Ambiguous Name: Childhood Friend Romance

As used here, it's a fallacious appeal to SCIENCE! with icky implications, and more importantly, does not inform on the trope.

This trope is about stories where one character did develop feelings for the other, and some proportion of them end with the characters sharing mutual feelings. Fiction involving Childhood Friend Romance clearly doesn't abide by the Westermarck effect, so why are we judging it as if it should? There isn't any point mentioning a hypothetical effect that the author never heard of that applies inconsistently at best. I'm sure you can come up with a reason why one character is affected and another isn't, that's just stretching the circumstances further to make it fit. It's not good for the trope(s) when it encourages editors to fixate on evaluating a possible explanation's bearing on everything. It does come up in discussions, but discussions of shipping. Use of it on a trope page is going to encourage fan interpretation.

Sorry if I'm making this a bigger deal than it needs to be, but it just seems wrong. I don't have much else to add other than saying the obvious: the merge is incomplete and the format of the old examples makes it very hard to fix. Here's the link to the morgue thread that did the merge if anyone's curious. It might help to broaden Patient Childhood Love Interest and use it to replace uses of Unlucky Childhood Friend and Victorious Childhood Friend, and only use Childhood Friend Romance when romance is at least treated as a serious possibility rather than just one side pining away for the other, though it wouldn't necessarily have to be the ultimate Official Couple.

I don't see why it's icky. "People who grow up together don't want to bone. This may bear some relation on why the trope sometimes doesn't work out well for the lovelorn party. It's also why it's rarer in real life."

I think Unlucky Childhood Friend should be its own trope again.

Never trust anyone who uses "degenerate" as an insult.

So if I understand correctly, your objection to mentioning the "Westermarck effect" is that shippers have invoked it in creepy ways*

and so it's... somehow become inherently creepy?

Actually, I don't think I understand in the first place.