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9. The Aoyagi’s – Loveless
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.