Found Family | The Most Wholesome Trope Ever Written [ Trope Notes ]

I'm going to try this new thing where on each new video I drop a random fact about myself, so here's one. I lived in Costa Rica between the ages of 9-16 and for a time we rehabilitated a baby raccoon. We named him Stitch after Lilo and Stitch and I have never had a pet more aptly named in my life (except maybe my current cat whose name is Khajiit).

Have you ever had a pet where their name suited them perfectly??? (Not rhetorical, reply with your answers)

Spy×Family is a great example of the Found Family trope!

Fanfiction is where most of my favourite found family stories are ✨✨✨ the only downside is watching or reading the base material again and realizing they haven’t gone through the adventure you read and is so dear to you now 🥲

Found family is a good alternative to excessive shipping.

Some people insist on ships when the sibling bond is perfect as is.

The story I had in mind is kind of a twist on this trope.
Estranged family members (war orphan brother and sister) who all got their own “found family” whether they acknowledge it or not come back together as a biological family when one of them is in terrible distress (the one who believed he had one was rejected by his found family and the whole community due to a life threatening dilemma)
So coincidentally the other family member comes back after years and is surprised to see the other as an outcast and as a single parent to a kid to boot. The family progressively gets bigger as the brother and sister get more kids under their charges and the found families becomes extended family of the “core family” (biological family) which leads to one their mental health back together while the other one learns the importance of family (biological and found) and heals from what estranged them in the first place. At the end, the family that was originally 2 became 3 then 4 then 8+ and they are all closely knit.

(It’s a fanfic born of a subplot from a larger fanfic I had in mind)

You should do a video on your most favorite tropes and make like a list or something

This is my favourite trope of all time!

I have so many found families I love: The team from Leverage, the Iron Triangle from Daomu Biji, the Manyang locals from Beyond Evil are my top three though. I love them and they love each other and just mentioning them will make me want to tear up, too much emotion XD

As someone who grew up without much affection nor a stable mother, this trope had always comforted me because I wanted to find a tribe that loved me for who I am and not for the fact we’re related by blood like most toxic families who are forced to stay together. I also enjoyed playing things like the last of us growing up because I never had a father like Joel to guide nor push me.

Found family is definitely my favourite trope it’s so wholesome

You'll love the anime spy x family

This found family always gets overlooked in my opinion. Criminal minds.
They even act like siblings and parents a lot during the episodes toward one another

To go off the ending about Found Families gone wrong, I'd say Voltron towards the end would be a good example of that. One of the major criticisms that was popping up was about how despite the earlier seasons establishing a Found Family trope amongst the main cast, towards the end the characters all felt like they were disconnected from one another.
Especially during the arc where Keith leaves the group entirely and there is barely a few throw away lines given by the cast to acknowledge he's gone let alone say they miss him like, ya know, if someone you loved left for months with little to no ways to contact them.
Even most of the major character arcs in the show become more focused on a singular character with little others getting involved, like Pidge finding her brother. It's a fairly self contained episode with barely any of the other paladins involved despite how close they all are. Compare that to the characters arcs found in other found family trope shows like Avatar (where almost all arcs have at least one other main character to support the one experiencing an arc, the fandom even nicknamed ones with Zuko as getting a 'field trip with Zuko') and it becomes clear how disconnected the Voltron Found Family is.

Omg I just watched ur channel its amazing

I wish there could be something I could follow to write a found family over a period of a few books and have it be a smooth growth, obviously found family can be a rough path, but I mean in regards to keeping it from feeling rushed or just shoved into the characters' lives

Sense8 on Netflix

My favorite trope ever, and an impotant and conforting one for my aroace self

i need a list of found families on tv shows cause I feel like I've watched it all and i desperately need something new just to feel something

As an autistic LGBTQ+ person with niche interests who's always felt outcast from society and my peers, I love the found family trope so much. Though my family could definitely be worse (and one side of it is worse than the other) I still cry every time I see a character find one person / a group of people who really understands them and accepts them fully for the ways in which they differ from the norm. It's my favorite kind of romance, too: one or more person who's never felt fully loved or accepted for who/what they are finding someone they can be 100% themselves around without any sort of fear of judgement makes me cry waterfalls of happy tears every goshdarn time.

The league of villains from MHA will always be my favorite found family.
It's great to see it applied to the villains and helps humanize them.

They're all a bunch of cringey weirdos working together to burn the world down and I love it.

The only way I can think of that found family can be done wrong is when the author rushes into it or neglects to show the relationships developing that dynamic over the course of the story.

Think the 2016 Suicide Squad. When Chato Santana declares the group his family before using his powers to help them, it feels hollow. It was near the final climax, so theoretically there should have been enough time to build up to that. But the story spends so much of it's runtime on specific members of the squad (namely Harley and Deadshot) that there's no space for a group dynamic to develop. So when they pull out the "look, they're family now" you don't feel it.

Blood makes us relatives, love is what makes a family “family”

Also Chris Sanders, the director of Lilo and Stitch, as well as the creator and voice of Stitch himself, worked on How to Train Your Dragon and created Toothless.

Leverage is my favorite found family tv show

Daughter of smoke and bone!

I think part of the reason you had trouble with the line between friends and found families is because it's more of a sliding scale, friends are family to some extent

One example you didn't mention for pet with sibling level intelligence is Darwin from Amazing World of Gumball!
He literally a pet that became sibling lol

THIS ❤️❤️❤️😭 Could use a 2nd part with emotion analysis like you did for How to make your reader cry

Found family is probably my favorite plot structure. I think that’s true of many who grew up in less than ideal homes. It’s definitely about hope. Everyone needs a sense of belonging on some level. When your family is a disappointment or nonexistent, you have to believe it’s possible to build a new and better one. Ohana!

it's a real shame that the psychiatric field don't take much interest in these kinds of relationships in modern day anymore. maybe they're too self conscious of ending up sounding freudian or something. but i've always been curious about the psychological effects of unconventional carer roles. this can be stressful when forced upon someone, like sister turned caregiver in lilo & stitch, or even child turned caregiver to their own parent, or it can be motivational and promote self development when someone like captain holt voluntarily takes that role in a younger person's life. would love to see it taken more seriously by academics in the future!

You can also have a combination of found family and family of choice. There can be and are separations. In the LGBT community, this can be seen in the house systems of Ballrooms, they are choices (obligation) and not always at the same level as a found family (familiar type love).

Yeah, you're awesome.
Deal.

Thanks for the video. I'm working on my first graphic novel that sort of falls under this category.

This is such a good video, thank you!

Kara and Alice❤️

ACOTAR is a bad found family

AN INTELLIGENT PET BEING A SIBLING IS TOTALLY VALID!!!

This is so helpful! Thank you for making this video

I think that this trope didn't work in Legend of Korra. We are supposed to believe that by the end of the story Mako, Korra, Asami and Bolin are best friends. But they barely spend any time together.

Found family, a.k.a. the best trope of all time. I've found I am personally really drawn to like, "a dad and his boy à la found family" type relationships? It could also just be a coincidence in what kinda media I consume lol but even so. This sub-trope of parental substitute can be found in stuff like The Mandalorian (a bit obvious innit but i love them), My Hero Academia (Dad Might for life even if in canon it's kinda more mentor-student, sorta) and I think ATLA (Iroh and Zuko) also counts? Guessing, in a way I'd count Héctor and Miguel from Coco in this too, albeit it's both a slight subversion and a very literal example of "found family" hdjshs

Anyway I really love that character dynamic ;o; would love to see similar stories and dynamics but "mom and her girl" which I have yet to really find, which is a shame, I'm sure it would work out just as well. Anyway, a lovely video!

in my opinion detroit become human sorta did found family wrong.
Alice and Kara's storyline is mainly about found family. Alice's father is abusive and attempts to kill Alice one day. Kara (their android) helps Alice run away and then becomes Alice's mother figure.
This is fine in theory, but for one.) both characters don't seem to get that much development past the beginning. In most found family stories I've seen they characters help fuel each other's development but in this one, it feels like they are pretty much the same ones after they ran away

2. (SPOILERS) Due to a shitty plot twist we find out that Alice is also an Android, and put the both of them in danger they didn't need to be. You see, androids don't need to feel cold, or need to eat. But Kara thinks that Alice is human, so alot of time playing Kara is making sure her needs are met, and both of them can possibly die because of it. Now, this flaw would be fine if it was agknowledged but it's not
3. Also, last point, the other side characters that sort of become members of the found family seem very disposable to the game. There is this character called luther that can sorta become Alice's father and protector, but he is able to die so much more than Kara and Alice.

Anyway, I just dont feel like Kara and Alice are that compelling of a found family.
The other found families in the game (conner and hank, and markus and Jericho) do feel more compelling mainly because they have character development which I feel is important to found families.

I too noticed the lack of information on this trope, and it's my favorite! I appreciate this video so much! 💜

One of my favorite manga series, +Anima (pronounced "Plus Anima") is all about Found Family. The four main characters are among the titular +Anima (people who gain the powers of animals during a near death experience) and are thus victims of discrimination at the hands of the society they live in, so they travel the world looking for a place they can live, and all four of them have been through trauma that they help each other work through.

I think one of my favorite examples of found families is the Raven Cycle. I love the character relationships in those books SO much.

Found family done wrong: any movie or book or game that does something bad to a character in the ensemble, but you don't even feel your tear ducts flinching because they didn't set it up correctly. They tend to be utterly forgettable. That's why you can't think of an example.

To repeat what so many of the comments have said, Found Family is easily one of my favorite tropes. I think everyone enjoys the feeling of reading or watching a group of people who choose to be together instead of having to put up with people just because "they're family" (looking at you, toxic blood-family relationships). It's just so cozy and feel-good-y. And I think the reason you can't find any bad examples of this trope is because if the writer did it badly you wouldn't recognize it as Found Family. Instead, it would just be a group of people that you wonder why the writer put them together when the chemistry clearly isn't there.

Who else is mostly here to find found family stories to read

Found Family is also great to show blended family types as well! I love this trope and its basically in all my stories aha XD

sooooo... you're saying tragic death is a type of found family? ;) I agree with the name found family, for the reasons you mentioned as well as alliteration.
Seriously though, I loved this video!(I always do) You did such a great job breaking it down. (you always do) <3 <3
I agree with your reasons for the father figure vs mother figure, but I also think there's something about seeing a rough tough man be paternal with a little one that's irresistibly endearing. No idea why that is, but you're so good at the psychology of all this, maybe you do?
Lastly, I love Drax! I'm wondering, what category of character would you put him in? He seems to be in more than one. The most obvious is comic relief, but he says some of the most wise lines, the clip at the beginning being a great example. So would you also say he's, at least sometimes, the mentor role?

I immediately thought of Matilda and Miss Honey. An awesome mother-daughter found family.

The fact that you made a video about "found family" and DIDN'T include the Fast and Furious movies worries me
How are you not going to include Vin Diesel saying in a grumbly voice "I don't have friends, I got family"?
Like Wiz Khalifa said, "how can we not talk about family when family's all that we got"