Playing With / Hollywood Genetics

Basic Trope: A character looks wildly different from their biological family.

• Straight: Alice is a green-eyed redhead, Bob is a blue-eyed blond, and their daughter Carol has black hair and dark eyes.
• Exaggerated: Carol also has dark skin, while the rest of her family is pale.
• Downplayed: Carol has dark eyes, but her dad's blond hair and her mother's pale complexion.
• Justified:
  • Carol looks like she does because she is a mutant, or a Reincarnation of someone with that appearance.
  • Carol dyes her hair and wears colored contacts.
  • Because blue and green eyes are genetically recessive, Carol ended up with dark eyes because she didn't get the other gene from both Alice and Bob.
  • Genetic analysis notes that Carol specifically mutated.
• Inverted:.
  • Carol is a Patchwork Kid— she has blond hair with red streaks, one blue eye and one green eye.
  • Strong Family Resemblance.
• Subverted:
  • It turns out that Alice had an affair with black-haired, dark-eyed Dan around the time of Carol's conception...
  • Carol was adopted.
• Double Subverted:
  • ... but a DNA test is done and Bob is her biological father.
  • Carol was adopted but it turns out that she was the long lost biological daughter her adopted parents thought they lost when she was a newborn.
• Parodied: Carol is born a completely different species for no adequately explained reason.
• Zig-Zagged: Carol is born to a dark-haired father and red-haired mother, meaning she should be dark-haired as well since red hair is recessive... except it's revealed her father has red hair in his family, making this possible.
• Averted: Carol is a realistic combination of her parents, and even has a few traits unique to herself.
• Enforced: The directors needed to hire big star celebrities, but couldn't get them to resemble their in-character relatives.
• Lampshaded:
  Carol: I'm Carol, Bob and Alice's daughter.
  Emily: You sure of that?
• Invoked: A medicine Alice takes while she's pregnant with Carol has this as a side effect.
• Exploited: When going through her rebellious teenage phase, Carol pretends not to be related to Alice and Bob.
• Defied: ???
• Discussed: ???
• Conversed: ???
• Implied:
  • As in "Lampshaded", where both Bob and Alice are The Ghost.
  • Or vice versa: Carol is The Ghost and Alice and Bob are asked if that's really their daughter.

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