Did you read my mind, because I was just thinking about incest earlier today.
Wait wait, that came out wrong! I was specifically thinking about incest as a literary motif and how it's so prevalent across so genres types of East Asian popular/pulp media, and also in Western Gothic/Gothic-inspired works. Then I fell into a Google Scholar rabbit hole which yielded some interesting results that I'm still sorting through, but a danmei-related snippet from this article (paywalled, but I've got a copy that I can share once I write all this up) says:
In Chinese language, the phrase 'luan lun' has richer connotations than its English equivalent ... The word luan denotes confusion and disorder, while the word lun refers to kinship, human relations, order and meaning. The primary function of the incest taboo in feudal China was to prevent the disruption of both family and social order.
tl;dr — it's subversion of/resistance to patriarchal power structures. Another article I read about the incest motif in shoujo advances te same argument.
Anyway I find it fascinating as a literary motif, especially one that features so heavily in so many genres.
Re: pseudo-incest — insofar as c-novels feature pseudo- instead of full-fat (as it were) incest, I wonder how much of it is due to platform content rules. IIRC JJWXC doesn't allow it now (if it ever did)? I vaguely remember meatbun posting on Twitter that she'd love to write pseudo-incest, and then added that she'd write real incest if the platform wouldn't censor it to ribbons. Absolutely no international readers seemed to pick up on the fact that she was talking about incest btw, because she referred to it using the Chinese online slang term, orthopedics.
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Wait wait, that came out wrong! I was specifically thinking about incest as a literary motif and how it's so prevalent across so genres types of East Asian popular/pulp media, and also in Western Gothic/Gothic-inspired works. Then I fell into a Google Scholar rabbit hole which yielded some interesting results that I'm still sorting through, but a danmei-related snippet from this article (paywalled, but I've got a copy that I can share once I write all this up) says:
tl;dr — it's subversion of/resistance to patriarchal power structures. Another article I read about the incest motif in shoujo advances te same argument.
Anyway I find it fascinating as a literary motif, especially one that features so heavily in so many genres.
Re: pseudo-incest — insofar as c-novels feature pseudo- instead of full-fat (as it were) incest, I wonder how much of it is due to platform content rules. IIRC JJWXC doesn't allow it now (if it ever did)? I vaguely remember meatbun posting on Twitter that she'd love to write pseudo-incest, and then added that she'd write real incest if the platform wouldn't censor it to ribbons. Absolutely no international readers seemed to pick up on the fact that she was talking about incest btw, because she referred to it using the Chinese online slang term, orthopedics.