Discussion Friday

[geraineon]

Time for Discussion Friday again!

This time, inspired by my very rapid descent into a Chinese otome game that tried to be culturally sensitive by translating "哥哥" (older brother*) into "childhood friend" in English, what are your thoughts and feelings about incest/pseudo-incest in fiction?

If you enjoy it, why do you enjoy it?

If you find it uncomfortable, is it for all incest/pseudo-incest related tropes, or are there situations where you are more likely to be okay with them and situations where it's a squick?

(Feel free to share any other related thoughts. I trust you all to be respectful to each other's preferences in fiction!)

*brother, very loosely, because it is not always someone related.

Comments

[douqi]

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.

[aurumcalendula]

That's really interesting and sounds like a fascinating article!

[douqi]

My Google Scholar dive has turned up quite a lot of interesting stuff! Hoping to write up a sort of literature review and post it (though probably under lock, lest people yell at me for 'supporting incest').

[liliacs]

That sounds like a very interesting article! It's funny that you brought up Western Gothic because when I saw this discussion prompt, it made me think that my favorite incest ship was the two sisters in We Have Always Lived in the Castle (which doesn't have canon incest, but does have resistance to patriarchal structures).

IIRC JJWXC doesn't allow it now (if it ever did)?

Huh, this made me realize that I've always assumed there was an incest tag that JJWXC removed, but now I checked, and the tag I was thinking of is just "forbidden love". I assume it must have been used for incest in the past because I saw locked incest novels with the tag, but I don't know if they were allowed or just dodging the censors.

[geraineon]

XDD Maybe the stars just aligned for incest discussions!

Thank you for linking that article! I got it through my university access. Looking forward to reading it, and your thoughts when you're done writing it up！ (I'll also toss it into the community drive later!)

That's interesting. It certainly is a very common trope! (which makes all the pearl clutching about it in the EN online spaces so stupid... like, your own literature also have lots of incest/pseudo-incest tropes!)

Hahaha, I suppose orthopedics is extremely removed from incest/pseudo-incest if one does not know the lingo.

Edited to add: The article mentioned is now in the cnovel comm drive (check resources! it's locked)

[anehan]

Maybe it'd be a good idea to link to resources posts from the sticky? They'd be easier to find that way while still staying locked to members.

[geraineon]

That's a good suggestion. Done!

[larryhammer]

"orthopedics" heh.

[lessonsinescapology]

Orthopedics... *dies laughing*