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Someone chooses to adopt a child after recognizing that they are particularly smart or skilled in a specific field. The skill in question could be anything from sports, to music, to magic, to cooking. Usually, the one doing the adopting does so because they need the child's skill to benefit them personally in some fashion. They may also recognize that the child is talented or has the potential to be talented in the parent's line of work and adopt them to hone that skill.
The line between mentor and adoptive parent can get a bit blurry. Simply taking a child as an apprentice after being impressed by them is not enough to count as this trope, but it can qualify, as long as the adoptive parent is the one raising them from a young age and/or it is officially said somewhere that they are an adopted parent and child.
If their adoptive parent is also their mentor, the child may be desperate to impress them, knowing they were adopted because of their particular skill, and afraid they will be abandoned if they can't use it to live up to their parent's expectations.
This kind of parent tends to lean toward the unsympathetic or villainous side — after all, adopting a child to make use of their special skills or powers is not exactly selfless. However, it is just as likely that they could be a kindly mentor who is the only one to recognize that the child has a special gift.
Common variations:
- The adoptive parent and child are magic users in a world where magic potential is rare.
- The adoptive parent and child have the same unique superpower, and the parent is one of the very few people in the world (if not the only person) who could possibly teach the child to use it.
Related:
- Adopt-a-Servant: Adopting an orphan to use them as a servant.
- Adoption Conflict: Sometimes the prodigy in this trope is an orphan, and sometimes they still have living parents. Whether or not they're Good Parents will depend on whether or not the mentor adopting the prodigy is a good thing.
- Children as Pawns: Using one or more children as part of a plan.
- Education Mama: A parent who cares about their child's grades above all else, often punishing them harshly for anything less than perfection.
- Mentor Archetype: A character whose role is to ensure someone's Character Development in case they can't do the pupil's task themselves.
- Mutant Draft Board: Differently Powered Individuals are routinely taken up for raising and training by a normally government-sanctioned organization.
- Super Breeding Program: Making "better" people by breeding them.
- Training the Gift of Magic: Magic is a skill, but not everyone can master it.
- Villain Takes an Interest: A villain may want a child's unique power or skill for their Super Long-Game Evil Plans™.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Ace Attorney (2016): "Sound the Turnabout Melody", an original story from the anime, shows that Manfred Von Karma was planning to put Miles Edgeworth in an orphanage to rid himself of the child. However, after seeing his talent as a potential prosecutor, Von Karma chooses to keep him.
- A Dog of Flanders (1975): Even though Nello lost the art competition, one of the judges, Hendrick Ray expresses a desire to adopt the orphan and have him sent to a fine art school because he was impressed by his drawing.
- Hell Girl: In "Cracked Mask", Ayaka was adopted by Midori, an actress and manager of a theatre troupe, as a child because she was impressed with the girl's acting potential. Sadly, it doesn't seem to have worked out as Midori hoped; as a young adult, Ayaka can remember all her lines but her acting is notably flat and wooden. Midori ends up disowning her after Ayaka hires two thugs to cripple another actress in the troupe because she was jealous that the other girl got a part she wanted.
- I Can't Understand What My Husband Is Saying, especially the My Girlfriend Without Wasabi spinoff: Rino Juse was abandoned at a garbage dump when she was three years old. She ended up in an orphanage after that and was adopted by the Juse family, a line of mask artists that has a thousand-year tradition, when they discovered her skill at mask making.
- Moero! Top Striker: Hikaru Yoshikawa is a Japanese boy who has loved playing football ever since he was young. When his parents die in a plane accident and leave him orphaned, ex-football player Albert Robson offers to adopt him so he can stay in Italy, as he saw Hikaru play and thinks he can one day bring home the cup. And he's eventually proven right, as Hikaru in the end defeats Team Margherita, the strongest team in the world so far, and wins gold.
- SPY×FAMILY: Master spy Twilight must adopt a child to be part of his fake family for his mission to gather intel on Donovan Desmond. The child must be smart enough to get into the same elite school as Desmond's sons, so he visits an orphanage and asks for a child who can already read and write. A little girl named Anya impresses him by completing a crossword puzzle meant for grown-ups, so he chooses her. He doesn't know it, but she is a telepath and answered the puzzle correctly by reading the answers from his mind.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!: Seto Kaiba's backstory reveals that weapons manufacturer Gozaburo Kaiba recognized Seto's genius when Seto beat him at chess, adopted him, and made him the heir to KaibaCorp.
Comic Books
- Batman: Many of the Robins/sidekicks who have fought by Batman's (Bruce Wayne) side are people who impressed him with their resourcefulness, detective skills, or other abilities.
- Daredevil: The Kingpin assumed guardianship of Maya Lopez—later to be known as Echo—initially because her late father was one of his more favored Mooks, but kept it up because he realized her Taskmaster-level skill-copying could come in very handy.
- Spider-Man: At multiple times (especially when Spider-Man is a teenager), Norman Osborn will show interest in taking Peter Parker under his wing and often expresses that Peter is the son he never had... sometimes right in front of Harry, Norman's actual son.
- The Umbrella Academy: Reginald Hargreaves adopted seven children born during a Mass Super-Empowering Event, intending to raise them as a superhero team. In the present, all seven of the now-adult children have significant psychological issues stemming from his abusive parenting style.
Fairy Tales
- In the fairy tale The Shepherd's Boy, a shepherd's young son is known far and wide for his wisdom. A king comes to ask him three questions. The first is "How many drops of water are there in the ocean?" The boy asks him first to have all the rivers on earth dammed up so that no water runs into the sea until he has counted them. The second is "How many stars are there in the sky?" The boy asks for a piece of paper and a pin, and makes so many tiny holes in the paper that everyone who tries to count them gives up. The third question is "How many seconds of time are there in eternity?" The boy's answer is "In Lower Pomerania, there is a mountain made entirely of diamond. Every hundred years, a little bird comes to sharpen his beak on the mountain, and when the whole mountain is worn away to nothing, the first second of eternity will have passed." The king is so impressed that he adopts the boy as his own child.
Fan Works
- A Bat's New Bird: Bruce has three reasons to take Marinette in as his own: 1) She's his biological daughter (Talia actually had twins and dumped baby Marinette in a French orphanage, (2) she'd been living in bad foster homes or on the streets while still working as Lady Noire, and 3) she's an incredible superhero that was defending Paris every day despite her terrible civilian life and less-than-reliable partner. Then again, adopting homeless children on a whim is hardly new for Bruce...
- Father Knows Best: Tadashi's mentor Professor Callaghan kidnaps him and fakes both of their deaths in the fire that destroyed the SFIT Showcase. He forces Tadashi to use his engineering skills to help rebuild the destroyed portal as part of his plan to get revenge on Krei for his daughter Abigail's death. The whole time, he acts like a creepy father figure to Tadashi, calling him "son" and acting affectionate with him when he complies, but turning abusive when he doesn't. He even convinced himself that Tadashi and Abigail would have fallen in love and eventually gotten married if she'd survived.
- If Wishes Were Ponies...: When Twilight first meets Harry, she's fascinated by his impressive potential for magic (the only reason he isn't considered a prodigy by Equestrian standards is because he was never taught how to use his magic). When the time comes to find a home in Equestria for Harry, Twilight happily volunteers to house him at the library. Harry thinks at first that it's just because she wants to study him more, but it's also because she recognizes that he's an abused kid alone in a different world. She does study him but her desire to give him a happy life is sincere.
- The Last Seidr: After Harry has shown without a shadow of a doubt that he has magical powers, Tony volunteers to take Harry in until they find a way to send him back to Hogwarts. Natasha points out that this is at least partially because he wants to learn about Harry's magic.
- Light of the Moon: Mother Gothel kidnapped both Rapunzel and Varian because they possessed the power of the Sundrop and the Moonstone, respectively. She wants to learn how to wield their powers for herself when the time is right, ignoring the fact that she's emotionally manipulative to Rapunzel and is only keeping Varian there by threatening to kill his father.
- The Negotiations-verse: In "Fallen", Princess Celestia reveals to Fluttershy that although she has had many students, Sunset Shimmer was the only one raised by her from infancy. Celestia adopted her after she had an incredibly powerful outburst of magic as a baby, so bright that it appeared as though a second sun had risen in Canterlot.
- running with lightning feet: Jedi Master Plo Koon notes during Feral Oppress' attack on a communication tower that the young fighter is strong enough with the Force to be a potential powerhouse, yet he's holding back and trying not to kill the clones fighting him. This leads to Master Koon taking Feral prisoner aboard his ship, wanting to see if he can pull Feral to the Light side of the Force and make him his apprentice, which is the closest a Jedi can come to having a child. Downplayed in that Feral is not a child but in his late teens/early twenties.
- The Spectacular Spider-Man: Lost in Gotham: Batman already wanted to meet with Spider-Man after the arachnid saved Robin, but he became very interested in him after he (and most of Gotham) saw him stop a monorail with nothing but webs and sheer strength.
- Vow of Nudity: While she was an orphan, Spectra learns that Bertram Ironstein, a local nobleman and famed novelist, was looking to adopt a daughter, and so she breaks into his printing press to steal one of his books to try and pass herself off as a fan and increase her chances of being chosen. She succeeds in getting a copy but ultimately plants the book on River, a fellow orphan who needs the adoption more than her, and Ironstein adopts River primarily because he thinks she's an avid reader of his novels.
Films — Animation
- Kung Fu Panda: Secrets of the Furious Five reveals that Tigress was the only predator in the orphanage she grew up in, while all the other orphans were prey animals like bunnies and ducks. She was very strong, but she didn't know how to control her strength, so the caretakers and other children were frightened of her and thought she was a monster. Shifu taught her self-control by playing dominoes with her. When she still wasn't chosen by any of the would-be parents on Adoption Day, he took her home with him to the Jade Palace and taught her to be a kung fu master.
Po: All the adults were still afraid of her... all but one.
- Meet the Robinsons: Zig-Zagged. 12-year-old Lewis is a prodigy inventor who lives at an orphanage, whose inventions tend to spook prospective parents to the point that he's lost hope he'll ever be adopted. When Lewis meets the Robinson family in 2037, who are all quirky inventors and scientists like him, he hopes to be adopted by them, an idea they happily endorse until Wilbur reveals he's from the past. This is because, as Lewis later discovers, the Robinsons already are his family — he gets adopted by Bud and Lucille/Dr. Krunklehorn in 2007 because they see something special in him after his science fair success, and he grows up to be Wilbur's dad, a brilliant inventor who changes the future.
Films — Live-Action
- Blades of Glory: Jimmy was adopted by a wealthy businessman as a child because of his talent at ice skating and was put through rigorous (and likely illegal) training to turn him into an award-winning athlete. He's promptly disowned after receiving a lifetime ban.
- Gifted: A variation. Mary is a gifted math prodigy who was put into her Uncle Frank's custody after her mother's death. Frank wants her to have a normal kid's life, but when her intellectual grandmother Evelyn discovers Mary is a prodigy like her mother was, a custody battle ensues, with Evelyn arguing Mary needs to be appropriately educated to match her potential. Frank argues that Evelyn was a severe Education Mama to Diane, with the goal of cracking the fabled Navier-Stokes Equation, and he doesn't want to see Evelyn control Mary the same way (especially since Diane actually committed suicide due to the pressure she was under). A third option to put Mary into a foster family that would grant both of them visitation and educate her at a gifted school is reached, but Frank discovers Evelyn paid off the family to give her control. When he gives her an ultimatum, saying he'll give her Diane's completed Navier-Stokes Equation in exchange for staying out of Mary's life, Evelyn takes the deal, showing she only really wanted Mary for the prospect of academic glory.
- Instant Family: One of the potential foster families is a white woman who attempts this trope, wanting to adopt an athletic black kid, The Blind Side-style. She actually ends up with an unathletic white kid.
- Orphan: Exploited — when the Colemans visit the orphanage looking for a child to adopt, they are immediately charmed by Esther, an unusually wise and mature little girl who is talented at painting. They are so taken with her that they decide to adopt her immediately. She is actually an adult with a growth disorder pretending to be a child.
- The Red Violin: In the second vignette, taking place in 1793, the titular violin comes into possession of young orphan Kaspar Weiss, who turns out to be a violin prodigy. The monks at the monastery he was raised in ask violin virtuoso Poussin to adopt him and take him back to Vienna to better foster his gift. While he and his wife care for the boy, when news gets out that Prince Mannsfeld is looking for a prodigy to accompany him back to Prussia, for generous reward, Poussin, who is struggling financially, subjects Kaspar to a severe training regimen so he may play for the Prince. This agitates Kaspar's congenital heart defect to such a degree that, on the day of the recital for the Prince, he plays brilliantly... and then collapses and dies. The violin, appropriately, is buried with Kaspar by the monks, so the greedy Poussin cannot benefit even from that.
- Star Wars: This trope is how a majority of Jedi end up in the Temple. When they are discovered to be force-sensitive (often as toddlers), the Jedi are summoned. Usually with the parents' permission, the child is taken by a Jedi Master and brought to the temple to be trained. Their early training is usually done by the Jedi who first brought them to the temple (like with Ahsoka and Jedi Master Plo Koon).
Literature
- Ascendance of a Bookworm:
- In Part 2, Benno considers doing this regarding Lutz for a period, because he wants to give him an important position in his store, but this entails having him leave the city of Ehrenfest to acquire necessary experience and his biological parents are reluctant to let that happen because he's still a minor.
- The "adult magic user adopts magic-using child of non-magical parents" variant eventually happens to Myne as part of the main plot's progression towards giving her higher and higher social status, as the story takes place in a Supernatural Elite setting.
- Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: Professor Lovell takes Robin as a ward after his family die of cholera because his language skills — the cornerstone of magic — are good enough for him to join England's Wizarding School. It's not a kindness: he discarded his previous ward for underperformance; would have left Robin to die if he hadn't proven his talent; and gives him an abusive, loveless upbringing. It's also revealed that both of Lovell's wards are actually his biological children, whom he sired for exactly this purpose, and he callously left both their mothers to die after they provided him with sons.
- Subverted in Chrestomanci, in which Gwendolen thinks her cousin once removed, the powerful nine-lifed enchanter Chrestomanci, has made her and her brother Cat his wards because of Gwendolen's magical talent. In fact, it's because Cat is an unwitting nine-lifed enchanter himself and because Gwendolen is an amoral menace and Chrestomanci wants to keep an eye on them both.
- Subverted in Female General and Eldest Princess: The aging Marshal Li Mu intends to adopt Lin Wanyue as his own 'son' and heir, thanks to her outstanding military achievements and to his own lack of a biological son. Unfortunately, he is poisoned and dies before he can formalize the adoption (though he still manages to pass some of the Li family's most closely guarded secrets and responsibilities on to Wanyue in a letter).
- A Little Life: A rare case of this happening to an Adult Adoptee. Jude was adopted by Harold, his Harvard professor, due to his extreme and prodigious intelligence that stood out even in that environment.
- Matilda: A kindly version; Miss Honey is the only adult in the story who recognizes how intelligent and wonderful Matilda is, and how she needs to be in classes that will better challenge her. While Matilda is not an orphan, her parents are neglectful con artists, so when Miss Honey tries to convince them to move her up to a higher grade, they prefer to watch their television program instead. At the end, when the Wormwoods have to leave the country due to Mr. Wormwood's crooked dealings, Matilda asks Miss Honey to adopt her, at which point Matilda is finally given the intellectual stimulation and loving home she needs. Doubles as Adopting the Abused.
- Magika Swordsman and Summoner: Both main character Kazuki and his childhood friend Mio were adopted due to their exceptional talents, Kazuki in the sword and Mio in magic.
- My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!: Duke Claes adopted Keith to be the new family heir after Catarina was engaged to prince Geordo specifically because of his natural talent with earth magic, something that would be very useful in a kingdom where magic users hold a large amount of political power.
- In The Mysterious Benedict Society, only children can take the tests of Mr. Nicholas Benedict, a prodigy himself, because he needs a team of children in order to infiltrate Mr. Curtain's Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened and only prodigies of one sort or another are suitable for such a team. Additionally, he only wants children who are in some way "alone" because he wouldn't feel right about putting children in danger that had parents. At the end of the novel, he adopts Constance (though she claims she adopted him) and reveals that a couple of his adult helpers, Rhonda Kazembie and Number Two, are previous test-takers that he adopted, but were unable to be part of a team because they didn't pass at the same time.
- Redwall: Sawney Rath kidnaps Deyna and tries to raise him as his own because Deyna is prophecied to be an extremely powerful warrior and Sawney wants to make him into a Super-Soldier.
- Shades of Magic: The Maresh royal family adopted Prince Kell as a young boy because he's the only known person in their generation to have the gift of Antari magic. Despite his comfortable life and beloved adoptive brother, he has some Adoption Angst over the knowledge that his parents only took him in for his powers.
- A Song of Ice and Fire: The wildling skinchanger Varamyr Sixskins (or Lump, as he was known as a child) was raised and mentored by Haggon, another skinchanger, starting from the age of six. Unlike most examples of this trope, he didn't "choose" Lump; rather, the boy's father dumped him at Haggon's doorstep after realizing he was a skinchanger and had warged into one of the family's dogs to kill his baby brother Bump.
- Star Wars Expanded Universe: Thrawn Ascendancy: Chaos Rising: An impoverished but brilliant young man named Kivu'raw'nuru is noticed by The Patriarch of the Mitth family and taken as a merit adoptive, essentially a probationary member of the family expected to repay his benefactor with skilled service. The newly renamed Mitth'raw'nuru, "Thrawn", later distinguishes himself in military service, and is granted the rank of "trial-born", securing his place in the family.
- Star Wars Legends: Outbound Flight: A young Commander Thrawn explains the Chiss practice of "merit adoption", wherein Chiss aristocrats will adopt promising commoners or orphans into their houses. In particular, all Chiss soldiers are considered merit adoptives, but lose this status upon leaving the military unless they distinguish themselves, in which case they are considered "trial-born", the lowest Chiss noble rank. Thrawn and his brother Thrass are both merit adoptives of the House of Mitth (Thrawn as a soldier, Thrass as a diplomat), and Thrawn has achieved trial-born status.
- Which Witch? (1979) ends with a positive version when the orphan boy Terence Mugg is revealed to be a powerful wizard and therefore an eligible successor to Arriman the Black. This frees Arriman to Marry for Love, and his love interest Belladonna is already good friends with Terence, so they happily become a family together.
Live-Action TV
- Avataro Sentai Donbrothers: Jiro Momotani (Taro's Replacement Goldfish and fellow Don Clan member) was taken in as a baby by the officer Terasaki with the express intent of grooming him into a replacement Penguin Juto for when Terasaki and his host both kick the bucket. Taro interferes with The Plan in the present and offers himself as the replacement instead, per his Batman Gambit to make the Forest of Slumbers public and De-power its hostile populace.
- Doom Patrol (2019): Niles Caulder adopted Jane because her vast array of superhuman powers made her similar to his biological daughter Dorothy, and he hoped to use her (particularly her child-like alter-ego Babydoll) to test out possible solutions for either suppressing Dorothy's powers or prolonging his own life. Jane did not find this out until decades after her adoption, and for a long time, believed that Caulder had adopted her solely out of love. She is understandably pissed when she finds out that she was originally adopted to be a test subject.
- In Echo, Maya Lopez was adopted by her Honorary Uncle Wilson Fisk after he realized that she was a brilliant martial artist. He groomed her into his personal enforcer.
- Snowpiercer: Joseph Wilford initially adopted Alex Cavill, daughter of his former engineer Melanie Cavill, just to get revenge on Melanie for stealing his train. However, he also discovered that Alex inherited her mom's genius for engineering, and thus when she got older, he trained her to manage his backup train, Big Alice, and groomed her towards being his successor.
- The Umbrella Academy:
- Like in the comic series, the basic premise is that eccentric billionaire Reginald Hargreaves adopts seven children born during a Mass Super-Empowering Event in order to turn them into a superhero team who could save the world. The dysfunction that results from their upbringing, including the death of one sibling and the disappearance of another, actually nearly dooms the world several times.
- In Season 3, due to meddling with time and meeting past Hargreeves in Season 2, the Umbrella Academy accidentally ends up in an alternate timeline where Hargreeves adopted different children except for Ben to create a superhero team, called the Sparrow Academy. While the team initially seems more put-together than the Umbrella Academy, they too have a complicated relationship with their controlling father. In fact, after being shown how to incapacitate Hargreeves by Pogo, it turns out they turned the tables and are now controlling him.
- In the case of both sets of adopted super kids, Season 3 also reveals the reason Hargreeves needed seven super-powered children at all was not to create heroes but to provide a sacrifice to the machine inside of Hotel Oblivion. So far beyond the Well-Intentioned Extremist he seemed to be, he was actually a Jerk with a Heart of Jerk the whole time.
- Lila Pitts is revealed to be another one of the 43 superpowered children, whose ability is Power Copying. The Handler had her parents killed by Number Five in 1993 so she could adopt the orphaned Lila and train her as a Child Soldier for the Temps Commission.
Video Games
- Arknights: "Exodus from the Pale Sea" shows Church of the Deep bishop Aulus adopting street urchin Isidoro after he recognized the magic tricks the child did as a Street Performer were actually rudimentary Alchemy - a type of Originium Arts long banned in Iberia. The child is best known as Rhodes Island operator Thorns, a genius in alchemy and swordsmanship.
- Honkai: Star Rail: Yanqing had no memories of his parents; General Jing Yuan took him as his apprentice when he was still a young boy, and to this day, aside from training him in the ways of swordsmanship, Jing Yuan looks after Yanqing like a father would.
- IDOLiSH7: Tenn was adopted at age 12 by Kujo Takamasa because of his talent for singing and dancing: Kujo was determined to turn Tenn into an Idol Singer superstar who could surpass the legendary Zero. It's later revealed that Kujo did the same with Tamaki's long-lost younger sister Aya.
- Imperator: Rome: If a Great Family does not have enough adult members to fill up all the government positions it lays claim to, the game will pick two of the available "minor" characters (i.e. characters not aligned with any Great Family) with the highest stats and let you decide which one, if any, the current family head will adopt, optionally changing their surname, as well.
- League of Legends: Prior to the game's Continuity Reboot, Sona was an orphan adopted by Lestara Buvelle — a Demacian noble — in large part due to Sona's connection with her magic harp-like "etwahl", an instrument that was repeatedly sold several times during Sona's early life in the Ionian orphanage, but mysteriously kept finding its way back to her. Sona grew up to be Demacia's "Maven of the Strings", and it was strongly implied that Lestara knew something important about the etwahl's true power and wished to take advantage of it, though this particular plot was cut short come the reboot, which revised Sona's backstory to lack this element (in current canon, the etwahl wasn't discovered to be magical until years after Sona's adoption).
- Team Fortress 2: The Demoman's backstory was that he was abandoned by his birth parents, only for them to adopt him later in life as his demolition skills started to manifest. It was said to be a "long-standing, cruel, and wholly unnecessary tradition" that all Demomen in his family had to go through.
Visual Novels
- Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: This is half of Manfred von Karma's motivation behind adopting Miles Edgeworth. Edgeworth had already been studying from a young age to become a defense attorney, and once Miles was orphaned after his dad, Gregory Edgeworth, was killed, von Karma saw potential in the young Edgeworth and raised him to become a cold-blooded prosecutor whose only goal was winning and maintaining a perfect record. The other half was Revenge by Proxy, as von Karma wanted Edgeworth to take the fall for one of his crimes as a means of getting revenge on Gregory for sullying his perfect win record.
Webcomics
- In the Ask a Pony blog Scootaloo the Sadist, Scootaloo is Pinkamena's apprentice as a Serial Killer. Her parents were abusive and her teacher convinced her it was just their way of showing love, so one day she decided to "love her mom more than her mom ever loved her." She was having so much fun dismembering her mom that she didn't notice that Pinkamena had broken into the house to kill her dad. Pinkamena realized Scootaloo was a budding killer just like her, and asked if she wanted to have fun together, which she accepted.
Web Original
- The Hero and Hope
takes place in a universe where everyone is born with an innate role they must fulfill. The protagonist Isla knows they're meant to be a Hero, and suspects the pair of retired Knights who have come to their orphanage looking to adopt are sniffing around for a child with the "proper" Destiny to follow in their footsteps. While orphanages aren't allowed to disclose the Destinies of their occupants, that doesn't stop people from learning through other means, and Isla grapples with their fears of the couple having ulterior motivations while slowly warming up to them.
Western Animation
- Adventure Time: In "Too Old", while she and Finn are visiting Castle Lemongrab, Princess Bubblegum comes across Lemonhope, a harp virtuoso mistreated because the dictatorial Lemongrab despises harmonious music and considers him "ugly". She manages to free him with the help of Lemongrab's subjects, and by the "Lemonhope" two-parter, we see she is trying to train him to someday liberate Castle Lemongrab of Lemongrab's tyrannical rule. However, Lemonhope inherited Lemongrab's underdeveloped sense of empathy and chose to run away rather than help his people. After nearly dying in the desert, Lemonhope is rescued by roaming adventurer Phlannel Boxingday heavily implied to be a disguised Princess Bubblegum, who convinces him to return to save his people. While he eventually does, he declines to lead them, still preferring to live on his own.
- Amphibia:
- Marcy's impressive intellect causes King Andrias to take her in as his unofficial ward and encourages her love of discovery, learning, and adventure. Of course, its later revealed that the Core wants her as a host and this is partially why Andrias kept her around.
- For the first month of Sasha's time in Amphibia, Grime treated her like a prisoner, interrogating her every day while she manipulated the guards who watched her into quitting. However, when he sees her fight a heron with nothing but a barrel and a bowl of insect mush (and sees how she uses positive reinforcement to turn the toads into competent soldiers), he makes her his personal project and second-in-command. By the start of the next season, they have a relationship similar to that of a parent and child (or, military father and army brat).
- Danny Phantom: Vlad Masters/Plasmius is the only other ghost/human hybrid in existence, with Danny being the other. Because Danny is a powerful fighter and the son of the woman he wanted to marry, he wants Danny as his son. Danny tells him off (multiple times) but Vlad keeps trying to either convince, coerce, or force Danny to join him.
- Gravity Falls: After he returns to Earth in season two, Ford becomes interested in taking his great-nephew, Dipper, on as an apprentice, as Dipper's intelligence and love of paranormal investigation has managed to impress him. A downplayed example, as the two are related and Ford outright says that he won't take full custody of Dipper and will ask his parents for permission first, but for all intent and purposes he offers to take Dipper in as his own.
- He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2021): Kronis adopted Duncan as a ward and apprentice from the Eternos vocational orphanage. A tie-in comic shows Kronis picked the six-year old Duncan when he saw the boy's invention chase off two older bullies.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: According to supplementary material, before Princess Cadence was an alicorn or a princess, she was an orphaned pegasus filly who saved a village with the power of a magical necklace. She was discovered by Princess Celestia, who adopted her as her niece.
- She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Shadow Weaver is shown throughout the series to have had several young personal students in the past, all of them strong with one form of magic or another. Her second was Adora, who she raised from infancy because she could tell the girl had First One magic inside her.
- Star Wars Rebels: Ezra's strong connection with the Force gains the attention of Maul when they first meet. For the rest of his time in the series, Maul tries to get Ezra to become his apprentice and younger brother-like figure. Ezra turns him down every time, especially because Maul's Sith upbringing means that he's willing to go much further than Ezra's willing to.
- TaleSpin: A sympathetic example where main character Baloo adopts the orphaned former Sky Pirate Kit Cloudkicker at the end of the four-part miniseries that acts as a prequel to the show proper. He does care deeply about the kid and wants to give him a better life, but he also does this to recruit Kit into his cargo airline business, to take advantage of his impressive navigation and air-surfing skills. It's also implied Baloo will teach Kit to become a pilot in his own right when he gets a little older.
- Ultimate Spider-Man (2012): A very creepy example of this trope happens in the episode "Carnage". The Green Goblin (aka a mutated Norman Osborn) kidnaps Peter Parker because Peter is everything he always wanted in a son: intelligent, driven, responsible, etc. He starts calling Peter "son" the moment he wakes up Strapped to an Operating Table and injects Peter with a Venom symbiote, turning him into Carnage.
Real Life
- The dancer Isadora Duncan legally adopted her six most talented students Anna Denzler, Maria-Theresa Kruger, Irma Erich-Grimme, Elizabeth Milker, Margot Jehl, and Erica Lohmann. They were called the "Isadorables."
- Subverted in the case of football player Michael Oher. In high school, he was already talented in the sport and being scouted by coaches. He was living in a series of foster homes during this time and was invited by Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy to live with them. Their story was made into the book/movie The Blind Side. But in 2023, it was found out that they never actually legally adopted him and put him under a conservatorship so they made millions in royalties from his story while not paying him a cent.
- This is often cited as a key reason for the century of "Five Good Emperors" (96 to 180 CE) of The Roman Empire: starting with Nerva, four emperors chose to adopt their most capable adult male relative as their son and successor. While this was a politically necessary move on Nerva's part, his adopted son Trajan saw the merit of such succession and elevated his grandniece's husband Hadrian as his heir, and so it went until Marcus Aurelius chose to instead have his own son Commodus succeed him, with whom their dynasty ended.note
