9 votes

What are some examples of "unrelated siblings"?

This question isn't about people so much as it is about anything else. It's hard to explain outright, so I'll use an example:

A few months ago I read Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven. I just finished with Ling Ma's Severance. The two books are completely unrelated but feel very, very close to one another. There are a lot of topical similarities: both portray a global pandemic, a lead female character, and narrative shifts between pre- and post-societal collapse, etc. However, more than that, both feel very tonally similar. I couldn't read Severance without constantly thinking of and comparing it to Station Eleven, and I think I liked both books better together than I did either of them on their own. Even though they're clearly different and written by different people, they very much feel like they come from the same family -- like they're unrelated siblings.

I'm curious as to what other examples people can come up with, in whatever category you consider: media, historical events, languages, etc. Anything goes as long as they have a familial resemblance.