#tumtar

Tar: *Skypes Tum from England to ask if he wants any souvenirs, then immediately goes "Okay goodnight byeee"*

Taboo is an interesting thing. Anthropologists have a saying that goes something like this:

There are no cultural universals that cross time and space except one: every culture has taboos, and in every one of those cultures the taboos are broken. 

Taboos can revolve around consumption (from we don’t eat shellfish/dogs to we don’t eat humans), to death (don’t kill your parents), and of course sexuality (don’t have sex with a child or a family member). 

Generally speaking, you can identify taboo within your own psyche if you react viscerally to an idea - as in the very thought makes you physically ill, changes your heart rate, engages a fight or flight response, etc... 

Okay so. I hope you can also see how taboos would be culturally based, even apparently simple and universal ones like: 

Don’t have sex with a child. 

This proscription rests on how we culturally define child vrs adult. Do we assign an age to the transition point (e.g. 18), an achievement (e.g. education, killing your first big animal), a physical manifestation (e.g. period, voice cracking), an individual choice in attire/appearance (longer skirts, a shaved head). 

(The fact that in reading the above you probably got a little frightened and maybe sickened is taboo in action. I call it the “squick factor.” This post is at risk of being taken down simply because i mention this subject. That is cultural enforcement of taboo.) 

Some taboo nuances are achieved (like education) while some are ascribed (like age of consent). Same thing for family dynamics: ascribed = biological birth links, achieved = social links like marriage. Many taboos will change over time even within the same culture: like age of consent, acceptability of cousin marriage, and being queer (e.g. sex between adult men, was/is in fact taboo in many cultures).

Taboos & Family Dynamics 

Family dynamics are similarly culturally flexible around incest taboos. The nuclear (Western concept) family dynamic is generally protected by the incest taboo in most cultures (that would be sex between direct biological lineage: grandparents, parents, children, siblings). Of course, there are exceptions, like marriages between brothers and sisters in Roman Egypt. 

However, there are cultures that linguistically include cousins in the filial (so cousins would be referred to as brother or sister there isn’t a separate word), in such places, cousins sleeping together is more likely to be taboo. Cultures where the term cousin exists as a separate linguistic concept are more likely to condone unions between cousins (e.g. Regency England), so, not taboo. Or not AS taboo. Although these kinds of things can, and usually do, change over time. 

Like with how we define what is means to be an “adult,” what it means to be a family member is also culturally defined, which brings us to... stepbrothers. 

The Stepbrother Trope in Origin Yaoi  

Taboos are often fetishized, which in romance means they can often become tropes. The stepbrother trope is pretty simple: 

stepbrothers fall in love with each other, often one of the two (usually the seme character) has a long held crush on the other, sometimes since childhood  

BL has a long tradition of using this trope. One of the most iconic examples of this is the yaoi manga Brother by Yuzuha Ougi (published in English by DramaQueen in 2005). It is INFAMOUS for being beautifully drawn, completely explicit, and one of the highest heat mangas ever produced. But A LOT of other yaoi used this trope before and after Yuzuha Ougi. 

Why This Trope Wigs People Out 

Stepbrothers means objectively: 

the parents of two boys marry each other (these boys are not biological siblings or blood related), and because of the social and legal construct of that union, the society recognizes that the two boys are now siblings. 

What’s interesting about stepbrothers and taboo is that the original act of the parents marrying means there is (by default) no blood-relation taboo in place (they could not marry if they were blood related). So if the parents had not married and the two main characters met = no taboo. It was the act of someone else's marriage that rendered the two characters somewhat arbitrarily taboo (they are, after all, not blood related, and yet now they have been assigned sibling status by someone else’s action). 

So what actually renders this taboo aside from ascribed status? 

What squicks people out about this trope? Here’s what many people would say: 

1. Childhood Exposure 

It’s sickening if the step-brothers grow up together and thus they were children together. 

How much time and how much of the childhood spent together renders this taboo? If the characters are already adult when the parents get together, does that make the trope okay? 

2. Proximity 

It’s cohabitation that makes it disgusting. 

What about best friends who grow up as next door neighbors then fall in love? Is that taboo? Does living under the same roof together make all the difference? How about a defacto adopted son, who seeks shelter in the neighbor’s home and ends up living there, then falls in love? How about the orphan taken in (see Cherry Blossoms After Winter)? Is that taboo too? 

3. Legal Standing in the Eyes of Society 

The social legality of the relationship renders it unpleasant. The mere fact of the parents being married has redefined the relationship of the children to such an extent that any sexual contact is verboten. 

What if the boys were in a relationship first, their parents met after they had already been together as lovers for years? Then the parents got married. Is the boys’ preexisting relationship rendered null and void? 

What about an adopted brother, same rules apply? 

4. Power Dynamic 

The stepbrother trope in BL often includes an age difference as well (one of them is older, sometimes a great deal older). This casts the older brother in a parental role, which many find repugnant. 

In BL and yaoi, one way they circumvent the inherent disgust of this power dynamic (especially if the characters grew up together) is to make it so that the older bother is the innocent ignorant uke character. It’s the younger one who has the crush. And it is the younger one who confesses first and acts on that crush. 

(And it’s one of the reasons we see the stepbrother trope so often in gay romance and so rarely in het romance - although it does exist - because het would require the female character to be the aggressor in order to subvert this power dynamic and the companion squick factor, but in het romance a woman with sexual agency is kinda taboo. *joke*) 

Why this post?

All of this messiness makes the stepbrother trope and it’s interrelationship with taboo fascinating to me. Sometimes, when I encounter it, I find myself utterly unbothered by it, other times it squiks me out. 

For me, this largely has to do with the nature and intent of the characters involved. 

What HIStory 4: Close to You has given us is an older character who genuinely believes he is in a brother-only relationship. Who loves and acts (and has always done so) as an older brother. Contrast this to an obsessed younger adopted stepbrother who has never believed in them being actual brothers, who has refused even to change his name because he so desperately wants never to be perceived as brothers. His obsessive desperation drives him to commit predatory acts of stalker-ism, physical violence, and ultimately statutory rape. 

It is particularly hard to watch because it’s pitting a pining seme character against a lonely uke character, but the ideology that ultimately separates them is how each character is defining taboo and family. Their world views are entirely different. It’s difficult to imagine how this can be reconciled well by the story. Even if they manage to somehow condone the seme’s actions, even if the actors have really great chemistry, we are in troubled waters here and the natural inclination on a storyteller’s part would be to end this tragically. 

I don’t have a pithy conclusion for this essay, I just wanted to unpack the trope a bit. Especially as it’s rearing it’s ugly head in two dramas right now (Brothers & H4). 

BL Using the Stepbrother Trope

Addicted Heroin - China RECOMMENDED

Brothers - Thailand 

HIStory: Stay Away From Me - Taiwan  

HIStory 2: Crossing the Line (subplot) - Taiwan RECOMMENDED 

HIStory 4: Close to You (subplot) - Taiwan 

Love By Chance, TharnType (subplot) - Thailand

My Bromance (movie, series, series 2) - Thailand 

Top Secret Together - Thailand 

The Promise - Vietnam 

Melting Night: Secret Kiss - Japan (short) RECOMMENDED

The On1y One - Taiwan 

Addicted Heroin - Thailand 

Gray Shelter - Korea 

GL

Transit Girls  

Alternate Versions of the Stepbrother Trope

Servant who grows up in or tangential to the household, kind of like a brother but much lower class. Or adopted brother/live in friend. This is often also a version of the whipping boy trope. 

Because of You (subplot) - Taiwan 

Irresistible Love - China RECOMMENDED 

Love By Chance 2: A Chance at Love (subplot) - Thailand 

Love Stage! (subplot) - Japan

Golden Blood - Thailand

Cherry Blossoms After Winter - Korea HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Friend Forever - Thailand 

Tin Tam Jai - Thailand 

Kisseki: Dear to Me - Taiwan (subplot - kinda) 

Unknown - Taiwan HIGHLY RECOMMENDED 

Kiseki: Dear to Me - Taiwan RECOMMENDED 

The Promise - Thailand 

Maybe brothers but it all turns out to be a scam or mistaken identity.

Because of You - Taiwan 

Precise Shot - China 

Paint with Love - Thailand 

Watching Tin cry because of the rejection again.

Watching Can be confused by his own emotions again.

Watching Ae break down because Pete is away.

Watching that TumTar storyline we all hate again.

Watching that disgusting mess of KlaNo storyline again and hate the ship even though we all love the actors so fucking much.

Are you really ready for this?

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