the Unfavorite: her parents' excessive attention and ridiculously high expectatives (specially Bob's) push her into a permanent neurosis and becoming an Extreme Doormat.
- Rugrats played with this a couple times. In one episode, Angelica convinces the twins Phil and Lil that every family has a Favorite and a Reject; each one spent the rest of the episode convinced that they were the Reject, and mistaking normal parental behavior as signs of this, until, in the end, they make up and decide to be Rejects together. In another, Angelica's parents are going to have another baby, and she has a horrible dream about being rejected in favor of it (until it grows gigantic and tries to eat her).
- Don't forget this was quite the plot point of the first Rugrats movie. After Dil's birth, Tommy felt abandoned by his parents and attempted to return him to the hospital with the help of his friends, only to later grow fond of Dil and accept him.
- An example of the second variant is in Metalocalypse: Pickles, the drummer of the most famous and successful band in history, is still second in his parents' eyes to his brother, an ex-con who lives in their attic.
- Sometime between the original run of Family Guy and the current series, Meg Griffin went from mildly ignored to outright hated by the rest of her family (caused in part by the running joke that Meg may or may not be the result of an affair Lois had behind Peter's back, which in turn cost her a chance to become an Olympic swimmer. Subverted in that the show itself has pointed out her unpopularity via doing an entire episode around the family being the subject of a reality tv show. In the episode, the people filming the Griffins point out that Meg is the least liked member of the family, resulting in her being replaced with an attractive actress.
Real Life
- A lot of kids have suspicions that they might be this. Most of them eventually realize it's not true.
- That being said, in all likelihood there are probably a number of Unfavourites in the big bad world.
- A recent study—yes, an actual, academic study—indicated that most parents do, in fact, have favorites. Equal treatment or attempts at same aside, most people are people and just relate more to one kid or the other, and therefore prefer to spend time with him or her and pursue their shared interests. In order to have a favorite/unfavorite dynamic at least two siblings must exist. Therefore, you have at most a 50% chance of being the favorite. Doing the math to figure out what the maximum probability of being the favorite assuming there must be at least one favored and one non-favored for larger sets of siblings is left as an exercise to the reader.
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