Not all villains have the luxury of having a Big, Screwed-Up Family of their own. In the case of an especially creepy few, they prefer instead to adopt children — and rarely stop at one. And unless Easy Adoption is in play, this is usually more of an abduction than anything else, sometimes even featuring the birth parents being murdered.
The end result is a parental villain surrounded by adopted children who have been indoctrinated into serving their foster parent's needs, either as henchmen, servants, playthings, or even worse, but regardless of how they're regarded, all of them will have likely experienced at least some level of abuse in their lives.
As for why this particular villain does this, they might genuinely want a family that they can't produce on their own due to evil being sterile. Perhaps the villain wants an army of Tykebombs that will serve them out of familial loyalty. In some cases, the children may possess unique traits that will make them incredibly valuable to the villain's cause somewhere down the line. And in some very unfortunate cases, it's for something even more depraved...
Needless to say, these villains may face just as much rebellion and betrayal as the standard Big, Screwed-Up Family, especially once it becomes clear to the adopted children that they don't even share blood ties with their abusive parent. In some cases, the betrayal may continue all the way to the point of killing the villain or joining forces with any hero with the patience for Defusing the Tyke-Bomb.
Please note that for a character to qualify as this, they have to have acquired at least two adopted children — not necessarily at the same time.
May overlap with Invasion of the Baby Snatchers, depending on the method of acquisition, and Children as Pawns, depending on the intended use of the adoptees.
Compare Fostering for Profit, the legal counterpart to this trope, and Orphanage of Fear, the institutional equivalent sans parental substitutes.
Contrast The Fagin, which doesn't involve even the unofficial adoption and can be portrayed as morally neutral rather than outright evil.
No Real Life Examples, Please!
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Ichi the Killer: Jijii is the guardian of the titular Ichi, using fake memories and gaslighting to make him kill members of the yakuza for him. The ending shows he "adopted" Takeshi as a replacement for Ichi after Ichi killed the boy's father during his final assault on the Anjo headquarters.
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1999):
- In the omake arc "The Skull Kid and the Mask," the Baga Tree has collected several Skull Kids, children zombified by the Lost Woods, to serve as his minions. The arc is set off when he forces one of the Skull Kids to lure Saria into a trap and kidnap her.
- In the main storyline, Ganondorf took in a young Sheik (unaware that Sheik was actually Zelda pulling a Batman Gambit) to serve as his main enforcer. He also found Link's sapient baby dragon Volvagia and with the hero sealed away, conditioned him into a vicious monster.
- Naruto: Orochimaru has a troupe of teens and tweens that he has groomed into being willing to die for him, to the point of aiding him with a coup d'état. He tries to kidnap Sasuke, one of the protagonists, praising his power, and after coming to him, Sasuke eventually finds out that Orochimaru intends to use him as his vessel to live through him.
Comic Books
- Batman: In the pages of Batman: Confidential, it's revealed that The Wrath—an Evil Counterpart to Batman—decided to copy his counterpart further by also taking a young sidekick under his wing. Though unlike Dick Grayson and Batman's other Robins, he didn't "adopt" his new sidekick so much as he did kidnap and subject them to hellish training. Only his fifth victim, Elliot Caldwell, survived his training and succeeded his mentor as the new Wrath years after his death.
- The Boys: John Godolkin, founder of the Godolkin Institute, has a number of young superheroes at his institute, the G-Men, all of whom are claimed to be orphans who were taken in and adopted by Godolkin. As the superheroes in the setting all gained their powers from Compound V and mostly grow up into hedonistic bloodthirsty celebrities due to a combination of too much power and corporate backing, this is already bad enough. It is later revealed that the G-Men are not orphans; they were tricked by Godolkin into getting in his limo without their still-living parents' consent, and Godolkin's primary interest was sexually abusing the children, with the superhero team G-Men only being a convenient cover for his pedophilia.
- Green Lantern: Kryb is a Sinestro Corp member who murders Green Lanterns with children and then "adopts" the children, hoping to turn them into loyal soldiers for the Sinestro Corps.
Fan Works
- Family Loading... Please Wait: G.U.N. begins to see the Wachowskis as this, as Tom and Maddie manage to legally adopt first Sonic, then later Tails and Knuckles (though G.U.N. almost thwarted them that time, but Rachel managed to find a Loophole Abuse), meaning that the government can't simply take the aliens and use them for their own purposes. A variant in that while G.U.N. (along with Stone, as he later shamefully admits) saw the Wachowski parents as this, they're actually just adults who saw lost kids who needed homes, and took them in.
- Future Is Bright (Danny Phantom): When he gets upset that he has no legal avenue to take custody of Danny from Bruce Wayne (nor can he overshadow him due to his wearing the Fenton Spector Deflector any time the two meet), Vlad holds a press conference where he accuses Bruce Wayne of being this, pointing out how many of the Wayne kids' adoptions have been unusual or unorthodox. The Waynes know that he's talking out of his butt, but Bruce still has to hold a press conference of his own to do damage control. They find out while Bruce is at his conference that the whole thing was a set up by Vlad to kidnap Danny.
- With Pearl and Ruby Glowing: King Candy in this setting is reimagined as an older man who adopted all the Sugar Rush racers and, while on the surface, he seems like a loving adopted father who spoils all of them (sans Vanellope), it's later discovered that he's a pedophile who adopted them to have access to children to abuse whenever he wanted.
Films – Live-Action
- It Takes Two (1995): The Butkis family has adopted multiple children in order to put them to work in the family salvage yard. Diane knows there is something wrong with the family, but because they keep the newly-adopted kids sealed away from the outside world until they've been broken in, she has no evidence of any wrongdoing until after they take Amanda.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe: The Mad Titan, Thanos, often abducts and adopts a promising child from one of the planets he conquers, usually after their parents have been killed in his decimation of the local populace. These children are then trained to become members of his Quirky Miniboss Squad, often pitted against each other in battles for supremacy, and those who don't measure up in these sparring matches — like Nebula — are subjected to brutal cybernetic augmentation to "improve" them. As adults, the Children of Thanos continue to refer to Thanos as "father", obeying his orders without question, slaughtering his enemies with great delight, and even the rare few who have dared to rebel find it hard to resist fearing and adoring their adoptive father. For his part, Thanos regards them as disposable pawns, except for his favourite, Gamora, who remains one of the few people in the entire universe that Thanos could be said to genuinely love.
- Pete's Dragon (1977): Downplayed and discussed; the Gogans would be this if they had the cash to buy another kid, but they don't, as Ma points out to her sons when they ask her why they don't just stop hunting down Pete. As for the Gogans, it's the closest they can get to being Hillbilly Horrors in a G-rated Disney musical, with a Lyrical Dissonance bluegrass song as their Establishing Character Moment in which they gloat about the torture and slavery they will unleash on poor Pete if they catch him.
- Juliana: Don Pedro is a deadbeat who would rather lure kids in with the promise of shelter (a run-down house) in exchange for them singing in public spaces for money than just be a responsible adult and get a job. He beats the kids when they fail to earn their monthly quota and only accepts boys, forcing the heroine to pull a Sweet Polly Oliver. Pedro's gang comprises about 10 kids by the time she joins them.
- Slumdog Millionaire: Maman is a gangster who "adopts" street children and trains them to become beggars. What's worse is that he is shown to use hot oil to blind the children to make them more sympathetic; upon discovering this, Salim, Jamal, and Latika run away.
- Speak No Evil: Patrick and Karin are revealed to be serial killers who prey on couples with children. They murder the parents, cut out the child's tongue, and take them into their home, passing them off as their child. When they find new victims, they kill the child to adopt a new one and the same manner. The film's main characters eventually end up among their many victims.
- Speak No Evil (2024): Like the villains in the original film, Paddy and Ciara are revealed to be serial killers who prey on couples with children, murder the parents, cut out the child's tongue, and take them into their home — pretending that they are their own child. When they find new victims, they kill the previously adopted child to adopt a new one. However, unlike in the original film, the film's main characters manage to save both their family and the last child adopted by Paddy and Ciara.
- V/H/S/Halloween: In "Coochie Coochie Coo," the Mommy is a ghost who — in life — was raped and impregnated by her husband and ultimately Driven to Suicide to escape the abuse. In death, she obsesses over having children of her own, a fixation she satisfies by luring rowdy trick-or-treaters into her Nightmarish Nursery and adopting them... by forcing them to drink her milk, psychologically regressing them into infants.
Literature
- The Five Ancestors: Discussed; Ying is convinced that the Grandmaster of Cangzhen Temple only cares about building his personal army by recruiting the young and vulnerable, which does track with Grandmaster taking Ying back to Cangzhen after killing his bandit father with his bare hands (and to whit, said bandit was actually his own son). Though Ambiguously Evil, the Grandmaster is generally depicted as a Well-Intentioned Extremist who wants people around to fight for China when no one else can, and at least some of the children sent his way had parents who couldn't care for them.
- An example that is at least as tragic as it is villainous: In The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side, movie star Marina Gregg, having fertility issues, adopted three children (it is implied she did so in succession rather than all at once), but proved to be a distant mother more interested in motherhood than good at it. What's more, when she finally becomes pregnant, she effectively shuts the children out... only for the baby to be born with severe mental and physical defects, causing her to have a nervous breakdown. Heather Badcock, a fan of Gregg's, will fatally regret this.
- Oliver Twist: At one point, Oliver is almost adopted by a chimney sweep with a habit of taking in children as apprentices — in other words, slaves — who he works until they are too old to fit in the chimneys, and many of them have died by getting stuck in said chimneys and him leaving them there. Oliver gets on his knees and begs the adoptions judge to give him literally Anything but That!, even death. The judge agrees.
- Reign of the Seven Spellblades: The magic tradition of the Linton clan is to snap up an assortment of magically talented orphans, dose them with poison, and stick them in an Evolutionary Pressure Cooker where those that die are force-fed to the survivors until only one mage with a strong talent for poisonmaking remains, who is then designated their heir. The process left Tim Linton understandably very messed-up.
- Wayward Children: The Master of the Moors is a Card-Carrying Villain Vampire Monarch who adopts one girl after another to groom them as his willing victims. In Down Among the Sticks and Bones, the new arrival Jill learns that her prematurely aged housekeeper used to be one of the Master's girls, yet remains happily convinced that she herself will be made a vampire when the time is right.
Live-Action TV
- American Horror Story: Hotel: As a vampire, the Countess cannot produce children of her own and instead seeks out neglected children (usually blonds), abducts them, adopts them, and infects them with the vampire virus. Known as "The Towheads" for their hair colour, the Countess genuinely loves them and gives them a Gilded Cage of a nursery to while away their evenings in, but she also expects them to regularly donate their own blood to her private stash... and because the Countess isn't above her own brand of Parental Neglect, she doesn't notice that some of these children are beginning to seriously chafe at being young for all eternity, and definitely doesn't care that the Towheads regularly murder hotel guests to feed their own hunger. Her newest addition to her "family" is Holden, the long-lost son of Detective Lowe.
- Atlanta: "Three Slaps" is about a Very Loosely Based on a True Story rendition of the Hart family murders
, which happened in California in 2018. A white lesbian couple adopt eight black children (from different parents — we see Loquareeous's adoption), only to abuse them, starve them, and subject them to underage labor. When the system starts to catch up with them, they drive their car off a bridge with the intention of killing themselves and their adopted children. However, indicating that this is a possible Dream Episode of Earn's, the children manage to escape the car just in time.
- The Blacklist: Lady Ambrosia is a seemingly-kindly woman who adopts disabled children, raises them to love and adore her, and then murders each one of them once they grow up, in order to "spare" them from a world that she insists will hurt them.
- Criminal Minds: In "Gabby", the titular little girl gets caught up in a revenge scheme by her aunt that involves her being kidnapped by a woman and her pedophile boyfriend. Garcia finds out that the woman has a habit of "rescuing" children taken by human traffickers, but she more often than not neglects or abuses them... or worse, lets her boyfriend near them. Thankfully, the BAU are able to find Gabby and the other kidnapped children before they get hurt. As the woman's arrested, she tries to defend herself by shouting "[she] was saving those kids!"
- Feud: Bette and Joan: Downplayed; Joan Crawford adopted five children in her lifetime, and while this miniseries does not present her as having been a particularly cruel adoptive mother (as a certain other depiction of Crawford previously had), it does suggest that her multiple adoptions were driven by a fear of being alone instead of pure altruism; when two of her adopted daughters go away to camp, she becomes so lonely that she tries to adopt some more children.
- Hannibal: The Villain of the Week In "Œuf" is a female serial killer who has been abducting children from around the country, adopting them as her own, indoctrinating them, and completing the ritual of adoption by paying the birth family a visit and murdering them — with the adopted child being expected to kill their original mother. Any children who can't go through with it are brutally murdered as well. For good measure, the eldest and most indoctrinated of the kids, Connor Frist, serves as the mother's enforcer, allowing her to act kind and nurturing while Connor intimidates the younger children on her behalf.
- Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: In "Care", the team investigates Dorothy and Jane Rudd, a mother-daughter team who foster kids for the sole purpose of allowing Dorothy to play at being a grandmother. When the kids fall short of "Mama Rudd's" expectations, she and Jane tie them up and cane them.
- Orange Is the New Black: Vee Palmer is a queenpin who adopted many children, including Taystee, then raised them to be runners in her drug empire. It's suggested she prefers older children in order to prey on their hopes of getting families and their lifetimes of disappointments. Even once in prison, she does the same to adults, working on Taystee again and grooming Suzanne. It's revealed that, for extra heinousness, she had sex with the son she raised from childhood, and then got him killed for selling drugs on her corners (even though he promised to cut her in on his profits).
- The Umbrella Academy (2019):
- After a Bizarre Baby Boom, the eccentric billionaire Reginald Hargreeves adopted seven superpowered infants — after bribing their horribly traumatized mothers into handing them over — with the goal of grooming them into superheroes. He is an abusive and neglectful parent who treats the Umbrella Academy as means to an end, subjects them to monstrous treatments to keep them under his control, delegates most of the nurturing duties to Pogo and Grace, and barely seems to tolerate the presence of the children at the best of times. As such, he's directly responsible for almost every horrible thing that happens in the series. His ultimate goal is to sacrifice the children to fuel an eldritch machine that will reboot the universe to his specifications.
- In season 2, the Handler of the Commission is found to have adopted a young girl named Lila after arranging for the murder of her parents, secretly training her to serve as an off-the-books assassin in her adoptive mother's pursuit of power and to combat the Umbrella Academy, since Lila's another superpowered product of the Bizarre Baby Boom. Later in the same season, the Handler also sets out to abduct the young Harlan Cooper and raise him as her own once he starts manifesting superhuman abilities. For good measure, when Lila figures out the role that the Handler played in the death of her parents and refuses to cooperate any further, the Handler just guns her down on the spot, having Harlan as a replacement. Fortunately, this is undone by Number Five's time travel.
Tabletop Games
- Ars Magica: In the Order of Hermes, House Bonisagus magi have the rarely-exercised right to unilaterally adopt other magi's apprentices. One historical mage did this seven times, each one dying under suspicious circumstances. This was technically compliant with Hermetic Law, just as it was legal for the aggrieved magi to declare Wizard's War, refuse any mediation, and burn the mage to ash.
- Vampire: The Masquerade: In Mexico By Night Tzimisce elder Szechenyi Jolan — AKA the Mother of Horrors — regularly "adopts" children suffering from serious birth defects, brainwashing them into loving her through a combination of the Blood Bond and using Vicissitude to correct their deformities. The strongest and healthiest children become her ghouls when they grow up, and the luckiest of all are Embraced. The unlucky kids end up as test subjects in Jolan's attempts to create a master race of Vicissitude-capable humans — or building material for a Vozhd. Oh, and for added creepiness, Jolan likes to accessorize the youngest of her children at parties, toting around limbless conjoined infants and breastfeeding them her blood.
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Lady Nicolete of Oisement gained infamy in Mousillon for demanding a tithe of children from her peasantry, with many rumours insisting that she had to be bathing in their blood to preserve her youth. In reality, Nicolete adopted the children as her own, training them to serve as acolytes in her study of Black Magic... and after she was locked away in her castle for her crimes, they were repurposed as handy sources of Life Energy she could use to extend her life. After many decades of house imprisonment, Nicolete still appears inhumanly beautiful, while her children have been reduced to wizened husks who mindlessly do her bidding.
Video Games
- Batman: The Telltale Series: John and Patricia Vale would often take in foster children for the sole purpose of getting the government stipends. They were horrifically abusive, locking them in a cellar and repeatedly beating them with belts. This is one reason why Vicki is so messed up.
- Code Vein: Juzo Mido adopted numerous children from an orphanage so that he could use them as fodder for his inhumane Evilutionary Biologist experiments. First, he had them turned into Revenants against their will to use as Child Soldiers, and when some of them were left comatose from the process, he was planning to dump their bodies into a trash compactor to get rid of them. One of the awake orphans, Emily, cut a deal with Mido to spare the others, but only under the condition that she become his chief test subject for the next part of his "research": implanting people with parts of the Queen to turn them into Humanoid Abominations.
- Final Fantasy XIV: Valens van Varro "adopts" children and tries to make them just as twisted as he is by forcing them to participate in Cold-Blooded Torture while reciting phrases like "burn out the bad" while applying hot brands to his prisoners. This contrasts him against his rival, Gaius, who genuinely loves his adoptive children.
- Kings Quest III Redux: Gwydion (Prince Alexander) discovers that his master, magician Mannanan, has kidnapped other male children, reared them to eighteen years of age, and killed them. This Gwydion is to become his next victim.
- Octopath Traveler II: The Blacksnakes are a clan of assassins and thieves made up of orphans adopted by Mother and Father. Throné’s main motivation is to be free of them. It is revealed at the end of Throné’s storyline that all of them, even Mother and Father, are related by blood, as Claude has given birth to countless children, all in the hopes of one becoming skilled enough to eventually kill him.
- Poppy Playtime: Part of the backstory of the toy manufacturer Playtime Co. establishes that they welcomed orphans to a section of the main factory called Playcare, and even encouraged employees to adopt one of them. Eventually, they were used in the sinister experiments to create living toys.
- Resident Evil 7: Biohazard: Inverted; Eveline seeks out people she can be adopted by, brainwashing them with her spores until they've been physically and mentally distorted into new parents and siblings. It's made clear that this is partly due to her programming as a bioweapon but also out of a twisted desire for the love of a family... but unfortunately, Eveline doesn't understand love or family, treating them as toys to amuse herself with for a time before discarding them and moving onto something more interesting. Over the course of the timeline, she starts off with Mia and Allan, then kills Allan and moves onto the Baker Family, then lures in Ethan so he and Mia can be her new parents.
- Resident Evil Village: The Four Lords who rule the village are revealed to be the adopted children of Mother Miranda, having been abducted and altered by her through her experiments with the Cadou over the course of the 20th century. Though not all of them were children at the time Miranda claimed them, they were encouraged to treat her as their mother, and the two biggest Psychopathic Manchildren of the Four Lords, Donna Beneviento and Salvatore Moreau, seem to treat her as such. Mother Miranda herself cares little for the Lords, regarding them as useful failures who can at least use their powers to keep the village under her control: the real goal of her experiments is to create a vessel in which her long-dead child can be reborn in... and now that she's acquired Rose, the Four Lords are surplus to requirements.
- Zeno Clash: This is revealed to be Father-Mother's secret. While they told their children they are both their father and mother, they are actually a male Zeno that had no children and resorted to kidnapping babies from their real parents to raise them as their own. While they did raise them under false pretenses and does everything they can to make sure they won't find out, Father-Mother has no motive other than having a family.
Web Original
- Creepypasta: In the ending of "My neighbors are acting suspicious and their children aren't aging," Rhea Ambrosio is found to be using her abusive mother's immortality spell to regress adults into her adopted children, seemingly for no other reason than to enjoy having absolute power over the regressed, to the point that she's even sent one Back to the Womb. Worse still, Rhea regularly exploits the kids' immortality to punish them in hideous ways just as her mother did, even cutting out their eyeballs and decorating the nursery with them. In a final twist, Rhea is found to have cast the immortality spell on the now-adult protagonist as well, and the story ends with him fleeing the neighborhood for fear that she might be planning to "adopt" him next.
- Visual Venture: One of the cases discussed in "Secret Cults Hiding in Plain Sight Today" is the Kashi Ashram cult, led and founded by Ma Jaya. Gerard explains that Ma not only arranged marriage between members of her compound at her leisure and demanded married members have children, but manipulated them into giving said children up for adoption to her. As in, making them sign adoption papers so she'll be the kids' legal guardian.
Western Animation
- Miraculous Ladybug: Lila Rossi is eventually revealed to be an inversion of this trope. In addition to manipulating her class, her friends and her benefactors like Gabriel, "Revelation" reveals that her mothers glimpsed throughout the series are three separate, unconnected women that she manipulated into adopting her; seemingly having convinced them that she's their biological daughter. Taking advantage of older women by treating them like maternal figures appears to be a fixation she has, as it's implied she was planning on turning Marinette's mom Sabine into mother number four (before she was forced to surrender her "Lila Rossi" identity), and by Season 6 she's apparently convinced Tomoe Tsurugi to adopt her, though Tomoe seems to be pretty uncomfortable with their arrangement.
