'Twixt my perpetual happiness and me?
Say that we had one father, say one womb
(Curse to my joys!) gave both us life and birth;
Are we not, therefore, each to other bound
So much the more by nature? by the links
Of blood, of reason? nay, if you will have it,
Even of religion, to be ever one,
One soul, one flesh, one love, one heart, one all?"
Romantic and/or sexual attraction between siblings. Most of the time it may be merely implied, but sometimes it's laid out right in the open for the viewer to see. Its presence in a story usually adds a great deal of emotional intensity.
Often it's just an extreme version of the Childhood Friend Romance setup; male and female characters who normally couldn't cohabitate with each other are "forced" to but meet with an arbitrary contrivance preventing them from developing past it. The only difference is that the audience is more likely to accept the latter contrivance as believable.
Many of the world's mythologies contain a fair amount of sibling incest between the gods, including Egyptian and Mesopotamian mythology, making the trope Older Than Dirt.
Not Blood Siblings and Surprise Incest are two Sister Tropes which ask the same question: What is it about kinship that makes incest an issue? Each scenario isolates one variable. Not Blood Siblings is about social kinship without any biological relation (such as adopted, fostered, or step-sibs), while Surprise Incest deals with biological kin without any social kinship (such as long lost sibs). Which of these two can to pursue their chosen target with relative impunity? There is no general consensus on that.
Many sociologists and evolutionary psychologists believe that the instinctive aversion to incest has developed to avoid the pairing of rare, potentially lethal, recessive genes. However, this is a very modern explanation that's only dates back to the mid 1800s. Religious prohibition was the typical explanation before that, along with occasional arguments about social kinship.
Although the Japanese have just as much of an incest taboo as any other culture, there does not seem to be any automatic assumption of tragedy surrounding incestuous relationships in anime, as there would be in most Western productions. It may be shown as sad, improper, and/or perhaps even reprehensible, but participants are no more likely to come out to a bad end than any other characters in the story. A supposed Japanese legend which states that star-crossed lovers are reborn as siblings probably has something to do with it as well.
The usage of sibling terminology applied to an unrelated love interest is a linguistic convention that appears and reappears all around the world, from ancients (Ancient Egyptian love poetry and Song of Songs) to contemporaries (modern Japanese and Korean honorifics).
See also Creepy Twins, Twincest, Not Blood Siblings, Kissing Cousins, Big Brother Attraction, Royal Inbreeding, and Little Sister Heroine. Contrast with Parental Incest, where the parent/child power dynamics can make it even squickier. Not to be confused with Double In-Law Marriage, where both of the couples are Not Blood Siblings but siblings-in-law.
NOTE: This trope is for actual cases of incest in-story. Incestuous subtext goes in Incest Subtext.
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Other examples:
- Sometimes used as a substitute for Parental Incest in fairy tales, such as Penta of the Chopped-Off Hands.
- In Princess Belle-Etoile, Belle-Etoile struggles with her feelings toward one of her brothers, Cheri, and his toward hers. Until she overhears a conversation between her parents, and finds they were actually all foundlings, and various things about them made even the parents think that he might not be her brother. In reality, he's her double first cousin.
- Hercules doesn't mention it, but technically, Hera and Zeus are siblings (as are the rest of the gods).
- The Lion King (1994) may or may not contain a half-sibling example with Simba and Nala. While any shared parentage is never made explicit, the movie never addresses the fact that Mufasa, as king of the pride, would normally be the one to father any cubs, and that Mufasa and Scar (who is stated never to have fathered any cubs) are the only male lions anywhere to be seen. The spinoff cartoon The Lion Guard showed that Nala's father is an unrelated male but it contains inconsistencies with the films and Disney doesn't acknowledge spinoffs or most sequels, so it's still rather ambiguous who Nala's father is.
- A young man is going at it hot and heavy with a young lady. He finishes, rolls off her, then says "Gee, sis, you're even better in bed than Mom!" She says, "Thanks, I know, Daddy said the same thing!"
- Dad once caught me and my sister smoking cigarettes together. He was so angry, he dragged us both straight out of the bed.
- Jokes about The Deep South, especially Alabama, tend to center around this.
- Discussed in Fat, French and Fabulous: This may have been the case between the Papin sisters, who suffered from shared psychosis.
- Mark Henry claimed during a sex therapy session that he lost his virginity to his sister when he was 8 years old and that he had just had sex with her 2 days ago.
- Vince McMahon of World Wrestling Entertainment has been trying to do an incest storyline going all the way back to 1999, when Ken Shamrock was supposed to be in love with his Kayfabe sister (Shamrock refused). The Mark Henry case apparently didn't satisfy him so Vince tried to have an incest storyline between himself and his real-life daughter, Stephanie (she refused); he countered by replacing himself with his son Shane (both of them refused). He finally got his incest storyline between Paul Burchill and his Kayfabe sister Katie Lea, although it never got past Incest Subtext. Note that his inability to get an incest story actually going didn't prevent him from alluding to such things.
- Vince Russo planned on doing this as a plot element to the Stacy Keibler pregnancy angle. She was seeing David Flair in the storyline, and was his fiance, so Russo planned to reveal that Stacy was Ric Flair's illegitimate daughter. Fortunately, WCW went out of business before this angle could come to fruition.
- In The Gamer's Alliance, Desdemona and Mordecai are siblings and very much in love although they have to hide their relationship from everyone else. Desdemona eventually gets pregnant with Mordecai's child and intends to give birth to the child, using it as a means to install herself on the Remonian throne by claiming that the child belongs to King Marcus.
- This has cropped up in Survival of the Fittest a couple of times (although in one case this was Twincest). Matthias Kovalenko of V2 was scarily obsessed with his sister Jodeen. (fortunately, she never made it onto the island). Nothing explicit ever occurs, but from Matthias' thoughts, most get the impression it isn't just brotherly concern.
- Fortunately averted in Broken Saints: Shandala and Gabriel look like they might be bonding romantically prior to Tui Jr's death, but it is cut mercifully short. This is especially creepy when you realize Gabriel knows Shandala is his sister.
- Etra-chan saw it!:
- A video
that had Akane be so mad that her brother Kuroki had a girlfriend and getting married that she crashed the wedding while wearing a wedding dress demanding that Kuroki don't marry. While Akane claimed that she didn't love Kuroki in a romantic way, she was very clingy to Kuroki after breaking up with her fiancé.
- In another video, Karin's father Hiiragi is creepily obsessed with his sister to the point that Karin's mother divorced him and refused to let him anywhere near their daughter for 20 years because he began to act inappropriately towards her too due to her looking exactly like her aunt.
- A video
- ETU - Animated Stories: One story has Sarah be attracted to her brother Scott, much to his discomfort. She was jealous of Eliza, his girlfriend and tried to get them to break up. She even kissed Scott, pretending to be Eliza, but Eliza posted the video and she was kicked out of the house by her parents.
- Lilium -Sims 2 is a Sims 2 machinima that revolves around a rich, isolated family circa 1900. Isis is attracted to her (possibly twin) brother Horitio. Their father doesn't like this so he has them meet the set of siblings he had paired them up with as children. Horitio is both in love with Isis and Estella, while Isis has no feelings for Baltazar and only wants Horitio. The siblings end up marrying their arranged spouses, but only one of the couples is happy.
- The story "Becka the Beast" (NSFW) is about Gia Cameron, a karate black-belt who falls in love with gay school bully Becka Jackson. It's quickly revealed that Becka is the victim of Parental Incest, coupled with a relationship with a Depraved Bisexual that has left her an empty shell. Gia's father adopts Becka in the end.
- In the Chakona Space setting, there are a number of examples of this (as well as some Parental Incest) between members of various genetically-engineered species such as chakats and foxtaurs. Hermaphrodite chakat sisters Forestwalker and Goldfur enjoy recreational sex, and foxtaur brother and sister Garrek and Malena are also mated (this is hand waved with the explanation that they have been genetically engineered to eliminate the sorts of diseases and conditions that inbreeding can produce in humans, and as created species do not share the exact same moral squick factors as their creators). Granted, Chakats and most other species still have taboos against inbreeding so Goldfur and Forestwalker are careful not to have sex when either one is in heat. Foxtaurs allow one generation of inbreeding because most of them can't leave their isolated Amish-style villages thanks to Territorial Attachment Syndrome, and a shortage of males.
- In SCP-404 of the SCP Foundation, a small experiment log tells the story of a Class-D having a questionable relationship with his sister when they were pre-teens and killing her boyfriend out of jealousy.
- In Tea, Biscuits and Incest Mikayla eventually learns that her boyfriend Jayden is also her half-brother.
- Appears in the Haskhian Inscriptions, a book in The Wanderer's Library, as it's based on ancient mythologies.
- In an online Q-and-A session, Invoked in the Wizards of Waverly Place creator's non-denial denial response to "a Jalex question":
Oh my gosh, we got a Jalex question.
(Reading) "Are Justin and Alex going to end up together?"
(Laugh) They are brother and sister, people.
- In supernatural web soap California Heaven, an episode features brother and sister, Dominic and KC, in a very seductive dance nearly kissing. Thought, it looks like KC was possessed. However, in a later episode, Dominic stares at KC as she is sleeping and she seems to have no problem with it.
- In Comix From The Underground, the Comix Scrutinizer suggests that the furry webcomic characters Kit n Kay Boodle are participating in this since they're not married and have the same last name.
- This was to have been a plot point in The Nostalgia Chick's video "Thanks for the Feedback" detailing a date between Chick and the Critic. In the original draft, they would have slept together and then been informed that they were actually brother and sister. This idea was scrapped prior to filming.
- Implied in Spooning With Spoony III, when Spoony fucks both The Nostalgia Critic and The Other Guy (along with plenty of other people) and tells the latter he makes noises just like his brother.
- In the Philosophy Tube-video "Jordan Peterson's Ideology", Adelaide (a Straw Character meant to represent TERFs and ostensible progressives who are really more concerned with not having to change anything or be inconvenienced in any way than with really helping people, and will be actively unhelpful if threatened) is very obviously in love with Ivan (another Straw Character meant to represent fascism and far-right extremism), her brother. At the end of the video, Adelaide lights Ivan's cigarette for him, before they start passionately making out.
- The Huggbees parody of the Outside in video devolves into this about halfway through as the two narrators argue throughout.
