Parental Incest

Women, listen to your mothers.
 Don't just succumb to the wishes of your brothers.
 Take a step back, take a look at one another.
 You need to know the difference between a father and a lover.

—The White Stripes, "Passive Manipulation"

Something much squickier than Brother-Sister Incest, Twincest or Kissing Cousins is incest between a parent and their child. Freud had a lot to say about the Oedipus and Electra complexes, and could find subtext in quite a lot of places. But in Big Screwed Up Families, Deadly Decadent Courts, particularly abusive households and elsewhere, one is likely to find examples of this trope.

When this trope shows up in media, it's usually used to highlight the specific psychological issues that a character has, particularly if it features in the Backstory of a Serial Killer or other psychopath, or to give an already nasty villain that extra bit of shudder factor. Incest between a father and daughter is often portrayed in media as being predatory on the part of the father, and in a lot of cases when it's revealed, it's a crossing of the Moral Event Horizon that serves to get the audience completely against the father in question. When the daughter is the aggressor in the relationship, it usually means the daughter is seriously twisted in some way or at least has serious issues. In cases of mother and son incest, the usual scenario is a case of a Beloved Smother or other Evil Matriarch who loves her son (often a Momma's Boy) in all the wrong ways, though there tends to be less focus on the predatory when compared to incestuous fathers and more focus on the issues of the son in question whether or not the mother or the son is the aggressor. Conversely, it's often played for comedy, with the son understandably freaked out due to the mother's advances.

This trope appears with step-, foster, or adoptive parents as well as biological ones (see genetic sexual attraction), sometimes to Bowdlerise it somewhat, although the power dynamics are still much the same as in parent/child incest. Wife Husbandry is one way to Bowdlerise it still further—though not out of Squick range.

Also see Surprise Incest, where the couple involved do not know they're related, also Brother-Sister Incest and Kissing Cousins. When children who don't know any better innocently suggest this, it's Father, I Want to Marry My Brother. See Pervert Dad for parents who don't quite go this far, but still have a healthy dose of Squick. See I Love You, Vampire Son, when the "parent" is the vampire that sired his "son".

Not to be confused with Mother F-Bomb.

Examples of Parental Incest include:

Anime and Manga

  • In Kanon By Chiho Saito the incestuous parent/child relationship is the hub of the whole plot.
  • In He Is My Master, the sister-maids ran away from their home in the first place because they got tired of resisting their father's constant sexual advances.
  • The ironically aptly-named Electra Complex relationship between the surrogate father and daughter pair of Nemo and Electra in Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water.
  • The anime villain Furumizu from Witchblade has some creepy implications of this. Doesn't help the man has a very messed up reverse Oedipus Complex.
  • Berserk has an incredibly creepy example in the King of Midland and his feelings for his only daughter, Princess Charlotte. After Griffith has sex with Charlotte following Guts' leaving him and the Hawks, the King goes crazy, and after throwing Griffith into the Tower of Rebirth to be put to the torture and declaring the rest of the Hawks Outlaw, he tries to rape Charlotte. She barely manages to fight him off, and the experience wracks him with incredible guilt, to the point where he visibly ages and falls ill. Charlotte (very understandably) wants nothing to do with her father afterwards, and won't even see him on his deathbed.
  • Sakurazuka Seishirou and his Hot Mom Setsuka in Tokyo Babylon and X 1999. No evidence about sexual encounters, thank God, but the Subtext is incredibly strong—specially in the CD dramas. Not helped by their Last Kiss in the manga, which comes after a teenaged Seishirou fights, defeats and kills Setsuka as the requirement to become the Sakurazukamori.
  • The main couple in the yaoi series Papa to Kiss in the Dark. Technically, Kyousuke is Mira's uncle, but still...
  • It's implied in Narutaru that this trope is the reason why Akira is such a suicidal Shrinking Violet.
  • This, along with many other types of perversion, occurs in Texhnolyze. It's implied to be a part of the carefully crafted breeding program among the Class. The ultimate result is Kano, a guy with deformed legs (soon replaced with cybernetics), and an even more deformed mind. Just for example, he seems to genuinely believe that the world exists only inside his mind, and all his atrocities are just a form of self-discipline.
  • In Saiyuki, one of the ways Jien (Dokugakuji) protected his younger brother (by his father's mistress) was by "taking [his] father's place" and sleeping with his mother to calm her down. He ends up killing her to keep her from killing Gojyo. Naturally, Dokugaku feels incredibly guilty about all of this, and, like the Brother-Sister Incest between Hakkai and Kanan, this is never spelled out in the anime version.
  • The title character in Bitter Virgin was raped by her stepfather, and became pregnant twice before the age of 16 as a result. Hinako miscarried her first baby, but gave the second in adoption after giving birth.
  • A convoluted example occurs in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle. Syaoran Jr.'s mother is his girlfriend's clone, reincarnated backwards in time to get married to Syaoran Jr.'s clone, who becomes Syaoran Sr., meaning technically he and his dad are the same person and his mom is an Expy of his girlfriend rather than the other way around. It's complicated, OK?
  • In Gankutsuou, Andrea Cavalcanti actually had sex with his mother, Victoria. Extra Squick in that he knew she was his mother.
  • In the Hentai OVA Yu-No, Miyo and Canna have a rather asymmetric sexual relationship, with Canna obviously caring a lot about Miyo (to the point of dying for her), while Miyo barely looks at her. Then comes the last episode, where we learn that Miyo is actually Canna's mother, tossed back in time after being impregnated by Takuya. Technically, of course, it's not incest, since the Miyo who had sex with Canna didn't actually give birth to her, but de facto... And let's not forget the eponymous Yu-No herself, who is obviously enamored with Takuya, who actually is her father... in the future. It Makes Sense in Context.
  • Played for laughs with Yuuna Akashi from Mahou Sensei Negima. Among her friends, she's known to get really jealous if other women seem interested in her Hot Dad. A recent chapter showed that this maybe due to inherent innocence about love rather than romantic designs on her father, though, as she apparently doesn't really know the difference between a kiss on the cheek and a "deep, passionate kiss." This leads to her saying that she wouldn't mind giving the latter to her dad, which elicits a squicked "No. Just... No" Reaction from Yuuna's friend Ako.
  • Boys Empire has Makoto and his mother, Umeko, having sex on several occasions... to the point Umeko discovers that she's pregnant and gives birth to twins -- one the child of Makoto and one the child of her husband Masoto. Yes, this can happen. As per usual for Makoto, it's her idea every time. He goes along with it because that's the sort of person he is.
  • While the pedophile cop in Paranoia Agent doesn't actually do anything to his daughter, he did set up cameras in her room to get pictures of her undressing and insists on the hookers The Mafia was bribing him with calling him "Daddy." Yuck.
  • The dubbed version of Slayers has an early-on example of this when Zelgadis identifies Rezo as "my grandfather and great-grandfather." Even if you'd prefer to believe that Zel's parents were a somewhat-more-palatable aunt-nephew pair, fandom often interprets Rezo's relationship with Zelgadis himself in that way. Note that in the original Japanese version Zelgadis had said that Rezo was either his Grandfather OR Great Grandfather, implying that Rezo has been around and lived for so long, Zelgadis was unsure how old Rezo truly was. Oh, what a difference one word can make.
    • This has been since stated to have been a translation error and should not have been that he was both. This has been confirmed by Crispin Freeman, the English voice of Zelgadis.
  • Franken Fran, with the eponymous character having a crush on her father/creator.
    • In the chapter where this is revealed, she receives a movie where the main characters are her and her father... it turns out to be a porno and the makers of it are killed shortly after Fran finishes watching it.
  • Initially Averted in Mai-Otome, Nina is in love with her adoptive father, though Sergey doesn't feel the same(and probably doesn't know about Nina's). Fortunately. Though Nina and Sergey come close to doing... well, you know...together close to the end, though Sergey chickens out at the last second, due to the fact that he only thought of her as his daughter and was Squicked out by her feelings for him. (thank God). In the end, Sergey loses his memories and it seems Nina has dedicated herself to nursing him back to health. This isn't present in the manga, where Sergey is the Big Bad and not related to Nina, biologically or through adoption.
  • This is apparent especially in the omake in Game X Rush, though in this case the "parent and child" in question only think that they're related.
  • This is often believed to be the case between Chibiusa and Mamoru in Sailor Moon. Not helped in the manga's second arc, when Chibiusa brainwashes him as Black Lady in order to have him. One justification for her feelings is that the series makes it pretty clear that Chibiusa doesn't completely consider or understand that Usagi and Mamoru are her future parents, and looks to them as older siblings. Although her possessed form does take Mamoru for herself, there are no indications that she feels anything but familial love for Endymion, the father figure she knows. It's repeatedly shown in the series that Chibiusa's initial personality is a copy of Usagi's; so the fact she takes likeness for Usagi's boyfriend just confirms that they both have similar preferences when it comes to boys. In the fourth series, when Chibiusa finally gains some independence (and a potential real love interest), she declares that she won't interfere with Usagi and Mamoru's relationship anymore (indicating she is growing out of considering Mamoru romantically as it's one-sided and futile anyway).
  • In the Battle Royale, Mitsuko has this a bit, leading to her, at that time, stable morals being broken and turning her into The Vamp she is as of the series beginning; and this event repeatedly comes up a lot, particularly when she is raping Yuichiro, as well as when Kiriyama was torturing her with bullets.
  • In Kaze to Ki no Uta, Gilbert and his sexual relationship with his uncle Auguste is made even squickier when we find out that Auguste is not Gilbert's uncle, but his father.
  • In Chobits, Freya fell in love with her father/creator. It did not end well.
  • In Bleach, Mayuri Kurotsuchi heals his daughter/creation after an enemy forcibly impregnates her with himself and bursts out of her mouth (Don't ask). It is heavily implied that he does so by having sex with her lifeless body. Oddly enough, this healing sequence is played for laughs.
    • More of a case of Screw Yourself, really. Although Mayuri did say the only reason Renji and Uryu (read 'we') make that assumption, is because they (We) have dirty minds.
  • In Kaguyahime Akira is her adoptive mother's lover.
  • In Not Simple, it is revealed that the older sister the protagonist Ian has been searching for all these years was, in fact, also his mother, impregnated by his father after the two slept together when she was in her early adolescence. His father's wife was forced to raise him as her own child, and she explained that the rage and resentment she felt towards his sister was the reason that she abused Ian so horribly.
  • In Black Butler, Freudian Excuse for some of Alois 's behavior. The very first scene of Season 2 gives us the blink-you'll-miss-it visual of Alois getting out of a bed in which an old man is sleeping before the much more noticeable bruised-butt shot. The kid only mentions his father during his clearly false innocent moments, otherwise freaking out at the mention of him, stating hysterically that he "got rid of all the old man's things". The numbers of when he was "saved" from his kidnapping experience, when his father is stated to have died, and when he contracted Claude all match up. It's eventually shown that the man wasn't his real father. But given that he eventually had to act as Earl Trancy's son, as well as the obvious fact that it's an old man having probably non-consensual sex with a boy who's only just hit puberty, mean the squick factor is still very much there.
  • In MM! the main character Taro is actively pursued by his sister AND mother who agree to share him between themselves and nobody else although they still compete with each other to see who will win his heart.
  • Strongly implied in the case of Yuri Tokikago and her Mad Artist father in Mawaru Penguindrum.
  • Hypnos (the God of Sleep) in Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas, since the four Dream Gods were said to be both his brothers and children.
  • Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha had an... unusual case with Scaglietti, who impregnated his cyborg daughters with clones of himself that had all his memories. There's no indication that any actual sex occurred, but it's still incredibly creepy.
  • It's very, very heavily implied that Sho Shibuya from Great Teacher Onizuka was sexually abused by his mother. Not only that, but nobody believed him when he went to the authorities, so he murdered her (or at the very least attacked her with murderous intent) and then attempted suicide.
  • Implied for Magnificent Bastard Kazutaka Muraki of Yami no Matsuei. His mother had a huge doll collection (which he has inherited and apparently maintains) and treated him as part of it. There is some highly symbolized flashback imagery of him as a little boy trapped by her with her terrible smile. Slight spider vibe; definitely playing up the 'predator' side. And look how he treats his human dolls...


Comic Books

  • Used in various adult comics by Rebecca (usually mother/daughter but sometimes mother/son or father/daughter): Housewives at Play, Hot Moms and Teens at Play.
  • In Larry Welz's adult comic book series Cherry Comics, the eponymous protagonist and her mother Pepper have been known to get it on with each other when no guys were available. In fact, through Time Travel, Cherry was her mother's first sexual experience ("I took your cherry!") and it seems pretty likely that Pepper returned the favor ("I taught her everything she knows!"). This is played strictly for laughs.
  • In Fallen Angel, it is widely believed, but not confirmed (although he has not denied it, either), that Xia has this relationship with her son, Jubal.
  • Numerous examples in Lost Girls by Alan Moore. While most of the examples are in-universe erotica, Dorothy and her Uncle Henry -- really her father -- have an extended affair.
  • In the X-Men comics, Legion (a.k.a. David Haller), the psychotic, overpowered son of Professor Xavier with a legion of split personalities, time travels to the past and is implied to have raped his own mother. Alternate Character Interpretation states that he may have even fathered himself.
  • In the dystopian divergent timeline of the Age of Apocalypse, Magneto and Rogue eventually marry and have a son despite their initial surrogate father-daughter relationship after she permanently absorbed the powers and part of the psyche of his own secretly long-lost biological daughter Polaris. In addition, Rogue is canonically even younger in this reality than any of Magneto's prior biological children: Polaris and their fellow X-men Pietro and Wanda. One saving grace might be the fact that the mainstream continuity hadn't settled on Polaris being Magneto's actual daughter when this story was written, so the Oedipal aspect wasn't as blatant originally. Though it still was a story where Rogue wound up in love with her main father figure...
    • Their fellow AoA X-Men, the reformed berserker Sabretooth and the jailbait amazon Blink are a fan-favorite cult pairing despite having a surrogate father-daughter relationship, as he rescued her as a child from Apocalypse's slave pens and raised her to adolescence. This is due to the intense Beauty and The Beast nature of their relationship, which is exacerbated by the fact that they are both highly sensuous warriors with a deeply intimate psycho-emotional bond and physically demonstrative displays of affection. They were separated when they were both made to lead separate teams of inter-dimensional heroes known as Exiles, but were eventually reunited on a single team. In fact, Blink's then-boyfriend and fellow Exiles teammate Mimic was revealed to have known that she would never love him or anyone else as much and feared that she loved Sabertooth instead. This was shown by the fact that despite having proven herself as a leader, Blink deferred to Sabretooth during field missions. Despite later being separated again on different teams, they are currently still both single, leaving fans ever hopeful. The fact that Mimic resembled Victor in more ways than one though is hardly coincidental.
    • Fellow AoA mutant Nate Grey has one hell of an Oedipus Complex story. The genetically-engineered son of his reality's Scott Summers and Jean Grey, he crosses over to the original timeline of Marvel-616 where he gets involved with Madelyne Pryor, the long-deceased clone of his biological mother. It is later revealed that he accidentally physically resurrected her with the sheer force of his immense mutant talent when he unconsciously and instinctively tried to psionically contact Jean Grey upon his arrival in the other reality. He also later gets involved with yet another counterpart of his biological mother, when an evil counterpart of Jean Grey from yet another alternate reality disposes of and impersonates Madelyne Pryor. This Queen Jean, a Jean Grey corrupted by her own power, was revealed to have had a prior consort who was her reality's counterpart of Nate, essentially her own genetically-engineered son, who rebelled against her and was ultimately executed, but not before helping his alternate counterpart defeat his mother Queen Jean.
  • A plot line in Mighty Avengers has one of the characters (the gynoid Jocasta) ending her relationship with her grandfather (Hank Pym, who created Ultron who created Jocasta) when she realizes that he is still in love with her dead sister/mother (his ex-wife/on-off lover Janet van Dyne—who's brainwave patterns Ultron copied to create Jocasta's AI). She marries her father (Ultron) instead (to be fair, that was why Ultron initially created her in the first place years ago, as he himself had an Oedipus Complex to his "mother", the wife of his creator-father).
  • The main character of The Tale of One Bad Rat is trying to come to terms with having been molested by her father as a child.
  • Crazy Jane from Grant Morrison's celebrated run on Doom Patrol is a multi-powered Metahuman who lived with multiple personalities after being raped by her father. Morrison based Jane on the Real Life psychiatric patient/memoirist Truddi Chase.
  • Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash: The Nightmare Warriors has a brief scene featuring Freddy making out with his daughter, who had just pulled a Face Heel Turn.
  • The famous Twinkie House meme actually comes from a(n) (in)famous gay comic called My Wild and Raunchy Son 2. It's an entire series of exactly what you think it is from an artist (Josman) famous for that specific genre (once even involving a grandfather of all people). To avoid allegations that he had a serious thing for his own dad, the artist said in an interview what he really loved were twins doin' it, and drew a token twincest story to prove it. No one believed him when that story still somehow managed to involve an older man in the mix...
  • One of the minor characters seen in hell in The Sandman tells the newly-arrived young thugs that "I took my mother by force, and strangled my sister when she wouldn't submit to my advances."
  • Averted - and demonized - in the sixth issue opening of Young Captain Adventure from Penthouse Comix as a way of saying Everyone Has Standards:

Narrator: Joey was, by now, as hopelessly in love with Hericane as she was with him. Which is hardly surprising when you consider that Emily and Joey's dad were bed-mates in the 70s, though Joey is not aware of this as yet. (And don't get any ideas, people, Joey's mom is not Hericane. That would be... sick.)

Fairy Tales

  • Commonly referenced in Fairy Tales. The heroine's father decides to marry her—often because she resembles her mother, or because she is the only person who can wear something that belonged to her mother, and her father promised to marry only such a woman. Some of these include All-Kinds-of-Fur, Donkeyskin, The King Who Wished Marry To His Daughter, The She-Bear, Margery White Coats, and Golden-Teeth. She usually attempts to hold him off, demanding Impossible Tasks for her consent, but this always fails. The princess must run away to escape, before going to a ball and winning a prince. Many folklorists interpret tales where she must flee her father for other reasons, such as Catskin, where her father wanted a son and so marries her off with no care, or Cap O' Rushes where he takes offense at what she says, or The Bear where she is smothered and wants to escape, as Bowdlerised variants. Note that Brother-Sister Incest can substitute, with the brother taking the father's place for the threat.
  • There is an extremely bizarre Russian fairy tale which involves a priest's daughter being tricked by a farmhand into having sex with him, without her knowing what it is (he tells her that his dick is a "comb" and that he is "combing" her). When her father finds out her confusion, he has sex with her and the tale ends with the narrator telling the audience that from then on, the priest had sex with both his wife and his daughter.


Films

  • The inbred family of the Wrong Turn movies are prime examples of this. We even get to see one of them give birth in the third movie, which spawns a very deformed member of the family.
  • In Aleksandr Sokurov's film Father and Son, Aleksey and his father's relationship is about as Ho Yay (or squicky, depending on your perspective) as it gets without actually doing the deed. This includes homoerotic smackdowns and almost-naked caressing.
  • Implied between Jessica and her father in The Gift
  • Babs Johnson with her son in Pink Flamingos

'Let mama make a gift to you! A gift that only a mother can give, a gift so special it will curse this house for years, a gift of supreme motherhood.'

  • U Turn
  • The Grifters. Implied until the end when indeed the mother's lust comes out into the open with tragic results.
  • Sherrybaby
  • Savage Grace. The film focuses largely on the real-life incestuous relationship between heiress Barbara Daly Baekeland and her son
  • Three seats for the 26, a French movie where Yves Montand plays himself and buxom sex bomb Mathilda May plays his illegitimate daughter Marion (a character created for the movie, not based on any real person). They meet and, not knowing that they are parent and child, feel attracted to each other and eventually have sex. The Reveal comes when Marion's mom tells her that Montand is her biological father. Marion isn't shocked or anything, she just makes an "oopsie!" face. Later, the two go tell Montand the truth. Montand, unlike Marion, is shocked, and looks at her daughter with a horrified face... but Marion just smiles and shrugs, which makes Montand relax and realize that Parental Incest is no such a big deal after all. They all become a happy family and the movie has a waffy end.
  • Similarly, in the French Murmur of the Heart, eventually, the main character (a 15-year-old) and his mother have a one night stand. They decide to treasure it and never bring it up again.
  • Chinatown featured Father/Daughter incest in an infamous reveal about Mrs. Evelyn Mulwray and a woman who Jake Gittes took to be the mistress of Mulwray's late husband. She's actually the sister and the daughter of Mrs. Mulwray because Mrs. Mulwray was raped by her father Noah Cross, who takes on Complete Monster status after the reveal in question. Noah crosses the Moral Event Horizon even further when at the end, he forcibly takes his granddaughter into his car, implying he wants to do the exact same thing to her. Evelyn Mulwray was going to be played by Anjelica Huston, John's real-life daughter, as an utterly perverse Casting Gag.
    • Spoofed in a cutaway on The Cleveland Show, where Cleveland mentions a remake of Chinatown with Miley Cyrus reenacting the famous "She's my sister and my daughter" scene.
    • Also spoofed in E!'s 100 Shocking Moments In Entertainment Countdown. When they bring up Chinatown, they play the iconic scene between Jack and Evelyn... and then one of the commentators is seen slapping himself and screaming "Mother! Father! Sister! Brother!" several times before he gives his opinions on it.
  • Father/Daughter happens to Forrest's love interest Jenny in Forrest Gump. Her dad was "very, very affectionate, indeed".
  • Marty McFly has to deal with the romantic attentions of his own 50s-era mother in Back to The Future after unwittingly recreating the events which led her to fall in love with his father. Marty then has to get his mother and father together so that he isn't erased from history before trying to get back home to his own time. It's not actually as squicky as it could have been. The novelization is even squickier, since when she kisses Marty, she says that it's like kissing her brother.
    • She says that in the film, too. How does she know?
      • Maybe it feels like kissing her brother because Marty takes after him, to the point where they have similarly-shaped lips?
        • Or, you know, it could just be the fact that "like kissing your brother" is a relatively common saying for kissing someone you have no sexual attraction to. It's like when people react to She Is Not My Girlfriend by saying that the not-girlfriend/boyfriend is like a sibling to them and actually mean it.
  • Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure, though it was never pursued beyond a few "Dude, your mom's hot!" "Shut up!" exchanges and Bill eventually telling Sigmund Freud that he has a "slight Oedipal complex". Of course, "mom" was actually a stepmother only a few years older than her stepson, not his birth mother.
  • Oldboy and Angel Heart both have lead characters who accidentally sleep with their own daughters. Spoilered because it's a huge twist in both cases, so highlight at your own risk.
  • The mother and son cat-people villains in Stephen King's film Sleepwalkers. They're apparently the last of their kind, though.
  • And the Cat People remake.
  • Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: While she's not his biological daughter, Judge Turpin wanting to marry his adopted daughter Joanna (with all that entails) certainly qualifies.
    • It would certainly be illegal in modern UK law. Adoptive parents may not marry their adopted children (though it's okay for adoptive siblings to marry, provided there's no blood relationship).
    • Technically, Joanna is Turpin's Ward, not adoptive daughter... but still, squick.
  • The French film Ma Mère has a very complicated incestuous relationship between a mother and her son.
  • And let's not forget the infamous "bath scene" in Pia Zadora's classic Butterfly.
  • Heavily implied in The Manchurian Candidate as part of the More Than Mind Control of the title character, but the Hays Code wouldn't let them say it outright.
    • The original novel was much more explicit about this, hence the film's notoriety even before the Kennedy assassinations.
    • Strangely, the '60s version with the Hays Code in full force was actually more explicit with this than the later remake. That was not a motherly kiss.
      • According to some, maybe! The kiss scene in the 2004 remake involves a lot of touching/body language that's pretty telling.
  • In the (in)famous indie film Spanking the Monkey, a drunken assignation between the lead character and his mother leads to him leaving home at the end.
  • Rebel Without a Cause: subverted, in that the attempts to deny even the appearance of incest destroy the normal expressions of affection. Judy's father refuses to show affection for her, stating that she's "getting too old for that kind of stuff", and when she kisses him, he slaps her.
  • An early version of Friday the 13th (film): The Final Friday revealed that Jason and his mother regularly had sex with each other, with this revelation even having an accompanying flashback of them doing it.
  • In Japanese film Inugami, the main character eventually discovers that the older woman he's been sleeping was his mother, and that his father was his uncle. It doesn't end well.
  • Pedro Almodovar's Volver has Attempted Rape by Paco towards Paula. Later, we learn that poor Paula was conceived in a manner similar to Katherine from Chinatown.
    • Some supplementary material states Freddy once beat and raped his mother.
  • In The Quiet, Elisha Cuthbert's character has an incestuous relationship with her father.
  • The main female character of Natural Born Killers is molested by her father. It's played like a sitcom...
  • The romantic interest in Aussie film Romper Stomper is also molested by her dad.
  • In Dogma, while not specifically stated, it is suggested by the following exchange:

Bartleby: But you, Mr. Whitland, you have more skeletons in your closet than the rest of this assembled party. I cannot even mention them aloud. [whispers something in Whitland's ear]
Loki: You're his father, you sick fuck!
[Whitland starts crying]

  • In the oft-maligned (for a good reason: it's farking confusing) An Awfully Big Adventure, Alan Rickman's character P.L. O'Hara deflowers his daughter. In all fairness, though, not only did he not know she was his kid, she didn't know it, either, and it's implied that she never found out. (O'Hara, on the other hand, did, and drowned himself because of it. So, squicky, but not as much as it should have been.)
  • In An American Haunting, it turns out that the "ghost" haunting the house is actually a psychic phenomena caused unconsciously by the daughter's trauma of being raped by her father. In scenes set in the modern day the daughter's ghost appears to a mother whose daughter, it turns out in the end, is also being molested by her father.
  • In The Damned Helmut Berger's character, Martin, has an unhealthy love/hate relationship with his mother, which culminates with a dubcon sex scene that he initiated. Afterward, the mother falls into a catatonic state and is then pushed to commit suicide by her son. Even if it doesn't really qualify as parental incest, Martin is also a paedophile and it is implied that he molests his little cousin.
  • In Peter Greenaway's 8 1/2 Women, Philip, while mourning his late wife, wakes up in bed with his adult son Storey; from the pillow talk viewers are to understand that something sexual happened between them. The father is horrified; the son is alarmingly eager to rationalize it. After this, the two men fill the house with a group of mistresses, but the Oedipal implications...pale by comparison.
  • Played for laughs (yes, laughs) in History of the World Part One:

Oedipus: (walking around collecting donations) Give to Oedipus! Give to Oedipus! Hey, Josephus!
Josephus: Hey, motherfucker!

  • In the movie of Tank Girl, the character makes a joke implying that her first sexual experience was with her father. Probably just a joke but considering the nature of the character, maybe not.
  • In Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire the title character is raped by her father, resulting in two children. The first child has Down's Syndrome. And in the movie it's strongly implied (and in the book, outright said) that Precious' mother forces her to "take care of her" (i.e., perform oral sex on her) because she feels that her daughter drove her boyfriend off and, as she says, "who was gonna love me?" That movie is fucked.
  • The Black Christmas remake has a flashback sequence that reveals Mrs. Lenz, drunk one night and obsessed with having another child, went up to the attic where her son Billy was kept and raped him. She wound up giving birth to a daughter named Agnes nine months later.
  • In indie film Unspeakable, James Fhelleps loses his teenage daughter in a car wreck, then goes on a killing spree when he thinks his daughter is talking to him through a dead hooker, pleading with him to save her. After this ends in his death, it turns out to be a dream, caused by guilt over his incestuous molestation of his daughter.
  • According to Danny Butterman in Hot Fuzz, Michael "Lurch" Armstrong's mother and sister are one and the same. That means...
    • He could have been implying Lurch, the mother, and the sister were all the same person.
  • Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
  • In The Goddess of 1967, Deidre is the product of this. Perhaps that's why she's blind...
  • Flashbacks in Hellraiser Deader implicate Amy was sexually abused by her father. The lurking phantom of parental incest is all over the first two movies in the series. "Come to daddy" and all that. There's no evidence that it actually happened, but the idea is pretty firmly put into viewers' heads.
  • Splice: Dren with both of her/his parents, although technically Clive is only a step-parent, at best.
  • In the Millicent and Therese segment of Trilogy of Terror, about two sisters who hate each other, Millicent claims that Therese seduced their father when she was sixteen. Since Millicent and Therese are actually the same person, it's likely that this is an ... uncharitable interpretation of what actually happened.
  • National Lampoon's Vacation: Cousin Eddie and his daughter Vicki.

Vicki: I'm going steady, and I French kiss.
Audrey: So? Everybody does that.
Vicki: Yeah, but Daddy says I'm the best at it.

  • In Year One, Zed rather casually admits to laying with his mother although he does say he felt rather awkward about it in the morning.
  • In Psycho IV, it is revealed that Norman Bates and his mother had a really really... odd relationship, wherein she apparently teased him sexually in his adolescence and then punished him for his natural reactions. As a result, he lusted after his mother and was jealous of her many boyfriends, and assumed the reverse was true, which resulted in a woman being knifed in the shower some 20 years after Mrs. Bates died. It is not clear if they ever consummated this or if he just had one hell of an Oedipus complex.
  • Played for laughs in Nanny McPhee, when Great-Aunt Adelaide Stitch assumes that Cedric intends to marry one of his daughters, Evangeline, to fulfill her demand that he remarry within the month. While Cedric did plan on marrying Evangeline, she was his scullery maid and not actually his daughter. That he is marrying a servant seems to bother her more than the idea of incest.
  • Part of The Reveal about Whoopi Goldberg's character in Clara's Heart is that she was raped by her son, who then killed himself.
  • Implied between Nina and her mother in Black Swan. Fan debate rages heavily.
  • In Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, Freddy takes the form of the sexually abusive father of one of his victims, and demands that she give him some "honey".
  • Meet the Robinsons: Averted. Although to nearly be adopted by your future wife is a scary thought.
  • This is pretty common in Tyler Perry's movies, because of the fact that he experienced this as a child.
  • Aguirre, the Wrath of God: Just after his crew is dead Aguirre declares that he'll marry his daughter and found a new 'pure' dynasty. It's evidence of his looming madness ... hopefully, and not something he planned all along.
  • Whether or not a "mild" form of this occurred is the central focus of Eve's Bayou. The theatrical release makes it more explicit that Cisely kissed her father and he stopped her, while the director's cut leaves it ambiguous who initiated the kiss.
  • In Machete, Booth admits to Padre in Confessionals that he has feelings for his daughter April, and he's disturbed by this. Later, it is revealed that April and her mother June film Home Porn Movies while he's away, lesbian scenes with each other and/or threesomes with some lucky bloke.


Literature

  • In Lolita Humbert is the eponymous character's stepfather, and says at one point that he, "with an incestuous thrill," had started thinking of her as his daughter, and had planned on impregnating her so that when she's too old, he'd have the next one ready.
  • Filmmaker Bertrand Blier wrote a Lolita-like novel, Beau-père. A 29-year-old sadsack failed musician, Remy, lives with his 35-year-old girlfriend, Martine, and her 14-year-old daughter, Marion. Remy has been raising Marion since she was 6, so when Martine is killed in a car crash, she wants to stay with him instead of going to live with her real father. She soon reveals that she's attracted to him and sets out to seduce him. He resists at first, but eventually gives in. Blier subsequently made a film of his novel.
  • After they escaped from Sodom, Lot's daughters believed that since their fiances were dead, they wouldn't have the opportunity to have children. Having children being Serious Business back then, they got their father drunk and raped him in order to have his children. Nine months later, they each had a son, Moab and Ben-Ammi. The former's name sounds something like the Hebrew word for "from Father" and latter's name means (literally) "son of my paternal uncle" or (figuratively) "son of my people" in Hebrew. Another version had that the daughters believed that they and their father were literally the last people left alive. Given that idea and the fact that they were seemingly the last living women and their father the last living man, they felt they had a duty to repopulate the world. Some critics contend that the Hebrews made up this story to put dirt on their enemies, the Moabites and the Ammonites, who were much like the Hebrews in all respects except religion, despite the fact that the Davidic line comes from the Moabites via Ruth. Also, these particular acts came before the institution of the sexual laws in Leviticus; as such, they may serve as a kind of retroactive Aesop: "This is what happened to people back before we had those laws against sleeping with close relatives, so aren't you glad we have them now?"
  • From the Gemma Doyle trilogy. This is Felicity's backstory. When she got "too old," Daddy dumped her, later taking in another young relative as a "ward"...
  • The father threatening marriage is found in many medieval Chivalric Romances. These include Vitae Duorum Offarum, Emare, Mai and Beaflor, and La Belle Helene de Constantinople. These are close to the fairy tale The Maiden Without Hands—so close, in fact, that the Grimm Brothers are often suspected of bowdlerising the tale with a Deal with the Devil.
  • Gregorius or The Good Sinner, a 12th-century German epic poem by Hartmann von Aue. The orphaned son and daughter of the ruler of Aquitaine have an illict love affair, resulting in the birth of a baby son, who is put into a box and cast adrift. He lands on an island in the Channel, where he is christened Gregorius. After growing up he becomes a knight and comes to the aid of the queen of a besieged city, whom he marries. It is then discovered that she is his mother. She becomes a nun, he a penitent hermit who has himself chained to a rock for seventeen years, after which he is elected pope. Thomas Mann retold the story in his novel Der Erwählte (The Chosen One, 1951). Here Gregorius and his mother/wife Sibylla have two daughters.
  • There's an e. e. cummings poem about this: 'annie died the other day'.
  • William Carlos Williams's poem 'Youth and Beauty' is about the narrator's seeing a dishmop as a substitute daughter, "naked, as a girl should seem to her father".
  • Dealing with the Borgia family (who were historically defamed as a bunch of incestuous murderers), Gregory Maguire's Mirror Mirror, a retelling of Snow White, has Lucrezia Borgia not only sleep with her father and brother, she also seduces her by-incest-son.
  • Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Subverted slightly in that Elena, who is the product of rape between Thomas Covenant and her mother Lena, actively pursues a sexual relationship with her father, without his knowing for most of The Illearth Stone that she's his daughter.
  • In Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Jones sleeps with a woman who, it is later revealed, is thought to be his mother. (Turns out she isn't.)
  • Robert A. Heinlein is notable for the Free-Love Future portrayed in many of his novels, in which familial relationships are sexually taboo only by tradition, which most sensible people discard as long as the matter is consensual and there's no genetic risk.
    • His protagonist Lazarus Long sexes up his mom towards the end of Time Enough for Love. He goes back in time to when he was 5 or so. At first he's Squicked out by the thought, but then realizes they're not procreating so it's OK. After all, he has sex with his female half-clones, and most other people he has sex with are his descendants at some level already. (Not to mention that genetic testing indicates that he has absolutely no harmful genes whatsoever—so even if he did get his mom pregnant, the baby would be perfectly healthy.) Later, in The Number of the Beast, he rescues her from death and brings her to his present (her future) so the relationship can be formalized.
    • And let's not get started on Heinlein's All You Zombies. The protagonist is a hermaphrodite, who travels through time, has sex with him/herself and becomes both his/her own father and mother. And son and daughter, logically. And is also the same person who took himself back in time to meet herself.
    • Lazarus came by it honestly. In To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Maureen tries to have sex with her father. (By the end of the book, it's strongly implied that she finally manages it.) In the same book, there's a consensual sexual encounter between Maureen's first husband (Lazarus/Woodrow's father) and their oldest daughter, who is an adult, pregnant, and soon to marry her child's father.
    • In Farnham's Freehold, Farnham's daughter mentions to him that, of the three men she's been stranded with, he's the one she'd prefer to father her child (if she weren't already pregnant just now). Her dad is completely undisturbed and in fact flattered by this.
    • In The Number of the Beast, Lazarus Long's free-spirited ways inspire protagonists Deety and Jacob (her father) to do the deed.
    • In Job: A Comedy of Justice, not only does Satan's wife tell him he should boink their daughter as a way of getting the girl past her teenage-rebellion stage, but she insists the girl will cry when her dad first makes his intentions known—and then will put up no resistance, leading to them both having some of the most enjoyable sex of their lives.
  • Invoked in Red Dragon, when the FBI agents claim that the eponymous Serial Killer "may have had sexual relations with his mother" as part of the highly sensational smokescreen that they feed to the press, because they specifically want to offend him into doing something stupid. In actuality, the killer's Freudian Excuse is significantly less Freudian, though still fairly effed up.
  • The title character of Stephen King's Dolores Claiborne had an asshole husband who, among other things, was trying to get into the pants of his own teenage daughter. This was one of several factors that eventually led to Dolores killing him.
  • V. C. Andrews dealt with incest all over the board in her books, including between parents and children.
  • In the novel Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, the fifteen year old main character gets involved in a relationship with a woman who is heavily implied to be his estranged mother. It's also heavily implied that she knows this but doesn't care.
  • Lord Raith in The Dresden Files novel Blood Rites is an incubus who binds all his daughters to him in sexual slavery (and kills all his sons. It's a theme...)
    • Lara Raith engages in a similar behavior at the end of Blood Rites, turning the tables on her father, and binding him to be her slave instead. By way of explanation, it's not pure sexual slavery, it's complete mental control, achieved through the use of their supernatural mojo.
    • Nicodemus also enjoys "indulging his daughter"...
  • Zillah and Nothing in Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite are a rare father/son pair. It seems incest runs in Nothing's family, as his mother Jessie seduced her father.
  • Craster in A Song of Ice and Fire, who has an arseload of wives, married all his daughters (and sacrificed all his sons to the Others). At least one of the daughters is shown to be pregnant.
  • The main male character in the Spellkey Trilogy is the product of father/daughter incest and is an outcast as a result.
  • Deerskin, by Robin McKinley, is based directly on the original Donkeyskin fairytale—except unlike in the various folk stories, the princess's father actually does rape her, and impregnate her, and she winds up miscarrying his incestuous baby in the snow on top of a mountain. While largely an amnesiac. It's not a happy story. It is, however, a beautiful story, in its way.
  • In Mercedes Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar series, this theme gets used several times. In Magic's Promise, a minor character was sexually molested by his mother; the trauma from this triggered his latent Psychic Powers. Further, in the Mage Winds trilogy, Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter Nyara is raised by her father, Big Bad Mornelithe Falconsbane, as a sex toy and guinea pig for his sadistic magical experimentation.
    • Also in Lackey's book with Holly Lisle, a young girl is being molested by her (step?)father and develops psychic powers and split personalities. You later find out the dad used to be mentally tortured by his own father, and his eventual comeuppance is very fitting.
    • In another Valdemar book, Talia uses her powers to punish a man who raped both his daughters and murdered one by forcing him to relive his younger daughter's experiences.
    • Another of Lackey's books, Unnatural Issue is based on the fairy tale The King Who Wished Marry To His Daughter, and had a more disturbing version. He wished to use his daughter's body as a vessel for her dead mother's spirit, and marry her all over again, even making plans to dismiss all the servants who knew about the girl and return with his new 'young bride'. In a particularly creepy scene, the heroine overhears her father ruminating on the things he's going to do to her (well, her body anyway) and is as horrified as you might expect.
  • A book that may have taken place in The Low Middle Ages had a Bastard (that's his name or nickname) as its narrator. At one point he's forced to settle with the (third?) cheapest whore at a brothel—an unattractive older woman—and the two have a conversation while getting busy. Several unnerving coincidences later ("What's your name?" "My name is Antonio." "I had a baby I named Antonio...") and the poor Bastard has to leave. His friend/mentor tries to assure him that "he has no mother or father", but it doesn't help very much. Played for laughs, but it probably was his mother.
  • In Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song, Chris's (the female protagonist) father tries to talk her into sleeping with him, although she refuses.
  • In Watch Your Mouth by Daniel Handler, there's an incest epidemic amongst the Glass family. Cynthia Glass sleeps with her father. Her mother sleeps with her son. Cyn and her brother sleep together ... And then there's a golem.
  • A character in Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern short story, "Rescue Run," rapes his three daughters to produce grandchildren.
    • Then he rapes his daughters/granddaughters, as do his sons/grandsons.
  • An Older Than Radio example: Paradise Lost. Though it's all very metaphorical, the idea goes that Sin sprang fully-formed from Satan's head (not unlike Athena with Zeus). He then had sex with her, impregnating her with Death, who after he was born raped her repeatedly. One Big Screwed-Up Family.
  • Father/Daughter happens to a secondary character in Peyton Place. It was deemed to be too squicky for the television adaption and the father was changed to a stepfather.
    • Actually, it was her stepfather in the original novel too, but it's still very squicky. There are also undertones of this with Norman Page and his overbearing mother, who punishes him (for talking to girls) with enemas and naked whippings.
  • In The History Of Danish Dreams, Carsten often spies on his mother Amalie while undressing or having sex while he's a child, and when he's a teenager, they start a sexual relationship. Eventually, Amalie comes to her senses and sends him off to a boarding school so they won't be tempted to do it anymore.
  • In Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, this is used to account for the youth of the supposed relative of the Emperor by a doubting Akbar.
  • In Push by Sapphire, Precious has two children by her father, who also has HIV and passes it on to her.
  • In The Cider House Rules, Mister Rose is the father of Rose Rose's baby.
  • In Isaac Asimov's Robots of the Dawn, there is a planet with such loose morals, that one of the characters received a lifelong trauma when her father refused to become her first man. And he could never figure out why he refused.
  • Dean Koontz uses non-consensual incestuous relationships fairly frequently in character backstories. In addition to the Brother-Sister Incest that figures into The Bad Place, in both Whispers and Life Expectancy, a major character is the product of a father raping his daughter. Additionally, in What the Night Knows, a major character is the product of three generations of line-breeding in his family, starting with a brother-sister pairing, then the father/uncle impregnating his daughter/niece, then impregnating his twin granddaughters/grandnieces, one of whom is the mother of the character in question. The other twin and her daughter (also fathered by the family patriarch) state in their last documented conversation with their relative that they're both about a month pregnant.
  • Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey has possibly the most horrific example of this, and one of the more unusual in that it's the son who rapes the mother...and the grandmother...and the great-grandmother, and....obviously, there's a bit of time travel involved.
    • Similarly in Up the Line, by Robert Silverberg, one of the Couriers, who has some major father issues, has a goal to sleep with every female ancestor he has, as a gesture of contempt toward their mates.
  • In Octavia Butler's Imago, almost all of the human race has been rendered sterile. At least one woman and at least one man are still fertile, though—we know because she gets pregnant. He runs away immediately after the conception and is never seen again, so the only way to perpetuate the species is in fact mother/son incest.
  • Due to their obsession with blood purity, the God Emperors in The Stone Dance of the Chameleon have been known to engage in this, as well as in Brother-Sister Incest. We see this happen in the story when Molochite - who is himself already a product of Brother-Sister Incest - weds his mother Ykoriana after he ascends the throne.
  • Heavily implied in To Kill a Mockingbird: when Mayella is explaining what really happened with Tom Robinson, she says she'd never kissed a grown man before, because what Papa did to her "don't count".
    • That line was cut from the film for obvious reasons, but Mayella's actress Colin Wilcox-Paxton said she communicated the incestuous relationship through her body language and facial expressions. She revealed in the documentary that comes with the deluxe DVD set, that she was acutely aware that Mayella's experience was real. "I saw these girls on the streets of violence, these very underprivileged girls. These girls from awful, awful backgrounds. I mean, most of them took it for granted they'd be molested by the time they were... certainly 12, by a father, an uncle, a brother -- or someone down the road."
  • The "novelization" of the 1980 Flash Gordon included a small scene of Emperor Ming and Princess Aura pleasurably reminiscing about the most recent time they had (BDSM-heavy) sex together.
    • The conversation begins with Aura complaining about 'missing their closeness'. Seems Daddy's been to busy oppressing to have time for her lately.
  • In the short story "Clean Slate" the protagonist kills her parents and becomes a serial killer when her father breaks off their longterm affair after she turns 18.
  • In the Chinese Cinderella story Bound by Donna Jo Napoli, Xing Xing's Wicked Stepmother suggested this to Xing Xing to mock her, though there was no denying that Xing Xing's father was much closer to her than to his stepdaughter Wei Ping.
  • In Book Girl and the Famished Spirit, one character is implied to have been sexually abused by her uncle/guardian, who is eventually revealed to be her real father -- which she knew, but he didn't.
  • In one of his columns, Dave Barry called for readers to send in candidates for what should be the national insect. In his next column, he mentions that someone wrote in saying "My vote for the national incest is mother-son. Thank you for asking."
  • The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison contains a scene where the narrator finds a man with two pregnant women in his yard. It turns out one is his wife and the other his daughter whom he accidentally entered (they shared a bed) while dreaming. She enjoyed it so much she begged him to continue resulting in both his wife and daughter being pregnant by him at once.
  • This is actually the motive behind the major case in the novel Case Histories and its subsequent TV adaptation. The little girl at the center of case was murdered by her oldest sister because the sister realized that their father had the intention of sexually abusing her like he had been doing with the sister. In order to spare her little sister from the same fate, she murdered and buried the little girl in their neighbor's yard and subsequently entered a convent.
  • In Death: Eve Dallas was subjected to this by her own father. She had to kill him to get out of it. Born In Death reveals that Madeline Bullock and her son Winfield Chase had been in a sexual relationship for years. Squick.
  • The book (and the subsequent Swedish and American film versions) The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has the character Harriet Vanger being raped from a young age by her father, Gottfried, and after his death by her brother Martin. This is of course why she leaves Sweden.
  • In The Thirteenth Tale, it's implied that George Angelfield at least had a sexual interest in his daughter. Certainly when she ran off, his reaction was more like a spurned lover than a father.
  • In Sara Douglass' Wayfarer Redemption sextet, this is the only form of incest not permitted to the Icarii. Everything else, including grandparent/grandchild, is fair game (so long as it's consensual). When Wolf Star kisses Azhure passionately, he admits that what he did was "unclean"... and thereby admits his parentage.
  • Michael Moorcock's Clovis Marca (Clovis Becker in a later edition) of The Shores of Death was the product of a consensual father-daughter relationship—and she was born of apparently just-as-consensual Brother-Sister Incest.


Live Action TV

  • Arrested Development loves to play with this one with Buster and Lucille.
  • In Sparkhouse the character Carol is a victim of incest by her father
  • Skins. Implied between Michelle's stepfather and stepsister and gangster Johnny White with his daughter.
  • Buried. Prison bully revealed to be victim of rape by his father.
  • A character in an episode of Cracker grew up watching her father sexually abuse her sisters.
  • Steve Owen in Eastenders was French kissed by his dying mother.
  • In an episode of Wire in the Blood a killer was having an incestuous relationship with his abusive mother.
  • In Bad Girls the character Shell Dockley was raped as an adolescent by both her parents.
  • Battlestar Galactica, in a very roundabout way coupled with Cloning Blues: Ellen Tigh sleeps with human-like Cylon Cavil in order to protect her husband. It's later revealed that Ellen is one of the Final Initial Five Cylon scientists who created the Significant Seven Eight human-Cylons, and Cavil was modeled after Ellen's father and knew all along who she was (Cavil is an angry, spoilt, sadistic teenager with an Oedipus complex in an old human's body, which he hates Ellen for "blessing" him with). Then there's Saul Tigh himself, also a member of the Initial Five, who becomes infatuated with much younger-looking Caprica-Six, possibly because she looks a lot like a young Ellen. Tigh gets Six pregnant, but she suffers a Convenient Miscarriage after Tigh switches (is forcibly switched?) his affections back to Ellen. Ellen calls Tigh out on basically screwing (one of) his own daughter(s). But doesn't do so to Tyrol, another member of the Five, even though he too was doing it to one of the Eights.
    • This calling out is doubly ironic given that Ellen slept with Cavil on New Caprica to get Tigh released.
  • In Beverly Hills, 90210, Valerie makes a sad example of this when her backstory is finally revealed.
  • Boston Legal had a plotline that involved a mother sleeping with her son.
  • On Grounded for Life, Claudia accidentally takes Jimmy to see a movie about this. Hilarity Ensues.
  • A second series episode of Angel features a woman who was sexually abused by her father
    • Cordelia, albeit Cordelia possessed by Jasmine, and Connor are also essentially this trope in season 4, since Cordelia acted as a surrogate mother to Connor as a baby in season 3.
  • Attempted in Forever Knight when LaCroix's daughter, Divia, attempts to get LaCroix to sleep with her after she brings him accross (makes him a vampire.) LaCroix responded by staking her and killing her, though she revived centuries later and came after him and his vampire children.
  • Used in the third season episode of House "Skin Deep," between a father and his intersex daughter.
  • Nip Tuck had some mother & (adopted) son incest.
  • There were a couple NYPD Blues where it was one of the plots-of-the-week, both father-daughter and mother-son. It was also eventually revealed as part of Diane Russel's backstory.
  • In Wizards of Waverly Place, there is an episode where Justin lifts his mom Theresa's dress. Well, he lifts it because he wants to see her shoes (to find out if Alex is in her body), but it still comes off as slightly creepy and squicky.
  • The controversial The X-Files episode "Home" centered around an murderous family of inbred hicks, complete with mother/son incest. The eldest brother turns out to be his younger brothers' father.
  • An episode of CSI revealed that the recently introduced character Keppler had, some years ago, murdered a man who he believed had raped his wife (or possibly girlfriend or fiancee, it's not made clear). He is then blackmailed by his father-in-law who has just murdered a prostitute and a fellow officer who had helped cover up the crime (which the CSIs are investigating). In the end he realises that his wife's rapist was her father. He proceeds to track down the villain to stop him murdering the last witness to his crime, getting shot for his trouble and then getting back up in time to shoot him and protect the witness, before he dies.
    • Plus the episode "Burden of Proof" reveals in the end that the murdered stepfather wasn't molesting his stepdaughter, the biological father was. When the daughter told the stepfather about it, the father murdered him, telling the daughter afterward that he'd kill anyone else she told and her too if the need arose. The guy actually lies when arrested, saying he killed the stepfather because he was abusing the daughter, before the team confront him with the evidence, saying it'll get him an instant life sentence.
    • And in another episode, the girl in question loved her father so deeply and believed he loved her back that her body actually began acting as though she was pregnant--even though he hadn't even touched her and found the concept repulsive. It turns out she killed her mother, out of jealousy.
    • A horrific episode from the first-season, "Blood Drops", features two sisters who survive the murder of their father, mother and two brothers. In the end, the older girl is revealed to have arranged the murder of her father, who had raped her, fathered her sister/daughter (played by Dakota Fanning), and was now molesting her. The others were killed because they had never stopped him.
    • In the episode "Committed" from Season 5, they are investigating a murder at a criminally insane institution of one of a male inmates and find out that the victim was having an illicit affair with a fellow male inmate. Turns out that the mother of the patient the victim was having an affair with had lied her way into being a nurse at the mental hospital so that she could continue her lifelong Parental Incest relationship with him. When she found out that he was "cheating" on her with an inmate, she demanded that he end it. When he refused, she killed the victim out of jealousy. The truly horrible part is that she used her power over her mentally-ill son to force him to cover up the murder of his lover.
    • Season 10 episode "Lost and Found" has the team assuming that dear old dad had knocked up his own daughter with their son/half-brother before disappearing. Turns out she was raped by her mother's brother.
    • Season 12, "Genetic Disorder". Mother does it with son, gets pregnant, dumps off baby to hide it. The kid goes Ax Crazy later and lashes out at the genealogist who uncovered the secret, and the body gets left in the bed of Doc Robbins and his wife, the genealogist's next client.
  • After Bill O'Reilly was interviewed on The Colbert Report and made an accidental Double Entendre about how impressed he was by Stephen Colbert's interviewing skills, Colbert revealed that he and O'Reilly had had sex. While not technically related, O'Reilly is the inspiration for the Colbert character, who sees him as the father he never had and calls him "Papa Bear". It's more than a little squicky.
  • The Practice had an episode involving a case about this. It was very vague about whether or not they actually had sex and who was the aggressor was, which was part of what the case hinged on. In the end it showed the mother sleeping peacefully and the son watching her, implying he was in love with her.
  • Played with in an episode of Supernatural. Dean goes back in time to see his parents as teenagers. Dean comments on how his mom is a total babe and that he will be going to hell (again) for thinking that. Also in that ep, The Yellow-Eyed Demon possesses Dean's mom's father and kills Dean's dad. The Demon makes a deal with Dean's mom that promises he'll bring him back to life and Dean's mom accepts. How is the deal sealed? With a kiss. Dean's mom makes out with kisses her demon-possessed father. Squick.
    • And in an earlier episode, Agent Henriksen tells Dean that he thinks John brainwashed Dean into believing that demons and ghosts are real and probably molested him as a child. Of course, Henriksen said this just to make Dean angry.
    • And in "Family Remains", the antagonist is first believed to be the ghost the daughter of the first victim. After all of the standard ghost-warding stuff fails, they figure out it was the dead daughter's daughter, who was a result of her father/grandfather raping her mother/half-sister. Jeez, these geneologies get complicated.
    • Let's not forget poor Bela/Abby, who sold her soul to Lilith in exchange for having her father (and it may be implied her mother as well, though we never see her) killed because he was molesting her.
  • In Scrubs, after a session with Wide-Eyed Idealist psychiatrist Dr. Molly Clock, it is revealed that The Todd's issues with women stems from his relationship with his mother (they made out once).
  • In Profit, Jim and his step-thanks-to-Executive Meddling-mother are engaged in an on-off sexual relationship, when she isn't threatening to tell the cops he set his dad on fire so he'll buy her things.
  • In Season 2 of Carnivale, through a chain of heavily destiny-mediated consequences, Sofie winds up working as a maid for Brother Justin, who becomes creepily obsessed with her and vice versa. A good deal of Sofie's childhood trauma comes from having been raised by her batshit-crazy, telepathic, catatonic mother (roll with it, it's that kind of series) who hated her due to the circumstances of her conception: her mother was raped by a strange man who became obsessed with her when she was working as a fortune teller. In the city where Justin went to seminary. 20-odd years ago. You see where this is going, right? Ironically enough, the only person with enough information to put the pieces together is Justin's sister Iris, and even she's a little weirded out.
    • Not to mention that according to Word of God, had the series continued Sophie, who thanks to some visions, is probably aware of the fact that Justin is her father, would have married him. And did I say that there would have been a child involved, who may or may not to be Justin's?.
  • Scott Barringer, Hayden Christensen's character on Higher Ground, was seduced and sexually abused by his step-mother. His love interest, Shelby, just happened to have had the same thing happen to her from her stepfather (who got her younger sister too).
  • Law and Order had an episode about the murder of a teenaged girl. The cops keep pursuing the girl's father, as evidence indicates the girl was sexually abused, but he keeps protesting his innocence. It's ultimately revealed that it was the girl's mother who was raping her and ultimately murdered her.
    • Used again by a young man facing a murder charge as part of an insanity plea that he'd regularly been pressured into sex with his mother. The court ordered shrink doesn't believe his insanity plea but does admit that the incest makes him look sympathetic in front of a jury.
  • SVU had an episode about a college student caught dumping her unwanted baby. By her father. Who she basically just met. Because she tracked him down. And it's not the first time she's gotten pregnant by him. Naturally, their father is an upstanding pillar of the community. After she's sentenced (or committed, I can't remember), he tries for custody of his (grand)son, but is shot down hard by Benson and Stabler.
    • She's committed -- but not for the unwanted live baby they found; she is aquitted of that. But later they find that she had a "stillbirth" a couple years prior, and Benson confronts her with that - and the girl blurts out that her father was also THAT baby's father, and she'd actually killed that baby herself. So she's committed for that earlier murder. The fact that the father had been schtupping his daughter longer than they'd thought makes them all the more determined to deny him custody.
    • SVU has a long list of these: A court judge who was harsh on sex offenders after he raped his 11-year old daughter and conceived a son, a gold-digger who seduced her stepson and convinced another man she was having an affair with to kill the father, a murderer who was in an incestuous relationship with his mother and killed her to free himself from her control, two brothers from season 1 who were molested by their father: one grew up to be a serial rapist, the other turned out normal but got drunk and killed a man he thought was his brother.
    • There was also the episode with a man who wanted lots of kids so he arranged for other men to impregnate his wife and, when she could no longer conceive, he fathered a child with his teenage daughter, albeit with a turkey baster, I believe.
    • Criminal Intent had one early on: A stepmother, her stepson, and her son by her stepson's father are suspected in a series of church burnings. Goren thinks the arsonist has a Freudian Excuse, and it turns out that the stepmother thought the best way to get to know her teenaged stepson was to seduce him one weekend when his father was out of town. She got pregnant by her stepson and covered it up by inducing labor perilously early, leaving the baby slightly duller then normal and highly suggestible. I think what happened was that mom and son were trying to cover up for the younger son, who just wanted all the weirdness between his mother and brother explained.
  • Shane on Weeds masturbates to pictures of his mother for a bit. After being discovered, his mother delivers an exquisitely uncomfortable discussion on the subject.
  • In Malcolm in the Middle, Reese finds a diary belonging to a girl he thinks goes to his school, and begins to read it. As he does, he gradually starts to fall for her, and fantasizes about kissing her. When Lois off-handedly reveals that the diary is hers, unaware of the fact that Reese has developed a crush on the girl in the diary, Reese imagines going to kiss his mother as she is now, and is horrified.
  • An early episode of All Saints features an abandoned baby. When her teenaged mother is found, she reveals, in a heartbreaking scene, that her father raped her and fathered her daughter, and that she abandoned her because she knew he'd do the same to another daughter.
  • In the old original Dark Shadows TV 'supernatural soap', the modern-day character of Roger Collins makes a reference to his ancestors, but the actor bungles the line and says 'incestors' instead. This was ironic or prescient, because we later learn that his late wife and the mother of their son was also his own grandmother, having returned to life supernaturally after a failed attempt to murder Roger's father and aunt, Jamison and Nora Collins. Poor Roger never had any idea that he had married his grandmother, however...and neither did the writers until later.
  • On Red Dwarf, it's revealed in Series VII that Lister had spent the first six and a bit series ogling and apparently briefly dating his own mother, Kristine Kochanski. That said, the father is Lister himself.
    • Technically, he was dating the alternate reality version of her.
      • The Kochanski Lister dated in series VII & VIII was the alternate reality version (played by Chloe Annett), the Kochanski Lister dated before the accident that wiped out the crew was the "real" version (played by Clare Grogan). His mother was the Chloe Annett Kochanski.
  • In the Cold Case episode "Blackout" its discovered that the victim, a grandmother, was extremely abusive, regularly molesting her son when he was young. She had her sights set on her thirteen year-old grandson when she was killed.
  • Twin Peaks.
  • Quincy investigated a case of this.
  • Strongly averted in one episode of Dollhouse, where the body surfing mother is investigating her own murder and is suddenly kissed by her adult son. She quickly pushes him away and starts gagging.
  • In one episode of Numb3rs that deals with an Expy of the FLDS, a girl finds out that she is the product of Parental Incest - her father married his own daughter. She was not happy about this.
  • Done tear jerkingly in an episode of ER, in which a little girl innocently reveals the "game" her father plays with her. The information causes Malucchi to have a terrible Heroic BSOD: he charges into the operating room, where said father is being treated, and begins beating the shit out of him on the operating table while screaming and sobbing incoherently.
  • Criminal Minds had quite a few Serial Killers with this backstory, but the one that takes the Squick has to be the killer from "Reflection of Desire" whose mother was an actress from 1950's films. To perfect the romantic plots they staged and re-enacted when she was younger, he cut off the lips of his first victim and affixed them onto his mother's long-rotted corpse, which he hallucinated was her, still alive.
  • Outrageous Fortune has Judd sleeping with his girlfriend's mid-twenties daughter during mid six season, they get married at the end of the season.
  • Lincoln Heights: "Baby Doe". Jenn (a nurse) and Eddie (a police officer) find an abandoned baby in a dumpster. They track down the mother, a teenager with abusive parents. Her father is especially hateful and at one point at the hospital where Jenn works, he spits in his daughter's face. Jenn wipes it off and has the saliva tested for DNA. Yep, he's the father of his daughter's baby.
  • The Secret Life of the American Teenager: Ricky was molested by his father, who claimed he was teaching Ricky "what it means to be a man." This lead to Ricky constantly sleeping around in an attempt to feel in control of his sexuality.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Spike, as a rookie vampire, turns his own mother. This new vampire implies that Spike did this because he has a thing for Mommy.
    • Spike claims that he did it to keep her alive, and staked her when she started coming on to him.
  • Just when you thought this trope couldn't get any squickier, Steve Wilkos had a father/daughter couple. The father justified it by claiming that because he hadn't been in his daughter's life, he didn't develop any of the usual genetic squick about having sex with his offspring. Steve thought that they were trolling, so he made them take lie detector tests... and they came back positive that this was true.
    • Another infamous episode of Steve's show featured a woman who'd molested her daughter orally and offered to make child pornography of her.
  • On Roar Fergus is initially quite attracted to Molly until he realizes that she's his daughter.
  • In the Doctor Who episode Father's Day, Rose's father Pete unknowingly invokes it in a hypothetical remark of "if I was going out with you" and is confused about her emphatic, repeated protests.
  • In Boardwalk Empire, this is revealed to be in the back story of Jimmy Darmody and his mother Gillian and was at least partially the cause of Jimmy enlisting in World War I.

Music

  • "Alive" by Pearl Jam is about a mother who reveals to her son that the man he thought was his father was actually his stepfather... and then she makes advances on her son because he looks like his dead (birth) father.
    • Seeing as no-one has ever understood a word Eddie Vedder sings in any of their songs, this has yet to be confirmed or refuted.
    • It's explained in this article. "Alive" is the story of a young man who never knew his biological father until he was told the truth by his mother later in life (a true incident from Eddie Vedder's own life). In the song, the mother is sexually attracted to her son and the relationship is consummated, leading the protagonist to become so messed up that he becomes a Serial Killer of prostitutes (the song "Once"), and ends up on death row (the song "Footsteps"). However, Vedder has veered away from this interpretation in later years, claiming that the fans "lifted the curse" off the song, and he now sees it as a life-affirming anthem.
    • "Daughter" sounds rather explicit in its subject matter (Father/Daughter incest), once you get past Vedder's nigh-unintelligible singing voice. Though it reads like that ("she holds the hand that holds her down"), "Daughter" is actually about a child with dyslexia ("mother reads aloud - child tries to understand it"), whose parents don't understand her disability and use harsh physical punishment to deal with it ("the shades go down"). Explained here on The Other Wiki.
  • No sex happens, but the video for "Lemon Incest" by Serge Gainsbourg and his young daughter Charlotte is extremely creepy.
    • The video for "Charlotte Forever", on the other hand, feels more romantic than creepy. Of course for some that may make it all the creepier.
  • "The Father of a Boy Named Sue"...maybe. It's implied, but not stated out loud.
  • "Magdelena" by Frank Zappa is a detailed confessional by a father to his 13-year old daughter of what he'd like to do to her.
  • "Tier" by Rammstein tells the story of a man who rapes his daughter, and of her revenge. Made even creepier by the fact that the live performance included the presence of the young daughter of guitarist Richard Kruspe onstage. The song "Laichzeit" also talks about a man who harbors sexual desire for both his mother and his sister.
    • The song "Wiener Blut" from the album "Liebe ist für alle da" is about the Fritzl case (see "Real life" below)
  • As a possible reference to Oedipus Rex, The Doors' "The End" has the line "Father/ Yes son?/ I want to kill you/ Mother, I want to... fuck you".
  • Played for laughs in the Tom Lehrer song "I Got It From Agnes" with the lines "Max got it from Edith, who gets it every spring. She got it from her daddy, who gives her everything."
    • "There once was a man named Oedipus Rex, You may have heard about his odd complex."
  • Also played for laughs with The Lonely Island's "Motherlover", where two studs agree to "fuck each other's mothers" for Mother's Day.
  • "Janie's Got a Gun" by Aerosmith. "What did her daddy do?" indeed.
    • According to Pop Up Video, the line "He jacked the little bitty baby" originally used the word raped instead of jacked.
  • Does anybody else find it kinda Squicky that Meat Loaf's stepdaugther sings along with him in the song "Man of Steel"? (Which includes lines like "I remember how it used to be, making love to you all night long.")
  • Motorhead's "Don't Let Daddy Kiss Me" from Bastards.
  • "Royally Fucked" by Mindless Self Indulgence.

"Mommy, daddy, why don't you finger me too?"

SUCK DADDY!


Religion and Mythology

  • This is absolutely everywhere in ancient mythology and folklore. The Other Wiki has a fairly comprehensive list here.
  • The most famous example of Parental Incest comes from Greek mythology with Oedipus Rex, about a prince who is prophesied to kill his father and marry his mother. After being left to die by his father and then found by someone else, he meets him unrecognized on the road and kills him. He has several adventures (including solving the riddle of the Sphinx) before heading home and marrying the Queen, who, yes, turns out to be his mother. He spends years with her—and they have children—before finding out the truth about what happened, and is so horrified by it all that he goes into exile, after exacting the punishment on himself for killing the old king to end a curse on the land, while she commits suicide.
    • Electra, if Freud Was Right about her desires. She murdered her mother, and her name was used for the gender-inversion of the Oedipus complex.
  • Other examples from Greek mythology besides Oedipus: Myrrha tricked her father Theias into incest after Aphrodite inspired her with passion for him and got pregnant. Theias, horrified and angry, killed Myrrha with an axe. Her corpse turned into a myrrh tree and, ironically, produced Adonis. Nyctimene committed incest with her father and was turned into an owl. Owls are therefore not seen by day because they are ashamed of themselves. Also, Phaedra's unrequited love/lust for her stepson Hippolytus, which ended with Hippolytus dead (or banished away and then taken in by Artemis in other versions) and Phaedra Driven to Suicide.
  • Thyestes was told by an oracle that he could only avenge the murder of his three sons on his brother Atreus if he had a son by his own daughter. So he raped his daughter Pelopia (in sme versions, though, he just raped a stranger woman not knowing who she was), fathering Aigisthos, who after being abandoned and nursed by a goat was adopted by Atreus and raised as his own son. Later, after Thyestes was captured by Atreus' sons Agamemnon and Menelaos, Atreus sends Aigisthos to the dungeon... but Thyestes reveals the truth to Aigisthos and Pelopia. Poor Pelopia kills herself with shame, while Aigisthos kills Atreus.
  • Zeus' first act after killing his father, and castrating him if memory serves, is to rape his mother, right after she tells him he must abstain from ever having sex with a woman lest he father a son that kills him as he did his father, Zeus's response? Raping Rhea right then and there, as snakes. Yep, Oedipus ain't got nothing on the king of the gods.
    • Zeus also rapes his sister Hera and makes her his wife.
      • Also, before being kidnapped by her uncle Hades, Persephone was raped by her father, Zeus, who was also her uncle, as her mother was his sister, Demeter.
      • Both examples involving Zeus are from the Orphic cosmologies. The Orphics seem to have regarded Demeter, Rhea, and Persephone as manifestations of the same underlying divinity.
    • To be honest to this trope, this troper's high school teacher always called the guy Zeus the Loose, didn't understand it much until we went further into greek mythology...
  • Antaeus is the son of Poseidon and Gaia. Gaia is Kronos's mother. Kronos is Poseidon's father. Truly, Greek myth knows no limits.
    • Also consider that Uranus was both Gaia's first son and the father of her other children.
    • That ain't all that Gaia's gotten up to. She also provides quite possibly one of the only instances of GREAT GRANDPARENTAL INCEST!! Hephaestus, the son of Hera, who is the daughter of Kronos, who is the son of Gaia, was overcome with unrequited lust after he tried and failed to rape his half-sister Athena and prompted ejaculated on the earth. Since the earth IS Gaia, she became pregnant.
    • Well, Heracles is Zeus' son. And his great-great-grandson (his mother Alcmene was the granddaughter of another of Zeus's bastards, the hero Perseus).
    • The homosexual variety also occurs. In some versions, Eros is the son of Ares, and they clearly go the Erastes Eromenos way. On other stories, though, Eros is the son of Khaos, which is the mother of Gaia, which is the mother of Kronos, which is the father of Zeus, who is the father of Ares.
  • Greek mythology is full of incest all way around. Justified by the fact that they are all gods/titans and they just can.
  • In Sumerian mythology, Nammu sleeps with her son An and births Enki. Enki then sleeps with Nammu's daughter Ninhursag, fathering Ninsar. Enki then sleeps with Ninsar, fathering Ninkurra. Enki then sleeps with Ninkurra, fathering Uttu, who he consequently sleeps with. Slightly pissed at Enki, Ninhursag takes the semen from Uttu's womb and, to make a long story short, impregnated herself with it, giving birth to eight new gods.
  • In Maori mythology the forest god Tane made Hine out of earth and breathed life into her, technically becoming her father. They then married but upon discovering the truth of her parentage Hine was so shocked that she ran into the underworld to become the Goddess of Death. Wonder what she would've done if she saw the examples above...
  • The Talmud (Sanhedrin 103b), expanding on the evil deeds of the biblical king Amon of Judah, says that he raped his mother, but not for the reason one might think. Afterward, she asks him bitterly, "Did you derive any pleasure, then, from the place whence you issued?" His response: "Did I do this for any other purpose than to provoke my creator?"
  • In Aztec Mythology the god of wind, wisdom, arts and other stuff Quetzalcoatl became human (as the historical figure Ce Atlat Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl) and became the King of the legendary city of Tula, which was seen by the aztecs as their own version of Arcadia. His rule was cut short when god of earth, night and war Tezcatlipoca, which in different myths is his brother, appeared as a member of the court and got him drunk, prompting him to sleep with his daughter Quetzalpetatl (in some versions she is his sister and he had made a Celibazy Oath, prehispanic myths vary a lot). A weirder and more complex example, as Quetzalpetatl wasn't a goddess in most stories just merely a human related by blood to the incarnation of the god. Quetzalcoatl was so ashamed he exiled himself, either way.
  • Not even Catholicism is free of this. Saint Dymphna's myth says that, after her mom's death, her father fell for her due to how physically similar they were, went Yandere for poor Dymphna, and tried to forcibly marry her. It Got Worse, obviously.


Tabletop Games

  • Dungeons & Dragons examples:
    • Belial and Fierna are father/daughter rulers of the fourth layer of Hell, and are believed to have this sort of relationship; both are embodiments of Lust, after all. Being devils, it's very much a Big Screwed-Up Family.
    • Another D&D example, this time being the squickier grandparental incest; Lolth, evil goddess of the drow, forced her grandson, a drow war-god, to be her bodyguard and consort for a long time before he was killed off. He apparently hated both positions.
    • Van Richten's Guide to Witches, from the Ravenloft setting, tells the myth of how hags were first created, and this Trope plays a vital part. Here's the short version: A woman is a faithful and loving wife towards her husband for many years, bearing him three sons. But the husband is unfaithful, and blatantly rejects her in favor of a younger woman. Her sons refuse to defend her, equating youth with usefulness. The rejected wife is granted dark powers by a malevolent entity, uses a disguise to seduce her husband, kidnaps his lover and holds her hostage, then murders him. Later, she seduces her oldest son (a powerful warrior) the same way, is impregnated by him, then kills him. Then she uses dark magic to transfer her unborn child to the captive woman's womb, and she bears the first annis. She does the same with her second eldest son, a farmer and outdoorsman, uses the same dark magic, and the infant is the first greenhag. Her youngest son, a sailor and fisherman, is not fooled by such a trick and wary due to the deaths of his siblings, so this time she disguises herself as his wife to seduce him, kills him, and again, impregnates her hostage, bearing the first sea hag. Van Richten himself admits in his narrative that the ghastly story is likely apocryphal, and a sidebar confirms this view.

A rather unpleasant way of avoiding this due to Loophole Abuse is found in the Book of Vile Darkness, where it mentions a cruel tyrant who was a previous owner of the Despoiler of Flesh, a cursed artifact which could reshape the flesh of others. This despot was attracted to his very beautiful daughters, but he refused to force himself on them. Instead, to satisfy his urges, he used the Despoiler on his slave girls to make them look like his daughters, and used them instead.

  • In Warhammer Fantasy Battle the Dark Elf Witch King Malekith and his mother Morathi are strongly implied to be lovers. Given that Morathi is a devoted follower of Slaanesh and will screw Anything That Moves, this is likely true.
  • The Exalted setting book for the Blessed Isle says that a high-ranking mortal Realm official is in a relationship with her Dragon Blooded father. It's apparently taboo enough for them to keep it a secret, but not so taboo that there are any consequences for the fact that the rest of the Dynasty knows anyway.

Theater

  • Shakespeare: Gets the plot rolling in Pericles. Pericles want to marry the daughter of King Antiochus but the king demands Pericles solve a riddle; the riddle basically says the king is having sex with the daughter. Pericles figures out the riddle but doesn't actually answer, but the king figures out that Pericles figured it out and sends goons after Pericles to silence him. In the end, both Antiochus and his daughter spontaneously combust.
  • Emperor Nero with his mother Agrippa, both (rumoured) in Real Life, and in I, Claudius.
  • The plot of Paula Vogel's How I Learned To Drive. (Well, actually her uncle, but Peck is as close to a father as L'il Bit has.) Oddly enough, the relationship is presented as sympathetically as possible, without downplaying the fact that Peck does horrible things.
  • ... Oedipus Rex?
  • There's an uncomfortable moment in act 2 of Wicked where the Wizard is trying to seduce Elphaba back to his side. The implication is there and you later find out that he's her father.
  • In Arthur Miller's play A View from the Bridge the main character is in love with his niece, whom he raises as a daughter, but he can't even admit this to himself.
  • In Spring Awakening one of the boys is said to have had a wet dream about his mother, and also the characters of Martha and Ilse are/were both sexually abused by their fathers.
  • In The Marriage of Figaro (both the Mozart opera and the original Beaumarchais play), Marcellina is determined to make Figaro follow through on a contractual obligation to marry her. Until it's discovered that Figaro is her long-lost bastard child.
  • "Accidentally" implied (and, like everything, played for laughs) in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, when they combine all sixteen comedies into one.

The Play: The pages' clothes get ripped off, revealing female genitalia. The Duke recognizes his daughter's.
Everyone: ...

  • Some versions of the musical Pippin imply this with Fastrada and her son Lewis.
  • In Richard Wagner's Die Walküre, Wotan seems way too fond of his daughter Brünhilde. His wife Fricka calling Brünhilde "the bride of his desire" also doesn't help.


Video Games

  • The patron saints of this trope have to be Aleph and Hiroko. Not only do they play the exact role of Official Couple Kazuya and Yuka from the previous game, but they set out to "rebuild the world" at the end of the game, possibly with Adam and Eve in mind (well, they did just fight God). Bear in mind that Hiroko is Aleph's mother...
  • Otacon reveals that he slept with his stepmother during a conversation in Metal Gear Solid: Sons of Liberty. He was a teenager at the time, and it's implied that his stepmother was slightly predatory. This was outright stated to be the reason why his father killed himself, cementing Otacon's Woobie status.
  • In Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, it's revealed that Therese was raped repeatedly by her father as a child, which is part of the reason why she has a split personality (the other part being she's a Malkavian)
    • Within the setting, Malkavians have a habit of choosing individuals who are already insane in some way (or who are on the borderline) to turn into vampires. It's almost a given that she had already developed her split personality long before being Embraced, and that her sire was drawn to her because of it.
    • The player character can get this as well with the optional runaway backstory. Which limits your social and seduction skills but gives you great bonuses on hiding and staying quiet.
  • This is more of a fan reaction than anything that actually happens in the game, but for some reason, an alarming number of naughty Oblivion mods are targeted at Seed-Neeus and Dar-Ma, the mother-and-daughter Argonian team in Chorrol. (Some involve threesomes with the player character, some just have them directly go after each other, but most at least involve the two naked in the same room....) That, or when advertising more generic naughty mods (nudity mods, remodeled/textured female bodies, etc.,) Seed-Neeus and Dar-Ma seem to be the examples in the screenshots a disproportionate amount of the time.
  • Angela and Thomas Orosco in Silent Hill 2 are the only instance of this in canon, although fans theorize that the trope has appeared elsewhere in the series as well.
    • To be more precise, some fans have actually shipped Heather, the heroine of Silent Hill 3, and her father in a combination of Wife Husbandry and May–December Romance. There are some mitigating circumstances, though the power dynamic can still make this one awfully squicky. The fact that the opening song's lyrics, confirmed by Word of God as describing Heather's feelings about her father, use a lot of sexually charged metaphors certainly doesn't help matters any.
      • Now that Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is out, in a way, that the ship is now canon. Cheryl of SHSM does indeed love her father. Very, VERY much. And this time, there's not even the mitigating circumstances any more. She's his blood daughter, as far as we know.
  • In Clock Tower 3, Lord Burroughs is so obsessed with his daughter that he ignores his wife, murders his son-in-law, and abducts his daughter. Later, he transfers his obsession to his granddaughter, the heroine Alessa, who's the very image of her mother. She manages to stop him though. Also a case of Love Makes You Evil.
  • In the Princess Maker series, it is possible to make the girl marry her adopted father. Many squick at this but some don't. (See Wife Husbandry.) They are not blood related and, depending on what age you set for the "father," the age gap isn't big at all.
    • In Anime/Manga, a 15-year-old raising a 10-year-old is often used in those cases of "older sibling raising younger sibling(s) due to being orphans." Considering the "father" is a war hero (there are just as many young heroes as there as old in Anime/Manga), it "should" be easier.
    • In the second game... not only the ending is very hard to get (the daughter must have very low morals, to start), but it's frowned upon by the Gods and the townspeople. The Guardian Deity openly says they're very surprised that this is happening, and only (reluctantly) approve because they're not related by blood.
  • Warden Clement of House of the Dead: Overkill almost definitely had this relationship with his mother, transplanting her brain into the body of Varla Gunns and making out with her. In the end, after the main characters kill the giant mutant version of his mother, he insists on returning to the womb in order to undo his wrongs. Agent G then notes the irony of Cluster F-Bomb flinging Washington using Motherfucker all the time except with Clement, which he somehow relates into how deep down, Washington actually likes G as a friend.
  • The Pokedad meme has Lickitung representing this trope.
    • Also Ninetales and Gardevoir.
  • In Ending E of the PlayStation 2 adventure game Shadow of Destiny, Eike Kusch, a de-aged immortal bishounen with recurring permanent amnesia, gets together and lives happily ever after with his biological daughter Dana, who was switched with another child as an infant in medieval Germany, and brought to the present day as a baby by the manipulative djinn Homunculus, in one hell of an insanely convoluted backstory. Neither of them apparently know they are actually blood-related, and it is unclear whether or not Eike still has eternal youth, but it's best not, because the alternative would be tragic otherwise. Eike and Dana both deserve some happiness!
  • Characters in Medieval: Total War can have this as a surprisingly common trait, reducing their religious support if it's discovered. This can sometimes happen with rather unlikely characters, such as unmarried 15 year olds. Strangely, Brother-Sister Incest never happens unless you specifically order it.
  • In the first Devil May Cry, Dante falls for Trish because she looks exactly like his mother, in sexy clothes. It's never really explored.
  • In the dimension of Praetoria in City of Heroes, the evil Emperor "Tyrant" Cole, mirror of the main hero "Statesman", has his needs attended to by the villainess "Dominatrix"—his granddaughter.
    • As of a recent official Q&A for the Going Rogue expansion, this has been rather humorously averted. The devs of the game had actually failed to notice this implication when the Praetorians were featured originally, and several fans calling attention to it got a rather entertaining "oh, crap, we did not mean to do that" reaction from them. Content since has been revised to avoid any sort of implication along these lines.
      • The comic actually implied it a lot more directly while at the same time pointing out the familial connection.
  • Used as a path to immortality by the villain Croseus Verlac in the interactive fiction game Anchorhead—and continues in the family for nearly four centuries.
  • In Umineko no Naku Koro ni, it turns out that Kinzo had an affair with his (dead) mistress's daughter. Kinzo was already pretty screwed up even before he met Bice, wanting to die before she gave him a reason to live...so when she died, and their daughter grew to look more and more like her mother as she got older, Kinzo lost touch with reality and truly believed his daughter WAS his deceased mistress reincarnated. And he does seem to deeply regret his sin, wanting nothing more than to apologize to her and the child that resulted from that sin. After this daughter dies, the child who resulted from that affair (Yasu) then grows up to become the 'Beatrice' of 1986...and falls in love with at least two of the cousins (who are technically also his/her nephews) though he/she didn't actually know they were related until years later.
  • Features into the backstory of Yaginuma and Shinji in Kara no Shoujo. The first's sister was raped by their father in an attempt to shield him, causing him to put up a Jerkass Facade that you only get to see come down once. The latter was raped by his mother and accidentally killed her.
  • Monster Girl Quest: Luka can potentially be raped by his grandmother Ilias and aunt Eden. It's complicated by the fact that the latter two are angels, which are made of holy energy, so the biological relation between them is unclear. Monster Girl Quest Paradox continues this trend, adding in Luka's mother, other aunt, and daughter from an alternate universe.


Web Comics

  • Sexy Losers has the "Kenta's Horny Mom" arc, which was Exactly What It Says on the Tin. (It is unrequited, though, and most of the humor comes from Kenta's weirded-out reaction when his mom keeps all but throwing herself at him.) There were also a couple of fourth wall-breaking strips later where the author, in an interview, pitched the idea of a Gender Flip version of that same story with a father and daughter, and all the sudden it went from funny to seriously creepy.
    • And each such strip featured the author beaten to a pulp by the same people who had laughed at the original version.
    • Which, in an uncanny turn, later changes gears to Kenta's Mother relentlessly pursuing Kenta's girlfriend. To the point of death. And then some.
    • Also played with in a one-shot strip, where a man, who is sleeping with his mother, thinks their secret is out because everybody (who he angers for unrelated reasons) keeps calling him "motherfucker".
    • There's also a strip where a boss catches his employee, who called in sick, having sex with an older woman. The boss is angry, of course, as the employee can't be all that sick if he's bumping uglies, but he explains that he's actually very sick.
  • DMFA joked about this.
    • Twice.
    • To be fair, she is a succubus.
  • This is one of the multiple reasons Lita in the webcomic Jack hates her father so much. It's also pretty clear that Drip raped his son Fnar; nothing was actually shown, but Fnar was found naked, weeping, and with Drip's trademark eye scars.
  • The supposedly autobiographical sideplots of Kit N Kay Boodle feature the artist and his girlfriend having sex in front of her mother, who masturbates to it in clear view of them. In a later one, the girlfriend's mother has cybersex with the artist's father in a chatroom containing the artist, the girlfriend, and several of their friends, none of whom seem remotely uncomfortable with the idea (though the artist wilts when his father demands grandchildren). Crush Yiff Destroy described the sideplot thus: "While it may not be entirely true, it cannot be read as anything other than an expression of the author's deepest Freudian issues."
  • Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff does this in one comic. The exchange goes something like this:

"I took [off my pants] because I was banging your mom for a minute there. And now you are banging her. HE HE HE."

  • Questionable Content: in the very first appearances (only two or three strips) of Marten's mom, her face is drawn EXACTLY like Faye's - and Marten at the time has a crush on Faye. Her look changes quickly until she looks almost identical to Dora - who Marten will become involved with shortly afterword. Dora also used to masturbate to Marten's mom's image, the squickiness of which is brought up by a horrified Marten.
  • In the old Drowtales, the manual stated exclusively that this is common practice among Drow. Since the number of children one has is a status symbol, parents often train their own children the art of concieving offsprings. Drowtales has been dramatically toned down with each remake, removing all referances to underage sex in particular, so it's very unlikely this still is the case.
  • In Life with Lamarr, remember when Breen and Mossman got it on during a Breencast? Well, it turns out that she's his mother, and Breen had aged extremely quickly due to his father, Kleiner, messing around with age serum.
  • Implied but averted in Girl Genius, where Prince Aaronev of Sturmhalten was trying to download the mind of Lucrezia/the Other into his daughter's body. The process fails and eventually kills her but given just how obsessed he is with the Other, and how the Other in Agatha's body fawns all over his son saying how alike they look, what he appears to have had in mind for his daughter's posessed body becomes pure Fridge Horror.
  • In Sister Wulfia Focka ... well, let's just say that the Big Screwed-Up Family formed by the eponymous naughty nun, her demon lover and their child is really screwed up. Even before Lyl has to kill the kid.
  • The doom cultists in 8-Bit Theater are implied to do this.
  • The title character of Niels thinks of sex as the ultimate expression of paternal love (whether for an actual father, or merely a father figure.) The author has lampshaded the implications for when his foster son turns eighteen.
  • Sinfest has had many gags that imply Lil' E has a crush on the devil. Recent revelations about his relationship with the devil have moved that to this trope.
  • In Erstwhile, the king resolves on this in "All-Furs".


Web Original

  • Subverted in Tea, Biscuits and Incest where Makayla is impregnated by her father Chad but neither of them know he's the father because it was artificial insemination by sperm donor. But then played straight so to speak when Chad finds out that Jayden, who he was having an affair with is his long lost son and Makayla's twin brother And then Chad reveals that their mother is also his daughter..


Western Animation

  • Futurama: Fry became his own grandfather by having sex with his grandmother.
    • "I did do the nasty in the pasty."
      • And that past nastification actually makes him the only person capable of saving the entire universe.
  • American Dad: In one episode, Hayley dates her father's identical body double. Her mother Francine is understandably uncomfortable with it, making her feel sick emotionally and physically.
    • That's only half of the story. Stan and Francine get rid of the body double after he makes a move on Francine. But to make sure that Hayley doesn't lose it, Stan pretends to be his own double on the camping trip Hayley and body double planned together. Unfortunately for Stan, Hayley decides that they are finally going to have sex, and Stan has to fend off increasingly explicit advances Hayley makes towards him while being disturbed that she would do such things. Including a threesome with a waitress.

Stan: (crying) You used to watch Sesame Street.

    • In another episode Francine looses her memory and runs off with Hayley's boyfriend. Stan suggest that both he and Hayley should get back at them by dating eachother. He quickly reconsiders.
  • Drawn Together: Princess Clara's father loves watching strippers... even if they're his own daughter. He especially loves watching his daughter make out with her attractive black roommate, Foxxy Love. And Clara, naive person that she is, equates his leering with paternal love.
    • "You smell like your mother..." Said while making out with her. Yikes.
  • American Dragon: Jake Long In episode when Jake return to the parent's past his Grandpa paired Jake and his mother together. to their horror. He didn't know the future though, and later when he said they were on a date... They didn't agree
  • Family Guy plays up this vibe deliberately with Chris, who has a pretty obvious attraction to his mother Lois. She seems more or less oblivious to it, and it's always Played for Laughs as a Running Gag, but a brief scene in the extra material of the movie's DVD showed just what it would look like if the writers ever decided to do something serious with it.
    • In "Airport '07", when Peter wants to be a redneck, he tries to hit on Meg, using the Yawn and Reach. She runs away screaming.
    • In "Dial Meg For Murder", Meg takes a level in badass after spending some time in prison. In one scene, she goes into a shower stall with her father Peter still in there, and does terrible things to him with a loofah. We don't see what happens, but considering what goes on in prison...
    • One episode also has a joke in this vein about Gilmore Girls characters Lorelai and Rory Gilmore.
    • From The Movie: "Now that we've practiced kissing and cuddling, we'll practice eating out... at a fancy restaurant!"
    • Peter develops an attraction towards Meg in the episode "Go Stewie Go!"
    • However, whenever Meg makes any advances towards Lois, even if Chris did so first with no repercussions or if it was only a joke (as both of this scenarios did happen), she is immediately reviled and forced from the house/room.
    • There's also "Peter's Progress," which has Peter's past life involved with at least a woman identical to (and named) Meg, but is most likely actually Meg's past life. Lois' past life, on the other hand, marries Stewie's past life when she's misled to think Peter is dead.
    • Glenn Quagmire, on the other hand, goes beyond subtext several times. Petergeist has the Griffins interrupt his "family game night" while Brian The Bachelor shows him setting up a threesome between the lovely girl-de-jour and his mother. One of their infamous cutaways makes a gag about how he, as a baby, somehow got off on breast feeding. ...this explains a LOT about his character.
      • Though the people we see in the house for "family game night" don't look anything like his relatives that we've seen, so it may have just been a weaksauce excuse he made up.
      • There was also the time he got an erection while hugging his recently sex-changed father.


Real Life

Moderator's Note: Please keep all examples in this section on-topic and documented. "Not really incest, but" or "It was rumored that" or "You know what they say" means it is not an example for this page.

  • Thomas Mann's diaries record that he felt strongly attracted to his son Klaus, the second of his six children, when Klaus was 14.
  • Kathryn Harrison, had a incestuous relationship with her biological father and later wrote an autobiographical account of it, "The Kiss", which helped publicize the then-undocumented phenomenon of Genetic Sexual Attraction.
  • Pearl Carter bears her grandson Phil Bailey's baby
  • Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned his daughter Elisabeth and fathered seven kids by her (in addition to the seven-counting-his-daughter that he sired by his wife). Truly an Australian disgrace.
  • Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn (he was her quasi-stepfather, being her adoptive mother's long-time boyfriend, but still.)
  • As part of a BBC My Shocking Story documentary on incest, a mother/son couple was interviewed in near-total darkness, as they are understandably fearful of being found out... unlike the other mother/son couple (? or maybe they were a May–December Romance brother and sister) who were perfectly fine with being interviewed on camera.
  • Pick any random Pharaoh from Egypt. Odds are good this may be the circumstances of their birth, although it's equally as likely that they were the produce of kissing cousins or brother-sister incest.
    • This is slightly arguable, due to different use of terminology in those days. For example, all the women in the palace technically belonged to the Pharaoh's harem, his mother included, but harem in this case did not absolutely mean exchange of sexual favours, though it theoretically could, and the Pharaohs called their wives as their sisters, regardless of whether they actually were related or not - the appearance of incest was more important to the Egyptian Pharaohs than necessarily the real thing, although at least some apparently did follow the custom literally.
    • Actually, DNA testing of various mummies has proven that there truly was a great deal of incest going in the royal family throughout Egypt's history. In fact, the incest between very close relatives went on to such a degree that it's made it difficult for expert sceintists to distinguish different generations.
  • Some years ago TV actress Mackenzie Phillips told Oprah Winfrey that her father, musician John Phillips, raped her when she was nineteen on the eve of her wedding while she was passed out. An allegedly "consensual" sexual relationship ensued for several years after that. Ms. Phillips ended it when she became pregnant and had an abortion because she didn't know if the father was her husband or John Phillips.
  • Serial killer Fred West was raised in a household were incest was considered fine, his father told him to "do whatever [he] wanted, just don't get caught", and his mother allegedly sexually abused him from age 12. His wife Rosemary also grew up in a home where incest was accepted and her father would visit their house after they were married to have sex with his daughters. West also raped his own daughters.
  • Casanova once planned to get married, but it turned out that the woman in question was his own illegitimate daughter. So they just had sex instead. Along with her mother.
  • Anais Nin wrote that before age 11, she was accustomed to her father photographing her naked. Her family told her he had beaten her frequently, but she couldn't remember it. She suspected he had also molested her. When she was about thirty he came back into her life and had an intense sexual affair lasting several months. Letters were discovered that confirmed this was not a mere fantasy episode on Nin's part.
  • British former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott discovered on a TV programme he was filming for BBC Wales that his great-great grandmother had four children by her father.
  • Nassereddin Shah Qajar, Fourth King of the Qajar Dynasty of Iran, had about 50 wives, so naturally he had a lot of children. An amusing (probably apocryphal) story about him claims he saw a beautiful woman in his palace one day, became smitten with her, and proposed to her right there. He noticed everyone around him was looking at him strange, and when he asked why, they told him she was one of his daughters. Fortunately, this revelation caused him to rescind the proposal.
  • Ex-GAFF member Hellfire. Quotes straight from the horse's mouth: "My Mom was a controlling bitch, wouldn't any man with a wife like that turn to his daughter for sex? Yes, of course he would" and "If I got married, it would be to another person who liked incest, and if I had a son, yes, I would fuck my son, too, because it's the loving thing to do".
  • Supermodel Janice Dickinson witnessed her father sexually abusing her sister and he attempted to do with the same to her
  • Comedian Billy Connolly was the victim of parental incest perpetrated by his father as a child.
  • Though not technically incest genetically, Jake "The Snake" Roberts was conceived when his father raped his stepdaughter (Jake's older stepsister); this revelation led to Roberts' long bout with alchoholism and substance abuse.
  • Happens more often than people might think with long-lost relatives, be they parents and children or siblings thanks to genetic sexual attraction. There have been several cases around the world where two children who were adopted have met and married one another with no idea they were siblings, because it's theorized that, lacking the Westermarck Effect, two people can be drawn to one another because of similar pheromones and other physical cues. Nearly always extremely traumatizing to the parties involved, so much so that the actual percentage of those who experience it is unknown, as many people are understandably hesitant to come forward about it.
  • One of the many accusations thrown at Marie Antoinette. At her trial during the height of the Terror, she was accused by Hebert of personally teaching the Dauphin to masturbate, in order to weaken his character and control him. She refused at first to answer to the charge, but when one of the jurymen insisted, she turned to the women in the court, appealing to them as mothers. This nearly secured her acquittal, much to the fury of Robespierre.
  • Billionaire Bruce Mcmahan seduced his biological daughter and had a long secret affair with her, which continued on even when she was already legally married to someone else.
  • David Epstein at Columbia copped a plea bargain and was convicted of attempted incest with his adult daughter.
  • In December 2011, at a pep rally in Rosemount High School in Minnesota, a bunch of students were blindfolded and given a partner to kiss. The pairs then started to make out, with one pair rolling on the floor and a person pulling the hands of her blindfolded partner down onto her butt. The students then took off their blindfolds to see that their partner was their own mother or father. Yeah. There's an article and a video of the disastrous prank here
  • The practice of fathers taking their daughters to "Purity balls" to ensure that their daughters remain "pure" until marriage. And it involves dressing up, dancing with each other, and the father giving a ring to his daughter, who then promises her virginity to her father until she's married, at which point she'll give it to her husband. The resemblance to date nights has been pointed out numerous times.
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