I like how she tried to compare her incest kink to Jaime and Cersei when it a) is seen as perverse in the story, b) sets off a war that kills thousands, c) is very toxic, d) is an example of Tywin Lannister’s failing, e) is meant to show the Lannister twin’s narcissism which leads to their eventual estrangement as they grow apart. How is that comparable?
Yesss. I loved their relationship because it led to such an amazing character development from Jamie. It was so powerful and fun to read when he finally rejected her to live his truth.
A better comparison would be the Targaryens, which for some reason George RR Martin really does not portray with the same degree of fucked up to be honest because they're clearly his favorite thing to write about.
@@theanxiousace3783 I think grr martin is kinda gross with the sibling love but nothing like this. It makes sense that super powerful families want to keep their power and fortune within the family, so for targaryen was not romance it was a duty to marry their siblings, cousins, uncles etc doesnt mean they wanted to, thats why cersei jamie thing is different haha they use targaryen as an excuse for their sexual deviance.
I think GRRM is just better at articulating the in-universe ‘why’ behind including incest, but let’s not pretend it doesn’t cross into weird territory after a while either. You get the sense he has a special fascination with the Targaryen dynasty (who have historically used incest to “keep the magic in their blood pure”) that he seldom displays with other noble houses, even fan-favorite ones (especially in his spin-offs). And sure, Cersei and Jaimie are not meant to be seen as romantic or aspirational, but they aren’t the only non-Targaryen inclusion of incest either; just the most blatantly dysfunctional incestuous pairing GRRM can point at and say “see? I don’t fetishize incest at all”. Off the top of my head I’m pretty sure Arianne Martell has a crush on Oberyn (her own uncle) in the books for literally no reason and hell, even Arya was originally written to have incestuous feelings for Jon, before GRRM eventually scrapped the idea. I mean, he’s no Cassandra Clare, but he’s a little too invested in the concept even when it's not justified by the worldbuilding, you know? But GRRM aside, I guess I wanna ask where’s the line separating people shipping Jace and Clari, or Ron and Ginny from the people shipping Jon and Sansa, or Jon and Daenerys, or Rhaenyra and Daemon, or Aemond and Helaena or Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters and the list goes on (and on and on- why is that, George? Was this much truly necessary?). It kind of feels like ASOIAF incest fetishists are cushioned by the genre and prestige of the franchise- whereas The Mortal Instruments are YA books targeted to a female teenage demographic (aka a cultural punching bag) and so people feel much more comfortable being vocal about their criticisms. The popularity of House of the Dragon and Daenyra has got me pondering the inconsistency with which audiences engage with fictional incest a lot lately lol. *Edit: I also wanted to add that despite how hard GRRM is coming down on Jaimie and Cersei in the framing, some incestuous Targaryen pairings aren't framed as questionable. I'm sure the counter-argument here would be "ASOIAF works are written like history books and utilize unreliable narrators who are a product of their time and have their own biases and agendas in how they frame the powerful. Targaryens were the ruling house and their foreign custom of incest came to be seen as an acceptable thing for them to do and the narration merely reflects that"; which is a sound argument, but I'd argue not a good one. I find these excuses very tiresome after a certain point, because I feel like there's ultimately too much incest that adds nothing beyond idly existing as a natural result of a worldbuilding decision GRRM made (even though the world was his oyster) that we’re asked to just accept and roll with and far too many meticulously planned justifications for it. Yes, the Targaryens practiced incest bUT YOU SEE, it's because they have this Valyrian blood magic thing that they want to keep to themselves, lest other houses become powerful dragon riders like them. And yes, some incestuous Targaryen pairings are portrayed as loving and functional bUT YOU SEE, it's because ~other~ people are telling this story, not me. Also, some noble houses practiced incest in medieval Europe and I'm all about historical realism in this story with dragons and giants and ice zombies, so I HAD to include an entire dynasty's worth of incest (that I often go off detailing to an excruciating degree) in order to be accurate to the period- my hands were simply tied. Also also, Cersei and Jaimie bad therefore I'm not fetishizing anything. Like. Why? Why all of this? If I’m simply not “getting it”, someone please explain it to me. I'm not saying there's no merit to any of his depictions of incest, but when it comes down to most of it it's just weirdly unnecessary and voyeuristic. He's isn't as questionable as someone like CC (who NEVER explores incest meaningfully or frames it appropriately despite writing for a much younger audience and refuses to just be honest about her fetish despite her very transparent intentions) but this will never not be a weird part of GRRM's writing to me either.
@@mgtogno I think GRRM also wants to keep the setting of the universe accurate to the time period. The Targaryen's are stated to want to keep their blood pure, which was something that can even be seen in the House of Habsburg family, an incestuous noble house in Austria. GRRM, I think we can probably safely say, doesn't like incest, but wants his ASOIAF series to be based on some semblance of reality and history that nobles used to partake in.
I looked it up and apparently she's an only child, which makes me feel strangely relieved. It seems that she simply cannot imagine the kind of bond actual siblings share, and thus she romanticizes/sexualizes it. It's still a whole lot better than if, say, she actually had an older brother...
@@marjibeach3486 ofc not, it's still weird as hell! not saying that most only children can't differentiate between sibling and romantic love, but i think her being one probably contributed a lot to her kink.
to be sure, most of these types r only children. she doesnt have any real excuse for being the way she is but its hard not to wonder if she would still have an incest fetish if she had to live thru one of the least sexy experiences on the planet. familial relationships just dont work like that.
I don't really have strong opinions on harry/ginny (though I'm not really into shipping at all) but like if I did dislike it my solution would probably just be for both of them to be single
The amount of characters someone could ship Ginny with that *aren't* her brothers is staggering. Even Cassandra Clare shipped Ginny with Draco in another fanfic that's also a precursor to the Shadowhunter series (you probably noticed that Jace is basically Draco Malfoy without the bigotry, still I don't know if Clare likes Ginny as a character or if she just think redheads are pretty given how different Claire is compared to Ginny)
man, her comparison with Tolkien's work is especially ridiculous when you know the context that Turin and Nienor both kill themselves quite literally IMMEDIATELY after learning that they're siblings LMFAO
And that's Tolkien's explicit homage to the Völsunga saga and the Kalevala, which are supposed to be these tragic works about destiny, doom, and irony. It's not romantic!
yup! and especially since that part is an homage to the Kalevala, the finnish national epic where that exact scenario takes place and is NOT romantic at all. very strange behavior from CC
I think what aggravates me about the incest in Claire/Clare’s works is that she isn’t willing to commit to writing just how fucked-up even a consensual incestuous relationship would be. Think about it. There’s the massive stigma about it, the sense of shame and social isolation. Then there’s the fact that pretty much anywhere you go in the world, there are incest laws that could land the participants in prison for this, see their children taken away from them, so on and so forth, which leads to even more social isolation and even greater secrecy. This would lead to an already pretty toxic relationship turning even more toxic, and from there, if things don’t end with the participants calling it quits and parting ways, whatever happens isn’t going to be good. And also, a lot of thought needs to be put into how two blood-related siblings who were raised together would even start to look at each other as viable romantic and sexual partners, anyways. Honestly, they don’t even need to be blood-related, thanks to the Westermarck effect and the social stigma reinforcing it ensuring that anyone who has been raised together “like siblings” since early childhood will almost certainly be averse to forming a sexual relationship with each other. So what you need to do is write a backstory for them that overpowers the Westermarck effect, and honestly, in fiction, I feel like the thing that could really do that is to detail a backstory of intense childhood abuse, extreme social isolation, extreme physical isolation, or more like a combination of the three, with potentially some other factors. You can also see the relationship between Cersei and Jaime Lannister in ‘A Song of Ice and Fire,’ which was precipitated by, yes, social isolation, but also by the narcissism of their father who held their family to be utterly superior in all aspects to all others. And this is all assuming that the “relationship” didn’t begin with one of the partners sexually abusing the other, which is statistically a lot more likely than a consensual incestuous relationship between siblings raised together arising-which, in turn, means that it’s not really a “relationship” at all. Even in a fantasy setting where incestuous relationships aren’t taboo, there are still problems. The Westermarck effect will still exist, for one thing, but more than that, you have to put a lot of thought into the societal forces that would have led to incestuous relationships not being taboo to begin with. We are most likely biologically hard-wired to be averse to incest, on account of it being genetically disadvantageous from an evolutionary standpoint to procreate with first-degree relatives. So in that case, how did this theoretical fantasy society overcome that, and why? My point is that I am hardly averse to taboo and stigmatized topics being explored in fiction. But they need to be given the weight they deserve. And it is not even remotely weird or unusual for people to be squicked out by incest and not want to read about it. Also, others have already said it in this comment section, but how dare she compare this to ‘The Children of Hurin?’ Turin and Nienor had no idea who the other was when they entered into a relationship. Turin had been forced to flee his home as a child while their mother was still pregnant with Nienor, and just before they met for the first time, Nienor was cursed with amnesia by the dragon Glaurung, so that she had no idea who she even was, let alone who Turin was. When Turin finds out, he stabs himself and dies-not just out of shame at having had sex with, married, and impregnated his sister, but out of shame that he killed the first man who tried to tell him she was his sister. When Nienor, who by this point is pregnant with Turin’s child, finds out via the dying Glaurung removing the curse of amnesia as a spiteful parting blow, she throws herself off a cliff into a raging river, and presumably drowns or is killed upon impact with the water. And more than that, the reason this is happening is because their family is cursed. Literally. Their father, Hurin, defied Morgoth, who is the story’s equivalent of Satan, and as a result he cursed their family to fall into ignominious ruin and set Hurin on a magic chair on a mountaintop and forced him to watch. Turin and Nienor were driven into each other’s arms as a result of an evil god’s desire to punish and humiliate their father. That’s why it happened. And after all of it is over, after Turin and Nienor have died, Hurin is freed and finds his wife, Morwen, sitting dying by their grave, having no idea what happened to their children after she was parted from them, and he can’t bring himself to tell her. And at the end of it all, Hurin threw himself into the sea. A far cry from anything Cassandra Claire/Clare has ever written.
It's ok that Cassandra doesn't like Harry and Ginny as a ship, it's her opinion and we know that J.K is not so good writting romantic relationships. However I think it's weird how she called Harry's desire to have a family as something pathetic.
Yeah she’s within her rights to think Harry and Ginny are weird together, don’t work together, that’s fine. I think her obvious disdain towards Harry himself is a little MUCH but that’s definitely subjective to me.
I think she just dosnt like the idea of wanting a healthy family relationship…which…yeah I guess can be boring on a story level but constantly not wanting this character your supposed to be rooting for to just…never get what they want because it’s more fun when they suffer? Tad bit sadistic there 😥
I have a similar issue in that I felt the romantic relationships were wrapped up too ideally and neatly with Harry, Ron, and Hermione literally becoming family. It just felt forced to me and I didn't buy Harry's relationship with Ginny. There's nothing pathetic about wanting to be a part of a family, but he's already part of that family marriage or not! It's obvious that they're all family for life.
It kind of shows she didn't understand his character or care about him. I mean, JK Rowling is horrible, but Harry yearning for a family makes sense. He never had that. He never knew what a healthy family was supposed to be until he got to Hogwarts, befriended Hermione and Ron and met the Weasleys who immediately welcomed him with open arms.
I think it's funny that she brings up 'the greek gods commit incest all the time!' and then you have Rick Riordan who goes out of his way in The Lightning Thief to explain that the demigods aren't biologically related to each other on their godly sides.
Greek gods also commit sexually assault and murder but that doesn't make it okay xD - Greek mythology is literally filled with fucked up shit it's like the purpose of it to show that even godly powerful beings are very human and childish, that power doesn't automatically make you great or to be looked up upon. It only gives you power and how you choose to use it says alot about you on its own and what it says about these Greek gods is that all of them are extremely childish not grown up at all despite being eternally old. Comparing Greek gods like this is not a good look like you don't want to do that xD
But yes in Percy Jackson lore they also mention they don't really have same DNA/genes something like that? Like they can't be biological related because gods don't really have that
My theory was the reason she named her published series the same as her incest fanfic is so that if anyone tries to look for the incest fanfic, her books just come up instead-this is a very real PR tactic that gets used to hide things in plain sight, the government even uses it sometimes!
the fact that she allegedly compared being a LITERAL PEDOPHILE to writing gay characters, as if literal pedophilia is at all comparable to being gay, has me...horrified!!!!
Not allegedly, I was in fandom at the time, she and MsScribe argued this REPEATEDLY. I just stopped trying to comment on that shit after awhile tried again in the SPN fandom to point out how fucked it was and stopped after getting told I was lucky my uncle molested me because it meant he really loved me. And then on tumblr you see people who ship Thorki or Elsa/Anna all the damn time and I just can't. I know how we got here and I hate the entire journey.
@@Sephirajo Well, Thor and Loki at least isnt blood related and compare to myths - thats tamed. Like, Loki literally sedused a horse and give birth to a Sleipnir.
I don't know her entire fanfiction backlog, but it's interesting that she said "If Harry has to get with a Weasley, I would hope it'd be Ron" and then decides that instead of writing a Harry/Ron fanfic, she'd rather write a much grosser incest fanfic.
"I don't have an interest in incest, but I do have an interest in your weird behavior," sums up my entire fascination with literally any strange person with a strong internet presence. Especially so when I can show their weirdness to my friends like I'm curating the world's worst museum.
Lol "world's worst museum" really is the best descriptor. It'd be amazing if we started referring to commentary RUclipsrs as curators of chaos, docents of drama, maybe historians of hysteria.
"Once uppon a time there was a girl named Cassandra (but not really), who said 'wouldn't be great if Draco and Ginny fell in love?' And the internet said 'sounds interesting, tell us more' and Cassandra said 'and wouldn't be great if they turned out to be siblings?' And the internet said 'Oh God no!' But a girl named Holly (but not really) said 'don't listen to them, keep going' and Cassandra wrote a lot of books about it, then changed the names so she could sell them and became a billionaire. The end"
"And I hate how Harry was with ginny because he wants a family." Gurl you want siblings to end up with each other. That being a driving factor for Harry is likely the most realistic thing and best characterization Rowling did
Also Ginny was perfect for him (despite Rowling claims otherwhise nowadays).. she's into the same things as Harry, she's a talented witch, smart, and she is headstrong enough to understand Harry's (understandable) issues and it's clear they love each other. They are such a good couple.
Especially since Harry grew up in an abusive household until he turned eleven and went to Hogwarts. I mean, as soon as Molly found out about him, she basically adopted him. Why wouldn't Harry want to be a part of this really loving family unit?
A school I worked in had a CC quote painted in the library. I laughed so hard the librarian shushed me. I told her to look into CC's history of plagiarism. Guess what she found instead!
The thing is, stuff like that can happen irl. A few months ago I watched an interview with a man and a woman. Both were adopted into different families when they were small children. They met the first time as adults without even knowing they had a sibling. They fell in love, became a couple and after a law had passed in my country that adopted children had a right to be told who their biological parents are, they decided to find out together. Well, turned out they had the same parents and are full siblings. After being in a relationship for several years. Like, how unlucky can you get? They decided to stay together, even though the parents of one of them shunned them for this. He got himself a vasectomy to not risk children. They have to live with this secret burden now (they only told their parents afair and the interview was anonymized). This is so f*cking tragic and not at all something I'd romanticize in a YA book. And that CC does it repeatedly is just sooo weird. Girl, write your kink stories, but please don't publish them with the YA label. As bad as 50 Shades was, at least people knew what they got when buying these books.
Did she really compared her writing to Tolkien's??? The audacity of this woman. Also, she completely ignored the fact that in Tolkien's works there are consequences for incest. Túrin and Niënor both end their life because they cannot bear the shame of marrying your own sibling. It's a tragic story, not some "forbidden romance"
@@marieblade0613 I legit think I should have done this, I almost throw up, and now I'm permanently traumatized, for real, if I just have saw your comments a moment ago I would still being happy
@@larissaoliveira6526 Yeah idk why I listened to it as long as I did either. When I see or hear this incest crap all I can think is 2 things: either the author is an only child and is chasing the 'thrill' of a relationship that is forbidden without understanding how instinctually disgusting that is to most irl siblings, or the author is inserting/projecting themselves onto one of the siblings and is using the idea of a sibling bond as the first step 'bind' the other character into a relationship.
I’m gonna be honest: I don’t care what weird kinks she’s writing about in fanfiction. But inserting those into a book series marketed to teenagers isn’t okay.
Yep I’m in agreement. The incest makes me feel icky, personally. But then being minors is the part where it’s actually wrong. As well as her trying to be dishonest to consumers about why she’s writing it.
I was 12 when I read the first book and thought "Cool, now they'll grow to a brother and sister bond and Clary'll probably end up with Simon." Oh, how young and innocent I was...
OMG SAME! Except my friend told me that they’d think they were siblings but later found out they weren’t and ended up together. So I thought oh ok so it’ll just be Clary and Simon until then. NOPE!😬
I’m no psychologist but like…when it comes to the weird incest kink this woman clearly has I think it stems from the fact that she maybe likes the idea of siblings together cause, usually, siblings are supposed to have a tighter bond and are more loving and caring to each other than they would be with a friend. She wants characters with the strong bonds siblings have but then tact on romantic love and it becomes like the “perfect” relationship but like…girl…this is your story lol you can literally have characters fall in love and have that tight relationship without having to do incest at all lol. Like who cares if it’s not “realistic” just do it lol and you can do it without being gross and weird lol
I really hope this take is closer to the truth than what I assumed. What I thought was that the incest stuff has appeal to her (and most ppl who are into it tbh) since it's taboo and scandalous. Like, 'it's gross and wrong so it's hot'. I don't think the siblingly closeness appeal is any better morally, but imo the taboo love appeal feels even more grimy. Maybe even both conjectures are accurate, who's to say.
That makes more sense than any explanation I can come up with. It’s almost like the close-knit bond between the “childhood friends to lovers” trope + a brutal romanticization/misinterpretation of sibling dynamics, along with a hearty dose of doubling down on the taboo out of spite.
I think it's more about the taboo Like "oh I'm not supposed to do this, but it feels so GOOD that I don't care" That's also my theory as to why its such a popular porn premise
Cassandra Clare referencing Tolkien and the Children of Hurin... lol, that's the story where yeah, Turin and Nienor who are brother and sister, who are cursed by Morgoth (who's like, the Middle-Earth version of Satan), who end up marrying without knowing they're siblings, and when they do find out, Nienor jumps off a cliff while pregnant and Turin kills the guy who revealed the truth to his sister right before killing himself as well. But yeah this is totally like the incest in TMI.
Well now... this video has certainly made me regret having the ability to hear. But at least we're all traumatized together by Ron x Ginny cest fic! Thanks, Rachel, I really needed to hear this blasted text. :)
While it's not actual incest, I think it should be noted that even in her newer shadowhunters series (the dark artifices) Clare has one of the main romances between two "parabatai" (for clarity to anyone who hasn't read the series, they're sort of like blood brother/sibling bonds, with magic) with a *whole* lot of focus on the forbidden-ness and fucked up-ness of it all. Definitely felt like she was going for the same sort of thing but in a perhaps more subtle way this time.
But honestly, parabatai romance is kind of more bearable. There's also a lot more backstory to it DHSKJDSHDS (e.g. Eloisa Ravenscar and Silas Pangborn or Robert Lightwood with Michael Wayland) and the parabatai curse lore :"> There's a legitimate reason parabati can't be together but spoilers DHSKJDHSKD
I knew there was incest themes in her books, but I had no idea until today that it was born from a Ron/Ginny incest fanfic. I’m just… perplexed… and now it’ll live rent free in my mind for who knows how long lol
If she "wanted to be the weird lady who writes about incest," then why not just say so? Obviously, people are OK with it. They're buying her books. Own your kinks, girl.
This is so disturbing and gross, but also, hearing you tear into these books is weirdly cathartic for me because The Mortal Instruments were the only books my ex-abuser liked (I tried reading City of Bones, obviously before I knew anything about CC, and couldn't get through it lol). Knowing that the only book series he could stand to read is almost as disgusting and twisted as him is strangely validating.
Kinda related but just wanted to cope. I read Chainsaw man and the whole plot reminded me of my relationship with my ex abuser and r*pist, just to discover she had the character who did the abuse in the manga on her Facebook profile pic. It felt validating but also god, those people know who they are.
NGL the thing the made me crazy in those books was JUST GET A BLOOD TEST. There are blood test., non magical, even then. They can check if the evil villain that has every reason to lie is in fact lying. Literally everyone in that book had the stupid ball all at once.
The list of incest recommendations at the end of the tumblr post absolutely broke me “No guys I didn’t write incest into my story because I’m into it… Anyway here’s some great incest books that I’m into” EDIT: ListS OMG she’s been self reporting for almost 20 years, shawtybae that’s a year longer than I’ve been ALIVE how can you stay THIS COMMITTED for THIS LONG
god as an oldest brother this shit makes me sick. i read clockwork angel at about twelve (its still on my bookshelf because i really need to clean out my books) and even at that age i had to put the book down because the idea of being like that with my younger sisters was so foul to me.
Those sex scenes were much more upsetting than I expected lmao. As a Supernatural fan, I am not a stranger to incest fic, but for the life of me, I can’t see how this got mainstream. I don’t like this.
I was very weirded out as well, esp. when I remembered that HP isnt even YA (which would have been bad enough) but middle grade. Why would grown women add 1ncest to a wholesome middle grade universe?!
@@moustik31 What I always wonder is; why did all those adult women write fanfics full of sex about children in the first place? I get it, if they started sexualising the youngest chararacters towards the end of the series, when Harry and co. were 17, but I know they didn’t. They fantasised about 13/14 kids having sex and it’s just…gross…even without the incest. I truly don’t understand it.
She’s definitely just really into incest and enjoys writing about it, I would even go so far as to say she is writing it to imagine herself in that situation. Clary is almost a spitting image of Cassandra herself, there are many similarities between author and main character so it’s even more weird to see that she’s just writing fictional incestuous relationships to live through. No one can convince me that it’s just a coincidence that Clary and Cassandra CLARE are similar. Nope. And the fact that Sebastian engages with Clary KNOWING they are siblings….
What is it with weirdo women and incest? Stephanie M said she based Edward on her own brother, Cassandra can't stop writing incesty shit, does she have siblings??
As someone who has never read her books or watched the series, I've only heard about it - it's so obvious! 😂 I'm not against self-indulgent bs in fanfics but for her to carry it over to her publish work is..odd
@@eneyavorodecky I'm sorry,she what?? Wasn't edward based on a "vivid" dream she had? (one that she seemed weirdly inclined to believe had really happened, but that's not the point), you're telling me there's more to that can of worms???
One of my favorite novels a number of years back featured incest between siblings as the main driving plot point, I remember feeling really embarrassed telling people who asked me about novels that had impacted me about that. The difference was it wasn’t a romance, it was a tragedy. It was commentary on two siblings who were forced to raise younger siblings together and take on adults roles because of the absence of that presence in their life, how that destroyed them mentally and made them desperately seek out someone who could understand. There are implied sex scenes but no explicit details because it wasn’t a fan fiction and wasn’t being romanticized. I think the reason it stuck with me so much at the time is because it was such a polarizing and taboo theme but in the end the author managed to build the characters up enough as people and individuals who were struggling that the ending is genuinely sad and you’re able to feel for all of the characters involved, not despite of but because of the subject matter. I wish I could remember the book or author name, it was a while ago but if I find it I will update my comment. I basically just wanted to say that it is possible to create interesting, readable, works of fictions featuring incest and it’s real world implications. Which is what makes smut like this so embarrassing, gross, and ultimately dull. edit: thank you replies! The book was ‘Forbidden’ by Tabitha Suzuma
It was “Forbidden” forget the author. I remember reading that and hearing them discuss how they loved each other but were traumatized by it as well. Such a strange book and I remember it wrecked me.
@@Ulaclarewrites I remember enjoying it a lot but fs needing a mental health break with some light reading for a while after. Definitely sensitive subject matter all around aside from incest even, so I recommend people be in a good headspace if they decide to give it a read
So she started changing her tune about the reason she writes incest around 2012, and the movie came out in 2013. I think Cassie was strongly advised to come up with better reasoning.
Thank you for covering this!!! I've been beefing with Clare and the ongoing normalization of incest for YEARS and it's great to see someone speak out about it, especially as someone who was constantly reminded "Jayce and Clary aren't related, don't worry!!!" I'm adopted, and the extent to which people are willing to ONLY draw the line at blood relation is really frustrating for me, because I was raised alongside my siblings... As siblings And the constant over-emphasis of a fundamentally messed up power dynamic by saying "they're not blood-related" has been really hurtful to me, because it feels like an implied diminishment of the relationships adopted kids have with their siblings as if they're not really part of the family The romanticization of this is weird, to say the least And prolonged exposure to that mindset in places like the book and anime community really ticks me off Even if it's not a perfect parallel because Jayce and Clary weren't raised together or whatever-- to me, being adjacent is enough for me to have a problem with it Rambling aside, love to see someone of sound mind on RUclips!!!
Yep because it doesn't stop at Jace/Clary, Sebastian/Clary or Ginny/Ron; Alec ALSO has a crush on Jace who is his Adopted brother and it's stated that they were *raised together*, TMI is so fvcked up honestly. I used to like it when I was younger but I'm SO GLAD that I grew away from it because I'm not going to defend this stuff.
Yep. My partner didn’t know his dad wasn’t his bio dad until he was 12 and grew up with 7 siblings. He saw them as fully family. The very idea that technically he could date one of his sisters grossed him out.
I agree, that this is a flimsy and insentive excuse: we are human beings, most of our relationships are built into us through socialisation: people raised as siblings are siblings. The end.
I'm a CSA survivor and one of my friends is adopted and yeah all of this comment. I just... I was in the fandom back in the day and let's just say watching her rise was so so depressing.
HOLLY BLACK BETAREAD THE INCEST FIC??? that is the biggest plot twist of modern pop culture I need everyone to understand that massive run on sentences to convey actions building tension is still one of the biggest signs that someone wrote fanfiction in the 2000s. Also, overuse of the phrase 'all X and X' - if a sentence in a book says something like, 'he was awkward, all lanky limbs and left hands', they probably wrote fanfic.
So after getting recommended the part 1 video I binged the rest of the other "bad author" series, and while I can say I don't think your content as a whole is for me, by God I'm invested in this thing. And I'm staying until the end. I could feel my soul shriveling as I listened to the quotes with how cringe they were. Those lines alone were "close book/phone and walk away" moments
I've known of Cassandra claire since her Harry Potter days. I found her while looking for HP fiction while waiting for new HP books to release. I followed the flame wars when they happened, and Cassie was a frightening bully in the community. She threatened to sue so many people, and her fans sent de@th threats to people like Avocado. Hoping part three will talk about it a bit. Love the series 💖
I think the other problem with her saying "i did it to make Sebastian iredeemable" is that he DOES get redeemed in the end, bc in the weirdest racism allegory ever when he dies his demon blood (which for the ones that didn't read the books, other creatures have and are seen for as inferior and inherently evil for when it's not) gets burned away and reveals that he would have been a perfectly good innocent guy without it. The other thing I remember, when you said gaslighting, is how one of the criticisms against her is her glossing over Clairy's sexual assault - it gets brought up once when she tells Jace so he can feel bad over it and then not really any further and when fans pointed this out to her, in the hopes of maybe having Clairy work through and heal from what happened to her, CC told them that she found it disturbing that fans want to see Clairy suffer as if she wasn't the one writing it in the first place...so she is just a full on professional gaslighter lmfao
It was quite an interesting time, and I also recalled that a popular work to crossover with Harry Potter was Naruto because the two happened to align in a lot of ways. God, imagine authors selling their anime ninja fanfics with wizards.
I mean, if I ever finish my book series, I would be "the dark fantasy-comedy author who started by Undertale AU fanfiction, including an x-reader." I don't know if that's better or worse. (But seriously, the HP fanfiction and fandom are terrifying.)
It's funny- I wrote Harry Potter fanfic myself, but my original fiction ideas are pure high fantasy and have nothing to do with it. But again, I'm not the person writing about incest or trying to put the homicidal spoiled elitist racist bully on a pedestal.
I'm really curious if Cassie has ever admitted that the Manga Angel Sanctuary was a clear influence as well. Especially since she mentions Clary is a fan of it. It's main themes are incest as well (not even going into all the incest in Manga haha) and the characters are very similar
This makes perfect sense. I had a friend who bought a poster of Setsuna with his arm over Sara's shoulders, and she thought they were a well-drawn couple. I didn't mean to splash cold water in her face...
It feels as if she has religiously consumed EVERY media possible, where brother-sister 1ncest is mentioned. (I mean, Gladiator?!) It's definetely her kink but she doesnt own it, probably so that her books remain as mainstream as possible. It's a shame bec. she traumatised (young) readers, who expected a regular urban YA romance and got (way) more than they bargained for. It's the Flower in the Attic of our era.
Currently working on two fanfic projects for one of my favorite ships, and BOY HOWDY tuning in to this cest fest makes me 1000x more confident in the quality of my own work. I’m a sucker for complicated and nuanced sibling dynamics in fiction, the only thing I love more than a good monster romance is a sibling relationship done right. Incest is NOT my thing, and being upfront about kinks is the best way to tell me what stuff I need to stay away from. That’s the biggest issue for me here. It’s fine if you want to write some freaky shit, just be honest about it. Keep your kinks to yourself and your own bubble, Cassandra Clare.
As much as I loved The Cruel Prince (the first book anyway), I can’t say that I’m surprised having read more of Holly Black’s work now. I am forever scarred by Valiant, in which the teenage MC discovers her presumably also teenage boyfriend has been cheating on her with her mother, an adult woman, and so she runs away from home. The entire book it’s framed like he is the real bad one here and her mother made an innocent mistake when in reality an adult woman was preying on a teenage boy. And then there’s a “funny” joke about not introducing her new boyfriend to her mom.
Honestly, its hard for me to tell with Holly Black since she writers a lot of characters that are intended to be very messed up and traumatized and not very good people.
I read Valiant (and the other books in the series) and remember being like "oh eh, these were pretty mediocre" and moving on. When the Cruel Prince became popular and I found out they were by the same author I was BAFFLED. Like these books are by Holly Black???? The same Holly Black that wrote about the pedophilic mom and the homeless kids who took drugs and slept in the subway and that weird sex scene where the man changed the protagonist's face to make her look like her friend who he had a thing for???
Oh man, that trilogy was one of the worst things I've ever read. I've never liked anything by that author so some part of me truly doesn't want to read The Cruel Prince bc honestly I doubt she's capable of good writing
@@Faith-Trust-Pixie-Dust I loved The Cruel Prince and The Darkest Part of the Forest was pretty good. I’ve tried most of her other stuff and didn’t care for it.
@@abs-urdity TCP was my first Holly Black book and I was blown away. I was dying to read The Wicked King all year and tried everything to get an arc. When it finally came out, I kept wondering if I actually had gotten an arc because it felt so unfinished to me. Queen of Nothing was fine, after the disappointment I had for book two. But while I was waiting for those books I read the Tithe trilogy and was kinda baffled by how bad Valiant was. It wasn’t even essential to the trilogy, it was just a bonus for that world and very yikes. I dnfed the vampire book and liked The Darkest Part of the Forest. I still have the fantasy monster trilogy on my tbr but I’ve been putting it off.
Here's a funny story I have about these books. In high school, I took a class called "trends and movements in young adult litterature." It was an English elective that allowed us to use the analysis skills we learned in regular English on more modern books that were more to our age group's taste. It was a fun class, got to read a lot of books id wanted to try out for a school grade. Anyway, we would break into groups depending on what book we wanted to read so we could discuss with our classmates. One group picked the first moral instruments book. I had already read the book outside of class, and had to hold back a reaction to their pick. Class goes on, they get close to the end, and I could tell when they got to the incest part because one person audibly went: "Oh my god!!!!" The group reconvene, and everyone is talking about the incest reveal and how it ruined the entire book for them. They all take a vote, and decide not to continue reading the series. It was a fun convo to listen in on.
I'm a writer and reader of erotic horror, so I am definitely no stranger to the topic of incest. I truly don't care what fictional topics rev someone's engine, truly I do not, but it's annoying when people equivocate about their tastes. Own your shit! It's just embarrassing to speak out of both sides of your (general your) mouth like this. There are a lot of interesting discussions to be had around incest as a theme in fiction, but trying to engage in those discussions purely as a cover for getting your jollies is nothing more than sophistry. And if you're gonna write incest, at least write it well. Yikes.
if you're into vns at all, I highly recommend The Price Of Flesh, it's on steam and itchio. It directly caters to us nasty little freaks, it knows what it is and is written very well. There's a bad end where it describes you feeling the weight of your internal organs being shifted outside of you and its visceral descriptions have stuck to my ribs. And the serial killers are really hot.
Draco was right there. We could've gotten a Ginny villain-origin story. We could've gotten Ron and some random new character. We could've gotten so much more and so much better, but the fact that CC looked at the world and said "it needs more incest" is what drives me crazy
Ohmygoodness I had friends constantly pushing me to finish her series and I did but always felt weird as a lil teen!! I even felt weird about Alec liking Jace since Izzy said they all grew up together as siblings. AND the Dark Artifices series where she does it AGAIN with the main girl falling for the boy she was raised with and all his siblings feeling like her own. I stopped after the first book because the pattern is just so obvious. How does it keep getting published???
I think that people can write their kinks but they need to acknowledge it and label it properly. I'm okay with D/s and a little dubcon in the fics I read/write but you HAVE to label that shit or you can trigger the unwary reader. I really enjoy kink in writing but it's not for everyone.
I recently read a book with pet play and feeder k*nk and while it’s not necessarily *my* thing, I acknowledge that it has a right to exist for others as long as the fiction in question is between consenting adults.
I have to agree, Taboo subjects can be therapeutic for some people as I've understood, but young people are impressionble and shouldn't confuse these really toxic tropes and kinks with normal relationships
i'd argue the problem isn't the incest in and of itself, much like murder, rape, physical and sexual abuse etc, aren't an issue - when used in appropriate context. Incest in a YA novel like Mortal Instruments is NOT the same as incest in an adult fantasy book. The fact that she argues in this direction is hilarious.
Its definitely true, it's about context, consideration, and intention of the author. It's present in Juniper and Thorn by Ava Reid for a purpose. Reid wanted to center CSA survivors like herself.
I definitely agree with the note about the audience being important. If your work is clearly aimed at a younger audience (and you yourself are not also part of that audience - I'm going to be a lot gentler on a young teen writing content aimed at other young teens, even if I think it's weird) , I'm going to be more critical. For example, even though 50 shades of gray is a lot more problematic than twilight, I'm actually more inclined to let a lot of it slide because the audience is clearly adults, who should be mature and experienced enough to differentiate fantasy from reality. Younger people are going to have a more difficult time not projecting that romanticization of toxic behavior into their real life and are not necessarily going to have the experience to identify some of these harmful behaviors.
Yes, when you write like you approve of these acts is when you crossed the line. Incest should never be romanticized, even if the incest his highly romantic. The line isn't hard to see, folks.
its the part where she made DOUBLE INCEST with BOTH love interests. like girl. just admit it. just wear the kink on your shoulder. but don't shoehorn it into your YA adventure novel please. keep it on the forums.
im currently listening to this alone in the sewing room at work and the first three paragraphs from the ron and ginny weasley bits are making me wanna surge a blanket together and just hide under it forever
and not to further incriminate cassandra for being weird but i cannot for the life of me remember how far along the book series was in 2004 so for all i can remember shes literally writing not just incest but incest between at best a highschool boy and his younger sister
Please tell me you’re going to do a part 3 on just her bullying behavior. I’ve had to defend my reasons for refusing to read her books since high school (well over 10 years ago now), and her bullying was my main one. If I’d known about the incest, I’m sure I would’ve led with that.
That’s it. You’ve officially won the prize for the weirdest thing I ever listened to while at work when you started reading passages from the original Mortal Instruments. I’d say congrats but… we all suffered on this one.
When the reveal happened in City of Bones it gave me such the ICK that I finished the book and never touched the series again. I've never understood the "it's so great" comments about the series and now I feel so vindicated in having not finished it.
I feel bad but never have I been more excited to go to a psychologist appointment then when you started reading that fic. I was like Oh... nooooo look at the time.
i had always heard about cassie clare's weird sibling love, but I had no idea how explicit tt was and this literally gave me visceral reactions of disgust. why is this a TROPE ?!?!?!
God, I've been waiting for someone to drag this woman. 😂 The biggest author bully finally gets the attention she deserves. I'm becoming a Patron just for this alone. It's brilliant. You're amazing. Thank you.
I thought EL James was the bigger bully. She issued a cease and desist on the creator of 50 Shades of Chicken. Also, why do these people who start off in fan fiction get high and mighty when people get inspired to write fan fiction or parodies about their own work?
I think we get as much "family love" in fanfic because a lot of fic writers are not great at writing love that is not romantic. It's not as easy as just going "they wanna bang...so now they are clearly in love." And I think that inability to show familial relationships, over a long period of time, kinda perpetuated a feeling that they were not characters with a whole web of bonds to different characters...but instead made them feel like bunch of dolls. Solely individual and easily swapped out for any other doll depending on what costume you wanted to play with today. They don't really internalize the whole troubling issue with **cest because to them it's just the doll named Ron kissing the doll named Ginny. And while I do think there is a level of kink involved...I think it spread so far into Fandom because readers and writers trained themselves to not think of characters as people in stories, but instead as blank-slate avatars that only had the personality they wanted them to have at any given moment.
yeah, I've seen a lot of siblings in fiction---published, fanfic, RP---that came off as incesty even when that WASN'T the writer's intent, and I think it's a combo of "not knowing how to write a loving relationship that isn't romantic, especially m/f" + "not having siblings themselves"
I've seen the thing about some fanfiction writers not being able to write platonic relationships with other things too, like with the absurdly high prevalence of shipping a canonically aroace character (and while aspec people can still want relationships, they were just writing her as if she wasn't aroace at all). Like is it seriously that hard to not ship *ONE* character
@@marymauney3235 I don't mean to come off as jaded. Unfortunately, sex and taboo sells. That's the only reason why stuff likes like this gets published year after year.
Honeslty and sadly you have to find the good fanfiction, it’s one of the main reasons I only ever read fan fiction on archive of our own. There you can find some good fa fiction with platonic relationships between friends and almost brother like relationships with out the stupid tension some people put on them
@Kiera Asher I think the main reason why you can find more variety of genres, love and so on on ao3 is how easy and robust they've made their search system, especially when people actively use the tags because they know no mods will be lurking to delete any works archived. I haven't used ff.net and other sites in a fair bit, but I remember finding what I wanted on ff.net was just plain difficult. all this to say I just love the OTW team so much, they're a sound bunch, the bee's knees of you will!
I'm writing a story where in it the main character escapes her family who are very much products of !ncest, running away from her abusive cousin who she was arranged to. She was always told it's normal to be with family but as she gets into normal society she realizes why her family is often sick and with deformities and is grossed out knowing she's a product of generations of !ncest. I never sexualized it, never made it a Romeo and juliet story, it's a story device(and meant to parallel pure breed dogs) without promoting it or making light of it. Cassandra... you didn't!
I'm reminded of the comic Preacher that has a side family with that kind of plot. Didn't really like the series and so never went past book 2 to know what happens there.
cassandra clare really has us INCENSED with her actions. i’m glad you’re INSPECTING them. crush her like an INSECT. these words are just coincidental and have nothing to do with Cassie’s writing.
the funny thing is that Cassandra Clare gave so much justification and signifcance to the name The Mortal Instruments in the shadowhunters series. And not clumsily either. There were layers to that title. That title has made me cry. finding out that it comes from a disgusting incest fanfic is a little like realizing santa claus doesn't exist.
My eyes were going wide with shock every 5 seconds in this video. This was a rollercoaster ride and HUGE props to your dedication to the tea because I can't get this entertainment anywhere else!
Props for reading that whole Ron/Ginny section out loud. I stood frozen with a ghastly look on my face the entire time, equally horrified by the prose and in awe of your zero-fucks savagery.
Honestly this video is making me want to write something original with REAL sibling love. I’m the oldest of five siblings and since the day each of them was born I’ve loved them like they were my own children. I have photos of them and with them, I have countless memories of giving older brother advice… I would love to write something based off of that. Something not gross, something that has brought comfort throughout my life.
I bought The Cruel Prince a couple of years ago because of the hype but saw that the dedication was to Cassandra Clare. Needless to say, I closed it immediately and haven’t touched it since
First book was like a 2.5, middle book was a 5 I won’t even lie… those political games and plot twists had me in a chokehold and then at the end the main character gets absolutely screwed over and I was dying laughing. Final book was not good at all.
Usually that's how you know the relationships will be toxic, the prose irritating, and the plot a meandering mess. She's also friends with Stephanie Meyer.
im rewatching this video and the part where her example about royal families doing incest to keep the bloodline was one POC royal family rubs be the wrong way. idk why but it strikes me as racist to use ancient egyptians as example when the spanish royals are the most famous case of incest that led to them having many physical and mental defects (sorry if i used the wrong terms, english is not my first language)
I would argue that there's a fourth bit of incest that you didn't point out: Alec's unrequited feelings towards Jace. Jace was adopted into Alec's family and I think that should count Edit: you did bring it up. Nevermind. Sorry, I posted with like 5 minutes left
plus if u wanna be specific.. the parabatai bond is there to symbolize a sibling-like relationship. the characters repeatedly talk about how prohibited a relationship between two parabatai would be.. so she not only decided to write Alec’s feelings like incest bc of the adoptive family aspect, but also bc of her own made up sibling bond that is the parabatai. and to make things even better, she decides to make an entire series in which the main couple are parabatai in love w each other. so
Late Comment: while I was watching this my TV shut down at the kiss, like it couldn't take it. Thanks for the intervention TV, but I'm just watching this to: 1) Support Rachel 2) Oddly give myself writing confidence.
The thing is, incest in greek mythology is a tricky one. With gods, they’re gods, it’s not like there’s enough to avoid it, but when avoidable it is greatly shunned. In the story of Oedipus, incest is seen as repulsive, and they try to avoid it. It’s about fate vs destiny, can one truly change their fate. You can’t use one set of mythos as a reasoning when the view on it varies from tale to tale. It’s a flimsy defense and poorly thought out
I just, I HAVE to point out the IRONY of the fact that she, a fan of incest, dislikes Harry/Ginny, considering the fact that the Potters and Weasleys are technically related 💀 Edit: clarified some wording
I'm stuck in a day job for the rest of my life and THIS person lives a charmed life and made eight million dollars and never has to work again. Um ... okay.
If nothing else you gotta admire the absolute audacity the show had to choose, of all the plot points to keep unchanged from the books, the double incest plot line. That shit airing on actual television is wild.
And just to be clear, medieval incest marriages were at most uncle/niece marriages. There were no brother/sister marriages in that era. Only some ancient Egyptian and Persian royals married brothers and sisters.
fun fact: every time you read an excerpt from the fic I took my headphones off my ears and chanted "nope nope nope nope nope" out loud until you were done.
![Hunxho - Ball Forever [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/nki9ZTF9Uls/mqdefault.jpg)
meanwhile, Oedipus literally wanted to die and put his eyes out over accidental incest.
They just don’t react the same these days smh :(
@@HallieEva That's the only acceptable reaction.
cassandra writes incest with the vigor of only someone who doesnt have siblings
Oh thank fuck I was so scared I didn't want to google it
i wheezed at your comment lmao i have three siblings and I was thoroughly disgusted by this video/the fanfic eww
@@shangc2781 ur welcome i googled to make sure so u dont have to lol
@@idkwhatimdoing4321 i got two siblings and i can only agree i felt so disgusted lmao
Exactly like listening to that was so uncomfortable as someone with a sibling
“There’s not enough passion and fireworks” Cassandra these are children’s books about children.
RIGHT????? These characters were LITERAL CHILDREN for the majority of the series! _Why???_
I like how she tried to compare her incest kink to Jaime and Cersei when it a) is seen as perverse in the story, b) sets off a war that kills thousands, c) is very toxic, d) is an example of Tywin Lannister’s failing, e) is meant to show the Lannister twin’s narcissism which leads to their eventual estrangement as they grow apart. How is that comparable?
Yesss. I loved their relationship because it led to such an amazing character development from Jamie. It was so powerful and fun to read when he finally rejected her to live his truth.
A better comparison would be the Targaryens, which for some reason George RR Martin really does not portray with the same degree of fucked up to be honest because they're clearly his favorite thing to write about.
@@theanxiousace3783 I think grr martin is kinda gross with the sibling love but nothing like this. It makes sense that super powerful families want to keep their power and fortune within the family, so for targaryen was not romance it was a duty to marry their siblings, cousins, uncles etc doesnt mean they wanted to, thats why cersei jamie thing is different haha they use targaryen as an excuse for their sexual deviance.
I think GRRM is just better at articulating the in-universe ‘why’ behind including incest, but let’s not pretend it doesn’t cross into weird territory after a while either. You get the sense he has a special fascination with the Targaryen dynasty (who have historically used incest to “keep the magic in their blood pure”) that he seldom displays with other noble houses, even fan-favorite ones (especially in his spin-offs). And sure, Cersei and Jaimie are not meant to be seen as romantic or aspirational, but they aren’t the only non-Targaryen inclusion of incest either; just the most blatantly dysfunctional incestuous pairing GRRM can point at and say “see? I don’t fetishize incest at all”. Off the top of my head I’m pretty sure Arianne Martell has a crush on Oberyn (her own uncle) in the books for literally no reason and hell, even Arya was originally written to have incestuous feelings for Jon, before GRRM eventually scrapped the idea. I mean, he’s no Cassandra Clare, but he’s a little too invested in the concept even when it's not justified by the worldbuilding, you know?
But GRRM aside, I guess I wanna ask where’s the line separating people shipping Jace and Clari, or Ron and Ginny from the people shipping Jon and Sansa, or Jon and Daenerys, or Rhaenyra and Daemon, or Aemond and Helaena or Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters and the list goes on (and on and on- why is that, George? Was this much truly necessary?). It kind of feels like ASOIAF incest fetishists are cushioned by the genre and prestige of the franchise- whereas The Mortal Instruments are YA books targeted to a female teenage demographic (aka a cultural punching bag) and so people feel much more comfortable being vocal about their criticisms. The popularity of House of the Dragon and Daenyra has got me pondering the inconsistency with which audiences engage with fictional incest a lot lately lol.
*Edit: I also wanted to add that despite how hard GRRM is coming down on Jaimie and Cersei in the framing, some incestuous Targaryen pairings aren't framed as questionable. I'm sure the counter-argument here would be "ASOIAF works are written like history books and utilize unreliable narrators who are a product of their time and have their own biases and agendas in how they frame the powerful. Targaryens were the ruling house and their foreign custom of incest came to be seen as an acceptable thing for them to do and the narration merely reflects that"; which is a sound argument, but I'd argue not a good one. I find these excuses very tiresome after a certain point, because I feel like there's ultimately too much incest that adds nothing beyond idly existing as a natural result of a worldbuilding decision GRRM made (even though the world was his oyster) that we’re asked to just accept and roll with and far too many meticulously planned justifications for it. Yes, the Targaryens practiced incest bUT YOU SEE, it's because they have this Valyrian blood magic thing that they want to keep to themselves, lest other houses become powerful dragon riders like them. And yes, some incestuous Targaryen pairings are portrayed as loving and functional bUT YOU SEE, it's because ~other~ people are telling this story, not me. Also, some noble houses practiced incest in medieval Europe and I'm all about historical realism in this story with dragons and giants and ice zombies, so I HAD to include an entire dynasty's worth of incest (that I often go off detailing to an excruciating degree) in order to be accurate to the period- my hands were simply tied. Also also, Cersei and Jaimie bad therefore I'm not fetishizing anything.
Like. Why? Why all of this? If I’m simply not “getting it”, someone please explain it to me. I'm not saying there's no merit to any of his depictions of incest, but when it comes down to most of it it's just weirdly unnecessary and voyeuristic. He's isn't as questionable as someone like CC (who NEVER explores incest meaningfully or frames it appropriately despite writing for a much younger audience and refuses to just be honest about her fetish despite her very transparent intentions) but this will never not be a weird part of GRRM's writing to me either.
@@mgtogno I think GRRM also wants to keep the setting of the universe accurate to the time period. The Targaryen's are stated to want to keep their blood pure, which was something that can even be seen in the House of Habsburg family, an incestuous noble house in Austria. GRRM, I think we can probably safely say, doesn't like incest, but wants his ASOIAF series to be based on some semblance of reality and history that nobles used to partake in.
I looked it up and apparently she's an only child, which makes me feel strangely relieved. It seems that she simply cannot imagine the kind of bond actual siblings share, and thus she romanticizes/sexualizes it. It's still a whole lot better than if, say, she actually had an older brother...
Uh I'm an only child and it has never occurred to me that incest is healthy, normal sibling bonding lol.
@@marjibeach3486 ofc not, it's still weird as hell! not saying that most only children can't differentiate between sibling and romantic love, but i think her being one probably contributed a lot to her kink.
I totally had that thought, too, that I sure hope she has no siblings.
to be sure, most of these types r only children. she doesnt have any real excuse for being the way she is but its hard not to wonder if she would still have an incest fetish if she had to live thru one of the least sexy experiences on the planet. familial relationships just dont work like that.
@@marjibeach3486 it just makes it better that she is an only child. Like if I found out a sibling wrote this… 😖😖😖
As someone who is not a fan of the Harry/Ginny romance, my solution never went to
~I n c e s t~
right! justice for harry and cho😔
Ikr, did she not remember there are other characters?
My solution is Harry and Luna
I don't really have strong opinions on harry/ginny (though I'm not really into shipping at all) but like if I did dislike it my solution would probably just be for both of them to be single
The amount of characters someone could ship Ginny with that *aren't* her brothers is staggering. Even Cassandra Clare shipped Ginny with Draco in another fanfic that's also a precursor to the Shadowhunter series (you probably noticed that Jace is basically Draco Malfoy without the bigotry, still I don't know if Clare likes Ginny as a character or if she just think redheads are pretty given how different Claire is compared to Ginny)
man, her comparison with Tolkien's work is especially ridiculous when you know the context that Turin and Nienor both kill themselves quite literally IMMEDIATELY after learning that they're siblings LMFAO
She will be never at Tolkien's level, no chance
And that's Tolkien's explicit homage to the Völsunga saga and the Kalevala, which are supposed to be these tragic works about destiny, doom, and irony. It's not romantic!
@@ultron374
I can’t stand when shite writers try and compare themselves to actual authors.
yup! and especially since that part is an homage to the Kalevala, the finnish national epic where that exact scenario takes place and is NOT romantic at all. very strange behavior from CC
I think what aggravates me about the incest in Claire/Clare’s works is that she isn’t willing to commit to writing just how fucked-up even a consensual incestuous relationship would be. Think about it. There’s the massive stigma about it, the sense of shame and social isolation. Then there’s the fact that pretty much anywhere you go in the world, there are incest laws that could land the participants in prison for this, see their children taken away from them, so on and so forth, which leads to even more social isolation and even greater secrecy. This would lead to an already pretty toxic relationship turning even more toxic, and from there, if things don’t end with the participants calling it quits and parting ways, whatever happens isn’t going to be good.
And also, a lot of thought needs to be put into how two blood-related siblings who were raised together would even start to look at each other as viable romantic and sexual partners, anyways. Honestly, they don’t even need to be blood-related, thanks to the Westermarck effect and the social stigma reinforcing it ensuring that anyone who has been raised together “like siblings” since early childhood will almost certainly be averse to forming a sexual relationship with each other. So what you need to do is write a backstory for them that overpowers the Westermarck effect, and honestly, in fiction, I feel like the thing that could really do that is to detail a backstory of intense childhood abuse, extreme social isolation, extreme physical isolation, or more like a combination of the three, with potentially some other factors. You can also see the relationship between Cersei and Jaime Lannister in ‘A Song of Ice and Fire,’ which was precipitated by, yes, social isolation, but also by the narcissism of their father who held their family to be utterly superior in all aspects to all others. And this is all assuming that the “relationship” didn’t begin with one of the partners sexually abusing the other, which is statistically a lot more likely than a consensual incestuous relationship between siblings raised together arising-which, in turn, means that it’s not really a “relationship” at all.
Even in a fantasy setting where incestuous relationships aren’t taboo, there are still problems. The Westermarck effect will still exist, for one thing, but more than that, you have to put a lot of thought into the societal forces that would have led to incestuous relationships not being taboo to begin with. We are most likely biologically hard-wired to be averse to incest, on account of it being genetically disadvantageous from an evolutionary standpoint to procreate with first-degree relatives. So in that case, how did this theoretical fantasy society overcome that, and why?
My point is that I am hardly averse to taboo and stigmatized topics being explored in fiction. But they need to be given the weight they deserve. And it is not even remotely weird or unusual for people to be squicked out by incest and not want to read about it.
Also, others have already said it in this comment section, but how dare she compare this to ‘The Children of Hurin?’ Turin and Nienor had no idea who the other was when they entered into a relationship. Turin had been forced to flee his home as a child while their mother was still pregnant with Nienor, and just before they met for the first time, Nienor was cursed with amnesia by the dragon Glaurung, so that she had no idea who she even was, let alone who Turin was. When Turin finds out, he stabs himself and dies-not just out of shame at having had sex with, married, and impregnated his sister, but out of shame that he killed the first man who tried to tell him she was his sister. When Nienor, who by this point is pregnant with Turin’s child, finds out via the dying Glaurung removing the curse of amnesia as a spiteful parting blow, she throws herself off a cliff into a raging river, and presumably drowns or is killed upon impact with the water.
And more than that, the reason this is happening is because their family is cursed. Literally. Their father, Hurin, defied Morgoth, who is the story’s equivalent of Satan, and as a result he cursed their family to fall into ignominious ruin and set Hurin on a magic chair on a mountaintop and forced him to watch. Turin and Nienor were driven into each other’s arms as a result of an evil god’s desire to punish and humiliate their father. That’s why it happened. And after all of it is over, after Turin and Nienor have died, Hurin is freed and finds his wife, Morwen, sitting dying by their grave, having no idea what happened to their children after she was parted from them, and he can’t bring himself to tell her. And at the end of it all, Hurin threw himself into the sea. A far cry from anything Cassandra Claire/Clare has ever written.
It's ok that Cassandra doesn't like Harry and Ginny as a ship, it's her opinion and we know that J.K is not so good writting romantic relationships. However I think it's weird how she called Harry's desire to have a family as something pathetic.
Yeah she’s within her rights to think Harry and Ginny are weird together, don’t work together, that’s fine. I think her obvious disdain towards Harry himself is a little MUCH but that’s definitely subjective to me.
Considering how most of her books have a found family element to them, this is even weirder
I think she just dosnt like the idea of wanting a healthy family relationship…which…yeah I guess can be boring on a story level but constantly not wanting this character your supposed to be rooting for to just…never get what they want because it’s more fun when they suffer? Tad bit sadistic there 😥
I have a similar issue in that I felt the romantic relationships were wrapped up too ideally and neatly with Harry, Ron, and Hermione literally becoming family. It just felt forced to me and I didn't buy Harry's relationship with Ginny.
There's nothing pathetic about wanting to be a part of a family, but he's already part of that family marriage or not! It's obvious that they're all family for life.
It kind of shows she didn't understand his character or care about him. I mean, JK Rowling is horrible, but Harry yearning for a family makes sense. He never had that. He never knew what a healthy family was supposed to be until he got to Hogwarts, befriended Hermione and Ron and met the Weasleys who immediately welcomed him with open arms.
I think it's funny that she brings up 'the greek gods commit incest all the time!' and then you have Rick Riordan who goes out of his way in The Lightning Thief to explain that the demigods aren't biologically related to each other on their godly sides.
The two ends of a spectrum
Greek gods also commit sexually assault and murder but that doesn't make it okay xD - Greek mythology is literally filled with fucked up shit it's like the purpose of it to show that even godly powerful beings are very human and childish, that power doesn't automatically make you great or to be looked up upon. It only gives you power and how you choose to use it says alot about you on its own and what it says about these Greek gods is that all of them are extremely childish not grown up at all despite being eternally old. Comparing Greek gods like this is not a good look like you don't want to do that xD
But yes in Percy Jackson lore they also mention they don't really have same DNA/genes something like that? Like they can't be biological related because gods don't really have that
@@zelpazzyeah since the gods have ichor instead of blood they don't have dna
My theory was the reason she named her published series the same as her incest fanfic is so that if anyone tries to look for the incest fanfic, her books just come up instead-this is a very real PR tactic that gets used to hide things in plain sight, the government even uses it sometimes!
I’m sorry but the trigger warnings being “incest, sexual assault, and Harry Potter” is sending me 😭 what a gnarly situation lmaooo
Frrr I thought the same thing lmaooo 😭😭😭🤣🤣🤣🤣😭😭😭😭
the fact that she allegedly compared being a LITERAL PEDOPHILE to writing gay characters, as if literal pedophilia is at all comparable to being gay, has me...horrified!!!!
Wait, what? When?
Not allegedly, I was in fandom at the time, she and MsScribe argued this REPEATEDLY. I just stopped trying to comment on that shit after awhile tried again in the SPN fandom to point out how fucked it was and stopped after getting told I was lucky my uncle molested me because it meant he really loved me. And then on tumblr you see people who ship Thorki or Elsa/Anna all the damn time and I just can't. I know how we got here and I hate the entire journey.
@@Sephirajo wtf I'm so sorry that happened to you what is wrong with people
@@Sephirajo Well, Thor and Loki at least isnt blood related and compare to myths - thats tamed. Like, Loki literally sedused a horse and give birth to a Sleipnir.
@@JustDeichan it’s still gross
I don't know her entire fanfiction backlog, but it's interesting that she said "If Harry has to get with a Weasley, I would hope it'd be Ron" and then decides that instead of writing a Harry/Ron fanfic, she'd rather write a much grosser incest fanfic.
"I don't have an interest in incest, but I do have an interest in your weird behavior," sums up my entire fascination with literally any strange person with a strong internet presence. Especially so when I can show their weirdness to my friends like I'm curating the world's worst museum.
Lol "world's worst museum" really is the best descriptor. It'd be amazing if we started referring to commentary RUclipsrs as curators of chaos, docents of drama, maybe historians of hysteria.
Hell yeah, time for Rachel to tell me the world's worst bedtime story
Settle in my metaphorical kids, were reading in*est fic from 2004
"Once uppon a time there was a girl named Cassandra (but not really), who said 'wouldn't be great if Draco and Ginny fell in love?' And the internet said 'sounds interesting, tell us more' and Cassandra said 'and wouldn't be great if they turned out to be siblings?' And the internet said 'Oh God no!' But a girl named Holly (but not really) said 'don't listen to them, keep going' and Cassandra wrote a lot of books about it, then changed the names so she could sell them and became a billionaire. The end"
@@Mario_Angel_Medina i read this in a soft mom voice and it made it even funnier. But also sad how that’s literally what happened
🤣🤣
"And I hate how Harry was with ginny because he wants a family." Gurl you want siblings to end up with each other. That being a driving factor for Harry is likely the most realistic thing and best characterization Rowling did
Also Ginny was perfect for him (despite Rowling claims otherwhise nowadays).. she's into the same things as Harry, she's a talented witch, smart, and she is headstrong enough to understand Harry's (understandable) issues and it's clear they love each other.
They are such a good couple.
@Zaihao yeah if your issue with a ship is that "there's no drama" that's probably a healthy relationship
Especially since Harry grew up in an abusive household until he turned eleven and went to Hogwarts. I mean, as soon as Molly found out about him, she basically adopted him. Why wouldn't Harry want to be a part of this really loving family unit?
@@heatherduke5410 hell, I only had an absent father and I wanted to be a weasley
@@dismurrart6648 Right? Their home just seemed so loving and fun, even as an only child with two good parents.
A school I worked in had a CC quote painted in the library. I laughed so hard the librarian shushed me. I told her to look into CC's history of plagiarism. Guess what she found instead!
The thing is, stuff like that can happen irl. A few months ago I watched an interview with a man and a woman. Both were adopted into different families when they were small children. They met the first time as adults without even knowing they had a sibling. They fell in love, became a couple and after a law had passed in my country that adopted children had a right to be told who their biological parents are, they decided to find out together. Well, turned out they had the same parents and are full siblings. After being in a relationship for several years. Like, how unlucky can you get? They decided to stay together, even though the parents of one of them shunned them for this. He got himself a vasectomy to not risk children. They have to live with this secret burden now (they only told their parents afair and the interview was anonymized). This is so f*cking tragic and not at all something I'd romanticize in a YA book. And that CC does it repeatedly is just sooo weird. Girl, write your kink stories, but please don't publish them with the YA label. As bad as 50 Shades was, at least people knew what they got when buying these books.
yeah! it's an interesting what-if topic to explore, which could (and apparently has) happen. what DO you do? CC...... just has a kink.....
i’m glad he got a vasectomy atleast, but god is that awful. I don’t know if i could go on finding something like that out. Literally devastating.
@@nitebreakNot really. If they don’t see themselves as siblings, there’s nothing wrong with them being in a relationship. It hurts no-one.
@@haggisa i didn’t say it hurt anyone but it’s an awful situation anyways. I feel bad for them.
Okay but the matching purple eyeshadow and lipstick is POPPING.
thank you!
Did she really compared her writing to Tolkien's??? The audacity of this woman. Also, she completely ignored the fact that in Tolkien's works there are consequences for incest. Túrin and Niënor both end their life because they cannot bear the shame of marrying your own sibling. It's a tragic story, not some "forbidden romance"
that fanfiction was painful. Straight up made me cry
I'm honestly glad it had so many run-ons since my annoyance at her grammar distracted me from the, you know, *gestures at all of it *
I legit skipped it and have no regrets now 😅 sorry
@@marieblade0613 I legit think I should have done this, I almost throw up, and now I'm permanently traumatized, for real, if I just have saw your comments a moment ago I would still being happy
@@larissaoliveira6526 Yeah idk why I listened to it as long as I did either. When I see or hear this incest crap all I can think is 2 things: either the author is an only child and is chasing the 'thrill' of a relationship that is forbidden without understanding how instinctually disgusting that is to most irl siblings, or the author is inserting/projecting themselves onto one of the siblings and is using the idea of a sibling bond as the first step 'bind' the other character into a relationship.
I covered my mouth with hand while watching that part, that fanfic is disgusting
I’m gonna be honest: I don’t care what weird kinks she’s writing about in fanfiction. But inserting those into a book series marketed to teenagers isn’t okay.
Yep I’m in agreement. The incest makes me feel icky, personally. But then being minors is the part where it’s actually wrong. As well as her trying to be dishonest to consumers about why she’s writing it.
I was 12 when I read the first book and thought "Cool, now they'll grow to a brother and sister bond and Clary'll probably end up with Simon." Oh, how young and innocent I was...
OMG SAME! Except my friend told me that they’d think they were siblings but later found out they weren’t and ended up together. So I thought oh ok so it’ll just be Clary and Simon until then. NOPE!😬
Cassandra Clare being friends with both Stephanie Meyer and Holly Black is the kind of thing that should shock me but makes waaaay too much sense.
why?
I’m no psychologist but like…when it comes to the weird incest kink this woman clearly has I think it stems from the fact that she maybe likes the idea of siblings together cause, usually, siblings are supposed to have a tighter bond and are more loving and caring to each other than they would be with a friend. She wants characters with the strong bonds siblings have but then tact on romantic love and it becomes like the “perfect” relationship but like…girl…this is your story lol you can literally have characters fall in love and have that tight relationship without having to do incest at all lol. Like who cares if it’s not “realistic” just do it lol and you can do it without being gross and weird lol
i'm in agreement, she could’ve made the story whatever she wanted. There were no constraints. The world was her oyster.
excellent point
I have another she just doesn't know how to relationships, and boom siblings thus very gross shorthand
I really hope this take is closer to the truth than what I assumed. What I thought was that the incest stuff has appeal to her (and most ppl who are into it tbh) since it's taboo and scandalous. Like, 'it's gross and wrong so it's hot'. I don't think the siblingly closeness appeal is any better morally, but imo the taboo love appeal feels even more grimy. Maybe even both conjectures are accurate, who's to say.
That makes more sense than any explanation I can come up with. It’s almost like the close-knit bond between the “childhood friends to lovers” trope + a brutal romanticization/misinterpretation of sibling dynamics, along with a hearty dose of doubling down on the taboo out of spite.
I think it's more about the taboo
Like "oh I'm not supposed to do this, but it feels so GOOD that I don't care"
That's also my theory as to why its such a popular porn premise
the ron and ginny fic has now traumatized me :D
You. And. Me. Both.
Cassandra Clare referencing Tolkien and the Children of Hurin... lol, that's the story where yeah, Turin and Nienor who are brother and sister, who are cursed by Morgoth (who's like, the Middle-Earth version of Satan), who end up marrying without knowing they're siblings, and when they do find out, Nienor jumps off a cliff while pregnant and Turin kills the guy who revealed the truth to his sister right before killing himself as well.
But yeah this is totally like the incest in TMI.
And that's in turn a big reference to Scandinavian epics like Kalevala and Volsungsaga- it's supposed to be tragic, like the story of Oedipus .
Well now... this video has certainly made me regret having the ability to hear. But at least we're all traumatized together by Ron x Ginny cest fic! Thanks, Rachel, I really needed to hear this blasted text. :)
Omg it almost made me vomit. Truly, we suffer together. 😂
Ewww I nvr read it and I can’t unhear it now
I cant unhear it. I can't sleep. This was not the video to watch before sleeping
@@lanzelet7386 same, jesus CHRIST. I made so many horrified faces. It was its own form of torture to listen to
"I've always had an interest in incest" is a sentence I never want to hear again
Finding out her incest series is abbreviated to tmi just shows me the universe has a cruel sense of humor
I sensed more Cassandra Clare drama and came as fast as I could 💀💀
Welcome, welcome… to hell
@@ReadswithRachel such a good way to invite someone to a channel, these videos are absolute gold
I cannot express how relieved I was when I found out that she 1) does not have any siblings and 2) does not have any children
While it's not actual incest, I think it should be noted that even in her newer shadowhunters series (the dark artifices) Clare has one of the main romances between two "parabatai" (for clarity to anyone who hasn't read the series, they're sort of like blood brother/sibling bonds, with magic) with a *whole* lot of focus on the forbidden-ness and fucked up-ness of it all. Definitely felt like she was going for the same sort of thing but in a perhaps more subtle way this time.
Exactlyyy
I thought this too! they grew up together like siblings...its so odd
At least she's trying to hide it now.
But honestly, parabatai romance is kind of more bearable. There's also a lot more backstory to it DHSKJDSHDS (e.g. Eloisa Ravenscar and Silas Pangborn or Robert Lightwood with Michael Wayland) and the parabatai curse lore :"> There's a legitimate reason parabati can't be together but spoilers DHSKJDHSKD
*parabatai
I knew there was incest themes in her books, but I had no idea until today that it was born from a Ron/Ginny incest fanfic. I’m just… perplexed… and now it’ll live rent free in my mind for who knows how long lol
Ron can do better. I also never got the Ginny hype.
If she "wanted to be the weird lady who writes about incest," then why not just say so? Obviously, people are OK with it. They're buying her books. Own your kinks, girl.
This is so disturbing and gross, but also, hearing you tear into these books is weirdly cathartic for me because The Mortal Instruments were the only books my ex-abuser liked (I tried reading City of Bones, obviously before I knew anything about CC, and couldn't get through it lol). Knowing that the only book series he could stand to read is almost as disgusting and twisted as him is strangely validating.
Kinda related but just wanted to cope. I read Chainsaw man and the whole plot reminded me of my relationship with my ex abuser and r*pist, just to discover she had the character who did the abuse in the manga on her Facebook profile pic. It felt validating but also god, those people know who they are.
NGL the thing the made me crazy in those books was JUST GET A BLOOD TEST. There are blood test., non magical, even then. They can check if the evil villain that has every reason to lie is in fact lying. Literally everyone in that book had the stupid ball all at once.
idk why but the censored bit followed by "and Harry Potter" in the trigger warnings made me snicker.
The list of incest recommendations at the end of the tumblr post absolutely broke me
“No guys I didn’t write incest into my story because I’m into it… Anyway here’s some great incest books that I’m into”
EDIT: ListS OMG she’s been self reporting for almost 20 years, shawtybae that’s a year longer than I’ve been ALIVE how can you stay THIS COMMITTED for THIS LONG
god as an oldest brother this shit makes me sick. i read clockwork angel at about twelve (its still on my bookshelf because i really need to clean out my books) and even at that age i had to put the book down because the idea of being like that with my younger sisters was so foul to me.
@@ratbaeby Bro Clockwork Angel does not have incest she is talking about The Mostal Instruments series what are you on about
Those sex scenes were much more upsetting than I expected lmao. As a Supernatural fan, I am not a stranger to incest fic, but for the life of me, I can’t see how this got mainstream. I don’t like this.
I was very weirded out as well, esp. when I remembered that HP isnt even YA (which would have been bad enough) but middle grade. Why would grown women add 1ncest to a wholesome middle grade universe?!
@@moustik31 What I always wonder is; why did all those adult women write fanfics full of sex about children in the first place? I get it, if they started sexualising the youngest chararacters towards the end of the series, when Harry and co. were 17, but I know they didn’t. They fantasised about 13/14 kids having sex and it’s just…gross…even without the incest. I truly don’t understand it.
@@haggisa This is an excellent point!
Oh god don't get me started on Wincest 😂
She’s definitely just really into incest and enjoys writing about it, I would even go so far as to say she is writing it to imagine herself in that situation. Clary is almost a spitting image of Cassandra herself, there are many similarities between author and main character so it’s even more weird to see that she’s just writing fictional incestuous relationships to live through. No one can convince me that it’s just a coincidence that Clary and Cassandra CLARE are similar. Nope. And the fact that Sebastian engages with Clary KNOWING they are siblings….
Makes me wonder if she has a brother, and if so, she really wants to get into her pants?
What is it with weirdo women and incest? Stephanie M said she based Edward on her own brother, Cassandra can't stop writing incesty shit, does she have siblings??
I literally cannot believe I didn't notice that Clare's pseudonym is nearly the same as her protagonist's until now. It's giving ~self-insert~
As someone who has never read her books or watched the series, I've only heard about it - it's so obvious! 😂
I'm not against self-indulgent bs in fanfics but for her to carry it over to her publish work is..odd
@@eneyavorodecky I'm sorry,she what?? Wasn't edward based on a "vivid" dream she had? (one that she seemed weirdly inclined to believe had really happened, but that's not the point), you're telling me there's more to that can of worms???
One of my favorite novels a number of years back featured incest between siblings as the main driving plot point, I remember feeling really embarrassed telling people who asked me about novels that had impacted me about that.
The difference was it wasn’t a romance, it was a tragedy. It was commentary on two siblings who were forced to raise younger siblings together and take on adults roles because of the absence of that presence in their life, how that destroyed them mentally and made them desperately seek out someone who could understand.
There are implied sex scenes but no explicit details because it wasn’t a fan fiction and wasn’t being romanticized. I think the reason it stuck with me so much at the time is because it was such a polarizing and taboo theme but in the end the author managed to build the characters up enough as people and individuals who were struggling that the ending is genuinely sad and you’re able to feel for all of the characters involved, not despite of but because of the subject matter.
I wish I could remember the book or author name, it was a while ago but if I find it I will update my comment. I basically just wanted to say that it is possible to create interesting, readable, works of fictions featuring incest and it’s real world implications. Which is what makes smut like this so embarrassing, gross, and ultimately dull.
edit: thank you replies! The book was ‘Forbidden’ by Tabitha Suzuma
Sounds like Flowers in the Attic
I think it might be "Forbidden" by Tabitha Suzuma
It was “Forbidden” forget the author. I remember reading that and hearing them discuss how they loved each other but were traumatized by it as well. Such a strange book and I remember it wrecked me.
@@okichan9134 It is!!
@@Ulaclarewrites I remember enjoying it a lot but fs needing a mental health break with some light reading for a while after. Definitely sensitive subject matter all around aside from incest even, so I recommend people be in a good headspace if they decide to give it a read
Listening to those excerpts made me more ace
VALID
Ditto- a fellow ace.
my frantic clicks forward could not protect my poor ace ears
Hard same
If I wasn't a sex repulsed ace before, I sure am now
My god, I will never forgive you for reading aloud those horrific Ron and Ginny passages to us 😭☠️🤮
So she started changing her tune about the reason she writes incest around 2012, and the movie came out in 2013. I think Cassie was strongly advised to come up with better reasoning.
Ohhhh yeah that tracks
Thank you for covering this!!! I've been beefing with Clare and the ongoing normalization of incest for YEARS and it's great to see someone speak out about it, especially as someone who was constantly reminded "Jayce and Clary aren't related, don't worry!!!"
I'm adopted, and the extent to which people are willing to ONLY draw the line at blood relation is really frustrating for me, because I was raised alongside my siblings... As siblings
And the constant over-emphasis of a fundamentally messed up power dynamic by saying "they're not blood-related" has been really hurtful to me, because it feels like an implied diminishment of the relationships adopted kids have with their siblings as if they're not really part of the family
The romanticization of this is weird, to say the least
And prolonged exposure to that mindset in places like the book and anime community really ticks me off
Even if it's not a perfect parallel because Jayce and Clary weren't raised together or whatever-- to me, being adjacent is enough for me to have a problem with it
Rambling aside, love to see someone of sound mind on RUclips!!!
As another adopted person, i feel the same. It's so hurtful to be thought of as not Actually family just because there's no blood relation.
Yep because it doesn't stop at Jace/Clary, Sebastian/Clary or Ginny/Ron; Alec ALSO has a crush on Jace who is his Adopted brother and it's stated that they were *raised together*, TMI is so fvcked up honestly. I used to like it when I was younger but I'm SO GLAD that I grew away from it because I'm not going to defend this stuff.
Yep. My partner didn’t know his dad wasn’t his bio dad until he was 12 and grew up with 7 siblings. He saw them as fully family. The very idea that technically he could date one of his sisters grossed him out.
I agree, that this is a flimsy and insentive excuse: we are human beings, most of our relationships are built into us through socialisation: people raised as siblings are siblings. The end.
I'm a CSA survivor and one of my friends is adopted and yeah all of this comment. I just... I was in the fandom back in the day and let's just say watching her rise was so so depressing.
HOLLY BLACK BETAREAD THE INCEST FIC??? that is the biggest plot twist of modern pop culture
I need everyone to understand that massive run on sentences to convey actions building tension is still one of the biggest signs that someone wrote fanfiction in the 2000s. Also, overuse of the phrase 'all X and X' - if a sentence in a book says something like, 'he was awkward, all lanky limbs and left hands', they probably wrote fanfic.
iirc theyre good friends and sort of overlords of the contemporary fantasy ya genre so this was not surprising to me in the least unfortunately.
So after getting recommended the part 1 video I binged the rest of the other "bad author" series, and while I can say I don't think your content as a whole is for me, by God I'm invested in this thing. And I'm staying until the end.
I could feel my soul shriveling as I listened to the quotes with how cringe they were. Those lines alone were "close book/phone and walk away" moments
Well good news: part two goes up today
I've known of Cassandra claire since her Harry Potter days. I found her while looking for HP fiction while waiting for new HP books to release. I followed the flame wars when they happened, and Cassie was a frightening bully in the community. She threatened to sue so many people, and her fans sent de@th threats to people like Avocado. Hoping part three will talk about it a bit. Love the series 💖
The way I screeched “NO” in my empty house while listening to you read those passages. 😳🤢You really took one for the team giving us this video.
Cassandra is like an harem anime writer who springs the "Actually we're not related by blood" twist on middle of the season.
I think the other problem with her saying "i did it to make Sebastian iredeemable" is that he DOES get redeemed in the end, bc in the weirdest racism allegory ever when he dies his demon blood (which for the ones that didn't read the books, other creatures have and are seen for as inferior and inherently evil for when it's not) gets burned away and reveals that he would have been a perfectly good innocent guy without it.
The other thing I remember, when you said gaslighting, is how one of the criticisms against her is her glossing over Clairy's sexual assault - it gets brought up once when she tells Jace so he can feel bad over it and then not really any further and when fans pointed this out to her, in the hopes of maybe having Clairy work through and heal from what happened to her, CC told them that she found it disturbing that fans want to see Clairy suffer as if she wasn't the one writing it in the first place...so she is just a full on professional gaslighter lmfao
She not only invented Draco in Leather Pants, but basically applies it to everyone she creates.
How many current popular authors came from the terrifying womb of Harry potter early 2000s fanfic?? Scary prospect
Oh dear god I don’t wanna know
It was quite an interesting time, and I also recalled that a popular work to crossover with Harry Potter was Naruto because the two happened to align in a lot of ways. God, imagine authors selling their anime ninja fanfics with wizards.
I mean, if I ever finish my book series, I would be "the dark fantasy-comedy author who started by Undertale AU fanfiction, including an x-reader." I don't know if that's better or worse.
(But seriously, the HP fanfiction and fandom are terrifying.)
I mean, it was an insanely popular fandom! I feel that quite a lot of authors spent time writing for it.
It's funny- I wrote Harry Potter fanfic myself, but my original fiction ideas are pure high fantasy and have nothing to do with it. But again, I'm not the person writing about incest or trying to put the homicidal spoiled elitist racist bully on a pedestal.
What’s great about the show is that they made it so that by the time the seelie queen thing happens they know they’re not related!
Yes and thank goodness for them fixing at least that
I'm really curious if Cassie has ever admitted that the Manga Angel Sanctuary was a clear influence as well. Especially since she mentions Clary is a fan of it. It's main themes are incest as well (not even going into all the incest in Manga haha) and the characters are very similar
This makes perfect sense. I had a friend who bought a poster of Setsuna with his arm over Sara's shoulders, and she thought they were a well-drawn couple.
I didn't mean to splash cold water in her face...
It feels as if she has religiously consumed EVERY media possible, where brother-sister 1ncest is mentioned. (I mean, Gladiator?!) It's definetely her kink but she doesnt own it, probably so that her books remain as mainstream as possible.
It's a shame bec. she traumatised (young) readers, who expected a regular urban YA romance and got (way) more than they bargained for. It's the Flower in the Attic of our era.
I bet CC loved Vampire Knight
If she hated Harry and Ginny, um hello Harry and Luna are right there and would be perfect together.
Yes! Their dynamic would be so much more interesting
Currently working on two fanfic projects for one of my favorite ships, and BOY HOWDY tuning in to this cest fest makes me 1000x more confident in the quality of my own work.
I’m a sucker for complicated and nuanced sibling dynamics in fiction, the only thing I love more than a good monster romance is a sibling relationship done right. Incest is NOT my thing, and being upfront about kinks is the best way to tell me what stuff I need to stay away from.
That’s the biggest issue for me here. It’s fine if you want to write some freaky shit, just be honest about it. Keep your kinks to yourself and your own bubble, Cassandra Clare.
“If you wanna write it, be honest about it”
This!!!
It is horrifying that incest is considered a kink instead of a horrorfest that deserves every bit of disgust it we all feel when we hear of it.
As much as I loved The Cruel Prince (the first book anyway), I can’t say that I’m surprised having read more of Holly Black’s work now. I am forever scarred by Valiant, in which the teenage MC discovers her presumably also teenage boyfriend has been cheating on her with her mother, an adult woman, and so she runs away from home. The entire book it’s framed like he is the real bad one here and her mother made an innocent mistake when in reality an adult woman was preying on a teenage boy. And then there’s a “funny” joke about not introducing her new boyfriend to her mom.
Honestly, its hard for me to tell with Holly Black since she writers a lot of characters that are intended to be very messed up and traumatized and not very good people.
I read Valiant (and the other books in the series) and remember being like "oh eh, these were pretty mediocre" and moving on. When the Cruel Prince became popular and I found out they were by the same author I was BAFFLED. Like these books are by Holly Black???? The same Holly Black that wrote about the pedophilic mom and the homeless kids who took drugs and slept in the subway and that weird sex scene where the man changed the protagonist's face to make her look like her friend who he had a thing for???
Oh man, that trilogy was one of the worst things I've ever read. I've never liked anything by that author so some part of me truly doesn't want to read The Cruel Prince bc honestly I doubt she's capable of good writing
@@Faith-Trust-Pixie-Dust I loved The Cruel Prince and The Darkest Part of the Forest was pretty good. I’ve tried most of her other stuff and didn’t care for it.
@@abs-urdity TCP was my first Holly Black book and I was blown away. I was dying to read The Wicked King all year and tried everything to get an arc. When it finally came out, I kept wondering if I actually had gotten an arc because it felt so unfinished to me. Queen of Nothing was fine, after the disappointment I had for book two. But while I was waiting for those books I read the Tithe trilogy and was kinda baffled by how bad Valiant was. It wasn’t even essential to the trilogy, it was just a bonus for that world and very yikes. I dnfed the vampire book and liked The Darkest Part of the Forest. I still have the fantasy monster trilogy on my tbr but I’ve been putting it off.
Here's a funny story I have about these books.
In high school, I took a class called "trends and movements in young adult litterature." It was an English elective that allowed us to use the analysis skills we learned in regular English on more modern books that were more to our age group's taste. It was a fun class, got to read a lot of books id wanted to try out for a school grade.
Anyway, we would break into groups depending on what book we wanted to read so we could discuss with our classmates. One group picked the first moral instruments book. I had already read the book outside of class, and had to hold back a reaction to their pick. Class goes on, they get close to the end, and I could tell when they got to the incest part because one person audibly went: "Oh my god!!!!"
The group reconvene, and everyone is talking about the incest reveal and how it ruined the entire book for them. They all take a vote, and decide not to continue reading the series. It was a fun convo to listen in on.
I'm a writer and reader of erotic horror, so I am definitely no stranger to the topic of incest. I truly don't care what fictional topics rev someone's engine, truly I do not, but it's annoying when people equivocate about their tastes. Own your shit! It's just embarrassing to speak out of both sides of your (general your) mouth like this. There are a lot of interesting discussions to be had around incest as a theme in fiction, but trying to engage in those discussions purely as a cover for getting your jollies is nothing more than sophistry.
And if you're gonna write incest, at least write it well. Yikes.
if you're into vns at all, I highly recommend The Price Of Flesh, it's on steam and itchio. It directly caters to us nasty little freaks, it knows what it is and is written very well. There's a bad end where it describes you feeling the weight of your internal organs being shifted outside of you and its visceral descriptions have stuck to my ribs. And the serial killers are really hot.
My thoughts precisely! I don't care what fantasies people have, but don't try to make it into something "meaningful". Just say that it gets you off!
Draco was right there. We could've gotten a Ginny villain-origin story. We could've gotten Ron and some random new character. We could've gotten so much more and so much better, but the fact that CC looked at the world and said "it needs more incest" is what drives me crazy
Ohmygoodness I had friends constantly pushing me to finish her series and I did but always felt weird as a lil teen!! I even felt weird about Alec liking Jace since Izzy said they all grew up together as siblings. AND the Dark Artifices series where she does it AGAIN with the main girl falling for the boy she was raised with and all his siblings feeling like her own. I stopped after the first book because the pattern is just so obvious. How does it keep getting published???
I think that people can write their kinks but they need to acknowledge it and label it properly. I'm okay with D/s and a little dubcon in the fics I read/write but you HAVE to label that shit or you can trigger the unwary reader. I really enjoy kink in writing but it's not for everyone.
I recently read a book with pet play and feeder k*nk and while it’s not necessarily *my* thing, I acknowledge that it has a right to exist for others as long as the fiction in question is between consenting adults.
I have to agree, Taboo subjects can be therapeutic for some people as I've understood, but young people are impressionble and shouldn't confuse these really toxic tropes and kinks with normal relationships
i'd argue the problem isn't the incest in and of itself, much like murder, rape, physical and sexual abuse etc, aren't an issue - when used in appropriate context. Incest in a YA novel like Mortal Instruments is NOT the same as incest in an adult fantasy book. The fact that she argues in this direction is hilarious.
Its definitely true, it's about context, consideration, and intention of the author. It's present in Juniper and Thorn by Ava Reid for a purpose. Reid wanted to center CSA survivors like herself.
it's definitely also that the incest is never NOT framed as sexy lol
I definitely agree with the note about the audience being important. If your work is clearly aimed at a younger audience (and you yourself are not also part of that audience - I'm going to be a lot gentler on a young teen writing content aimed at other young teens, even if I think it's weird) , I'm going to be more critical.
For example, even though 50 shades of gray is a lot more problematic than twilight, I'm actually more inclined to let a lot of it slide because the audience is clearly adults, who should be mature and experienced enough to differentiate fantasy from reality. Younger people are going to have a more difficult time not projecting that romanticization of toxic behavior into their real life and are not necessarily going to have the experience to identify some of these harmful behaviors.
Yes, when you write like you approve of these acts is when you crossed the line. Incest should never be romanticized, even if the incest his highly romantic. The line isn't hard to see, folks.
its the part where she made DOUBLE INCEST with BOTH love interests. like girl. just admit it. just wear the kink on your shoulder. but don't shoehorn it into your YA adventure novel please. keep it on the forums.
Unholy Trinity of trigger warnings: Incest, Sexual assault and Harry Potter
im currently listening to this alone in the sewing room at work and the first three paragraphs from the ron and ginny weasley bits are making me wanna surge a blanket together and just hide under it forever
and not to further incriminate cassandra for being weird but i cannot for the life of me remember how far along the book series was in 2004 so for all i can remember shes literally writing not just incest but incest between at best a highschool boy and his younger sister
What a terrible day to have ears
Please tell me you’re going to do a part 3 on just her bullying behavior. I’ve had to defend my reasons for refusing to read her books since high school (well over 10 years ago now), and her bullying was my main one. If I’d known about the incest, I’m sure I would’ve led with that.
Hi! Yes, part three is entirely about her bad behavior in online spaces, including bullying, as well as her connection to Miss scribe.
That’s it. You’ve officially won the prize for the weirdest thing I ever listened to while at work when you started reading passages from the original Mortal Instruments. I’d say congrats but… we all suffered on this one.
I’ll wear my medal with… not pride, but something 🎖️
@@ReadswithRachel A bronze star, lmao you deserve it.
When the reveal happened in City of Bones it gave me such the ICK that I finished the book and never touched the series again. I've never understood the "it's so great" comments about the series and now I feel so vindicated in having not finished it.
Wow this was a terribly day for me to have eyes and ears.
Rachel: “OMG THE RUN ON SENTENCES”
Me, wishing it was just a run on sentence I heard: *incoherent screeching*
I feel bad but never have I been more excited to go to a psychologist appointment then when you started reading that fic. I was like Oh... nooooo look at the time.
I was waiting breathless for this update!
She was also involved in an online mess where someone faked their entire identity
i had always heard about cassie clare's weird sibling love, but I had no idea how explicit tt was and this literally gave me visceral reactions of disgust. why is this a TROPE ?!?!?!
God, I've been waiting for someone to drag this woman. 😂 The biggest author bully finally gets the attention she deserves. I'm becoming a Patron just for this alone. It's brilliant. You're amazing. Thank you.
Welcome to patreon! glad to have you
I thought EL James was the bigger bully. She issued a cease and desist on the creator of 50 Shades of Chicken.
Also, why do these people who start off in fan fiction get high and mighty when people get inspired to write fan fiction or parodies about their own work?
I think we get as much "family love" in fanfic because a lot of fic writers are not great at writing love that is not romantic. It's not as easy as just going "they wanna bang...so now they are clearly in love." And I think that inability to show familial relationships, over a long period of time, kinda perpetuated a feeling that they were not characters with a whole web of bonds to different characters...but instead made them feel like bunch of dolls. Solely individual and easily swapped out for any other doll depending on what costume you wanted to play with today. They don't really internalize the whole troubling issue with **cest because to them it's just the doll named Ron kissing the doll named Ginny.
And while I do think there is a level of kink involved...I think it spread so far into Fandom because readers and writers trained themselves to not think of characters as people in stories, but instead as blank-slate avatars that only had the personality they wanted them to have at any given moment.
yeah, I've seen a lot of siblings in fiction---published, fanfic, RP---that came off as incesty even when that WASN'T the writer's intent, and I think it's a combo of "not knowing how to write a loving relationship that isn't romantic, especially m/f" + "not having siblings themselves"
I've seen the thing about some fanfiction writers not being able to write platonic relationships with other things too, like with the absurdly high prevalence of shipping a canonically aroace character (and while aspec people can still want relationships, they were just writing her as if she wasn't aroace at all). Like is it seriously that hard to not ship *ONE* character
@@marymauney3235 I don't mean to come off as jaded. Unfortunately, sex and taboo sells. That's the only reason why stuff likes like this gets published year after year.
Honeslty and sadly you have to find the good fanfiction, it’s one of the main reasons I only ever read fan fiction on archive of our own. There you can find some good fa fiction with platonic relationships between friends and almost brother like relationships with out the stupid tension some people put on them
@Kiera Asher I think the main reason why you can find more variety of genres, love and so on on ao3 is how easy and robust they've made their search system, especially when people actively use the tags because they know no mods will be lurking to delete any works archived.
I haven't used ff.net and other sites in a fair bit, but I remember finding what I wanted on ff.net was just plain difficult. all this to say I just love the OTW team so much, they're a sound bunch, the bee's knees of you will!
I'm writing a story where in it the main character escapes her family who are very much products of !ncest, running away from her abusive cousin who she was arranged to. She was always told it's normal to be with family but as she gets into normal society she realizes why her family is often sick and with deformities and is grossed out knowing she's a product of generations of !ncest. I never sexualized it, never made it a Romeo and juliet story, it's a story device(and meant to parallel pure breed dogs) without promoting it or making light of it. Cassandra... you didn't!
This sounds like a great premise!
I'm reminded of the comic Preacher that has a side family with that kind of plot. Didn't really like the series and so never went past book 2 to know what happens there.
How fascinating.
cassandra clare really has us INCENSED with her actions. i’m glad you’re INSPECTING them. crush her like an INSECT.
these words are just coincidental and have nothing to do with Cassie’s writing.
the funny thing is that Cassandra Clare gave so much justification and signifcance to the name The Mortal Instruments in the shadowhunters series. And not clumsily either. There were layers to that title. That title has made me cry.
finding out that it comes from a disgusting incest fanfic is a little like realizing santa claus doesn't exist.
My eyes were going wide with shock every 5 seconds in this video. This was a rollercoaster ride and HUGE props to your dedication to the tea because I can't get this entertainment anywhere else!
i'll never get over the "it's common in fantasy" comment. EW! NO! GROSS! it most certainly is not.
Props for reading that whole Ron/Ginny section out loud. I stood frozen with a ghastly look on my face the entire time, equally horrified by the prose and in awe of your zero-fucks savagery.
Honestly this video is making me want to write something original with REAL sibling love. I’m the oldest of five siblings and since the day each of them was born I’ve loved them like they were my own children. I have photos of them and with them, I have countless memories of giving older brother advice… I would love to write something based off of that. Something not gross, something that has brought comfort throughout my life.
I bought The Cruel Prince a couple of years ago because of the hype but saw that the dedication was to Cassandra Clare. Needless to say, I closed it immediately and haven’t touched it since
This is hilarious
It's actually really boring. I read it like half way and I just really didn't like it. There is just violence for the sake of violence and stuff.
First book was like a 2.5, middle book was a 5 I won’t even lie… those political games and plot twists had me in a chokehold and then at the end the main character gets absolutely screwed over and I was dying laughing.
Final book was not good at all.
Usually that's how you know the relationships will be toxic, the prose irritating, and the plot a meandering mess. She's also friends with Stephanie Meyer.
im rewatching this video and the part where her example about royal families doing incest to keep the bloodline was one POC royal family rubs be the wrong way. idk why but it strikes me as racist to use ancient egyptians as example when the spanish royals are the most famous case of incest that led to them having many physical and mental defects (sorry if i used the wrong terms, english is not my first language)
I would argue that there's a fourth bit of incest that you didn't point out: Alec's unrequited feelings towards Jace. Jace was adopted into Alec's family and I think that should count
Edit: you did bring it up. Nevermind. Sorry, I posted with like 5 minutes left
plus if u wanna be specific.. the parabatai bond is there to symbolize a sibling-like relationship. the characters repeatedly talk about how prohibited a relationship between two parabatai would be.. so she not only decided to write Alec’s feelings like incest bc of the adoptive family aspect, but also bc of her own made up sibling bond that is the parabatai. and to make things even better, she decides to make an entire series in which the main couple are parabatai in love w each other. so
Late Comment: while I was watching this my TV shut down at the kiss, like it couldn't take it. Thanks for the intervention TV, but I'm just watching this to: 1) Support Rachel 2) Oddly give myself writing confidence.
The thing is, incest in greek mythology is a tricky one. With gods, they’re gods, it’s not like there’s enough to avoid it, but when avoidable it is greatly shunned. In the story of Oedipus, incest is seen as repulsive, and they try to avoid it. It’s about fate vs destiny, can one truly change their fate. You can’t use one set of mythos as a reasoning when the view on it varies from tale to tale. It’s a flimsy defense and poorly thought out
There’s something about the sister in the incest thing being named Clary when she chose the pen name Clare for herself.
It's such a testament to the harm jk Rowling has caused that Harry Potter is now a triggering thing.
And here I was, thinking I could make myself some dinner and listen to weird writer drama without dry heaving
I just, I HAVE to point out the IRONY of the fact that she, a fan of incest, dislikes Harry/Ginny, considering the fact that the Potters and Weasleys are technically related 💀
Edit: clarified some wording
I'm stuck in a day job for the rest of my life and THIS person lives a charmed life and made eight million dollars and never has to work again.
Um ... okay.
If nothing else you gotta admire the absolute audacity the show had to choose, of all the plot points to keep unchanged from the books, the double incest plot line. That shit airing on actual television is wild.
Like does she think she's Gabriel García Márquez or what?? This isn't symbolic, it's just gross. Her being an only child makes SO much sense
And just to be clear, medieval incest marriages were at most uncle/niece marriages. There were no brother/sister marriages in that era. Only some ancient Egyptian and Persian royals married brothers and sisters.
fun fact: every time you read an excerpt from the fic I took my headphones off my ears and chanted "nope nope nope nope nope" out loud until you were done.