very interesting... father/son issues have always been a source of great angst for me, focal points for interesting hangups. usually this is because fathers and sons are not expected to be close anyway in most cultures, and all the unspoken need to reach out and pull away makes for a lot of room for speculation :3

never paid much attention to the difference in treatment between j-angst and w-angst though... besides the fact that w-media tends to make the father and the son face each other in an elaborate verbal confrontation, which makes them sound as if they're reciting off scripts given to them by their individual therapists.

i would like to see complex mother/son relations. only example in fiction that comes to mind right now is the one in ursula le guin's the dispossessed. sure the society where the hero shevek operates in is one that advocates total equality, parenthood for all, that stuff, but the longing to be nurtured by a biological mother still appeared to be a great influence in the shaping of shevek's character. in their confrontation, it turned out that rulag ("the mother," as she introduced herself) turned out to be the unemotional, unattached one, whose sentimentality took a back seat to intellect. their maternal relationship (or lack of one?) is not just curious because it cast a woman into the stereotypical role of father, but because it showed the profound impact of an emotionally distant mother on the psyche of her child, especially her son.