Ok, killed the mother and almost killed the father. (I must have misremembered)
Still, a pretty life changing thing to happen to the brothers.
eta: We should probably return to the funny stuff.
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Amen to all of that
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Slight correction… Those based on fairy tales, the source material has the dead parent.
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That’s true, but not just for the older traditional fairy tales.
Meet the Robinsons (orphan)
Finding Nemo (mom has died)
Frozen (orphans)
Just to name a few.
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Valid point.
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This is exactly right. Give the protagonist some adversity to overcome. Give us a reason to root for them even more than we would. It’s a great theme, which is why it is used so often and over so many centuries of story-telling.
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So funny! 🧛♂️
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Missed some stuff?
Who are these parent-killing people? And why are we talking about them?
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OMG I hate you.
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slow 
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OK the fact I’m literally LOL over that is probably a red flag of some terrible disorder
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And now back to getting cards and letters from people I don’t even know
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I remember having this discussion in a college class (in ancient times):
A dead parent is probably one of the most convenient story vehicles to get there.
Researchers analysed over 1700 novels to reveal six story types – but can they be applied to our most-loved tales? Miriam Quick takes a look.
“My prettiest contribution to the culture” was how the novelist Kurt Vonnegut described his old master’s thesis in anthropology, “which was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun”. The thesis sank without a trace, but Vonnegut continued throughout his life to promote the big idea behind it, which was: “stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper”.
In a 1995 lecture, Vonnegut chalked out various story arcs on a blackboard, plotting how the protagonist’s fortunes change over the course of the narrative on an axis stretching from ‘good’ to ‘ill’. The arcs include ‘man in hole’, in which the main character gets into trouble then gets out again (“people love that story, they never get sick of it!”) and ‘boy gets girl’, in which the protagonist finds something wonderful, loses it, then gets it back again at the end. “There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers”, he remarked. “They are beautiful shapes.”
"Thanks to new text-mining techniques, this has now been done. Professor Matthew Jockers at Washington State University, and later researchers at the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab, analysed data from thousands of novels to reveal six basic story types – you could call them archetypes – that form the building blocks for more complex stories. The Vermont researchers describe the six story shapes behind more than 1700 English novels as:
Rags to riches – a steady rise from bad to good fortune
Riches to rags – a fall from good to bad, a tragedy
Icarus – a rise then a fall in fortune
Oedipus – a fall, a rise then a fall again
Cinderella – rise, fall, rise
Man in a hole – fall, rise
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I am DYING!
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You should just call it Autumn!! 
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Thank you! This gives my logic-loving brain something new to think about when reading or watching movies/shows. I enjoyed the analysis.
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