Hi, I was just wondering if it is becoming overused and cliched to have the villian of a piece be the main character's dad/mom/uncle/grandpa/sister etc etc?
I wouldn't say overused, I'd say it's an easy option. Because a family connection is generally thought of as coming with strong emotional weight - good, or bad - and many of the less well done ways of doing this come with the assumption that, for the reader, "X is related to Y" automatically gets "X has strong emotional connection with Y" so the writer does not actually have to
depict the strong emotional connection or how and why it forms.
I think that in the Dresden Files Jim is subtly commenting on this in the ways that
Harry assumes that being related to someone automatically gives a strong emotional connection with them of a particular and predictable shape; things like Murphy's family do seem to me to make it clear that we are not expected to read Harry's assumptions about the way the world works as how the world in the DF
actually works, as it's clearly a different shape of set of relationships that does not work in ways Harry intuitively grasps, by comparison with the Carpenter family dynamic, which he mostly grasps (and somewhat idealises.)