(no subject)

[cahn]

Please rec me books with dads who are major characters (important secondary character is fine) and for whom parenting is an important component of their character, with kids who are older at the time of canon (teenager or above). They don't need to be good parents, necessarily, and they can make horrible mistakes, but they should be (relatively?) non-abusive and clearly love their kid(s).

So far I've got

-Aral Vorkosigan (...I guess he's not super a main character any more, but he casts a pretty long shadow)
-Atticus Finch
-Andrew Wiggin
-Jean Valjean
-Reb Saunders and David Malter
-Van Hohenheim (taking the prize for not being a good parent and making horrible mistakes...)

...this is a much lower percentage of the books we own than I had thought it would be!

Comments

[melannen]

This is tough! I thought it would be easier too.

-Various King Arthurs?
-Some of Heinlein's self-inserts, but that gets... weird
-Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser start having all their adult-ish illegitimate kids with various one-off women they had seduced in their quests show up in the later stories when they're trying to retire, which is pretty amazing
-Aubrey-Maturin's kids are teens by the time the series ends, iirc

...everything else I'm coming up with, either it's generational sagas where the kids are the MCs by the time they're teenagers (like Damia or Witch World) or it's stuff with a huge ensemble cast that includes parents (like Song of Ice and Fire. Although most of them die in that.) Or it's moms (or NB parents, if Fosyf and Celar count. They probably don't anyway).

[cahn]

(lol at your Heinlein comment!)

You know, it's sort of interesting how few present dads there are in Arthurian mythos, really, given how many guys are riding around (well, maybe the problem is that they're all riding around all the time). Sir Ector in Sword in the Stone is the only one I can really think of -- Arthur doesn't have a father around, the Orkney boys maybe had King Lot for a while, I guess?? (although my opinions on this are highly colored by T.H. White) Mordred definitely didn't have his father around, Lancelot ran off from Galahad... a bunch of deadbeat dads, here!

...I have only read like one or two Fafhrd-Grey-Mouser stories, and clearly I need to read more of these, because that sounds awesome.

Hm, I should do a similar post asking for mom/NB-parent recs, because honestly I had even more trouble coming up with moms on our bookshelf, although that... might partially be a problem with our bookshelf, because like you say there should be things like Damia and such that we don't happen to own right now. Also there seem to be a lot of dead moms out there.

(Although... I'm not sure Fosyf and Celar make my cut of not-crap parents, which is obviously super highly subjective given that Van Hohenheim made it.)