[thinking] This doesn't really apply to my computer-program characters and I can't remember what I came up with about Roy (it's somewhere in a meme plurk waaaay back, that's what I get for not moving it to his journal)

and there's several other characters for whom there's no canonical mom information (Gai, Bob, Hitsugaya, Red, Jei, and I'm not even getting started on where canon is about the Doctor at this point )

Bel has one canonical line which is among the funniest in that particular book. I cannot every time. After the end of their career as a mercenary, Miles runs into them unexpectedly in front of people who can't be allowed to know that they ever met,

and Miles, who hasn't seen Bel since then and doesn't know where he stands with them, is all "my mother was from Beta Colony, you know!" and Bel, an outspoken and proud Betan from Beta Colony, says, absolutely deadpan, "what a coincidence, so was mine."

There's nothing like Bel getting a chance to be absolutely terrible and no one can do anything about it without blowing their cover.

But if that wasn't a joke, it means one of Bel's parents identified as a mother. And that's all we know about that.

As for Cheris, she had a complicated relationship with her parents. They were part of a minority ethnicity who had to hide many of their practices lest the hexarchate exterminate them as heretics. They refused to assimilate enough to find equilibrium with mainstream hexarchate culture,

and Cheris's mother made inconsistent attempts to pass down the Mwennin language and beliefs, the community elders with their furtive pride in the differences that would forever mean they could not belong left Cheris cold and vaguely ashamed, and she joined the Kel military for its promised sense of belonging.

She still wrote to her parents, feeling grayed out and cold again when her mother wrote back in faulty high language; their relationship remained civil but strained, and her mother remained anxious and bewildered and unable to understand why she had not been able to pass down her sense of Mwennin identity.

And Then Very Horrible Things Happened, because this series.

It's a really good portrayal of intergenerational tensions where a majority culture wants a minority culture stamped out and children are born into that situation and feel, with no way to articulate or understand it, that assimilation is the only way to be safe.

Cheris's family culture was so insular that she would not have been able to find synergy with them except by making herself wilfully too small for her own skin, and she just couldn't. But she ultimately couldn't live with the oppressive majority culture either.

...Oh, there's one more! Vash is a plant, but Rem was his mom in every way that matters and he misses her so much forever. ;a;

I don't even remember what happened (I was playing Vash from the og anime) but Vash lost Rem very young and it was really sad.

He tried to live by her loving, peaceful example for the rest of his life.

I don't think there was any significant parental canon for Hitsugaya at the time I was playing with him (he was raised by a grandmother), but if there's been any since, I don't know about it.

Zangetsu, of course, is a sword.

(Ish. Again, canon doing weird stuff after my time playing him, but he did still end up functionally a sword and we love that for him. ^^)