#cw incest (proposed first cousin marriage)

[katabasiiis]

solo canon vs rp canon relationship thoughts on cas, mostly for my own benefit since i decided all of this when i was For Sure Never going back to rp (yeah, how'd that go for you, four years ago dany). warning, this is pretty long because as i may have mentioned i am incapable of shutting the fuck up lmao

BACKGROUND

casira meets lucan when he badgers ronos into taking him on as an apprentice; he looked at the college debt costs and benefits of a standard non-altus magical education through one of the circles, looked at the job prospects on that trajectory, looked at the loans he'd taken out to make ends meet between his discharge from the army and the small stipend he got as a circle mage and what he was sending his family to support them, and decided that cozying up to a magister was a much better way to get the instruction he wanted while also getting his foot in the door in politics. cas is nineteen at the time and just starting to really chafe under her father's plans for her life and sees this slightly older, very attractive man from a lower social class as the kind of forbidden fruit that makes her feel a bit more free and in charge of her own life. lucan gets closer to the caedrons, cas gets agency, they're both pretty happy with this. ronos, however, is not, given that he's trying to arrange a marriage for cas that would either bind the caedrons to their rivals, house ardonis (shoutout @deathswcrn for the ocs), or quell the rivalry between his de facto heir cas and his nephew auron whose entitlement and popularity is threat to the house's stability. (this is what cas is trying to fuck her way out of.) correctly identifying casira as too stubborn to do what he says in this case, he blackmails lucan into breaking things off with her in exchange for not blacklisting his name with every magister and circle mage he has connections with. lucan accepts. cas, it turns out, is pregnant when this happens, and because of the Extremely Bad Breakup, she doesn't tell lucan about it. ronos sends her to vol dorma to live with her grandmother for a while, to have the baby in peace away from minrathous' gossip mill and to ensure that she and lucan are far, far apart and don't get back together. lucan only finds out after olivia's birth, at which point he decides that, yeah, he made a huge fucking mistake and starts writing to her begging for a chance to talk and to meet their daughter. casira is still angry and returns them, first unopened, then ripped to shreds, then burned to ash, at which point he stops sending them and resorts to just. he just. he goes to vol dorma himself and shows up at her window at night by surprise, basically. he doesn't trust that cas was the one returning his letters and not her grandmother, and he just... he has to know. in his defense he doesn't expect her to give him a second chance, but he does desperately want to meet olivia at least once.

SOLO CANON

they get to talking, and since neither of them actually wanted to break up, they do what any normal couple would do and elope to rivain with their daughter. they spend a few months there seeing if they can make it work, and when they decide they can, they go back to minrathous and start making their own way without house caedron's support - cas stays home and takes care of olivia and learns how to be a normal person for the first time in her life, and lucan basically swallows his pride, cuts down the luxuries he wanted for himself, and puts his head down to get the mage equivalent of an office job. they aren't living anywhere particularly nice, and they struggle to make ends meet, but they have a baby and a cat and casira eventually learns how to run a household mostly on her own and they're actually pretty happy. olivia's magic manifesting as upsettingly as it does forces them back into contact with ronos who in the intervening time has decided that this SUCKS, actually, and over the next year or two they start rebuilding a relationship - ronos eventually takes lucan back under his wing as an apprentice, and reinstates cas as his heir (which finally pushes auron into the arms of the venatori). they try to have more children - kell antigen incompatibility ruins those plans, and a son who dies hours after birth is their last attempt. by inquisition, they've been married for thirteen years (!!!) and are still quite happy in that relationship; olivia is close to both sides of her family, with lucan's represented by his mother jaemera, his brother caius, his sister nerixa, and caius and nerixa's kids. since olivia's not planning on having children, she expects to make one of her cousins or their children, if one of them is a mage, her heir to whatever she inherits from her father, while one of nykos' children elion and naerys or one of their children becomes her heir to the caedron inheritance.

RP CANON

they get to talking, but nothing comes of it; casira doesn't leave with him. lucan is still ronos' apprentice, and they agree to spend some more time apart, with casira staying in vol dorma for the next few years with aurania, and while cas was always distinctly aurania's second favourite grandchild after auron, they actually get along quite well and aurania sees a lot of herself in cas. aurania suspects olivia's dreamer abilities quickly, and the three of them return to minrathous shortly after they manifest; cas and lucan make a few attempts at getting back together, but it just doesn't work this time. the time away from ronos helped cas to grow a bit of a spine where he's concerned, but... she's still pretty strongly yoked to caedron interests in a way that she dislikes. she's pricklier and sharper-tongued than her solo-canon self as a result, and hasn't gotten to the point of understanding with ronos that she has in that canon - they butt heads a lot more. she and lucan have a decent coparenting relationship, but olivia's much, much closer to her mother's side of the family than to his.

[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