Not Blood, Not Family

A common sentiment is that "Blood is Thicker Than Water." However, some people use this idea to exclude someone as family simply because there is no genetic relation. Even if someone's non-blood relatives treat them better than their blood relatives, some people will insist that the former can never be "real" family simply because they aren't biologically related.

There are different types of people who hold this sentiment: bigoted outsiders who despise the idea of non-traditional families, jerkasses who hold this sentiment towards their in-laws, foster family, step-family, etc, insecure foster children who feel that they're not their parents' "real" children, evil blood relatives trying to turn their blood-family against the latter's "fake" family, foster parents justifying favoritism towards their biological children, a Flirty Stepsibling attempting to use it as justification for Brother–Sister Incest, and more.

While some people might genuinely hold this sentiment and stick to it, hypocrites will have no problem Playing the Family Card against a denounced non-blood relative when it's convenient. A foster parent who denounced their foster child might have no problem insisting that the one they denounced owes them under the reasoning that a child is obligated to care for their parent. A stepsibling who wants money out of their "fake" sibling might use the sibling card to mooch off of the one they originally denounced as fake.

Due to Values Dissonance, some works may agree with this view due to the importance of blood ties in the time or culture it was written in.

Sub-Trope of Thicker Than Water. Related to Not Blood Siblings. Obnoxious In-Laws and Wicked Stepmothers will sometimes hold this sentiment. Overlaps with Adoption Diss if a person expresses this sentiment towards an adopted person or Adoption Angst if the adoptee holds this view about themselves. Overlaps with You're Not My Father if a person is saying this towards their step-father, foster father, or other father figure. Family of Choice is the antithesis to this idea; also contrast Friends Are Chosen, Family Aren't if a person actively prefers their friends to their biological family. See also Friendship Denial if a person goes further and says that someone isn't even their friend.

No Real Life Examples, Please!; while some people do hold this sentiment in real life, it's a somewhat controversial topic, plus there would be pages of examples.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Gunnm: Last Order: The teenagers that Gally meets in Zalem describe as "pseudo-families" the households where they lived with their Child Care Managers who had been previously submitted to Brain Uploading.
• One Piece: This is how Charlotte Linlin, aka Big Mom, feels. Despite it being common for members of the Big Mom Pirates to refer to her as "Mama", the only ones she considers to be her true family are her 85 biological children.^note  Although that doesn't stop her from being neglectful and/or abusive to her children since she mainly sees them as tools to further her own goals. This feeling is also shared by the majority of said children, especially when it comes to the 43 husbands Big Mom has had over the years.
• Remy: Nobody's Girl: The anime begins with Remy's estranged father Jérôme Barberin coming home from work. To her surprise, he's angry to see her and tells her she isn't part of her family. Remy then learns that when was a baby, she was discovered by Jérôme, and he had no intention of taking her in. However, his wife Anna took pity on Remy and took her in, hiding the fact that she wasn't of their blood for most of her life.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: This is one of the driving forces in what lead to Marik's Start of Darkness. Because his brother Rishid/Odion was found by his parents as a baby, he was never truly considered family by their father and deliberately raised to be the family slave. When Rishid attempts to mimic the engravings Marik received as a part of the Tomb Keeper ritual (which he cannot undergo due to a lack of blood relation) as a way to help him feel more accepted? Their father becomes absolutely furious, leading to him getting beaten and Marik finally snapping, using the Millenium Rod to kill their father.

Comic Books

• The Good Asian: In the backstory, main character Edison Hark's mother was a maid to the rich Mason Carroway when he was a boy. After she was killed during a burglary, Mason adopted Edison and raised him like a son, and Mason's son Frankie, who had been friends with Edison before this, also treated Edison like family. Mason's daughter Victoria, however, was not so kindly disposed to Edison, as she believed Edison was using her father as a Meal Ticket (which was not entirely unfounded, as before her death Edison's mother had forcefully pushed him to ingratiate himself to the Carroways, believing that being friends with the heir to a rich white family gave a Chinese-American boy in the 1920s a lot more opportunities than he'd otherwise get), and once cruelly told him "You're not my brother, you're trash my father gave a home." It would take years before Edison won her over.
• Nightwing: In the storyline "The Crew of the Crossed", Captain Blüd is a hereditary title. The current Captain Blüd is the chosen daughter of the previous one, but her adoptive brother rejects his father's choice and insists that being Blüd's biological son makes him the true heir to the title.
• Robin: While the other Robins have had a degree of Adoption Angst and dislike for each other in the past, Damian Wayne is the one who begins here and takes an awfully long time to step out of it (especially with Tim Drake), assuming that being Batman's biological son makes him the "true" Robin and also the only "true" member of Batman's family.

Fan Works

• In The Loud House fanfic Checkmate, Lincoln and Clyde, or as this fic calls them, Spade and Jackson, are the Loud sisters' adoptive brothers. During a squabble, the sisters tell the boys they aren't really their brothers.
• The New Retcons:
  • With the exception of April and Meredith and Robin, Francçise Caine, Anthony’s daughter and Elizabeth’s stepdaughter is treated as this in varying degrees by the Pattersons: Michael and Deanna are nice to her but don’t build a strong relationship with her, John ignores her and Elly is more directly hostile towards her step granddaughter, calling her "someone else’s castoff" during her last letter before her breakdown.
  • As the fic progresses, John is shown to have this attitude: When he reveals that Michael isn’t his son, it’s implied that John resented being a stepfather and he’s shocked when Anthony says that he’s going to raise James as his own son, despite knowing that Elizabeth conceived him with Warren.

Film — Animated

• Puss in Boots: The Last Wish portrays Goldilocks as a human adopted by the three bears, with Baby Bear repeatedly insisting she isn’t his sister. This serves to fuel her Adoption Angst and seek the wishing star to gain a “real” family.
• South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut: When Sheila tells her son Kyle to bring his "little brother" (Ike) with him, Kyle replies, "But he's not really my brother; he's adopted!".
• The Tigger Movie: Subverted. Tigger initially believes this when he comes to realize the implications of being ‘the only one’. But by the end of the movie, when he learns that it was his friends who wrote the letter to him, he realizes that this is not true and that a real family is the people who support him.

Film — Live-Action

• Avatar: The Way of Water: Zigzagged with the Recombinant incarnation of Miles Quaritch. While he knows on an intellectual level that he's not the same man as the original human Quaritch and openly acknowledges that he's not truly Spider's father, he nonetheless displays fatherly protectiveness towards the boy. He tries to invoke this when Neytiri threatens Spider's life in response to Quaritch threatening Kiri's; he denies Spider meaning anything to him, claiming that "We're not even the same species." But when it looks like Neytiri is about to slit Spider's throat, Quaritch shouts out a Big "NO!" in panic and releases Kiri.
• Disenchanted: When Morgan is angry at her stepmother Giselle, she says, "You're not even my real mother!", hurting her feelings.
• Like Father, Like Son: It seems Japan at large holds onto this idea and the movie tries to challenge it.

Literature

• (Very) briefly happens in the Brother Cadfael book "The Confession of Brother Haluin", when it's revealed the half-sister of a family is actually unrelated to them by blood. The head of the family says she's entitled to nothing... before clarifying that she has no family but them and so should stay, blood ties or no.
  Cenred: So she is no sister of mine. She is no sister of mine!
  Adelais: None, but until now she believed herself so. It is not her fault, never cast blame on her.
  Cenred: She is no kin to me. I owe her nothing, neither dowry nor lands. She has no claim on me.
  Adelais: None. But she is kin to me, [...] She will not be penniless.
  Cenred: Madam, you mistake me. This house has been her home, she will still think of it as home. Where else is there for her? It is we here who are suddenly cut off, like topped limbs. Her father and mother, both, are in the cloister, and what guidance, what care has she ever had from you? Kin to us or not, she belongs here at Vivers.
• Ratburger: Downplayed — Zoe refuses to call her stepmother Sheila "Mum", but that's more because she's a Wicked Stepmother than because they're not blood relatives.
• Warrior Cats:
  • It's a subtle reoccurring theme for characters to stop seeing their adopted parents as their family after learning they're adopted. It isn't mentioned in-text, but several characters stopped referring to their foster/adopted parents as such upon the reveal.
    • Hollyleaf and her siblings take it particularly far, not only becoming more distant from their adoptive mother Squirrelflight upon finding out the truth but outright hating and resenting her for lying to them, with Hollyleaf having a dramatic Freak Out over it.
    • Twigbranch feels out of place due to being adopted and wants to find her "real" family despite her adoptive family being shown to be loving, looking with jealousy at how much biological parents love their children. However, when switching Clans to be with her biological father she ends up regretting it and returning to her adopted Clan.
  • Pinenose, Violetshine's adoptive mother, is described as being very loving towards her biological children while not having much affection for Violetshine. This prompts the aforementioned Twigbranch, who does have more loving adoptive parents, to still wish someone loved her the way Pinenose loved her biological children.
• In The Black Wolves Of Boston by Wen Spencer, Joshua's extended family generally treat him like crap and ignore his existence or give him insultingly-small gifts, out of a mix of this and racism, as they know he was adopted as a baby and believe him to be half Latino. (He isn't, but he is a werewolf.) Making this worse, though, he doesn't know he's adopted, as his parents have always insisted otherwise, so he's just gotten used to his larger family scorning him for no apparent reason.

Live-Action TV

• Boat Story: Janet is very close to her ex-boyfriend's son Alan, whom she raised since he was a baby. Upon finding out that her ex intends to move to Australia, Janet is devastated and desperate to bribe him to let Alan stay with her. However, when gangsters come after Janet, she invokes this with Alan by trying to Break His Heart to Save Him. She tells him that she's not his mother and he's not her son, and to go with his real father. However, she later apologises and explains why she said that.
• Damages: Their long-term family lawyer Leonard Winstone is genuinely extremely loyal to the Tobins and prides himself on being treated as one of them (in part since he has no family of his own and faked his entire identity). Until Joe tells him that Louis laughed at him behind his back and regarded him not as a member of the family but as a "performing monkey", and mocks him for believing he was ever one of them.
• Game of Thrones: In season 8, Arya argues that no matter how well the Starks get to know Danaerys, they can't trust her because she's not one family.
• The Golden Girls: In "Home Again, Rose," Rose suffers a heart attack and goes into emergency triple bypass surgery. Dorothy, Blanche, and Sophia all rush to the hospital, but since they're not blood relatives, they can't go into her room. When Rose's daughter Kirsten shows up, the other women ask for her help, but she tells them that they aren't her family, much to their sadness; Dorothy points out that they're a Family of Choice ("We share our lives together!") and Sophia remarks that she genuinely considers Rose one of her own children. Kirsten doesn't budge until she gets to see Rose, who immediately asks "Where are the girls?," meaning Dorothy, Blanche, and Sophia; later, Blanche immediately offers to mortgage the house they share to pay for Rose's aftercare, and Kirsten realizes that she's been foolish:
  Kirsten: I'm gonna go talk to the doctor about you. I think my mother needs to be with her family now. All of her family.
• Justified: Theo Tonin says that he treated Quarles (his adopted son) as his family alongside his biological son, Sammy. However, when Quarles points a gun at Sammy, Theo has no problem drawing the line and saying that This Is Unforgivable! because Sammy is his real son while Quarles is not.
• Law & Order: In "Caviar Emptor" the Asshole Victim was the patriarch of a wealthy family who wouldn't allow his daughter to adopt a baby from China. His exact words were: "I won't allow someone else's bastard to become my grandchild."
• Subverted in the case of Rodney in Only Fools and Horses, while it was a long-time suspicion that Rodney was born through an affair through his and Del's mother, they treat him the same nonetheless. Exploited in the episode "Thicker Than Water" however, when their father Reg convinces Del that he is the illegitimate son, knowing that, while Del would be perfectly sympathetic to Rodney about it, he would be too proud of his own Trotter blood to show his face, getting rid of Reg's biggest adversity when slinking back into the household.
• Played with in Succession:
  • Shiv's fiancee (later husband) Tom is in a difficult position in the Family Business because, no matter how often he proves his loyalty to Waystar, Logan doesn't regard him as "one of them" (and even Shiv gets a few moments of suggesting that). He's even suggested to rank below Greg since Greg is at least Logan's biological nephew (although a newcomer) and is always overshadowed by Kendall in particular but even Roman (who Logan doesn't even particularly like). During the cruises scandal, Logan shows some inclination to protect all his kids, but Tom is his first choice to be thrown to the wolves. However, Season 3 finally marks a defrosting in Tom and Logan's relationship. Tom looks after Logan during his UTI, and then Tom stakes out his loyalty to Logan by turning against his kids, betraying Shiv in particular. Logan dies shortly afterwards, so it's unknown if this would've lasted.
  • In their argument in the Series Finale, Kendall tries to pull rank on his siblings by saying that Logan wanted the company to stay in the family and he is (as of that moment) the only one with heirs so he should inherit Waystar-Royco. Roman plays this trope on him by saying that Sophie is adopted and Iverson is the product of an affair Kendall's ex-wife Rava had with someone else. While Kendall is a deadbeat Disneyland Dad, he also treats them as his real kids. The argument then gets swiftly overshadowed when Shiv reminds Kendall of what happened with the waiter.

Video Games

• Criminal Case: Mysteries of the Past: After Viola finds out James isn't her biological father, she says, in her own words, "Just because I'm getting closer to figuring out who my biological father is does not mean I need to cast away the man who raised me". Later, she feels she has done that after she finds out Horatio Rochester was using her.
• Mortal Kombat 1: Bi-Han, who is Sub-Zero in this game's timeline, does not treat Smoke with any respect due to the latter not being part of the Lin Kuei by blood. This is in direct contrast to Kuai Liang, Bi-Han's blood brother and this timeline's Scorpion, who greatly values and trusts Smoke.
  Bi-Han (Sub-Zero): Mind your place, Tomas. Father may have taken you in, made you one of us... but your blood will never be Lin Kuei.
• Persona 4: This is the core conflict within Kou Ichijo's Social Link. As the adopted son of a notable family in Inaba, Kou feels like The Unfavorite compared to his younger sister who is their parents' biological daughter. This prompts him to try and search for his biological parents. While he never ends up finding them, Kou still gains closure after he's reassured that his adoptive family does love him.
• In The Roottrees Are Dead, the trust set up by the family founder Elias is specifically and only for direct blood descendants, and the salary for running the Roottree Candy Company is deliberately set low so that only blood relatives can afford to take the job.

Web Animation

• Revenge Films: "My boyfriend and his mother were abusing his step sister": The main character's boyfriend and his mother abuse the boyfriend's stepsister, even going so far as to starve her and forbid her to bathe. The boyfriend's "justification" for doing so is that his stepsister isn't real family.
• This is strongly implied to be the attitude of Raven Branwen towards Ruby Rose in RWBY. Ruby is the daughter of Raven's ex-husband Taiyang and her friend and former teammate Summer Rose, Ruby was raised beside and fiercely loves her half-sister Yang, who is Raven's estranged daughter, and also loves and hero worshipped Raven's twin brother Qrow, who dotes on her in return. Despite having multiple reasons to at least regard Ruby as more than just another stranger, Raven has only ever treated Ruby with cold dismissal when they've interacted. This is in contrast to her daughter Yang, as despite being an absent mother for most of Yang's life, Raven obviously feels some affection for Yang and it's noted with surprise by more than one person that Raven is much quicker to try to accept and open up to Yang than she would be to virtually anyone else.
• Trouble Busters: Kiara's parents favored her sister Karen for being cuter, to the point where they abandoned Kiara and allowed Alan and Melanie, Kiara's maternal uncle and his wife, to adopt her. Years later, Kiara's parents want her back because they want to use her and insist that they have the right because they're Kiara's biological parents. When Alan and Melanie insist they are Kiara's parents because of the family registry and alongside the fact that her biological parents outright said that they didn't consider Kiara their daughter, Kiara's biological parents insist that Alan and Melanie aren't "real" parents because Kiara's mother was the one who gave birth to Kiara and that Melanie isn't family at all because she isn't biologically related to Kiara.

Web Videos

• Apple Texts:
  • Stories involving evil in-laws, step-family, or foster family will often have them insisting that the protagonist isn't family because of a lack of blood ties. At the story's end, said characters almost always try to play the family card in order to guilt-trip the protagonist into helping them.
  • In stories involving evil blood relatives and good non-blood relatives, the former will insist that they are the protagonist's "real" family and denounce the latter as being strangers.
• Viral Texts: Naomi, who abandoned her father along with her mother for a rich man after her father became hospitalized, demands that her father should give her and her mother money on the grounds that a father should support his daughter. When she learns that her father is re-married and has a stepdaughter, Wendy, she calls Wendy a "fake made-up daughter" and says that her father should be willing to support his "real" daughter. When Naomi's father decides to disown her, Naomi doubles down on her attitude, calling Wendy a "pseudo-daughter" and demanding her ex-father give her 400,000 dollars.

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: Invoked in "The Words". Gumball says that Darwin is not his brother in order to show him how much words hurt, telling him that he's just a "pet that grew legs" (which, in a way, is true). However, after hearing how much Darwin is crying, Gumball immediately regrets saying it and quickly takes it back.
• Back to the Future: In "Go Fly a Kite", Jules kicks off the problem by claiming that his less-scientifically-inclined brother Verne is adopted. He uses phrases like "my mother" and "my family" to tease his brother further. This leads to Verne running off into the time stream and disrupting Benjamin Franklin's lightning experiment. After finding out what he did, Jules is remorseful.
• DuckTales (2017): During "The Last Adventure", when Webby is explaining to her newly discovered sisters/clones May and June about her family, they get confused by her referring to people like Lena and Violet as family, pointing out that they aren't biologically related. Webby tries to explain that you don't have to be related to someone to be family, but May and June ignore her.
• Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids: "The Secret" is about an adopted girl named Francie who never knew she was adopted (she was adopted as a baby) until her brother told her during an argument, with the brother telling her that she's not his "real" sister. By the end of the episode, they've reconciled and accepted each other as family.
• King of the Hill: In the episode "Happy Hanks Giving," the Hills are set to go visit Peggy's family in Montana, including Luanne's dad/Peggy's brother who is in town for a few days. On the way to the airport, Hank asks Luanne to show him her ticket, and when Luanne says she didn't buy one, Hank says that she can't go with them. When Peggy asks Hank why he didn't buy her a ticket months before when they were cheaper, Hank responds that he bought tickets for the Hill family, and since Luanne is not a Hill, he felt no need to buy her a ticket, or at the very least tell her she needs to buy her own. After a brief argument, Hank is forced to spring for a very expensive day of travel ticket for Luanne.
• Sofia the First: This has come up from time to time in a series about a blended family.
  • In the first story arc, Amber insists on referring to Sofia as her stepsister, until a spell Amber tried to cast left everyone in the castle frozen save for herself and Sofia. Cinderella comes to Sofia via the Amulet of Avalor, telling her that she herself regretted never patching up the relationship between herself and her step-sisters. Sofia and Amber come to terms, and Amber subsequently drops the step whenever she refers to Sofia from then on.
  • In another episode, Princess Hildegard makes an offhand remark during the preparations for a father-daughter outing if Sofia will be fine, as King Roland isn't her real father. Amber demonstrates that she was very sincere in dropping the step in stepsister when she puts a comforting arm around Sofia, and asks Hildegard why she would even say that, and that step-fathers are just as much fathers as a birth father. Hildegard apologizes for her remark, though the seeds of doubt were already planted in Sofia's head, and it takes a bit of effort by Amber and Roland to show her that they consider her as much a part of the family as they do each other.
• South Park: Subverted in "Ike's Wee Wee" — when Kyle finds out that his brother Ike is adopted, he decides they're not actually brothers and sends him away. Upon looking at old photos, however, he decides Ike is his brother after all and gets him back.
• The Venture Bros.: Brock bluntly tells the boys that this is the case in "The Family That Slays Toether, Stays Together Part I, insisting that his bodyguarding them was just a job and that he's not part of the family. However, it's made clear Brock is only saying this to get them out of the line of fire, and that it tears him up to have to say it. And Hank didn't believe it for a second.
  Hank: "Seriously, Brock? The Lassie trick? What, was I born yesterday?"

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