Archive | January 29, 2011

On incest in other people’s fiction, and similar things

I was thinking this morning about “wrongness” in stories I read.

I don’t mind reading sibling-sibling incest (Arthur and Morgan le Fae comes to mind), and cousin-cousin incest like in The Enchantment Emporium doesn’t even faze me.

But situations where a man ends up romantically involved with a non-relative girl for whom he’s stood in loco parentis? (Afra/Damian in Anne McCaffrey’s Roawn, Narl/Rosie in Robin McKinley’s Spindle’s End)…(Unrelated: should I change my name to McAlder?)… That creeps me right out. These men have known these girls since they were infants. Ew.