Nephewism

As far as I know, Peter Parker doesn't even have a mother; he was merely created spontaneously when Aunt May and Uncle Ben came down with nephewism, a common affliction in fictional characters. —The Comics Curmudgeon

So Bob's parents aren't around. What happened to them? You tell me. What happens to Bob? He lives with his aunt/uncle, of course. Sometimes a cousin or two will be thrown into the mix. This trope usually occurs when a character's parents are completely absent (as in, not part of the story in any way), missing, secretly the Big Bad, or established as dead.

If this trope happens in an adventure story, expect the aunt/uncle to be keeping secrets about the parents, or who/what their niece/nephew really is. Also, expect them to die fairly early on in the story to get the hero motivated.

It's an easy way to graft characters to an already-existing dramatic family, and have your old characters (and hence the viewers) be/get emotionally attached to them. The advantage for the writers might be that it's OK to be more distant from aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews than it is from parents and children. If it's a sitcom, expect the new addition to be a Cousin Oliver. If it's used in a soap-opera setting, expect the niece or nephew to be a troubled but attractive teen, who can stir things up without breaking any existing characterizations.

This trope can also be used in reverse, to apply to a person besieged with nieces and nephews in their life. In these cases it is often used to allow plots in which canonically single characters fulfill a parental role without significantly changing their character. Strangely enough, nephews in these situations often look and act like clones of their uncles, in defiance of everything we know about heredity.

The non-animated cousin of Chaste Toons.

Not to be confused with Nepotism.

Examples

Advertisement

• Froot Loops has a toucan and its three nephews as its mascots.

Anime and Manga

• Majiru Itoshiki, a Adorably Precocious Child/Mouthy Kid is the nephew of the protagonist of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. Majiru was abandoned by his father and so decided to crash at his uncle's place.
• Aizawa Yuuichi, protagonist of Kanon, starts the story by going to live with his aunt because his parents are leaving home for an extended period of time and would rather have him live with Akiko until graduation than be home by himself.
• In Aishiteruze Baby, Yuzuyu, whom the protagonist Kippei is saddled with raising, is technically his cousin, but given that her mother, Kippei's aunt, is basically the same age as his older sister, it's more of this trope.

Comic Books

• Peter Parker has Aunt May and Uncle Ben.
  • In the comics and first animated series his parents turned out to actually be elite soldiers/spies who vanished on a final mission. In the Ultimate universe, they were geneticists killed when Eddie Brock Sr. experimented on himself with the anti-cancer Symbiote the Parkers and Brocks created, becoming the first Venom and crashing the plane they were on. The 1990's animated series had Peter Parker's parents being spies, who were actually not dead, but in Russia. The degree of inconsistency about what happened to them actually reinforces the case of nephewism. No one can agree what happened to Peter's parents or who they were, but everyone knows he lives with his aunt and uncle.
• The Duck family: Scrooge McDuck is uncle to Donald Duck, who is uncle to Huey, Dewey & Louie. Not a parent among 'em. Scrooge's sister Hortense and husband Quackmore Duck is eventually revealed to the parent of Donald and Della Duck, the mother of Huey Dewey and Louie. They were first depicted long after the other characters were, and, in any case, are obscure enough to have made no appearances outside of Disney Comics.
  • Mickey Mouse also has two nephews, Morty and Ferdy. Daisy Duck meanwhile has three nieces, named April, May, and June. Goofy has a Insufferable Genius nephew in the comics named Gilbert.
    • Although Goofy is also the only actual parent; he has a son named Max.
    • In the comics, Gyro Gearloose and Donald's cousin Fethry Duck also have nephews. Yes, it's a trend, Disney prefers nephews to children.
  • Huey, Dewey, and Louie are a particularly odd case in that, in their first appearance in 1938, they did have a mother, Dumbella, who was Donald's sister, and they were explicitly just visiting. They never left, and by 1942 Donald was shown onscreen listing them as dependents on his tax forms.
• Korky the Cat from The Dandy is often seen with his three nephews.
• One of the most-cited aversions, however, is from The Dandy's sister comic The Beano, where Dennis the Menace's dog Gnasher is the father of his sidekick Gnipper.
• Inverted by Little Dot, who had such a severe case of Aunt/Uncleism that there was a long-running comic series dedicated to them.
• Subverted in Clan Destine. Aspiring superheros Rory and Pandora Destine were raised by their Uncle Walter and grandmother Florence... who turn out to actually be their (much) older siblings posing as their uncle and grandmother. Until Walter explained what was really going on, they sure looked like an instance of this trope...
• In the Archie Sonic the Hedgehog comics (and the Saturday morning cartoon, but the comics have had more opportunity to really explore it), Sir Charles Hedgehog is better known as Uncle Chuck, erstwhile guardian of Sonic the Hedgehog, famous inventor, and purveyor of the finest chili dogs on the planet Mobius. Early on in the comic it's just accepted as fact that Sonic's parents were casualties of Dr. Robotnik's enslavement program the same as everyone else's parents, and Chuck was for whatever reason the important relative. Later on it explains that Chuck is, in fact, the reason he has Nephewism in the first place; when he was forced to test his roboticizer on his gravely injured brother, he discovered that the machines his patients turned into had no will of their own (which made it rather unviable in its intended purpose of extending the lives of the injured and infirm). This sent him spiraling into depression and he abandoned the project, allowing Robotnik to swoop in and steal it for his takeover scheme.

Fanfiction

• A really wonderful Veronica Mars/House MD crossover fic posited that Logan was House's nephew, and he went to live with him after his dad was arrested for Lilly's murder. Canonically, he became legally emancipated and started living in a hotel suite.
  • This is generally a popular trick in crossover fics, as the Relatively Flimsy Excuse is often the only one that can explains why characters from two different canons should give a damn about one another.

Film

• In Star Wars, Luke was raised by his Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru Lars before they were killed by the Empire. Of course, when Darth Vader is your father, maybe it's for the better.
  • Continued in the EU. At least in New Jedi Order, Luke seems more like a parent to Han and Leia's children than they do sometimes.
• The film version of The Wizard of Oz doesn't even offer the books' token reference to Dorothy's parents.

Literature

• Dorothy in the Land of Oz series. One of the books does verify that her mother was Uncle Henry's sister; he makes the internal observation that his niece is "a dreamer, as her dead mother was".
• The ever-aunt-afflicted Bertie Wooster is an interesting example, because while his parents are established as dead, their deaths are never used as plot devices. Since this is a comedy series, they could just as easily have been written off as absent. This is exploited in Fan Fiction all the time.
• Also Miss Marple, who has nieces and nephews in plenty. She is even explicitly unmarried ("Miss").
• Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings adopted his cousin/nephew Frodo (at age 21; before, he'd lived with his other relatives). Justified in that almost all Hobbits seem to be rather closely related.
• Eragon in The Inheritance Cycle.
• Harry Potter is nominally the nephew of the couple he lives with. In practice, he's more the unpaid overworked abused servant with nowhere else to go than a family member. Dumbledore arranged for him to live there so he wouldn't learn about the whole "Boy Who Lived" thing until he could have some perspective - and because he needed Harry to live with a family member as part of a magical protection, and Petunia was the only candidate.
• Subverted in Codex Alera, at first it seems like Tavi's aunt and uncle will play the role of the typical "Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen" and die early on to get Tavi's heroic journey started. Actually They remain major characters and Tavi's aunt turns out to actually be his mother.
  • Worth noting that unlike most nephewism couples, Tavi's aunt and uncle are brother and sister, rather than husband and wife.
• Also subverted in His Dark Materials, in which the man Lyra has been lead to believe is her uncle turns out to be her father.
• Jupiter Jones in the Three Investigators series lives with his aunt and uncle.
• A common plot in the Goosebumps series was for the protagonist to be palmed off with an aunt and uncle while the parents made a flimsy excuse to disappear - usually just long enough for the protagonist to encounter the ghost/vampire/werewolf/mummy/whatever horror made up the subject of the book. The best (or worst) example is probably Werewolf Skin, where Alex apparently has to live with his aunt and uncle indefinitely because he even starts going to the local school. And we never once hear where his parents are!
• Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider series, does this... twice. First, when Alex's parents die, he gets sent to live with his Uncle, Ian Rider, and when he dies, he gets to live with Jack Starbright, who isn't actually family, subverting the trope, the second time.
• The Belgariad employs this with Garion being raised by his "Aunt Polgara", in actuality, his great-great-great-etc-aunt, sister to his royal ancestor some 3000 years ago.
• The Finneys of Sharon Creech's novels Walk Two Moons and Absolutely Normal Chaos seem to take in cousins as necessary: in the latter book, Carl Ray is looking for a job, and in the former, Ben's mother is explicitly out of the picture due to being in a mental institution. Where his father is in this isn't made clear.
• In Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Edmund and Lucy are left to live with their aunt, uncle, and cousin Eustace while their parents and elder siblings are traveling.
  • Prince Caspian was also raised by his uncle, Miraz, who'd secretly murdered his father to claim the crown. While Caspian's paternal grandfather had presumably died when Caspian's father became king, the absence of his mother or of his maternal grandparents is not explained.
• Tobias lives with various uncaring aunts and uncles for the first few Animorphs books, until he gets stuck in hawk morph.

Live Action TV

• Jessica Fletcher from Murder She Wrote. She had no children, but loads of nieces/nephews (though Grady was the only real repeater among them). Of course, the whole "family" isn't really related, but a loose guild of contract killers.
• Used to the point of overdose in Are You Afraid of the Dark? A large number of the protagonists were either living with aunts, uncles, and grandparents or visiting for the weekend, summer, holiday, etc. Used as a way for the kid to stumble into the episode's inherent weirdness without having people wonder why they had lived beside it for years and not noticed it before.
• Used at least twice on Desperate Housewives, first with Edie's nephew and then with Carlos and Gaby's niece.
• Jess on Gilmore Girls. His mother's inability to deal with him is the reason he was sent to live with Luke in Stars Hollow in the first place. She does eventually show up in town
• The Dukes of Hazzard. There were five regular Duke cousins (three originals, two temporary replacements). None of them were siblings. All of them mentioned being raised by "Uncle Jesse" with no sign of any of their parents around. What happened to Jesse's 5 brothers and/or their wives?
• Cousin Pam on The Cosby Show.
• Veronica on The George Lopez Show. Her mother died and her father is a no-good con man. She is there to replace Carmen, who "went to college".
• Eleventh Doctor companion Amy Pond was raised by her aunt, saying that she "doesn't have a mum and dad." This turns out to be a plot point - her parents were Ret Gone by the space-time anomaly in Amy's house.
  • Classic series companion Sarah Jane Smith was also raised by her aunt.
• Iron Chef: Chairman Kaga has at least one nephew and, depending on what you consider canon, may have two more.
• The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, of course. He has a Disappeared Dad while his mom is alive and well in Philadelphia (and comes to visit occasionally); she just sent him to his aunt and uncle to keep him off the streets and out of trouble. His dad did show up, for one of the most emotional episodes of the series. Here's the climax.
• In Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger, Ryouga has been the adoptive parent figure to his niece Mai for most of her life, since her parents were killed when she was a baby.
• Many Police Procedural episodes in which children's parents wind up murdered or jailed end with the tearful child being placed in the custody of an aunt or uncle.
• The American sitcom Bachelor Father (1957-62) was about bachelor attorney Bentley Gregg who raised his adolescent niece Kelly after her parents died in an automobile accident.
• Merlin's mother is still alive on Merlin, but he lives with his uncle Gaius anyway.

Newspaper Comics

• Zipper Harris in Doonesbury, who matriculated to Walden College to fill the empty niche left by the graduation of his uncle, Zonker Harris.

Puppet Shows

• Robin the Frog in The Muppet Show, nephew of Kermit the Frog. Robin's father was referred to once on the show; additionally, Muppet Babies (in which he appeared as a tadpole) established that his mother was Kermit's older sister.
• Andy and Randy Pig, nephews of Miss Piggy in Muppets Tonight.
• Bobo's Uncle Travelling Matt in Fraggle Rock — the only family relationship established between any Fraggles.

Theater

• Mr. Spettigue in Charley's Aunt, who has a niece, Amy, and a ward, Kitty. And of course, the titular aunt has a nephew in Charley.
• Mame Dennis and her nephew, Patrick in Mame, Auntie Mame, and Travels with my Aunt. He's an orphan, so the cause of the nephewism isn't unknown, but Mame still has a case of it. It's hinted that Mame is Patrick's biological mother.
• In the stage musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (and the 1967 film adaptation), J.B. Biggley, the president of the World Wide Wicket ("WWW") Company, employs his nephew, Bud Frump, in the mailroom of the company. This is where the protagonist, J. Pierrepont Finch, is sent to work. Frump uses his relationship to Biggley as license to bully the others in the mailroom. This is especially true regarding his treatment of Finch, whom he quickly realizes is a real go-getter whose drive for success may trump his nephewism. Just prior to the end of the play, when WWW's chairman of the board, Wally Womper, threatens to fire everybody in the company — including (especially) Biggley and Frump -- Finch sings the show-stopper song "Brotherhood of Man" in an effort to change Womper's mind. (In the lead-in to the song, Finch tells Womper "we're all brothers," to which Biggley adds "some of us are uncles.") Womper relents and retains everybody except Frump, who vows revenge.

Video Games

• Persona 4's main character (who's canonical name is Yu Narukami) gets sent to live with his uncle for the duration of the game because of his parents travels for their work.
  • Likewise, Naoya of Devil Survivor (like Persona, part of the Shin Megami Tensei series) is the Hero's cousin, who was raised by his aunt and uncle (the Hero's parents) and treats the Hero like a younger brother.
• Sunny from Metal Gear Solid 4, calls her caretakers "uncle." Of course, anyone who's played the second game knows exactly what happened to her mother.
  • Also Meryl, until we find out that Campbell is actually her father, not her uncle.
• Emil from Tales of Symphonia Dawn of the New World.
• Diddy Kong is Donkey Kong's nephew. Either he's adopted, or the sibling of a gorilla can have a monkey for a child.
• Link, in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to The Past, lives with his uncle. As it's eventually explained, they are all that remains of the bloodline of the Hylian Knights. The manga gives a backstory to the absence of Link's parents.
• Dr. Neo Cortex's niece Nina Cortex from the Crash Bandicoot series. Parodied in Twinsanity when Neo first introduces her.

My daught... err... NIECE!

Webcomics

• Partial subversion in Girl Genius-in flashbacks, Agatha is being raised by her uncle, Barry Heterodyne, because her parents have disappeared, but by the time the story begins, Barry's gone missing too, and she's being raised by her foster parents Adam and Lilith Clay (better known as Punch and Judy, construct sidekicks of the Heterodyne Boys).
• Last Res 0 rt has the Vaeo family with Vince, his daughter Cypress, and his nephews/ her cousins, Nathaniel and Damien. It's been heavily implied so far that the Vuelos Incedent killed off Cypress's mother and Nathaniel and Damien's real parents.

Web Original

• The Comics Curmudgeon, although not actually containing any examples of Nephewism, is the Trope Namer and provides the page quote.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender: Zuko was essentially raised by his uncle Iroh, as his father is the abusive Complete Monster of a Big Bad and his mother is mysteriously gone. Iroh took Zuko under his wing when a) his own son died in the war and b) Zuko's mom disappeared, having been banished long before the series started. Eventually, Zuko considers Iroh to be more like a father to him.
• Inspector Gadget had his niece, Penny, living with him (and secretly solving his cases). Why is never mentioned or explained.
  • Set to be averted in the upcoming Son of Inspector Gadget.
• In the older series, the Scooby Doo gang seems to spend more time visiting its various members' uncles than living with their real parents.
• Up until The Reveal in the series finale, Hey Arnold was a case of this, since all you knew for sure was that Arnold was living with his grandparents. We never (Canonically) found out the kid's last name for crying out loud!
• Skippy Squirrel does not appear to have any parents, and lives with his Aunt Slappy.
• James Bond Jr is the nephew of James Bond.
• Jackie Chan Adventures has the eponymous grown Jackie living with Uncle, who is shown to have raised him. In the first episode, they are given care of Jackie's niece, Jade, who, despite having living parents in Hong Kong, spends the rest of the series and after with her uncles.
• Popeye has four nephews that appear in several Popeye cartoons: Peepeye, Pupeye, Pipeye and Poopeye.
• Time Squad Buck Tuddrussel tries to explain that Otto is his nephew to his ex wife who is of higher rank. She doesn't believe him, knowing that Larry had admitted to her that he was kidnapped/adopted.
• In Young Justice, Wally, aka Kid Flash, is Barry, the Flash's, nephew, while M'gann, Miss Martian, and Artemis are the nieces of J'onn, Martian Manhunter and Oliver Queen, Green Arrow, respectively. Later episodes show that the last two are actually subversions.

Real Life

• Many medieval Popes had 'nephews' that they were close to. The thing was, as often as not, said 'nephews' were the pope's unrecognized illegitimate sons. Innocent VIII was the first to actually recognize his bastard children. This is where the term Nepotism comes from, since Popes frequently appointed their nephews (both actual nephews and "nephews") to high-ranking Church positions, even when said nephews were clearly unqualified, and nepos is Latin for "nephew".
• Most real life custody arrangements do have either grandparents or aunts/uncles assuming custody if the parents die, followed in likelihood by unrelated godparents, whose express purpose is to raise the godchild in the event of the death or incapacitation of the child's parents.