the problem with found family as a concept is that ppl who are into it aren't open to the fact that family is built on power dynamics, weirdness and often abuse. you can't have grown ppl going like "you're like a mother to me" and say it was very normal and that we shouldn't call freud
This is what the Locked Tomb series explores so well. Nona the Ninth takes the concept of a found family, gives us a beautiful but messed up example in Nona/Cam/Pal/Pyrrha, and juxtaposes it with the previous book's depiction of God Emperor's lyctoral household, which (as expected from a court of superpowered immortal rulers) is cult-like and rife with abusive dynamics.
But more than anything, I keep thinking about the scene in Nona where Pyrrha (who wants to be a parent more than anything) sees for the first time the body of her ex-lover's child, which she once thought she had fathered:
Nona felt vaguely hurt and envious. She didn’t have a mother for Pyrrha to have punched out an airlock. Nor had Pyrrha ever looked at her the way she now looked at the dead corpse with red hair—a kind of soft, guarded want; a hunger—a living desire to take the corpse in her arms like Kevin’s wanting desire with his dolls. To own, to squeeze, to cosset and destroy.
It's such a beautiful depiction of the complicated and scary emotions involved in parenthood. Tamsyn Muir depicts family both as a potentially redemptive environment (Harrowhark's body getting the loving childhood that Gideon and Harrow never got) and as a structure that facilitates violence—sometimes even in the same household, because ultimately these are all-too-human emotions. We all negotiate daily with our desires, our better natures, and the demands made by our wounds.
