azdaema

Come with me—let's go down to the harbor. Let's walk among the ships; I will show you my armada. They are glorious ships, and I love them fiercely.

You may notice that a disproportionately high number of them are siblings. What's up with that?

I don't think incest is inherently wrong, no. When has categorically banning a whole class of loving relationships between consenting adults—interracial relationships, same-sex relationships, polyamory—ever been right before?

But that does not answer the question. My lack of disapproval of incest might explain a ship or two, but it does not explain why roughly half of all my ships are related. Polyamory is currently, in the West, the class of relationships next in line to becoming accepted—far ahead of incest, but still only just standing on the threshold. And yes, I do have a certain protective fondness of poly ships for that reason. But while I have a few polyamorous ships, they are not a prominent pattern in my armada.

The question is not, "Why am I ok with incest ships?" The question is, "Why am I drawn to them?"

The asking of this question doesn't come from a need to justify or defend myself. I was ushered into this sphere of shipping in large part by the Lannisters, and if there is one thing Tywin Lannister really got right as a parent, it was teaching his children pride—a particularly resilient, "fuck the world" type of pride. And so, thanks to them serving as my gateway, I never felt any shame around this narrative predilection of mine.

I have been baffled by it though. Why this, of all things? Why, when the vast majority of the world's cultures say, "Thing bad!" am I like, "Oooh, thing!!"?

So I began to analyze it, out of my own curiosity. This essay has been in the works for over a year. It is not a comprehensive list of all the reasons I ship incest, but rather the culmination of a few major lines of thought—ones which a) lie at the heart of it for me, and b) I find interesting.

Detached From Reality

Incest is fictional in much the same way outer space is. Both absolutely do exist—and yet, the stories we tell about them are largely divorced from that factual reality.

I cannot be sure of this—perhaps this is just a misconception of mine, born of the kind of stories I am drawn to—but I suspect that there are more stories out there about space-wizards than there are about astronauts. Nearly everyone who writes about space is not writing from personal experience. When writing, we are more likely to turn to tropes and our imaginations than to read an astronaut's memoir.

Incest is different of course. Unlike space, which is barred by logistics, incest is barred by taboos. Some people who write about incest do have personal experience—but still, the vast majority do not. With the rise of the internet, people have begun anonymously telling their personal accounts of incest, which in previous eras would've been kept secret for a lifetime. And some people looking to write incest do seek those out and read them. But even so, I still would reckon that the majority of incest stories do not have such research behind them—just imagination, tropes, and other incest narratives the authors have read.

I do not mean to say that doing extensive research is the only good way of writing and telling stories. On the contrary, our human ability to imagine situations we have not personally experienced is one of the most amazing things about us. If we only wrote about things we had personally experienced then we would have no dragon stories—and no one wants that.

I'm not in the camp of "it's wrong in real life, but ok in shipping," either. Both in fiction and real life, the premise "love is love, and as long as they're not harming others, consenting adults should be allowed to do what they want without strangers coming in and vetoing it" still holds. In real life in particular, I have no interest in playing god—casting moral judgement and destroying the lives of people I don't even know.

I will not be that shitty straight man who enjoys lesbianism in porn but devalues actual lesbian relationships. Their love is not your kink. (Or maybe it is—but it's not just that.) I reject the idea that it's ok when and only when it's pleasing to you. This has to do with them and their lives—you are not a part of this; what you think is irrelevant. The world does not reorder itself around you.

Still though, I do think it's worthwhile to consider when something is more akin to the fae realm—existing in our collective consciousness via a collection of stories we tell stories about it, rather than as a reflection of real lived experiences.

Out of Myth

Incest is primordial, poetic, ancient and otherworldly.

Cross-culturally, mythology tends to include a lot of incest. It is very difficult to answer the question "Does incest feel primordial because it's associated with mythology, or is mythology heavy in incest because incest feels primordial?" One obvious answer is that in creation myths—where every character's origin must be carefully accounted for, and the world is new and there are few possible answers—there are few alternatives to incest. Perhaps it is a logical solution to a storytelling problem.

Alternatively, what if there's something primordial about incest, just as there's something primordial about patricide and fratricide, which also features heavily in mythology? Murder and sex; life and death—it doesn't get much more primal than that. It is virtually universally expected that everyone both loves and hates their family to a certain extent—but going too far with either is an uncomfortable, forbidden realm.

Regardless of whether the chicken or egg came first, you are still left with an otherworldly air about incest. Our continued propensity to tell stories which link incest to groups of people with an otherworldliness about them—for example, the Targaryens, the Kencyrath—certainly has not undermined this idea.

Despite being such an incest junkie, I'm not big on contemporary incest. This is far from a hard-and-fast rule, but it's not uncommon for me to find stories of contemporary incest a bit discomfiting. Stories set in a world more like our own are more likely to inspire mixed feelings or lukewarm reactions in me. (Examples: Alex and Justin of Wizards of Waverly Place, Lochan and Maya of Tabitha Suzuma's Forbidden.)

Contemporary incest is quite simply sad. Not just angsty—not the cathartic, almost pleasurable form of pain—but the defeated, hopeless kind. The best-case scenario typically involves moving away, cutting all ties with the people they know and love, and starting new lives under fake names. In a real-world setting, that inescapable bleakness is a lot more apparent.

I like my incest fantastical, which is to say, a) I like it in fantasy settings, and b) I like it big and epic and heartbreaking. For me, incest is borderline mythical—strange and otherworldly and tinged with magic. To put it in a contemporary setting is like putting a phoenix in a contemporary setting: You can do it, of course. Some stories do. Some stories even do it well. But more often it feels out of place. Like seeing a butterfly with clipped wings, it's heart-wrenching and pitiful, with a certain sense that it's wrong—that this isn't supposed to be this way. They were meant to fly. Magical epic things belong in magical epic stories. They shouldn't be tethered to the ground.

Symbolism

There is nothing I love so well as a ship that is a metaphor of some sort.

Sometimes it is more pronounced, sometimes less, but few incest ships are entirely devoid of the idea of one's lover as a refracted reflection of oneself. Virtually all literary relatives serve as foils to one another—they are deliberately compared and contrasted in order to highlight their similarities and differences. (For more on the concept of foils, see here.) Family is a group of people who are like us—typically more like us than we would really like to admit, even to ourselves.

What, then, does it mean to desire a person so much like yourself?

Well, it can mean a lot of different things, and stories have taken this in many different directions. In A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, the Lannisters tinge it with narcissism. In P.C. Hodgell's Kencyrath books, Torisen's attraction to his sister—who reflects back at him all the parts of himself he's most uneasy with—intersects with his bitter internal struggle with self-acceptance. In Harry Potter fanfic that pairs Sirius or Andromeda Black with any of their darker relatives, most stories play with the idea, "You are a part of me—the dark part of me, the part that calls to me, the part I can't cut out no matter how I try."

Balancing a Paradox

Esther Perel is a Belgian psychotherapist, and possibly the most ridiculously smart and insightful person on the planet. (I stan.)

So what sustains desire, and why is it so difficult? And at the heart of sustaining desire in a committed relationship is the reconciliation of two fundamental human needs. On the one hand, our need for security, for predictability, for safety, for dependability, for reliability, for permanence. All these anchoring, grounding experiences of our lives that we call "home". But we also have an equally strong need—men and women—for adventure, for novelty, for mystery, for risk, for danger, for the unknown, for the unexpected, for surprise, for journey, for travel. [...] So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide. Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge. Give me novelty, give me familiarity. Give me predictability, give me surprise.

Our modern ideal of romantic love promises that both of these fundamental human needs can be satisfied in a single relationship, by a single person. And yet these two things are always inherently contradictory, if not downright mutually incompatible.

Our desire for both softness and edge carries over into shipping as well, where it can be seen in the question, "Friends-to-lovers or enemies-to-lovers?" And as that one tumblr post once observed:

An incest ship has all the emotional history of a friends-to-lovers ship, but all the turmoil and angst of an enemies-to-lovers ship.

Incest manages a strange balance between these two polarities. You have the familiar, familial side—someone that has known you all your life, who you trust implicitly, who knows you inside and out. What "feels like home" more than family does? It is known, it is safe, it is soft. And at the same time, almost no class of relationships is more dangerous and transgressive than incest. It is impossibly taboo, completely forbidden, highly secretive. Incest manages to incorporate coziness and edge together into a single relationship better and more gracefully than anything else I've seen to date. It is both gentle and fervid all at once.

I often think our modern ideal of romantic love is a fraught and dangerous thing. It is not fair—not kind, not loving—to ask one's partner to be everything. I do not condone this kind of thinking—not even in incestuous relationships. And yet, it is a compelling idea. And because incest does manage to deliver on it fairly consistently, it's difficult to look away.