Duplicate Trope: What The Hell Dad

What the Hell, Dad? is a trope for bad father figures. The snowcloned name makes it sound like it's Calling the Old Man Out by any other name (since What the Hell, Hero? is an in-universe trope). However, according to the description:

"He views his son (this is almost Always Male) as an equal and in no real need of monitoring, instruction, or the rest of the whole parenting game. Can border on its own form of abuse"

The examples on the page do not support this definition. Aside from the usual zero context examples, it seems to be a mix of:

Straight-up Abusive Parents:

• Fire Lord Ozai from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Yes, his son survived what he put him through, with Uncle's help, and yes, his daughter was highly competent as The Dragon, but he did not do the parenting thing, and sent them both into great danger very casually. Azula at least he trained personally.
• Josef Stalin's son Yakov was so heavily abused by his father that he attempted suicide. When Yakov was captured by Nazis in WW 2 the Nazis offered to free him in exchange for several high ranking officers since he was Stalin's son. However Stalin refused the deal, believing that the deal was unfair because Yakov was not a high ranking officer himself. Yakov later died in a Nazi concentration camp.

Parental Neglect:

• In a rare mother/daughter example, Rayojini in Burying the Shadow is left alone for months at a time while Ushas goes in search of work. This is actually probably the best arrangement for the both of them.
• Granddad from The Boondocks. Riley hangs around known criminals, Huey has a massive weapons stockpile, and Granddad doesn't care. Though he does beat them when they do something bad.
• When Homer Simpson isnt an Abusive Dad, he's this trope, especially towards Bart. This is especially obvious whenever Marge isnt around, as Homer has little interest in proper parenting and usually just ignores his children until he's guilt tripped into doing actual parental things with them.

Disappeared Dad / Missing Mom:

• In the 2003 anime adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist, after Disappeared Dad Hohenheim comes back to see his kids (who are only 16 and 14), he figures they've taken care of themselves long enough that it doesn't really matter if he takes up a fathering role. And so he leaves again!
  • He was pathetic and low in pretty much every arena possible. Al really wanted him to stay, but he didn't listen. His Wangst reaches really annoying levels when you find out just how much of an asshole he is.
  • The original Hohenheim, however, is a completely different story.
• John Winchester from Supernatural trained his sons from an early age to kill the demon that murdered their mother, and didn't really do much else in the way of parenting. He left that to oldest son Dean, treating Dean more like a grown hunter than a child.

Or even Education Mama.

• To some degree, both of Light Yagami's parents in Death Note do this to him, though it's most likely unintentional; they seem to completely ignore every aspect of his life besides his schoolwork, to the point where they fail to notice his deteriorating mental state and murderous tendencies. This may or may not contribute to Light's Psychopathic Manchild state.
  L: Your son's pretty smart.
  Soichiro: Yeah, I guess he is.

Does anyone think there's something worth salvaging here?

Bump. Any thoughts?

It does seem like this is a weirdly gender segregated lump of a trope. All of the other tropes the examples are actually citin are gender neutral. Good job on showing the misuse.

Definition seems like it's just Parental Neglect. It's redundant.

. True. I suggest dissolving the trope and sort examples where they belong as started in OP.

Crowner hooked. This should go quickly.

Calling the Old Man Out is for when the confrontation occurs between the child and the bad father.

What the Hell, Dad? is an attempt to trope a reason for why Parental Neglect occurs. Parental Neglect simply tropes the occurrence of parents not be parenting their children but doesn't cover any reasons why it might be occurring. What the Hell, Dad? is attempting to trope those incidents when Parental Neglect is occurring because the parent thinks the kid doesn't need a parent so doesn't bother parenting.

What we seem to have is Parental Neglect as the supertrope (neglect occurs) with several tropes attempting to explain why there's neglect:

• Parental Neglect - the parents aren't looking after the children.
  • Alcoholic Parent - the parent is incapable of looking after the children because of substance abuse. [Could be Abusive Parents instead - depends on how the alochol affects them.]
  • Hands-Off Parenting - the parents come from a hippy-type background and believe discipline is bad.
  • What the Hell, Dad? - the parent thinks the kid doesn't need parenting so doesn't bother.

And so on.

What the Hell, Dad? seems more like a duplicate of (or the rest of the trope explanation for) Hands-Off Parenting than a duplicate of Parental Neglect.

edited 16th May '16 3:02:07 PM by Wyldchyld

It only has 104 wicks, shouldn't take too long.

edited 17th May '16 2:05:23 PM by Karxrida

Dewicking begun-now at 44.

Dewicking is now complete. With 132 inbounds, should this be redirected somewhere else? Parental Neglect or Calling the Old Man Out maybe?

I'd pick the latter.

Me Too!

Thirded.

Going with the flow, Fourthed.

Changed to redirect, and left a note. Looks like we're done.