From Outcasts to Found Family: Why Readers Love the Found Family Trope
Greetings and salutations Scribblers,
Today, we’re talking about one of my top tier favorite tropes: Found Family.
You hear a lot about this in young adult and middle grade and it’s starting to become more prominent in adult genres as well. The trope centers on the people we find along the way through life that we develop deep, intimate emotional bonds with that have zero biological relation to us. There’s no single way for found family to come together and there’s no one way for found family to function–which is definitely part of the fun.
If you plan on using found family in your story, it is important to thoroughly understand why it works and how to weave it into your narrative. So today’s video is going to look at some essential details of the found family trope you need to keep in mind as you craft your story.
First, let’s examine why readers love this trope. It feels pretty self-explanatory, but I want to dig deeper. Readers who adore the found family trope often have a questionable history of family relations in their own past and this can range from differences of opinions to more violent or traumatic experiences. No matter what, those readers have felt like an outcast from their own family in some way. And this is what makes the found family trope so enticing. The character is able to find people who love and accept them exactly as they are in ways their biological family never could.
Acceptance is a primal human need. We want people to love us, accept us, and want to be around us. So, weaving this into your narrative is giving you an immediate way to engage your reader because it’s relatable. Every reader is going to understand this need in your character and the urge to find the people they belong with.
It’s the outcasts finding each other at recess and forging unbreakable bonds, or the work friends that all suffered through the same toxic boss together.
Which brings us to our first necessity for creating a found family trope. There has to be something in the character’s life that doesn’t fit in with society or their family. They need to be put into situations where they feel isolated and unwanted. There are a million ways to do this. Whether they have political beliefs that don’t align with their family, their family doesn’t support their interests, or it’s just a toxic family filled with emotional and verbal abuse.
Whatever the conflict is, it’s going to force your character to try and make themselves smaller or to hide their truth. They might start being more passive aggressive or they might openly fight back–but those arguments are just going to push them further away.
This is a popular middle grade and young adult trope for a reason. That particular age group is going through daily dynamic changes in who they are. They’re not only navigating their family dynamic, but their school or sports team dynamics as well. Finding refuge with other kids who share their interests, hobbies, or beliefs might be the only stability they have. And books that have this trope let those kids know they aren’t alone in how they feel and that it’s possible to find people they can trust and be themselves around.
Once you’ve determined what the conflict is with their biological family, you can continue to flesh it out and get really specific about what’s missing from your character’s life. Then you’re going to create the exact people your character needs and introduce them on page!
The entire process of your main character going from feeling excluded to included can be a great baseline for the overarching plot and theme of your novel. As you move through each act of your story, you’re going to have that character transition from being unsure if they can trust and rely on these new people in their life to being fully entrenched and relaxing into that well deserved feeling of love and safety.
There are a few fun ways you can subvert the found family trope too. One is to really highlight the difficulty of maintaining that relationship–sometimes found family comes together easily and sometimes it takes work on everyone’s part. By shifting your focus to this aspect, it can really bring new perspective to the concept of found family.
Another great way to subvert this trope is to make the dynamic unhealthy–this is great if you have a crime syndicate or some type of structure in your story that draws in the people looking for safety and love, but then manipulates or uses them to do not so great things. Which asks the question how can found family be dangerous to those who are part of it?
I’d love to hear what your favorite aspects of the found family trope are or get your recommendation for a book that features this trope. I love reading found family stories! So drop your thoughts in the comments.
See you next time! Happy writing, Scribblers!
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