Hi all, On the Tumblr I’m hosting a Valentine’s Day event/challenge. There’s more info here. The idea is that participants will submit shippy content of various kinds in response to a prompt.
Prompt:
Not Together Yet – How the incest pairing of your choice ended up on a date on Valentine’s Day. The general idea is that they’re not an established couple and this happened accidentally or through a series of unforeseen circumstances. Or it’s not supposed to be a date, but by the end of the night it basically was one. Not a date but totally a date.
Established Couple – How the planned romantic date of the incest pairing of your choice ended up going awry and they ended up doing something completely different but still romantic in the end.
This would be for ships from popular media or original characters.
I’m sure this will be a very small event. If the prompt sparks any ideas, please think about participating. You don’t have to write a fic, just a premise or summary is great. I wrote a short original fiction piece to fill the prompt which I have already posted. (It’s also on AO3.)
Some of you may not be aware that there is canon brother/sister incest in the Amazon Prime show Carnival Row.
After a long wait (three and a half years?), the second/final season was just released, and it seemed like a good opportunity to talk about it and share some details. I also put together a video of the most relevant scenes so that you can enjoy Jonah and Sophie without having to watch the show. I’ll discuss in more detail at the end, but if I were you, I would watch my video and not watch the show, especially if you’re only interested in Jonah and Sophie.
I probably should have finished the second season before I started writing this but it seemed easier to write as I go, rewatching the first season and then getting into the new stuff. However, in retrospect, that was a mistake, because it ends badly, I now know, and I would have approached this differently had I known that.
There are different kinds of ending badly. This is one of the worst. However, everything up until it all goes to hell is really great. So I invite you to join me in wavering back and forth between 1) pretending like the rest didn’t happen, and 2) engaging in fix-it headcanoning.
Carnival Row is set in a fantasy world where fairy-world creatures have been driven as refugees from their homeland to settle in a nineteenth-century-London-type nation called the Burgue. The fae continent of Tirnanoc was the site of a long war eventually won by another nation, “the Pact”. The Burgue, the lesser of two evils from a fae perspective, and an ally to the fae, withdrew and a large number of fae fled Pact-controlled Tirnanoc in order to settle in the Burgue, where they are not particularly welcome. Carnival Row is the name of a slum where a lot of them live.
Here is the description from IMDB/Amazon:
Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne star in “Carnival Row,” a Victorian fantasy world filled with mythological immigrant creatures whose rich homelands were invaded by the empires of man. This growing immigrant population struggles to coexist with humans in the grimiest section of the city, forbidden to live, love, or fly with freedom. But even in darkness, hope lives, as a human detective, Rycroft Philostrate, and a refugee faerie named Vignette Stonemoss rekindle a dangerous affair despite an increasingly-intolerant society. Vignette harbors a secret that endangers Philo’s standing during his most important case yet: a string of gruesome murders threatening the uneasy peace of the Row. As Philo investigates, he reveals an unimaginable monster.
The series centers on Orlando Bloom’s character Philo, a Burguian (?) who once fought in the war in Tirnanoc and is now a cop working Carnival Row and friendly to the fae. Cara Delevingne plays Vignette, a fae who has only just now come to the Burgue and isn’t adjusting well. There are a few threads running throughout the story that don’t really connect with each other that much. We’re only interested in the one that centers on the Chancellor of the Burgue, Absalom Breakspear (Jared Harris), and his family. It definitely plays second fiddle to the other drama.
Absalom’s son, Jonah, likes to hang out in brothels in Carnival Row and stumble home disheveled in the morning. His conniving mother, Piety (Indira Varma), engineers his kidnapping, framing Absalom’s political rival, Ritter Longerbane, and killing him in such a way that it looks like he succumbed to his interrogation. This family appears here and there in episodes 1 and 2, but this thread becomes a larger part of the story beginning with episode 4.
We are also introduced briefly in episode 4 to Sophie Longerbane, Ritter Longerbane’s daughter, who longs to travel and study, but her father will allow her to do very little outside of their home. (The mother is dead?) She’s got a lot of cheek but seems to stay in line for fear of being cut off from her father’s resources.
This is going to be a slight departure from what I usually write about because it’s a step relationship. (Usually being a loose term, because I haven’t published something on this blog in way too long. But just a reminder: I am still active on tumblr @shipcestuous with stepcest (in addition to adoptive/in-laws, cousins + more distant, and nonfiction are all) posted @shipcestuous-two.
Did any of you guys watch Stargirl? It ran for three seasons on the CW (with a proper ending) and is based on characters from DC comics. It didn’t tie in with the Arrowverse, but had some of the same names involved in production.
First, let me say I’m not writing this as a recommendation, exactly. I think the show is pretty good, and the relationship I am going to talk about is GREAT, but it’s probably not going to have an appeal for a lot of people. The taboo factor is extremely high – not only is it stepfather/stepdaughter, but it’s soooo wholesome. This is more of a situation where I just felt like I shipped it enough that I just wanted/needed to talk about it. (I watched the first season around the time that it aired, and recently rewatched season 1 and caught up on the second and third seasons so it’s all very much in my mind right now.)
The mainest of main characters are teenager Courtney (played by Brec Bassinger) and her stepfather, Pat (played by Luke Wilson). In his younger years, Pat was a sidekick to the “Justice Society”, a league of superheroes led by Starman (Joel McHale). The Justice Society is wiped out by a team of villains, and Pat, having been put on the sidelines, is (seemingly) the sole survivor, charged with passing Starman’s special weapon (the “cosmic staff”, which is really cool and almost worth watching the show for) onto a worthy successor. This successor turns out to be Courtney, by accident, ten years later.
This year a Christmas movie came out that kicked father/daughter suggestiveness to a whole new level. If you’ve seen it, or even seen the trailer, then you already know what movie I am talking about: Christmas Is Canceled, a last minute holiday incest-shipping gem (available on Amazon, I believe).
The premise is this: Emma has a nasty surprise when she learns that her father Jack’s (played by Dermot Mulroney) new girlfriend will be intruding on one of their traditional family Christmases, and even worse: his new girlfriend, Brandy, is her old enemy from high school. So we have a movie about an adult daughter, very close to her father, who is determined to sabotage his new relationship. The fics practically write themselves!
What makes this rare, beyond the favorable premise, is that both Emma and David are very attractive, and Jack/Dermot Mulroney, while being old enough to be her father, is not old. It’s convincing that Brandy would want to be with him, would be attracted to him, and by extension, it’s convincing that Emma could feel that way too.
I’m going to talk through the plot and spoil as I go, not that there’s much to surprise anyone. Overall, it’s a fun watch for fans of father/daughter but I wouldn’t call his a can’t-miss recommendation.
Emma’s mother has passed away two years ago and Emma seems to have slipped right into the wifely role despite having aged out of the house: in the first scene Emma has just returned from a research trip that lasted a couple of months. Jack comes home and Emma tells him that she picked up his dry cleaning and folded his laundry and she’s about to make dinner. Emma does live on her own but clearly is used to coming and going from her father’s house whenever she wants to. They also work together at the same corporate-type company.
Brandy, this enemy from high school, grew up across the street and has moved back into her parents’ empty house. She and Emma haven’t seen each other in 10 years, so Emma is most likely about 28 years old. (Jack is 54.) Brandy comes over to say hello and it’s clear that she and Jack are already together but they pretend they’re not because Jack hasn’t told Emma yet. Brandy offers some kind words about Emma’s mom and brings up a time when she took the girls to the mall and bought them both bras with pineapples on them. The story being about bras, possibly one of the girls’ first bras ever, is weird and wonderful on so many levels, and Emma actually brings it up later after she finds out that Jack and Brandy are dating.
We cut to two weeks later and Emma’s friend Charlyne is trying to invite Emma out to do stuff, but Emma has traditions with her dad that she would rather do. Charlyne wants Emma to be a “normal twenty-something” and when Emma tries to defend herself, Charlyne points out that she cooks pot roast for her dad and that her clothes are probably from Talbots (which, if you’re not aware, is typically known for having clothes for older women).
Emma says she’s doing it for her dad, but Charlyne asks her if she’s doing it for him or for herself, and if maybe she’s the one who’s really lonely, not him. In an ideal shipping situation, it would be both, of course. But the implication that Emma isn’t just doing him a favor, but actually wants all that, is good.
Emma brings her dad some breakfast at work, which seems to be something that happens all the time. He apologizes and says he forgot to tell her that he had a breakfast meeting. This breakfast “meeting” is with Brandy, who comes strolling in, dressed inappropriately for the office. The two had planned to meet at a restaurant but Brandy had left a message with Jack’s secretary, Bea, to meet at the office instead, which may or may not have had an ulterior motive. Bea, the secretary, appears not to have told Jack on purpose and clearly disapproves of Brandy. I think we can all guess what direction this movie will go but wouldn’t it have been great if Brandy was just awful for Jack and everyone thought so, not just Emma.
It has been two weeks since Emma came back from her trip and Jack still hasn’t told her. He’s had plenty of opportunities – not just that first night when they had dinner together at home, but presumably every day at work as well. That’s pretty significant, I think. Naturally he doesn’t want to tell her, it’s an awkward conversation to have and he can be certain she’ll disapprove because she wastes no opportunity to insult Brandy, but at this point it’s ridiculous. And in fact Jack doesn’t tell her, Emma picks on the implication from talking with Bea.
This post will be a collection/depository for all the shorter posts from the tumblr that were flagged by tumblr as NSFW and are not compliant with their new policies. Some of them are really good posts and it hurts.
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From the commentary on Sleepwalkers:
An ask about The Dreamers (September 24th 2014):
Message: Have you watched The Dreamers? What are your thoughts?
Answer:
It’s not one of my favorite movies, but I appreciate it. I’ve actually only seen it once, and it has been a number of years – 5 or so – so it’s not exactly fresh in my mind or particularly well-known to me.
I suppose I sort of resent that Theo and Isabelle invite a third person – Matthew – into their sanctum. They were so close – twins, best friends – and they had their parents apartment to themselves, and they let a third person in to see all that was private about them and to become almost as close to them as they were each other.
But at the same time, I see how they needed Matthew as a proxy. He could have sex with Isabelle and Theo could watch or imagine and it was less taboo. And Matthew serves as the narrator’s POV since he’s new to them and their lifestyle and everything that’s going on.
And having Matthew get so close to them and yet never close enough in a way just reinforces the idea of the bond that Isabelle and Theo have. That’s something that I took away from the ending. Matthew tries to call them back, but he’s not really one of them.
I guess I think it’s stupid that they even needed a proxy, but I also delight in this intense level of unresolved sexual tension between Isabelle and Theo. They refuse to consider that they might just be together, and so they play this crazy game of “everything but”. And actually one of my favorite parts is when their parents come home and are about to catch them all sleeping naked in that tent, and Isabelle sets out to kill them all. It shows how deeply ashamed she was, and how, on some level, she had a very conventional set of values.
Well, take all of this with a grain of salt. Like I said, I saw it once, five years ago. I’ve got a copy, I just haven’t watched it again yet.
I suppose a lot of the other things that make it appeal to people – the visionary Italian director, a 1960’s Paris setting – aren’t the sort of thing that get me too excited. I do love Eva Green, though.
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An ask about John and Samantha from Doom turned into this discussion:
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shipcestuous2 