January 3rd, 2024
Tasteful sibling-incest media is hard to come by but when it's good, it's really good.
If the gothic is where the romantic and the real find tension, then this is the quintessential modern gothic novel. When a loving family's father dies, the mother takes her children to live in an attic in her parents' huge mansion. Virginia Andrews said that her aim in writing was to put her characters in the dark throughout her novel, and then end with them standing in the sun. This novel was very popular when it came out though it's under-appreciated nowadays.
Nabokov, a genius of wordplay, famous for writing Lolita, writes a long masterpiece about a love story between two "cousins" (genetically, they are siblings). Very difficult to read but worth it.
'Yosuga no Sora' is a purposefully vague name that can mean a lot of things: 'Sora, who depends on me', 'Sora, on whomst I am dependent', 'A sky of connection', 'The sky I depend on', 'Sora, who I am related to'. This follows a theme in eroge gaming where-in authors will make the names purposefully vague in order to instill a sense of artistic meaning in works whilst providing hints of decadence. In this game, two twins (Haruka and Sora) with a lot of emotional baggage move to the countryside after their parents die. Sora has impeccable fashion sense. The incest taboo has always been a little loose in Japan.
The creator of this game knows and understands the gothic like a fish knows swimming. Two siblings who've been left for dead, locked in 'quarantine' in their house, do anything to survive. And since they only have each other now, family boundaries break down.
Nick Land's first piece of philosophical writing, littered with references to 20th century feminist psychoanalysis, posits that the prohibition of incest is instrumental to the paranoiac-machine's functioning.
A look back upon the incestuous listerature of the victorian and early-modern periods, with contextual analysis of how the incest scare happened, and the subsequent institution of its prohibition.