Think Your Family Is Bad? 14 Dysfunctional Anime Families

7. The Mercenary’s – Berserk

Go ahead and name a family in Berserk that isn’t messed up? Between Casca and her parents selling her into slavery, Griffith and his life on the streets, the Midland royal family, and even Farnese making Serpico burn his mentally ill mother, there is a lot of family drama to go around. However, rightly so, the worst family dysfunction lies with the main character, Gutts.

Gutts was a child that was born from the corpse of a woman who had been hanged. It was likely he would have died, but he was rescued by the wife of the mercenary Gambino. Initially, their family life was okay.

However, when Gambino’s wife died, it left him angry, blaming Gutts as bad luck. With a father who took his anger out with beating and sword play, Gutts quickly turned into a warrior and, after Gambino’s maiming, a caretaker. Yet, despite how good he did on the battlefield, it never earned the praise he sought from his father.

All that is pretty twisted, but the most twisted part of Gutts’s early life was kept from the anime. In the manga, Gambino sold Gutts for the evening to another mercenary, Donovan, who viciously raped him. This is what would lend to Gutts stabbing his father, running away, and having massive touching issues.

8. The Kokonoe’s – Kodomo no Jikan

Kodomo no Jikan is a show about little girls trying to seduce a grown man, so it is already pretty messed up from the get-go. However, while it uses the inappropriate sexual advances of young girls as a thing of comedy, it actually veneers some pretty dark issues.

While the main little girl, Rin Kokonoe is mischievous and determined, she was not always the way she was. Raised by a single mother, Rin’s father figure came when her cousin Reiji moved in and began a love affair with her mother.

Accepting of it, they lived as a normal, albeit weird, family until Rin’s mother died from cancer. She became a living doll after this, only coaxed out of it by her friends.

After defending a friend by bullying her teacher to a nervous breakdown, Rin falls in love with their next teacher, Aoki. Despite her advances, he refuses her each time. After she begins to get even more forceful, she ends up blackmailing Aoki and almost injuring her love rival a number of times.

At home during all this she is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with Reiji’s obsession with her and desire to make her into his wife. Yet, as uncomfortable as she is, she is conflicted because she wants him to remain as her father and only family.