Mama Bear / Literature

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• In 1632, Wallenburg's Croatian mercenaries quickly learn that it is a very bad idea to attack a town whose defenses include two very formidable female fighters and a female tactical expert, all of whom are currently pregnant (one with her second child, her first also being in town). For bonus Too Dumb to Live points, they go after the school, where most of the town's kids are being protected.
• Animorphs:
  • The Diversion, where the Animorphs finally out themselves to their family, has several examples. Cassie's mother puts her body between her daughter and Ax, whom she thinks is dangerous, mutated wild animal. Rachel's mother grabs a spice rack and faces down what she believes is a full grown male grizzly bear to protect her two younger daughters (unaware said bear is her actually oldest). Tobias compares this to the way his own mother seems to have abandoned him, but the book ends with her taking a Dracon beam in the back for him too.
  • Eva, Marco's mother, repeatedly denies opportunities to free herself from the torment of being Visser One's slave (which at one point had her pushed off a cliff and then tortured) in order to help prevent an all out war that would very likely claim the lives of her husband and son. Obviously, badassery is genetic in the Animorphs universe.
  • Visser One herself is a villainous example. She is a Puppeteer Parasite who conceived and delivered twins through a human host and considers them her own, though she was forced to give them up to maintain her cover. The whole reason she opposes an open war to conquer Earth is because it could kill billions, and those billions might include the only two humans she cares about.
  • Rachel's a Mama Bear to the rest of the kids and Jake is the Papa Wolf.
• In Armada, the hero Zack's mom Pamela goes to defend her son with a baseball bat against alien drones before getting a laser weapon instead.
• In Batman Cant Fly by David Hines, David, the narrator, has a nasty experience at a swimming pool with a paedophilic attendant who sees him having an erection and orders him into the changing room, threatening to call the police on him and insisting on measuring his penis. David agonises over it and eventually confides in his mother. Her response is to drag him to the pool and make him point out the attendant, before going into a side room with the attendant and completely terrorising him. It's not known what she said to him or the manager, but afterwards she warns the attendant that if he ever lays a finger on her or anyone else's child, she'll "speak to someone, and it won't be your balls they'll cut". She ends by throwing the broken ruler at him.
• The Belgariad:
  • Having found the man she believed to have kidnapped her son, Ce'nedra went psycho in his direction. She had to be restrained.
  • Do NOT threaten ANY of Beldaran's descendants or you will have a very pissed, very powerful Polgara making sure you have a VERY long time to regret it.
• In John Varley's story The Bellman, Anna Louise Bach. Think that because she's in labor she can't defend her about-to-be-born child? Guess again. She's got a power drill.
• Beloved: Sethe, the main character, attempts to kill her children in order to protect them from having to go back into slavery. She only succeeds with the titular Beloved.
• In Black Maria, Mig's mother becomes very angry when she finds out that Aunt Maria had turned her son into a wolf and tried to get the town to shoot him. Later, when Mig is being held captive in the orphanage (which is essentially used to brainwash the town's children), her mother storms in and demands that the people in charge tell her where her daughter is. All we see is the mother dragging the head of the orphanage and shaking her for locking Mig up, but it's implied that she did more. The children in the orphanage are delighted and cheer her on.
• The Black Spider: The titular giant demon was not caught and buried alive by a soldier or a hunter, but for the mother of one of its victims.
• The Bridge Kingdom Archives: In Traitor Queen, harem wives are very protective of harem children, both their own and born of other wives. Which is why they particularly hate the king's spymaster Serin and have given him the nickname "Magpie". It's not only that his voice is so grating — magpies are known to kill young songbirds.
• Bruce Coville's Book of... Spine Tinglers: It's made very clear that the gigantic monster at the end of Grendel is going to get revenge on the scientists and photographers who have been running rampant on her baby's corpse.
• Cassandra Kresnov: The titular character discovers that she's this after she befriends a trio of war orphans in Operation Shield. Considering that she's an Artificial Human supersoldier who makes the Terminator look about as threatening as a Robosapien doll, any threat to her kids quickly becomes a Mook Horror Show.
• The Chemical Garden Trilogy: Cecily shoots Vaughn, partly to protect her baby from him.
• The Chronicles of Dorsa: Joslyn essentially becomes a surrogate mother to Milo and Linna, becoming very protective of them. With her being an extremely skilled warrior, a person threatening them will certainly face dire consequences from her.
• In Chronicles of Chaos, while Echidna is never exactly safe, it is the death of her son that inspires her to come and slaughter every human being she finds.
• Chronicles of the Raven: Erienne in spades. Most of the book Nightchild is devoted to her role as this. Friend or foe, warrior or mage, nothing will prevent her from protecting her and Denser's daughter.
• Chrysalis (RinoZ): Ants may not have traditional family roles, especially monster ants with asexual reproduction, but their first queen still views them all as her children, and she goes on the warpath when they are threatened by Garralosh. She still doesn't have the raw power to win, but she's able to break through Garralosh's armour and draw blood, the first wound Garralosh has suffered in many years.
• Sherrilyn Kenyon's Dark Hunter: Particularly in any of the books that mention the Peltiers — a family of Katagari (animals who can turn into humans) bears. You do not mess with Nicolette 'Mama Lo' Peltier or her family. She will beat ten types of crap out of you before you have time to rethink your decision or write out your will.
• Deadworld Isekai: When Matt starts killing young Clownrats, their mother is furious, and once she finds him, she goes berserk.
  The dungeon has been scanning records of your home planet to better serve you, and can compare this to a mother experiencing a burst of adrenaline and suddenly being able to lift an entire car off her child. It's not a good situation for you, but honestly, you were kind of asking for it.
• Dear America:
  • In A Coal Miner's Bride: The Diary of Anetka Kaminska, Anetka and her family were having rocks thrown at them. She tried to ignore it until one hit her step-daughter at which point she says she became a mad woman like a mother cat and ran after the culprits.
  • Mrs. Roe in A Line in the Sand responds to a raid on the village by loading a musket. When her daughter asks if she's really going to shoot someone, she says she will if she has to: no one is going to hurt her family.
• In the 4th Dexter novel, Dexter by Design, a bound and gagged Rita manages to knock her kidnapper into a running table saw in response to his threats to her children and husband.
• This trope sees many uses in Terry Pratchett's Discworld:
  • Magrat in Carpe Jugulum who disposed of Countess Magpyr in a cold-hearted Mama Bear showdown. While she had a Beware the Nice Ones moment in every book prior to her daughter's birth, it was always a one-off thing triggered by a Berserk Button. In this book, though, her determination to protect baby Esme makes her possibly the most in-control of the witches (at least in Granny Weatherwax's absence). As Agnes thinks, mothers aren't wet, they're only slightly damp.
  • Sergeant Jackrum in Monstrous Regiment cares deeply for those under her protection. She will fight many foes and blackmail the top brass of the army to keep them safe.
  • Also invoked and deconstructed by Granny Aching in The Wee Free Men, where she teaches a valuable lesson with the aid of a Mama Sheep.
  • In Mort there's mention of a sacrificial goat that gave birth to twins just before the fatal part of the ceremony, and chased all the priests out of the Temple of Blind Io in defense of her kids.
  • It's mentioned in one of the books that one of the only creature Greebo ever backed down from was a vixen with pups (this is the Greebo who will chase bears up trees).
  • Before meeting Sam Vimes, the only thing Sybil Ramkin really cared about was looking after her swamp dragons. In Thud!, upon learning that the dwarf who just got incinerated by said swamp dragons was the fourth member of a team of assassins sent into their home to be killed or captured and the number remaining is unknown, she hands Sam one of the dragons and says "Coal him up."
  • Glenda in Unseen Academicals, towards pretty much everyone in her sphere. According to Vetinari ^note who should certainly know — her grandmother was the cook at the Assassins' Guild when he was at school there, and had a standing rule about never using her food to poison anyone, it's a family trait:
    That's a Sugarbean woman for you, Drumknott, little domestic slaves until they think someone has been wronged and then they go to war like Queen Ynci of Lancre, with chariot wheels spinning and arms and legs all over the place.
• The narration of The Divine Comedy compares the resident Mentor Archetype, Virgil of Limbo, to a mother who is woken up by a fire and grabs her kid without pausing, putting his safety above her own. In the same way as that figurative Mama Bear, Virgil "snatched [Dante] up" and rushed out of the circle before any demon could scratch him.
• Dolores Claiborne: Dolores puts up with years of physical and mental abuse from her husband, because her main focus is giving her kids the best life she can by saving for each of them to go to college. But when she finds out that he's hurting the kids, he has to die. She's very methodical about it, arranging to make it look like an accident and ensuring that none of her children are home at the time it happens.
• In Don't Look Back, Sam's mother Joanna is utterly furious when she finds out that Cassie's mother slapped Sam and wants to sue her for assault. She takes this up to the hilt in the end when she shoots her own husband, Steven, to protect Sam and Carson from him after he reveals his true colors as Cassie's killer.
• No matter the supposed heroics of the main cast, the prisoners' escape from Pax Tharkas in the first Dragonlance novel (Dragons of Autumn Twilight) would have ended in utter disaster if a certain old, insane, and technically evil dragoness hadn't come through for 'her' (adopted) children in the end and taken on the other (younger and stronger) dragon present all by herself.
• Dragonvarld: Although she admits she's really not that good a mother to him, Bellona sets out at once to find her adoptive son Ven once he disappears and won't let anything stop her.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Charity Carpenter, who is not only a badass with a sword, but fiercely protective of her kids, to the point where she scares even Harry.
  • There's Susan Rodriguez, who performs a Heroic Sacrifice for her daughter from being sacrificed by vampires. During this sacrifice, she had killed a man and drank his blood, changing her into a full vampire and losing her soul, but she held onto the last fragments of her humanity to allow Harry Dresden to kill her and destroy the whole Red Court, all for the love of her daughter.
  • Hints of this with Harry's mother as well. Since Harry is quite a lot like her, this is almost a certainty.
  • Then there's Queen Mab. Now, she probably didn't give two shits about some two-bit players trying to cause trouble in her court (until they spilled blood), but trying to harm Sarissa didn't exactly earn her favor.
  • Titania almost kills Harry, despite the fact that he was trying to save the world and everything in it, because Harry killed Aurora in a previous book (for a good reason of course). She had been getting therapy, lucky for him and the world.
• Earth's Children: Ayla is fiercely protective of her children or those she perceives as her children. When her newborn son Durc is considered deformed - meaning he must be left to die - Ayla runs away with him to a small cave she had lived in when she was cursed with death a year or so earlier, intending to return after seven days, as if a baby lives that long it must be accepted by the clan's leader. This is despite the fact she is still torn, heavily bleeding and quite weak from her traumatic birth, which almost killed her. She later stands up to Broud in front of everyone and calls him out when he tries to separate her from her son, and vehemently defends Durc and his half-Clan heritage from her own people. She's very protective of her animals, some of whom she regards as her children (especially as she raised them from babies). When her cave lion Baby appears at the Mamutoi Summer Meeting, she flings herself between him and some spear-wielding hunters to protect him despite the dangers. She risks her life to rescue her horse Whinney when she gets caught up in stampede near a cliff. She also freaks out on Jondalar when he (reluctantly) suggests they Mercy Kill her horses because they can't make it over a glacier (the ice is so sharp it cuts open their hooves) and instead comes up with another solution (leather booties to protect their feet).
• Emergence:
  • Eleven-year-old black belt Candy beats a grown man to death when he makes the fatal error in judgement of launching a potentially deadly attack with a frying pan on her lifelong pet/sibling Terry (a hyacinth macaw), who is referred to as her "child substitute".
  • A would-be rapist finds out about Mama Bear the hard way when Kim catches him with six-year-old daughter Lisa. Kim's biggest distress over this incident is how long it took to get the mess out of the carpet.
• "First Law": Emma Two abandoned a human in danger, violating the First Law of Robotics, because otherwise the human would've killed their child. No, how Emma was able to give birth is not explained.
• In The Fight for Home, Arianna goes out on her own to engage an approaching enemy fleet. Said fleet wishes to kill her son and his crew and she will only accept either the commander being dead or the fleet going through her dead body to get to her son.
• Averted in Frostflower and Thorn because while Thorn mounts a daring rescue for her biological son Starwind she's doing it for Frost's sake, not his, and while Frostflower would give her life for her son she would not take a life for him, especially since she knows he won't be harmed by the priests.
• Full Dark, No Stars: In "A Good Marriage", Darcy discovers that her husband is a Serial Killer. She realizes that her children will run into serious problems with careers and personal lives if this becomes public knowledge, so she solves the problem herself by killing her husband in a way that looks accidental, to keep his activities secret while putting a stop to same.
• In John Gardener's Grendel, told from Grendel's point of view, he recalls a time when he was separated from his 'mama' as a child (he actually calls her that sometimes!), with his ankle trapped between two trees, unable to free himself. After a while of screaming for his mama - so loudly the ground rumbles - that a bull comes and attacks him. Why? Because Grendel was going after a newborn calf that he smelled, distracting him from getting home before dawn. After the bull gives up on trying to knock him out of the tree and gore him, Grendel encounters humans for the first time. Who eventually attack him. Just as Hrotgar's ax hits him across the shoulder, Mama comes in with such a fireball of fury, scaring off the humans...and maybe even Grendel himself. And she tears down the trees to make him fall out.
• Hank the Cowdog:
  • The series brings us Sally May, mother of Little Alfred and Baby Molly. Unfortunately, Hank is quite often the target of her scorn for "corrupting" her children. Still, more than once she's stood up to some pretty serious dangers to keep her kids safe.
  • Gertie Cat, Though being thin and tired from constant nursing, manages to make a bull run for it's life when it tries to eat the haystack that her kittens are hiding in. She even manages to bring out Hank's Papa Wolf side. When Pete threatens them Hank (quite gladly) pitches him out into a downpour.
• Harry Potter:
  • This is the reason Harry survived his first encounter with Voldemort. His mother Lily was given the chance to flee but she chose to protect baby Harry with her life, which granted Harry magical protection. Notice that this was a young woman in her 20s without her only weapon and in front of one of the most powerful mages ever, and she chose death over handing her baby to the Death Eaters.
  • McGonagall has shades of this when it comes to her students, as shown when she defends Harry from Snape. Also, in a castle controlled by Death Eaters, she, despite being noted as old, continues to stand up to people who are known for their hobby of torturing and killing people they don't like, all for the sake of her students. And in the final book when she learns Hogwarts is about to be attacked by Voldemort's forces, she takes charge to protect her students.
  • Narcissa Malfoy, Draco Malfoy's mother, proves that Even Evil Has Loved Ones: in the seventh book she lies to Voldemort so she can reunite with her son Draco. She may be a pureblood supremacist with the mindset of Screw the Rules, I Have Money!, but she is willing to cross the mightiest dark wizard of all time to ensure her son's safety. Extra marks for successfully lying to the greatest mind-reader of the current age.
  • Even Professor Trelawney gets a moment of this: the last we see of her in the books is when she fights off Fenrir Greyback to defend Lavender Brown, one of her favorite students.
  • In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, when resident Dark Action Girl Bellatrix Lestrange nearly kills Ginny Weasley, Ginny's House Wife mother Molly goes ballistic and kills her in a matter of seconds with a well-placed curse at the chest. "NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!" quickly became the most-quoted line from the book. This is a double example: Bellatrix showed her "Too Dumb to Live" credentials by mocking Molly's recent loss of one of her sons, Fred, which only got the Action Mom even more pissed off than she already was. According to Word of God, Molly comes from a family of aurors, and her brothers Fabian and Gideon Prewett had been killed by Voldemort and his followers years earlier. Twin brothers F and G? Not likely a coincidence. The reaction could have been skill or sheer instinct — remember Molly's boggart, alias her biggest fear? Losing her family and friends. And, at the time, Molly (and everyone else) still thought Harry was dead, whom she viewed as a son. This was just one more reason for her to want to kick the Death Eaters' asses. Just how powerful does Molly turn out to be? Earlier, Professor McGonagall was ambushed by four Aurors firing Stunners at her chest, which knocks her out. Molly fires a Stunner at Bellatrix that causes immediate cardiac arrest. It's turned up even more in the film, in which the spell squeezes Bellatrix's chest for a moment, then disintegrates her.
• In M.T. Anderson's novel He Laughed With His Other Mouths, Dolores Dash battles an evil alien who has her son under mind-control. She causes a building to collapse on the alien.
• The Heroes of Olympus:
  • An evil example with Ma Gasket.
  • Frank's mother protected her son from an actual bear by turning into one herself.
• Honor Harrington: The life of whoever hurts anyone under the titular heroine's command or protection is forfeit.
• Sophie Pendragon (née Hatter) in House of Many Ways: Do not touch Morgan Pendragon or SHE WILL KILL YOU.
• In Death: Areena Mansfield murdered Richard Draco in Witness in Death. Why? Because he was having sex with their daughter Carley. She had told him that she was their daughter because she thought it would turn off his interest in her. Instead, he went and did it, knowing that he was committing incest. He bragged about it to her and wanted to have a threesome composed of him, Areena, and Carley. If you do not consider this a good enough reason for her to go Mama Bear, then you clearly have no soul!
• Journey to Chaos: When Sathel caught her daughter's kidnapper, the only reason she didn't kill him then and there was because he was about to turn himself in to a Justice Station. Instead, she subjected him to years of poison-induced illness, nightmarish hallucinations, and horrible itching.
• The Jungle Book: Mother Wolf, whose very first scene involves standing down Shere Khan the tiger over Mowgli's life, and who is named "Raksha the Demon" for a very good reason.
• Done to absolutely terrifying effect in Agatha Christie's short story "The Last Seance". In the story, a young woman named Simone who is genuinely gifted with the psychic ability to channel the dead plans on finally retiring, as her power exhausts her mentally and physically. However, she agrees to perform one last seance for a woman named Madame Exe, who lost her only daughter Amelie and still mourns her. When Madame Exe shows up, she is reminded that she must not touch whatever manifestation appears for fear of harming Simone. But when the young woman does manage to physically channel Amelie's ghost, Madame Exe goes absolutely ballistic and grabs the child, despite Simone's screams. This ends up killing the psychic (she manifested the spirit from her own body, and breaking the link essentially ripped her in half), but Madame Exe doesn't care. All she wants is Amelie, and she is willing to defy death itself if it means getting her back.
• Legacy of the Dragokin: Two examples: one hero and one villain
  • Daniar will break her Thou Shall Not Kill rule if you kill her son
  • Kthonia is The Juggernaut powered by maternal fury.
• Lensman: Inverted in Children of the Lens, in which the heroine's daughter wreaks havoc with the mind of an enemy agent in order to force that agent's co-operation with her mother. In fact, the trope plays almost straight in-universe because the agent views the mother as automatically more capable than the daughter (not knowing that the inverse is true here) and alters her perceptions and behaviour accordingly.
• In The Man In The Queue by Josephine Tey, the murderer finds out that her daughter's jealous ex-boyfriend is planning an If I Can't Have You… murder, and kills him before he gets the chance.
• Averted in Masked Dog by Raymond Obstfeld. The sociopathic Femme Fatale Spy witnesses her daughter held captive by a serial rapist and murderer of adolescent girls, and is relieved that she doesn't feel outraged and driven to extremes to save her child like she heard mothers are in those circumstances.
• Gaia Marinos from Natural Law. She is raised in the wilds to be a warrior, goes into the gladiatorial games straight after delivering her son, and will lead armies to war, all to make the world a safe place for her son to live in.
• Well, Mama Fox in the case of Akahana in "No Need for a Core?". It turns out that Kazues gardener/herbalist mom was taking a break to raise her kid, and is in fact a seven-tailed kitsune druid. Complete with a cassowary animal companion.
• On the Jellicoe Road:
  • Extreme side character Trinny, leader of touchy-feely Darling House (the story takes place at a boarding school).
    If those cadets come near my Year Sevens again, I will maim them.
  • Tate, when she finds out her neighbor left her daughter with a child molester.
• Rinthy from Outer Dark after she realizes that her brother, Culla, lied about their incest child dying after their birth and actually abandoned them. She leaves her home and goes on a months-long journey to find the local tinker that she figures has the baby, but, unfortunately, she is ultimately unsuccessful, thanks to interference from the antagonists.
• In Penny From Heaven, Penny relates an incident in which her grandmother threatened Bobby the neighborhood bully with a meat cleaver after he hit Frankie.
• In Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Sally Jackson, the loving and nurturing mother of Percy, was shown fighting in the last battle using a stolen shotgun from the police.
• Jodi Picoult's novel Perfect Match is about a woman who shoots and kills a man who she believes molested her five-year-old son. Tragically, he turns out to have been innocent.
• In Please Don't Tell My Parents You Believe Her, Penelope's mother, The Audit, although The Dreaded herself, won't hesistate to take on another Dreaded to save Penny.
• Darcy in Quicksand House is a pre-teen, deranged, stab-happy version of this trope. She doesn't care much about most people, but she's extremely protective of her adopted little brother / son Drool, and even dotes on Leech despite Leech being so young that she should still register as unbearably ugly to adult humans (It Makes Sense in Context). The nannies are also all like that - threaten a nanny's charges, and she'll pull off her own leg and hit you with it in their defense.
• Sidney Sheldon's Rage Of Angels reveals lawyer Jennifer Parker to be a version of this, though she has to work indirectly. When her son is kidnapped, she knows time is of the essence, so she calls on the Mafia prince who's been lusting after her — whom she knows to be very bad news from personal experience — and asks him to do whatever he can to bring the child back alive, and when asked what to do with the kidnapper, she says "Kill him!" He mobilizes his forces to track them down, the child is rescued, and he kills the man himself. The two adults become lovers after this, setting up the remainder of the book.
• Coupled with an instance of Good Stepmother in Ragnar Lodbrok and His Sons: When her stepsons Erik and Agnar are killed by Eystein Beli, Aslaug drives on her biological sons to avenge them, and personally leads an army to battle Eystein, who is eventually defeated and killed.
• In Ratman's Notebooks, the title character's relationship with the Swarm of Rats starts when his mother orders him to drown the rodents that have infested her garden, but he's too impressed by the mother rat's determined efforts to rescue her babies to go through with it.
• In The Red Tent, when she finds out that her husband Laban had been fondling Leah and Zilpah, Adah proceeded to beat the ever-living crap out of him. When he was just inches away from dying from the resultant injuries, Adah swore that if he did it again, she would not only beat him up again, but that she would call upon the Powers That Be and have them give him some Laser-Guided Karma in the form of disease and impotence. Laban then made sacrifices to the gods, had a statue of one of their chief goddesses made, and bought Adah and his daughters jewelry...and never touched the girls again. She also brought it up again, when he had made a deal with Jacob to marry Rachel off to him, because Rachel had not yet menstruated. In all fairness, Laban didn't know that, but the threat was enough to get him to comply with his wife's wishes, and extend the time Jacob worked for him.
• How about the Badger mothers in Redwall?
  • Redwall, Constance is calm and peaceful... then Cluny threatens Redwall and she lifts A GIANT TABLE AND THREATENS TO CRUSH HIM WITH IT!
  • Marlfox, Cregga; the former Badger Lord of Salamandastron; now blind and seemingly peaceful...she tears through half of the Marlfoxes' troops to get the Dibbuns (kids) to safety.
  • Bellmaker, Mellus, very old; gives her life to protect the Dibbuns from Captain Slipp.
• Hirsent from The Reynard Cycle turns into one of these after giving birth to Pinsard. It's understandable, as she's already lost two children.
• Amelia Smudge in Jennifer Trafton's novel The Rise And Fall Of Mount Majestic. She seems tough and unsympathetic to her daughters, but when they're endangered, look out.
• In the Dale Brown book Rogue Forces, former Kurdish separatist Zilar Azzawi retakes her sword after a Turkish airstrike kills her husband and children.
• After a divorce, Princess Elena in Royal Escape by Susan Froetschel kidnaps her own son, an attempt to remove both sons from royal system.
• Mere Lessard of Sacré Bleu nearly brains the titular muse with a crepe pan when she believes that Bleu is endangering her son. She earlier gives a few gruesome examples of what she will do to "Juliette" if Lucien comes to any harm whatsoever.
• In The Sea Hawk, Fenzileh will do anything to advance her son's future.
• In The Secret of Platform 13, Larina Trottle is a villainous example, using her vast resources to move heaven and earth to protect her son from kidnappers. (Despite having kidnapped a child herself to get a son; these new kidnappers, in fact, are trying to restore him to his rightful family.) She also plots to destroy the life of her servant boy, Ben, for the simple crime of being smarter and more generally likeable than her little darling. (For added hypocrisy, Ben was the kid she kidnapped and planned to raise as her son, until she got pregnant and tossed him aside.)
• Septimus Heap:
  • Although Sarah Heap usually proves that Adults Are Useless, she can become very vocal if her family or any of her children are threatened in any way, as Marcia Overstrand had to find out the hard way in Flyte:
  • Queen Cerys's, Jenna's mother, job is to keep her daughter safe from harm, as she does by throwing Queen Etheldredda out of the Queen's Room in Physik.
• Seven Years Awesome Luck: Even with all his magical power, Kester is still mildly intimidated by Jacqueline's campaign to track down the witch who's toying with her family and make them stop.
• The Shadowhunter Chronicles:
  • In The Mortal Instruments:
    • Inquisitor Imogen Herondale hates Jace because she resents the fact that Valentine's son survived the Uprising while her own son, Stephen, was killed. This ends up backfiring on her in her final moments, when she realizes that Jace isn't Valentine's biological son, he's Stephen's, making him her grandson. Too bad she ends up dying before she can explain the truth.
    • Special mention goes to Jocelyn as well. She betrayed her husband, faked her death, and left her entire worldbehind at nineteen because she refused to let Valentine do to her daughter what he did to her son.
    • Lilith considers Jonathan her "son" due to him being tainted by her blood, and takes measures to protect him throughout the second trilogy.
  • In The Infernal Devices: Charlotte Branwell hovers somewhere between this and overprotective sister for the younger inhabitants of the London Institute.
• Shatter the Sky: Naava is the mother of all the dragons. She sets out to free all of them after Maren has liberated her, unwilling to rest if any remain slaves.
• In The Shining, Wendy Torrance treasures her son Daniel and will fiercely protect him from harm, even if it's ghosts or own possessed husband Jack who’s threatening Danny. At one point there's a moment where it seems like she has injured her son, but Jack immediately dismisses the idea knowingly full well that Wendy would sooner pour gasoline on herself and strike a match than hurt Danny.
• Sho-shan y la Dama Oscura:
  • Dagmar Obscura as an example of an Action Girl ascended to Action Mom. Don't dare to touch her beloved daughters because it doesn't matter if she's dead, she will find the way to kick your ass. Even her husband knows this.
  • Placida is this for Luisa after Dagmar dies.
  • Kadiri Miyamoto is this for everyone on her shrine. She's devasted before the death of one of her nuns.
• Inverted in Skulduggery Pleasant: Death Bringer when Valkyrie hears her mother was attacked by a mugger and breaks into his cell to beat him up.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Cersei Lannister's main motivation, and her only good trait, is her love for her children. Joffrey, Tommen and Myrcella are the world to her, and to protect them from a prophecy she has interpreted as saying that they'll be crowned and die before she kicks the bucket, she will do anything. Including arranging the death of her husband's bastards any time she finds one, baby or not.
  • Catelyn Stark also turns into one of these, going so far as to free Jaime "the Kingslayer" Lannister in exchange for her daughters Sansa and Arya, and later she goes on a Knight Templar-like vendetta against the Freys because, among other things, they brutally killed her eldest son Robb.
  • Catelyn's sister, Lysa, who is so protective of her only son that she immediately packed up and headed back to the Vale the moment her husband died, so no one could take Robert away from her. Definitely crosses over into My Beloved Smother, as she still breastfeeds him even though he is six years old.
  • Note to anybody trying to attack Bear Island: the women of the place live up to the name, be they of House Mormont or not. What with regular Ironborn raids and their husbands, fathers and brothers often away at sea for long periods either fishing or trying to settle scores, the women and girls have carefully cultivated the instinct to protect their own by becoming Action Girls, Action Moms and Never Mess with Granny-types. Touch their kids with malice aforethought; get a face full of axe.
  • Rhaenyra Targaryen also qualifies, the mother of five sons and a stillborn daughter during the Dance of the Dragons, she becomes more and more vengeful as her sons die, stopping at nothing to try and avenge them. She outright forbade her younger children from participating and was also quite protective of her step-daughters, Baela and Rhaena.
  • Daenerys Targaryen doesn't lift a finger to save her brother Viserys from being murdered by Khal Drogo after he drunkenly threatens to kill her unborn baby. She has put up with her brother's abusive behavior for years, she has lobbied the Dothraki from punishing Viserys before for mistreating her, but the moment he threatens her baby, she will gladly show who is the real dragon of the relationship.
• In the Spiral Arm novel On the Razor's Edge, Bridget calls in the Hounds to get aid: they are going after her daughter into enemy territory. Later, one Shadow is surprise at how many Hounds followed; another is not, because she had stolen the cub from the Mama Bear.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Leia becomes one with the birth of the twins Jaina and Jacen, and later Anakin. She does not look kindly upon threats to her children.
  • The Han Solo Trilogy details Han in his youth and early years as a smuggler, and the first book, Paradise Snare, shows that Chewbacca wasn't the first Wookiee that he developed a close bond with. Serving as a cook aboard the outlaw Garris Shrike's vessel, she came to see the orphan Han Solo as a son, and he reciprocated the feeling. At 16 years of age, Han attempted to strike out on his own, knowing that Shrike would use his abilities as a pilot and scam artist until Han either got caught or was no longer useful. After stealing some supplies, Han met with Dewlanna to say goodbye, but was met by Shrike and his men, and past experience made it clear what was coming. Dewlanna rose to Han's defense and beat up Shrike's men, viciously shattering his brother's arm, before being gunned down by the outlaw. Her sacrifice allowed Han to escape and grow into the man that everyone knows him as.
  • Tash Arranda in Galaxy of Fear is sometimes an odd example. She starts the series at thirteen years old, with a brother a year younger. Feeling Promoted to Parent, she does what she can to help him with their Orphan's Ordeal, but has understandable separation anxiety and abandonment issues. When her brother disappears, Tash believes a Hutt gang lord who threatened both of them before may have abducted him, and goes to beard him in his lair without hesitation. In many other books they're more of a Brother–Sister Team with each helping out the other.
  • Kirney Slane a.k.a. Lara Notsil finds out in Mercy Kill that the new Wraith Squadron contains an alarming number of children or descendants of the original members. She makes Voort state that he will not recruit her children. Four times.
  • A rarely discussed, but still notable, example is Mara Jade Skywalker. Just because she's firmly under the Light Side of the Force doesn't mean she won't utterly destroy anyone who endangers her son Ben. Probably most notable in Sacrifice, in which her worry for Ben convinces her to go hunt and attempt to kill the two Sith Lords whom she thinks are plotting to kill him. She's partially right in that respect, and this leads to a very nasty brawl. Do not mess with a Mama Bear who's also a trained assassin. It will not end well for you. Unless you're Darth Caedus, and even then, he barely escaped.
• Meg in Stork Raving Mad. Think that because she's in labor with twins she can't defend her about-to-be-born children? Guess again. She's got a hat rack.
• In John Wyndham's short story "Survival", one of the stranded passengers resorts to extreme measures to make sure that her baby doesn't starve.
• Sweetheart: Bliss, Susan's hippie mother, takes someone out with a statue of Buddha to protect her full grown daughter.
• In A Tale of Two Cities, Miss Pross, although she is technically not Lucie Manette's mother, loves Lucie like a daughter. In order to protect Lucie and those she cares about (but mostly Lucie) she ends up killing Madame Defarge.
• Tales for the Midnight Hour plays maternal protectiveness for horror. A bored and disrespectful night guard, pulling himself out of staring at a princess' sarcophagus, sticks his gum to the back of a mummy's head. It crosses his mind afterwards that the mummy was said princess' son. Her spirit punishes him for desecrating her son's body by using the sarcophagus' painted eyes to hypnotize him into shutting himself inside it.
• In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Helen's fears for her son and not her own misery force her to take him and run away from her husband. While this may seem like logical behavior now, at the time the novel was written this was illegal, scandalous, and unheard of.
• There Is No Epic Loot Here, Only Puns: Perhal is a Royal Knight, one of the strongest fighters in the world, and contractually bound to serve despite being quite evil and having magic focused on devouring creation. At one point, when a teen has annoyed her, she decides she's going to take just "a little bite" before she goes home — and then she's on the ground, skin ripped and eyes and ears bleeding, after the boy's mother uses her own magic to massively overload Perhal's senses.
  Isanella: Don't.
• In The Three Hostages, Mary Hannay gets ferocious in defence of the youngest hostage, a small boy. She's not his mother, but it's made clear that her protectiveness toward him is driven by the thought of how she'd feel if her own small boy were in the same situation. In the climactic confrontation, the villain laughs in the faces of the male heroes but Mary genuinely terrifies him.
• Time Scout: Ianira. In Wagers of Sin, the fact that Skeeter was trying to rescue the father of her children gave her words extra weight, for both uptimers and downtimers.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth: Christopher Tolkien describes a Worthy Opponent version of this trope. In the wars between Gondor and the Wainriders, a revolt is arranged among some of the Wainriders slaves while the men are away on campaign:
    "But most of them perished in the attempt; for they were ill-armed, and the enemy had not left their homes undefended: their youths and old men were aided by the younger women, who in that people were also trained in arms and fought fiercely in defence of their homes and their children."
  • The Fall of Gondolin: In The Book of Lost Tales's version, Idril is described as fighting 'like a tigress' to protect her son Eärendil from Maeglin.
• Tranquilium: Lady Svetlana after giving birth in the beginning of Part Two. She goes out of her way to protect her little boy from revolutionary terror, war and a scarily ruthless conspiracy based in another dimension, though she got help along the way; for all her other issues and whatnot, the safety of her child clearly becomes an overriding concern for her for the rest of the book. This status of hers is also helped somewhat by the fact that she is actually pretty good at fist-fighting thanks to the training she underwent with her father's men (her father was a captain).
• Vampire Academy: Janine Hathaway is very protective of her daughter, and deeply cares about her safety and well-being. She is very intimidating to Rose's would-be boyfriends.
• Vorkosigan Saga:
  • Barrayar:
    • Cordelia Vorkosigan is an off-worlder who is mostly bored by the Byzantine politics of her husband's home planet Barrayar. Until a civil war puts her baby (in a high-tech incubator) in danger. Then she single-handedly defeats a usurping ruler and ends the war, and brings back the usurper's head in a shopping bag to make her point clear.
    • Princess Kareen Vorbarra makes a very credible attempt to kill her unwanted lover when she realizes the man is a threat to the life of her five-year-old son, Gregor. She fails, but not for lack of trying.
  • In Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, the controlled, undemonstrative half-haut Baronne Cordonah reveals her inner Mama Bear by pinning the treacherous ally who has endangered three of her children to the wall.
• Warrior Cats: Many queens behave like this whenever their kits are in danger or bullied. Several examples include Yellowfang, Leafpool, Sasha, and Sandstorm. Averted with Rainflower, the mother of Crookedstar and Oakheart, who cruelly neglects Crookedstar all because he broke his jaw. Thus, it's Shellheart who brings out his Papa Wolf roll. It is arguable why she does this, it is quite possible she does it out of tough love care, thinking that if she goes soft on him, he would not become a stronger individual. While she seems cold from his perspective, it could be much more than what is not described.
• Nancy goes into Mama Bear-mode in the climax of Where Are the Children?, combined with Determinator, upon figuring out her kidnapped children are being held at The Lookout and that her deranged ex-husband took them. She drives to The Lookout alone in the middle of a raging storm and with her windshield covered in ice (she rolls down the side window to see better), then continues on foot after crashing her car into a tree without so much as a breather. Even though she’s no match for him physically, she attempts to fight off Carl to save her kids, including biting a chunk out of his jowl when he strangles her. She then chases him up to a narrow and slippery widow’s walk to rescue Missy, barely being slowed down when Carl kicks her in the head, and manages to grab Missy before she's thrown off the balcony.
• In The Witches of Karres, Toll is the mother of one of the main characters — and the resident Great Gazoo is afraid of tangling with her.
• World War Z has a woman who goes into a blind rage when a zombie tries to get her daughter. Her children told her later that she had ripped its head off with her bare hands. There was also the nun who held off a zombie horde for quite some time with a large iron candlestick, protecting the children from the local Catholic school.
• Young Wizards:
  • Nita Callahan's mother in The Wizard's Dilemma turns into one of these when faced with the prospect of the Devil-equivalent taking Nita's soul. Her line is "She is still my daughter, and she does not have my permission!"
  • In High Wizardry, Dairine Callahan becomes the "mother" to a race of sentient silicon lifeforms, and a threat to them (as well as Nita and Kit) prompts her to tell the Devil-equivalent, "Touch them and you're dead meat." Shortly after, when a powerful ally appears to help out, the ally's gender turns out to be female, surprising the protagonists, said ally then comments "Men will fight bravely and be heroes, but for last-ditch defense against any odds... get a Mother."

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