Markup View

Author: LordGro

Oct 6th 2017 at 2:29:05 PM

^ But I'm not convinced that characters born of incestuous relationships are all that analogous to bastards.

In most of the many, many cases of SurpriseIncest, the incestuous parents are treated as tragic victims of circumstance. They may actually be married. Such unconscious inbreeding is usually ''not'' a sign of depravity. And indeed the offspring of such "tragic incest" is usually not "evil".

The Modred example above is still a ZeroContextExample; it only says that Modred is an AntagonisticOffspring, but being antagonistic is not synonymous with being evil. But consider that Modred is not only of incestuous birth, but also of illegitimate birth. He ''is'' a BastardBastard; it is not evident whether his "inbredness" marks him out for evil ''additionally'' to his illegitimacy.

At least, you need to consider the circumstances of the incest that leads to inbreeding. Incest in itself is only  "depraved" when one or both of the parents are conscious of it. Indeed all the examples above which are not ZeroContext examples imply ''conscious'' incest. Which suggests the "evil" is not so much tied to the biological issue of inbreeding, but to the depravity of people who commit incest ''knowingly'', which (in fiction) is naturally passed on to their children.