Thoughts on Found Family

[sqbr]

liz-squids posted about found family on tumblr (which may require being logged in, sorry) and I had some rambly thoughts. A lot of this stuff is things I've said before, and I feel like I haven't quite articulated my point, but so it goes.

On the one hand I think it's unfair to assume people who write found family don't know there's other kinds of family/friendship. (Liz didn't do this but one of the commenters did) They generally just enjoy stories of unrelated people without many other connections forming a close interconnected bond, and including extended families wouldn't generally fit.

I mean I love the fictional polyamorous romance equivalent: 3 or more people who all love each other but don't date anyone outside the group. But irl I'm in a polycule with like 7 other people, all in distinct couples, all way more likely to date new people from outside than anyone within. And while I don't think there's anything wrong with closed triads etc, I'm well aware that they're rare in real life poly circles, are often massive sources of drama, and the idea of being in one myself sounds horrifying. I have never really written the kind of polyamory I've actually experienced, because it doesn't fit as neatly into the kind of fiction I like to write. I've had some interesting discussions about this with moonvoice, who is dating me and has been poly for years, and is also a professional romance writer who usually prefers writing and reading intensely committed couples.

Like we have a lot of conversations in fandom about depiction versus endorsement, but it's not just a matter of Kinks vs Squicks/Triggers. Personal experience, personal real life preference, what you read, and what you write are four different things that interact in complicated ways. And it's a bad idea to jump straight from "this trope is very common and feels irritatingly unrealistic to me" to "all these writers mustn't understand how the real world works".

On the other hand...GOD found family stories creep me out sometimes. And the poly equivalent can be even worse. For me the problem is often this idea that Real Love Means Not Having Emotional(/Sexual/Romantic) boundaries. Twice I've been recced Sweet Queer Poly Games that turned out to have the protagonist overtly judged by the narrative if they didn't want to have sex with ALL their friends/metamours D:

Although extended family stories can be exactly as claustrophically close, see Clan Mitchell, where the authors got very upset at the idea that anyone, in-universe or out, might find the family creepy.

Not that there's anything wrong with liking super close relationships. Sometimes I come across people bemoaning the ubiquity of romantic happily-ever-afters in fiction when they yearn for a variety of endings better reflecting real life, and I simultaneously acknowledge their point and continue to love romantic happily-ever-afters myself (except in music, where I love break-up songs) To those people, I am the conventional-minded dumbass into creepy, unrealistic fluff. So I am mostly happy to let lovers of found family stories have their fun.

But sometimes it creeps me out.

(I don't find it boring, so much, but that's a valid reaction, and what Liz was actually talking about)

Comments

[anghraine]

I think this is all fair!

I did wonder if part of what goes on is—hm, it may just be my personal experience, but it seems like a lot of the found family stuff these days is rooted in meta/headcanon? Of course, many things are, and it does also happen in fic and is sometimes very popular there, but personally, I just see a lot more scattered found family headcanons and posts about Why Found Family Is the Superior Trope than people substantially entering into actual found family scenarios. It can seem very preachy (to me, anyway!), which makes the depiction/endorsement line fuzzy.

(Subjectively, I love claustrophobically close relationships, just ... not as a morally superior thing, lol.)

[sqbr]

Yes! Now that you mention it, that's absolutely one of the uncomfortably evangelical approaches to Found Family I've seen. And it can get tied up into queerness too: being queer is being alienated from your family and wanting a Found Family, and liking anything else (irl or in fiction) is heteronormative. Which, no.

[anghraine]

And it can get tied up into queerness too: being queer is being alienated from your family and wanting a Found Family, and liking anything else (irl or in fiction) is heteronormative. Which, no.

Right, exactly! I think evangelical is a really good term for it (I get a very strong "have you heard the good news of FOUND FAMILIES???" vibe, haha). And there is definitely a line of rhetoric that ties those together into a One True Narrative, or at least One Superior Narrative, about queer experience. There's this sense that cutting ties from the family you grew up in and getting absorbed into a peer group is obligatory to coming to maturity as a queer person. And no. It can happen! And it can be very wish-fulfilling in fiction! It's just not the only or the superior life trajectory.

[sqbr]

Right!

[fred_mouse]

I'm having a moment of understanding why Heinlein's work was so captivating, particularly anything involving Lazarus Long -- because it is often about large rambling families, and the community that can come from that.

[sqbr]

I never managed to get into those stories, the first and last story I read in that universe was "To Sail Beyond the Sunset", which did have a close extended family, but, uh...a little too close for my tastes haha.

[fred_mouse]

Yeah, that wasn't a good one. I read one of the really early ones first, before Heinlein went a long way off the rails, so had good associations with Lazarus Long. I was fascinated with 'To Sail Beyond the Sunset', but it came as an extension of the ideas that Heinlein had been working up to, so wasn't a surprise.

[muccamukk]

I can go either way on found family. It's either "dawwww, that's lovely" or "Oh good, you've joined cult. Have fun with that."

I do find the kind of open poly network that I'm actually part of is tricker to write though. I should work on that, because it's really a great feeling, but when I try to do it in fiction it always feels like someone's getting left out.

[sqbr]

Yeah I've never managed it either.

[holyschist]

On the one hand I think it's unfair to assume people who write found family don't know there's other kinds of family/friendship.

That's a wild assumption - I mean, if one lives in society, one sees many types of family and friendship, presumably.

Anyway, I'm not sure how I'd describe myself at this point in relation to poly/not-poly IRL (mostly celibate and not looking, occasionally dating a poly friend, but if I were seriously on the dating market at this point, I don't think I'd have the bandwidth for more than one partner? it's complicated), but I definitely have similar preferences in fiction versus reality. They are very different things!

I am excited when I find a network poly story that rings true to me, but I feel like those require certain types of setups and lend to certain types of stories that are quite different and much less common than the canon setup where protagonist is emotionally very close to BFF and love interest and maybe BFF also has feelings for love interest and it's just...nice to close that all up and write what is essentially a straightforward monogamous HEA romance but with 3 people instead of 2.

And found family tropes in fiction do often slide over into creepy unhealthiness. It's the sort of thing where I often like it if it's there in the background, but if a story is tagged or described as a found family story, it's...often not my thing. I think it's also connected to the tendency in a lot of - particularly setting-based/procedural TV shows - for the characters' entire emotional lives to revolve around work and their coworkers, slotting the coworkers into that found family and only friends role in ways that are often wildly dysfunctional but portrayed as good and aspirational. (Am I thinking of NCIS? Yes. But not just NCIS.)

[sqbr]

Yeah and I guess a close knit group of characters suits a lot of these kinds of stories, there's a neat line between characters who are important and ones who aren't. Life doesn't work that way, but life isn't a story.

[holyschist]

I often reflect upon how my life has a really badly written narrative arc! (This is also, I think, the challenge of writing fiction based on real people - it's more satisfying with a narrative arc, but how much is it ok to change without being misleading about the subject/main character?)

I feel like comics with big sprawling canons is probably where I've seen interlocking/overlapping stories and side stories most often. I guess you could probably do it with anthology TV...and romance writers do like to introduce main characters of future books as side characters, but I feel like that's a bit different somehow. Hmm. Not sure. But neatly focused narrative arcs are the easiest to approach, I guess.

[sqbr]

Hmm! Yeah, that might suit it...you've got me thinking now, about what kinds of stories would benefit from focussing on this kind of relationship.

[holyschist]

I feel like a story either has to be BIG (like a multigenerational saga/Victorian novel) so the main narrative can hold up all the side plots and interconnecting relationships and characters who are important emotionally but narratively minor - or loosely connected/less structured, more connected storylets than a single overall narrative. Which is something that I think is probably hard to market, but it's the kind of thing people can get really into in collaborative writing setups, e.g., fandom (oh, I guess there is the concept of shared world anthologies, although I feel like ones that aren't tied to a more traditional property have tended to fizzle out).

[sqbr]

Yeah!

It could also work with a branching narrative, like a visual novel or dating sim, with different characters and relationships the centre of different branches. Background NPCs in a roleplaying game could work too, as you wander between cities you get a picture of the complex relationships between people, including romantic ones.