#this play isn't even really about the incest! it's about the nature of fate and the cost of truth!!

[branules]

Why do you like aeriseph, sorry if this comes off as rude but I'm generally not too involved in any fandoms so I can't figure out for myself why ppl like this that's just my dumbass lmao

ok i've sat on this one for like a week debating if i should answer or not but sure. i'll preface this by saying that there is no canonical basis for aeriseph in ffvii. like i can't stress enough how much i am making shit up because i like to have fun. but anyway.

the short answer is:

1. sephiroth and aerith are my two favorite fictional characters. 2. i like to draw my two favorite characters lezzing out, because i am a lesbian, and because my sephiroth is transfem. it makes me smile.

as for the longer answer:

i like how much aerith and sephiroth parallel and contrast each other. i like the idea of aerith of having a secret affair with the evil dead woman she is duty-bound to save the world from. not to mention this evil dead woman's ties to zack and the incident that took him from her. i like the idea of the planet's steward and calamity's child going against their natures because they can't resist each other, and it becomes haunting and tragic knowing aerith's eventual fate and the sort of eternal damnation that waits for sephiroth afterwards for doing something so unforgivable, considering she goes from godhood to immortal planet parasite unable to pass on. i find it soooo compelling to think that despite their feelings for each other, aerith ultimately loved the planet and her friends more, enough to do everything in her power to stop sephiroth with Holy, and that sephiroth chose an extraterrestrial brainworm masquerading as a mother over a kind-hearted woman who offered her genuine love. i like the idea of aerith drawing out all the human parts of sephiroth that sephiroth tried so hard to exorcise herself of. i could go on about this for forever but basically i just like doomed yuri.

some necessary addendums:

first, a lot of people like to imagine aerith and sephiroth as siblings. that's fine and cute and i totally get it, but that's not what i'm trying to do. i don't interact with a lot of aerith and sephiroth content that views them with that angle, even if it's cute, precisely because i don't want to cross those wires or make anyone uncomfortable thinking i'm trying to come at this from an incest or underage angle.

second, i want to add that i really don't fw the other aeriseph content i've seen out there lol. i just think i'm into aeriseph for fundamentally different reasons, considering i have no desire to depict them as a het pairing or create gooner noncon content and the like. it isn't that i'm better than anyone, i just don't want to be associated with what goes on in that pairing tag on ao3, and i can't blame anyone who doesn't like aeriseph for that very same reason. i have yet to see someone go about aeriseph in the same l way as i do (sighhhhhh </3) so until then i'm just going to continue playing with my barbie dolls in my locked ivory tower. i am delusional but i am free. hope this helps <3

[poorlittleyaoyao]

You're doomed--may you never fathom who you are!

Oedipus Tyrannus, lines 1167-1173 (tr. Robert Fagles)

[spectershaped]

Umineko spoilers, cw incest

OK I'm thinking once again about Sayo's whole (or)deal and. See, full disclosure, when I played the game, I didn't quite get the extent to which Sayo's despair after meeting Kinzo was about her realizing any of the blooming relationships she had would be retroactively incestuous (though, of course, that was very much foreshadowed with the whole Furfur/Zepar love trial from ep 6); at the time, I just thought she felt like she had always been a prisoner of fate and so forth

And one detail that really stuck out to me reading Confession was that Sayo felt shame about loving the people she suddenly became aware were her cousins because she saw that as being equivalent to, and a continuation of, Kinzo's incest

So that, in turn, got me thinking - is Umineko doing some interesting examination of incest as a social taboo here? We're introduced to two different instances of incest or potential incest, and the difference between them are very salient

First there's Kinzo, the abusive patriarchal figure par excellence, taking advantage of a child he cloistered from the world from her birth and towards whom he projects an affection for a deceased woman regardless of said child's own feelings on the matter. The act of incest here is, of course, ghastly, but it's also sort of continuous with, and reflective of, everything else in the scenario as a whole, which itself is but a more grandiose reflection of the patriarchal nuclear family from which abuse is the most natural byproduct. It's a drastic escalation, but not a deviation, from the norm

Then there's Sayo and the cousins. Sayo herself is already marked as "deviant", at least in her own understanding of the world/society she lives in, by her...unusual body situation. When she discovers her biological heritage, her relationship with the cousins becomes retroactively incestuous despite none of the parties knowing, until that point, they were related; and they never really see each other in a sibling-like way growing up, even Jessica, who grows up alongside Sayo (so to speak) and who thinks of her as a friend. Hell, even the (somewhat questionable, admittedly) genetic objections to incest don't really come into play because Sayo can't bear children. Sayo ostensibly thinks of her affections as incestuous because she can't help but think of Kinzo's foul actions, but it's hard not think at least some of that shame derives from being a) a product of that incest, and thus "tainted" in and of herself and b) a body marked as "deviant" by the world she inhabits, in terms of disability and gender and the intersection of the two. Sayo's imagined incestuousness is fundamentally distinct from Kinzo's: his is horrible and damaging but is also just an extension of what "normal" family-ness entails; Sayo's is basically harmless and would more or less be harmless even if it was consummated, because the reasons incest is taboo are important beyond the act itself

You can even argue Sayo and George's romance is sort of an extension of this general idea: Sayo isn't actually 16, but George pursuing her while thinking she is that age says something about him regardless of the concrete facts (hey, that's also a big theme in Umineko! Damn!); this is also sort of mirrored by how the girl George proposes to is his own family's servant who has very little life experience outside of the domain and watchful gaze of said family as if that's any sort of level ground, which is kind of an extension of what marriage means in their society. AND 23 year old marrying seemingly 16 year old Sayo would be perfectly legal in Japan until the 2000s as long as the 16 year old is the female spouse - once again, none of this is Deviancy, it's the norm taken up a notch!

I don't think Umineko is making a specific claim about incest in and of itself, but I think it's making a larger point about the things we accept as Normal or Deviant and how a taboo can elide the way its target is an extension of that which is socially acceptable

[poorlittleyaoyao]

#this play isn't even really about the incest! it's about the nature of fate and the cost of truth!!#<- prev YEAH. and now im thinking about that one bit of uhhhhhh violence and the sacred#'If we eliminate the testimony brought against Oedipus in the second half of the tragedy then the conclusion of the myth#far from seeming a sudden lightning flash of the truth striking down the guilty party and illuminating all the mortal participants#seems nothing more than the camouflaged victory of one version of the story over the other#the polemical version over its rival—the community’s formal acceptance of Tiresias’s and Creon’s version of the story#thereafter held to be the true and universal version the verity behind the myth itself'#rip i realise i am a) pasting literally a paragraph in the tags and b) thinking abt jgy as oedipus instead#(he Did have a patricide moment though. like that is notably a thing that did also happen if under very different circumstances)#but mostly i am thinking about how the revelations of jgy's crimes are consistently Focalised Through Other Stuff#like are you seeing the actual thing or like. someone else talking about a letter written about someone else knowing about etc etc etc#and there is a limit to how much of that is just because the protagonist isn't able to see it Directly#but the result is like. im not going to paste another girard paragraph but there IS one about how all the accusations against oedipus Are#Just An Argument with tiresias (and creon?) and it's only the injection via prophecy etc of what an audience Knows is in the myth that#breaks the stalemate of This Is Just An Argument by Revealing the crimes the audience already knows were fated#i think the way the narrative (can it count as a narrative if it's a play) of oedipus rex relies on an audience knowing and trusting a myth#is v similar to how the narrative of mdzs/cql uses focalisation to allow The Victory Of One Version Of The Story Over The Other etc

@catilinas I am reading this tag analysis on the Oedipus post like 👀👀👀 and wANT TO HEAR MORE because

1.) The discrepancies between the version of events in CQL that we see unfold as viewers in real time and the version we get from NMJ during the Empathy sequence are a constant subject of rumination for me, and they're yet another example of seeing JGY through not one but two sets of filters, and NMJ's version of events is the last we see, and thus forms our lasting impression, but it's so far removed from the originals you don't even realize how much they've omitted unless you watch them back-to-back. Meanwhile, Tiresias's account is one of the first things we hear, but it colors everything that comes after it because We All Know The Story, the characters themselves fixate on it, and everything unfolds more or less in real time so we the viewers don't have time to forget anything and never got to see Oedipus or Jocasta or Laius outside of this moment.

2.) something something JGY claims that someone tried/ is trying to harm him every time he's confronted, and Oedipus accuses Creon of plotting to overthrow him

3.) what if "JGY lives" AU in the style of Oedipus at Colonus