TheLowKing
Really Really Experienced
To paraphrase a quote I recently read: "All possible perversities are inevitable. Every conceivable taboo has been committed."New goal, make an Abraham Lincoln quote meme out of this and see if I can convince anyone it's real. Why do you think Mary Todd Lincoln had so many mental health problems bro!!the only limit to your degeneracy is yourself
..Huh. I wonder if there's a multiverse sex story in there somewhere.
It really says a lot about how all-encompassing the taboo of incest really is that even a world-spanning conflict like World War 2 is not enough to break down the barrier.It's an inaccurate thought in this context since no abeyance thresholds are really met when England maintained relative stability of governance during the war (admittedly probably not heavily weighted toward incest statute enforcement) but my verbatim interior reaction to reading this was:
Wow. How many brotherfuckers were forged in the Blitz!
The effective stake for the characters hinges way less on the technicalities of what constitutes incest, since it matters much more what happens if or when people find out. Like say someone's mom has a step brother who's functionally their uncle. The technicality of him not being a blood relative is not going to be what drives Mom's reaction if she finds out they had sex. There's a violation of social acceptability there and I really respect it when stories make an effort to honor that. I can still enjoy stories that prefer to ignore this and get straight to the fucking, but I really love being put through the paces if the characters settle into or worry about their activities with a more realistic range of emotional approaches.
Then again, there have been societies in which incest was acceptable, even preferred. Queen Cleopatra married her brother (and then had him killed. (And then married her other brother. (And had him killed.))) and that was standard practice for the Ptolemaic dynasty that ruled Egypt. The Habsburgs' unofficial family motto was "Let others wage war, but thou, O happy Austria, marry". And by 'marry', they meant 'marry each other', explicitly using incestuous marriage as a method of gaining and maintaining political power, even when that had some, uh, unfortunate effects down the line.
