hi!! i was wondering if you’d be willing to help me to better understand the incest/rot conversation and why it’s a poorly suited metaphor (at least on the context of asoiaf/hotd)? i hope this isn’t too ignorant of a question <3
one big objection is that “rot” is a natural and totally neutral-to-good process. rot is a part of life on earth. things die and rot and from that rot new things are born and grow. the perspective of rot as negative is a very anthropocentric one, really: obviously, we have all had to throw out some rotting leftovers in the fridge, and it’s unpleasant; a house can having rotting walls, in which is becomes hard to live a human life within them. but to pick up the metaphor in the latter, the fault is not the rot itself, which is a natural process, but in the fact that human social structures mean that if you have a house that is rotting and can’t afford to remove said rot so your own life can flourish, that’s a problem for you that human social structures should be altered to fix to allow for human flourishing. but it is a human problem, and so is incest. incestuous abuse is a product of man-made, human social structures and concious human actions, which makes such a natural process an ineffective metaphor for me.
this metaphor grows out of deep roots in western literature; the idea of the cannibalizing process of incest in a degenerating, aristocratic house as symbolizing a privileged, hermetic class eating itself is all over gothic literature, and what people are picking up on when they talk about the “rot” of the targaryen family - a royal dynasty that practices incestuous marriage (brother-sister, avunculate, and cousin-cousin) as a tool of maintaining its own feudal power, and then periodically destroys itself through things like interceinine succession conflicts and addiction to messianic prophecies that kick off massive bloodline-eradicating subject rebellions.
so one problem with using “rot” here relates to the above: this is not a reflexive, unthinking process. there were good reasons for the incest marriage in the early targaryen dynasty in terms of practical power politics: if your power and authority derives from being the only family that can wield huge dragons capable of leveling cities, you do not want to dilute that exclusivity by allowing girls to marry exogamously and perhaps put their dragons in the power of their husbands who might oppose you. the solution is then to marry those girls to their brothers or uncles or cousins. then there is the religious justification that grows up around, or with, this marriage strategy. sibling marriages are taboo in the dominant faith of the realms you have conquered, the faith that you (house targaryen) have in turn adopted. so you have to say, well we have dragons. no one else has dragons, and the fact that we have dragons means we are special and unlike other people. unlike other people, we can marry our sisters. and even after the dragons have died out, the sibling marriages will remain, as ideology that justifies targaryen rule. attributing this all to “rot” is lazy to me. it offers no room to analyze the intersections of patriarchy and power that produce this as an experience or think about how those who experience it conceptualize it.
another problem with “rot” is it totally uncritically uptakes one of the most suspect aspects of the series to me, which is how disability is used as sign and symbol of excesses of power - from aerys’ “madness” to viserys’ leprosy in the show, this universe, both books and adaptations, often externalize the unjust power targaryen kings enact on others as mental or physical illness, where these ailments of the mind and body act as metaphor for wrong action. the ableism here should be quite obvious. i do think the source texts sometime complicate this. for example, although i object to how viserys’ abuses of women, starting with the murder of aemma in 1.01, are externalized by his body bearing the signs of such moral rot by physically “rotting” - the correlation is made clear in the show, as his illness is tied both to aemma’s death scene and his marriage to and rapes of alicent in various ways, and then this is confirmed by showrunner commentary - paddy considine’s wrenching performance of viserys’ dying, the visible agony it causes rhaenyra and alicent and daemon, the heroism and dignity of his surprise appearance in the throne room in 1.08 adds up to a real narrative compassion for his suffering and contradictory refusal to moralize it that winds up in a far more ambivalent place for me than it could have been. so how disappointing to watch the fandom, en masse, take up this kind of framing without any questions at all!
lastly, to return to the issue of “thinking about this as an experience,” which is the most important one to me here - such language casts those who experience incest as outside the human community. firstly, it buys into the targaryens’ own propaganda, which even rhaenyra at 14 sees through quite clearly (“people say targaryens are closer to gods than to men. but without [dragons; and so implicitly justifying and supporting incest], we’re just like everybody else.”) which is quite silly when such framing is purporting to critique their use of power. they are not people who arrange their intimate lives in a particular way that we can ask questions about and try to imagine, who are also thereby subject to specific manifestations of and excuses for violence because of such arrangements that we should have more empathy for than to imagine it makes them human black mold. the fandom frames them instead as themselves rot, and also pure symbol.
but though it does not occur within the context of dynastic incest marriage practiced by dragonriders, real people in the real world experience incest. they experience it for reasons that often, from the inside most of all, feel beyond the reach of comprehension. but like the targaryens, those reasons in fact are not inexplicable, not an act of god or nature. it is in fact vitally important to try to comprehend incest as a lived, human, social experience, not evocative metaphor. even when people are wacky blood-soaked royal dynasts from magic dragon incest atlantis, they do not experience their own lives in only this way. they are born, and grow up, and marry, and have children, and raise those children, all within this family structure. they love and are loved and are hurt and hurt others within this particular relational structure. for me the most important thing with fiction is the very unchic one of simply asking the one question: how is it, to live any life? this has urgent moral and political and artistic import for me. it is when that answer does not seem obvious or is most difficult to bear asking that it is most vital to ask it rather than mystify or reflexively condemn the experience activating that refusal, and the ubiquity of “rotposting” is a constant aggravation because it brings home how much easier it is to so many not to ask.
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