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Popular culture often expects twins to share everything, including, it seems, their beds. It's a particularly common trope in Slash Fic, Hentai, and porn, though it does occur in mainstream fiction often enough to be a discernable trope. It's especially common as a way of making Creepy Twins just that much more disturbing.
Note that Twincest is not necessarily homosexual: that's what fraternal twins and Half Identical Twins are for. However, a great deal of the appeal to viewers is the popular fantasy of sleeping with two identical copies of a single hot person at the same time, so homosexual (or bisexual if there's a lucky third party of another gender) twincest is more often used to titillate viewers. For Yuri Fans and Yaoi Fans who became fans at least partly because they see a forbidden appeal to such relationships, Twincest supercharges that part of the appeal.
A common twist, in this and in Brother Sister Incest in general, is for a couple to fall in love, only to find out later that they were Separated At Birth. (See genetic sexual attraction .) How far their relationship goes before they discover this generally depends on whether the plotline is supposed to be humorous or tragic.
The mentalities of twincest are generally vastly different from Brother Sister Incest in general. BSI usually caters to siscon, "sister complex", where a male wishes to protect a helpless little girl that looks up to him to the point of idolization — and her cute cries of " oniichan!" don't hurt. If it's notable, it's usually an Official Couple and the focus of the series. Twincest, however, is almost always composed of Yaoi Guys, both of whom are much more mature than the cute little sister, and aimed at fangirls; if it's not canon, there will be plenty of girls shipping it.
An old Japanese myth says that if two star-crossed lovers commit dual suicide, they get reincarnated as twins. This may be one of the factors in the frequency of Twincest stories in anime.
Of course, sometimes even Twincest isn't quite incestuous enough for the writers.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Picture above: Candy Boy is entirely about yuri twincest, in that Yukino does like to tease her sister Kanade quite a bit. There's nothing explicit going on, since Kanade decides to keep a cool outer appearance, although she is obviously enamored with her sister.
- Black Lagoon's Hansel and Gretel. Given their history, this is possibly the least disturbing thing about them.
- A non-canon pairing trope popular with fans of the Digimon series. Kouji and Kouichi from Digimon Frontier were Separated At Birth and, to a much lesser extent due to their limited involvement (but still plausible... we're talking one of the most messed-up fandoms in recent memory in regards to who they pair up), Ai and Makoto from Digimon Tamers fall into this. Camp Gay Rhodo-Knightmon (Crusadermon) makes thinly-veiled Twincest jokes about Kouji and Kouichi in one memorable episode.
- Yoh and Hao in Shaman King are twins. In the anime, especially the 4Kids dub, Hao kept saying it was Yoh's destiny to unite with him. A lot of yaoi fangirls love Yoh/Hao.
- Subverted in Gundam SEED: Kira and his Separated At Birth twin sister Cagalli meet in the first episode (neither knowing they're related), and when they reunite further in the series, Cagalli comforts the emotionally ragged Kira in a purely platonic way. This is ironically taken as a threat by Flay, Kira's screwed-up girlfriend (it's not a healthy relationship), despite the fact there's no romantic attraction to it. Further toyed with when Cagalli displays a Luminescent Blush at overhearing Flay admit to her ex-fiancé Ssigh that she and Kira have slept together.
- Gundam 00 plays with this too. Whether Ribbons Almack and his "sister" Healing Care qualify as twins is debatable, both of them being DNA-engineered children with the same sequence, but Healing seems to show a bit more adoration than is platonic towards Ribbons.
- .hack//tasogare no udewa densetsu hints strongly at incest, or at least lust, between two characters who are twins. This is basically a Flanderization of subtler jokes in the manga, where it was the sister's completely different-looking and skimpily-dressed computer avatar that set off the whole thing.
- It can't be helped either that the anime altered the storyline near the end where their relationship is implied to be much stronger.
- In Revolutionary Girl Utena, Half Identical Twins Miki and Kozue have a bizarre relationship which may involve twincest, particularly in the movie.
- Onegai Twins features a boy who is not sure which of the two girls in the story is his long-lost twin sister. They both fall for him, making one a case of twincest and the other not. Now, if only they knew which...
- And if only the manga and anime were the same on that point...
- Chobits has some extremely un-sibling-like touching between Chi and the "Dark Chi" that appears in her mind. This proves to be her sister, Freya, whose mind was downloaded into Chi.
- In a similar CLAMP example, see Hinoto and her hallucinatory evil twin in X1999.
- Another Clamp example, Fai and his twin Yuui in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle. Not canon, one of them is dead since before the story began, but extremely popular in fandom.
- The Hitachiin twins in Ouran High School Host Club play this up for their fangirls for the purposes of their club. They also seem to be very affectionate toward each other when the fangirls aren't watching, but this, too, could also be a game they play.
- In one episode they are shown to share a bed.
- This is highlighted by the fact that one of them (probably Hikaru) emerges with no clothes on except for an elephant face over his crotch that proceeds to spout streamers, in what might be some bizarre metaphor.
- Boku wa Imouto ni Koi o Suru ("I'm In Love With My Little Sister")
- Myself Yourself has twins Shuri and Shusuke with a particularly strong relationship in the face of Parental Abandonment, with a later rumor even claiming a more illicit relationship. Under threat of separation, they run away together near the end. The Distant Finale strongly suggests that the twincest subtext has become canon.
- The Kannazuki no Miko manga ends with Chikane and Himeko reincarnated as twin sisters. Oh, dear. At least they didn't have to go far to find each other again.
- This may be a variation on the Japanese myth mentioned above.
- Many fans pair Vash and Knives from Trigun. To be fair, it is strongly implied that Knives has one heck of a brother complex towards Vash. The first big confrontation between Vash and Knives at the very end of the first Trigun manga really looks like a metaphorical rape scene complete with grotesquely obvious phallic symbols. Which wasn't even the most disturbing thing about this scene in the first place.
- And let's not get started on Rociel / Roshiel's 'ambiguous' attitude towards his twin-sister-Alexiel-reincarnated-into-Setsuna in Angel Sanctuary. But then again, Rociel isn't a paragon of sanity, and brother-sister incest is one of the main themes of the manga.
- One of the fanon yaoi pairings in The Prince of Tennis involves a set of twins: the Kisarazus, namely Atsushi from Saint Rudolph (short hair, a red bandanna) and Ryou from Rokkaku (long hair, a white hat).
- There are multiple examples of pairing up Netto and Rockman from Mega Man Battle Network/Mega Man NT Warrior. It's up to the Gentle Reader to decide which squicks him or her more — the game version, where this trope applies in full, or in the anime, where he's just a computer program.
- Amiboshi and Suboshi in Fushigi Yuugi, though a lot of this is fan speculation. Especially because Suboshi feeds Amiboshi a mind-erase drug through a kiss in episode 40.
- In an author's note in the manga, Yuu Watase claims that she didn't mean for that particular incident to seem so sexual. Sure she didn't.
- The revelation at the end of Chrono Crusade that Chrono and Aion are twins hasn't stopped some fans from shipping them. The fact that Aion really does seem to have a brother complex doesn't help dissuade them.
- Zero and his long-lost twin Ichiru in Vampire Knight. The 'cest is entirely irrelevant to the plot. It just needed that extra element.
- In an example where the incest is relevant to the plot, in Saiyuki Hakkai's girlfriend Kanan was actually his Separated At Birth twin sister. It's not known when they found out, but it was Hakkai's motive for what he did after she was given up to the demons by the villagers.
- The Hayasaka twins from Buso Renkin, while most likely not involved in actual twincest, do act a lot like a married couple, and used to recite the traditional wedding vows to each other as a game, as kids.
- In Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid the assassins Xia Yu Fan and Xia Yu Lan are twin sisters who take showers together. And hold each other at every available opportunity. Also Yu Lan sees Yu Fan descending naked from the sky toward her when she dies.
- The relationship between Carossa and Melissa in Gun X Sword has elements of this, though they are never so pronounced as when the two first appear and Carossa licks away Melissa's tears. Van, watching, cannot help but be a little disturbed.
- On learning that Fai of Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle has a deceased twin brother named Yuui, the fangirls hit the keyboards hard. To their credit, they usually seem to base it in the Omake-verse for the series, where said twin is alive and well.
- Actually, Fai is the dead twin and the Fai we know in the series is truly Yui, having taken his brother's name after his death. Make of that what you will.
- The Acid Tokyo arc's Kamui and Subaru actually manage even more Ho Yay than their counterparts in X1999 (who are not related in any way). Vampirism may have something to do with it.
- Some Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni fans like to ship Mion and Shion, despite the fact that both girls have potential canon love interests. The animation company doesn't help this.
- Ditto for Lucky Star's Kagami and Tsukasa. There still have been some decent stories involving this couple though.
- Ayashi No Ceres plays this trope quite creepily and mixes it with Rape As Drama.
- The fan pairing of USA/Canada. The fans they have are few, but very loyal.
- There are also some Taiwan/Hong Kong and Nort Italy/South Italy shippers around, but the jury's still out on the subject of these two "couples" being twins or just siblings, though.
Comics
- In the Ultimate Marvel Universe, there were hints about Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch going down this road from the beginning, until it was confirmed outright in a recent issue of The Ultimates, immediately before her death.
- This Troper thinks that the twin's relationship was iffy long before Ultimates...
- Marvel Comics' Fenris twins (Andrea and Andreas Von Strucker) play with this idea (and likely, each other!) fairly frequently. Shudder.
- It gets worse. Andrea has since died, and since their energy blast powers relied on them touching to function, her brother had her skin made into leather and wrapped his sword hilt with it. On top of that, he is nothing short of fanatically obsessed with finding a way to resurrect her. The whole thing is portrayed just as creepily as it sounds, with even other characters around him being squicked by it.
- Their Ultimate versions were pretty much the same, save for the bit in spoilers up there.
- It was heavily implied in a few issues of Infinity, Inc. that Obsidian had a crush on his long-lost twin sister Jade. She was blissfully oblivious.
Films
- Narrowly averted (at least according to Fanon) in Star Wars: the viewers (and the characters themselves) are initially led to expect a love triangle between Luke, Leia and Han, but then it is revealed in Return Of The Jedi that Luke and Leia are actually twins.
- However, the novel Splinter of the Mind's Eye was written and takes place before their relationship was revealed and so features romantic scenes with the two.
- When this troper saw the re-release of The Empire Strikes Back in the theaters, the scene where Leia kisses Luke (to make Han jealous, and rather passionately) invoked horrified groans from the audience, 'cause we knew!
- David Cronenberg's 1988 film Dead Ringers features some creepily sexual scenes between Jeremy Irons and Jeremy Irons as twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot.
- Based on the novel Twins, later re-released as Dead Ringers.
- Creepy Twins Wendell and Darlene from the horror film The Hamiltons.
- Pretty much the basic plot of The House of Yes, with Parker Posey.
- Julie Taymore's film version of Titus Andronicus portrays Chiram and Demetrius this way. They're just as touchy-feely with their mom, too. It's okay, though, because Anthony Hopkins puts them in a pie.
- Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Okay, the twincest doesn't actually happen, but boy, does Prince Badass Bishonen Faerie want it to.
- Ryan and Sharpay Evans from High School Musical have a suspiciously close relationship, what with singing love songs to each other and playing romantic leads opposite each other. Plus there's that video of "I Can't Take My Eyes Off of You", a song in which Troy, Gabriella, Ryan, and Sharpay all sing — Troy and Gabriella (established couple) sing to each other and Ryan and Sharpay... also sing to each other. Sample lyrics: "I can't take my eyes off of you/ I know you feel the same way too" and "You never really know what you might find/Now all I see is you and I/ You're everything I never knew that I've been looking for."
- That could be one of the reasons that song was left out of the film, but I think the song was originally meant just for Troy and Gabriella, like it is in the play version. And, in that video, it was the actors singing. (Except Zac Efron...)
- "If Sharpay could figure out a way to play Romeo and Juliet at the same time, her brother would be out of a job."
- In Euro Trip, Jenny and Jamie get trashed on absinthe and make out. The are appropriately horrified the next morning.
Literature
- Cersei and Jaime Lannister in A Song Of Ice And Fire. Jaime is revealed to be true father of Queen Cersei's children, thus making them false heirs to the throne. This eventually is one of the main causes of the following civil war.
- Goes from pretty nasty to very squicky when it's revealed that they were in love with each other even as little children. Cersei even implies that the bond went back to birth, seeing as the two shared a womb, something that squicks the everloving fuck out of Ned Stark.
- Implied in Edgar Allan Poe's Gothic horror story The Fall of the House of Usher.
- Implied? It's practically text.
- Robert Heinlein's recurring hero Lazarus Long has two Opposite Sex Clone copies of himself, which seem very, very twincesty, on top of the hero sleeping with them both in the first place.
- Not sure if this counts per se, but in "... All You Zombies" the main character is both his own father and mother, and the bartender who gets the "two" of them together.
- There's a rather bizarre example in Fifth Quarter by Tanya Huff. The soul of Bannon is forced to share the body of his twin sister Vree when another man steals his body. Vree goes after her brother's body, and when they find it, they devise a plan that Vree will distract him by seducing him, and Bannon will "push" the interloper out his body. Partway through, Vree realizes that Bannon is more interested in seducing himself than in getting his body back, and calls it off.
- Twins Charles and Camilla from Donna Tartt's The Secret History are revealed to be sleeping together towards the end of the book, although it is hinted at earlier in the book.
- Twins Estha and Rahel in Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things.
- Shelley and Kipling in Judith Hawke's Heart of a Witch get into a very complicated relationship that was hinted at from the beginning with Shelley's possessiveness of her brother. Even more weirdly, this eventually turns into a threesome with Snow, the leader of the coven that they join.
- In P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles Of The Kencyrath series, Highborn Kencyr families used to practice sibling and cousin marriage extensively in order to breed Shanir (individuals manifesting powers of their triune God). Twin marriage was especially valuable for this, since it reinforced traits so strongly in offspring. Since a married pair of twins betrayed their people to the Big Bad and killed off two-thirds of them a few thousand years ago, it's fallen somewhat out of favor, but families that stick to the Old Ways still only breed with others in the extended family. The heroine and her twin brother are, by book 4 (To Ride a Rathorn), having very powerful erotic dreams together and some highly sexually charged meetings, and Word Of God says that they have Single Target Sexuality and will end up together (although not for a while; they have a lot of angst to get past first, especially brother). It's notable that some of the results of constant incest seem to be prevalent in the Highborn; they're dying out, fertility is down, childbed mortality is high, and some families are getting rather strange indeed.
- The Thirteenth Tale has the twins Adeline and Emmeline. It's more of a incredibly close bond between twins, but with damn powerful implications.
- Children of Dune has some pretty heavy overtones about Leto II and Ghanima's relationship at times.
- From Leto II's own mouth: "Let us pass puberty living in the same house, and all your taboos will be as a red rag waved in the face of a Sandworm." Perhaps mercifully, he undergoes transformation into a sandworm-like creature prior to puberty, thus removing this pairing from consideration.
- ...Of course, that doesn't stop him from marrying her later. But both of them are in complete agreement about the fact that there will be no weirdo hanky-panky going on, and that all her children will be bastards sired by a Harkonnen survivor, of all people. (Though they're in love anyway, so, good for them.)
- Stalking Tender Prey by Storm Constantine has, within the first few chapters, a pair of twins who, because they are hybrids of human, and a very oversexualised variation on the Nephilim, and the only two in the area, and therefore can only express themselves to each other get into twincest an awful lot. They're also Half Identical Twins though this is not out of prudishness on the authors part, as one of them later turns out to be massively bisexual, and, lets be fair, most of the main characters do bedhop with most of the other main characters. In fact the main antagonist, as THE fallen angel, effectively satan pretty much gets to bonk 98% of the main characters. Repeatedly.
- This◊ aptly titled (and NSFW) pulp novel.
- It's really, really difficult to read the opening few hundred pages of Polgara the Sorceress without reading some seriously odd romantic undertones into the relationship between non-identical twin sisters Beldaran and Polgara: not only does Beldaran have her sister completely wrapped around her adorably girly little finger, but they're apparently sharing a bed well into adolescence at least on the occasions when Polgara hasn't decided to run away and live in a tree, and Pol's explicitly possessive anger when Beldaran gets engaged would be a little freakish in its intensity even coming from an actual romantic rival.
- In Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun, twins Agia and Agilus are found to have an incestuous relationship when Severian enters Agilus' cell the day before his execution, only to find the brother and sister nude and huddled together. Agilus admits, "Everything you suspect is true," the implication being incest.
Live Action TV
- In the final episode of Arrested Development, Michael's twin sister Lindsay admits that she's attracted to him. However, this is only after the revelation that Lindsay is adopted.
- It's impossible to watch Maya and Alejandro Herrera in Heroes without thinking about it. After all, Maya killed everyone but Alejandro and herself during her twin brother's wedding after she learnt that his bride to be was cheating on him...
- House points out that two identical female twins who are both fighting to join his team are "distracting to every man and lesbian in the room".
- There was a pair of fraternal male twins that the main characters used to go to school with on Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia that were sexually involved. Turns out the entire McPoyle family is one large, ingrown incestual orgy. It's just about the creepiest thing this troper has seen on television.
- Jack from Will And Grace has, as his life's ambition, to one day meet and have sex with a pair of male identical twins. Will once actually invited over a pair of gay identical athletic twins just to make Jack jealous.
- Katie and Emily Fitch from Skins. Moreso Katie than Emily; she states that Emily is "hers" and Naomi (who is romantically involved with Emily) could never love Emily as much she does. It doesn't help that at one point during the end of the twins' episode in series three, when Emily is confronting Katie, someone in the crowd yells out that Emily should kiss her.
Music
- This troper finds this implied when The Veronicas, a band consisting of twin sisters sing "All About Us", a song by T.a.T.u., apparently Schoolgirl Lesbians.
- Similarly, when Ryan Dan (another twin band, of the male variety) sing mushy romantic duets to one another.
- Well, at least one can sing soprano very well.
- More willfully-interpreted Ho Yay: Bill and Tom Kaulitz◊, of German band Tokio Hotel.(New .gif for your pleasure! More lap-bouncing, less arm-tugging)
Music Video
- This seems to be the gist of the relationship between the Kagamine twins of Vocaloid, at least among the fandom.
- The fact that a lot of people shipping either of them with others hate the Rin x Len pairing on incest grounds is a focal point of the Ship To Ship Combat in the Vocaloid community, despite none of them having any personalities or character traits other than Rin and Len being siblings due to Crypton being Sure Why Not with their fan interpretation.
Print Media
- Expect this in any pictorial featuring twins in the less classy porn magazines.
- In 2003, Shane and Sia Barbi sued Hustler for unauthorized use of photos showing "intimate sexual acts between the twin sisters".
Video Games
- Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, because Eirika and Ephraim's supports are all but... huh.
- Resident Evil: Code Veronica implies that Alfred's devotion to Alexia goes some way beyond mere intense admiration.
- The novelization pretty much states it outright.
- Devil May freakin' Cry. It doesn't help that Dante and Vergil are ridiculously pretty and there's a lack of female characters (that don't look like their mom.)
- Metal Gear Solid, being chock full of Ho Yay moments, certainly didn't shy from playing with this trope. In the first game, Liquid Snake strips Solid Snake's shirt off while the latter was unconscious, and there was his desperate need to prove that he was the dominant brother. Naturally, it's kicked up to overdrive in the remake. It also certainly didn't help that Liquid was a Large Ham and his voice actor, Cam Clarke, seemed to have an uncanny ability to make the word "brother" sound very erotically incestuous.
- Liquid does blatantly say that part of his motivation is that, 'in Nature, family members don't mate with each other, but they help each other to survive'. Bad biology aside, it's pretty easy to overthink how that would justify him killing his brother instead of 'helping him to survive'
- Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly, with their whole "becoming one with your other twin". One of the key plot elements of the game is the fact that the village use to perform rituals in which the older twin would strangle the younger one, who would then become one spiritually with the older twin and then they'd get to be togeetheeer foreeveeer. This whole "I want to be with only YOU, -insert other twin's name here-!!" thing happens with prettymuch all of the Twin Shrine Maidens depicted in the game, including but not restricted to Azumi and Akane Kiryu, the protagonist Mio and her sister Mayu, and the antagonist Sae with her sister Yae. Sae seems to be the one with the most weirded-out obssession with her sister, since she seems to all along have fantasized about the day that she'd get to be strangled by Yae by the end of the game you find a crystal left by her that is pretty much along the lines of "Oh Yae, kill me, KIIILLL MEE" like she's getting turned on by the idea.
- Not to mention in the promotional comercials, Mio and Mayu are shown in a number of amusingly suggestive poses together. The strangling pose Mio puts hersel fin above Mayu at the end of the game in Normal mode is also very suggestive.
- Aaaaand some official art has them sitting together or swiming together in bikinis. Very... very closely.
- Nero and Weiss from Final Fantasy VII, although mostly from Nero's side - Nero's whole motivation for siding with the villains is his older twin Weiss, who is 'the only person he ever loved'. (Which is kind of ironic, since Weiss is the shirtless prettyboy Large Ham and Nero is just the bondage-gear masked psychic.)
- In the PSX rpg Dragon Valor, the grandson and granddaughter of Clovis, the game's first protagonist, are fraternal twins who are the "most important thing" to each other. It is revealed in the final scene that they are forced to keep their love a secret most of the time as they can only freely express their mutual affection in places where "nobody knows that they're the prince and princess" (i.e. brother and sister).
- In Xenosaga, Albedo is revealed to have been the conjoined twin of Junior. And let's just say that Albedo... was really obsessed with him, to the point where the thought of being unable to stay with him forever drove him mad.
- In King's Quest III, after
Gwydion Alexander frees his twin sister Rosella and talks to her, he seems attracted to her in a not-so-platonic way. Of course, they were also Separated At Birth.
Web Original
- Whilst nothing explicit has happened (Yet?) Survival Of The Fittest V3 characters Lenny and Elizabeth have a whole lot of Subtext in their relationship, prompting a lot of 'speculation' amongst members of the board. It isn't clear precisely what relationship the pair have, but it is implied it goes further than being simply siblings.
- Recently the handler more-or-less addressed this issue, quoting a Fanfic in this first half of one of his posts. This editor was immensely relieved to discover it was a trick.
Western Animation
- Robot Chicken has a long running gag portraying the Bush twins, Barb and Jenna, as hard-partying Girls Gone Wild types, often ending with the two of them making out.
- During the Star Wars special, there was the inevitable skit involving Luke and Leia in bed.
Real Life
- A pair of separated at birth twins in the UK had their marriage annulled when they discovered their relation. [1]
- Ho Yay example: Kyle and Lane Carlson, twin male models. This editor would like to go no further.
- This troper regularly posts on an RPG message board with a thread on the creepiest person you've ever gamed with. Once, a mod dropped a mention of a "twincest" story. This led to hundreds of pages of half-joking cries of "TWINCEST!?!" as the posters demanded to know more.
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