Strong Women, Weak Fathers: Daddy Issues in Sci Fi
Source. This character arc is done extremely well…but the fact remains that there are some uncomfortable parallels between her father and the Doctor in terms of personality.
Daddy issues?
I can hear you protesting already. “But Magpie, it’s normal for characters to have family trauma! Chriton has daddy issues in Farscape too!”
The thing is, male characters with daddy issues generally are trying to impress their fathers. Female characters have the emotional connection thing going on. They usually did not know their fathers or had a poor connection. In Doctor Who, Rose’s father died when she was a child (though she later meets him). Liara’s ‘father’ in Mass Effect ran out on her mother after marital problems. The Leia/Darth Vader thing in Star Wars is another example.
The problem with the daddy issues is that it is usually used to make the heroine more accessible to the hero. I wrote a long blog post about the love interests in ME and their issues some time ago–I give some points to Tali for trying to impress her father as a son would, but Tali, Liara, Ashley, and Miranda all have enormous daddy issues. EDI does not have these (unless you count Cerberus as her father….) and Morinth and Samara also lack them…but none of these can be properly romanced. Jack doesn’t have daddy issues but did have a severely traumatic childhood nonetheless. Compare the male love interests’ issues–Garrus has duty and honour, Kaiden has the biotic thing, and Thane–who does, admittedly, have the issue with his son–mostly is concerned about his wife. Jacob does have daddy issues as well, but he’s the only one.
A few series manage to avoid this issue, but those characters aren’t usually love interests. Consider Zev in Lexx. She doesn’t have daddy issues, but like Jack, she does have a traumatic/unnatural childhood. I don’t watch Battlestar Galactica, but a quick info check on Wikipedia revealed that even hard-drinkin’ and sharp-shootin’ Starbuck had a traumatic childhood and was abused; her father was also conspicuous by his absence. Aeryn Sun, a personal favorite, had an absent father and grew up in a facility with restricted freedom. Admittedly, Starbuck and Aeryn both have romances in their series, but considering how powerful they are, the fact that they’re hobbled by a similar past trait is interesting.
Diverting into the superhero world, more evidence of the rule of daddy issues OR being raised in an unnatural facility is easy to find. Spiderman’s Gwen Stacy conflicts with her father. The Marvel X-Men are rife with it. Oh, not all females are abused, and plenty of the men go through the same sort of trauma (Batman’s parents, for instance), but it’s still a disturbingly consistent trend.
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Why is this happening?
It’s a reasonably well-known fact that girls often base their romantic expectations on their interactions with their fathers from a young age. I don’t have information on how this is affected by orientation, but it definitely has an impact on the relationship’s longevity and health. When I was still in classes and studying for my degree, the link between healthy parent-child relationships and attachment to a partner was a big topic of discussion. Without delving too much into psychology textbook territory, the cliche that problems are usually rooted in childhood has a nasty tendency to be true.
We see the echoes of this in science fiction. The ladies I’ve mentioned here often choose strong alpha male heroes to replace their absent fathers. Their damaged histories make them more approachable, giving the hero a shot at winning their hearts. It’s as though a strong woman can only be made by childhood trauma and an absent father. Is it really necessary to suggest that the only way a woman is accessible is if she’s had a terrible childhood? Would a woman with a healthy background look twice at these heroes, or–worse–would she be even more of a threat to them? None of them really lead independent lives without their love-interest heroes, who are usually implied to be quite fine standing on their own without said girlfriends. It would be nice to even suggest that these women would be fine without the men in their lives having come by to save and ‘fix’ them.
I have to give Farscape and Mass Effect and Portal some points though; all of these explored issues with the female character’s mother in great detail, as opposed to blaming absent fathers for all of the issues. I also loved that Bioshock 2 had the father figure as the nurturing one and the mother as the villain. However…mothers are often absent when fathers nurture. I’ve even done that in my own writing. It’s clearly a tricky balance. So why are mothers the next go-to villain?
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Dan O’Brien
Editor, Empirical
Author: of The End of the World Playlist, Bitten, Cerulean Dreams, and The Journey
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Source: http://thedanobrienproject.blogspot.com/2013/06/strong-women-weak-fathers-daddy-issues.html
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