Gruesome Grandparent - TV Tropes

• The miniseries Scarecrow: Year One features a violently fundamentalist great-grandmother as the biggest influence in Jonathan Crane's childhood. She not only starved and physically beat him at the slightest misbehavior, but trained the local crows to swarm him if she was in a really bad mood. His grandmother wasn't much better. When Jonathan was born she wanted to bury him behind their family's mansion and pretend he was never born. He killed both of them.
• Humpty Dumpty of Arkham Asylum: Living Hell was also raised by a physically abusive grandmother. This, coupled with his almost supernaturally bad luck, broke his mind and made him obsessed with disassembling objects, studying them to learn how they worked, and then "fixing" them to be better (hence "All the king's horses and all the king's men / Couldn't put Humpty together again"). At some point, Humpty extended this philosophy to his grandmother, "fixed" her with an axe, and put her back together again with bootlaces. It's ambiguous whether Humpty consciously understood what he was doing the whole time, or if he's genuinely mentally-arrested enough to not realize.

Tai: What a shame I never got to bounce you on my knee.

• Ursule Valois was sent to live with her grandmother when she had trouble mastering the family's signature magic arts, who denied her food for days on end, forcing her to learn to cross a frictionless floor to receive it. She also gave Ursule a kitten to raise, only to then force her to kill it with her bare hands to get her used to the idea of seeing everything as a tool, especially human lives.
• The Patriarch of the Sherwood clan, protagonist Oliver Horn's great-grandfather, is shown in volume 10 to be one of the worst people in the entire series: when he and his father fled to the family estate while his mother Chloe Halford tried to fight off her former Gnostic Hunter comrades after they turned against her, he took them in... and immediately made it clear they were nothing more than tools for him, explaining why Chloe went no-contact and enrolled at Kimberly Magic Academy under a pseudonym. He inflicted a horrific Trauma Conga Line on young Oliver, first forcing him to relive his mother's Rasputinian Death through her Ghost Memory, and treated the comparatively weak Edgar as a Chosen Conception Partner and Oliver himself as little more than a test subject for the family's magic and carrier of Chloe's Superpowerful Genetics while paying only lip service to helping Oliver and Edgar avenge her. This finally escalated to the point where he drugged Oliver into raping and impregnating his cousin Shannon in hopes of breeding Chloe's powers back into the main family. Oliver's first murder as a young adult was him, as payback for all the abuse he inflicted on his descendants.

• As revealed in "Kayda 8: The Best Days of Our Lives (Part 2)", Pejuta's grandmother had a long-term plot to get Pejuta to leave school, by having people harass her, and almost got her killed.
• Eisenmadel's family is a mess. Her great-grandfather was the Nazi Theme Agent The Green Knight. While her grandmother, the original Eisenmadel, rejected her father's beliefs and became an anti-Fascist superheroine. Then her mother joins with the branch of the family which clung to The Fourth Reich's attempts to subvert the US government, with Erica herself joining her grandparents in opposing them.

• Fathom's grandfather Albatross kills most of their family and tries to kill Fathom himself before Fathom kills him in self-defense.
• Qibli is terrified of his grandfather, Vulture, because he physically abused Qibli and his siblings by putting them through harsh trials, such as letting them be bitten by snakes repeatedly to see how long they could last before they collapsed. Vulture also runs a crime syndicate, is covered in skull tattoos that represent every dragon he's killed, and orders an assassination attempt against Queen Thorn.

• Jon Snow is revealed in Season 6 to be the grandson of Aerys II Targaryen, better known as the Mad King, through the man's eldest son Prince Rhaegar.
• Lord Tywin Lannister averts this, surprisingly enough. Despite his despicable treatment of his children, he's overall not too bad to his grandkids. He's threatening and bullying to Joffrey but that's only because Joffrey is, well, Joffrey and Tywin's forceful demeanor is the only way he can get the little shit to actually listen. He ignores Myrcella and doesn't seem very broken up over her being sent to Dorne but he's never abusive to her and he's sincerely paternalistic and caring to Tommen, showing him genuine affection and reassurance that he will be a good king after Tommen shows that he has a decent head on his shoulders unlike Joffrey.

• A couple episodes also feature Pop-Pop, Dennis and Dee's grandfather. He is pretty well near death in his appearances, but the gang learns that not only was he a Nazi during the war, but the summer camp he took Dennis and Dee to as children was a neo-Nazi camp.

• Grandpa Victor and Grandma Ida see Reese as their favorite grandson, while they hate Francis because of his criminal record (despite the fact that Reese creates almost as much mayhem as Francis did before being sent to Military School), and look down upon Malcolm as a weakling because he does well in school. Dewey is mostly spared because they ignore him, though he apparently remembers them dropping him when he was a baby, and Victor nearly running him over when he was three years old.
• Victor only appeared in the introductory episode, as by the time Ida made her next appearance Victor had already died. Even by herself, Ida was still loathed by most of her family, still psychologically abusing Lois, getting into heated arguments with Francis, and looking down on Malcolm because of his studiousness. Because Ida is also a Racist Grandma, she'll occasionally mouth off an offensive comment aimed at Pyama, Francis's wife, a woman of Inuit descent.

• Downplayed with Samuel Campbell, when he is briefly resurrected in season six. He is at odds with his grandsons, Sam and Dean, as he betrays them a couple of times while working under a separate agenda: the resurrection of his daughter and their mother, Mary. Samuel admits that while he has no ill will towards his grandsons, they are basically strangers to him. Ultimately, he is turned against them completely after he is possessed by a monster spawned by Eve, forcing Sam to kill him.
• Chuck Shurley, already having questionable parenting skills with the archangels, tries to get his Nephilim grandson Jack killed for being a threat to his power and eventually does the job himself. Jack is eventually brought out of the Empty and becomes one of Sam and Dean's main allies against Chuck.

• Lycaon, the first werewolf, butchers a child to trick Zeus into committing cannibalism. Depending on the Writer, the child was his own infant grandson, and in others it's his young son. Either way it's seen as exceptionally repellent and he's cursed to become a werewolf because of it.
• Perseus' grandfather Acrisius locked him up with his mother in a crate and sent them out to sea because he feared Perseus one day overthrowing him. Fate being what it is, this fails and Perseus accidentally kills him with a discus throw many years later.
• Gaia instigates no less than three rebellions to topple down whoever controls the heavens whenever something bothers her. She helps her children, the Titans, depose her husband, Ouranos, then aids their children, the Olympians, to depose them in turn. She later gives birth to Typhon and the Gigantes, who became the last serious challenge to the Olympians' control over the universe.

• Gaia ends up allying with Kratos because she wants to get revenge on her grandson (and Kratos' father) Zeus, for locking away the Titans for the sins of just one. She eventually turns on Kratos, her great-grandson.
• God of War III has Kratos face off against Cronus, Zeus's father and thus his grandfather. Cronus' beef with Kratos is because due to the Ghost of Sparta opening Pandora's Box and infecting Zeus with fear, Zeus threw him into Tartarus. That, and he believes Kratos killed Gaia.

• In the second book of It Lives, the main character Harper's grandfather Arthur is extremely harsh and controlling from the start. Then it is revealed that he killed Harper's parents. But then it turns out he was framed and is Good All Along. However, one of the main villains, a terrifying lake monster, is revealed to be Arthur's wife, Harper's grandmother Josephine.
• In the third book of The Royal Heir, there's Barthelemy Beaumont, who attempts to wrest custody of the heir, who can be his granddaughter through his son Maxwell (if Riley marries the latter), from her parents, as part of his scheme to take over Cordonia and run the kingdom to the ground, as well as raise the heir to be like him, a tyrant.

• Grandfather, the Greater-Scope Villain and father to Father, turns out to literally be the grandfather of Nigel Uno/Numbuh One; he was the Archnemesis Dad to Numbuh Zero, a.k.a. Nigel's father Monty Uno. For what it's worth, he does seem to be fond of his son (in a Worthy Opponent manner), but has no compunctions trying to turn his grandson into a Senior Citizombie like everyone else.
• Numbuh Two's Grandma Lydia, a physically abusive Jewish Mother who leads the supervillain group known as the Senior Citizen Squad. Outside of supervillainy she serves as the matriarch of his family, with her anger issues causing them to see her as The Dreaded.