#because they think consanguinity is the problem which...ok

[frereamour]

guys i just came back from final destination, and it's alright, but more importantly there's two brothers who are boyfriends

[familyromantic]

Just for those people who don't understand why I'm relatively (pun not intended) okay with first cousins having children, but are strictly against inbreeding between more closely related individuals. "Isn't it almost the same"

NO.

So, I searched for research on children of close relatives. I found three studies, surely there's more but I seriously doubt there would be something showing opposite results. So, the conslusions of those studies:

"Analysis of the persons involved in the incestuous

relationships gave no reason to expect the

striking inbreeding effect observed. The observed

frequency- of defect approached 35 to 40 per cent

instead of the 25 per cent expected on the basis

of a linear extrapolation from first-cousln studies"

"In this way, the group of 86 living control children came to include 4 abnormals, and the group of 130 living incestuous children 53 abnormals. The difference is hightly significant"

"Twelve of the 21 children

ascertained only because of the history of consanguinity

had abnormalities. If the three (Patients 1, 8, 23) with the

least significant abnormalities are omitted, there remain

nine (43%) with serious problems" "Despite absence of specific

causes for most of these patient's problems, it remains

evident that the empiric risk for abnormalities in children

of incest is high"

Though, it is noted in those studies that the sample is small and it is not clear how many of those negative effects are caused by indbreeding and how many by the factors surrounding the incest. "It is difficult to judge how much can be attributed to the

inbreeding and how much to the particular biologic background

of those families where incest occurs" "Homes in which incest occurs may compose a biased sample in terms of intelligence and other biologically determined factors; environmental factors that impinge

on development (e.g., poor diet, amount of alcohol consumed)

may also be different" "Undoubtedly, the parents of the children of incest are not a representive sample of the general population, and some cases of mental subnormality in the chidlren may be attributable to the mental subnormality of their parents which probably played a role in the occurence of incest"

BUT, even considering this, the risk is just way higher than with cousin matings. So I encourage you to think before you say that it's OK for closely related people to have children.

Links for the studies so you don't think I'm lying to you:

[churchyardgrim]

HEART OF MIDNIGHT by J. Robert King

[intro post]

oh boy that is a cover innit. god.

Spirit Halloween wolfman in tights aside, this one gives me some mixed feelings. bit of good, bit of bad, averages out into something i enjoyed but that left a weird taste in my mouth

our tale begins in fair Kartakass. do you like wolves? is your ideal political system American Idol? do you like, really like wolves? then boy howdy have i got the dread domain for you!

yes this place appears to be 50% bards and 50% werewolves. or wolfweres. or other, wolf-shaped things, it's just all wolves all the time ok

also you become mayor by winning a singing contest. that's literally the first thing that happens, is our uhhhhhh sure let's call him a hero for now, Casimir, charisma-rolls his way into ousting the current reigning mayor, who is also his estranged dad, whomst he hates.

and who is also a werewolf! shocking, i know.

if you've got two brain cells to rub together here you can figure out the next twist; Casimir, as the child of a werewolf, is also a fuckmothering werewolf. so, naturally, he lures his ex-mayor dad out of the public eye and kills him in a nasty lil dogfight

the downside to all this, is that in order to pull it off Casimir had claimed to be the bardic protégé of Harkon Lukas, the meistersinger of the next largest city in Kartakass. Lukas tolerates this for unknown reasons, and isn't shy about using that leverage over his new pupil.

shame the kid turns out to be shit at governing! he wants to Fix Problems, which manifests in bandaid solutions that piss off the guild leaders and hereditary nobility, and also he bullies his friends :( it's very sad.

there's also a bizarre cousin romance played remarkably straight? not even a token "oh she's adopted" excuse, just full on "my estranged father's sister's grandkid is the hottest person i've ever seen actually" and it goes on for most of the book. granted, several US states have looser consanguinity laws than that, so i guess it's a matter of personal taste, but even putting that aside the romance is lackluster and typical of the genre, and also the plot physically recoils from the mere possibility that this lady might catch werwolfism from her beau, which obligates us to give it a failing grade

let women be great hairy beasts dammit! half the guys in this plot get to rampage around as furries, i think we deserve some feral wolfwomen! give us the monstrous feminine, the redditor's worst nightmare, hairy and bloodthirsty and all beast no maiden!

my consolation prize for this travesty is that the entry for Kartakass in the Doomsday Gazetteers (a campaign supplement published at around the same time, composed of in-character travelogs through each domain) delivers in full on my lady werewolf cravings with a handful of delightful npcs. the entry also references the events of the novel, through the perspective of the traveling scholar conscripted to research each domain, which is very interesting to read lemme tell u

but i digress; we have werewolf fuckery to get on with

so Lukas, to our considerable surprise, is not a werewolf! no, dear reader, he is a wolfwere. what the fuck is a wolfwere? why it's a werewolf in reverse, because of course it is. a trickster wolf that takes a human shape to fuck with ppl, untethered to moon phases and other such pedestrian things. silver does nothing to them, but they're really not fans of iron. some fae ancestry in there? maybe.

anyway Lukas says to our friend Casimir he says, "kid you're a shit politician and you're an even worse predator. maybe stop trying to be nice and start hunting your constituents for sport?"

Casimir, who is an asshole but is at least trying, says "fuck that actually" and spends a few chapters trying to be a human person while his teenage hormones lycanthropy continually throws wrenches in the works

eventually Casimir's human friends identify Lukas as a persistent saboteur, and Casimir himself as someone who is both a supernatural predator and also a selfish jerk, and there's some confused escape and/or assassination attempts, and this is where the plot goes in circles for a bit. there's betrayals, and double-crossings, and un-betrayals, and a lot of ppl acting on conflicting information, and it honestly goes on a bit long for me

the final climax is very fun though, with Casimir attempting to out Lukas as a monster without realizing that uh…. buddy his pack is everywhere. u are so outnumbered.

so it's a big fun wolfbrawl, and Casimir's clever enough not to get cornered, and also to poison Lukas so he can't actually change shape, so for a while you're not sure who's gonna come out on top here

but spoilers, it's Lukas. dude's just too wiley, and also too lucky; Casimir's the one what gets outed as a monster, and tho Lukas barely survives the mauling, he does survive while Casimir's ladyfriend tearfully puts him down

very tragic, very sad, but damn if it isn't a fun show to watch

overall i'm torn on this book. on the one hand it scratches my chronic itch for werewolves, not just Wolf Shifters; they're actual monsters here, wild animals, and the book does not shy away from the brutality of it. 

it's also something that one of my horror discussion podcasts touches on, which is that werewolves are different from possession or haunting stories, bc it's not some outside force taking control of you or invading your body; The Werewolf Is You. that's the core of the conflict here, is that as much as you are this human person with goals and family and a desire to accomplish good things in the world, you are also a base and feral animal that just wants to hunt and consume the things that attract you. and this book does that very well i think, even though i suspect it doesn't know that's what it's doing.

the downside is, well, the prose just doesn't live up to its subject matter. something's missing in a way that's hard to articulate, it comes across very bland. there's some very nice gory descriptions, and it makes a valiant effort to get the feral vibe right, but it falls short of what i really want it to be with the visceral focus and drive that i like best

the other downside is hoo boy is there a lot of suicidal ideation in this book. most of our characters die in genuinely tragic ways, it starts with a suicide and ends with a suicide, and in my opinion it crosses the line from Horror to Depressing. there's fun twisting the knife and then there's twisting the knife in a way that just leaves you unhappy about it, and this is the latter

so yeah, it's a mixed bag! worth a shot for the fun hairy bits, but be warned it doesn't pull punches in the mental health department

[rainbowamory]

My Conversation with a Professor (on queerness and consensual incest)

I wanted to share an experience which I found to be inspiring and insightful and is on topic. For the sake of privacy, I’m not going to give details like names or titles.

I was once part of a group of queer people that were having a discussion about intersecting identities and queer history. A professor that teaches queer theory and feminism was there to lead the discussions. At one point someone in the group mentioned that certain places in the world have bans on media. Among the list of banned subjects are Incest and anything LGBTQ. This person was really upset about this because they did not see how those subjects were in any way connected... 

I was upset too, but for a different reason. Although it’s not surprising to me, it still bothers me deeply that I have to censor myself even in a space where we’re supposed to be sex positive and have rational discussions about oppression. 

After everyone left the room for the day, I went up to the professor and asked if I could speak to them privately. 

I began by saying that I was upset at the thing that the other person had said. I expressed that no one ever talked about this topic from a consent perspective and that when consent is involved, it is a whole other story... I acknowledged that incest is a very complex topic and that there’s a lot I still don’t know, but that I knew of people that were in consanguineous relationships (cousin couples for example). I expressed that it bothers me that this is never talked of, even when consanguineous relationships and marriages are everywhere in society (just hidden in many cases). I gave examples of the few I knew about in real life.

I was really nervous because I’m not the kind of person who is good at talking out loud about sensitive subjects...I prefer to write. And I had no idea what the professor would think of me.

I told them that I’ve been researching cousin/cousin relationships for awhile on my own for my writing, and that sometimes in queer spaces I feel like a ‘double agent’ because I can’t help but apply the things I am learning (about queer history) to the stuff I am learning about consanguineous couples - that while acknowledging there were differences, I couldn’t deny the similarities between them.  

The professor was surprisingly open to what I had to say. They listened attentively to my breathless ramblings and told me that they didn’t have an issue with incest as long as it’s consensual and safe (Between adults. Or teens close in age). They said the only thing they don’t support is pretty much things that don’t involve consenting human beings or... toilet play (as an example of something that can cause health problems, is unsanitary and not safe). 

They said one of the reasons people might have a strong reaction is because when the word “Incest” comes up, people automatically think of a man abusing a little kid.

The professor even went so far as to ask me if I’d like them to bring up the topic of incest (the consensual kind) with the other youth in the group. I said no, because it’s a sensitive topic for me (and I didn’t feel the others were ready to talk about it from that viewpoint). I thanked the professor so much for listening to me and left soon after, kind of shaking.... because I’m not used to talking about taboo subjects with people face-to-face. So that was scary for me, but also exhilarating. 

The thing that moved me most was that the very next day (which was our last day gathering as a group) the Professor, while introducing our assignment, made note that we can use anything as research material except things like bestiality where there is NO consent, and that they are OK with anything that involves Consent. I felt like this was another reassuring comment directed to me, building on the private conversation we had the day before. The people didn’t seem to take anything by that comment (maybe they got what was meant, who knows.. lol) but I was so happy.

This incident was really special because not only was it the first time I dared to speak about it to a stranger directly, but because the Professor’s reaction showed me that there are leaders in the queer community that are intellectually consistent, people who would try to at least be neutral towards consenting incestuous couples and who won’t judge allies for their views, because they’ve already challenged their own minds and given it thought - as anyone who cares about human rights should. 

This is also great for related couples because it means they DO have allies in the queer community after all, including allies who are leaders. That is pretty amazing. 

<3

[I have made the details of the professor vague on purpose to protect their identity for this post. This is still a taboo subject and I don’t want to negatively affect their career in any way.]

[thelioninmybed]

Misc replies

berrysphase replied to your post “valaraukars replied to your post “AU maeglin in mithrim with grandad...”

I'm sideeyeing myself here for sounding so "MY PET THEORY" when my whole point was there's actually a whole bunch of ways to explain Earendil not getting the Kingship and some of them can leave Maeglin the legitimate heir -- lol sorry (Assuming Gil is Orodreth's, that is, I always do too!) I figure the relative Sindarin comfort with powerful women has a lot to do with Melian, but it turns out I could go on and add screenfuls about Elwe's special status

and king's choice etc etc so uh I'll spare you... Also surely this attitude has a lot to do with why Galadriel married a Sinda.

Elves arguing inheritance politics is my catnip but it's also a bit brain-breaking -- I mean here are these immortal beings arguing about different interpretations of inheritance law when inheritance was just invented out of whole cloth so recently, you get to blatant rationalization s and bad philosophical arguments so fast

No no, it certainly can be done but you’re right, I forgot about Earendil during my analysis. Gil as Orodreth has always made sense to me, especially with how small a player he is until after the War of Wrath. God, the Galadriel-Marries-A-Sinda thing is an excellent point. I tend to skim over the more overtly patriarchal crap in the text (and in my fic, unless I’m making a point) but it explains an awful lot about why such an ambitious woman would spend so much time away from the action - she has vastly more of a say in governance etc. in Doriath than she would have in her own peoples’ lands - and of course she’d marry a Sinda, this is great. 

God, yes, how did the issue of who would inherit Finwe’s crown break society when the issue was, as far as anyone knew, entirely academic? (because it was really a question of who daddy loved more :()

psychopompious replied to your post��“valaraukars replied to your post “AU maeglin in mithrim with grandad...”

"and she's his great aunt" you say that like it would be a problem for him. that's only 4th degree consanguinity, same as first cousins!

also re: Celeborn's relation to Thingol, I think in that version it's through the schrodinger's cat brother (aka Elmo) but I'd have to dig up that lovely chart of Doriath's long line of cousin marriages to check

.......okay fuck, you’re right. Maeglin would. 

If that’s the case then I suppose I owe Tolkien an apology. But he’s dead and also we have no idea what happened to Lalwen so I’m just gonna sit on it. 

vardasvapors replied to your post “Paying attention to those things is not my forte but thank you for...”

I just wanted to mention that this series of prompted au's is like my fave thing in the fandom rn

Thx xx I just wish I could be more varied with them than ‘but then everyone died anyway’

crocordile replied to your post “valaraukars replied to your post “AU maeglin in mithrim with grandad...”

to be fair though, nothing in canon suggests elwing held a position of authority by herself; you can easily assume her position comes from her marriage :/ Though ofc that is not my interpretation/headcanon at all!

re: earendil's ellegibility for high kingship: on the purely legalist side cirdan and co might just be following finrod's logic and taking finarfin's to be the royal line after fingolfin's death, or something? i always assumed that (but then again i def hc gil as oro's son which not many do hahaha)

You: “I don't think Tolkien meant for us to interpret it this way."

Me, an intellectual w. a folder of Silm erotica: "He didn't mean for us to interpret a lot of things this way. But we did."

I.E. Elwing is queen and idgaf what Tolkien wanted. 

I am with you on Gil as Oro’s (AND NOT JUST FOR SHIPPING REASONS OKAY, I HAVE LAYERS), someone pointed out the thematic neatness of the three lines of Finwe’s descendants dying to other elves, to Morgoth, and to Sauron respectively and Gil as an Arafinwean falls neatly into that. 

simaethae replied to your post “Paying attention to those things is not my forte but thank you for...”

how about they win a decisive enough victory to reclaim *one* silmaril and then morgoth flips and... volcanoes. or something. anyway you could totally contrive an AU where some of the feanorians, i'm saying C&C for kicks, have to fall back to the safety of Doriath in the ensuing chaos with their newly-obtained silmaril (since after all we know a silmaril can get you through the girdle...)

like i'm sorry this is great but i feel like it just needs more terrible decision making from the noldor to be a silm AU >>;

I’m starting to feel bad for Anon, okay? Just like Mandos, even my cold heart can be moved to pity. 

C+C in Doriath would be exquisite tbh, it’s yet another closed system where they can feed on paranoia, claw for power, and Celegorm can get into a creep off with Daeron while Thingol despises them while coveting the jewel and Melian is like ‘for fuck’s sake guys’ but no one listens. At least maybe the dwarves are free of the murder shenanigans this time around!

emilyenrose replied to your post “Paying attention to those things is not my forte but thank you for...”

ok but any au where luthien doesn't dress up as a vampire is a bad end au anyway

Truer words have never been spoken. 

vardasvapors replied to your post “Idk if you'll agree or not, but for the au where the silmarils don't...”

this is so wonderfully terrible and perfect, i love the...honesty and simplicity of the things they say, in them talking specifically about their relationship, though the feelings and Maglor's claims about finishing it can map onto much more. Also "I'd like that" JUST KILL ME.

It didn’t kill Mae though, more’s the pity :( Okay but realtalk, thank you <3 I suppose by this point all pretension’s pretty much been stripped away, they’re well past the point where lying to each other or themselves would do any good. 

valaraukars replied to your post “Ok I've find that tag .. but you actually read it? You can find it...”

You know who defied the valar? You know who doesn't get any credit? You know who is a character of true depth and nuance, constantly dismissed by an undeserving fandom? Ungoliant

No no Ungoliant, as established, abandoned her children and is a bad mother and thus a bad woman giant spider. Please keep your vile glorification of her off my blog. 

imindhowwelayinjune replied to your post “Idk if you'll agree or not, but for the au where the silmarils don't...”

You are maddeningly good at feelings that cut to the bone and somehow have this soupcon of humor - 'I'd like that,' said Maedhros wistfully - that makes the feeling go straight through the bone to the marrow

I left off the hurtful swears cause I know you don’t really mean them. Maedhros wishes feelings really worked so literally :(