It’s Tuesday, which means we’re delving back into TV Tropes to talk about an amusing or just quirky literary device that makes the entertainment we love work. This week, we’re investigating a trope called In the Blood.

Genealogy and Ancestry are really popular tropes in fiction. It makes a great Secret Legacy, a source of fraternal conflict, adds drama with an unexpected family reunion, and can set up a host of different conflicts and relationships. Just like in real life, a person’s ancestry can determine their genes and, to a lesser extent, their personality and even their talents; but in fiction this extends to skills, superpowers, and even moral alignment.

Sometimes even The Messiah and the most valiant Knight in Shining Armor are at risk of going insane, or over to The Dark Side, if a parent or grandparent was a Villain by Default or member of an Evil Race. This inevitably leads said character into a Wangstyexistential crisis that comes completely out of left field, since they rarely ever struggled against villainous impulses before this revelation.

Boy howdy, where do you even start with this one when it comes to Star Wars? You’ve got your various generations of the Skywalker and Solo bloodlines, all sorts of Hapan royalty, and who knows how many Fetts. Sometimes, there are certain traits that seem to carry on from generation to generation. Young Ben Skywalker definitely inherited his mother’s snark. If you look at the Antilles family, one daughter became a pilot like Wedge and the other daughter went into intelligence work like Iella.

Occasionally generational ties provide a familiar touchstone that can bridge from one age group to the next. Aaron Allston has said as much when he’s discussed the importance of the Antilles sisters in more recent Expanded Universe works.