Long time no see, friends. I made this account in 2019 hoping to grow my reputation, and I've bounced back to try to do the same thing. My story takes on a bit of a Found Family trope. What are your guys' thoughts on it? What makes it special?
I personally find the trope very inviting and motivational. Typically, the original families of found families are dead or broken. Finding not only a replacement, but also a strong healthy connection first is the start of something magically beautiful. I love stories that use these, it's so wholesome.
If it's a trope, how will the story shed new light on it? What does it want to say about Found Families? They're almost exclusively a storytelling construct - and a comforting one, a bit like abandoned babies being raised by wild animals, or orphans being reunited with their parents thanks to a trinket. In real life, sadly (and with no disrespect to anyone who is currently in the rare circumstance of living in one), they're often no substitute and tend to be extremely fractious - to the extent that the trope might be, not -harmful- necessarily, but a little indirectly detrimental to young people who are sofa-surfing, or at risk of being recruited into gangs. In the background somewhere it might normalize something abnormal. There's a distinction to be drawn between Found Families and Composite Families (where two families who consider themselves incomplete merge). Foster Families and Adoption also I hope are obviously out-of-scope. Kinship Care is different again. And children's Residential Care occasionally gets conflated unhelpfully with found families. I'm in the UK, other jurisdictions delineate these scenarios differently. Any treatment of a really-existent family structure should be based on careful/jurisdiction-specific research, but I think Found Families are different because they emerge from storytelling more than real life, and because there is often an element of escapism. The typical Found Family is probably more familiar from cinema than novels - where the hero and heroine decide to move in together and adopt the orphan, just as the sun sets and the film ends - and with no-one undertaking an adoption assessment first. There have been socially-conscientious efforts in sequels to 'catch up' with some of these fictional families and show how they have overcome problems and made it work. (I can't call an example to mind, possibly one of the Beethoven sequels). But I've only ever seen it be highly sanitized. Typically, the oldest female (the first film's heroine as case may be) is shown struggling to manage a former-orphan teenager's independence-formation behaviours: who shouts back "you aren't my mum". This is quite true, but the plot then validates the first character (via a contrived ritual initiation) into a maternal role, and equips her with a convincing "yeah, but...". Yeah, but the monsters would eat you if you ran away. Yeah, but you could do worse. I wish writers would research comparable real found families more before using these setups - and it's difficult to research a family structure that the whole of children and families law (from a UK-&-many-other-countries perspective) is designed to obviate. A fantasy setting can set up different social conditions so that found families can more plausibly occur, and be sustained, and be legally and socially acknowledged - but I think if it does this it should still be true to the difficulties presented within the human condition (which all our social and bureaucratic restrictions on people going about just "finding" families are holograms of). How does the found family provide a stable setting for child development? How does it provide love and warmth? How does it present socially? How does it moderate its members' behaviours? What feelings of loss or grief do its members carry over from their earlier lives? If the fantasy setting isn't casting light on the human condition, inclusive of our need for secure family attachments, there's a risk of it reducing to or collapsing into a plot device. The OP's intent clearly isn't that they just want to get out of writing grown-up characters, or to create an environment where risky behaviours aren't spotted or there is no child protection - but the more authors use the trope in an unguarded/unresearched way, the easier other authors may find it. Aliens or non-humans might form and negotiate attachments differently - but if they do, I feel it shouldn't be as a plot device, or because readers couldn't conceive of a human young person tolerating a contrived home set-up, there should be a full and satisfying alien mechanism worked out for those characters before they are thrown into the story.
What do you mean by a found family trope? I could google it, but what's your particular take on it? Do you mean like in Guardians of the Galaxy, where a bunch of misfits form a group that feels like a family?
