[ pinch-hit daily entertainment ]

[sardonicynic]

Morning, all, and happy Thursday! I've had family on the brain for the past week, and it's showing:

→ Describe the relationship(s) your character(s) had/have with their mother, their father, or both. Good? Bad? Ugly? Do they still get along now? (Or, would they, if given the chance?)

Comments

[boston_bruiser]

Voodoo's mother disappeared when he was five, but he doesn't really have any bad memories of her, sooooo chalk that one up in the win column?

He got along rather swimmingly with his dad, though. Still would, even if he's changed some.


If I recall correctly, John's mom died during childbirth, and his dad was a raging alcoholic that got blinded in a barfight in South Chicago. He died a couple years after, but even then I'm guessing he didn't have the greatest relationship with him.

John would be a lot more likely to get along with his mom than he would his dad, I imagine.

[sdelmonte]

Kirk idolized his father. He was close with his mother sometimes, but there was always a little distance between them as she knew she'd lose him to the stars, as she did her husband. I suspect she was closer to Jim's brother.

Knox's father is a rather cold man who isn't really close to anyone. So Knox has always viewed his dad as this guy who's married to his mother and not much else. He would be closer to his mother if his dad weren't in the way. Also, they live in Florida and Knox sees them every two years or so.

Cyborg's dad makes Knox's look like Cliff Huxtable. The relationship between the two has been terrible since before the Stones divorced. The fact that Silas Stone saved Cy's life didn't help. Cy was close to his late mother and misses her most days.

Gibbs hasn't seen his parents in ages, and assumes they must be dead. He was never close to them, but in that era, parenting tended to be a lot less emotionally engaging for many.

Howard Stark's dad is, in his opinion, a corporate drone who traded the vision of Grandpa Stark's aviation firm for the safety and relative ease of a desk job at Ford. The two make small talk at family events, but try to avoid each other. Howard's mother is too much the socialite to ever spend time with the children.

[bjornwilde]

Ben did not have a good relationship with his parents. I don't remember for sure but I think his father was abusive towards his mother and would fight with his older brother. There's a reason Ben swears by his Aunt Petunia.

Hank I think has a good relationship with his parents but his deciding to hide his mutation from them has put a wall between them; as secrets are want to do.

Thalia has a terrible relationship with her parents. Her mom is a neglectful alcoholic and she has yet to see her father face to face.

Julie has a lukewarm relationship with her parents. This is mostly due to her father who I feel is jealous of those with super powers.

Kate had a wonderful relationship with her parents. Then her mother and twin sister got killed. Then she found out her father knew or suspected her twin sister may have survived the killing but kept it from her. She no longer has a relationship with her father.

Mars has a great relationship with his mother. He doesn't have a father though Jupiter tries.

Palamedes has a great relationship with his brothers who came with him to Britain. I can't imagine it was easy for his father to let his sons go off on such a long journey so there must be some strain there. I honestly don't know about the mother.

Beast Boy had a close relationship with his mother, working with her everyday and loving her dearly. She's not around anymore. No word is given about his father.

[sky_child]

Canon: who the heck knows because you never see his parents and the only mention of his parents made in the game is when Levias complements his parents' taste in names.

Headcanon: never knew his father because he kicked it before he was born; loved his mom lots, and her death was one of the things that made him want to be a knight. Also factors into his...poor reaction to threats made on the people he loves.

[auraofmystery]

I'm going to have to do this one pup at a time, I think.

Everything history tells you about Mac's family is a lie cooked up by his own press people. And by 'press people' I mean himself.

Not even Leo knows the following:

Mac hasn't seen his mother since he left the village he was born in. I believe his father died when Mac was very young, and he was raised, with some younger siblings, by his mother.

He left to make a name for himself, and intended to send money home, but - he never really made enough money for that. He loves his ol' Mum, though.

[minkhollow]

Cata never really got on with her parents. She hasn't talked to them since she went to the Guild.

Sam's situation is... complicated. But as of last year's Conversations With Dead People, he can safely say he would have got on smashingly with his mother... if she hadn't had her brain magically scrambled to keep her from telling people who raped her, anyway. As it was, she did what she could, but she was in no position to really be a mother to him.
(As for his father, Sam wasn't fond of him before that little tidbit came up, and after it did? He killed him. I think he would have done that without the contract, at that point.)

Claudia doesn't really remember her parents - she was too young to really grieve them properly when they died. (She made up some of that after a CWDP, speaking of those.) I think she'd get along okay with them if given the chance. Joshua mostly filled the parental role for her, and she would (and has done) go to the end of the earth for him.

Apollo hearts his mother. He can put on a polite face with Zeus, usually. He is... not remotely fond of Hera.

Imp's mother, I headcanoned a long time ago, died when he was young. He hasn't talked to his father since their blowout argument when he left Llamedos. (I think if his mother had still been around, that wouldn't have been quite as bad.)

Regulus is not fond of his mother - but then, pretty much no one is fond of Walburga Black. His father isn't such a bad guy, though!

Red doesn't remember either of her parents; she was very young when people hunted down her mother, and she has no idea what happened to her father. (She hopes he managed to get away rather than being eaten by her mother. Because... yeeeeeah.) Her relationship with her grandmother is currently very strained, but she does intend to patch it up, once she can actually have that conversation.
(How this translates into Storybrooke: Her mother was just as much of a wild child as Ruby was, and possibly overdosed on something when Ruby was little. Her father ditched them after knocking her mother up, and her grandmother doesn't let her do anything. And yet, she stuck around to help her grndmother rather than go to Boston anyway. For some damn reason.)

[cantdiequiteyet]

Teresa's parents were eaten in front of her by a yoma. Now she can't even remember what her parents looked like. She assumes that she loved them. People do love their parents, right? And she was a human back then.

She's just forgotten what that felt like.

[a1enzo]

Enzo's mother died when he was born. He's mostly to terms with this (awkward wording, I would say he had come to terms with it but I don't think there was a specific time when he did so); he understands that it is unreasonable to consider her death his fault and that no one does so... but of course he feels guilty about it anyway.

He has, of course, seen pictures and been told about her since he was little, and he would very much like to have known her... but because he lost so many people in the Twin City disaster, he is sometimes glad he never did because she's one less person to miss. (But only when he is feeling exceptionally depressed or bitter, which is fortunately not that often.)

He always had a good relationship with is father when he was little. Welman wasn't too much of an absent-minded professor and was close to his family. Of course, then the Twin City exploded, apparently Welman's fault (and apparently killing him), so that added another load of sporadic bitterness to Enzo's pile. Later, when Welman was semi-resurrected as a sentient null in an exoskeleton suit (I love my canon), it was established that the accident was the fault of nothing more than really bad coincidental timing. So Enzo doesn't need to blame him anymore, which was a big relief.

Enzo's not as close to Welman as he was pre-disaster, because he got used to Dot being his primary caretaker and then he went off to the Academy, so it's just not the same relationship as when you're living under the same roof. However, they still love each other, are very proud of each other (even if Enzo doesn't understand any of the science stuff), and bond when they can. Enzo would really like his father to be fully recompiled, but on the other hand, the null-bot thing is pretty awesome.

[interrogoiterum]

Renee loves her parents dearly, even though she's long been aware of their faults as people. For a long time her life was focused in her family, and although they weren't shy about how disappointed they were that she didn't marry young, they were proud of her for becoming a cop and keeping the city safe.


Then they discovered she was gay and disowned her.

Her father has since made movements in the direction of 'I still love you,' but her mother has not. Renee has not spoken to her family in years.

[to_serve]

This reminds me I need to call you. Later though as I'm a little busy right now.

[no_justice]

Death doesn't have parents.


He is sadness about this fact.

[sdelmonte]

And now I remember that I left Charlie also not having parents off my list above. D'Oh!

[genarti]

Ahahaha. *eyes roster*

Trowa has none! No memory at all of his parents; he was orphaned as a toddler. (Which he doesn't know for sure but suspects; all he knows is that he was a foundling in a warzone.) They were good parents from the tiny bit we see, I guess.

The closest he had to a parental figure at all was his captain. Who was the captain of a mercenary troop including a child soldier they never named, so... uh. It's complicated! Their relationship took a hit when Trowa killed a bunch of troopmates who had turned on them, and then the captain died when Trowa was 13 or 14, in a way that was Trowa feels indirectly responsible for. Trowa loved him without having the vocabulary to really express that, as a kid. Nowadays, his feelings are differently complicated: love, and the awareness that Captain Singh was really terrible at responsible childcare (but also did try to do right by Trowa, however poorly he succeeded, and Trowa as a kid was also pretty resistant to being cared for), and guilt over his death, and the quiet knowledge that Captain Singh's horror at some of Trowa's choices is part of why he doesn't make those choices any more.

I would be fascinated to see what would happen if they ever actually met in Milliways, is what I'm saying, although he's a tiny minor backstory character and it's highly unlikely. I gave Trowa a Conversations With Dead People dream instead.

River has always been a daddy's girl. Even before the Academy, she and her mother loved each other, but with some level of frustration and mutual misunderstanding. Then came the Academy and being a fugitive and then the Milliways revelations that her father knew more of what was going on that he'd let on, and basically there were several years of estrangement that was painful for everybody. But nowadays they get along! River and Regan are always going to be sort of talking across a conversation gap of conflicting personalities and (nowadays) River's communication issues, and River and Gabriel are gradually and subtly renegotiating their relationship to include the fact that daddy's little girl has grown up (into a gunslinger with some other father figures and a high body count), but there's a lot of underlying love to go with the underlying guilt. Everybody's working at the relationship.

Clare is another with no real memory of her family. She has some vague memories, because she wasn't orphaned as young as Trowa, but they're a child's memories -- impressions of warmth and caring, snapshots of rooms and toys, that kind of thing. No names or details, and later trauma that overlays a lot of it.

Her second sorta-mother is Teresa, cantdiequiteyet. Clare loves her fiercely, notwithstanding the fact that Teresa died years ago for her. (But Clare has what you might call a keepsake! Er.) When they re-meet in Milliways, the fact that Clare became a Claymore is going to be a source of friction, but they both love each other with a ferocious and desperate and co-dependent love, so it'll work out.

Thor's relationship with his parents is complicated by the fact that they're royalty, which means that they're also his sovereigns. Once canon kicks in, it's also complicated by the fact of his brother.

Thor loves his mother uncomplicatedly, and she's the nurturing one of his parents; I think their relationship is pretty straightforward. They don't always spend a lot of time together, but he has no doubt that Frigga loves him. (Which is, of course, one of the many reasons Loki's lies in Thor hit so hard.)

Odin... um. Okay, Thor would say that Odin is a good father and a good king, and would get really angry at anyone who questioned either of these things. Personally, I disagree; I think that Odin's a good king, but a pretty terrible father, well-meaning or not. He lies to Loki about important facts about his life, he's oblivious to Thor's shortcomings until they're waved in his face with neon lights (at which point he preemptorily banishes him, without telling Thor or anyone whether this is a permanent punishment or a short-term object lesson), and he attempts to raise his sons to be kings of two realms without telling them that fact and only succeeds in raising them to compete for the throne of one. And here's where the royalty thing (and the patriarchal society) combine to make Thor extra-defensive about all this, because questioning his father means questioning his king, and Thor is a righteous warrior who sees both these things as dishonorable and unfilial. And the one time Thor really got in a fight with his dad, Thor was genuinely the one in the wrong, which reinforces that.

So basically, all of Odin's family needs a lot of family therapy that they will never actually get! And Thor gets along very well with his father, but in a way that obscures the underlying problems of this family. I think he will gradually get some more emotional distance to recognize Odin's flaws, as he grows up more, but a) it'll be very very gradual, and b) admitting something to himself is not the same as being so disloyal as to admit it out loud to other people.

Uzura is a toddler. She loves her adoptive father and adoptive brother! She doesn't really have any complications about this! They may have complicated feelings towards her, given that she's a magical puppet-child created from the wreckage of a different magical puppet, but Uzura is largely oblivious to that at this point in her life.

Regan... hmm. I think Regan got along quite well with her mother, and had an amiable, loving, and somewhat superficial relationship with her father where they got along well but never talked about anything really serious. Which is part of why she's always quietly frustrated by her inability to connect beyond superficiality with River.

Have I forgotten anyone? I don't think I've forgotten anyone... Can you tell I gravitate towards characters with family-related issues? Or at least family influence of one sort or another.

[cantdiequiteyet]

*snickers* keepsake.

[renegadeheart]

Marguerite's parents died when she was very young. She and her brother raised themselves, calling each other petit-papa and petite-mama. If you asked Marguerite about her family, she would fix on Armand, instead. And she adores him.

[sardonicynic]

→ Ben Wade's father was killed over a shot of whiskey when Ben was eight years old. His mother said she and Ben would go east to start over; she took him to a train station, sat him down with a Bible, and told him to read it while she got their tickets. She left him there. Ben read the Bible cover to cover; it took him three days.

Both these relationships are, uh, parenting failures, but Ben made his way to Dodge City, and made a name for himself as an outlaw. The way he sees it, it was what it was, and that's that. He's doing just fine for himself.

→ Gina Cowell has the most functional parental relationships of any of my roster! She may not see her mother and father as often as they'd like, but phone calls and e-mails are a regular thing. The only true point of contention is Gina's failed marriage to Richard Castle. (And the fact that her mother has Gina on Google Alerts -- so when Gina shows up on Page Six, explanations are in her immediate future.)

→ Kate Warner's driving force is family. Her mother died in London when Kate was 22, just as Kate was starting grad school at Stanford. Kate wasn't there, and still has a ton of guilt; she left Stanford to help her father and her younger sister, Marie, cope afterward. She tried to become more of a mother to Marie than a sister, with mixed results. She misses her mom more than she can articulate.

She worships her father. She became a finance executive at Warner International because of him, and because, as the oldest daughter, and the Responsible One, she felt like she had a responsibility to the family business. (Initially, Kate wanted to major in chemistry and become a pharmacist; after many, many arguments her freshman year of undergrad, she switched to finance.)

Now, after Marie's involvement with terrorist organization Second Wave, Kate and her father are talking in circles. Bob Warner is horrified and grief-stricken and so angry; Kate wants to believe that some part of Marie is still good, and that with enough love and support, Marie can rediscover the parts of herself she's shuttered away. Needless to say, it's complicated. (When Kate gets back to L.A., it's going to be a lot of breaky fun to play out.)

Annnnnd that's all the bloviating I've got time for, at the moment -- now, it's off to a committee meeting. Aw yeah, research compliance.

[genarti]

...Reading this makes me think that Thor and Kate really ought to talk sometime, once he's done with the first movie of his canon.

[1nv1nc1ble]

Mark, as evidenced in his OOMs so far, is very much his father's son. He and Nolan are kindred spirits (in more ways than one, which will become evident as things progress). He also loves his mother dearly and worries about her when Nolan is in peril. They are about as functional and stable a family you could want, aside from that whole superhero thing.

[raptorcanaria]

Dinah loves her parents dearly. She is just also aware of their flaws.

Starting with her Dad - Larry Lance was a bit of a cocky ass, who tended to take her mother for granted, never took anything seriously and was perpetually patronizing to both wife and daughter. This was a bit of an act, however, as he loved them both and was well aware that his wife could kick his butt to Star City and back - the power dynamic between them was even one of the reasons he did perpetually act like a dick - he knew Dinah wouldn't lay a hand on him.

But he loved his wife very much, and he thought that the sun shone just for the sake of his daughter. And Dinah jnr loved him for his patience, for the way he stood up for her against her mother, and for the way he always knew what food went with what situation. From Larry Dinah inherited her complete lack of impulse control, and her love of good food. When he died, Dinah's world was shaken to its core, but she will always remember that he died fighting to save the world, and she's put him on a bit of a pedestal since.

Her relationship with her mother is strained by the fact that they still live together, that she has inherited both jobs from her mother and that Dinah snr is a little overly controlling and a back seat superhero and florist. Since Larry's death they've grown a little co-dependent and Dinah resents this a little. Even though she can't imagine doing anything with her life that's not floristry and superheroing, she resents the fact that she hasn't broken out on her own.

They're both strong-minded, stubborn women with powerful independence streaks and this causes friction that can't be resolved with screaming matches if one of you can cause the building to fall in with your voice.

We'll ignore - for now - the fact that Dinah snr is in remission and never even told her daughter she was sick.

[kd7sov]

Hmmmmmmmm.

Well, Felix... Felix's parents are NPCs of the NPCiest sort. They have no names, they have like three lines total over the course of the canon, etc. So. I'd imagine the relationship is kinda strained, since they all got kidnapped and then he decided to help the kidnappers and then after rescuing happened (which is so very complicated that I'm not even going to try to describe it in this comment) he got banished from their home village. (Mostly. There are some exceptions to the banishment, and it's not really enforced all that strongly. But he's supposed to not be there, and mostly he isn't.) And then he got all depressed and avoided all human contact for... what'd I say it was? Two, three years? So yeah, things are not all that excellent between them. Maybe I'll try to sort that out once I get him to realize there's stuff wrong with the way he's living, himself.

Kain's parents are dead. Have been for a while, actually; I think the king adopted him when he was about four. Between his idolization of his father, and his self-flagellation, I'm not at all sure they'd get along very well.

Fluttershy has no parents. No pegasi do, except for Pound Cake on account of he was very nearly born on-screen, and also on account of the writers needed a reason for Pinkie to do the babysitting. This is a major failing of the show, in my opinion.

That said, I rather think that they worry about her, and she does her best to convince them not to. Also that whatever their actual relationship is, she believes (perhaps very insistently) that it's perfectly fine.

Also: http://fav.me/d4ivlbg

[a1enzo]

Ahahahaha. I do not doubt that Fluttershy's father is either just like that, or else both her parents are even quieter than her. Maybe she's actually the outgoing one!

...though if that were the case, I doubt they would have managed to reproduce.

[no_vampires_plz]

Twilight Sparkle, in Millicanon, has barely spoken to her parents since getting into magic school. She suspects they're actually afraid of her ever since she accidentally turned them into houseplants during her entrance exam. She's much closer to her older brother, and to Princess Celestia.

Alyx Vance's mother, Azian, died in the Black Mesa Incident. Alyx was only two and a half years old at the time. She mostly remembers watching her mother work on pottery--pretty much all she knows about Azian as a parent and as a person comes from stories her father told years later. She came to terms with her mom's death a long time ago, although she still gets a little angsty from time to time about being a mother when she doesn't remember her own mom. As for her relationship with Eli... well. There's a reason she spent three months in Milliways after Ep2 ended before she felt functional enough to go home and deal with the consequences of his death.

It's extremely questionable whether Princess Luna had parents. I've tossed around the idea that the Fausticorn is Luna and Celestia's mother, but I haven't nailed anything down yet.

The cat, like most cats, never knew his father, and hasn't seen his mother since he was old enough to catch his own prey.

D0G is a robot and therefore has no parents.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

Ellen's mom lived long enough to name her daughter, and then went into cardiac arrest and could not be revived. Thanks to a series of circumstances she has no idea what her mother looked like. As for her father, she got along really, really well with him for nineteen years. Then he left Vault 101 without telling her why. She patched things up somewhat with him after rescuing him from Vault 122, although there was some screaming and face-slapping involved first... unfortunately he then died and left her with an amazing number of loose ends to handle, which spawned quite a bit of resentment. She has almost forgiven him at this point. Almost.

[acts_of_gord]

Gordon got along moderately well with his mother before the Black Mesa Incident, but she was one of those cases of the cobbler's children having no shoes- she was a King County family court judge who was not entirely clear on how matters stood in her own family. She meant well, but probably was not really cut out to be a mother. As for his father, Gordon's dad was an airline pilot who wasn't home very often. I covered that relationship, more or less, in conversations with dead people.

[hecu_marine]

Adrian and his dad got on pretty well, although it was generally agreed that he took after his paternal uncles more than his actual father. Dad was a businessman and very probably would have been happy living in Morgantown if he'd ever had the opportunity. Happens sometimes. He's a little bit of a momma's boy to this day, though, and that's in spite of the fact that her standard punishment duty for swearing where she could hear it was "come and work with me in the family beehives". They get along very well to this day, and Shephard will freely admit that there are three things in this world he is afraid of- "four if you count Momma when she's mad".

[ihavemyflaws]

Kara felt pretty close to her dad, the concert pianist. He taught her to plunk out some tunes on his piano before walking out on the family when she was eight. Kara's mom gave her a completely different set of issues: besides just being casually unkind (when Kara's warned not to let a manipulative Cylon get in her head, she mentions her mom always said she had nothing in there anyway), Socrata Thrace was physically abusive when Kara was little and didn't seem to approve of any of the choices she made as she got older. Socrata was fixated on the idea that Kara was meant for something bigger and better, and she tried to make Kara into a warrior; arguably the motherly lesson Kara remembers most is that fear gets you killed and anger keeps you alive. The day Kara found out Socrata was dying of cancer they had a fight that lead to Kara running out and never going back. These days the closest thing Kara's got to family is the crew of Galactica: the old man's her much-respected father figure, Helo's her BFF (when he's not off on solo Caprica adventures), and Lee... well, Lee's almost been her brother-in-law and he's almost been her lover and he's almost her friend. Since she's only experienced two weeks of canon, there's still kind of a feeling of us-against-the-universe that she has for the entire crew, regardless of whether she gets along with them on a personal level.

Kate Austen also has pretty massive parent issues. She was lied to for twenty-three years about the identity of her father. She'd thought it was Sam Austen, a genuinely good guy who was as much of a father to her as her mother would allow, but she discovered the guy she'd been considering her step-father was her real dad. Not only was this a problem for Kate because Wayne was an alcoholic who abused her mother and repeatedly behaved inappropriately toward her, but it damaged the bond she'd had with her mother. When her mom effectively chose Wayne the abuser over her on more than one occasion, their relationship shattered. Life on the run means she shouldn't get close to people, but she's made some mistakes there.

Following a shuttle accident, Faye Valentine was in cryogenic sleep for a long time. When she woke up she had no memory of who she'd been, and she didn't remember anything about her old life for over three years. Unfortunately, once her memories returned she discovered that there was no going back: her home was in ruins, and her friends and family were either dead, gone, or much older than her. The Bebop is her home, and its crew her family.

[againsttherules]

I hope this has come out in Jack's OOMs, and in threads where he's talked about it, Jack doesn't have the best relationship with his father.

They are very alike, and yet, very unalike. Both of them are excellent soldiers with powerful minds, but Jack senior only ever thinks about himself, and what he wants, whereas Jack junior is far more empathetic, and generally considers others in his decision making processes.


Jack's mother, he has an excellent relationship with, and does his best to see her as often as he can. She is generally where he goes to for moral guidance, and she encouraged him to study history, and brought it to life, which grew into the passion he has for the subject.


Erik Selvig, Erik is reasonably old in himself, being of the same school/university year as Jane Foster's father, and so, his parents are both dead now. However, when they were alive, he had a good relationship with them, they encouraged him to pursue his interests in science, which lead to him being where he is now, although they were a little disappointed that they never got any grandchildren.

Trigger warning: Child abuse, incl. sexual.

[respectthegun]

Hahahahaha
Hahahaha
Haha
Ha.

Well, the good news is, that they're both dead?

Floyd's parents were vicious, abusive people in a vicious, mutually abusive marriage, and honestly wanted each other dead. His mother, in fact, told Floyd and his brother Ed that her husband was a terrible person and persuaded Ed to murder his father. Floyd was locked out of the and watched Ed shoot his father in the spine. In the confusion, Floyd accidentally shot his beloved brother dead.

Years later, Mrs Lawton tried to con Floyd into finally killing his father by having Floyd's 8 year old son Eddie kidnapped. Eddie was raped and murdered by the kidnappers, and Floyd in return shot his mother in the spine, deciding that death was too good for her.

When his parents finally died, Floyd discovered they had been keeping the existence of his daughter Zoe from him.

Whatever horrible things you could be justified in saying about Floyd Lawton, he is determined to never be as shitty a parent as his were.

[the_seafarer]

*eyes pups*

Caspian never knew his parents, but grew up with a sort of vague respect and love for both of them. He was always told they were good people and good sovereigns, and he strives to make his father proud. He was raised mainly by his Uncle Miraz, who tried to have him assassinated when he was twelve, and his Aunt Prunaprismia, who never liked him, so his idea of what a real supportive parent-child relationship should be is more than a little skewed. By all appearances, though, he didn't let it screw up his relationship with Rilian.

Emma is a bucket of parent issues thinly wrapped in sarcasm and red leather, which is what happens when you spend your childhood and teen years until majority in the foster care system, bouncing from home to home because your real parents sent you through a magical wardrobe in order to save you from a curse abandoned you by the side of the highway. Personally, I blame Pinocchio and Geppetto for most of her abandonment issues.

Danny seems to have a pretty solid relationship with his family. We've only met his brother in canon, but we know both his parents are still alive, that he has a bunch of sisters, and that his dad is/was a fireman. I imagine his family to be very loud, very opinionated, and a lot of fun.

Jack is hated by and hates his father, while also craving his attention, respect, and affection. He loves and pities his mother.

[alorn_bear]

Belar's dad is UL, the closest thing his 'verse has to a big-G God, and his mother is the Universe itself. Aside from some initial bitchery with UL over "YOU SHOULDN'T CREATE THAT WORLD THERE" "YES I SHOULD" "NO SERIOUSLY YOU SHOULDN'T" "ALL SEVEN OF US ARE GONNA, ARE YOU IN ON THIS OR NOT, DAD" "THIS IS A BAD IDEA" "HEY, MONSTROUS THINGS, GO FIND UL, HE'LL BE YOUR GOD" they get along great.

I honestly have no idea how Varric gets along with his parents, or even if they're still alive. He tends to be at odds with his brother over the fact that his brother's an Orzammar-born dwarf with a temper and a stick up his ass, I know that much. I have a vague mental image of their mother being a dwarf of the "Where are my grandchildren? I want grandchildren!" persuasion, but that's about it.

Arcade's dad died in a military action when he was a very little boy. He and his mother moved around from place to place a lot for the next few years. When his mother died he was essentially raised by several of his father's old military buddies. He worries to this day about whether his father would approve of his only son being a not-very-notable doctor in a grungy part of New Vegas instead of following in Dad's footsteps.

Thalestris had good parents and a Sauromantian clan that functioned as an extended family. Her mother had a shorter temper than her father. Given that this was a Bronze Age civilization this could have gotten ugly if they were Hellenes with Hellene expectations of women's social roles, but the Sauromantians took after the Amazons in some regard, with women fighting alongside men in war. Thalestris' clan had a rule that a woman couldn't marry until she'd brought her prospective husband the head of an enemy slain in battle by her own hand. Her mom brought her dad three heads. She also attempted to call the Cretan captain out for a duel when her daughter was selected by lot as one of the tributes to Minos, and when she was refused, called out the town headman for being too much a coward to stand up to Minos. Thalestris will never forget this.

Mordin is from a haplodiploid species in which the males have no fathers. Fertilized salarian eggs develop into daughters. Unfertilized eggs develop into sons. Either way, they imprint on the clan matriarch shortly after hatching, to ensure a greater loyalty to the group than to the individual parent, and then they're more or less communally raised. He had a good clan, though, so there's that.

Ray's parents were both good people; his mother was an antique book dealer and his father a chemical engineer. They didn't entirely understand that children are different from adults until they'd gotten Ray to about age six or seven, which is why his sister turned out more like an ordinary person than he did (that, and Ray was no good at reading faces and very bad at socializing). But he pretty much idolized them both, and they loved him right back, which is why it was a hard thing when they passed away not long after he started grad school. (Canon: "My parents left me that house!")

Oh, and Medic's parents died under Suspicious but Unclarified Circumstances when he was just a wee sproglet. He was raised in Stuttgart by his grandparents, a very strict old grandfather who nearly moved the family to Berlin, and a softer and friendlier grandmother who sends him cookies to this day and is only too happy to refer to him as 'Medic' instead of his actual name, because hey, doctor in the family. Even if he technically doesn't have a license any more both his grandparents are proud of him, although you'd need pentothal to get Grandpapa to say so out loud.

[the_gene_genie]

I am lol'ing over Belar's relationship with his parents when I mentally compare it to Torak's. Those seven are...different. To put it mildly.