#i know i've grumped about this before—both the trend and specific instances of it

[anghraine]

Maybe it's just because I'm sleepy and my brain is tired and irritable, but I do wish fandom in general weren't so absolutely intent on casting all familial or quasi-familial relationships into some near approximation of US nuclear family idealization.

Acting as a caretaker for a child doesn't automatically make someone their "real parent" or "adopted parent" or "any parent at all" if the child doesn't see them that way. These caretaking relationships can be messy, begrudging, or essentially coercive (in both fiction and IRL, and in life, forcing children into situations where "they'll be taken care of" is often coercive and/or predatory).

And sometimes a caretaker adult, whether a natural parent, adoptive parent, some kind of guardian, or more amorphous caretaker, is ... bad, actually. It's understandable for the children they take care of (whether literal children or now-adult people who experienced it previously) to have had negative experiences they have complicated feelings about, to have complicated feelings about their caretakers that may not distill down to "real parents", to be capable of harsh criticism of their former caretakers, even if they love them.

Sometimes it is the simpler scenario where a child is adopted and it looks very much like a conventional "nuclear" relationship (though even then, the child can have more complex and inconvenient feelings than they're often supposed to have). But—okay, I may be biased from coming from a family that was licensed for foster care, which saw a lot of children essentially forced into foster care with varying complicated feelings about it that didn't always equate to "this person who looks after me is my mother"—even after a long time, sometimes.

And there's frequently a nasty pressure on children placed in "care" to either reach out to their birth or adoptive parents, or to wholly turn their backs on them and accept their current caretakers as the only parents who matter. But usually things are messier than that. You can care about a caretaker, you can respect and love them, and still not feel like you're their child. Or maybe you do! It just depends.

This can happen with siblings as well, especially when there's a big age difference—yeah, one of the siblings may be functionally filling the shoes of their parents as well as they can, but it doesn't necessarily make them actual parents in the eyes of their younger siblings (or themselves). It can, but doesn't have to. Or maybe it's something messier, like when the relationship is almost parental, but not quite, and the exact nature of the dynamic is hard to pin down.

There's also the case where the relationship may have been parental at one point, but one of the parties (usually the caretaker) burned bridges so badly that the child (often an adult at this point) cuts ties and doesn't deny that the caretaker filled a parental role back then, but wholly rejects it as any kind of current reality. This can happen with biological family, but also with looser caretaker relationships as well (esp the cultier ones).

I'm thinking of a lot of fandom examples of these kinds of indeterminate caretaker-child (or former child) relationships, where either we know or have good reason to believe the child doesn't regard a former caretaker as exactly the same as a parent, or we just don't know what the nature of the relationship is, and fandom will be absolutely insistent that the only possible way to read it is parent-child.

And also, sometimes there's nothing wrong with the caretaker relationship, but it's still not parent-child. It simply doesn't map onto this parental mold that fandom tries to box all adult-child caretaking relationships into, because family is more complicated than a single, very simplistic model allows.