I don't get what people see in... (ask the fandoms!)

I imagine the main draw is that it's taboo.

The fun thing about humans is, the more it's forbidden, the more we want it. Plus, it's definitely on the list of the less 'dangerous' things that you can find. It's also not necessarily because the person who likes it has incestuous feelings. I've met people into incest who would never touch any of the members of their family and even express revulsion at the mere idea of doing so.

@ryanasaurus 0077

It is from a manga called Medaka Box.

Speaking of incest, why anime fans in general like it? Is it a cultural thing? Or just wish fulfillment?

... What?

Why do you assume anime fans in general like incest?

I just noticed how there was some incest or subtext in shows such as My Sister Cannot be this cute(?) as well as shows of this type.

and I tend to see more fics with incest warning labels for things like, oh, Digimon or that Host Club anime than for, say, Firefly or Harry Potter.... ~shrug~

And what's your current avvy from, GAP? Or did you tell me after you had changed it? Just asking.

It is Patchuoli Knowledge from Tohuou and I changed my avatar. Touhou is a game franchise and not an anime just to tell you.

Those are specific instances. The thing is that the Japanese have less of a taboo with incest than we do, so they're more visible because they're less harshly condemned.

The western world, in particular the USA, has a pretty big taboo about incest, and it's the butt of a thousand jokes.

I'm not that familiar with the Persona series, but I detest Saw; I think one major difference between it and Dangan Ronpa is that the former is grimdark srs bsnss and revels in making the characters suffer in arbitrary nauseating ways, while the latter is consciously ridiculous, and makes the punishments horrific but Actually Pretty Funny in the manner in which they are delivered. The gothic lolita set up to be romantically burnt at the stake, only for a fire engine to extinguish the flames and run her over instead, is Black Comedy, while Asshole Victim #78 being burned alive and crushed to death because it's ostensibly a metaphor for their prior sins is just black.

More games like Phoenix right? Dangan Ronpa does have an appeal but it isn't for me. I prefer action games.

edited 26th Dec '14 8:48:06 PM by GAP

...well, you asked what the appeal was. :P

What's the appeal behind Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep in non-Cosmic Horror Story settings?

I don't think that many of the incestous ships are done by actual incest fetishists. It's not so much that family members are shipped because they are related, but they are shipped in spite of it. When there are only a handful of characters in a work, often a pair of siblings end up being the closest ones, with both the most detailed individual characterizations, and the largest amount of shared scenes. The westermark effect makes us unattracted to our own relatives that we grew up with, but with two fictional relatives, "they are related" is just a bunch of words, that can be ignored on the altar of shipping.

For example, note how many of Frozen's Elsanna pairing stories are AU where they are not related at all, just two strangers meetingfor the first time, or bethroteds from different kingdoms who were raised up together, or something like that, who just share the canon characters' personalities. And the ones where they ARE related (r9k Elsa is Suffering, Stolen Ice, Tessellate), treat it as a source of angst and plot conflict The fandom was evidently not a big fan of their relatedness, it was an obstacle to work around.

That being said, speaking for the few actual incest fetishists, the kind that go out of their way to ship Ron with Ginny because they are siblings (even if otherwise neither of them would be primary shipping material), or who would hook up a protagonist with his barely mentioned sister, that appeal seems to work really well for the kind of people who just lack the maturity to "get" adult romantic dynamics. For the quasi-asexual, aromantic, possibly autistic, or otherwise anti-social misfits who can't really picture people hooking up with strangers, visualising family relationship dynamics work as a crutch, a fallback to the most basic close relationships that they are familiar with. After all, this weird "romance" thing everyone hypes up must be kinda like family love, but with sex added, right? Therefore, the most romantic relationship is obviously for people who are actual family having grown up together and havin been super close all along.

edited 27th Dec '14 1:01:25 PM by Ever9

Ron Being Ron The Death Eater:

There's a saying we love characters for their flaws. It's wrong.

We love characters for their flaws, when we share those flaws and those flaws are not treated as flaws. And we hate characters for their flaws, when those flaws are ones we share and they are treated as flaws.

Bookish, socially inept Hermoine is loved by a bunch of fanfiction writers who almost all share some level of bookishness and social ineptness, because she is never made to suffer for being bookish and social inept.

Normal teenage male Ron on the other hand suffers for being a normal teenaged male; he makes the usual mistakes in relationships. His willingness to suffer for a good cause has limits. He can be stubborn. He doesn't want to study. And he is punished for many of these things.

Hermoine comfortingly tells us that you do not need to change or confront your failings, that you can be successful and happy as you are. Ron reminds us that you are not perfect, and that you will be challenged and discomforted as a result of the things you lack in your personality and your upbringing.

And thus Hermoine is loved. And Ron is hated. (See also Shinji Ikari for further examples.)

You realize your description of substituting familial for romantic love could apply just as easily to people manufacturing non-familial relationships for characters that would normally be incestuous? Because they rarely go out of their way to change the dynamics of the relationship that much...

edited 27th Dec '14 8:31:53 PM by Night

For the incest-ships: Let's just say that writers don't know how to differentiate between The Four Loves.

To me, having faulted flaws only explains e.g. Ron's increased susceptibility to the Ron the Death Eater Trope, not why he's subjected to it in the first place. But it does have an inverse regarding its Counter Trope: If a character has characteristics that are supposed to be "flaws" yet the reader doesn't view them as such, said character is more likely to receive Leather Pants. However, said character still has to be identifiable in some way to the reader in order to have the pants made in the first place. And, yes, "identifiable" includes "could easily be on the Contemptible Cover of a Romance Novel". Conversely, a candidate for "Death Eater" merely has to be repulsive in some way; again that "some way" includes being "in the way"^note even for as little as being an Innocent Bystander unwittingly killing the moment of a One True Pairing.

edited 28th Dec '14 11:25:19 AM by DonaldthePotholer

I'm inclined to disagree, at least when you state it in such broad terms. Love to Hate is a thing, and characters like Belkar from The Order Of The Stick revel in Heroic Comedic Sociopathy, even though other characters detest them for it.

edited 2nd Jan '15 7:41:02 PM by KarkatTheDalek

Meh, Belkar is tied with Durkon for my least favourite Order member.

Understandable. I like him, particularly after the latest couple of arcs.

What is the appeal of crossovers?

I'm guessing it's mostly based on the question of "What if Character X and Character Y were to interact?" And stuff like Super Smash Bros. probably doesn't help.

Why is Draco in Leather Pants so popular?

Besides being fun to write? Depends on the crossover. Sometimes the appeal is seeing similar settings overlap. Sometimes it's about contrasting two completely different works, and seeing how one set of characters deals with the challenges of another work. Sometimes it's as simple as "hey, wouldn't it be cool if this character met this one?"

That said, I've found that the "90% is crap" rule goes double for crossovers. Some settings don't mesh well at all, especially if it's clear that the author doesn't want to bother making it work. A lot of crossovers are just half-assed wish fulfillment.

No idea. I guess some people have trouble reconciling "I like this character" with "this character is an asshole."

edited 5th Jan '15 7:59:57 PM by SapphireBlue

As someone who's written several crossovers, you pretty much nailed it. The good ones are great, the rest of them have you quickly reaching for the back button.

As one who mostly writes crossovers (and tries to make them crossovers worth reading), sometimes, you're a hardcore Neon Genesis Evangelion fan, and you just spent the afternoon binge-watching a good chunk of the first season of 90's Sailor Moon, and then after that you read some NGE fanfic you like, and now your brain has both NGE and Sailor Moon kind of blending into each other, and then you suddenly find yourself trying to plot out how the heck you'd ship Shinji and Sailor Saturn in the background, while in the foreground you have Sailors Jupiter and Uranus going head-to-head with Angels and winning.

Or you spend the better part of a week binge-reading JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and you're suddenly asking yourself, "if [crossover character] had a Stand, what kind of Stand would it be?" And then you're not only working out the Stands in question, but trying to work out a plot to justify why the characters even have Stands, and then you have a story on your hands.

Or maybe you just love the crap out of Super Robot Wars, and want to plot up an SRW of your own, using your own favorite series and tinkering with the storylines and settings to make them mesh up in new and interesting ways, like Second Impact starting the global wars that ended with the crash-landing of the SDF-1, or having Tekkaman Blade help out in the battle with Ramiel because Operation Yashima is the epitome of Radam bait, or having Haman Karn as a Gundam Fighter, etc., etc.

Draco in Leather Pants is almost always the result of perceived 'coolness'. I chalk it up to terrible taste, myself.

I'm describing one method for getting to Ron the Death Eater, not all methods. (Though I would argue that it probably impacts nearly every portrayal of the original Ron as a Death Eater.) Broad terms are not meant to be implied.

Japan doesn't actually have a much lesser taboo against incest than Western countries. It's more that anime has a giant Running the Asylum problem. It's been getting increasingly niche and insular, and its profit model is based less around mass appeal and more about wringing as much money as possible from a tiny group of obsessive nerds, and since it's built around catering to those nerds, they're the ones with sufficient interest to go into the industry, and you get this great big self-reinforcing loop. Without having to worry about mass-appeal, then, anime can be geared more towards those weird nerds' fetishes without causing loss of money through audience alienation. Incest just happened to be one of the fetishes in vogue recently.