036. the mother we share
December 18th: What draws you to incest ships for streussal
ahahahahahahahahahahaha
streussal, why do you do this to me
I honestly don't know how to explain this but I am going to TRY to explain.
I'm drawn to codependency in dynamics? That obsessive, us against the world, it's just you and me vibe? The thing is, with non-incestuous ships, codependency is a BAD THING (not that codependency in incest is an okay good thing as well, but I'm getting to that). It's not something I want to champion at all, even if I'm enjoying it, and while there's several ships I dig that are codependent and/or obsessive while not incestuous, they're not really ships that I can root for in the long run (or I may root for it, but in a "burn down the whole world or be terrible people together" sort of way; it's complicated). I generally want those people to get better, to find or have more for themselves or achieve some kind of healthiness or happiness. Or even if I don't want that, they're still not long term ships for me. I am struggling to think non-incest ships like that atm, but I know I have them. I think Scott/Stiles in Teen Wolf, may be one of my major, codependent but not incestuous OTPs that I dig, and they are fairly healthy otherwise for the most part, at least, within the context of canon, and they get referred to as brothers all the time, so of course it's an OTP for me.
(sometimes I just wail really loudly and go ALL MY SHIPS ARE THE SAAAAAME)
Anyway that changes with incest, because while the codependency is still bad, it's much more difficult to really fix it or extricate the character from it. Like, I feel if siblings ends up having sex, there's no going back. like, idk man, once you decide to have sex with your brother/sister/sibling, how do you ever really come back from that? Even if one half of the ship goes far away, that's not something that can be undone, there's still going to be that TAINT there and I like the idea of something like that leaving marks, something that can never really go away. It's hard to break up with your brother and/or sister, really.
(side note: it's really, really important to me all the incest I ship be consensual, or at least mutual. Like, there are sibling dynamics that I find abusive that I am still really interested in (most of everything on TVD lbr), but I rarely ever do crossgen or parent/child incest because that is TOO FUCKED UP AND WRONG TO ME and comes off with abusive dynamics and power dynamics that I can't enjoy. Like it's not so much it's too wrong, it's that I lack the ability to enjoy it or derive anything from it except serious squick. Lol this is my entire problem with Bates Motel fandom, where everyone ships either Norman with his mom or Dylan with his mom, and while I can clearly see the show is basically daring you to do that, no one tags it properly, and it squicks me so hardcore that I just can't deal at all and therefore, never engage in Bates Motel fandom #rant over
The only time I've been into cross-gen incest is India/Charlie in Stoker and in all fairness, that movie is about the coming of age story of a serial killer, and India is 18 at the start of the film and just MEETS Charlie for the first time, so that gets rids of a lot of power dynamics that squick me in the first place, even if Charlie is creepily obsessed)
Not that every incest ship I have is codependent; a good number of them AREN'T (there's more than one way to do incest!), and I love them anyway or for different reasons, but I think codependence--obsessiveness, "us against the world" being unable to live without the other person--is sorta of my favorite thing? That kind of heightened emotionality and all the ugly issues that crop up in it? Tbh, if I am trying very hard to be honest with myself, I feel like those are romantic tropes that I used to like as a kid, but grew out of, but still liked, but couldn't deal with them because they were so clearly terrible, so I transferred that to incest shit. Like, being so fucked up that you're unable to live without your significant other seems terrible and a terrible romantic subtext, especially when it comes to romantic het ships, so I tend to shy away from those dynamics, but being unable to live without your brother or sister being in your life, that sounds a lot more reasonable, even if it's still messed up and not a healthy ideal, obvs; I understand that a lot more (even if I do think being able to move on from said loved one's death is the healthy response). Like, I'd be a lot more willing to kill for family. Which probably says something about me.
Like Sam/Dean was my very first incest ship and a lot of my favorite things about shipping it came from there. I really liked the claustrophobic dynamic of it, I liked the isolation of it, the fact that as of s1, they really only had each other to confine in--that in pre-series, they only really had each other to rely on, before Sam got to go for college, and they both grew under John Winchester's abuse--and the weird terrible comfort of there being one person in the world that would kill and die for you. I liked that Dean was willing to kill unhesitatingly for Sam, or the terrible, terrifying lengths Sam was willing to go for to get Dean out of hell. I like things that stem out of terrible situations, or coping with trauma and abuse (I say things rather than incest ships because I do like all kinds of ships that stem out of coping with trauma and abuse). I love the isolation, either emotionally or physical, or stuff stemming from "I've lost everyone but you," vibes. I also have a huge thing for people being ~blood bonded~ but that obviously doesn't apply to every incest thing I ship.
I eventually grew out of Sam/Dean (I still ship it but only in the vaguest sense; I don't go here anymore and I've sorta of stopped actively caring; only the wayward tumblr graphic can make me feel), but that just...followed me to every fandom, I started to look for a similiar dynamic everywhere, in some way or the other. I think I shipped Stefan/Damon next and then Jaime/Cersei and Jon/Robb in Asoiaf happened (though lbr A Song of Ice and Fire is a cornucopia of incest shipping). It became a thing that really appealed to me a lot and I wanted to keep exploring that dynamic in various different forms.
And the incest ship needs to feel messed up to me? Functional and happy, I am good with, but it can't feel normal, essentially. Like some ships I just can't do because the age gap is too much (Katniss/Prim, Buffy/Dawn--both don't feel like parent/child but there's an element of the sister being far too old for me to ship with their bb sibling) or ships I can't do because they don't feel THAT kind of messed up, like Katara/Sokka in Avatar. They have the set up--orphan kids growing up in the midsts of a war and relying on each other and Katara half-raising Sokka to a point--but they simply felt too normal for me. Azula/Zuko, on the other hand, felt really deeply fucked up so I could ship it.
I find incest fic hard though, because hardly anyone wants to commit to it. In my experience, I can't tell the number of times I've read fic for my ship that downplays the incest, erases it or made the other characters have a non-reaction to it, which I feel happens because people don't want to deal with it, or simply don't like the same things I do. Like, Jeremy/Elena is a thing I really, really love but there's not a lot of a fic and a good chunk of fic tries to pull the "oh, we're just cousins, so it's not really that bad" and that always left a sour taste in my mouth. I like that it's that bad. I hate dismissing their relationship to "just cousins so we can fuck." I don't feel like finding out you're cousins late in life should somehow invalidate the sibling relationship that was already there.
Taking an incest ship and trying to make it more palpable or less wrong kills part of the appeal for me? All I want is to roll around in how awful it is. There's also a lot of incest fic that treats the relationship like a regular, no big deal thing, and has everyone not really respond to it as a fucked up thing. This always made me sad, because I live for shit like that. Like, when I wrote Love Takes Hostages, it was really important to me that Elena freak out when she figures out Stefan/Damon are fucking. It was really important to me that she'd feel disgusted for a bit. I can't say how well I sold her coming around to it, but I didn't want her to be okay right off the bat, and I love reading the discomfort and uneasiness or outright horror and disgust of people not within the incest circle.
(like example: There is a huge huge fandom for Chuck/Herc in Pacific Rim; I wouldn't be into it anyway, because cross-gen is just not my thing at all but even so, it's played so weirdly cutesy and nbd in fic I just DO NOT GET IT, why anyone would be interested in Chuck/Herc if all you're gonna do it as just a regular age gap type ship that happen to be related. I could write that better and I hate the ship)
(though on another note, I also really dislike making an intense melodrama about incest. Like stories where people found out they're actually related even though they were not raised together and met each other as friends then a romantic partner first, and they freak out about how TERRIBLE IT IS AND HOW CAN I LIVE LIKE THIS. Man one time I watched a movie where a girl ended up sleeping with her half-brother unknowingly and they both kill themselves at the end. SIGH)
This is also sorta of why I'm not as super into aristocratic types of incest, like Jaime/Cersei or Cesare/Lucrezia, or like, certain types of vampire or immortal incest. I do really love Jaime/Cersei (god Jaime/Cersei is pretty much the dream in some ways), and Cesare/Lucrezia as well but a part of me is annoyed that most canon incest ships tend to be like...pretty white aristocratic, rich as hell decadent people. It's like it's being used as a way to remove them from society, ~above normal people~ hence why the incest. Or a way of saying THESE PEOPLE ARE SO EVIL AND DECADENT SO OF COURSE THEY HAVE ~UNNATURAL DESIRES~ and playing on the whole, slightly normalized royal incest thing. It feels like an excuse for incest, and I hate excusing it (I am not saying this necessarily applies to like, Cesare/Lucrezia--I haven't seen S3 so like, I AM NOT SURE HOW IT'S HANDLED really, and it looks a lot more complex--but on a broader scale, I feel those types of incest ships tend to be canon because it's easy for an audience or the creators behind it to excuse away. They're ~rich and royal~ so what do you expect from THOSE people). It's not that it doesn't make sense or it doesn't work, or even that I don't enjoy those things as ships, but it doesn't ping me in the same way.
This is also why I've never been super into Originalcest, though I do enjoy those ships too, but my feelings just aren't as strong. Klaus/Rebekah and Klaus/Elijah and the like seem like it can be easily excused as the consequences of being 1000 year old immortals. I mean. THAT PROBABLY IS WHY incest is no biggie, but mainly what I mean, when characters are that ancient, I don't really care about them breaking a taboo rule of society via incest, and I don't think they do either, like...they got bigger issues. Klaus/Rebekah is a mess, and while the fact that they're siblings is hugely important to the ship, I just don't feel as strongly about it (though I do think they're a good example of an incest ship that's "broken up" for the most part, and it really works for me for that reason).
Like, again, it's not to say I don't enjoy those ships--India/Charlie had that vibe too, and Thor/Loki, which I really really like, also fall under the "immortal so the rules are different" incest category (and are pretty much NOT codependent, actually), Nauda/Nuala from Hellboy 2 is a thing I really love, Sarah/Helena is my favorite thing in Orphan Black, and while they definitely have elements of obsessiveness and codependence (mainly on Helena's end), but given they met so late in life, they don't feel as twisted. My favorite incest ships tend to be stuff like, Jeremy/Elena, Seth/Richie, Fancy/Kit (Slice of Cherry--which I still haven't finished reading, but woc serial killing codependent sisters is literally everything I ever wanted), Ginger/Brigitte (Ginger Snaps), even Jaime/Cersei still presses a lot of those buttons (WE WERE BORN TOGETHER AND WE WILL DIE TOGETHER #and then I died). Jeremy/Elena is kind of an outlier in those terms, but Jeremy/Elena had that S4 arc where they kept trying to kill each other, couldn't live without each other, where Jeremy kept killing dudes unblinkingly for Elena, or where Elena literally fell utterly apart when her brother and last tie to humanity died. Aka they were perfect *____*
Ultimately I need HUMANITY. Ugly messed up painful HUMANITY when it comes to my incest ships. I suppose I could sum up the appeal as that, that really my favorite types of incest are the stuff that are just messy and not pretty and I may or not want a happy ending for my ship (idk it really depends on the ship) but the incest should feel ugly and not normal, at the end of the day, even if I don't necessarily want GRIMDARK stories about incest. It should still feel wrong, you know?
Anyway. I stayed up all night writing this. I'm going to sleep now. I'll answer comments later when I get a chance. Hope y'all enjoyed my embarrassing incest ramble.
ahahahahahahahahahahaha
streussal, why do you do this to me
I honestly don't know how to explain this but I am going to TRY to explain.
I'm drawn to codependency in dynamics? That obsessive, us against the world, it's just you and me vibe? The thing is, with non-incestuous ships, codependency is a BAD THING (not that codependency in incest is an okay good thing as well, but I'm getting to that). It's not something I want to champion at all, even if I'm enjoying it, and while there's several ships I dig that are codependent and/or obsessive while not incestuous, they're not really ships that I can root for in the long run (or I may root for it, but in a "burn down the whole world or be terrible people together" sort of way; it's complicated). I generally want those people to get better, to find or have more for themselves or achieve some kind of healthiness or happiness. Or even if I don't want that, they're still not long term ships for me. I am struggling to think non-incest ships like that atm, but I know I have them. I think Scott/Stiles in Teen Wolf, may be one of my major, codependent but not incestuous OTPs that I dig, and they are fairly healthy otherwise for the most part, at least, within the context of canon, and they get referred to as brothers all the time, so of course it's an OTP for me.
(sometimes I just wail really loudly and go ALL MY SHIPS ARE THE SAAAAAME)
Anyway that changes with incest, because while the codependency is still bad, it's much more difficult to really fix it or extricate the character from it. Like, I feel if siblings ends up having sex, there's no going back. like, idk man, once you decide to have sex with your brother/sister/sibling, how do you ever really come back from that? Even if one half of the ship goes far away, that's not something that can be undone, there's still going to be that TAINT there and I like the idea of something like that leaving marks, something that can never really go away. It's hard to break up with your brother and/or sister, really.
(side note: it's really, really important to me all the incest I ship be consensual, or at least mutual. Like, there are sibling dynamics that I find abusive that I am still really interested in (most of everything on TVD lbr), but I rarely ever do crossgen or parent/child incest because that is TOO FUCKED UP AND WRONG TO ME and comes off with abusive dynamics and power dynamics that I can't enjoy. Like it's not so much it's too wrong, it's that I lack the ability to enjoy it or derive anything from it except serious squick. Lol this is my entire problem with Bates Motel fandom, where everyone ships either Norman with his mom or Dylan with his mom, and while I can clearly see the show is basically daring you to do that, no one tags it properly, and it squicks me so hardcore that I just can't deal at all and therefore, never engage in Bates Motel fandom #rant over
The only time I've been into cross-gen incest is India/Charlie in Stoker and in all fairness, that movie is about the coming of age story of a serial killer, and India is 18 at the start of the film and just MEETS Charlie for the first time, so that gets rids of a lot of power dynamics that squick me in the first place, even if Charlie is creepily obsessed)
Not that every incest ship I have is codependent; a good number of them AREN'T (there's more than one way to do incest!), and I love them anyway or for different reasons, but I think codependence--obsessiveness, "us against the world" being unable to live without the other person--is sorta of my favorite thing? That kind of heightened emotionality and all the ugly issues that crop up in it? Tbh, if I am trying very hard to be honest with myself, I feel like those are romantic tropes that I used to like as a kid, but grew out of, but still liked, but couldn't deal with them because they were so clearly terrible, so I transferred that to incest shit. Like, being so fucked up that you're unable to live without your significant other seems terrible and a terrible romantic subtext, especially when it comes to romantic het ships, so I tend to shy away from those dynamics, but being unable to live without your brother or sister being in your life, that sounds a lot more reasonable, even if it's still messed up and not a healthy ideal, obvs; I understand that a lot more (even if I do think being able to move on from said loved one's death is the healthy response). Like, I'd be a lot more willing to kill for family. Which probably says something about me.
Like Sam/Dean was my very first incest ship and a lot of my favorite things about shipping it came from there. I really liked the claustrophobic dynamic of it, I liked the isolation of it, the fact that as of s1, they really only had each other to confine in--that in pre-series, they only really had each other to rely on, before Sam got to go for college, and they both grew under John Winchester's abuse--and the weird terrible comfort of there being one person in the world that would kill and die for you. I liked that Dean was willing to kill unhesitatingly for Sam, or the terrible, terrifying lengths Sam was willing to go for to get Dean out of hell. I like things that stem out of terrible situations, or coping with trauma and abuse (I say things rather than incest ships because I do like all kinds of ships that stem out of coping with trauma and abuse). I love the isolation, either emotionally or physical, or stuff stemming from "I've lost everyone but you," vibes. I also have a huge thing for people being ~blood bonded~ but that obviously doesn't apply to every incest thing I ship.
I eventually grew out of Sam/Dean (I still ship it but only in the vaguest sense; I don't go here anymore and I've sorta of stopped actively caring; only the wayward tumblr graphic can make me feel), but that just...followed me to every fandom, I started to look for a similiar dynamic everywhere, in some way or the other. I think I shipped Stefan/Damon next and then Jaime/Cersei and Jon/Robb in Asoiaf happened (though lbr A Song of Ice and Fire is a cornucopia of incest shipping). It became a thing that really appealed to me a lot and I wanted to keep exploring that dynamic in various different forms.
And the incest ship needs to feel messed up to me? Functional and happy, I am good with, but it can't feel normal, essentially. Like some ships I just can't do because the age gap is too much (Katniss/Prim, Buffy/Dawn--both don't feel like parent/child but there's an element of the sister being far too old for me to ship with their bb sibling) or ships I can't do because they don't feel THAT kind of messed up, like Katara/Sokka in Avatar. They have the set up--orphan kids growing up in the midsts of a war and relying on each other and Katara half-raising Sokka to a point--but they simply felt too normal for me. Azula/Zuko, on the other hand, felt really deeply fucked up so I could ship it.
I find incest fic hard though, because hardly anyone wants to commit to it. In my experience, I can't tell the number of times I've read fic for my ship that downplays the incest, erases it or made the other characters have a non-reaction to it, which I feel happens because people don't want to deal with it, or simply don't like the same things I do. Like, Jeremy/Elena is a thing I really, really love but there's not a lot of a fic and a good chunk of fic tries to pull the "oh, we're just cousins, so it's not really that bad" and that always left a sour taste in my mouth. I like that it's that bad. I hate dismissing their relationship to "just cousins so we can fuck." I don't feel like finding out you're cousins late in life should somehow invalidate the sibling relationship that was already there.
Taking an incest ship and trying to make it more palpable or less wrong kills part of the appeal for me? All I want is to roll around in how awful it is. There's also a lot of incest fic that treats the relationship like a regular, no big deal thing, and has everyone not really respond to it as a fucked up thing. This always made me sad, because I live for shit like that. Like, when I wrote Love Takes Hostages, it was really important to me that Elena freak out when she figures out Stefan/Damon are fucking. It was really important to me that she'd feel disgusted for a bit. I can't say how well I sold her coming around to it, but I didn't want her to be okay right off the bat, and I love reading the discomfort and uneasiness or outright horror and disgust of people not within the incest circle.
(like example: There is a huge huge fandom for Chuck/Herc in Pacific Rim; I wouldn't be into it anyway, because cross-gen is just not my thing at all but even so, it's played so weirdly cutesy and nbd in fic I just DO NOT GET IT, why anyone would be interested in Chuck/Herc if all you're gonna do it as just a regular age gap type ship that happen to be related. I could write that better and I hate the ship)
(though on another note, I also really dislike making an intense melodrama about incest. Like stories where people found out they're actually related even though they were not raised together and met each other as friends then a romantic partner first, and they freak out about how TERRIBLE IT IS AND HOW CAN I LIVE LIKE THIS. Man one time I watched a movie where a girl ended up sleeping with her half-brother unknowingly and they both kill themselves at the end. SIGH)
This is also sorta of why I'm not as super into aristocratic types of incest, like Jaime/Cersei or Cesare/Lucrezia, or like, certain types of vampire or immortal incest. I do really love Jaime/Cersei (god Jaime/Cersei is pretty much the dream in some ways), and Cesare/Lucrezia as well but a part of me is annoyed that most canon incest ships tend to be like...pretty white aristocratic, rich as hell decadent people. It's like it's being used as a way to remove them from society, ~above normal people~ hence why the incest. Or a way of saying THESE PEOPLE ARE SO EVIL AND DECADENT SO OF COURSE THEY HAVE ~UNNATURAL DESIRES~ and playing on the whole, slightly normalized royal incest thing. It feels like an excuse for incest, and I hate excusing it (I am not saying this necessarily applies to like, Cesare/Lucrezia--I haven't seen S3 so like, I AM NOT SURE HOW IT'S HANDLED really, and it looks a lot more complex--but on a broader scale, I feel those types of incest ships tend to be canon because it's easy for an audience or the creators behind it to excuse away. They're ~rich and royal~ so what do you expect from THOSE people). It's not that it doesn't make sense or it doesn't work, or even that I don't enjoy those things as ships, but it doesn't ping me in the same way.
This is also why I've never been super into Originalcest, though I do enjoy those ships too, but my feelings just aren't as strong. Klaus/Rebekah and Klaus/Elijah and the like seem like it can be easily excused as the consequences of being 1000 year old immortals. I mean. THAT PROBABLY IS WHY incest is no biggie, but mainly what I mean, when characters are that ancient, I don't really care about them breaking a taboo rule of society via incest, and I don't think they do either, like...they got bigger issues. Klaus/Rebekah is a mess, and while the fact that they're siblings is hugely important to the ship, I just don't feel as strongly about it (though I do think they're a good example of an incest ship that's "broken up" for the most part, and it really works for me for that reason).
Like, again, it's not to say I don't enjoy those ships--India/Charlie had that vibe too, and Thor/Loki, which I really really like, also fall under the "immortal so the rules are different" incest category (and are pretty much NOT codependent, actually), Nauda/Nuala from Hellboy 2 is a thing I really love, Sarah/Helena is my favorite thing in Orphan Black, and while they definitely have elements of obsessiveness and codependence (mainly on Helena's end), but given they met so late in life, they don't feel as twisted. My favorite incest ships tend to be stuff like, Jeremy/Elena, Seth/Richie, Fancy/Kit (Slice of Cherry--which I still haven't finished reading, but woc serial killing codependent sisters is literally everything I ever wanted), Ginger/Brigitte (Ginger Snaps), even Jaime/Cersei still presses a lot of those buttons (WE WERE BORN TOGETHER AND WE WILL DIE TOGETHER #and then I died). Jeremy/Elena is kind of an outlier in those terms, but Jeremy/Elena had that S4 arc where they kept trying to kill each other, couldn't live without each other, where Jeremy kept killing dudes unblinkingly for Elena, or where Elena literally fell utterly apart when her brother and last tie to humanity died. Aka they were perfect *____*
Ultimately I need HUMANITY. Ugly messed up painful HUMANITY when it comes to my incest ships. I suppose I could sum up the appeal as that, that really my favorite types of incest are the stuff that are just messy and not pretty and I may or not want a happy ending for my ship (idk it really depends on the ship) but the incest should feel ugly and not normal, at the end of the day, even if I don't necessarily want GRIMDARK stories about incest. It should still feel wrong, you know?
Anyway. I stayed up all night writing this. I'm going to sleep now. I'll answer comments later when I get a chance. Hope y'all enjoyed my embarrassing incest ramble.