Basic Trope: An extremely convoluted and utterly confusing family tree.
- Straight: Bob's step-uncle is his father too, and his grandma is younger than him.
- Exaggerated: Bob has two fathers and no mother, his son is his grandfather, there are over nine thousand clones of Bob, and just about everybody's committed incest more than once.
- Downplayed: Bob is the nephew of an uncle decades younger than him and his godmother is his step-mother.
- Justified:
- Someone had multiple children along the line, causing the records to mess up.
- Bob's family is a bunch of Reality Warpers.
- One or more friends and family are time travelers and have had several years in the past and in the future, so it ends up being a mess.
- Inverted:
- In a work where everybody's family is a Tangled Family Tree, Bob is the only one to have a normal family.
- Single Line of Descent.
- Subverted:
- All the people claiming to be his family are mistaken, and he simply has the standard extended family...
- There is more than one Bob Tupper (one from a British family, another from a Hungarian family, yet another from a Norwegian family and perhaps more), only when you conflate them do you get a 'tangled family tree'.
- Double Subverted: ...Who turn out to be incestuous wrecks themselves.
- Parodied: Bob's pet dog, cat, bird, and hamster turn out to his biological parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, daughters, sons, nephews, nieces, stepparents, godparents and his roommates.
- Zig Zagged: Bob's step-uncle is his father.
- Averted: Bob has a normal family tree.
- Enforced: The creators set this up as conflict so their character Bob fix the problem.
- Lampshaded: "Woah, Bob. That's a pretty tangled family you got there!"
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: Betty claims to be Bob's Opposite-Sex Clone from the future and Bob believes her because of how confusing his genealogy otherwise is.
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
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