♥ #1 is one of my favorites ever. As sappy as it is, I also love Paul Simon's Father and Daughter.

*victory fists* My next task for myself will be to please you thus with a romantic pairing, and to have it be in a shiny book with covers.

I stopped watching Heroes entirely after the atrocity of season two, but Mr Bennett and Claire in pretty much the entirety of 'Company Man' in season one kill me dead. She's a superpowered mutant! He's a fiendish bespectacled minion of evil bent on exploiting her kind! But she is his LITTLE GIRL and HE LOVES HER MORE THAN ANYTHING.

Good As Lily by Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm.

GRACE: Mom, Dad...d-do you sometimes wish I had died instead of Lily?
MOM: ...Grace, don't you ever ask that question again. Do you hear me? If you ever ask us that again, you are grounded for a year! Oh, I'm a terrible mother! I'm sorry, honey, I'm so sorry...
GRACE: No, Mom, I...
MOM: Grace, we love you so so much. I'm so sorry if we don't seem like we show you enough...
DAD: Grace-ya... you have our love for two daughters all to yourself. And that's not only because of Lily's death. We're that proud of you. We're so very proud of you.

I cry every time I read Good As Lily, or even think about that scene. I am crying just typing that out.

Also, here is a scene from a somewhat obscure (but awesome!) Irish YA book called Has Anyone Seen Heather? by Mary Rose Callaghan. Context: Narrator is Clare (16), and Katie is her 15-year-old sister. They normally live in Dublin with their grandfather, but have spent most of the book in London; the original plan was for them to work at summer jobs and stay with their mother, but as a result of their mother's mental health issues the original plan ended up not happening, and as a result of Clare's insistence on being "the sensible one" and taking care of Katie, the girls have been basically alone all summer (and have been in some danger, though nothing permanently bad has happened). At this point, they haven't seen their mother in a year; they're meeting her in a nursing home.

Her skin was wrinkly and her hair roots were now completely white where the blonde had grown out. Also she was thin. So she had her anorexia again."Clare! Katie!"
We went to her awkwardly.
She hugged us, then stood back. "Let me look at you. Katie, you're so grown up!"
My sister blushed like a big shy child.
"Oh, Clare, give me a proper hug!"
They say time stands still. It does. That was the happiest moment, no, the happiest second of my life. And it seemed the longest. Heather's smile was the same. Her eyes as blue.
"Do I look a sight?"
"No!" we said together.

(That one's really bittersweet, because after weeks of thinking "everything will be all right if we can find Heather", they find her and realise that she's not going to make things okay -- in fact, she can't even look after herself, much less take care of them. But that doesn't mean they love her any less.)

I know that many people in real life do happily stay with their high school sweethearts, but its popularity as a fictional trope makes me uneasy.

You've probably read it but there was an interesting discussion on this, particularly as it relates to manga over on Seeking Avalon.

Edited at 2010-04-04 01:52 am (UTC)

#1, hands down.

And while I can't remember specific scenes, there's a ton in both The Dark Is Rising and A Wrinkle In Time.

Although it doesn't totally qualify, I feel the need to post it.

karen help me now I am watching the PIVOT! clip and there are so many more related videos help help help help

"We're her KIN! Who are you?"
"We're family."

#1 FOREVER. I took my sister to see Lilo and Stitch in the theater, and when Nani is singing to Lilo the night before she's supposed to be taken away I BAWLED LIKE A BABY.

Also:

Simon: Captain... why did you come back for us?

Mal: You're on my crew.

Simon: Yeah, but you don't even like me. Why'd you come back?

Mal: You're on my crew. Why we still talking about this?

From the episode "Safe" of Firefly. We make our families where we find them.

And it's way too long to quote from, but the scene in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn where Katie stands at the top of the stairs while Johnny and Francie and Neely bring up the Christmas tree and has a series of epiphanies about her family and their future. It is brutal and heartwrenching.

Oh, I so love that scene from Warrior's Apprentice. Also, there's a scene in Brothers in Arms, I think, where Miles tries to explain to Mark that he's his brother, and their mother is going to ask him, "Miles, what have you done with your brother?", because according to Betan law, that's what Mark is. (Could be Mirror Dance, I'm not entirely sure now.)

Almost any scene between Cordelia and Miles. Or Mark, for that matter.

Also, because I'm such a Dunnett gal: Game of Kings, the scene in the dell north of Hexham, where Francis tries to remind Richard that they're brothers after all. And then later when Richard remembers it too, but too late.

Oh, and the scene in Checkmate where Richard makes a very late approach, with a diffident comment about a gift he once returned to Francis.

Farscape, Crichton and the gang eating a feast in the galley on Moya, just before everything goes to shit at the end of season 1. "We're going to have a BABY!"

"I thought you didn't want me.
You didn't either. I've even heard you say so myself."

Her eyes went wide.
All at once, she laughed.
"Oh, how I didn't want you!" she admitted.

"I was so mad.
But when I think of life without you...
I did want you, Kate.
I didn't know it right away, that's all.
Be reasonable.
How was I to guess, ahead of time, that you were the one
who was coming...
Have you brushed your teeth?"

---from the poem "About Poems, Sort of" in Jean Little's Hey World, Here I Am! LOTS of good ones in that book, but this is my favourite. It's the toothbrushing bit that does me in, I think.

I was trying to explain the Māori concept of whakamā to folks today; it didn't go all that well. I was trying to explain how it's so much more deep and human than something like 'catholic guilt'... ah well, you can only try.

Ae. It's a tricky one. As far as cultural consulatants go, Do you have Mel Tahata, mal3ficent? I'm sure she'd be very happy to chat and is a native speaker.

With regards whakamā I guess I was thinking/talking about how the concept is used in criminal justice in New Zealand. It's very powerful to see that shit in action. Turning people around and all that.

Dory: No. No, you can't... STOP. Please don't go away. Please? No one's ever stuck with me for so long before. And if you leave... if you leave... I just, I remember things better with you. I do, look. P. Sherman, forty-two... forty-two... I remember it, I do. It's there, I know it is, because when I look at you, I can feel it. And-and I look at you, and I... and I'm home. Please... I don't want that to go away. I don't want to forget.

Finding Nemo.

Jed: So I'll be Uncle Jed. Cooool. Families rock.

Rose: Aren't *you* the one that told me "Families suck"?

Jed: They do both. They rock *and* they suck.

- Sandman

Unrelated, and you've probably seen it already, but in case you didn't, Kate Beaton did a Penny Arcade strip today ("Karen will be pleased!" I thought):

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/4/05/

It could be called a love scene though, so I guess that might justify me making a comment on this post :)

It's more familial acceptance, but Victor and his dad in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. It also makes for a good ending from Smoke Signals.



And also because Smoke Signals is awesome:

So, I've been thinking about this for several days.

And I thought, "Hey, how about that scene in Swallowdale by Arthur Ransome, where the Amazons and the Swallows climb one of the hills near Lake Windemere, pretending that it's Kachenjunga, and at the top they find a tin buried by Captain Nancy's parents where they were children and did nearly the same thing... only now Nancy's father is dead and her mother is alone and Nancy nearly (but not quite) loses it?"

And then I thought, "But wait, what about the scene in Wild Strawberries by Angela Thirkell, where the Leslie family is mostly hanging about in their mother, Lady Emily's, bedroom, and her son John (whose wife died after a year of marriage) says something about how he wishes he could feel simple affection like hers again, as he did when he was young, and Lady Emily is suddenly overwhelmed with grief for her eldest, killed in WWI, but stifles it because John needs her?"

So, I went looking for either one of those books but instead found this:

"Sadik had stopped before the dormitory entrance. She stood motionless, erect and slight, her face still, in the weak light of the street lamp. Shevek stood equally still for a moment, then he went to her. "What is wrong, Sadik?"

The child said, "Shevek, may I stay in the room tonight?"

"Of course. But what is wrong?"

Sadik's delicate, long face quivered and seemed to fragment. "They don't like me. In the dormitory," she said, her voice becoming shrill with tension, but even softer than before.

"They don't like you? What do you mean?"

They did not touch each other yet. She answered him with desperate courage. "Because they don't like -- they don't like the Syndicate, and Bedap, and -- and you. They call -- the big sister in the dorm room, she said you were all tr -- She said you were traitors." And saying the word the child jerked as if she had been shot, and Shevek caught her and held her."

The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin.

Edited at 2010-04-07 03:46 am (UTC)

Because #1 and #4 are two of my favorite declarations of family love ever -- sometimes I just think #4 and get weepy -- I am adding everything else on this list to my To Read shelf.

I really utterly adore this post because I don't think families get enough attention in fiction.

Seriously, reading your favourites made me choke up. Especially Lilo and Stitch, which reduced me to a sobbing wreck in the theatres. The end of Finding Nemo had much the same effect, when Nemo says innocently, "Dad, you gotta let me go!" FLAIL. I had taken my baby brother to go see it with a bunch of his friends. 3 eight-year-old boys were alarmed to see their 18-year-old babysitter BAWLING HER EYES OUT for what appeared to be a completely incomprehensible reason.

The only two books to have made me sob were RAMONA AND HER MOTHER and THE BOOK THIEF. THE BOOK THIEF in particular had some gorgeous passages about Liesel and her Papa, but the description that slayed me was about Rosa, her adopted mother, who was liberal in applying a wooden spoon as corporal punishment but had a heart bigger than it looked.

Still, nothing compared to this:

As Ramona watched her mother fold underwear for her to take away, she began to understand that deep down inside the place where her secret thoughts were hidden, she had never really doubted her mother’s love for her. Not until now…She thought of all the things her mother had done for her, the way she had sat up most of the night when Ramona had an earache, the birthday cake she had made in the shape of a cowboy book all frosted with chocolate with lines of white icing that looked like stitching. That was the year she was four and had wanted cowboy boots more than anything, and her parents had given her real ones as well. She thought of the way her mother reminded her to brush her teeth. Her mother would not do that unless she cared about her teeth, would she? She thought of the time her mother let her get her hair cut at the beauty school, even though they had to scrimp and pinch. She thought of the gentle books about ears and bunnies her mother had read at bedtime when she was little.

“There.” Mrs. Quimby closed the suitcase, snapped the latches, and set it on the floor. “Now you are all packed.” She sat down on the bed.

Ramona pulled her car coat out of the closet and slowly put it on, one arm and then the other. She looked at her mother with sad eyes as she grasped the handle of her suitcase and lifted. The suitcase would not budge. Ramona grasped it with both hands. Still she could lift it.

Hope flowed into Ramona’s heart. Had her mother made her suitcase too heavy on purpose? She looked closely at her mother, who was watching her. She saw—didn’t she?—a tiny smile in her mother’s eyes.

“You tricked me!” cried Ramona. “You made the suitcase too heavy on purpose. You don’t want me to run away!”

Made me cry at 6 years old, still makes me cry at 24.

Keith and Veronica, oh my fucking heart:

"Who's your daddy?"

And Veronica pauses and then smiles, completely without irony and with a hell of a lot of love there: "You are."

Also the entirety of the book The Brothers Lionheart. Basically.