Exploring Kinks: #4 Incest

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So today’s kink of choice to discuss is incest. There are a dozen different varieties of this but I’m going to be focusing on the immediate parent/child and child/child pairings, be it by blood relation or just role relation (step, adopted, etc.) Which is actually important to realize with this topic. What makes incest such a hot topic for a lot of readers—and believe me, this has a huge fanbase—isn’t necessarily the genetic taboo. A lot of the times it has more to do with the perversions of the family roles represented in incest. Some of those roles and people’s natural reactions can be used in other fictional pairings, such as long time friends, or child with a friend of the parents to get the same triggering that attracts people to incest.

Let me say when I use the word ‘child’ in this topic, it’s to denote son/daughter/brother/sister, not anyone under age or a minor. Also, I should probably say that I’m not encouraging incest or anything in real life. This is all fiction. If you are in an incestual relationship, I have no judgments, just covering my ass here.

Again, I will stress the importance of understanding what you’re writing and why your audience responds to it. It helps you be a better writer, for one—always important. Don’t become stagnant; it’s boring. But maybe even more important, an audience that responds is a happy audience. It doesn’t even have to be a good response—People don’t go to watch horror movies because watching people get cut up into bloody bits makes them feel good. But they do crave the chemicals that are pumped into their system from the feelings they do get. No matter what you’re writing, as long as your audience feels it, trust that you’re doing something right.

Okay, diving in…

A ‘Healthy’ incest relationship

I’m going to start here as a baseline. Why? Because I tend to write unbalanced, unhealthy relationships because I enjoy the push and pull that they create on an emotional level. I like seeing people struggle before they get to their happiness and that can get complicated. A more healthy version of that relationship won’t be as intense or interesting (to me) but it will feature the roles and emotional bonds that are usually present between the characters that form these relationships. It’s these underlying emotions and connections that are the driving point for a lot of readers and their interest in this topic.

What is pulling your characters together?

• Shared experiences and familiarity
• Trust
• Protector role responding to another character’s vulnerability
• Unconditional love
• Curiosity
• The knowledge that their mistakes will be forgiven
• A deep understanding of each other

If you take out the fact that these people are related to each other, on paper they look like what a lot of people are searching for in a soul mate. It’s a romance, not a fuck fic. Because of the characters’ ability to communicate and understand each other so well, it’s also usually balanced in a lot of ways, even with that parent/child dynamic. An experienced adult, ideally, would be able to communicate and guide the child to a balanced level. It’s incest at its most wholesome and, honestly, it bores the fuck out of me to read.

What is pushing them apart?

• Genetics and family roles
• Society where incest = wrong/illegal
• The need for constant secrecy
• Fear of damaging yourself or love interest by such a relationship
• Fear of unreciprocated affection
• Fear of being shunned by family
• Fear of ruining what you have

This is your conflict to all those soulmate things above pulling your characters together. Conflict is usually what makes the pairing hot otherwise it’s just another romance. Society is going to be the biggest conflict unless your characters are isolated. Even still, it will always be a secret relationship, either the fact of their affection or their family bonds. Those other topics, fear of ruining the relationship and the world as the characters know it to be can also be used in friends to lovers fics, sometimes even the secrecy too if they’re dealing with opinionated friends and family that like to fuck things up. Again, when it comes to ‘healthy’ incest it really is about overcoming the family status and society most.

An unhealthy incest relationship

This will be the sort of fics I write and depending on my mood will depend on what’s going on. The main point is an unbalance of power/standing between the partners and/or an unbalance of acceptance to the relationship changing as well as a lack of communication. It’s the difference between ‘healthy’ people in a relationship and damaged, needy, obsessive, selfish people (let’s call them ‘human’) in a relationship. So let’s see what that looks like.

What is pulling your characters together?

• Sexual desire
• Desire to control/hold onto the love interest
• Assuming that intentionally crossing boundaries and damaging the love interest will be forgiven (or just not caring)
• A deep understanding that is used to manipulate the other
• Fear of being alone, unloved
• A need for the other’s family role to always be in their life no matter if it’s unbalanced
• A desire to keep the other vulnerable and weak and always in need of them
• Unconditional obsession

Now, you can actually add the healthy list into this one as well because really, people are complex and it could be all or just one of these depending on your story. This is when jealousy, obsession, and fear of losing the one they love overtakes the potential ‘healthy’ relationship.

What is pushing them apart?

• Genetics and family roles
• Society where incest = wrong/illegal
• The need for constant secrecy
• Fear of damaging yourself or love interest by such a relationship
• Fear of unreciprocated affection
• Fear of being shunned by family
• Fear of ruining what you have

Yup, it’s the same list. Don’t be too surprised. The drama of this type of story comes from the pull of the people, not the push from society. You will be amazed at how good people are at creating their own shit. They don’t need an ax hanging over their head, they just need to refuse to let their love interest go even though they understand it would be better for both of them. This is the sort of story where characters create the drama and the plot just pushes things along.

Why? Because it’s an internal conflict. You’re taking something that people have absolutely no control over—sexual/romantic love—and then making a blanket rule as to who is allowed to feel and act on those feelings. And it is such a deep-seated, societal rule, that it isn’t questioned. If it comes up at all, it’s done in secrecy, and rarely gets to the point of society discovering it. I think the first time I saw an actual incest pairing on television was for one of those British murder mysteries where you find out the brother and sister had murdered because the person had caught them having sex. It was never society questioning if these people had a right to their relationship and them fighting back, it was definitely an acceptance of they didn’t have a right and the only question was how to hide it.

It showed me that in this type of fiction, focusing on trying to fight that underlying social norm has little value in creating tension and conflict. Instead, that happens because of your characters, their behavior and…

The perversion of the family roles

There is a reason ageplay is popular. I’m not going to go too deep into it (maybe another post,) but it’s people of a consenting age playing roles of usually parent and child with a sexual nature in the mix. People might look at the question of someone playing a child in a sexual role—I’m looking at the underlying incestual tones because of those family roles.

Now when I say perversion, I mean not only the sexualisation of these roles but also, on some levels, a selfishness and need for control added on what would normally be ideally a loving, guiding balance.

So, how do you pervert the family roles? Well, first you need to identify them. They’re your character’s interactions on a daily basis. Let’s see… A parent cooking a meal, an older sibling helping with homework, a sibling standing up for another. You’ll find a lot of these actions based examples buried in the first list of pulls for a healthy relationship. What does unconditional love look like on a daily basis? Once you establish that and the many boundaries that those roles require, you then change/pervert them for the goal of your fiction.

Some examples. With an older younger pairing, you can focus on the manipulation of wills to get what one wants, as well as the exploitation of age and experience. The child will be more inexperienced in everything including the emotional consequences of their actions, giving them a willingness to do more emotionally damaging things in the name of love. While the parent has an innate power over the child which can be exploited as well as exploiting the unconditional love and forgiveness directed at them so they can gain their own fulfillment.

Expect mind games instead of talking for child/child. Guilt, manipulation, bad behavior for personal gain, trying to trap the other into giving in, the tricks and blackmail used to keep them from telling about what they did—you name it, this can be in your fic. People that are close to each other can sometimes be the cruelest because they lose sight that they’re dealing with a person outside of themselves. We are the worst to ourselves.

The more the initial baseline is twisted and corrupted and the more the characters are effect emotionally—possibly physically and financially as well, the more impact you create. The ability to create tension is all about acknowledging, identifying, and being able to point out these turning points to your reader right before you cross a line. Focusing on the characters’ internal struggles before setting them off to run across that line makes the impact greater than just having them cross a line.

I’m going to give you a quick example of the ease of perversion when it comes to these roles with an excerpt from Robyn: Forced to be Their Sister.

Half expecting to be beaten given the heated stares from all three of his angry brothers, Rob was confused when he was just wrestled into place, Dan’s large hands pinning his wrists behind his back and holding him still.

“It was a joke,” he said lamely, his jaw squared as he met Frank’s hard gaze.

“Like fuck it was, you little brat.” Out of the three of them, Frank was the sternest when he wanted to be. His brother had no problem punishing him for doing bad, usually making Rob feel ridiculously young and small whenever he did no matter how old he was. Frank had that look in his eye like maybe he’d be making his youngest brother stand in the corner for a fucking night just to prove some point.

“You know better, Robbie,” Joey said, stepping up and drawing the boy’s eye. “You know how my blood sugar gets. You could have really hurt me.”

“I didn’t…” Rob bit his lip, staring up into his brother’s soulful, gray eyes. He had totally forgotten about Joey’s diabetes. But Joey had laughed at him just like Dan and Frank, and it wasn’t like he had actually gotten hurt if they had caught him already. “You guys were being assholes and—Fuck! Frank!” Rob gasped, turning wide eyes to his eldest brother who had just slapped his ass. Hard.
Frank’s expression was severe, the tall boy glaring back at him as he sat deliberately on the edge of Rob’s bed and made a sharp beckoning gesture with his hand.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Rob hissed, yelping when Dan shoved him into Frank’s waiting arms, the older boy pulling him over his lap. Blood rushed to Rob’s face, his gaze suddenly filled with a view of the floor, stomach crunched against a hot leg, his towel roughly stripped away from him to leave him exposed, his ass cool and vulnerable as his brother held him down over his knees.

“Fight me on this, Robyn, and I’m just going to make it hurt more,” Frank promised, his voice a low growl as his fingers bit unyielding into the flesh of Rob’s hip. “You crossed a line. You’ve been crossing a lot of lines lately but this one is unacceptable.”

Rob didn’t care what the hell he had done, there was no way in fuck he was going to let Frank spank him. The last time he had been spanked he had been seven and had been running with scissors. No way was this okay. “Let me go, you stupid fuck, or I’ll tell mom!”

It was the wrong answer, Frank’s hand smacking down firmly, Rob yelping from the sound followed swiftly by the feeling of sharp pain. The feeling barely had time to fade before Frank’s hand smacked down again, Rob gasping as it struck harder this time.

“I hate you,” he grunted out, ducking his head, tears stinging the corners of his eyes to be so humiliated. His brother was too strong and with Dan and Joey watching, there would be no escape. Frank hit him again, the older boy getting into a rhythm, his large hand slamming down over Rob’s firm cheeks, each strike making the quickly reddening flesh give a jiggle and the slender boy a pained, embarrassed yelp.

“Should have behaved, little bro,” Frank muttered, slapping down again on the boy’s perky ass. “Sure as fuck shouldn’t have kept the evidence in your bag like a total idiot. It was like you were looking to get caught.” His hand crashed down again, Rob gasping in reply. “How many was that?”

“More,” Dan said brightly. “She hasn’t even said sorry.”

“Fuck, I hate you!” Rob growled, shouting even though he refused to look up and see his smirking brother. “I’m not a fucking girl!”

“Quiet,” Frank snapped, slapping his hand down again, even harder than before. “The only words I want to hear from you are ‘I’m sorry.’”

Rob couldn’t hold it back anymore, his tears streaming hot down his face. He ducked his head further down but nothing could muffle his sniffles. His ass was burning hot, the flesh vibrating with each strike. He felt helpless, overwhelmed, and so weak compared to Frank’s strong body and hard muscles. They were always treating him like a little kid but they were the ones that were at fault. He refused to apologize. Frank had been a total asshole and he was just defending himself.

As if Frank could sense the defiance in the smaller boy, his blows hit harder, or maybe it was just the fact that Rob’s cheeks were already so sore, the flesh sensitive and feeling even more so with every slap. Rob grit his teeth only to cry out every time his brother’s heavy hand hit down. His cries were turning to sobs much to his mortification, his tears growing thicker, voice full of his pain. What was worse was when one of Frank’s strikes jolted him forward, Rob shuddering to find he was hard, his dick bare, erect, and pushed right against the coarse material of his older brother’s jeans. He would have covered himself, tried to curl away but he couldn’t move in Frank’s grip and his cheeks were still being struck, no mercy in his brother’s ministrations. He was left with his white-hot shame, trying to keep his hips back so Frank couldn’t tell that some really messed up part of him was aroused by the treatment.

Realizing it didn’t matter what he did, he was going to be spanked until Frank felt he had enough, Rob closed his eyes, sinking forward, trying to breathe around his gasps and tears. As long as they didn’t find out he was hard, he’d be okay. That was all he could think about, that and the steady, painful rhythm of his ass being spanked with each of his breaths. As long as he didn’t hump up against the boy’s leg like he was desperate to do to feel some relief to the unbearable ache growing between his thighs…

So to start with you have an establishment of roles. Frank is the stern, righteous brother willing to do what it takes to teach Rob a lesson. Dan’s gleeful in his younger brother’s punishment, and Joey is sweet but standing firm (kinda like mommy ^^). Although nearly the same age, the three are taking on a more parental role in this scene with the doling out of punishment. Rob’s role is to be younger, defiant, and in need of learning a lesson. So in this scene, you literally have a perversion of a role where Rob isn’t that young, where punishing him in such a way at his current age is more a power play, and that he’s aroused by it suggests a particular wiring on his part and a complete change in dynamic of their interaction. And believe me, it gets far more interesting as the scene progresses and the roles completely twist by the end.

A lot of what makes these types of fics interesting (when I write them) is the change brought on from that role perversion. Change in characters, their dynamics, and the world around them. This particular fic has Rob deciding he might want to be a cross-dresser by the end of it—probably not the most traditional theme of an incest fic, but hey, the sky is the limit.

In conclusion

Incest is the push and pull of an inappropriate relationship but instead of the full out selfishness that can happen with strangers, you’re adding in an underlying long-term emotional foundation between the characters first. You need an aggressor to get things moving, and usually, you need the foil to fight the pull and draw the tension out. Fear of discovery, fear of ruining the relationship they did have, fear of ruining the person they love for their own desires, fear of never coming back from the obsession—All these emotional pulls to stop vs the physical, sexual, emotional pushes to continue. This goes back to what makes dubcon sexy; the internal struggle of what you want vs what society wants for you.

This is the same theme in teacher/student, doctor/patient, boss/secretary fics, etc, just that the roles are different and tend to be based in more than just action. Family roles have an underlying emotional bond that is missing from the other types of roles eroticised in fiction. It’s more an archetype than just a role. The extra emotional connection is usually part of the draw for readers. It somehow justifies the intense and exploitative behavior because they can rationalize and fantasize about obsessive love. And what’s more obsessive than falling for someone you’re not allowed to have?

Did I miss anything? I usually write these things off the top of my head. If there is anything that you think could totally describe incest, let me know and I’ll be happy to add it!