Mostly just parent-child angst, though. And sex angst. And angst I can mock. And... er, right. :D The epiphany, yes! Because even the ones who think it might be OK or who don't notice eventually do see it, or they see that there's this person with half their genes whom they don't know at all, but still love, and who doesn't really want to get to know them. Parent issue plots are the one sort of plot that really, deeply affects me, too, because on one level I really understand that whatever they were doing was important and they needed to do it, but on another level, I think it's sort of unforgivable to fail your child that way. (Makes for good fiction, though. :D)

I have seen that frozen-family thing, so much. I guess it's understandable, too, because I always assume that nothing at home will have changed in the months I'm in Australia. And it's so selfish; it makes me want to hit the character, because what is he thinking, that the sun stops rising when he's not around? His fatal mistake, egocentricity.

That Sasuke thing! I went off on a major tangent on him, and had to stick it in a post in my journal. :D

Motherhood in fiction isn't often very complicated--there are so few failings that society as a whole seems to be willing to forgive mothers, which really limits what's shown and how it's shown. My mum wouldn't really fit in the mother-pattern, either (although my dad does fit in the absent-father role); I think it would be really creepy to meet a mother who did, because, dude. What is she hiding, why is she pretending to be that way? No real person could naturally be what we have the cultural expectation that mothers are, surely. The ideal mother portayed seems to be what we assume a parent should be, but lacking anything else--she's given away her personality, her self, so that she can be Mother, a totally devoted figure of first femininity. (And if she's not, she's unforgivably flawed.) Like Sasuke's mother, dude. She freaks me out. :/

And when they're not that freaky, unrealistic, boring type, anime mother figures often piss me off in a completely different way--Hatsumi's mother in 'Hot Gimmick', for one. ARGH. She told her daughter off for refusing to go out with a boy who had pushed her down the stairs in childhood! Because it might lower their status in their apartment building! >:| (See, you forgive me for Joyce. Can you forgive me for Joyce and Sasuke?)