Random Musing: It's a brother/sister thing...

[shipperx]

So while reading last night, I again fell victim to the 'estranged brother's struggle to come together' trope.  It seems to be one of my story kinks, which made me wonder... why is it always brothers?

You see this in fiction a lot, brothers with a fractious or even estranged relationship who have to find a way to work together and thus grow close and/or reunite.  You rarely (ever?) see that with sisters (or with brothers and sisters).

There are sister plots.  But the sister plot usually seen is quite different.  Frankly, most of them when you see them tend toward the Elizabeth and Jane Bennet (P&P) mold.  There is also occasionally the quasi-maternal  Katniss and Primrose Everdeen mold of one sister going to great sacrifice for the other.   (And the rare brother/sister plots seem to also often fall into either the Katniss/Primrose or Elizabeth/Jane mold where someone is either protecting someone or they're buddies to begin with).

Am I wrong or just not familiar with a sister plot akin to the frequently seen estranged brothers plot?  Anyone have examples?  And I wonder what the gender role dynamics are that have resulted in the frequent use of the estranged/battling brothers* reconciling plot that makes it so much more common than anything similar with female characters.**

Huh...

* The estrangement was pretty severe in the one I was reading.  Set in Victorian London, the younger brother got tossed out to fend for himself on the streets St. Giles until he became a full-blown criminal... who at around the age of twenty returned to have a rip-roaring fight where he defenestrated the elder brother who had turned him away, permanently disfiguring the older brother.

**  And while writing this I did think of Mary and Edith of Downton Abbey as arguing, nearly estranged sisters... except there seems to be absolutely not dramatic push for these two to ever have any sort of reconcilliation or common ground and are just supposed to be separate and unequal forever.  It's basically, they just don't like each other, m'kay...

Comments

[elisi]

I have yet to see Frozen (I will remedy this on Saturday, yay!), but I do believe it has just such a plot [about estranged sisters). And considering that it's the highest grossest Disney animation ever, I think we can safely say that people like it. :)

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Good point. I haven't seen it either, but my whole thought in this was "why WOULDN'T this work just as well with sisters??!" Then I started trying to think of examples and came up woefully short (which made me sad.)

[usedtobeljs]

I immediately thought of one of Nora Roberts' Irish (or as some internet wit rightly put it, "fetish-Irish") trilogies, the Born in series. The first two books are the romances for the sisters Maggie and Brianna, but also feature their complex relationship, which is healed in the first book. The third book brings in an adult half-sister hitherto unknown, which does NOT go well initially. The growing bond of the sisters is almost as important as Shannon's romance.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I used to really like Nora Roberts' books. Might check some of those out.

[cindergal.livejournal.com]

I just finished reading Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn (of Gone Girl fame), and there is a very...interesting relationship between two sisters (half sisters, actually) in that book. I'm not sure if I'd call them estranged, but they haven't seen each other in many years, and when they do their interactions are very odd and dark as you might imagine with her style of writing. I really liked the book.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Flynn is a little dark for me (I kind of wanted "rocks fall, everyone dies" in Gone Girl.)