Quirky Household

That's not even counting the robot, the rest of the frogs, and that Tyrannosaurus Rex they recently adopted.

"That was this family's speciality: strange conversations."

— Tomoya, CLANNAD

Now remember, as far as anyone knows, we're a perfectly normal family...

An ensemble of bizarre characters who are related, or might as well be. Unlike the Dysfunctional Family, we as the audience plainly see the family is extremely well adjusted, supportive and loving — more so than some "real" families. They are also easily able to absorb friends, acquaintances, and distant relatives into their structure.

This is coupled with a range of quirks easily labeled "bizarre" by any of their peers.

It's also very convenient for heroes to have these, as they're not bound by the Masquerade, weirdness is normal.

May overlap with Creepy Family or Super Family Team. Likely part of the natural growth of a Pretty Freeloaders group. For a larger grouping, see Quirky Town, or Wacky Homeroom.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Black Butler: the Phantomhive Manor's residents each have something strange about them, save perhaps Tanaka.

• The Kawai family from the Pretty Sammy series (Alternate Universe #276 of the Tenchi Muyo! multiverse). Her parents were so insane but easygoing, she didn't need Parental Abandonment to have the freedom to run around fighting monsters.

• Yuu and Miki's parents in Marmalade Boy met, liked each other so much that they divorced and remarried each others' spouses, and then all moved in together into one big house.

• Both the household of the Takamachis and the Harlaowns of Lyrical Nanoha.
  • For that matter, the Yagami household. It consists of a crippled girl and her humanoid program Guardian Knights, the Wolkenritter.
  • The Nakajima clan ain't no slouch in this regard, either.
• Yuan's family in Samurai Deeper Kyo. Also, the Shiseiten, if you look at them as a family and not True Companions.
• The Hiiragizawa household in Cardcaptor Sakura. The "dad" looks like a ten-year-old kid, and his "children" are a genderless magical being posing as a teenage schoolgirl and a winged cat that looks like a toy most of the time.
  • Not only that, his girlfriend appears to be way too old for him and used to date the older brother of the girl he antagonized on a regular basis (and is now dating his maternal family's descendant), who went on to date his previous incarnation's angelic moon spirit. And their father is his half-reincarnation!

• Although with only two members, they don't make as dramatic a showing as some examples listed above, arguably the Koiwais from Yotsuba&!. Certainly, in his way Dad is nearly as quirky as Yotsuba, if more laid-back about it.
• The Furukawa family from CLANNAD featuring a kind mother who is a lethal baker, a dad who is still a kid inside and a shy but cute daughter who's somewhat of an airhead.
• In Reborn! (2004), one by one Reborn, Lambo, Bianchi, I-Pin, and Futa all freeload off of Tsuna.
• The Sakura Hall in The Pet Girl of Sakurasou: An Idiot Savant (Mashiro), an insecure guy who shelters seven cats (Sorata), a Sensei-chan (Chihiro), a hyperactive Otaku Surrogate (Misaki), an effeminate Hikikomori (Ryounosuke), a Casanova with an inferiority complex (Jin), and a workaholic aspiring voice actress who pushes herself too far (Nanami), living together in a two-storey wooden house.
• Similar to the Sakura Hall example above, Hidamari Apartments in Hidamari Sketch, a private rooming house for art-stream high school students, also has such a reputation.

• The Polaris Dorm in Food Wars! are full of weird people. Soma is a Cordon Bleugh Chef who enjoys deliberately cooking horrible dishes for the lulz, Isshiki is a weirdo who likes walking around in the buildings in very minimal clothing, Yuuki raises her own animals in the backyard, Ryoko brews wine during her free time, Ibusaki smokes food in his room, Marui is a hopeless Butt-Monkey, while Those Two Guys frequently bicker with each other for any reason. Really, the only "normal" person in the household is Megumi.
• The Higashikata household from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: JoJolion is this. While the family patriarch, Norisuke IV, is relatively normal (or at least, as normal as you can get in a series like JoJo), the family also consist of his children, Beetle Maniac Jobin, Brainless Beauty Hato, Jerkass Butt-Monkey Joshu, blind Yandere Daiya, Jobin's wife, Beauty Obsessed Mitsuba, their son, Creepy Child Tsurugi, and Ninja Maid Kei Nijimura. Over the course of the Part, they gain new members in the form of the Part's protagonist, Amnesiac Hero Josuke, a Rock Animal and the Token Heroic Orc of the Rock Creatures, Iwasuke, and Norisuke's ex-wife and resident Black Sheep Kaato.
• The Forger family in Spy X Family is an interesting take on this trope. Each member of the family has a Secret Identity (Loid is a spy, Yor is an assassin, Anya is a telepath, and Bond can see the future), but each of them except Anya thinks the others are perfectly normal. Yor thinks that Loid is a mild-mannered psychiatrist, and Anya is actually his daughter from a previous marriage. Loid thinks Anya is simply the smartest kid at the Orphanage of Fear he found her at, and Yor is just an Office Lady who needed a male partner to get the Secret Police off her back. It's unclear how much Bond knows about the humans, but since he's a dog, it's not like he could tell anyone. Anya knows everyone's secrets, but she's not telling anyone.
  • Yor's brother Yuri has no idea about any of the family's secret identities, though Loid knows he's a member of the Secret Police.

Comic Books

• The Crossovers, who buck the idea that the Quirky Household residents don't need to worry about The Masquerade, because every member of the family is maintaining a different Masquerade. The dad Carter is the Flying Brick superhero Archetype, the mom Calista is a Vampire Hunter, the Bratty Teenage Daughter Cris secretly travels to a Sword and Sorcery word as the heroine Eradika, and her kid brother Clifford is communicating with The Greys.

Fan Works

• Child of the Storm:
  • The Avengers household is very much one of these. They're a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits, each with quite a few psychological issues, and a Family of Choice, kept more or less in order by Team Mom Pepper Potts. It gets to the point where explosions, Tony running around screaming and half-naked, or the Warriors Three performing an impromptu rendition of Mambo Number Five is just another day in the life.
  • The Royal Household of Asgard, though it's less obviously quirky, is also this trope - Loki mentions that his parents didn't care what he and Thor kept in their rooms as long as nothing ate the servants, and all unusual smells and explosions were kept within the room.
    • Likewise Algrim has developed two separate routines. In the same way that animals can predict upcoming thunderstorms, he can predict Royal Family arguments and explosions with incredible accuracy. When Harry is about to explode at Odin for not getting him out of the Dursleys, Algrim is noted to select a particularly heavy desk. Likewise, whenever he leaves a room where Loki (or latterly, Tony and Bruce) are experimenting, he steps outside, counts to eight, then ducks into the nearest alcove. Cue explosion.
• The Queen household in the Legacy Series is also this trope-everyone in the family is or used to be part of Team Arrow, it's full of usually-affectionate snark, and once Jon gets going as the second Arrow, they get sucked back into the wild world of vilgilantism.
• The tenants of Hôtel Camélia from The Legend of Royal Blue and La Sylphide is a "found family" example of this trope. Alphonse Agreste is the landlord, his grandson Gabriel is a Scholarship Student by day and a superhero by night, Frau Tannenbaum is a doddering Granny Classic who treats her houseplants like pets, Christine and Quentin Pons balance work and raising their kindergarten-age daughter Paulette, Giselle Marion is a nursing intern made all but nocturnal by her shift schedule, Davy Blaise is an anxiety-ridden law student, and M. Lévêque lives in the Creepy Basement and does most of the mansion's upkeep despite Gabriel never actually seeing him.
• The Date-Sanada household in SlifofinaDragon's Sengoku Basara fanfics (set both during the Warring States period and modern times (Heisei era-Reiwa era). Despite being unmarried, Date Masamune and Sanada Yukimura are living it quite well, with Masamune being the current head of the Date Yakuza syndicate and them having two kids Yuki (daughter) and Masa (son), and eventually their young grandson Tsukitora, who Masa gives birth to, courtesy of the obviously doomed Oyamada Nobushige, but Katakura Kojuro fills in being stepdad and Masa's second boyfriend.

Films — Animated

• The Parr family from The Incredibles films appear to be a nice suburban family. Little do their neighbors know that they are actually superheroes who have to keep their superpowers a secret to avoid lawsuits.
• In Meet the Robinsons, the Robinson family includes a patriarch with a smiley face drawn on the back of his head who always wears his clothes backwards (but claims his head is backwards) and his wife, a retired Ditzy Genius who loves dancing (called "baking cookies"). He has two brothers, one of whom is big and fat and needs to be fed lest disaster strike and married to a train enthusiast with very large model trains, the other of whom is a Henpecked Husband married to a ventriloquist dummy with two adult children who act like fighting kids: a sister who wears a giant skyscraper hat and a brother who flies around painting on everything. Their son invented almost everything anyone uses and his wife spent most of her life teaching frogs to dance, sing, and play instruments. She has two brothers, one of whom is a cannon enthusiast (both using and being shot out of, actually racing at one point with his train enthusiast in-law) and one of whom delivers pizza dressed as a superhero in a UFO. Their grandson is fairly ordinary in comparison but still managed to leave the garage door open so that one of the two family time machines got stolen. There's also a robot, a butler who is a giant squid, and two random twins (apparently unrelated to everyone else) who live in the flower pots on the stoop and compete for doorbell rings. They frequently have food fights at the dinner table, cheer and toast when people fail, and have a very difficult to navigate their own house. Still, they are one of the most functional loving families ever.

Films — Live-Action

• In Unstrung Heroes: young Steven Lidz' home, to a lesser extent. Especially quirky, however: the labyrinthine apartment (filled with hoarded junk) in which he lives with his eccentric uncles for awhile, after his mother's illness exacerbates the awkwardness of Steven's relationship with his father. Franz—actually Steven, now rechristened by his uncles; It Makes Sense in Context—undergoes an disorienting yet often enjoyable identity crisis. Then, as it turns out, at least one of his uncles is a bit more than merely eccentric. Franz must navigate between his uncles' pride in their heritage (complicated by imagined anti-Semitism lurking everywhere), and his inventor father's 100% materialist (i.e. anti-spiritual) worldview.
• Beetle Juice: The Maitland/Deitz family household is a quirky blend of a benevolent ghost couple mixed with a perky goth chick, her father and very artsy stepmother.

Literature

• The Moomin family, from the children's book series by Tove Jansson.
• Roleplay example — the cafe in Kokoro.
• The Bagthorpe family in The Bagthorpe Saga almost all have one or more screws loose - from arrogant, misanthrophic disaster magnet Mr Bagthorpe to advice-giver to all but her own family Mrs Bagthorpe to the three teenage/pre-teen Insufferable Geniuses that are William, Tess, and Rosie to their 4-year-old cousin and vortex of destruction Daisy Parker, comic mayhem is never far away thanks to their self-absorption and not being quite as clever as they like to think. Unsurprisingly, the books are mostly told from the bemused perspective of the Only Sane Man among them: 12-year-old "Ordinary" Jack Bagthorpe. However, if someone from outside the family threatens them in any way, the Bagthorpes don't hesitate to band together against the outsider.
• The Cassons of Saffy's Angel and its sequels (the Casson Family Series).
• Harry Potter:
  • The Weasleys fit this, due to their seven children (nearly all with extremely different personalities), Mama Bear mother, eccentric father, weird pets (hyperactive owl; ancient, enfeebled owl; and ghoul), all crammed into a small, ramshackle house and, oh yeah, they're all wizards.
  • If they qualify, then they're normal compared to the Lovegood household.
• The Threepwood Household at Blandings Castle: The dithering Earl of Emsworth, his long-suffering sister Connie, the Hypercompetent Sidekick Beach, Emsworth's ditzy son Freddie (occasionally bordering on the Genius Ditz), and the Team Pet, the Empress Of Blandings.
• Tana French's The Likeness has one consisting of intelligent yet socially backwards twenty-something Daniel March and his best friends, Rafe, Abby, Justin and Lexie. The five live in a large estate which Daniel inherited from his uncle.
• This describes the Barbapapa family perfectly; a group of multi-colored blob monsters who can voluntarily shapeshift into anything they want to, and all with their different quirks. There's Barbabravo, a red jock sports fan and amateur Kid Detective; Barbabright, a blue scientist; Barbazoo, a yellow Animal Lover, the only furry one and a black painter; Barbalala, a green calm musician; Barbabelle, a purple narcissistic beauty queen; and Barbalib, an orange intelligent bookworm. And that's without mentioning Frank and Cindy, or the many (though relatively normal) dogs and other animals that the kind, caring family keep around them.
• InCryptid: The Price family is a Badass Family of cryptozoologists who include a roofhopping ballroom dancer, a Badass Bookworm herpetologist, a roller derby-playing Sorcerer, a Dimensional Traveler Grandma who looks younger than her own grandkids, and a Human Outside, Alien Inside telepath who loves math. Oh, and they also live with hundreds of mice that worship them as gods.

Live-Action TV

• Subverted by The Young Ones, in which none of the characters in the house can actually stand one another for any significant length of time. This doesn't count as an instance of Dysfunctional Family, as the characters in a Dysfunctional Family show are permitted to get along with one another despite their differences.
• The Coneheads from Saturday Night Live.
• The Addams Family and The Munsters are classic examples.
• 3rd Rock from the Sun: Tom, Dick, Harry and Sally. On Earth.
• The characters of Firefly sound a lot like a "walks into a bar" joke if you list them all. Two veterans, a pilot, a doctor, a crazy girl, a mercenary, a priest, a whore, and a mechanic walk into a spaceship...
• Million Yen Women: Shin's household consists of himself (a stuggling novelist), a cat and five women who were invited to move in with him by an unknown person. The women are a high-schooler, a rude Shameless Fanservice Girl, a Bookworm, a socially awkward woman, and a Nice Girl.
• Stephen Poliakoff's BBC miniseries Shooting the Past has the massive Fallon Photo Collection stored in a Big Fancy House and cared for by five eccentric curators. None of them are related, but they've all been doing this for so long that they regard each other this way. Chief curator Oswald Bates (Timothy Spall) says they're liable to be regarded as "pathetic dusty people who just stepped out of an Ealing comedy with Margaret Rutherford."
• Pataclaun is basically if the Flintstones met Casper. It stars a ditzy housewife for a mother, an abrasive father, three quirky ghosts, and a baby with the intelligence and foresight of a college student. And they're all clowns, also.

Roleplays

• Often in multifandom Role-Playing Games on LiveJournal, characters will form together in a (very quirky) band of True Companions depending on where they live. For example, the game Polychromatic has characters from Princess Tutu, Ouran High School Host Club, Chrono Crusade, and Count Cain among others that have settled in a building known as "The Opera House". The result is a chaotic but tightly-knit group of character that often treat each other like family. (Poly has tons of characters, so this is just one example of many.)

Theater

• Made famous in the 1936 Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway theatre hit, You Can't Take It With You, by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, making this a fairly well aged ensemble. This also applies to the movie verson.

Webcomics

• Housepets!: Wolf House, the informal nickname for a single household in the small suburbia of Babylon Gardens owned and paid for by the wealthy Milton Family. True to its name, its lived in most prominantly by the sprawling wolf clan trying to adjust to modern society outside the woods, but also houses a family of dogs, a red panda, squirrel, and bobcat. A Running Gag after a while of this becomes just how cramped the place is and how much money goes into letting everyone inside stay rent-free.
• The Verres family of El Goonish Shive, consisting of two shapeshifters (One an adopted weresquirrel with enormous magical power, the other a Chivalrous Perverted Mad Scientist who causes oodles of Gender Bending.) is the most noticeable example. Far more subtly is the Dunkel household, which is fairly normal other than having an Opposite-Sex Clone of the Ordinary High-School Student Elliot, and the fact that the parents show almost no concern (compared to most people) when their son randomly changes sex or breaks into a government installation and brings back said mysterious twin sister. They just give a lecture then offer their kids brownies. It gets really, really weird after a while.
  Dan: I also liked that reasoning because it gave me the idea for this comic, and I love writing scenes like this. There's a certain madness to the Dunkel household that, in my opinion, makes the Verres household look relatively sane. It's enough that I feel I must now assure you, the audience, that there are no questionable ingredients in Mrs. Dunkel's brownies.
• Bob, Jean, Molly, and Snookums in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!. Could probably expand it to include Galatea, Auntie Voluptua, Roofus, and Djali.
• The River family from Irregular Elis. A Spanish webcomic about a Badass Family of "Superheroes" with a lot of Hanna-Barbera influence.
• At many points, the cast of Sluggy Freelance.

Web Original

• Agents of the Protectors of the Plot Continuum tend to come in pairs, and while antagonism between them is sometimes played up for comedic effect, this trope applies almost universally
• The Jamesen-Larssen family in The Slave Breakers - of the seven regular members, only two are actually related, and almost everyone else is having sex with each other - not to mention the near-constant parade of trainees in and out of the house, who must also be sexed up pretty often. They make it work.

Western Animation

• The Planet Express staff from Futurama straddle the border between the Quirky Household and True Companions. In the episode "Future Stock", Fry even says, "We're not a traditional family, like the Johnsons next door or the lesbian coven across the street, but we're still a family!"
• The boarders in Hey Arnold! are portrayed this way in several of the later episodes.
• The residents of Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends.
• The Oblongs. 'Nuff said.
• The Chan family, in Jackie Chan Adventures, have a rather strong sense of this, consisting of a twelve year old who can sneak in anywhere with almost ninja-like efficiency (whether she's wanted or not), a grumpy, snarky old witchdoctor, a former sumo wrestler turned villainous Tank turned Gentle Giant chi wizard in training, and a rather stressed out archaeologist with a knowledge of martial arts as good as... well, he's Jackie Chan, you do the math.
• The Flynn-Fletcher Family from Phineas and Ferb. A father who's an expert on random and obscure antiques, a mother who was once a one-hit-wonder, a semi-neurotic teenage girl who likes screaming at cheese, a pet platypus who's secretly a special agent, and two brothers who do everything.
• The Cake household in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. For one thing, Pinkie Pie is part of it. There's also Mr. and Mrs. Cake's precocious foals Pound Cake (a pegasus) and Pumpkin Cake (a unicorn), and Pinkie's toothless pet alligator Gummy.
• The Goof family on Goof Troop is a single parent household where the father is a clumsy idiot (Goofy) and the son is a snarky High-School Hustler (Max). The closest thing they have to problems are Max feeling embarrassed when people say he reminds them of his dad, but they are extremely loving and close, especially compared to their neighbors.
• The Eggert family on Pelswick has a Cool Old Lady grandmother, an absurdly politically correct single father, a Disabled Snarker big brother, an Adorably Precocious Child little sister, and a baby yet to grow into his quirk. They're very loving and supporting of each other. The household gets quirkier if it includes Pelswick's Guardian Angel.
• The Duckman family in Duck Man; Duckman himself is a widow, his sister-in-law is the mother figure even when they hate each other, he has two/three sons (one of them has two heads and the other is toddler-level dumb) and a grandmother in a constant coma.
• Gravity Falls: Once Dipper and Mabel come to stay with Stan, their portion of the Pines family starts to evolve into one of these. First there's Cool Grunkle Stan, then Polar Opposite Twins (who are best friends all the same) Dipper and Mabel. Then Soos, who is gradually revealed to idolize Stan as a father figure, and is implied to see the twins as his own siblings. And by the end, they are all implied to feel likewise about him, especially Stan. Then there's Wendy, who could easily be considered far more than an employee and friend after all the adventures they've been on together. This household, which already zigzagged the trope a bit, teeters much farther toward a Dysfunctional Family littered with Poor Communication Kills upon the return of Ford Pines, but it's heavily implied to go back to being a Quirky Household after the finale, when Stan and Ford make up and Soos and Abuelita move in to the Mystery Shack.
• Kaeloo: Stumpy and his sisters make up one of these. Stumpy is a complete moron, Ardoise is obsessed with money and spends all her time investing in stocks, Cramoisie is a bully, Lavanade has supernatural powers, Nombril spends all her time trying to get people's attention, Poucave is an aspiring journalist who writes her articles by spying on people with a Paper-Thin Disguise and learning their deepest secrets, and Violasse is cursed with terrible luck and keeps having to be rescued from bad situations.
• The Loud House: Lincoln Loud is a fairly average kid who happens to be the middle of eleven children, the rest of whom are girls. There's Lori, the bossy oldest sister; Leni, the sweet but ditzy one; Luna, a budding rock starlet; Luan, a wannabe comedian obsessed with pranks and bad puns; Lynn, the athletic one; Lucy, a snarky pre-teen goth girl; the twins, tomboyish Lana and child pageant starlet Lola; Lisa, a four year-old super-genius; and Lily, the youngest.
• The Propulsion family from Ready Jet Go!, who do many odd things. They also all have an unironic love of failure, cannot keep their alien identities secret, are perpetually enthusiastic, and, according to Word of God, wake up each day having forgotten previous events.
• Jacob's family from Jacob Two-Two, which consists of a mellow Author Avatar father, a multi-faced and soft-spoken housewife, a Shrinking Violet younger brother, a Brother–Sister Team who love to play jokes, a Bratty Teenage Daughter and a slacker older brother. The quirkiness also extends to an Alter Kocker grandpa and a Granola Girl aunt.
• The Pearson family from Pepper Ann share a duplex with their relatives, the Diggety family. The Pearsons consist of a perky Glamorous Single Mother and two tomboyish daughters (a smartass Meganekko and a masculine stoic), while the Diggety family consists of a Granola Girl hippie mother, a dad who is a beefy cop on a health food streak, and a slacker teenage son. They’re always there for each other.

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