Actually, Were They Not Related, I Bet It'd Be Canon By Now.

[rionaleonhart]

Here is a question for the Supernatural fans among you, whether you're Wincest people or not: how would your perception of the Sam and Dean relationship be different if they were not related? Yes, all right, I know that half the premise of Supernatural doesn't work if the boys aren't brothers, but let's set that aside for a moment. If they had the same bantering, mocking, die-for-each-other-in-a-heartbeat relationship they do at the moment, but they weren't brothers (childhood friends, let's say), how would you react to them?

I have to confess that I probably wouldn't love them quite so much; sibling relationships really are more or less my favourite thing in fiction. I'd have started 'shipping them sooner - pretty much immediately, in fact, and I wouldn't have this 'but do I actually 'ship them, or am I just interested in pairing them up because of the mental issues that would ensue?' uncertainty - but I think I would have taken much longer to start writing fanfiction, if I ever got around to it at all. Sam/Dean fascinates me because it's twisted and destructive and more likely to all go completely to hell (quite possibly literally) than not; were it not for the wrongness, I don't think I'd find it as interesting as I do.

(EDIT: There's also the fact that I'm interested in the Sam-and-Dean dynamic as both a platonic relationship and a sexual one, but for entirely different reasons; taking away the incest aspect would make the platonic and sexual relationships less radically different, which, again, would make things less interesting for me.)

The idea of the two of them not being brothers actually distresses me, for reasons I can't quite place. Distresses me to a slightly weird extent, in fact, especially when you consider the fact that this is a hypothetical situation regarding characters who are fictional anyway. It's like Holmes and Watson never meeting; it's just wrong. This is why I can't read Sam-and-Dean AUs.

Comments

[rionaleonhart]

I've always thought of being raised as brothers as being essentially the same as being actual brothers, so that doesn't really make much of a difference in my mind. I suppose it could make a difference to them, though.

[draegonhawke.livejournal.com]

Right! What happens if they're raised as brothers, but someone specifically targets and blocks those memories? &/ What happens if Adam from Torchwood shows up? (And was it just me, or was Adam Actually an Evil!GF?)

[rionaleonhart]

...Adam really was an evil GF, wasn't he? And I think losing their shared growing-up-together memories would definitely lessen the sense of incest, whether they were biological brothers or not.

(You know, I stumbled across a fic in which Sam lost his memories and fell in love with Dean, not knowing that Dean was his brother, and Dean, who hadn't lost his memories and was perfectly aware of Sam's amnesiac condition, agreed to have sex with him. Gigantic moral squick.)

[draegonhawke.livejournal.com]

(That... does not seem like something I would buy Dean doing. Did they justify the hell out of it?)

Really, if incest-aversion has a biological basis in wanting to prevent inbreeding, any sort of homosexual incest circumvents that, anyway. Not that it stops it from existing even in situations when no offspring can result – well, you know, in Fandom anything's possible – but it's interesting.

[rionaleonhart]

(Not - not really. Basically, Dean resisted, Sam said 'please', Dean said 'well, all right, there's no real reason not to if we're both consenting adults', I said 'I RESPECTFULLY DISAGREE'.)

[amy-wolf.livejournal.com]

Incest aversion actually has more to do with being raised together. There's something called the Weintraub effect, I think? Something they found on Israeli kibbutzes. Basically, raising the kids in a massive group, as basically family, led to almost no marriages between kids from the same kibbutz. Because it felt incestuous.

There's also a similar thing with Chinese brides who were sent to their future husband's family at an early age and raised together. Growing up as effective siblings tended to ruin the subsequent marriages.

[chenoeh.livejournal.com]

I think the opposite is also true, where sibs raised apart who meet later in life are known to have a high incidence of sexual attraction. I'm not sure how reliable that is, or how common. See the film Eyes Wide Shut with Clive Owen.

[rionaleonhart]

I definitely heard a news story fairly recently about a couple who married, then discovered that they were raised-apart siblings. I think the article said that their genetic similarity probably made them more attractive to each other.

Which is interesting, and certainly seems to indicate that an aversion to incest is much more socially than naturally ingrained.