datshq:

Warning: This meta talks about domestic abuse a lot.

So.
The Kuwabara family. I know enough about the manga to know Shizuru and Kazuma
have a canon dad, who looks kinda shady but is generally a good dude to his
kids and their friends. The anime dialogue also makes a reference to a mom who
sounds rather strict. As such, I’d think the Kuwabara family has a history of
shady dealings but is very firmly directing their children away from that path.
Kazuma has an immensely strong honor code and Shizuru, while significantly
rougher than her brother, doesn’t seem to be in a moral disagreement with him
at any point. So, yeah, I’d say they’re being raised to be respectable
citizens.

Now,
while I do think the Kuwabara parents want a good future for their kids, I don’t
think they’re very present. This is mostly because, at the start of the Yukina
arc, our introduction to Shizuru is her bringing snacks and refreshments for
her brother and his friends, before Kazuma asks her for some money for the bus. The part of her beating her brother only comes up much later and she’s explicitly intending it as a punishment of some sort.

Shizuru plays both nurturer and disciplinarian to her
brother, possibly because their parents aren’t around all that much. However,
Shizuru is startled when Botan claps her on the arm companionably in episode
51, so she might not receive much affection from her parents either. As such,
her more nurturing behaviours could be self-taught, which is supported by her slowly getting better at them as the show progresses.

As
for where the beating comes from, while I’d rather not think it comes from
their parents, it is a real possibility, especially because of the
aforementioned strangeness to positive physical contact. In a less terrifying
scenario it could be because Kazuma is 1) a delinquent and 2) a very large and
strong boy. Shizuru obviously believes might makes right, which means she might
feel that violence is the only language her brother would understand. So she
has to establish she is the boss by physically cowing her brother first. She also seems to often resort to violence towards strangers when she wants to get her way, so it might also be a more general response to her.

I
also considered, back when Kazuma first voiced his concerns over fighting
women, that the two might have been the kind of siblings who got into physical
fights a lot but that ended badly. They do tend to take verbal potshots at each other. This might be because Kazuma used to
fight back but doesn’t anymore, after becoming so strong he might injure
Shizuru in a fight. Perhaps he already has, and that was the event that caused
him to swear off fighting women. If he could hurt his tough-as-nails sister, he
has no business hitting any woman, he might think.

Now that we know Shizuru beats him, that behavior might be left over from when they could still get physical with each other without causing serious injury, although such an option would make Shizuru a lot more immature than she’s been depicted in the show so far. At this point I’ve mostly disregarded this theory.

Of
course, there still is the chance that one or both of the parents are
physically abusive, either with each other or with one or both of the kids.
Most likely the mother, since she was being used as a scare tactic by Shizuru
in her single mention so far in the series. While Kazuma doesn’t strike me as
a victim of parental abuse exactly, Shizuru is angry, violent and socially
disruptive in addition to having self-destructive habits like drinking and
smoking at a young age while lacking self-preservation instincts in the way she goads the tournament guards and courts a morally bancrupt man. So it might be that Shizuru is or was abused by one of
their parents and is mimicking that behaviour towards Kazuma once she was left in charge of him.

Well, that was angsty.