The 10 Worst Mothers In Geekdom Power Grid by The Mary Sue Staff | 6:10 am, May 8th, 2011 You are seeing this message because you have javascript disabled. To use our slideshows you need to enable javascript. There's no cross domain hackery or tracking voodoo, it's just some sweet jQuery animations. Please, think of the animations. In the meantime, enjoy the html version below. I guess. If that's your thing. Allow Us To Explain No! Don't get angry! Bear with us! Last year, we totally did up a grid of the Greatest Mothers in Geekdom, with Martha Kent, Aunt Beru, Sarah Connor, Molly Weasley, and other loving, kickass ladies that did a great job of raising kids. And then my mom asked me, very nicely, if maybe next year I could do a grid of terrible mothers, so that she wouldn't feel inferior in comparison. So here they are, the mothers and grandmothers of some of the most screwed up kids in science fiction and fantasy; from the harridan who just wants children to love her, forever, and never return to their families; to a mom who lets her daughter hang out with her near-rapist; to a grandmother who locks people in coffins at the bottom of swamps. Love you too, Mommy. Mom Mom's persona as the figurehead of MOMCORP and Mom's Friendly Robot Company is a chubby, delicate, heart-shape-coiffed grandma type who has convinced all the robots in the world that she loves them very much and cares deeply about their well-being. But she really just wants to be the supreme ruler of all things and have all those robots do her bidding. In fact, she's equipped them with a device that lets her control their every move while she mercilessly discards their loving gifts of cards and money and turns it all into "orphanage-grade" toilet paper and "hocus-pocus" cures for cancer. (Suckers.) She has three sons, and she knows the father of one of them for certain. But she smacks them around and insults them on a fairly regular basis. Though they're all pretty stupid and infatuated with her that they don't seem to notice they're being physically and emotionally abused. And ripped off -- Mom owns 99.7 percent of MOMCORP while the other .3 percent is evenly distributed among the three of them. But like I said, they probably have no idea. Is it abuse if they don't notice? If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Exactly. (Mom said that's how it works.) Mrs. Coulter A refined and icy representative of the Church in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series, Marisa Coulter's relationship with her daughter, Lyra, is…complicated. Coulter hides her identity as Lyra's mother when they first meet, seeking to gain her trust through other means, with mild success. Her loyalty to the Church means that she continuously puts Lyra in danger, only to whisk her away at the last convenient second to comfort and soothe her. When that love isn't directly returned, she can turn sadistic in flash, her daemon of a golden monkey acting violently on her behalf. Though her actions are sometimes read as conflicted by her love for her daughter by fans, it must be stated that her job when they meet is as head of a facility that kidnaps, holds, and, effectively, tortures children by separating them from their daemons, their soul's representation in animal form. At best, her genuine love is twisted by her ambitions for power. The way to a child's heart, after all, is not by keeping them drugged and in a cave. Even "for their own safety". Mystique Everybody's favorite blue-skinned shapeshifting mutant is many things. She's a trained combatant, a principled member of a(n evil) cause, and occasionally, supermodel Rebecca Romijn. But she's also a mother. A terrible, manipulative, and ultimately deadly mother. Her three children, Graydon Creed, the X-Man Nightcrawler (aka Kurt Wagner), and her adopted daughter, Rogue, all suffer varying degrees of trauma, identity confusion, and a sense of abandonment, all thanks to dear ol' mummy. Graydon, her first child, fathered by recurring villain Sabretooth, was given up for adoption at a young age. Mystique, never one to loose track of a potentially useful pawn, kept tabs on him until adolescence, only to abandon him a second time when his expected mutant abilities failed to emerge. Naturally somewhat peeved about the whole experience, Creed extended his hatred of his (awful) parents to include all their Homo superior brethren, growing up into an anti-mutant political leader. That is, until his career was cut short when he was assassinated by an anonymous shooter. You guessed it; Mom. Nightcrawler and Rogue get off comparatively easy, but don't fare much better. Kurt is abandoned after Mystique murders her then-husband for his (entirely justified) paternity suspicions (a blue-skinned, pointed-tailed, yellow-eyed boy being an extreme version of the red-headed stepchild trope). He is raised by a Gypsy sorceress, and, eventually develops a serious thing for Catholicism. As for Rogue, Mystique's adopted daughter, things started out on the right foot. Rogue was taken in by Mystique after her powers drove her to leave home, and fought for over a decade with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. But after Mystique forced Rogue to absorb the powers and memories of Carol Danvers, aka Ms. Marvel, Rogue was left emotionally shattered, and out of control. She ended up having to seek help from Professor Xavier, eventually joining the X-Men, and developing very, very mixed feelings for her once-adoptive mother. So much for a mother's love. Norma Bates Talk about the Mother of All Horror Movies. We never see Norma Bates on camera. At least not as a living human being. But this woman who verbally abused and shamed her son (that would be Norman) throughout his entire childhood, pretty much convincing him that the only pure, clean woman in the world was her ("A boy's best friend is his mother"), definitely set the standard for modern Evil Moms in the horror genre. Norma screwed up her son so much that when she had the nerve to take another lover after his father's death, he, uh, killed them both. And then he took on her personality and pretended to keep living with her, you know, in the same body. The corporeal version of Mom stuck around the house too. And "Norma" starts killing people, much to the horror of Norman. As you can gather, this kind of living arrangement does not work out in the end, and Norma engulfs Norman completely in the end. Because that lady wasn't going to let anyone else have the last word. The Other Mother While not technically a mother, The Other Mother is an archetypal maternal figure at her sugar-sweet best, and at her monstrous, terrifying worst. When Coraline first enters the Other World through the portal in her living room, the Other Mother appears to be everything she's missing from her own life. She responds to every whim of Coraline's, providing all the delicacies and, most importantly, attention, that Coraline feels is lacking in her Real mother. The Other Mother loves her, and wants her to stay in the Other Realm. Forever. But what if Coraline displeases her? Tries to leave? Refuses to have her eyes replaced by buttons, as asked? She'll transform into a spindly, frightening, spider-like form, and lock her in a room with the ghosts of the other children who have found the door. You know, the ones she got tired of, eating their bodies, and discarding their spirits. She'll kidnap Coraline's real parents, too, making her play a deadly game to try and win them back. In Gaiman's modern fairy tale, too good to be true really is just that. Mater Motley Grandmothers are mothers, too, and Mater Motley, of Clive Barker's fantasy series Abarat, might rank among the worst of the lot. She's a figure of nightmare by description alone; an unfathomably old hag who spends her time sewing an army of stitchlings -soldiers of leather and cloth, filled with magic mud - to one day conquer all the Islands of the Day. She is attended by a host of seamstress-witches, and is depicted by Barker in his paintings as traveling by giant, upright hand, or walking in a dress made of sewn-together parts, with skeleton dogs nipping at her heels. Looks aren't everything, though, and the Mater's actions fit her appearance to a T. She is frighteningly intelligent, and has spies everywhere that feed her information about all that happens in the Abarat. As grandmother to the series' main villain, Christopher Carrion, it is eventually revealed that she burned down their family's manse on Pyon, killing all other members of their clan, in order to "save" him. (Killing her own child/children, we might hasten to point out.) When Christopher was a child, she seems to have constantly terrorized him, notoriously sewing his mouth shut for uttering the word "love". When Christopher rejects her attempts to manipulate and control him as an adult, she attacks him, and takes over as Gorgossium's tyrannical leader. Mater Motley is such a horrific mother, she's made it last into the next generation. Dahlia Gillespie For those unaware, the world of Silent Hill (encompassing many video games, sequels, prequels, and one strange film adaptation) concerns a town that, through the occult dalliances of its population, has dropped off into a pocket dimension. That pocket dimension? Essentially, Hell itself. And if your town's dropped off into Hell because of something someone did, you can bet your save cards that it's pretty bad. We're talking evil-cults-sacrificing-psychic-children bad. Apparently running an antiques shop in a sleepy town is just boring enough to necessitate getting a hobby. At least, that's what Mama Gillespie decided to do, when she became the de facto leader of a cult bent on bringing their dark God into being. When her daughter, Alessa, began to exhibit telekinetic and telepathic abilities at a young age, Dahlia was overjoyed. So overjoyed that she used occult rituals to impregnate her daughter with the God's seed, set her own house on fire with Alessa inside, and then used magic to keep her alive, imprisoning her disfigured body in the basement room of a hospital, in the care of another cult member. The resulting reality-bending from the mind of the captive Alessa plunged the town into its ultimate Darkness. All we're saying is, we might have joined a book group, instead. Talia al Ghul Sure, Talia al Ghul used to be crazy. Crazy in love. So in love with her father that she'd marry any man he found suitable to preserve his megalomaniacal legacy. So in love with her father that she’d love any man that he chose for her. Neither of them expected that one worthy man to refuse to helm a worldwide criminal network. So for many years Talia's main story characteristic was that her love for Batman was equal to her loyalty to her father. But crazy in love got shortened a bit in the past decade or so, and now Talia al Ghul is just plain crazy. Sure, her half sister kidnapped her and tortured her with repeated deaths and resurrections, and her dad let himself die as apart of a scheme to get her to take over the family business. But the crazy really started when she decided to hide the fact that she had given birth to Batman's son, and let him be raised by the League of Assassins, so she could use him as just another pawn in the family plan to severely cull the human population and then rule over the survivors that naturally cannot go forward without destroying Batman first. To this end she: Replaced Damien's injured spine with a cloned replica which allowed her to remotely control his body, so that a guy known as Deathstroke the Terminator could use him to kill Dick Grayson. Named her son Damian an enemy of the house of al Ghul when he, in a rare moment of actually honestly expressing his emotions, told her that he had finally decided that he'd rather be a superhero than an assassin or the Head of The Demon, and begged her to accept him for who he had discovered that he was. ...chose that same moment to mention that she’d actually seen this coming for a while, and so she’d already prepared a clone or dozen so she could fix the mistakes she’d clearly made with him. Even Doctor Thaddeus Venture had the good sense not to tell his kids that he’d created an army of duplicates to replace them. He told them it was their Christmas present. Marie L'Angelle Warning: Preacher spoilers. It’s a long, long time, or at least it seems like it while reading Preacher before you figure out why the hero, Jesse Custer, became a preacher in the first place, since all of his flashbacks have mostly been concerned with him and his girlfriend being car-stealing vagabonds. Turns out, he got called home by his Grandmother to join the fold. Which is to say, she sent her two murderous farmhands to take him back or kill his girlfriend. Miss Marie is a firm believer in the special divine connection that the L’Angelle family has, and in the traditional way they express it: The men become preachers, the women make more men. Bar none. For her devotion, God (who is a character in and of himself in Preacher) rewards her with really creepy and unnatural long life. So when Jesse’s mother ran away from home, found a man to love and had a child with him, it was really only a matter of time before Jody and T.C. would finally figure out where she was and bring her back home so her son could be raised as a L’Angelle. Her husband returned with his family, on pain of death. About five years later he led them in an escape attempt, only to be shot dead on Marie’s orders in front of Jesse. Jesse’s mother lasts a few years longer before she snaps at Marie’s abusive behavior to her son, and is executed herself. Pretty much every minor transgression Jesse committed was punishable by having the shit kicked out of him by Jody on Marie’s orders, but when he is especially bad he gets locked in a weighted coffin and sunk to the bottom of the swamp for hours, days, or weeks at a time. Marie orders his girlfriend shot in front of him, the last incident in a long trend of systematically eliminating every loving connection he makes with anyone or anything (like a pet dog) outside the L’Angelle family. She knows she can’t kill Jesse; he’s the only other L’Angelle around, but she can make his life so miserable that he’ll only have God to turn to, fulfilling her wishes anyway. The Original Silk Spectre It's easy to feel bad for Sally Jupiter, born Sally Juspeczyk. In the fictional world of Watchmen (SPOILERS ahead), the first Silk Spectre can be read as a product of her time. Changing her last name to disguise her immigrant heritage, accepting her role as an outrageous sex symbol in order to gain publicity, acting as a beard for fellow Minuteman hero Hooded Justice, even deciding against pressing charges on her would be-rapist, team member The Comedian. Sure, many of her choices seem abhorrent to the modern woman, but it was the 1940s, and Sally did what she had to do. The problem is, she kept right on doing it, though the birth and rearing of her daughter, Laurie Juspeczyk aka Silk Spectre II. Not only did Sally make no effort to navigate the changes between generations, she left many of her actions open to interpretation by her assertive daughter. This includes her eventual reveal that her assaulter, The Comedian, is Laurie's real father, by consent. It's enough to make any young woman's head spin. Sally's own issues of self-esteem are directly projected onto Laurie, who bucks under the criticisms and wishes of her mother. Sally also pushes her daughter to take up the superheroine mantle she has retired from, a life that brings Laurie pain, and adds considerable pressure to her relationship with "living weapon" Dr. Manhattan. One of the most vocal critics of her daughter's choice of mate, Sally is a sad hypocrite who's dropped her offspring into a life she didn't want, and left her to figure it out for herself. Follow The Mary Sue Follow @TheMarySue Like us on Facebook filed under Abarat, Coraline, DC Comics, Futurama, His Dark Materials, Preacher, Psycho, Watchmen, X-Men (team)
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