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pseudoincestuous · 11 months

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feeling nostalgic, so I thought I’d share my story of how I came to be here, as an incest shipper. Up until now I have been too concerned with others finding out my identity to share my thoughts, but I think I am finally comfortable doing so.

The first incest ship I was into was pinecest back in 2017 (thanks to doublepines artwork) and I felt so guilty about it I deleted that blog. I still have the dummy e-mail address I used to create the account, though. That was my real first incest ship. I never would have gotten curious if it weren’t for anti-pinecest fans vaguing about the ship in the tags. I remember liking the taboo nature of the ship, and the portrayal of the forbidden love between the siblings as something that had some positive aspects (rather than the universally negative portrayals I had only ever seen in media at that point in my life.) After having that account for a short period, I deleted it out of shame and pretended it had never happened.

Years later when I got into Jojo, I was enjoying part 4 and the fanart that came with it. I stumbled across some Josuhan ship art, and ended up feeling conflicted. At the time, I still saw ship art as something that can be immoral. Yet, I liked the bickering, frictional relationship between the characters, and imagining how it would transfer to a romantic context.

Eventually I decided to make a separate twitter account for my problematic Jojo fanart indulgences, the Sarah_j0jo account which is now my main twitter account. (I stopped using twitter connected to my real name a long time ago.) I got into Josuhan even though it was an age gap ‘toxic’ ship, and then by proximity, because I figured if I was going to ship problematic things I might as well go whole hog on the matter, so I got into JotaJosu. To be truthful, I didn’t like it much when I first got into it, but the ship gradually grew on me. I found one of the most haunting fanfictions that I have read to date. The power imbalance between the older and jaded Jotaro and his young uncle Josuke felt like a very old story indeed, just put through the lens of fandom’s interpretation of the characters.

Over time, I went back to using tumblr, but gradually I was becoming more comfortable with the idea of shipping “immoral” things. I became infatuated with Kusucest later in 2021, another frictional relationship, but this time between estranged siblings, both of whom were queercoded and one of whom was implied to have masochistic, incestuous feelings for the other on a purely physical level, the other implied asexual, forming a stark contrast. They captivated me, these two characters who were so different and yet blood related; so dependent on each other despite themselves, all their interactions coming in the form of violence of some kind, even when they had a positive outcome.

I was fascinated by the fact that one was so thoroughly obsessed with the other, the other pretending they weren’t related whenever possible; this inconvenient, spiteful, competitive brother who so thoroughly messed up his worldview as a child by demonizing an integral part of him, his psychic powers. And yet, at the same time, the older idolizes the younger for what he is, and even loves him unconditionally. And the younger realizes that he is indebted to his brother (and by proxy his brother’s obsession with him). Despite everything, by the end of the story, Kusuo can’t seem to dislike him.

It’s a thoroughly dysfunctional relationship with plenty of themes to explore, and both of them grow over the course of the story, and there’s so many things about the characters that feel like contradictions and yet seem to work. I stayed quiet about shipping them because most of the fandom understandably wasn’t interested in imagining them together in a romantic or sexual context. The blog I ran was (or rather, still is) mostly focused on the characters and the story, and the themes of friendship (all things that I still wholeheartedly love and appreciate about the show.)

It wasn’t until I got into Vijinx about a year later that I really decided, fuck it, this is fiction, and stopped seeing the matter as a two-sided issue. Instead, there’s people who are comfortable with it and people who aren’t (and it is a weird, uncomfortable hobby to have by definition.) I spent a very long time being uncomfortable with it, and yet drawn in nonetheless. But around early 2022 was the point at which I completely stopped seeing it as an issue of something that reflected any sort of real life morality, and embraced the idea that we as human beings will have dark thoughts and fantasies that don’t define us as people, no matter how much or how little we identify them as true.

Fast forward to this year, and everyone who follows my non-problematic tumblr accounts knows that I’m accepting of portrayals of complex characters and character relationships, both in canon and in fanon. I’ve attended therapy, spent invaluable time thinking about what it *really* means to be a good person, and read some really insightful books that made me rethink the shame I felt over ‘problematic’ shipping, more specifically incest shipping which I had by then realized I liked.

I figured out shipping was, for one, a harmless diversion and didn’t mean that I had any interest in doing anything that I wanted fictional characters to do. It’s a way to mentally put yourself in a difficult, undesirable or even dangerous situation without being harmed. I figured it was ultimately me trying to work through difficult questions and feelings, ones that weren’t actually directly related to incest at all, but instead reflected the ways in which people are alienated and ostracized from their true feelings and inner selves.

It’s about falling in love and feeling totally out of your depth and out of control because of who you fall in love with. It’s about the unspeakable taboo (what happens if other people find out how I feel?) and the way the entire world is against the feelings that seem inevitable to you, no matter how much you try to scrape them out of you. It’s all a potent metaphor for queerness and the feelings I’ve struggled with my entire life. Especially because there seems to be less and less stories in fandom these days that really dig into the psychological terror, the confusion, the guilt, the anxiety, cold fear and the repression that queer people go through (especially ex homophobic, and ex religious christian queer people) to accept their identities.

On a deeper level, it’s about the shame itself; it really is. The shame I have been conditioned and taught to the point that I internalized it. The ways in which I am still discovering the power that unnecessary shame holds over me, deconstructing the ways it eats into my life as I take it into consideration with everything I do- scheduling my time, creating art, communicating with others, even simply using my own body as I eat or exercise or sleep. That shame is the root of so many psychological problems and so much miscommunication, not just in my life but in many people’s lives. It’s a much deeper shame than feeling; it’s the shame of being.

Incest just happens to be the perfect vehicle to examine that shame. There’s nothing quite so universally shamed and condemned as incest, for its connotations with abuse and the inherent ‘yuck’ factor that nature, nurture or perhaps both has installed in humanity.

If incest is about shame, then maybe cannibalism is about codependency, vampirism is about sexuality and lyncanthropy is about repression. So many dark tropes have a metaphorical quality to them.

Literary metaphors are sometimes a hard thing for someone who is naturally somewhat literal minded like me to accept. But most of the time, even when an author means a story to be completely literal, there’s a metaphorical reading that can be found within.

I just wasn’t consciously aware that I was looking for that in these stories for a long, long time.

Many fanworks are created by victims of some kind of abuse looking to understand that abuse better through the artwork. Some people are aware of everything they are exploring through their art, some aren’t, and some, (probably most) like me, don’t fully realize what they are exploring until they really dive in and let themselves have fictional experiences through fandom that aren’t restricted or unilaterally positive. I honestly believe that in some way, on some level, every person who creates art with dark themes is trying to understand something that happened to them, or someone else close to them in their lives. It just isn’t always exactly what they are creating art about. And it isn’t always life ruining trauma, but it’s something no less real. And of course it is enjoyable. Exploring human relationships through fiction is enjoyable, creating art is enjoyable; controlling the narrative and the outcome of the story is enjoyable. Examining it is an important step in learning about ourselves and the world around us, and in the healing process for trauma that allows us to make these difficult questions and emotions and construct them into something. It’s an enjoyable process, because it’s cathartic.

And this isn’t the end of the journey for me, either. I have more art to create; more of myself to accept, more difficult bits of reality to understand. But I’m no longer shying away from the darkness of it. Sometimes the only way out is through. If I can’t handle reality, then it follows that I would include bits of reality in my fantasies which reflect some truth which I have yet to fully see. Constructing a story, oddly enough, helps me do that. By constructing the story I extract the unconscious things which I observe and make them conscious, and draw conclusions about them. And of course, what I create isn’t reality itself, only a meditation on it from my own limited perspective, injected with enough fantasy to make it something I can comfortably embrace.

Finally knowing and understanding all of this has brought me some peace. I hope it brings you peace as well.

#sarah speaks #long post #proship safe #comship #shipcest

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