Parental Incest

Instructions for AI

“Women, listen to your mothers. Don’t just succumb to the wishes of your brothers. Take a step back, take a look at one another. You need to know the difference between a father and a lover.” —The White Stripes, “Passive Manipulation” Something much squickier than Brother-Sister Incest, Twincest or Kissing Cousins is incest between a parent and their child. Freud had a lot to say about the Oedipus and Electra complexes, and could find subtext in quite a lot of places. But in Big Screwed-Up Families, Deadly Decadent Courts, particularly abusive households, and elsewhere, one is likely to find examples of this trope. When Parental Incest shows up in media, it’s usually used to highlight the specific psychological issues that a character has, particularly if it features in the Backstory of a Serial Killer or other psychopath, or to give an already nasty villain that extra bit of shudder factor. Incest between a father and daughter is often portrayed in media as being predatory on the part of the father, and in a lot of cases when it’s revealed, it’s a crossing of the Moral Event Horizon that serves to get the audience completely against the father in question. When the daughter is the aggressor in the relationship, it usually means the daughter is seriously twisted in some way or at least has serious issues. In cases of mother and son incest, the usual scenario is a case of a Beloved Smother or other Evil Matriarch who loves her son (often a Momma’s Boy) in all the wrong ways, though there tends to be less focus on the predatory when compared to incestuous fathers and more focus on the issues of the son in question whether or not the mother or the son is the aggressor. Conversely, it’s often played for comedy, with the son understandably freaked out due to the mother’s advances. This trope appears with step-, foster, or adoptive parents as well as biological ones, sometimes to Bowdlerise it somewhat, although the power dynamics are still much the same as in parent/child incest. Wife Husbandry is one way to Bowdlerise it still further—though not out of Squick range.