Looks like someone won't be dealing with being grounded any time soon.note
"We took pity on him because he lost both parents at an early age. I think, on reflection, that we should have wondered a bit more about that."
— Lord Downey on Mr. Jonathan Teatime, Hogfather
What might be considered the inverse of Offing the Offspring, and is equally aberrant behavior, is when a character murders their own parents. Any character behaving this way will probably be Ax-Crazy and/or a Psycho for Hire. An Evil Prince or princess can also do that if they’re impatient enough. It's the ultimate mark of an Enfant Terrible, Antagonistic Offspring, Adult Hater, or the Abusive Offspring, the end result of a Betrayal by Offspring, and a likely origin of an Evil Orphan (who may also be abusive).
It can be justified if the parents happen to be abusive or cruel mockeries of humanity from beyond the void — insofar as murder can be, but at least it's then the domain of the dark and troubled protagonists. It's more justifiable if the parent is an outright villain. In addition, there are also instances where the child either unintentionally killed their parents or something genuinely horrific happened to their parents so that they were forced to kill them. It can also be justifiable if said parent was going to be Offing the Offspring anyway, and the offspring in question needed to defend themself and had no choice. Or, it may just be because the child Hates Their Parent. As a result, while this trope is a Moral Event Horizon for many people, especially if the parents were innocent and loved their child who killed them, it often is considered significantly less bad if said parents totally deserved their death for whatever reason.
Contrast with Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas, which is based on the premise that no one, no matter how bad, would act this way. If it happens before the murderer is born, this is the Grandfather Paradox. If only the father or mother is killed, then it's Patricide or Matricide, respectively. The extreme version, where a person kills not just their parents but their entire people or clan is Genocide from the Inside.
One subversion is to have this happen by accident and/or for the parents' death be ultimately caused by their own actions involving the child. If said parent's child also happens to be a Mook of the parent, it can also overlap into The Dog Bites Back. Another case could be if the parents were suffering something bad, like And I Must Scream, and their child stops it by putting them to death.
A Sub-Trope of Murder in the Family. An extreme aversion of Honor Thy Parent.
As this is a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.
Example subpages:
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Audio Plays
- Jeff the Killer (Pastra): The titular Jeff causes a house fire that kills his father, and later stabs his mother to death.
- Torchwood (Big Finish): In "Corpse Day", Diane and Glynn are given a Weevil to raise. The Weevil eventually kills his adopted mother, leading to Glynn keeping him in the basement and stealing woman to have sex with him. The women, growing sick of their treatment, eventually encourage Sonny to kill his father as well, which he does.
Fan Works
- In Acceptance
, once a young basilisk is able to reliably control her killing gaze, the time comes when she has to use it to kill her mother. This is a natural part of their life cycle, since having them both alive at the same time sharing their magic can lead to insanity and death for both if they delay this too long.
- In Atonement (Worm), it's hinted that Ruin's Power Incontinence killed her parents.
- Between Three Rogues : When he was just 12, Lord Galcian, disgusted by his gossipy mother's desire to climb the social ladder and his father's hypocrisy towards their so-called family honor, arranged things so that his mother would catch his father raping a woman, and while they argued, locked them in and set their house on fire.
- Children of an Elder God: Gendo and Yui used the power of the Outer Gods to create a perfect world. However, their stolen power was gradually corrupting that world. When the Children realized what was happening, they rebelled and resolved to destroy the dream world. Unfortunately, Shinji — helped by his teammates — had to kill his mother Yui to achieve that goal.
- The Dark Lords of Nerima: In The Dark Lords Ascendant, Zhang is revealed to have killed his father and fellow students to prevent anyone from going after him when he struck out on his own with his school's full array of assassination skills.
- Doing It Right This Time: Subverted. After hearing how his father treated Rei, Shinji wants to kill him... and then he thinks of a better idea: giving him exactly what he wants — to reunite with Yui — and then watching while his mother gives Gendo a piece of her mind.
- Farce of the Three Kingdoms: Lu Bu manages to kill his own father multiple times.
- The Fundamental Essence of Villainy: Toga, after killing both of her parents at the end of Frayed Edges.
- Harveste, who was living with abusive relatives after his loving parents died protecting him, killed his legal guardians and his cousin, effectively re-orphaning himself at the age of five.
- Hellsister Trilogy: Subverted. Orion attempts very, very dark to make himself fatherless, and he believes he succeeds in obliterating Darkseid, but Supergirl reveals that Darkseid faked his death because he will be fought by the Legion of Super-Heroes in the far future.
- Helluva Classmate: Blitzo helped Chloé get revenge on her mom by throwing her and the assassin who poisoned her into a jet engine. And once Chloé masters a few more weapons, Millie's idea of a reward is helping her kill her dad, too.
- Higher Learning (Strike-Fiss): In the original timeline Asuka got murdered by her own son. In turn, Shinji and Kaoru locked him into what was left of the Geofront. Kaoru thinks that his father died down there.
- The Legend of Zelda: The Fall of Hyrule: Zelda sets up a plot to have her own father assassinated so that she can become queen, forcing Link to do the job by having him shoot poison arrows at the king during a speech.
- In Chapter 10 of Loud Heroes, a The Loud House fic, Chandler decides to kill his imprisoned father Mr. McCann via drowning him with his newly-gained water superpowers, after the latter disowned him back when he was about to get arrested (due to him hating how ugly Chandler got from accidentally getting soaked in toxic waste during Mr. McCann's fight with the L-Crew). At that late moment, Mr. McCann regretted what he said before dying.
Chandler: Now I have decided that I have no father, figuratively AND literally!
Mr. McCann: No, nooo, NOOOOOOOO! - Lulu's Bizarre Rebellion:
- Shirely helped Lelouch kill her father before either of them realized who he was.
- Kallen killed her mother accidentally while trying to stop the uncontrolled stand her mother was powering.
- As in canon, Suzaku remembers killing his father. However, the power of Hey Jude reveals that it was actually V.V. and the geass directorate who killed him and altered Suzaku's memories.
- My Brave Pony: Starfleet Magic: Titan killed his father for more power. While it is possible he still killed his family, after the rewrite, he just simply killed his entire planet.
- My Hero Academia: Unchained Predator: Curator murdered his entire family to claim his family fortune. When the Slayer finds out the full story of Curator's past, he makes a mental note to give a Cruel and Unusual Death to Curator.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion: R: Lyn mercy-killed his mother when he was a child. What makes it worse is that he seems to have, at the time, known what he was doing in spite of his very young age, but his mother begged him to. His father never let him live it down and now hates him for it. So does, Lyn, for that matter.
- The North Remembers: During Stannis Baratheon's attack on Winterfell, Ramsay Bolton finally loses it and kills his father Roose Bolton with his flaying knife. He takes him off guard as he's shouting orders to his men, and drags the knife deep down into his spine and through his throat. When the castle explodes, he finds the corpse of his father horribly mutilated from all the rubble and pees on it as a final insult. To most characters, this would be seen as a Moral Event Horizon, but considering how Roose had betrayed and murdered his own King, desecrating his body with the Freys, it's more of a Karmic Death. Fat Walda Frey, who is Ramsay's stepmother, also meets a gruesome end as Ramsay beats her to death with a jagged rock.
- Paint It Green, Blue, Black: Subverted. For all it's worth, Enfant Terrible Vendetta won't kill her parents and gets mad when Charlotte asks her how come she hasn't killed them already. It's never clarified why, but it's unlikely to be for moral reasons as she has no issue helping Charlotte kill her grandmother.
- The Peace Not Promised: In his first life, Severus Snape killed his parents at Voldemort's instruction, to remove any possible alternative claim on the Prince family inheritance. Since his mother was merely grossly neglectful, he was merciful enough to kill her painlessly in her sleep. His alcoholic and violent father, not so much.
- Pokémon Reset Bloodlines:
- The whole plot of Chapter 23 happens because Belladonna is determined to kill the father of her girlfriend Aurora for betraying and abandoning her. Aurora for her part only follows along with the plan because she's afraid of Belladonna leaving her, even though she doesn't want her father to die.
- A criminal named Heratia gave birth to seven sons to use as tools to commit her crimes. One of them managed to escape from her clutches and made a new life. The remaining six seized the chance when she was brought down by Gligarman and beat her to death.
- Pride Lands Generations: Somehow, Jahili weathers years in backstory, and months onscreen, of Kuchinja's constant contempt, disgust, hatred, and cruel abuse — mostly verbal and emotional, but some physical blows do enter into it — all revolving around how useless and worthless he is (whether to his cause or in general). It's only when his father finally threatens to kill him, and then to seduce and claim Taraji for his own, that Jahili finally turns on him and attacks with a ferocity and viciousness that startles and disturbs everyone, even Kuchinja himself. The only reason he doesn't succeed in killing his father is Kuchinja injuring him badly enough that he is caught and pinned, and then Taraji and Dhahabu intervening to bring the battle to its conclusion.
- Princess of the Blacks has a slight variant with Priest. His former family (and ex-fiancée) are still alive, but he erased all memory of his existence from their minds as the price for a bit of Black Magic that lets him survive getting dismembered without bleeding out.
- Project Delta: It is revealed Dr. Orsen, the man in charge of the project and one of the people Jane killed while escaping, was her biological father.
- RWBY: Dark: Ruby Rose began her life of crime by stabbing her mother Summer to death with a knife, then lacerating her father Taiyang with her scythe and throwing him off a cliff.
- SAPR: Cinder burned her home to the ground with her stepmother and one of her stepsisters inside. Then years later during the course of the story, she stabs her other stepsister to death in a dark alley.
- Silver and Gold: This happened by accident when seven-year-old Lily got loose after her first werewolf transformation and killed her parents and older sister.
- Soul Eater: Troubled Souls: Bizarrely, Crona is directly responsible for the deaths of both his/her father and mother. Sometimes when they were still together, Medusa ordered Crona to kill a certain Evil Human and Ragnarok to eat its soul. After the deed is done, Medusa muses on how “[its] genes helped [her] created the perfect subject,” all but confirming that Medusa made Crona kill his/her biological father. In the third arc, Crona finally achieves payback against Medusa for all the crimes and heinous acts she’s committed to him/her personally and those around him/her.
- Split Second (My Little Pony): Sparkle's dark magic killed her parents. This is probably an unintentional example.
- In Strings (Lantur), it is heavily implied that Tarrlok killed his father soon after his mother committed suicide due to the abuse.
- The Third Coffin: The Trio ends up killing their parents like in canon, but unlike canon, Adam first starts to torture both of them before actually killing them.
- In many canons of Troll Cops, Tavros, aka the Nefarious and Notorious Mr. Pupa, did this as the first of his many heinous criminal acts.
- Vow of Nudity: Gloria goes from a regular orphan, to being adopted by the King of Duskvale, to this when she eventually stabs him in his sleep to claim the throne.
- White Devil of the Moon: Fate does this to Precia after she attacks Alicia. Pretty much no one can blame her at that point.
- In "Will You Help Me Hide a Body?", a dark Frozen (2013) fan song, it's revealed that Anna killed her parents... and intends to come after Elsa next.
Films — Animation
- The Dagger of Kamui starts with a tragic variation: The Protagonist, Jiro, is framed for the murder of his adoptive mother and sister, and forced to flee mob justice. He's rescued by a passing monk, Tenkai, who offers Jiro the chance to take revenge on the Ninja who killed them. This ninja is actually Jiro's Disappeared Dad, who had rebelled against his former master. Tenkai had arranged the murder both as a trap for the rogue and as the opening act in a Gambit Roulette revolving around making Jiro into a Tyke-Bomb to discover the secrets that died with his father.
- At the end of Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conqueror of Shamballa, Envy finally kills his father. He had been wanting to do so most of his life.
- Kung Fu Panda 2: Lord Shen is an indirect and regretful example. He massacred a village of pandas and was banished by his parents as a result. According to the Soothsayer, the grief of sending him away caused them to die from despair — being told of this gives Shen a very brief Ignored Epiphany.
- Vital to the plot of Lupin III vs. Detective Conan. Queen Sakura of Vespania is believed to have been accidentally shot to death by her son and heir Prince Gill, who then shot himself in regret. In reality, Queen Sakura's brother-in-law, Duke Gerard, killed Sakura first and then shot Gill dead after he walked into the crime scene...
- Tales from Earthsea starts with the main character Arren murdering his father, the king, for no reason other than to steal his Cool Sword, leaving his mother a widow.
- This drives the plot of The Willoughbys: the Willoughby parents are so awful that the kids decide to indirectly kill them so that they can have a better life as orphans. Ultimately, the parents are eaten by a shark, while the much nicer Nanny and Commander Melanoff adopt the kids.
- My Life as a Zucchini begins with an involuntary version of this, when the titular character, while escaping from his menacing drunk mother, accidentally hits her in the head, causing her to fall down the stairs to her death.
Films — Live-Action
- Addams Family Values has this in the form of Debbie Jellinsky, the kids' apparent nanny and professional "black widow"-style Serial Killer who reveals that her first murders were her parents, who got her a Malibu Barbie instead of a Ballerina Barbie on her birthday: "That's not what I wanted! That's not who I was! I was a ballerina! Graceful! Delicate! They had to go." So she burned the family house down with them inside.
- Alien: Right after they're born, the "Newborn" Xenomorph from Resurrection and the "Offspring" from Romulus kill their respective mothers (the "Cloned Queen" and Kay).
- Diane in Angel Face, though she only intended to murder her stepmother through Vehicular Sabotage, and not her father as well.
- Catherine Trammell from the Basic Instinct movies may have killed her parents after writing a book detailing her plan to do so, then used, "right, I wrote out this plan for killing my parents, published it in a book, then did it — I'd have to be crazy to do that" as a defense. Whether she actually did murder her parents or not is not actually stated, though several characters express their opinions that she did.
- Blood Pi: The first scene in the movie is of Amber murdering her parents. She kills her mom by slashing her throat, and bludgeoning her dad to death with a baseball bat.
- In The Catcher, Johnny beat his father to death a baseball bat, and then spent the next 17 years of his life in an asylum for the criminally insane. The film starts on the day of his release.
- Cruel and Unusual: One of the condemned in the afterlife, named William, murdered both his parents. It's not clear why he did it either.
- In Cruella, Cruella initially believes herself to be this, having caused the accident which resulted in her mother's death. In fact, it was no accident, as the Baroness actually use a dog whistle to purposely set her dalmatians on her. Furthermore, the Baroness is Cruella's real mother and that the woman she thought was her mother, Catherine, had adopted her.
- In The Curse of the Living Corpse the father of the Sinclair family has died, although the family suspects that he only looked dead and is now back and killing them for disobeying his last will and testament. It's actually the second son, Philip, killing everyone else, including his mother, Abigail. Presumably Rufus, the father, actually is dead.
- In Dark Phoenix, the film opens with a young Jean Grey accidentally killing her parents when she loses control of her powers and causes her mother to fall asleep at the wheel, causing the car to crash into a truck. It turns out that only her mother was killed in the crash, while her father gave Jean up to Professor X.
- Enforced in Death Warmed Up. Dr. Howell wants to get rid of his partner Prof. Tucker, whom he sees as an obstacle to his ambitions of creating a way to prolong life. He proceeds to brainwash his son (and the film's protagonist) Michael to kill him and his wife. Michael ends up in a mental facility, and Dr. Howell enjoys a productive career.
- Dust Bunny: Little girl Aurora is one by accident. As her first foster family were Abusive Parents, she wished a monster into existence who ate them. Since them, the monster would go on to eat all of her foster parents, even the ones she likes.
- In the Extended Cut of Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, it is revealed that Claire was the one who envisaged the sauna Escape Room which killed her mother years ago (note that she was a young girl at that point). In the present, after Zoey frees her, she wastes no time to take revenge against her father by gassing him with poison in the same glass prison he trapped her within.
- Michael Carter, the archvillain of the Aussie horror flick Feed, smothered his obese mother when he was a child. He's locked into a cycle of repeating the same murder as an adult.
- In Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, Maggie kills Freddy Krueger, her father. However, he was already a horrifically evil serial killer. Also, Freddy himself. Years after being abandoned by his birth mother, he murders his abusive stepfather.
- Fresh Meat: Rina has no recourse but to kill her own father when he tries to kill her. Maybe.
- Edmund in Germany, Year Zero poisons his sick father, who is lamenting his uselessness to his family and had previously said he wished he was no longer a burden on his children.
- It's implied Ginger and Brigitte did this to their abusive parents in Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning. When they come upon an outpost, Ginger says that their parents drowned - which is soon revealed to the audience to be bullshit. However, when talking privately with Brigitte, Ginger still alludes to their parents being dead, so one wonders why she had to lie about it before. Add in the casual references to them having been beaten before, and the fact that for some reason, they're traveling on their own during winter at the start of the movie, and the fact that Ginger, at least, always had some sociopathic tendencies, and... Yeah.
- In The Gravedancers, the young Pyromaniac Dennis killed his parents, and the rest of his family, when he burned down the family home. However, he was trapped in the house and died in the blaze as well. He returns as a ghost with pyrokinetic abilities.
- Haunter: A flashback shows how the murderous evil ghost poisoned and suffocated both his parents in the 1930s. They're among the group of spirits who appear to send him to Hell at the end.
- In Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, Pinhead reveals that Monroe killed his own parents with the same gun he tries to use on the pillarized Pinhead.
- House at the End of the Street: What ended up happening with Ryan's sister, as she murdered both her parents. Although "she" was actually Ryan...
- In the second The Human Centipede movie the Villain Protagonist's mom tries to kill him but he wasn't in his bed at the time. A few minutes later he, in turn, kills her then sets her bashed-in corpse at the table and continues his dinner like nothing happened.
- Edgler Vess in the film Intensity Lampshades the Freudian Excuse when he tells the protagonist that his parents were most loving, caring people that he could have ever wanted... but he killed them anyway.
- While he didn't kill them, the titular child character of the movie Joshua drove his mother crazy until she was committed and drove his father paranoid until he was arrested, essentially making himself an orphan. All so that he could be adopted by his uncle, who he liked better.
- Just Cause: Blair Sullivan has Bobby Ferguson kill his parents, in return for taking credit for the crime Bobby Ferguson committed.
- The Tartutic from M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water are described as being SO evil that they kill their parents after they're born (one wonders how the species survives, if they're that uncooperative).
- In Jupiter Ascending, Balem killed his mother, because she begged him to, likely because she can't stand taking part in the planetary genocides anymore.
- Kick-Ass 2: Chris D'Amico, albeit by accident, because it was caused by an argument and his reaction afterwards shows he regrets having his mom killed by his tantrum.
- In Man in the Attic, Slade murdered his mother as the Ripper's first victim.
- Matou a Família e Foi ao Cinema is about a man who kills his own parents with a straight razor and then goes out to watch a movie.
- Midsommar opens with Dani’s sister Terri killing both of their parents in a Murder-Suicide.
- In Mikey the title character murders both sets of adoptive parents he gets.
- As the last set of "parents" he killed weren't his biological parents, either, it's unclear just how many people he's killed...
- The killer in Mindhunters when he was just a lad. He assumed the police would take him away when they investigated the scene, but to his astonishment, nobody even suspected him of causing his parents' deaths, which just fed his misanthropy even more.
- The incomparable Natural Born Killers has the female lead helping her badass Anti-Hero boyfriend kill both her parents, who are admittedly Very Bad People.
- The Purge: Election Year: Kimmy happily claims that she murdered her parents before attacking Joe's deli.
- Alluded to in Red Eye when Jackson Rippner is discussing his unfortunate name. Whether he is joking or not isn't exactly clear, knowing this fellow. (He also told the female character that he'd never lied to her... make of that what you will.)
"That wasn't very nice of your parents."
"That's what I told them before I killed them." - In Scanners III: The Takeover, Helena kills her father to take over his pharmaceutical company.
- Scream:
- In Scream 3, it's revealed that Sidney has a half-brother named Roman Bridger, who was conceived when their mother Maureen was gang-raped by a number of movie producers. Roman tracked down Maureen years later, but because he was a product of the sexual assault she experienced, was rejected by her. He then stalked her for months, learning she'd had affairs with a number of men in Woodsboro, and orchestrated her murder by using Billy Loomis (and by extension Stu Macher) as a proxy, as Maureen had an affair with Billy's father, which caused his mother to leave him. During the film proper, Roman murders John Milton, one of the producers who participated in Maureen's gang-rape, as his last victim.
- In Scream 4, Jill Roberts, Sidney's cousin, arranges the murder of her mother Kate, if not outright kills Kate herself. Jill showed a lot of disdain towards Kate, but the reason why she has her killed is to draw more parallels to Sidney, who had to suffer the death of her mother Maureen, in her scheme of planning a series of Ghostface murders to make herself seem like the Final Girl of the story. When she recounts the fact that her own mother had to die as part of her plans to Sidney, Jill casually says that Kate's death is "no great loss".
- In Silent Fall, Sylvie stabs her parents to death to stop them from molesting her and her little brother.
- Spree: The first victim of Kurt's killing spree is his mother, and his final victim is his father.
- In Stone Cold, the villain tells one of his soon-to-be-murder victims:
Chains: You know, at moments like this I think of my father's last words, which were... "Don't, son, that gun is loaded!"
- The Substance: Sue technically isn't Elisabeth's daughter, rather an idealized version of her younger self (though Elisabeth does birth her). As a result of the increasing resentment shared between the two women, she ends up killing Elisabeth in a fit of blind rage.
- Theresa & Allison: Miranda tells Theresa how she had killed both of her parents after holding off feeding on any humans for a long time and losing control.
- Happens more than once in Village of the Damned (1960). Especially notorious in the 1995 version, where Mara, the ringleader of the Creepy Children, first telepathically forces her mother Barbara to put her hand inside a boiling pot, and then uses her Psychic Powers again to make her throw herself off a cliff.
- In Wanted, Wesley unknowingly became one of these, killing his Disappeared Dad because the Fraternity used him as an Unwitting Pawn — the one person the rogue assassin who was decimating their ranks could never kill. Naturally, he was told that he was hunting the man who killed his father, instead.
- The Witch has a sympathetic example with Thomasin. Her father had already died via being mauled by Black Phillip, and then her mother, now completely insane and blaming Thomasin for the family's misfortunes, attempts to strangle her. Thomasin stabs her to death, visibly in tears the whole time, and holding her in her arms after she dies.
- Wolves: Early on, Cayden slaughters his parents while in wolf form. Although he believes he really did it for most of the movie, it was Wild Joe.
- The Young Poisoner's Handbook:
- Graham kills his stepmother by poisoning her with thallium and is in process of killing his father the same way when he is arrested.
- Berridge, Graham's cellmate at the insane asylum, is a young soldier who snapped while home on leave and murdered both his parents.
Folklore
- There's an old Jewish story that's a good way to introduce the concept of chutzpah: a man convicted of murdering his parents begs the court for clemency on the grounds that he's an orphan. It's often used as a metaphor for Digging Yourself Deeper.
- A little dragon is found, crying. When asked where his mom and dad are, he says he ate them. When asked if he knows what it makes him, he says "Yes — a complete orphan."
- The infamous skipping-rope rhyme about Lizzie Borden dramatizes her Ax-Crazy double homicide:
Lizzie Borden took an axe
and gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
she gave her father forty-one.
Manhwa
- In Killing Stalking, Seungbae wonders if Sangwoo killed his missing parents. The truth isn't that simple, however: Sangwoo easily admits to having murdered his abusive father, but whether or not his mother died at his hands or his father's still isn't revealed. There are panels from Sangwoo's perspective of him strangling his mother, but there's nothing concrete to prove if these were memories, or if he was hallucinating.
- Tasha Godspell's sister in Witch Hunter killed their father soon after awakening as a witch, an event that drove her insane. She also killed Tasha's mentor, who was like another mother to Tasha, in a fit of jealousy.
Music
- Aerosmith's song "Janie's Got a Gun". She shoots her dad because of the abuse he inflicted on her.
- Dir en grey's song "Berry" tells the story of a nine-year-old girl who gets sick of her parents abusing her, takes her father's gun, and shoots them. If that's not disturbing enough, the girl's favorite food is jam on bread, and the blood her parents shed is referred to as raspberry jam.
- The Chad Mitchell Trio's song "Lizzie Borden" is one of several based on the real-life case of Lizzie Borden.
Some folks say she didn't do it, and others say of course she did
But they all agree Miss Lizzie B. was a problem kind of kid - Hinted at in They Might Be Giants’ "Stone Cold Coup d'Etat", a surreal song about underlings revolting and killing their leaders:
Around a dinner table a family says grace
And the son sees the secret signal on his sister's face
Dad smiles at his wife
Daughter reaches for the knife - Jim Morrison fantasized about killing his father (and also knocking off Brother and Sister Morrison for good measure) in the 1967 performance piece "The End" (oh yeah, and then he raped his mother). It was later parodied by Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman in 1993's "Wasted Youth".
- Tom Lehrer's song "The Irish Ballad", from Songs by Tom Lehrer, details the life of one of these:
About a maid I'll sing a song
Who didn't have her family long
Not only did she do them wrong
She did every one of them in... - mothy has the match-selling girl in "Flames of Yellow Phosphorus" kills her abusive father by burning their home while he was inside.
- Sound Horizon gives us "Yield", in which the protagonist kills one or both of her parents due to her incestuous feelings towards one of them.
- The titular character of the Johnny Cash hit “A Boy Named Sue” desires to kill his estranged father for giving him that awful name. Averted though, because he doesn’t go through with it in the end.
My name is Sue! How do you do? Now you’re gonna die!
Mythology & Religion
- Arthurian Legend: Gaheris kills his mother, Morgause, when he catches her in bed with Lamorak; the two families had a feud since Lamorak's dad, Pellinore, killed Gaheris' father/Morgause's husband, Lot. In some versions Gaheris frames Lamorak for the crime; either way, he and his brothers (except Gareth) would later kill Lamorak, too.
- In Buddhism, killing one's own father or mother are two of the five sins that will guarantee its perpetrator to be reborn in Avici, the lowest level of the Uṣṇanaraka.
Podcasts
- Sick Sad World:
- The first case in "Fathers In Crime" has a family man kill everyone in his family, among them his mother. The second case is about a college-age man who killed several of his family members, including his mother. He meant to kill his father as well, but it didn't work out that way.
- "Who You Gonna Call?" discusses a college-age kid who killed his family, starting with his parents.
Professional Wrestling
- WWE's The Undertaker may be a self-made orphan, or may not be. All we really know is that his parents died in a fire at the funeral home they owned and operated. At various points, we've been told that he set it by accident, he set it on purpose, his half-brother Kane set it, etc. It's all very confusing and pointless.
- Nah, Undertaker definitely started the fire.
- Then again, this was during Taker's Ministry of Darkness phase, when he was allied with Paul Bearer again, so there's definitely a hint of ambiguity/unreliability as to who did what. For we know, Bearer could've torched the home.
- This was during Vince Russo's run as booker, and he loves Ass Pulls, even if they produce nonsensical incoherent unresolved storylines.
- Vince Russo or not, the backstory of both Undertaker and Kane can be easily considered a complete mess.
- Nah, Undertaker definitely started the fire.
Radio
- Bleak Expectations: Series Big Bad Mr. Gently Benevolent is one. It was his second act of evil (the first was him punching an annoying boy who'd caused him to finally become evil). Played with, in that neither his mother or his stepfather are actually upset about this. His stepfather praises him for having "finally grown a backbone", and his mother says she's proud of him.
- Old Harry's Game: Thomas Crimp killed both his parents by shoving them down a well as a child, after they wouldn't buy him an expensive toy, even after he threw a massive tantrum.
Roleplay
- Daigo from Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues poisoned his stepmother to death after suffering her abuse for years. It's implied that he's poisoning his abusive father in the same way, except this time he's drawing out the man's suffering for as long as he can.
- In Survival of the Fittest version one, Cillian Crowe and Daphne Rudko both murdered their own parents, though Cillian was confined to an insane asylum due to his actions while Daphne got off scot-free.
Tabletop Games
- BattleTech: This happens quite a bit in the Inner Sphere. Most notably, it's what invoked the Karma Houdini Warranty for Katherine/Katrina Steiner-Davison; her son realized how much of a snake she was and proceeded to off her.
- Champions: In the adventure "The Coriolis Effect", the villainess murdered her own parents by turning them into pools of slime.
- Forgotten Realms: After discovering a magical Power Crystal and mastering its powers, the red dragon Hoondarrh returned to his birth cave, killed his single surviving parent, and took over their hoard.
- Middle-Earth Role Playing: According to legend, Glaurung devoured his own father, the elder dragon Iaurlóke the Cold.
- Paranoia describes Chutzpah (a major stat in 2nd edition, a skill in XP) as standing before a judge to be sentenced for murdering your parents and pleading for clemency because you're an orphan.
- Warhammer 40,000: The fallen Primarch Horus attempted to murder his father, the Emperor, but "only" succeeded in mortally wounding him and was killed by Him in turn.
Theatre
- In Electra (Sophocles) and The Libation Bearers in The Oresteia, Orestes enacts vengeance against his mother Chytaimnestra and stepfather Aigisthos for their murder of his father Agamemnon. Though Electra doesn't actually wield the blade, she is guilty too.
- The protagonist of Lady in the Dark, accused of being indecisive, recounts "The Saga of Jenny", whose life was ruined by her decisiveness. To begin with, it leads to the accidental deaths of Jenny's parents (and siblings):
Jenny made her mind up when she was three
She herself was going to trim the Christmas tree
Christmas Eve, she lit the candles, tossed the tapers away
Little Jenny was an orphan on Christmas day - Oedipus the King: Oedipus is cast out from his home and raised by adoptive parents who did not tell him that he was adopted. One day, as an adult, he kills a man in a dispute on the road, who was in fact his father — who, in great irony, had thrown him out to begin with due to a prophecy stating that he would be killed by his own son. He's later indirectly responsible for his mother's death when the revelation of their Surprise Incest drives her to suicide.
- In the Roman comedy Pseudolus, the Pimp Ballio claims to have beaten and killed his parents 'to save their Keep'.
- In the play The Revengers' Comedies, the Ax-Crazy Clingy Jealous Girl who acts as a Toxic Friend Influence to the protagonist is strongly implied to have started the fire that killed her parents when she was eleven because they did something minor to displease her.
- In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, George killed both of his parents by accident.
Visual Novels
- Ace Attorney:
- Played cruelly with Miles Edgeworth thinking for fifteen years that he accidentally killed his father Gregory and having constant nightmares about it. Subverted, in that it was proven that he was wrong: Gregory was murdered by his rival Manfred Von Karma, who later manipulated the surroundings to make everyone think Edgeworth had done it.
- In the final case of Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, a young woman named Vera Misham is put on trial for killing her father, but she is innocent. The actual killer is Kristoph Gavin, who also tries to kill her.
- Dual Destinies has Athena Cykes eventually accused of murdering her mother Metis (the initial "culprit", Simon Blackquill, was Taking the Heat) and, unlike with Edgeworth's case, everyone believed it was a deliberate act, albeit one with sympathetic motives (it was thought that Metis had been treating her as a guinea pig for her scientific experiments and Athena eventually snapped). Athena herself eventually believes she did it because all she can remember of that day was stabbing someone and feeling the blood run down the blade and onto her fingers. It turns out that someone else killed Metis, Athena accidentally walked on the crime scene, and what she actually recalled was stabbing the real killer in self-defense.
- The Hayseed Knight: A tragic example, as Sep accidentally burned her adoptive mother to death when her powers went haywire as a kid, and while she didn't directly kill her adoptive father, he was still blamed for it and got executed to appease the angry mob that ensued.
- In the sixth case of Paper Perjury, two of the four suspects in Joules Wattson's murder are her sons Kelvin and Raiden, with the other two being her stepson Donner(the son her husband had in an extramarital affair) and Kelvin's girlfriend Amber, with the former pair being more suspicious. The actual culprit is Kelvin, who's motivated by his mother disapproving of his relationship with Amber to the point of cutting him out of the will, as well as his mother allowing him to take the blame for his father's accidental death(his mother was the one responsible).
- In Sisterly Bliss ~Don't Let Mom Find Out~: Ichika, in her bad route. While being transported to another school by her parents, knowing that she would not be able to be with Futaba if she were to arrive to destination, she decides to kill her parents by pushing them from a cliff when they were observing the view. This was considered an accident by the police and Ichika was allowed to stay with Futaba in their house to take care of her.
- Super Danganronpa Another 2: Among the numerous victims of Kanade Otonokoji's killing spree were her own parents.
- In Tavern Talk, Zephir plans to have someone else kill his parents out of revenge on their abandoning of him, but in the bad ending of "The Parent Trap", he regrets it at the last minute and stops Jade from killing them so he can nonfatally fight them himself.
- When They Cry:
- Higurashi: When They Cry: Satoko, under the effects of Hinamizawa Syndrome, believed her mother/stepfather were planning to kill her and pushed them both over a cliff in self-defense.
- Umineko: When They Cry:
- Dlanor A. Knox killed her own father after he violated the Knox Decalogue. Afterward, she stopped aging.
- Also, in one arc George Ushiromiya kills his mother Eva. It was mostly in self-defense when her Superpowered Evil Side Eva-Beatrice came out in the middle of a heated discussion in regards to her Parental Marriage Veto, though.
Web Animation
- Gameoverse: By complete and total accident. In the past, by beating her Game World by defeating Malice and Mayhem, Kit Bodega inadvertently and unintentionally caused the complete destruction of her world which included her parents, Orph and Tina.
- In Red vs. Blue: The Project Freelancer Saga, Carolina sets out to kill The Director for casting her and the team aside, causing them to fragment and turn on one another, all in the name of reviving her mother and his wife, Allison who had died during the Human-Covenant war. Carolina finds the Director, a sad and broken man at the end of the season and she forgives him of all he's done. Before she leaves, however, he asks she leave him with her pistol, with which he commits suicide.
- RWBY: Mercury Black murdered his single father Marcus as retaliation for the former's abuse.
Webcomics
- Black Mage from 8-Bit Theater may be this; we know he's killed his (blind) brother and has said he "wouldn't use the present tense for any member of my family" (with a blood splatter in the background, no less).
"It would have been cruel to let him live after what I did to his eyes."
- Archipelago: Captain Snow started off with birds and squirrels, then went on to kill his parents and apparently the rest of his family, sparing his nephew but forcing him to work for his crew.
- El Goonish Shive: Damian killed his biological parent, Mr. Guyur, when he took over (read: murdered everyone in) the Project Lycanthrope facility.
- In Girl Genius, Anevka Sturmvoraus fatally electrocutes her father; she never shows the slightest regret, but then, it's his fault that she's a Brain in a Jar controlling a robot body. Or rather, a robot that only thinks she's the real Anevka, but she doesn't know that. Agatha H. and the Clockwork Princess strongly implies that she killed her mother as well, though it doesn't give any context.
- The Handbook of Heroes reveals in "Tragic Backstory" that Fighter killed his own parents at a young age, in order to become an adventurer (as everyone knows that all the best heroes are orphans).
- Homestuck: Vriska Mercy Kills her own lusus after a landslide traps her under rubble.
- Jack: Drip was told by his horrific grandmother that he had killed his parents, in some roundabout way about his birth forcing them to live in a bad neighborhood where they got brutally murdered. But then in an arc showing how he became the Anthropomorphic Personification of Lust it's shown that thanks to the odd nature of time in the afterlife he actually did kill his parents, Lucifer led him to believe that they were an ex-girlfriend of his and her husband, and he didn't realize his mistake until he dropped their baby on his mother's torn open ribcage and got a good look at him. And Drip's daughter Lita is more than a bit obsessed with killing him for what he did to her mother and to herself, even committing suicide in order to follow him into hell and kill him again, though she really had no idea what she was getting into.
- Jared murdered his own father, the fate of his mother is as of yet unrevealed, though it's likely she met the same fate.
- In The Last Days of FOXHOUND, Ocelot sets up a The Reveal and then tells Pyscho Mantis that I Am Your Father. Mantis' only response is a deadpan "No you're not. I killed my father when I was eight." Ocelot looks slightly uncomfortable (no small feat) and changes the subject to the actual reveal.
- Richard of Looking for Group admits having killed his own father. In fact, he's proud of it. Actually, he thinks of it as a funny story. But then again, anything involving killing is funny to Richard.
- Used as a threat in the comic that succeeded Lowroad 75, The Smashing Adventures Of The Bottomleys:
Dad: Um... Well, you see... erm... I'm building this new machine in the basement and the TV had some really useful part...
Alice: Dad, If you finish that sentence I will be forced to make myself an orphan... - The Order of the Stick: Early in the prequel "Start of Darkness", a young Xykon decides to leave home and turns his parents into zombies on the way out. More specifically, he kills them with his (zombie) grandmother. Xykon is not a nice person.
- In the Quest Den adventure Perpetuity, Clive reveals to his friends that two years ago, his younger brother Rodney overheard their parents planning to get rid of Clive; in order to protect his big brother, Rodney murdered them both in their sleep. Lilian, the only other kid in the group with a sibling, approves.
Lilian: I mean, I love my parents and all, but if it meant keeping Phillip safe? It's not even a difficult choice.
- Keith Keiser of TwoKinds killed his drunken father in self-defense after said father had killed his own wife. On top of it, he was accused of both murders and banished. It turns out that his father was actually innocent; the Intelligence General murdered Keith's mother when he found out she was from the other Bastin nation, the one without the compulsion to follow any order.
- Unsounded: Gingerly-We-Go Sanguinary slit her parents' throats in retaliation after they poisoned her lover.
- The Uricarn from The Wotch is a self-made Last of His Kind. It's likely he killed his parents because, in an aside, he regrets killing them all while he was still a kid. He wishes he left a female alive.
- Welcome to Hell (2010) starts out with the main character, Sock, digging three graves, having just "killed his parents... in his sleep". He then proceeds to fill the third.
- White Dark Life: Eloria murders her father to take his position as a Demon Lord. It also didn't help that he purposefully tried to piss her off in the first place.
Websites
- Killerbunnies: Visceraline is rumored to be the reason as to why she is absent parents, which wouldn't be unlikely, considering how she is, which leads to a bit of Fridge Horror. We also have this with a mentally ill Razelle, apparently, when she set her house ablaze while in a fit of delirium, killing her parents (along with her grandmother), though it's unclear.
Web Videos
- In The Birch, Lanie uses her powers of botanical manipulation to first kill her father by ripping off his jaw. After her daughter's death, she initially seeks comfort in her mother's arms. But when her mother says it was better that way, Lanie starts her transformation into the Birch and ends up constricting her mother to death.
- Critical Role: Campaign Two: Caleb Widowgast was groomed to be a magic assassin by the Cerberus Assembly, and his final "test" was to murder his parents under the influence of Fake Memories. He set their farmhouse on fire with his magic, but seeing the aftermath of his actions cut through the brainwashing and he suffered a massive Freak Out, leading to his "master" Trent Ikithon dumping him in an insane asylum for ten years before someone restored his memories and let him see how he had been tricked.
- In Dimension 20: Fantasy High, the Abernant sisters kill their father and leave their mother for dead. Of course, their parents were also horrifyingly abusive villains, so it was called for.
- In Friendship is Witchcraft, Fluttershy kills her father, who was abusive towards her. He was also a dragon. Apparently, dragon genes are recessive, thus why she is a pony.
- Hellsing Ultimate Abridged: Alucard admits to Walter that his three favorite things he's killed, in ascending order, are Turks, Nazis and his own father.
- The Human Pet: Sam killed his parents after snapping thanks to their abusive nature.
- According to The Perfect Castlevania Timeline, as soon as Malus embraced his status as Dracula's reincarnation, he murdered his parents before setting fire to his home village. On his 8th birthday.
- Visual Venture: Two of the cases of "The Most HORRIBLE People in Gaming History" are people who killed their own parents.
- Menhaz Zaman was a Perfect World player who killed his own parents and sister as an alternative to come clean about his lie about enrolling to York University and graduating, which he made up in response to their pressure to excel academically. Gerard explains that as a result of that, Menhaz got jailed with a life sentence with no parole for 40 years.
- Daniel Petric, having started off as the star player of his high-school team until a skiing accident ruined his performance, became obsessed with playing violent videogames, specifically those of the Halo franchise. However, when his father caught him buying Halo 3 and locked his copy away, Daniel left the house for a friend's before going back to kill his parents as he retrieved the copy, but then his sister and her husband walked in and called the police. While his mother died from the gunshot, his father survived.
- Played for Laughs in Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series when, as a child, Kaiba fires his parents.
Western Animation
- Adventure Time: Jake ends up killing his surviving biological parent, a shapeshifting blue alien named Warren Ampersand, who tricked Jake into transferring his life essence so that he could live forever (and had already done this to hundreds of his other children prior to this). Jake was able to trick Warren into transferring his life essence back, but accidentally made Warren aware that he had five children of his own that Warren could also siphon the life essence of. To keep his own children safe, Jake hurled Warren into a black hole, knowing this would condemn him to a barren space rock.
- Fire Lord Ozai from Avatar: The Last Airbender, although he used an assassin (his own wife, Princess Ursa, who he convinced to use a colorless, odorless poison on Azulon since he was going to make Ozai kill their own son, Zuko).
- In Batman: The Animated Series, Jason Blood claims that Klarion turned his parents into mice. Then the camera zooms in on Klarion's cat Teekl, implying that Teekl ate them.
- Dark Danny from Danny Phantom didn't just kill his parents, he ''killed his sister, his friends, and his teacher (as well as his human self way earlier)''...just to secure his own future.
- In Dragons: Riders of Berk, it is strongly implied that Dagur the Deranged, Mad Chief of the Berserker Tribe, killed his own father. Dagur claims that his father Oswald the Agreeable "retired", later saying that he "had to be eliminated" so that he could become chief. Oswald is never seen or heard from once in the show. However, it is revealed later on that Dagur didn't kill Oswald. Dagur did deliberately play up the notion early in his career, thinking he wouldn't be taken seriously as such a young chief unless people were given a reason to fear him, but he actually had no idea what happened to Oswald until late in Race to the Edge.
- Duckman: If we go by his dad's last words.
Duckman: Did I ever tell you my dad's last words to me?
Cornfed: Mm-hmm. "Careful, son, I don't think the safety's on."
Duckman: Before that! - Final Space: In the Season 2 episode "The Grand Surrender", we learn that Ash accidentally killed her own parents (and several other bystanders) when her powers first manifested after she saw her sister getting sacrificed to the Serpent God Werthrent.
- The Omnicronians of Futurama eat their mothers when they grow up. Leela understandably regrets telling a baby Omnicronian that she hoped he would always think of her as a foster mom after he tells her this.
- It's implied that the other parent doesn't fare much better, if at all; Lrrr claims to have killed his own father, and "Patricide" has its own merit badge in the Omicronian equivalent of scouts.
Lrrr: (to his son) ...Well, let's work up to that one.
- Leela nearly does this herself when she and her mutant parents are reunited. She takes the photos they have of her as proof that they are creepy stalkers who murdered her birth parents. Her parents go along with it because they'd rather die than let their daughter live with the shame of being a mutant. Fortunately, Fry and the others arrive just in time to reveal the truth.
- It's implied that the other parent doesn't fare much better, if at all; Lrrr claims to have killed his own father, and "Patricide" has its own merit badge in the Omicronian equivalent of scouts.
- Gravity Falls has Bill Cipher who, when asked if he has a family in his Reddit AMA, replied "NOT ANYMORE", this was hinted at in "Weirdmageddon: Take Back The Falls" when Bill Cipher said he "liberated his dimension." The tie-in book Gravity Falls: Journal 3 explicitly says that he killed his parents, along with everyone else in his home universe. The Book of Bill strongly suggests that that was not what he intended to happen, but convinced himself that he "liberated" it as a means of coping with what he'd done. The Axolotl implies that Bill does feel guilty over it, but refuses to face it.
- Iron Man: Armored Adventures:
- Justin Hammer’s father died under mysterious circumstances and Justin comments about a deity that did whatever necessary to gain power. Nick Fury even suspects that Justin killed his father to take control of Hammer International.
- In one episode a Jerkass classmate implies that Tony did this to his father because of their (actually friendly and good-spirited) competition to one-up each other's inventions. It's completely false and Tony does not take it well at all.
- A variation on Jimmy Two-Shoes: Every member of the Heinous Family has frozen their father and taken over Miseryville. Since the family is different generations of Satan (a fact clearer in the original pitch) you get the impression that this is as close to death as they can get.
- Robot Chicken: In a skit from "Lust for Puppets," Calvin's parents become concerned that he thinks Hobbes is real, and put him on medication and electroshock therapy. Hobbes comes back to life when they aren't looking and urges Calvin to...well...deal with the problem differently.
Hobbes: Calvin, your parents don't believe. We have to kill them. (pulls out a chainsaw)
- In The Simpsons:
- Mr. Burns fills out a health form and says that his parents died because they got in his way. This is contradicted by other episodes wherein he was adopted by a wealthy relation and that his mother is still alive. He has not forgotten that she had an affair with former President and Chief Justice William Howard Taft.
- Another episode has a brutal prison warden attempting to justify himself:
Warden: [somber] When I was a young boy, I saw my father murdered in front of my eyes. [suddenly cheerful] By me.
- In South Park, Eric Cartman manipulated the events that resulted in the death of his father, though he actually didn't realize they were related until several seasons later, when it was revealed by his vengeful half-brother, Scott Tenorman.
- In Spider-Man: The Animated Series, the Kingpin is as strongly implied to be this as the censors would allow. After being left for the police by his father in a robbery gone south, he walked out of prison with the physical strength, connections, and mentality needed to build his empire. It's not made clear what he did to his father, but Smythe is shocked that even Kingpin could be so ruthless. Near the end of that storyline, the Kingpin makes his own son Richard take the fall for Kingpin's exposed scheme. Along his wife left him for earlier actions, the Kingpin is left alone holding a photo of his shattered family, bitterly wondering when his own son would take his revenge.
- M Bison, Big Bad of Street Fighter (1995), doesn't understand why Cammy and Chun-Li are angry at him, retorting with this trope.
Bison: Yes, yes, I killed your father! What is it with you women anyway?! I killed my father too and you don't hear me whining about it!
- Teen Titans (2003): Raven destroys Trigon at the end of the fourth season, and he's never seen again since then.
- The Batman (2004): In the episode "A Matter of Family", it's implied with Tony Zucco, at least of the accidental sort. Back when he used to be a knife-thrower, his father was often the volunteer in his act.
Batman: Why'd you give up such a promising career?
Tony Zucco: Well, one day... I missed.