Fresh Morning in a Broken World

It utilises a seemingly powerful adult and a powerless child, but for this trope to work, the child has to have something that gives them power over the adult, whether the child realises or not. They need something from this dependent that makes them resentful yet unable to let go.

It's technically the Mother Gothel archetype from Tangled. But I liked these examples because here, the parent and child is aware of the transaction to varying degrees. It creates an additional layer of falseness from the child's side as well.

In general, in the few chinese historical webnovels I've read, the dynamics of concubine children and the main wife do operate in the similar way. The concubine's children can only call the main wife as their mother. But it sort of depends on their utility whether the main wife will acknowledge and provide for them.

Parental bonds are considered so paramount in many cultures, the purest love between a mother and child etc. but the injection of overt performance and transaction really deconstructs the relationship, lays out the costs of bringing affection and bonding into the exchange. With parental relationship, it undergoes a reverse with sufficient time. If continued to old age, or even with sufficient power reversal as the child grows, it now falls on the child to take care of the parent and simultaneously they're also less reliant on them. The exchange falls apart here.

The culmination of usual fake dating trope (that has a bit of equality from both sides) is usually them falling in love with each other. But the inherent inequality at the starting line means the fake parenting can never culminate happily. That's why Contract Marriage seems extreme and more risky version of fake dating. In the legal institution, the husband has more power and thus for that to end happily, it usually involves a radical drastic change. If I had to take the same example as Exhibit B, When the Phone Rings also involves a contract marriage. But it took several kidnappings and expose of lifelong secrets for the dynamic to straighten out.

With fake parenting, the legal institution of it all is less obvious, more cloaked in affection, but all the more insidious. The bonds a parent can place on their child in name of gratitude and duty in even a normal family become more highlighted in this trope. And specifically, in above examples, the child counterpart's awareness is crucial for them to navigate safely out of it. Their specific situations (transmigration in A and C and being an older child in B) prevented them from falling for the societal narrative which was crucial for their survival.