can you deal with incest in fanfic?

[percival]

If you are a mature adult, yes, possibly. But if you are a child or a teenager? Will you know that it is not a good idea to have sexual relationships with your sibling? Or will repeated exposure to the idea and fantasising about the idea somehow start to make incest acceptable to you after a while?

Just a Buddhist thought:

In Buddhism, we try to be compassionate and loving in our hearts. That means that we neither dwell upon violence nor enjoy it. One of the key insights in Buddhist spirituality is that who you are and how you act is closely related to what you think. As a consequence, we need to work on our mind, our thinking. We need to make sure that our thoughts are compassionate, loving, free of clinging desire.

So, from a Buddhist perspective, actively seeking out incest fics because you get a thrill out of the dark, forbidden relationship is clearly wrong because you are indulging a desire to see people harm each other. You invite these fantasies into your mind and nourish them.

How would a Buddhist regard people who read incest fic? Well, non-judgmentally, with compassion and understanding. If they decide they need to pollute their minds, they will have a reason for doing it.

For the record, I myself continuosly pollute my mind with thoughts of anger, self hate, sarcasm, hate of others, petty jealousy. But seeing that I want to be a good Buddhist, I will need to work on that. Sigh. Revelling in anger can be such fun sometimes, just as revelling in fantasies of incest or rape can be fun for people who read those fics. But ultimately, it's nae good for you, says Uncle Gautama. And Uncle Gautama is usually not far off the mark, if you know what I mean.

Comments

Re: insest

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

Mind you, I'm tarring it all with the same brush -- but I'd like somebody to show me an exception that deals with it as a horrifying tragedy for the brothers and the family.

Er...I wrote that. Though, it was Bill/Ginny, not twincest. But still. Some of us do actually write stuff like that from time to time. When I wrote it it spawned a lot of very interesting dicussion about the horror that is incest, and how difficult it is for victims to speak out.

But I suppose I shouldn't have written it, as it forced me to dwell on thse horrors for a while? Hmph.

Re: insest

[sff-corgi.livejournal.com]

Some of us do actually write stuff like that from time to time. When I wrote it it spawned a lot of very interesting dicussion about the horror that is incest, and how difficult it is for victims to speak out.

It's not the 'some of you' that are the point of debate -- it's the ones who write it like 'forbidden luuuurve', as if it's the consummation of all that is beauty and desire.

I'm glad to read... OK, 'glad' is a bad verb here. Ermm... I can appreciate that it sparked some serious and insightful discussion.

How did writing it make you feel? I'm curious about the inside of your head.

Re: insest

[kitsune13.livejournal.com]

Actually, incest as "forbidden love" has a viable tradition of literary representation, primarily among the Romantics: Byron and Shelley, in particular, tended to represent sibling incest as an extension and intensification of normal sibling love, rather than a perversion of it -- part of their theme of Romantic transgression. The tragedy (esp. in Shelley's Laon and Cynthus) comes in part because of the judgment of the outside world. Also, a decent number of folk songs treat sibling transgressors with a great deal of sympathy ("Sheath and Knife").

The point being that there has always been a space in literature acknowledging that incest is far too complicated an issue to merely file it away under "OMG EVIL." And treating the incestuous characters sympathetically isn't even remotely within the realm of "glorification." I have yet to read an incest story, literary or fanfictional, that says "Incest is great, so go out and sleep with your relatives right now!!1!" Anyone who managed to get that from a fictional story has issues of their own.

[ivyblossom.livejournal.com]

Uh...

I'm disturbed that you're so interested in the inside of my head, but writing the fic was a very interesting experience. I was writing about issues of consent in as many situations as I could come up with, problematizing as much as I could.

From what I can tell, people participating in this conversation may not understand why anyone would do that. I think there's something to be said about working through these things, both in private and in a public forum. I certainly learned a lot. The conversations that emerged were interesting and enlightening; some people felt that the incest victim I was portraying was in fact 'a slut' because of her situation. If people honestly have the capacity to think that way about girls caught in these kinds of vicious circumstances, I think it's something we really should explore, by your own moral standpoint. What if this stuff makes people more sensitive, rather than less?

How did it make me feel, writing incest? I really have no idea, I was more fixated on how my characters would be feeling than how it was making me feel. Challenged, I guess. It's difficult to write emotionally-charged situations. It felt more like a manifesto than anything else.

Hope that helps.

[perceval.livejournal.com]

yes, it helps enormously. Your comment helps me understand why people write incest. Issues of consent are certainly part of it, as are issues of power (big brother/little sister).

And these issues need to be explored, because no matter how "enlightened" or "holy" a person is, s/he will still feel all of the negative emotions that everybody is subject to. Now, (and this is my spiritual tradition coming through again, so bear with me ...), I think that it is much better to acklowledge a negative emotion and to explore it with compassion than to push it away and smack yourself for even THINKING about such things.

Well written incest really can make people more sensitive. I came away from Lolita thoroughly disgusted by Humbert Humbert, and marvelling at the way people can justify their own behaviour.