#yet another defence of poor merope

[saintsenara]

Just for argument's sake, what's a sibling incest ship in hp that you think /could/ be compelling?

thank you very much for the ask, anon!

it's certainly an interesting question - which i've popped the answer to below the cut, not only because it's about sibling incest, a trigger warning in and of itself, but because it also discusses physical and sexual abuse.

in the response which inspired this ask, i said that it seems to me that the reason why people ship sibling pairings is primarily because they find the taboo engaging - and "engaging" here can refer to anything on a spectrum from "mildly interesting" to "hot".

and i have no moral objection to this in a fictional context. many of the best books i've ever read - the secret history and ada or ardor chief among them - have sibling incest, and sibling incest which is presented specifically as romantic, as a prominent theme. i've also [like any other millennial with too much time on their hands] seen game of thrones...

but in fanfiction, while i understand the fun of a taboo fantasy in which siblings hook up in an imaginary setting where nobody is getting hurt, i find this quite uninteresting. by which i mean, i don't vibe with the fact that the standard presentation of sibling incest is as something that everyone involved is broadly fine with.

and i think the reason for this is that it ends up being woven - a lot of the time - into the fanon which has sprung up around "pureblood culture", which presents aristocracy as something dark and sexy, the class system as something it's legitimately important to maintain, and notions that pureblood families are genuinely special [i.e. that they have certain "family magics"].

a lot of the time, sibling incest pairings - and parent/child ones - are situated within this context: that it is natural for someone who is special by virtue of their birth to think that the only person worthy of their attention is their own blood relative.

i'm on the record as finding this aristocracy wank uninteresting in general - and so i find it uninteresting in this specific form as well. and it's why i don't vibe with pairings like sirius/regulus or bellatrix/narcissa - they are typically written as making perfect sense.

what I think would be compelling, however, is an approach to such pairings which takes a view of sibling incest closer to our real-world understanding of the phenomenon. not as something which is taboo in a naughty, forbidden way - but as something which is corrosive, almost certainly abusive, and highly like to be accompanied by other forms of violence.

which is to say... there is a sibling incest pairing actually implied in the canon text who i think are fascinating to explore: morfin and merope gaunt.

the gaunts’ extreme incestuousness is played for laughs in half-blood prince:

“Marvolo, his son, Morfin, and his daughter, Merope, were the last of the Gaunts, a very ancient Wizarding family noted for a vein of instability and violence that flourished through the generations due to their habit of marrying their own cousins. Lack of sense coupled with a great liking for grandeur meant that the family gold was squandered several generations before Marvolo was born. He, as you saw, was left in squalor and poverty, with a very nasty temper, a fantastic amount of arrogance and pride, and a couple of family heirlooms that he treasured just as much as his son, and rather more than his daughter.”

this alludes to common jokes in britain about how inbred the aristocracy are. it also winks conspiratorially at the reader about the irony of a family which considers itself to be of such “pure” blood living in filth and fucking their own blood relations - and morfin and merope both have a birth defect associated with inbreeding [exotropia, eyes which stare in different directions] which serves as a visual metaphor for the gaunts' hubristic decline, in that it is written as making them look ugly, simple-minded, and poor.

but there is also a subtext here - in the way that dumbledore talks about the family's increasing isolation from the rest of the world -that the gaunts' incestuousness is narrowing from first cousins to siblings.

[indeed, i always wonder if we're supposed to imagine that morfin and merope's - presumably - dead mother was marvolo's sister, and that's why the siblings have this birth defect while marvolo does not...]

the three gaunts do not appear to go anywhere or know anyone, and morfin and merope evidently did not attend hogwarts. this isolation - especially when coupled with their appearances, since many of the pureblood families we meet in canon are described as being good-looking, and their finances - means that neither child has any hope on the upper-class marriage-market.

but the way that both morfin and marvolo talk to and about merope - especially the way morfin taunts his sister about tom riddle sr. - suggests that this doesn't matter, since morfin and merope will be keeping it in the family...

“‘Darling,’” whispered Morfin in Parseltongue, looking at his sister. “‘Darling,’ he called her. So he wouldn’t have you anyway.” Merope was so white Harry felt sure she was going to faint. “What’s that?” said Gaunt sharply, also in Parseltongue, looking from his son to his daughter. “She likes looking at that Muggle,” said Morfin, a vicious expression on his face as he stared at his sister, who now looked terrified. “Always in the garden when he passes, peering through the hedge at him, isn’t she? And last night - ”  Merope shook her head jerkily, imploringly, but Morfin went on ruthlessly, “Hanging out of the window waiting for him to ride home, wasn’t she?”  “Hanging out of the window to look at a Muggle?” said Gaunt quietly. All three of the Gaunts seemed to have forgotten Ogden, who was looking both bewildered and irritated at this renewed outbreak of incomprehensible hissing and rasping. “Is it true?” said Gaunt in a deadly voice, advancing a step or two toward the terrified girl. “My daughter - pure-blooded descendant of Salazar Slytherin - hankering after a filthy, dirt-veined Muggle?”  Merope shook her head frantically, pressing herself into the wall, apparently unable to speak.  “But I got him, Father” cackled Morfin. “I got him as he went by and he didn’t look so pretty with hives all over him, did he, Merope?”

morfin's hatred of tom riddle sr. is obviously driven by his blood-supremacist beliefs. but it is also transparently sexual - he loathes the idea that riddle might "have" merope, he attacks riddle in response to his sister's unrestrained display of romantic/sexual interest in a man who is not him, and he delights in the knowledge that hurting riddle [and telling his father why he did so] will only secure his power over merope.

indeed, merope is "defeated" by marvolo - dejected and broken in his presence and by his violence - but the only person of whom she is "terrified" is morfin.

merope is also treated - as dumbledore says - as little more than an heirloom. she is the conduit for slytherin's blood - and she is, therefore, the person who is the primary victim of her father's desire to keep this bloodline pure. with no other candidate on the horizon, if this pure bloodline is to continue... then it is because she will be forced to bear children for morfin, extending the cycle of abject poverty and pain which defines the decaying last generations of slytherin's line.

and this raises questions which i think are genuinely compelling, both within the canon timeline and outside of it. what understanding of consent and bodily autonomy can merope have, and how does this play into her rape of tom riddle sr.? what happens if merope doesn't escape - if morfin gets away without prison time and returns to the shack? what happens to her and her baby if - when riddle sr. flees her - she is forced to come home? what would her life have been like as a mother to her brother's children - especially if she had daughters she knew would be similarly abused? how might she have resisted - since, if she can brew a love potion, she can brew an abortifacient - if she had been trapped with morfin? what would morfin have done to tom riddle jr. if his nephew hadn't been holding a wand?

and what does the teenage voldemort make of it all? after all, he attacks his uncle, knocks him out and frames him for murder... immediately after morfin has called his mother a "slut".