An Incoming Decline Part Three

Proving My Point

I criticised the CW Flash for glorifiying incest. Some fan said that Game of Thrones actually has incest but then that's incest between stepsiblings, which is legally and genetically not so different between adoptive siblings...in a way. Not to mention that abusive incest in real life tends to occur between adopted/stepsiblings. Even if it's with stepsiblings and adoptive siblings, it would still legally count as incest. Incest has existed in literature before though it would have been done for shock value, played in seriousness, for black humour and taboo titiliation. The novel "Flowers in the Attic" garnered controversy for including it. (And that it predated A Song of Ice and Fire by 17 years.) It even got adapted for film twice. But somewhere along the line, some people got bored and decided to include it fairly often.

While stuff like "Royal Tannenbaums" had incest of some sort, I can argue that fan fiction and some anime have a much stronger influence when it comes to mainstreaming incest. Several months before A Song of Ice and Fire was adapted into Game of Thrones and a few years before the Flash got his telly series again, there was a thing for this novel series called Oreimo. The two siblings develop a romantic bond for the fact that they like geeky things. The boy also had some romance with different girls as well. One novel cover was interesting enough to spawn an Internet meme. Even if the people working on Game on Thrones and CW Flash were never influenced by either Oreimo or Flowers in the Attic, these two have left a considerable impact.

"Flowers in the Attic" sold 40 million copies, perhaps helped by its controversy. Oreimo, as previously stated, was popular enough to spawn an Internet meme and the first nine novels sold 3.7 million copies in Japan. While stuff like "Royal Tannenbaums" and "The Witching Hour" were popular, it can be safe to say that the Dollanganger series made it possible and popular judging by its success and prior controversy. The same thing can be said of "Oreimo" to some extent. You have fans who lie to themselves, never mind that in the original comics though Iris herself was adopted she was never Barry's adoptive sister. And Barry's brother got adopted by accident. If he has any descendants, he would've fathered them with different people and his children would do the same until Meloni Thawne came along.

Genetically and geneaologically speaking, the Thawnes are the Allens' distant cousins, though precisely they're their fifteenth cousins given that the former come from the future and the two factions share a common relative. It still proves my point that some of these shippers are downright ignorant of not only history and the comics canon but also the television canon where Joe West says to Barry that he's his adoptive father and Barry kissing his sister Iris. Why I brought up both the Dollaganger series and Oreimo is because the former can be seen as the Oreimo of its day, it sold a lot of copies, popularised incestuous romance (possibly in years) and got adapted into other media which also happened to the latter. Both of them are book serials so it shouldn't be historically surprising.

As to why incestuous romance has gotten so popular, in part it wouldn't have become a big thing in recent memory if it weren't for the likes of Dollanganger. History repeats itself in the anime scene with Oreimo. So this would mean that the likes of Game of Thrones and CW Flash aren't much different at least when it came to a brother-sister romance despite either one of them being genetically different from his/her adoptive/step family. But that wouldn't have happened if both Dollanganger and Oreimo books paved the way.