#it’s the least they can do for me after they denied me julia nina and elizabeth 😑
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autolenaphilia · 10 months ago
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Thank you for your kind words prettyvampy, and this is very insightful:
#also I’d like to add Andrew is the one with more incest-y actions/show it more than Ashley#the thing that made me go 🤨 was how Andrew is so violently against Ashley having sex (with others)
Yeas I realized this after I wrote my OP. Andrew gets so upset over the incest when his mother accuses him of it and the vision on the Burial route, but that's probably a case of him once again not wanting to take responsibility for his own actions and desires. He definitely wants to fuck his sister.
Maybe more than she wants to fuck him. Ashley might bring it up more explicitly in jokes and admits "i honestly figured it might happen eventually", but that's because she is far more capable of taking ownership of her fucked up desires and actions. She is maybe kinda blasé about her incestous desires in comparison, which is why she can joke about it, while Andrew's strong reactions point to extreme repression rather than lack of desire.
And you are literally right that Andrew is violently against Ashley having sex with others. And again inverting the Ashley as abuser and Andrew as victim dynamic, he is violent against Ashley herself. He threatens to "backhand" her just for jokingly suggesting doing sex work. Ashley's response is to call him a wifebeater, and he doesn't deny that framing, just says "it's only towards you , honestly."
Also I missed this on my first playthrough, but the kitchen conversation, he is literally pawing his sister's ass:
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Also there is "you're struck with an odd urge to pull this broody bitch into your arms and force her to stay until she smiles.", a thought he explicitly represses. There is also the pov shot when he wakes on their parent's couch of him looking at Ashley's cleavage instead of her face.
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And there is tons of other stuff, like him asking his gf Julia to tie up her hair like Ashley does.
Andrew is repressing his incestous desires, and it's repeatedly leaking out during the game. it's what he can't admit, precisely because incest is bad by any conventional moral standards. It would mean he isn't a doormat being manipulated into doing evil by Ashley, he wants to do bad things himself.
#and honestly them being together is probably better for everyone else around them #cuz yeah Ashley harasses Andrew’s gfs but you can’t convince me Andrew won’t do something similar if Ashley even so much as have a crush#on another guy#aka if they date others the partners will suffer so like might as well just have them date each other
You are right here of course.
But outside of shipping, I think now that Andrew and Ashley going explicitly romantic/sexual would "fix" Andrew, albeit in a way that would make him worse by conventional standards and possibly making them more dangerous for the people around them. The incest vision shows Andrew as being openly horny towards Ashley, suggesting that he has finally taken some ownership of his desires, that he has accepted he wants to do and has committed incest. And it implies that he has accepted that he is a bad person, by conventional moral standards at least, that he and his sister are incestous murderer-cannibals, and he is fine with that.
This might make them more dangerous to other people, since conventional morality like "don't kill people" have stopped mattering entirely to them. But on the other hand, it's not like that other people than his sister ever did matter to Andrew, even as far back as when Nina dies he is mostly worried about the consequences for himself. And TCOAAL portrays a realistic if exaggerated capitalist world where such moral precepts as the sanctity of human life never really matter anyway.
Some thoughts on The Coffin of Andy and Leyley
I found out about The Coffin of Andy and Leyley from an ”antiship” blog that I was on solely to block, because these people are always violent callout culture transmisogynists. Them getting very upset about this game having incest in it piqued my interest. The art looked interesting, and if these people hate it, it can’t be all bad.
(Case in point about the transmisogyny, from my understanding some people tried to dox the pseudonymous and secretive developer of this game, Nemlei. And the motivation was to prove the doxxer’s suspicion that Nemlei is a trans woman, because “only a trans woman could create such degeneracy.”)
Sure enough, TCOAAL is actually a nuanced and well-written psychological dark comedy /horror game. This is going to be more of a preliminary analysis than a review so full spoilers beyond this point. It’s by necessity preliminary since the game isn’t finished yet. My review is: go buy it if you are a fellow sicko who enjoys interesting stories about cannibalism and incest and like visual novels.
TCOAAL uses a trick from more transgressive forms of horror fiction, where the protagonists are not the heroes, but the villains, and the story is from their perspective. Andrew and Ashley Graves are murderers who kill people, sacrifice their souls to demons and cannibalize their bodies. They would be the villains of a more conventional horror story, their crimes investigated and thwarted by some heroic detective perhaps. But in this type of story, you are denied the comfort of heroes, or even innocent victims as you watch the protagonists twisted psychology lead them to commit terrible deeds.
The tone of the story mostly isn’t really horror, but very dark comedy, kinda Jhonen Vasquez-ish. The horrors are portrayed with a gleeful flippant tone, and cute appealing art. The tone mirrors how especially Ashley feels about her crimes. The game’s tone gets serious sometimes, going for straight horror occasionally, acknowledging how heartbreaking yet insane the Graves situation is, but there is a deep vein of the blackest humor.
Andrew and Ashley
Andy and Leyley themselves have this co-dependent toxic abusive sibling dynamic. Ashley is emotionally abusive, extremely possessive and manipulative towards Andrew. But her beloved Andy is the only person she actually cares about, and the rest she is able to kill with gleeful abandon in her heart.
Yet Andrew is not purely a victim. I’m going to talk at length about him, because the gap between how he describes himself and what the game shows is fascinating. I’m not the first to point this out. And it even extends to the game’s promotional material, like this official art on the game’s steam page is actually subverted by the game itself.
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His character is not "doormat extraordinaire" who just "exists", the words "very not good, in fact very bad" apply to him too.
He is a victim, and loves to point at times how exploited, manipulated and abused he is by Ashley and he’s of course right. But he also uses that as an excuse for the horrific violence he commits, that he is just a doormat has been manipulated and corrupted by Ashley. “I was just being manipulated by Ashley to do it” is his variation on the old Nuremberg defense for his crimes. He has no sense of personal responsibility, no understanding that even if someone else tells you to do it, you are still responsible for your actions.
And the game itself proves that “it’s all Ashley” is not really true. A lot of the violence and murder are definitely on Andrew’s own initiative. He is violent towards Ashley too, the abuse is reciprocal. And he like Ashley doesn’t care much about other people. He gets distraught about killing people, but if you follow his dialogue, he is mostly freaked out about the consequences for himself. He is dependent on Ashley as someone who he can lay all the responsibility and blame for his own actions for. And of course, there is genuine affection there, because things are complex. He was parentified to take care of Ashley as a child and still has the drive to be her caretaker and protector.
It’s a fascinating pair of characters, and an interesting dynamic to observe.
“Der Mensch lebt nur von Missetat allein”
And the game’s writing is smart enough to have them not be an individualized evil, that came out of nowhere. Andrew and Ashley are the products of a neglectful and cold parents. Their mother made Andrew the favorite, but basically in order to parentize him to take care of his younger sister. And their dad can’t even remember the names of his kids. Not that the cycle of abuse starts with the parents, the mother had Andrew and Ashley when she was 15 and 17 respectively. But that doesn’t excuse how they ultimately, sell their kids’s lives for money to an organ harvesting scheme. This scheme is strongly implied to be part of an hilariously over-the-top soda company, toxisoda (it’s implied their soda is literally made from humans, so the company is doing the same thing that Ashley and Andy does, but on an industrial scale).
This is the situation that pushes Andy and Ashley to become evil murder-cannibals horror movie villains they become. They are deliberately being starved to death, and decide human meat is preferable to that. And the point here is obvious. To quote Brecht, “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral” or in english translation “Food is the first thing. Morals follow on.” Andy and Ashley are bad people who kill and eat other people, but they are the product of an evil society. A family system where children are property of their parents to be abused and sold. And ultimately a capitalist system which kills people to feed others, a societal and systematic version of what Andew’s and Ashley does. They literally become cannibals to escape becoming literally or essentially cannibalized themselves by the capitalist system. Capitalism is a system which works on prey and predator dynamics, and they just fought to became predator instead of prey. To further quote the same song by Brecht, in capitalism, “Der Mensch lebt nur von Missetat allein” or in english “mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.” And in that broader view, Andrew and Ashley’s small-scale evil is dwarfed by the system they are born into.
Incest
It’s with all this context the game’s treatment of incest must be understood. It’s a horror game, about two siblings with a fucked-up abusive relationship. Of course there is incest, it’s far from being the worst thing these two do. The game only gets more explicit about incest in one optional ending, but it’s there explicitly and subtextually from the very start. Ashley jokes about it repeatedly, it’s there in the possessive jealousy Ashley feels for any of Andrew’s girlfriends, it’s implied in the casual physical intimacy of the siblings. Like it’s very obvious that their fucked-up but close relationship can lead there right from the beginning of episode 1. It’s a very natural conclusion to their dynamic. And the characters know it, Ashley definitely knows it, and their own mother accuses them of it. Andrew denies his mother’s accusation of fucking Ashley, and he’s probably not lying at that moment, but his relationship with Ashley leading there make perfect sense and he is not just capable of admitting that. Anyone who claims to have played this game and then claims be shocked that there is an optional incestous ending can’t have been paying much attention. This is the incest cannibalism game.
The Graves siblings are heading towards committing more murder as long as they stay alive, and incest is a minor sin for them. And probably not even the unhealthiest way for their relationship to develop. It definitely won’t fix them, but I doubt it will make things much worse.
And condemning the game morally is just absurd. This is a horror game, and you are outraged about the incest and not the murder-cannibalism? The Graves siblings relationship is not portrayed as healthy and the incest is part of that.
In fact the game portrays this double-standard in the actual story. It’s the possibility of her kids committing incest that finally makes Mamma Graves admit she is “the worst mother ever”, and not the whole selling the lives of her kids for money thing.
Sure, there is a fair argument to make that the incest is romanticized and fetishized. Ashley and Andrew are certainly drawn as attractive, and even the abusive elements can be part of the fetish. But the thing is, Ashley and Andrew are not real people, it’s fiction, it’s not real incest, so if people get off to it, I have no reason to see it as a problem.
The antiship blogger was actually especially angery about this official art from a devlog and honestly after playing the game, it kinda sums up my feelings about the incest controversy:
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glitchydyke · 3 years ago
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she/he vitoria…. she/he eve….. when will lovelink fuck up the pronouns again and accidentally give me she/they ruby
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