(no subject)
I will completely understand if anyone chooses to skip this particular discussion, I'll be putting up another one soon I'm sure anyway as I want to get more in for Fannish 50 (which went a bit by the wayside during Evil Virus of Doom back in June and not properly picked up) so feel free to just come back to that one, whatever it may be.
When it comes to incestuous pairings, would you read/write? Does that come under your "wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole"?
An angle I'll open on is, what if you don't know they're related at first and then later find out - would you still ship the pairing once you know, or is that it, done with that ship? While I never shipped them I'll use Lost's Jack and Claire as an example. In season 1, the question of them being related was never raised, so if I'd been writing at that point (I only really got into writing somewhere around mid season 3 after a big binge throughout 2006) in theory I could have considered them an option. Then we get to season 2, where Christian is seen in a flashback demanding to see his daughter in Australia, and at the time, a lot of people did call that being Claire. So by the time it was actually confirmed in season 3, it was the biggest non-reveal ever because everyone had worked it out months earlier. Because the idea was in the back of my mind that they were possibly siblings before it was official, in my head at the time, that pairing was off limits as a romantic ship. Similarly with Jacob and Ilana, they actually didn't end up being father and daughter, but because the theory that they were had been doing the rounds for a while, that had made the pairing off limits to me. As for Jacob and What's his Face Asshole...finding out they were siblings was a part of the reason why I stopped shipping them. Unless you've only met me quite recently, you will be well aware of the fact that aforementioned asshole has been dead to me ever since wiping out my het pairing and one half of my slash pairing. Said episode is now on my DNR (Do Not Rewatch) list, although that may be one for another post.
If you come across it in a fic and there wasn't a warning for it, would you still continue with it or immediately hit the back button? If you've known me a while you'll likely have heard this story, but somewhere around 2007, I was reading a Harry Potter fic - the basic concept was, Harry, Ron and Hermione accidentally sent themselves back to Marauder era, and Harry decided to try and save his parents. I can't remember exactly how but he exposed Pettigrew earlier on, and chose to kill Snape by giving Sirius the idea to suggest the prank of Snape going after Lupin, and then making sure James was out of the way and didn't know anything about it in time to save Snape. So far so good, until the fic went down the Harry/Lily route without warning. Okay...nope.
Where do you actually draw the line at all? I've seen people talk about Riverdale's Betty and Jughead as being too incestuous a pairing, and personally I wouldn't count that at all - yes, they share a half sibling, yes, their parents have dated, but there's no actual blood relationship there. With Lost's Shannon and Boone as another example, again there's no blood relationship but there is the argument there that some might make about the fact that they had been raised as siblings for so many years (their parents having married when they were primary school age, and the show didn't make clear how long their parents had been together before getting married, so it's possible to add a couple more years perhaps on to that time.) If you'd avoid parent/child, would you read sibling/sibling? Or maybe a specific pairing you get that vibe from?
What about taking the context of the specific fandom into account? If you're familiar with Game of Thrones-verse, well, in that fandom if you see an incestuous pairing in canon, must be Tuesday. Or take Supernatural and Wincest - if you think of the early episodes, before characters such as Castiel and Crowley among others had appeared, Sam and Dean were the main consistent characters, then over time more characters appeared. If the likes of Castiel and Crowley had been around in SPN canon from day one, more characters to potentially ship, would Wincest have reached the heights that it did? The one thing where it's potentially coming up for me at some point is English history. Yes, I have been saying for years about a Legends of Tomorrow and Princes in the Tower fic, yes I have started and will finish. At the time, there was a rumour that Richard III intended to marry his niece, Elizabeth of York. It never happened, we'll never know how much truth there was to it and whether it would have ever come to anything had Richard III survived Bosworth (or even whether they'd have got the dispensation from the Pope that would have been required at that time - would that one have been pushing it?) but while trying to think of how the Legends could break the timeline, that is a possible angle.
When it comes to incestuous pairings, would you read/write? Does that come under your "wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole"?
An angle I'll open on is, what if you don't know they're related at first and then later find out - would you still ship the pairing once you know, or is that it, done with that ship? While I never shipped them I'll use Lost's Jack and Claire as an example. In season 1, the question of them being related was never raised, so if I'd been writing at that point (I only really got into writing somewhere around mid season 3 after a big binge throughout 2006) in theory I could have considered them an option. Then we get to season 2, where Christian is seen in a flashback demanding to see his daughter in Australia, and at the time, a lot of people did call that being Claire. So by the time it was actually confirmed in season 3, it was the biggest non-reveal ever because everyone had worked it out months earlier. Because the idea was in the back of my mind that they were possibly siblings before it was official, in my head at the time, that pairing was off limits as a romantic ship. Similarly with Jacob and Ilana, they actually didn't end up being father and daughter, but because the theory that they were had been doing the rounds for a while, that had made the pairing off limits to me. As for Jacob and What's his Face Asshole...finding out they were siblings was a part of the reason why I stopped shipping them. Unless you've only met me quite recently, you will be well aware of the fact that aforementioned asshole has been dead to me ever since wiping out my het pairing and one half of my slash pairing. Said episode is now on my DNR (Do Not Rewatch) list, although that may be one for another post.
If you come across it in a fic and there wasn't a warning for it, would you still continue with it or immediately hit the back button? If you've known me a while you'll likely have heard this story, but somewhere around 2007, I was reading a Harry Potter fic - the basic concept was, Harry, Ron and Hermione accidentally sent themselves back to Marauder era, and Harry decided to try and save his parents. I can't remember exactly how but he exposed Pettigrew earlier on, and chose to kill Snape by giving Sirius the idea to suggest the prank of Snape going after Lupin, and then making sure James was out of the way and didn't know anything about it in time to save Snape. So far so good, until the fic went down the Harry/Lily route without warning. Okay...nope.
Where do you actually draw the line at all? I've seen people talk about Riverdale's Betty and Jughead as being too incestuous a pairing, and personally I wouldn't count that at all - yes, they share a half sibling, yes, their parents have dated, but there's no actual blood relationship there. With Lost's Shannon and Boone as another example, again there's no blood relationship but there is the argument there that some might make about the fact that they had been raised as siblings for so many years (their parents having married when they were primary school age, and the show didn't make clear how long their parents had been together before getting married, so it's possible to add a couple more years perhaps on to that time.) If you'd avoid parent/child, would you read sibling/sibling? Or maybe a specific pairing you get that vibe from?
What about taking the context of the specific fandom into account? If you're familiar with Game of Thrones-verse, well, in that fandom if you see an incestuous pairing in canon, must be Tuesday. Or take Supernatural and Wincest - if you think of the early episodes, before characters such as Castiel and Crowley among others had appeared, Sam and Dean were the main consistent characters, then over time more characters appeared. If the likes of Castiel and Crowley had been around in SPN canon from day one, more characters to potentially ship, would Wincest have reached the heights that it did? The one thing where it's potentially coming up for me at some point is English history. Yes, I have been saying for years about a Legends of Tomorrow and Princes in the Tower fic, yes I have started and will finish. At the time, there was a rumour that Richard III intended to marry his niece, Elizabeth of York. It never happened, we'll never know how much truth there was to it and whether it would have ever come to anything had Richard III survived Bosworth (or even whether they'd have got the dispensation from the Pope that would have been required at that time - would that one have been pushing it?) but while trying to think of how the Legends could break the timeline, that is a possible angle.