Back many parts ago in this editorial, I mentioned that a lot of fantasy stories lack a strong family dynamic.  I had stated that this was a theme that took away some originality from the storyline as well as took away some relatable content for the audience.  After all, family to most of us is more precious than anything.  Many people have dedicated their entire lives to the protection of their families, even dying to preserve their own bloodline.  It has to the power to make or break us, depending on the circumstances.  Noticing the lack of this theme, I talked about the positives of it and how to incorporate this ideology into potential fantasy story lines.  Considering that part has been well reviewed by many readers, I think it is safe to say I did a pretty solid job explaining the underused trope's positive potential.

  However, there was an aspect of the trope that I failed to expand upon.  That aspect was another type of strong connection, a familial bond created through strong amounts of friendship or trust.  This is the bond that can be created when a group of people, for example a group of ragtag adventurers trying to take down a common evil, work together for a massive period of time and become so attached to one another that the death of losing a single party member would be unthinkable.  Although they are not related at all, these adventurers consider themselves family in a non-traditional sense.  This aspect of a familial bond can be just as powerful one created through blood relations and in some cases can be even more powerful.  Yet, this variant of the trope like with family dynamics is quite underused.

  Every time I think about the great examples this underused trope has created, I am even more baffled as to why not many authors try to use it in sone capacity.  One such example exists in the video game that not only inspired me as a child to become a writer but made me realize just how powerful the bond between two teammates can become; Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky.  In what should have been just a simple spin-off game, I was presented with one of the best examples of a familial bond not influenced by blood.  That bond was between the heroic Grovyle and his former trainer turned later into a Pokémon, which just so happens to be your avatar for the game.  In a dark future created by the complete paralysis of the planet, your avatar and Grovyle work together to change the world's depressing fate.  After gaining knowledge of the cause of this dark future through many exploits together, the two venture into the past using a time portal to reverse the dark fate of their planet, despite the fact this would cause both of them to cease to exist.  When their plot gets sabotaged by an evil creature known as Darkrai, your avatar sacrifices themselves to save Grovyle from a powerful beam blasted into the portal.  The two get separated, with Grovyle still doing the mission in honor of their partner while the avatar character receives amnesia and turns into a Pokémon themselves.  After a series of events, the two reunite when the mission almost completely fails, and they manage to get to the destination where they can change the entire future's fate.  However, a future Pokémon trying to stop the mission called Dusknoir attempts to kill both characters right at the adventure's climax.  Dusknoir's motivation behind this was to preserve the dark future, so they could prevent themselves from disappearing into nothingness.  Remembering the sacrifice their trainer took to save them, Grovyle takes one for the team and is seriously injured in the fight.  He then makes the ultimate sacrifice by forcing Dusknoir into the time portal that sent him to the past in the first place, which had the effect of taking Grovyle forcefully as well.  In this tearful moment, Grovyle sacrifices his own happiness so the trainer, you, can survive and complete the mission.  The whole entire story between these two characters made me realize the bond that can be created between two non-related individuals.  It was this, and many other great aspects of this game, that made me want to write complex fantasy stories of my own.  This realization for me happened in the fifth grade, almost an entire decade ago, and yet even at nineteen I still have the same exact impression by this game.

  The story inside that game is what made this trope so desirable to me.  When I became a serious reader, I became devastated to notice that this theme did not carry on into other fantasy stories.  This is the same feeling I got when I noticed this to be the case with the theme of family in literature as well.  Mostly, the only themes I really saw was either survival after an apocalypse or another supernatural romance, which by now have been really overused.  Why couldn't a more relatable theme about family, both in the traditional and non-traditional sense, exist?

  I would really love to see more stories in which neither of the cliché plots mentioned existed and were replaced with themes about family.  With the theme of family incorporated into a storyline, the audience would  find themselves more devoted to the characters.  They would  find themselves full of emotion whenever a character sacrifices themselves to save the ones they love or when the cast manages to fight off a terrible foe that threatened to destroy them all.  It is these emotional responses that drive audiences to read such classics like Of Mice and Men, The Shining, The Lord of the Flies, and The Kite Runner.  With this in mind, why wouldn't anyone incorporate some type of familial themes into their stories?  Considering the evidence collected from all of these classic books, I really am confused as to why this theme is not more common.