Think Your Family Is Bad? 14 Dysfunctional Anime Families

Think Your Family Is Bad? 14 Dysfunctional Anime Families

9. The Aoyagi’s – Loveless

Think Your Family Is Bad? 14 Dysfunctional Anime Families
Think Your Family Is Bad? 14 Dysfunctional Anime Families

Loveless is a show where the majority of its plot actually surrounds the dysfunction of its main family, the Aoyagi’s. The primary focus of Loveless is on Ritsuka who lives with his mother who is suffering from a mental illness.

This has driven her to become both physically and mentally abusive to him, compounded by the death of his older brother. Throughout all this, his father plays the absent Japanese salaryman who is always at work.

Think Your Family Is Bad? 14 Dysfunctional Anime Families
Think Your Family Is Bad? 14 Dysfunctional Anime Families

However, as it turns out, Ritsuka’s brother Seimei is not dead, but faked his own death because he is a murdering psychopath that terrorizes other characters in the series. Yet, Seimei also holds Ritsuka emotionally captive with his abuse and weird control issues.

Needless to say, Loveless is a pretty on the nose title for this series.

10. The Zoldyck’s – Hunter x Hunter

Think Your Family Is Bad? 14 Dysfunctional Anime Families
Think Your Family Is Bad? 14 Dysfunctional Anime Families

A dysfunctional family is not a stranger to the shounen genre, but Hunter x Hunter really runs with it. While the Freecs are no Brady Bunch, it is the Zoldyck’s who ran off with the biggest piece of the dysfunctional family cake.

As the most skilled family of assassins in the land, you can expect the family dynamic to be a bit wrong particularly since they are taught to abandon all emotion.

Trained from birth with weapons that compliment their Nen, they are trained to kill and this has made many of them hard. At one point Killua is tortured by one of his siblings, but the pain is something he can just fall asleep to.

Think Your Family Is Bad? 14 Dysfunctional Anime Families
Think Your Family Is Bad? 14 Dysfunctional Anime Families

Even before that, Killua’s older brother attempts to manipulate him into thinking he is just a killer which is a ploy to try to get control over him. With more filial murder and members of the family locked away in isolation for years, there is a lot of crazy to go around, but Killua’s friends keep him rather well adjusted.

11. The Ushiromiya’s – Umineko: When They Cry

Think Your Family Is Bad? 14 Dysfunctional Anime Families
Think Your Family Is Bad? 14 Dysfunctional Anime Families

Umineko takes the very real concept that when you have a very rich family and many who could inherit a great sum, they will do terrible things to each other. However, even outside all the blackmail, emotional abuse, and physical abuse, the Ushiromiya still takes family dysfunction to the extreme.

One of the worst moments of their family comes from the head of it himself. Kinzo, after fathering his main children, fell in love with Beatrice and fathered a child with her. After Beatrice died birthing that child, he dove into the occult to try to bring her back. Meanwhile, the bastard child grew up to look like her mother, enticing Kinzo to force himself on her believing that it was Beatrice reincarnated.

Think Your Family Is Bad? 14 Dysfunctional Anime Families
Think Your Family Is Bad? 14 Dysfunctional Anime Families

After his sexual abuse resulted in an incestuous child between them, he tried to get the wife of his eldest son to raise it. In one timeline, she does so lovingly. In another, she ends up dropping the child off a cliff only to have it live and become a servant in the house.

  1. The Ikari’s – Neon Genesis Evangelion

The whole Ikari family is kind of a clusterfuck of problems that all stem from the mother. Yui Ikari was kind, intelligent, and motherly. After she met Gendo in college, they started a presumably happy family, but that all went sideways when she died. Her son, Shinji, was kept at an arm’s length by his father which caused great resentment.

Think Your Family Is Bad? 14 Dysfunctional Anime Families
Think Your Family Is Bad? 14 Dysfunctional Anime Families

However, while Shinji was away growing up, Gendo was trying to salvage his wife’s soul from EVA-01 and place it back into a body. When this failed, the emotionless doll Rei was created. Even though there was no part of Yui in Rei, she garnered affections from both Gendo and Shinji.

  1. The Britannian Imperial Family – Code Geass
Think Your Family Is Bad? 14 Dysfunctional Anime Families
Think Your Family Is Bad? 14 Dysfunctional Anime Families

No royal family is particularly normal, but in the case of Code Geass’s royal family, it is not generations of inbreeding that created the crazies, it is pretty much just their father. Charles zi Britannia is a big fan of social Darwinism, so he not only encourages class conflicts in the world, but among his own children. This likely was brought about by his own family murdering each other for succession during his childhood.

While Lelouch’s climb towards the throne is not quite as bloody as his father, his use of the Geass greatly throws a wrench into all of his sibling’s plans and personalities. For instance, his oldest brother, inept in most things, is demoted to regular foot soldier after Lelouch is made emperor. On another occasion, his sister Euphemia is accidentally brought under the Geass control and starts a massacre of Japanese people, something that is so against her caring mentality, that ultimately results in her death.




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