Do you WATCH this show?

[trinityvixen]

Leave it to me to ignore the significance of a bunch of TV actors getting to speak at the UN in favor of goggling at this:

Incidentally, am I the only one still rooting for [Starbuck] and Captain Lee “Apollo” Adama to get together for more than just a quickie? Given that Lee’s father, the commander, already thinks of Kara as a daughter, their union would make family gatherings, like their equivalent of Thanksgiving, all the more pleasant.

Yes, I know that my family reunion was much more pleasant this year after I hooked up with--and brought as my date--my dead sister's ex-fiance. Oh, how we laughed!

SRSLY U GUYZ, THE SPACE INCEST HAS INFECTED EVERYBODY. Stop stop stop.


(And yes, I know it's not technically incest. However, our incest taboos are much more about avoiding sexual relations with people we've been socialized to accept as our family than it is simply about not fucking people genetically related to us. It's the socialization aspect--two people socialized to be siblings, say--being overturned that really gives people the squick.)

Comments

[svilleficrecs.livejournal.com]

FWIW, on the Kara/Lee front, they weren't raised together, and met as adults. For me, they've always read more in line with that biblical (rule/line/scripture/whatever) that if a man's brother's dies, the man is supposed to marry the brother's widow. Same vibe I get from Sarah/Derek on SCC and Sherrif Bullock/whatsherface on Deadwood.

[avram]

Levirate marriage.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Interesting note on that link: Islamic custom seems to run 180-degrees the opposite way from Christianity, whereby the scripture prohibits brother-in-law marriage, but custom supports/enforces it. Christianity's major religious text treats such marriages as common but moved swiftly to prevent such unions as a matter of practice.

It's also interesting to note that such marriage practices tend to occur in those societies where women have few, if any, rights of person or property. In which case, it would seem that such arrangements are less about familial psychology and more about survival.

[avram]

Oh, yes, especially property.

Traditional Jewish inheritance law is weird, because a woman can inherit property as a daughter, but not as a wife. So if a married man dies, his sons get the property. If no sons, the daughters get it. If no kids at all, the man's father gets it; if the father's dead, the deceased's brothers get it; if they're dead, then their heirs.

So, yeah, levirate marriage in Judaism insures that a childless widow will have a child to inherit her husband's estate. The sin of Onan was that he was willing to fuck his brother's widow, but pulled out to keep from fathering a child on her, thus keeping himself in line to inherit his brother's estate. (Indirectly, because his father was still alive, but when his father died he'd have inherited either half or two-thirds of that estate.)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

This is a situation in which we're neither of us wrong, not really. You're right that Lee and Kara were not raised together; however, they were introduced and spent their initial formative time together socializing as, for better or worse, brother and sister due to the fact that Kara was dating Lee's brother. (And, had she married Zak, she would have been in name the sister she was socialized as.) It is not an absolute in this case, but a sliding scale. I see that scale as tipping incestuous given Kara and Lee's initial socialization and the fact that, independent of their relationship, Kara was adopted (in spirit) by Lee's father. She's his sister in more ways than one as far as family dynamics seem to go.

In fact, I have always found it creepy on Lee's part (and this is now confirmed given his shot-to-the-groin reaction to meeting Kara) that he was so attracted to Kara given their relationship via Zak and William Adama. I don't doubt that the attraction was there for her, too, but she has always been the one pursued. (Pretty much. She went for Lee in a drunken hook-up, but he's the one who actively wants her most of the time.) I think this has a lot to do with her religious faith, which is why your mention of biblical doctrines promoting spiritual incest is interesting. Because while that was certainly true in the bible, church doctrines all but lurched away from incest not too long after the Catholic Church was fully realized. They went so far the other way to the point where they increased the incest taboos to a point where step- and god-relations weren't allowed to have sexual relations. Kara, being the assumed wife/fiancee of one brother, would have been totally off-limits for the other by the church mandate. Given how frequently church's make such non-biblical decisions, it's fair to say that whatever Kara's scriptural doctrines, there's no evidence that she or any other person of faith would hold to them over versus an overwhelming social/temple pressure to do the opposite.

It's totally moot, regardless, since Kara is a polytheist and polytheism doesn't necessarily rely on one set of religious texts. (We know about the Scrolls of Pythia, but are they the only scrolls?) Her religion, however, does seem to be somewhat conservative and severe on the issue of marriage. Despite her frequent infidelity to her husband, Kara refuses to divorce. Even though the marriage was performed without Kara being entirely devoted to the idea of it (thus bringing into question its validity in the first place), it is forbidding to consider divorce if you believed in the spiritual law that created the union in the first place. It's likely, therefore, that these stricter interpretations as regard marriage suggest a similarly conservative religious sect that might frown, as did the Catholic Church and its offspring, upon incest in similar ways.

Of course, that's entirely wank to justify my going "Oh, come on, guys, ewwwwwww." And as for Sarak/Derek? I don't see it. I mean, I see where it could come from, but Derek isn't his brother either--enough so that he seems able to divorce himself from any intentions towards Sarah, and vice-versa. I haven't completely caught up on season two yet, though, so I'm probably wrong.

[arcane-the-sage.livejournal.com]

It's the socialization aspect--two people socialized to be siblings, say--being overturned that really gives people the squick.

Lol, I would love to seen your reaction then to a certain eps of Private Practice dealing with the issue of siblings (having been raised separately and not knowing about the other) trying to have a kid (and finding out they are bio-sibs).

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

This has come up in two other things I've seen, and in a few cases reported about in real life, so these things don't shock me or anything.

My honest response? Let them get married, but they probably shouldn't have biological children together. They could and most likely (unless one or both had serious health issues) the children would be fine. They could do any number of genetic and family history screenings to determine the likelihood of passing on something devastating to their children. To me, that would be biological incest, something that is not really all that harmful versus spiritual incest.

Spiritual incest is the problem, as I said. It implies something almost broken about a person's psyche that they cannot respect the social rules and roles we subconsciously assume when we are raised with other people. We can make exceptions for distant relations, and we do; some laws recognize no problems with first cousins marrying, for example. (Biologically, they are no more likely to pass on detrimental genes--barring a few dangerous at-risk groups--than strangers. In fact, those "at-risk groups" are often more likely to pass on bad genes if the groups are restricted enough.) But siblings are raised to be siblings, not lovers. Siblings who cannot respond to social cues or whose parents don't provide them represent something fundamentally off enough that most major cultures over the last thousand years have strictly forbidden such sexual relations (or, if not, regarded them with abhorrence).

The mistake, here, is in assuming two strangers meeting and falling in love and happening to be genetically related is more gross than two people who've been raised as siblings (with or without genetic relation) becoming lovers. One is a problem specific to more modern times; the other has been recognized as somewhat abhorrent for centuries. (Always excepting some of the upper class, whereby such taboos were bypassed with the need to concentrate wealth in clan/family hands.)

[mithras03.livejournal.com]

Nothing to do with BSG - just thought you might enjoy this

http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b105070__i_Project_Runway__i__s_Catty_Kenley_Fitted_for_Handcuffs.html?intcid=home_coverflow-blog-_i_Project_Runway__i__s_Catty_Kenley_Fitted_for_Handcuffs

Live-in ex? poor guy....

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

You know it's a tough economy when this guy can't leave this girl. He probably needs her to make the rent.

[mithras03.livejournal.com]

Exactly - imagine having to stay with her of all people because of the economy

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Seriously. I'm glad that she is as big a freak as we all pegged her to be. I like being right, you see.

[mithras03.livejournal.com]

Totally! I mean, she apparently threw the CAT at him. Who throws a cat?!

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Someone who wants to do a lot of damage! But not a cat lover, I'll tell you that much.

[viridian.livejournal.com]

I like how Lee/Kara is turning out to be one of the LEAST incestuous things that's happened on this show.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Sigh. I wish you were wrong...

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

If it worked like that, then her relationship with Zack would be equally incestuous.

Except that he only ever met her after Zak died. I don't think the incest works retroactively. :P

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

But that *does* undermine the socialization argument. (Or would, if it were still canon...)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

HA HA HA HA HA HA WHAT IS THIS "CANON" OF WHICH YOU SPEAK?

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Using the word "incest" to describe a Kara/Lee pairing undermines the serious of incest, because none of the actual problems with incest are present within the Kara/Lee pairing.

Brother-sister pairings are still incestuous in our culture and many others, even though there isn't a power imbalance per se. Does this specific couple have the problem that incestuous couples do? Not really? It's an open secret that they were having an affair together (though how open it was is debatable--maybe only their spouses knew for sure), and no one has recoiled in horror.

Except, I'll note, that Daddy? Has not been informed. To the best of my encyclopedic knowledge about this series. Sure, maybe that's because it's none of his business, but I think Lee and Kara have been careful enough to keep the people in te know about their affair to a minimum. Fear of Adama finding out is a good reason, given how he treats them both like his kids. There's also that scene when Kara came back from the dead where Lee talked about his feelings about her return overwhelming his suspicion of her as a Cylon in terms of love of a sibling. His appeal to his father was "What if it had been Zak?" It's an interesting choice of tactic, which, yeah, okay, he then went and snogged her, but I maintain that that was still icky. (His saying, "I believe you" was way more touching.)

And then there's fandom. Lee and Kara, stemming from their season one/two relationship, are frequently referred to as "the Twins" in fandom. Maybe this is what's really creating the incest taboo for me.