More incest reading yay!

[lotesse]

I, unlike the rest of the world, did not read Flowers in the Attic in Junior High, but I've heard considerable amounts about it due to everyone else's cires of, "It warped me forever! And I liked it! Eeep!" So I found it at the Goodwill for a quarter and picked it up.

I totally love this book. Even though I can't help thinking that it isn't that well made. It's pure emotional masturbation, baby, but it hits enough of my emotional kinks that I'm totally in love with it.

I've been finding that I really, really love sibling incest stories. Not Weasley twincest, for some reason. It just seems sort of boring to me. I think it may be due to the fact that I find the twins about as iteresting as drying glue, but hey. YMMV. But I like the incest stories that are dark and twisty and wong wrong wrong and yet so wonderfully right, the ones that you root for at the same time as you cringe at it all. The ones that you secretly want to last for ever and ever. The ones that are stories about true love, but not really, because they're also vaguely horrible and destructive.

Why is this so attractive? I have no interest in actual incest; usually it's ignorant and crude and opressive and horrid, nothing like the gothic elegance of my incest stories. Perhaps it has something to do with the longing for ultimate closeness--the sibling, closest to us in all the world, friend and companion, also becoming lover and partner, one person filling your emotional life completely, as close to you as your own heartbeat. You will know each other completely, two halves of one whole.

Maybe this is part of it, but the undercurrent of wrongness is also definitely a factor. I don't think I'd be interested in a completely happy-ever-after story, something that didn't address the against-the-grain-ness of it all. That would feel false, jarring, crude. I don't know.

Thoughts?

Comments

[psyknife.livejournal.com]

I read that book... a long time ago, though. I remember liking it and kinda getting turned on by the whole incest thing, too... not that I want to commit it, but those children didn't know any better. Besides, it is relgion that tells you it is wrong, so if you are not religious I don't see why you can't have different opinions on it. After reading The Mists of Avalon I can see the whole incest thing from opposing views. I still don't know which one I'm on, but at least my mind can work both ways... and so can yours :)

[lotesse]

But see, I think that tey do know better, and that that's part of the attraction. No one wants to read about the boy- and girl-kings of Egypt, or all the other people who married their sibs and didn't think anything of it. We want the badwrongtensionness of it, and without that the attraction isn't nearly so strong.

And I also think that there's more to it than religion...the taboo seems pretty widespread for that.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I wish I could understand my love of that kind of incest but so far I don't know what it is. Maybe the idea that two people are literally "made for each other" because they're the male/female version of the same thing? I don't know...but as idlerat recently pointed out, it seems to be popping up on TV as well, and I think it seems to work best when there's an adolescent theme, so the characters are sort of set against the mean adults.

Flowers in the Attic being an obvious example. God, it's so bad in so many ways but you can still see why that story sucks people in. You're right, it's such pure emotional masturbation.

[lotesse]

"The love that dare not speak its name" and all that?