MoBros: Am I the only one that finds this a little disturbing? A single family in a completely isolated region with morbidly deformed offspring... Oh, no. Are they really suggesting?
Flavor Text: INCEST
MoBros: Kids may not pick up on that, but it's still a stereotype.
Flavor Text: INCEST
MoBros: Kids may not pick up on that, but it's still a stereotype.
One common incest association links it to poor, rural, unsophisticated people. There are a couple different angles to come at it from:
- Acceptable Targets: Wealthier urban people like to feel superior by telling narratives about how poor rural people are Half Witted Hillbillies: stupid, backwards, and worthy of ridicule.
- Logistics: In small communities, everyone is likely to be related. If the community is isolated and people neither move in nor out, where else are you going to find a partner?
- Lawlessness: In places outside the reach of a strong central government, you can get away with bucking the rules. Who's going to enforce them?
This trope can be set either Down on the Farm or in the Wild Wilderness. It goes hand-in-hand with Hillbilly Horrors. There's a high level of co-occurrence with Bandit Clan and Cannibal Clan.
Hillbilly incest is usually Played for Laughs or Played for Horror. Either way, it skews heavily toward short gags. Very rarely is it a topic explored in depth or given much time. It's very derogatory, pulling in tropes like Inbred and Evil and Villainous Incest. It often dips into Black Comedy Rape. It's virtually never the Forbidden Love that can be found in upper-class incest.
While the two are framed very differently, there is still some surprising parallelism to its Opposite Trope, Royal Inbreeding. Incest is associated with the extreme upper and lower classes, and almost never with the middle class.
In the US, hillbilly incest is associated with the Deep South and Appalachia. In the UK, it's associated with Norfolk and the West Country. In Australia, it's associated with Tasmania.
While there have been recorded instances in real life, No Real Life Examples, Please!
When adding examples, remember that the average reader isn't familiar with the characters. You need to list some traits that identify them as hillbillies.
Sweet Folds Alabama!
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Comic Books
- The Authority: The monstrous Three-Willy Seth is supposedly the product of a bunch of hillbillies gang-raping their sister.
- Old Man Logan: Bruce Banner has gone insane after the villains took over and fathered an inbred clan of green-skinned cannibal hillbillies on his cousin Jennifer. Green-skinned inbred hillbillies are an allusion to the real-life Fugate family of Kentucky, whose rare genetic mutation caused blue skin.
- Providence: When Robert Black visits the Wheatley family, he gets an earful from the town barber that patriarch Garland Wheatley is a bizarre hillbilly who fathered children on his daughter. The truth manages to be even more disturbing: Wheatley willingly became possessed by an Elder God who used him to impregnate his daughter with the monstrous (and thankfully invisible) John-Divine.
Fan Works
- Arrest Ye Merry Gentlemares: Spitfire denigrates Ponyville as an Earth Pony (a.k.a farmer-based) Deep South-esque rural settlement, and references rumors of incest with cousins.
Spitfire: Typical ground town. Barely mustered enough wingpower to refill the Cloudsdale reservoir. The most exciting thing there is probably the gossip about who got caught cuddling with their cousin this week.
Film — Live-Action
- Blazing Saddles: Implied with the residents of Rockridge, a typical humble, peaceful Old Western-film town where everyone has the last name "Johnson". This — and their moronic, racist behavior — is meant to highlight the stupidity of racism and discrimination overall in the film.
- My Cousin Vinny: Stan discusses this on the phone with Bill's mother when explaining why they think they're being framed as murderers by the Alabama police. This gets a negative reaction from the guards nearby.
Bill: [to his mother] We think they're setting us up as patsies. You know how corrupt it is down here — they all know each other...
Stan: The Klan's here, they're inbred, they sleep with their sisters... [realizes the guard is glaring at them]... some of them do. - Wrong Turn: The Mountain Men are an inbred Cannibal Clan of hillbillies lurking in the hills. The first film touches only lightly on the inbreeding itself, showing them as grotesquely deformed and showing articles about inbreeding briefly in the Photo Montage over the opening credits. The sequels get into this more centrally, exploring the exact family dynamics the killers have.
Jokes
- What did the redneck ask his girlfriend after they broke up? "Can we still be cousins?"
Literature
- Gautrek's Saga — a Norse saga from the late 13th century — has a very early Unbuilt example. Skafnortung is the patriarch of a family of hillbillies living an extremely isolated life in the forests of Götaland. None seem able to imagine a life outside their farm, so Skafnortung pairs his six grown-up children (three sons, three daughters) into three couples — although he ties this up with the advice not to procreate because their little farm cannot support more people. No actual incest takes place. Skafnortung's children don't even know about sex and think women can get pregnant from any touch, which they diligently avoid. We don't know how Skafnortung met his own wife Totra, but the readiness with which he advises his own children to marry each other and the fact that both spouses are noticeably small could Imply their marriage was also incestuous.
- Whenever rural characters show up in the works of H. P. Lovecraft, this is likely to be at least implied. Cases where it's explicit or close to it include:
- The Lurking Fear: The Catskills locals in general are described as "gently descending the evolutionary scale," but the Martenses take it a step further. They have bred themselves among themselves until they've turned into a race of tunnel-dwelling goblins.
- The Dunwich Horror: The story is set in the remote backwoods of Massachusetts, and much is made of the rural nature and the low intellect of the residents. It is heavily implied that Old Man Whateley served as a vessel for Eldritch Abomination Yog-Sothoth to impregnate his daughter, Lavinia. This resulted in the birth of two children.
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince combines this with Royal Inbreeding in the case of the decrepit Gaunt family, an ancient lineage of pureblooded wizards in Campbell Country who have descended into squalor over the centuries but who stubbornly refuse to marry non-purebloods. This appears to have negatively impacted their physical appearance (note the father's apelike physique and his children's Fish Eyes) and mental health.
- To Kill a Mockingbird: Within their small Alabama town, the Ewells are a desperately poor family who live in the town dump and are looked down upon by their neighbors for their poverty, lack of hygiene, and boorish behavior. The patriarch, Bob Ewell, is heavily implied to sexually abuse his eldest daughter Mayella.
Tom Robinson: She says she never kissed a grown man before... She says what her papa do to her don't count.
- Murder in Advent by David Williams has the reclusive Daras family holed up in their remote farm: an elderly patriarch and three women of varying ages, his daughter and granddaughters. A character who knows the family says she suspects he sleeps with all of them.
- Red Dwarf: In Backwards, the crew are accosted by an enraged hillbilly and later encounter a dead body that looks a lot like that hillbilly. Kryten surmises that the corpse is probably the first hillbilly's brother or cousin, and Rimmer snidely remarks, "Probably both. Probably his father and his uncle, too."
- A Song of Ice and Fire: Craster is the Medieval European Fantasy version of a hillbilly. He's the bastard son of a member of the Night's Watch and a Wildling woman, but he's part of neither Westerosi nor Wildling society. He lives in an isolated, rundown shack in the middle of the forest with his Big, Screwed-Up Family. He has 19 "wives" because for generations he has been marrying his daughters, siring more children on them, and keeping the daughters and leaving his sons to die of exposure or be taken by ice zombies.
Sam: Dolorous Edd says Craster's a terrible savage. He marries his daughters and obeys no laws but those he makes himself.
- Conversational Troping in Thief of Time, when Death looks at three moments in Gytha Ogg's life, and the raven questions how she went from "Miss Ogg" to "Mrs Ogg", saying "That sounds a bit rural, if you get my meaning". (It's actually because witches are matrilinear.)
- Phil Rickman's The Wine of Angels features a reclusive farming family whose sons are expected to lose their virginity to their mother before going out to rape and murder innocent victims. It's set in a fictional village in the West Midlands.
Live-Action TV
- It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: The McPoyle clan leans heavily into this trope. They are implied to be hillbillies due to their rural accents and the family meeting in a remote cabin in the woods. The whole family is very inbred. Siblings Liam, Ryan, and Margaret McPoyle are all overtly sexual toward one another.
- Justified is set in the Deep South and generally averts this trope. However, Bo Crowder discusses this trope (among other stereotypes) and disparages it.
Bo Crowder: I may not own a private plane or a fancy car, and when you look at me, you probably see some dumb redneck who likes to eat roadkill for breakfast and have sex with his cousins. I don't eat roadkill and I don't screw my relatives and I didn't just get off of no shortbus.
- Whose Line Is It Anyway?: In one "Scenes From a Hat" game, they are given a prompt for hillbilly renditions of Shakespeare. Greg does a version of Romeo and Juliet where they're cousins.
Romeo: Juliet, you get down here! I love you and you're my cousin! Get on down here!
- The X-Files: The greatly controversial episode "Home" is about a murderous, inbred clan terrified of losing their home to urbanization. They live in the rural small town of Home, Pennsylvania. The matriarch, Mrs. Peacock, is involved in incestuous relationships with her sons, one of them being the father of the other two.
Magazines
- MAD: One issue has a Faux Documentary of the hillbilly lifestyle that includes a budding teen romance. A corpulent girl stuffing herself with snack cakes and soda is getting a kiss on the cheek from an unkempt rural boy. The caption below them reads, "After plying her with Ho-Ho's and Dr. Pepper, George finally gets to second base with his sister Emily." Peering from the house's window are their parents presumably, beaming at this development.
Music
- The song "I'm My Own Grandpa" is a strange zigzagging example, where the incest is subverted and the hillbilly aspect is merely implied. The song is about a man who, through an unlikely (but not incestuous) combination of marriages, becomes stepfather to his own stepmother. Most renditions use humorous "redneck" speech patterns. When it appeared on The Muppet Show, it was performed by a hillbilly jugband.
- Insane Clown Posse, "Piggy Pie":
The first little piggy, his house is made of wood
He lives in a chicken, turkey, piggy neighborhood
He likes to fuck his sister, and drink his moonshine
A typical redneck filthy fuckin' swine - Kurtis Conner's song "Blood Related" is a Country Music parody full of Deep South stereotypes, about how a Southern man is disappointed to fall in love with a girl who isn't related to him. He ends up marrying her brother just so he'll be related to the girl he's in love with.
- Lou Reed: "Beginning of a Great Adventure" is a song about the narrator thinking about having a child or more children, which contains this verse:
Why stop at one, I might have ten, a regular TV brood
I'd breed a little liberal army in the wood
Just like these redneck lunatics I see at the local bar
With their tribe of mutant inbred piglets with cloven hooves. - Poxy Boggards: "Inbred Local"
is from the POV of the titular inbred local who wishes he had more chromosomes. He has a cousin-father-grampa and is married to his niece. The song's Folk Music genre implies a rural background. Artistic License – Biology: Having "more chromosomes" actually causes trisomy disorders like Down's Syndrome. Wanting to be less inbred would mean wanting "more heterozygous genes."
- "Weird Al" Yankovic: Discussed in "A Complicated Song". When the narrator learns that his girlfriend is actually his cousin right as he was about to propose, he wonders what he should do from there.
Believe me, if I knew she was my cousin we never would have dated.
What to do now? Should I go ahead and propose,
And get hitched and have kids with 11 toes,
And move to Alabama where that kind of thing is tolerated? - Comedy-country artist Wheeler Walker Jr.'s song "Redneck Shit" lists the many things he does that make him proud to be a redneck, and having sex with a number of his family members pops up a few times.
Fuck my cousin in her asshole 'fore I finish on her tits,
Then I shoot my neighbor's cat, I love that redneck shit!
Radio
- The Now Show: The Wurzels protested that a book about Somerset was filled with stereotypes and clichés. Amused that this was coming from the band that had done so much to promote this stereotype, Mitch Benn wrote an I Resemble That Remark! song which included the lines:
Oi, 'ow dare you,
Say that we're inbred?
Oi told moi woife and mother,
An' this is what she said...
Stand-Up Comedy
- Jeff Dunham's redneck puppet Bubba J Subvertes this with a Bait-and-Switch. He says he met his wife at a family reunion — then clarifies that she was on the catering staff.
- Jeff Foxworthy's notorious "You Might Be a Redneck If..." routine includes several jokes about incest such as "if your family tree does not fork..." or "if you go to a family reunion to pick up women..."
Tabletop Games
- Pathfinder: Ogres are based on a particularly monstrous and savage take on the theme of depraved cannibal hillbillies, complete with crude slang from the US South and a taste for banjos. They are also infamous for their incestuous practices, which often result in ogre clans being riddled with deformities, birth defects, and congenital disabilities.
Video Games
- Conker's Bad Fur Day: Upon meeting the dimwitted Franky the Pitchfork and hearing him try to issue threats in his heavy Southern US accent, Conker asks:
Conker: [to Frankie the Pitchfork] Were your parents related? Like, before they were married?
- Grand Theft Auto V: One random event has two redneck brothers engaging in sexual activities in a motor home at the wind farm. Upon getting too close to the van, the brothers will attack the character.
- The English localization of Lunar: The Silver Star has the rural village of Meryod being populated entirely by severely inbred hicks. Almost every single NPC in the village is some flavor of The Ditz. You're treated to this conversation when you first enter the village:
Nall: So this is Meryod... This is amazing, Alex. They built a city entirely of wooden planks suspended over the water.
Nash: No, the amazing part is that these hicks managed to nail anything not related to them.
This is entirely an invention of the localization. The original Japanese version doesn't even remotely hint at anything like this.
- Red Dead Redemption II:
- The Murfree Brood are a Cannibal Clan living in the caves of Roanoke Ridge (an area inspired by the Ozark Mountains) who terrorize travelers in the area. They're alleged to practice extensive inbreeding—many of them have visible deformities, and in-game dialogue shows family members referring to being incestuous with one another.
- Bray and Tammy Aberdeen are rural pig farmers. They invite Arthur into their house for a meal with the intent of poisoning and looting him. Midway through the dinner, Arthur realizes they're brother and sister and becomes increasingly disturbed by them flirting with one another. It's also implied that they may have been sexually abused by their parents as children, inspiring them to murder them and take over the farm.
- Streets of Rogue: The backstory of the playable Cannibal mentions inbreeding as one of the reasons for their deranged behavior — the other reasons being toxic waste and the fact that they are morally opposed to eating animal meat, but also think vegan food is disgusting.
Web Comics
- Nip and Tuck: Rebuffed with the "redneck rebuttals". Jeff Foxworthy jokes about inbreeding, and Tuck responds with a quip about European royalty.
- Schlock Mercenary: Dr Bunnigus's hillbilly parents were mandated to use eugenics for their child, implied to be on grounds of being inbred.
Web Original
- Whenever incest of any variety is brought up online, it has become a meme for users to comment "Sweet Home Alabama!" and/or "Roll Tide!" in reference to the stereotype of the Deep South being a hotbed of hillbilly incest.
- SCP Foundation: SCP-7454 talks about rural folks having sex with their cousins:
SCP-7454: They were there to worship a two-thousand-year-old image of a pretty lady with her fucking tits out, hoping she would help them bang their cousins or whatever it is rural towns in this country do.
Web Video
- The Seven Deadly Schmucks: For this Abridged Series, Dawn Roar has been reimagined from being a Badass Crew into a Badass Family called the Skeeter Brothers. Each character is given a stereotypical redneck name and accent. Fitting the redneck theme, Token Female Jessie is also a Lust Object for the leader Skeeter whose canon counterpart Slader was a Manly Gay fighter.
Western Animation
- Family Guy:
- Episode 2.13 "Road to Rhode Island": Brian and Stewie see two hillbillies arguing with each other, leading to the following exchange:
Old man: You put your seed in my daughter's belly! You're fired!
Young man: But pa, you can't fire me!
Old man: You're lucky you're my brother too, or I'd kill you! - Episode 3.12 "To Love and Die in Dixie": The Griffin family moves to the town of Bumblescum in the Deep South. Meg ends up impressing the locals with her city-life intellect, and one of her new friends hopes that her brother hasn't already claimed dibs on her.
- Episode 5.12 "Airport '07": Peter attempts to adopt a redneck lifestyle. One part is trying to assault his daughter Meg, much to her disgust and horror.
(Peter puts his arm around Meg as they sit on a couch)
Meg: Dad? What are you doing?
Peter: Meg, I'm a redneck, which means I am about to do something to you that you will not remember until you're 40.
(Meg runs off screaming)
Peter: Meg, come back here! I meant sex!
- Episode 2.13 "Road to Rhode Island": Brian and Stewie see two hillbillies arguing with each other, leading to the following exchange:
- The Fairly OddParents!: In "Whittle Me This", Timmy mentions that hillbillies are cool due to several reasons, including that they can take their cousins to the prom.
- Fugget About It: The episode "Just Stick It In That There Doo-Dad" exaggerates this. Jimmy and Cookie are captured by hillbillies from rural Saskatchewan, solely for the purpose of getting some outsider DNA into their bloodstream as their constant inbreeding led to their kids being... weird. Cut to 4 albino kids levitating and reading advanced literature. They even mock Cookie for not being related to her husband. They refer to themselves as "brother-cousin-father-sons."
Cookie: [deadpan] ...So it's a Deliverance reunion?
- The Ren & Stimpy Show: In episode 3.10 "Lair of the Lummox", implied when a redneck refers to his wife as "Sister Momma" and she calls him "Brother Daddy".
- The Simpsons: The Half-Witted Hillbilly couple Cletus and Brandine are have frequent jokes about how they're related. Negative Continuity means their exact relation changes for whatever's funniest. They're either cousins, brother and sister, or mother and son.
- The Simpsons Movie: When asked to guess how local hillbilly Cletus could do a fake removing-his-finger trick, Russ Cargill sarcastically responds, "Four generations of inbreeding?"
- SpongeBob SquarePants: In episode 7.16 "Trenchbillies", it's a Implied Trope, as there's a single family in a completely isolated region with deformed offspring.
- Squidbillies: The Cuylers are a Dysfunctional Family of hillbilly squids, and there's a lot of incest within their family tree. Just to name a few examples: Gaga Pee-Pap is both Granny Ruby Jean's brother and ex-husband and he has made out with his grandson Rusty. Early's often implied to have non-consensual sex with his sister Lil. Rusty and his girlfriend Tammi are revealed to be half-siblings, but they still stay together and have a son named Randy.
