Loser Son of Loser Dad

Homer: Why am I such a loser? Why?
Bart: Well, your father was a loser, and his father, and his father ... it's genetic, man. [Beat] D'oh!

— The Simpsons

So someone's got it in for your parents. Maybe it's just a certain clique, or maybe it's the entire town. Maybe your parents committed some crime. Maybe they broke a promise or taboo. Maybe they came from another town or country and upset the status quo with their strange foreign ways. Maybe they made a close and personal enemy out of someone in a position of power. Or maybe a bunch of rumors simply got out of hand. Whatever the case, everyone you're likely to meet sees your parents as persona non grata at best and Public Enemy #1 at worst...and as far as they're concerned, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. If at all.

To say people expect the worst of you is an understatement. Someone started a fight? It had to be you; everyone knows your dad had anger issues. Someone stole the proceeds from the charity bake sale? Of course it was you; you're the son of a kleptomaniac. Denying it? Of course you're guilty; your father was a pathological liar. All the adults around you will be nothing short of merciless, and the Generation Gap is no excuse for the kids not to get in on the fun, either: expect to be taunted and tormented by your peers at any age.

If you're lucky, you'll merely wind up an outcast, a loner on the fringe of society. The Only Sane Man might become your friend and ally, even in the face of public opinion, but don't expect support from anyone else: after all, how can a pariah like you be anything but a villain? If you're not so lucky, the years of constant abuse will leave you angry and resentful, a prime candidate for becoming the very villain everyone accuses you of. Not that anyone will mind, of course: some people would rather be right than happy, and if you prove them right by Jumping Off the Slippery Slope, they'll simply applaud themselves while they go and grab the Torches and Pitchforks after years of crossing the Moral Event Horizon themselves.

What can you do about it, then? Escape is always an option: run away or find an excuse to leave the town and seek your destiny elsewhere. The only thing the town will miss is their convenient scapegoat. You could also try to change the peoples' minds about you, a quest more likely to end in tears and tragedy than anything: any good deeds you do will likely be dismissed out of hand or turned upside-down. The more proactively vicious will likely go out of their way to see you prove yourself a villain rather than a hero. Try to help an old lady across the street? They'll run the old lady down in cold blood, and you'll be blamed for it. Give blood? Patients with your blood type will start showing STD symptoms. Help out at the local soup kitchen? An inexplicable rash of food poisoning will ensue, and it'll all be traced back to you. (The perpetrators responsible will, of course, never realize or care that they're the very kind of monster they're hell-bent on proving you to be.)

And what about your parents, the cause of the bad blood that's turned your life into a living hell? If you're lucky, they're still alive and all the charges against them just the product of a big misunderstanding. (Not so lucky if their idea of defending you is beating the crap out of anyone who so much as looks at you funny.) Optimistically, Evil Parents Want Good Kids, and they'll help out however they can. ... Or they may be disappointed you aren't living down to your potential.

Compare Sins of Our Fathers and Revenge by Proxy. Contrast Turn Out Like His Father. Subtrope of All of the Other Reindeer and Malicious Slander.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Gall Force: The Rhea/Earth Chapter series has Sandy Newman, whose father discovered the ruins from Eternal Story and created the NME.
• Hayate the Combat Butler is a heroic inversion of this plot: Ayasaki-Dad is always stealing money (he even cops to it), run con businesses, and has been stated to have two large debts, one to the 'very nice men' and one to Wataru's video store; but, Hayate is the hero of the manga, and his brother is stated to be a hero, even going to rescue Athena from the devil.
• Monster:
  • Wim: his father is a deadbeat alcoholic, so all the neighborhood kids beat up on him for being "trash."
  • Also Fritz "Son Of A Spy" Verdeman.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V, Yuya Sakaki's father, Yusho no-showed a dueling event he was supposed to compete in and went missing, pissing everybody off and causing them to declare him a coward; Yuya gets harassed a lot about this and labeled a coward as well.

Comic Books

• The Astro City "Confession" story arc centers around Brian, a small-town boy who wants to become a superhero to avoid this trope. It's painful to the reader because it's obvious that Brian's dad was never a loser, but a self-sacrificing and noble doctor; it's just his patients were ungrateful jerks.
  • In "The Tarnished Angel", Yolanda Costello — daughter of the super-villain Goldenglove — vows to avoid this by being a smarter crook than her dad was. In the end she learns to be a hero instead.
  • Jessie Taggart is so disgusted by her criminal dad that she takes up his gear and identity to become a hero. She ends up being the world-famous superhero Quarrel.
• Marvel Comics' Runaways suffered many times because of the fact that their parents were all criminals.

Fan Works

• A Case Study in the Sturdiness of the Rookie 9: After Team 7 shocks Konoha with their actions during the Chuunin Exam, Shikamaru thinks to himself that it might not be that surprising, given that their instructor is Kakashi, whose father was Driven to Suicide after being denounced as a traitor. The Dramatic Irony of this is that Kakashi never intended to teach his students that it was okay to betray their allies, and is just as horrified as everyone else.
• CONSEQUENCES (Miraculous Ladybug): WORLD BEYOND centers around Hawkmoth taking his terrorism worldwide after getting his hands on the Miracle Box, causing Monumental Damage and murdering hundreds as part of a scheme to get people to blame Ladybug and Chat Noir for not being able to stop him or bring back his victims with the Miraculous Cure. Naturally, this only succeeds in making him a notorious supervillain Hated by All, and when his secret identity is revealed, Adrien naturally suffers the stigmata of being his son. During their final conversation, Adrien bluntly informs him that he's renouncing the Agreste name.
• In Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Lesath Lestrange is the bastard son Bellatrix Black and Rabastan Lestrange, both of whom were notorious Death Eaters. In fact, his mother was part of Voldemort's inner circle. As a result, he gets heavily bullied at school.
• The Karma of Lies: After Gabriel is unmasked as Hawkmoth and arrested, Adrien finds himself being regarded with increasing suspicion as people speculate about him potentially aiding his father. He doesn't do himself any favors by arguing for leniancy, insisting that the existence of the Miraculous Cure meant that Hawkmoth hadn't really hurt anyone. Sure, people died, but they were brought back, so it's fine, right? Suffice to say, this only cements his poor reputation, especially after he's publicly exposed as Chat Noir in a way that leaves everyone convinced he deliberately handed his Miraculous to Mayura.
  • In the Recursive Fanfic Tales of Karmic Lies Aftermath, we see that this reputation has stuck. In a video call with Gabriel, father and son each blame the other for their misery, with Adrien making several salient points about how Gabriel was such a Control Freak that he micromanaged his education in ways tailored to keep Adrien ignorant and dependant upon him.
• Luminary Uprise: Sephiroth killed both of Zexion's parents, leaving him an orphan, and wants to finish him off as well. Why? Because he happens to have the DNA of Micaiah, Sephiroth's mother and Jenova, his sister.
• Marinette Ocean: After finding out that her biological father Danny Ocean is a master Con Artist, Marinette initially wants nothing more to do with him for fear of Chloé or anyone else finding out and using this to ruin her life. After Lila destroys her reputation without ever finding out about Danny, she decides to switch tactics: if people will believe Malicious Slander about her anyway, why keep playing by their rules?
• Seven Days in Sunny June: In Broken Down in Sunny Town, Rundown's afraid that he's going to end up just like his old man, a once-respected doctor who's now serving time in prison for child pornography.
• sunflower (Naruto): Gai and Kakashi both dealt with this growing up; Gai's father was widely derided as the "Eternal Genin" who just couldn't seem to earn a promotion, while Kakashi's father fell from grace after a failed mission. Kakashi believes that Gai eventually managed to escape this by becoming the Green Beast of Konoha, whereas Kakashi still has to deal with the White Fang's tarnished reputation.

Films — Animated

• A Bug's Life: Flik moans that if he fails "my children's children will walk down the street and people will say, 'Look, there goes the spawn of Flik the Loser!'"

Films — Live-Action

• In Back to the Future, Strickland was ready to denounce all McFlys.
  "No McFly has ever amounted to anything in the history of Hill Valley!"
• The Disney franchise Descendants is structured around the idea that Disney heroes are uneasy with having the children of Disney's most notorious villains integrate with the heroes' children at school because they expect the children of the villains to be a Generation Xerox of their parents.

Literature

• Andrew Tabor of the Apple Valley books is assumed to be a drunken bum because his father is and has to leave town forever in order to get rid of that reputation.
• In the Dragonriders of Pern series this is yet another source of angst for Jaxom: he's a decent enough guy, but the other Lord Holders are wary of him turning out like his father Fax; fortunately Jaxom was raised to be a good person by his Warder Lytol.
• Earth's Children: Lanoga is treated this way by many people in the Ninth Cave of the Zelandonii, along with the rest of her siblings. They're dismissed as a lost cause and looked upon with disdain for being constantly dirty and begging for food, and their lazy, freeloading parents are some of the lowest-ranking and least-popular members of the Ninth Cave. However, Ayla points out that it's hardly their fault that they have such awful parents and that Lanoga is doing her best to look after her younger brothers and sisters. Ayla is able to shame some of the neighbours into helping Lanoga care for her family by informing them that in the Clan no child would be allowed to starve, essentially implying they're worse than the "flatheads" they dismiss as mere animals.
• Harry Potter. Averted in general, in that most people in the Wizarding World consider James Potter a great man, and his son as being his successor. But this is not the opinion that Severus Snape shares. To him, when they were students at Hogwarts, James Potter was his rival and they were constantly at each other's throats, including at least a very serious incident between them. Also, after Snape wrecked his friendship with a girl named Lily, she decided to marry an Older and Wiser James, and Snape never forgave James for that (to the point of seriously considering to go Comforting the Widow, which backfires horribly and gets him harshly chewed out by Dumbledore). Others continually try to point out to Snape that in personality Harry is not entirely like James, but he refuses to see it.
• Aedelas Blackmoore of the Warcraft Expanded Universe novel Lord of the Clans is the son of a traitor to the Alliance, and the stigma he endured as a result may have contributed to his drinking problem and his resulting plan to train Thrall as a puppet ruler of the Orc clans to turn them against the Alliance and gain control of it for himself.
• Warrior Cats:
  • Tawnypaw is told by an elder that she will become just like her father, the Big Bad of the series, because she did an apprentice task wrongly; this results in her defection to her father's Clan, made worse when it is revealed in a later book, Bluestar's Prophecy, that the elder, Smallear, is her own grandfather.
  • Firestar subverts this by treating Bramblepaw and Tawnypaw like other apprentices, not discriminating against them at all; however, he is accused of discriminating against the two by their mother, because he couldn't manage to track down Tawnypaw after she ran away.

Live Action TV

• KC in Degrassi experienced this in his childhood; his Character Development arc in the High School-themed show was based on his attempts to subvert it.
• ER: Doug Ross basically declares himself this when he realizes that his lifestyle — womanizing, drinking — is all but identical to that of the father who abandoned him.
• Theon Greyjoy from Game of Thrones. Around 10 years prior to the start of the series, his father Balon rose up against King Robert in an attempt to claim independence for the Iron Isles ^Read  "We want to rape and pillage all the fishing villages we want, without suffering any repercussions. Ta.". He was summarily crushed, utterly, and treated like a joke by all and sundry from that day since, with Theon, his only surviving son, being taken as a hostage/ward by Ned Stark.
• Puck from Glee proclaims that "His father was a deadbeat, but he doesn't roll that way." Sadly, this doesn't appear to be the case... Character Development and Jerkass Woobie treatment however helps him evolve past this though.
• Grimm:
  • One episode has a kid who is an outcast and gets bullied because his dad catches and sells rats for a living.
  • A lot of the Fantastic Racism between the Wesen species works like this: a species might have abilities that in the past made it well suited to an occupation that was treated with disdain by the other Wesen (eg being a ratcatcher); in modern times, members of the species have many more opportunities and work in more respected fields but among the more racist Wesen they are still treated as bottomfeeders.
• Bud and Kelly Bundy in Married... with Children, although it's completely Justified when you see how they actually behave; also, in one episode it's revealed that generations ago a witch put a curse on the Bundy family, forever dooming them to lives of mediocrity.
• On Merlin, Morgana seems to attribute this trope to her half-brother Arthur, believing that he's just as bad as their father King Uther, despite all evidence to the contrary. If anything it's she who takes after Uther more in that both are tyrants, despite Morgana being a sorceress and Uther an anti-magic zealot.
• Raising Hope: Like his parents, Jimmy is a Book Dumb high-school dropout working a dead-end job; one episode has the three attempt to get their GEDs by taking a class at a high school, taught by a teacher they all had who predicted Jimmy would end up like his parents: Virginia and Burt previously walked out of his classroom as teens, declaring that they didn't need to finish school. Since they all studied different subjects, they completed different subjects of the test so that Jimmy would get credit and get his GED; also, Jimmy had a child at a young age, though his young daughter is shown to be very intelligent (her biological mother comes from a more intellectual/educated family), which is what prompted them to try to get their GEDs, as Jimmy didn't want his daughter to think he was an idiot once she got older.
• Both the real Amanda Clarke and fake Amanda Clarke experience this on Revenge: seventeen years before the pilot, David Clarke was framed for funding terrorists by the Graysons and sent to prison; due to the public vitriol generated (including a book further libeling David written by Mason Treadwell) Amanda was treated hardly any better than her father, with no one questioning why she was institutionalized for no apparent reason. The real Emily Thorne also uses Amanda's father as an insult against her during a prison fight; she (ironically) later takes on the persona of Amanda Clarke herself after they switch identities, and faces much the same prejudice as an adult, with Daniel treating her coldly and generally acting like terrorism is hereditary.
• Star Trek:
  • Klingon society works under this principle: when a warrior is disgraced somehow, his dishonor hurts his entire family and his sons are also dishonored for seven generations; the dishonored are outcasts in the Empire and are forced to live with the shame of their forefather's actions. Worf in particular had a problem with this, since his father was framed for treason with the Romulans, which led to Worf being cast out from the Empire until he'd cleared his name; in particular, Worf only discovered the existence of his own son after accepting discommendation and dishonor. It weighs heavily on him that even acknowledging Alexander as his son would make it next to impossible for the boy to find any place in Klingon society until Worf could expose the real traitor; but in the end, when he finally does succeed in bringing the truth to light, Worf doesn't exactly turn out to be Parent of the Year...
  • Nog decides to join Starfleet rather than go into the merchant business, as is expected of a Ferengi, specifically to subvert this: he sees how his own father, who is considered by most to be a loser, could have been incredible if he'd gone into engineering (which he's good at) rather than going into business (which he's not good at) because that's what everyone expected, and Nog knows that he has the same set of strengths and weaknesses and that if he follows expectations like his father did, the same thing will happen to him. Played with in one episode where Nog does show himself to be skilled at basic bartering when he makes a series of trades to get an engine part for the ship. Despite pissing off a bunch of people in the process, all the deals he made eventually pull through and everyone is ultimately satisfied.
    • Rom himself is this to some degree since it's suggested that Quark and Rom's father was a lousy businessman. Quark averts this because he takes after his mother, a very shrewd and cunning businesswoman (even though, as a Ferengi woman, she's not supposed to have anything to do with these sorts of things).
    • Rom ultimately subverts this himself when his son's example makes him realize he can be better too, and he begins focusing on his engineering abilities and ingratiating himself to non-Ferengi, becoming a respected member of the Deep Space Nine civilian maintenance crew. As the Ferengi culture itself begins to shift (thanks in large part to the influence of Quark and Rom's aforementioned mother), his eventual fate is to be established as the Grand Nagus, the head of the Ferengi government.

Mythology and Religion

• Defied in Chapter 18 of The Book of Ezekiel, where God states that He does not operate under this and that the Israelites should not either.

Theatre

• Billy's daughter Louise in Carousel gets treated as a pariah by her town because of her father's maligned reputation as a no-good wifebeater who committed suicide before Louise was born.
• The very first line of Jasper in Deadland cements Jasper as this.
  Jasper's Mother: Three C's, two B's, and an F, Jasper. You wanna be a failure, like your crack-head father? Do you?

Video Games

• Isair and Madae from Icewind Dale 2 got this treatment because their father was the devil Belhifet who tried to open a portal to the Nine Hells and nearly destroyed the Ten-Towns: as cambions — elf-demon half-breeds — they are literally half evil, and Iselore warned their foster mother against raising them because of this; their foster mother was the only one who ever believed they could grow up to be good people.
• Persona series:
  • Part of Yukari's Backstory in Persona 3: their father was blamed for a tragic incident several years ago and they allude to others treating them horribly. This got so bad that their mother finally decided to move away and start over in another town; tragically, they misinterpreted this attempt at protecting them as "turning her back on my father", leading to a long-standing grudge against her.
  • This trope is also a major fear of Junpei. His father is an abusive good-for-nothing drunk, and Junpei, who has no real standout talents or goals in life, is terrified he will end up the same way.
  • Fears of this form a big part of Munehisa Iwai's Confidant in Persona 5: he used to be in the Yakuza and wants to make sure his adopted son doesn't end up the way he did, keeping his past a secret from his son for this reason.
• Star Ocean: The Second Story: Precis and her father Graft are Gadgeteer Geniuses who have managed to develop robotic technology that far outpaces anything else that can be found natively on Expel. Unfortunately, this has led to both being outcasts in their own village, as the other residents of Linga generally regard them as loons and do their best to avoid them. In Rena's version of Precis's potential recruitment scene, Graft admits that he's worried about the toll this is taking and asks Rena to consider becoming her friend, as she's the first person he's met in ages who hasn't judged his daughter before meeting her.

Visual Novels

• Tomoya Okazaki is shaping up to be one at the start of CLANNAD. He has a disinterest in academics after a fight with his father left him with a permanently dislocated shoulder. His father is an alcoholic who can't keep a job and later gets arrested for selling drugs, which causes Tomoya to lose out on a job offer later in the novel. Avoiding this fate after meeting Nagisa is part of his character development.
• As revealed in Fate/Zero, this is the case with Shinji Matou from Fate/stay night — Shinji is an all around loser and Jerkass who abuses his sister Sakura, which is exactly what his father, Byakuya, did when he was still alive. Both also lack/lacked Magic Circuits. However, it should be noted that Shinji is actually fairly capable when he really puts his mind to something, and is implied to get fairly good grades and have multiple women interested in him (though the later is primarily because he has money). It's just that his dream (being a Magus) and his romantic target (Rin) are both completely inaccessible to him (Rin is utterly repulsed by him, while becoming a Magus is physically impossible for him because he lacks Magic Circuits). Ironically, it's implied he was on his way to defying this in his youth, having made peace with his lack of magical powers during childhood (even if he still sulked over it). He only really lost it when Sakura showed him pity, with Zouken egging him on afterwards out of amusement.
• Satoshi and Satoko in Higurashi: When They Cry, because their parents supported the construction of the dam, which the whole town opposed.
• Invoked in Little Busters!. Long ago, Haruka's mother was married to two men: one went insane and attacked her and was sent to jail; later, she gave birth to two children... one from each father. Since the family couldn't tell who was the daughter of who, they decided that whoever was the loser daughter would be considered the son of the criminal: Haruka proved less capable than Kanata and so all her life was labelled the worthless daughter of a worthless man, with her believing every word of it and hating her father because of it.

Webcomics

• The Class Menagerie reveals this to be Brad's background. Brad Hawthorne isn't his real name, it's Eric Hawthorne Jr; he changed it upon starting college to distance himself from his father, a corrupt banker. When he was in high school, his father was accused of embezzlement (he was acquitted but was actually guilty) and because the two looked virtually identical, people tended to mock him for it; the comic ends with Brad transferring back to Texas, having decided to stop living in his father's shadow.
• In Endstone, Cole hears murmurs that she's evil like her father.
• In Shadowgirls Becka suffers because her mom Really Gets Around, and is hated by Misty's mother, one of the sickest examples of the Alpha Bitch in the history of webcomics; in one of the worst examples, Misty concocts a scheme that almost ends up with Becka being raped:
  Misty: Serves the little slut right if she gets knocked up... like her mother.

Western Animation

• Aaahh!!! Real Monsters has a Downplayed case in Krumm. His father Horvak lost an eye, suffered the Curse of the Krumm, and ultimately flunked out of the Monster Academy, becoming a lowly muck farmer. The Gromble doesn't exactly have high expectations for Krumm to excel where his father failed, either... However, Krumm himself doesn't seem particularly bothered by this. Possibly because both of his best friends have their own Parental Issues
• A good portion of the In-Universe hate directed at Prince Zuko in Avatar: The Last Airbender is this: after a century of war caused by his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, you can see their point, and, to an outsider's eye, Zuko seems to be following in their footsteps, until he finally gets over his "Well Done, Son" Guy attitude and calls the old man out.
• The Belcher kids in Bob's Burgers are a self-identified version of this. They all love their parents but are also well aware that Bob and Linda are failures and that they will follow in their footsteps. However, while they have internalized the idea that they will never amount to anything, they've also made peace with it.
  Tina: Don't underestimate us, our family motto is "Hey, maybe someday we'll get lucky".
• Chester McBadbat and his dad from The Fairly OddParents!, who both suck at baseball, even though Chester's dad was somehow qualified to be on a professional baseball team in the first place; it's possible he was a very good baseball player BEFORE he started sucking.
• On Family Guy, Chris and Meg are the loser children of Peter: while the latter is the resident Cosmic Plaything, the former (when he isn't being a nonentity) Took a Level in Jerkass to become a Generation Xerox of his father.
• In Rick and Morty, Morty Smith mostly takes after his father Jerry Smith in being a cowardly simpleton, though his experiences with Rick Sanchez has helped him grow a spine. His mother Beth Smith recognizes this and allows her son to go on dangerous adventures with her father partially out of the fact that she'd rather Rick rub off on him than her husband, with him indeed coming to outshine Jerry in many ways. Jerry himself would also eventually develop to be a more assertive and well-adjusted person as well.
• The Simpsons:
  • Bart Simpson and Homer Simpson as is the nature of the Simpsons Gene (it only affects males though). This might be an aversion though, depending on how canonical one considers the future episodes (those that are set in the future) as at least one shows Bart becoming a successful bike shop owner, another shows him going into law school and, if one considers canonical the ending of "Itchy and Scratchy The Movie", he would end as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; however, "Lisa's Wedding" shows him as a demolition worker with three divorces who frequents strip clubs and Moe's bar.
    Homer: Why am I such a loser? Why?
    Bart: Well, your father was a loser, and his father, and his father. It's genetics, man... Doh!
  • Much like his father Kirk, Milhouse is a Butt-Monkey and Future Loser that everyone else looks down on and the universe enjoys tormenting for no real reason.
• Basically every Homeworld Gem Steven Quartz Universe meets in Steven Universe tries to kill him because of something his mother Rose Quartz did. Complicated by the fact that Gems don't naturally reproduce and Steven is a rare, if not the only child of a Gem ever made. Because of this, many Gems have no idea what a son or daughter is and assume Steven is Rose Quartz, just in a different form.

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