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Characters with incestuous subtext in a story. Even though incest is a taboo in many places in the world, it is not entirely impossible that accidental subtext can sneak in, either unintentionally or surreptitiously.

This can originate from the author intentionally playing with the closeness of the characters' relationship and slipping into romance, even though nothing serious was supposed to come out of it. In some works, especially comedy ones, this is usually Played for Laughs involving Lampshade Hanging, and can involve a Digging Yourself Deeper speech: "It's Not What It Looks Like! She's my sister!" "...that's DISGUSTING!"

There is another variation, when the attraction itself is textually there, but the characters are not literally blood related, so openly sexual relationships can also have incestuous subtext. For example, in Japanese works, girls might use Japanese Sibling Terminology for a guy (or especially a girl) they are in love with.

A Relative Error can come across this way (either intentionally or not) if the original "romantic" scene is a little too convincing. Compare Flirty Stepsiblings. Contrast Incest Yay Shipping, where subtext may or may not exist but fans create a relationship regardless. See also Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading for when any Incest Subtext was clearly not the intention of the writers.

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Examples:

The following works have their own page:

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  • This remake of an '80s Folger's commercial has a reunion between a guy who came back from college for Christmas to his younger sister. In the original, this is innocent Big Brother Worship due to her young age, but the remake ages her up and makes her actions seem rather flirtatious.

    Anime & Manga 
  • Bakugan. Mira is too obsessed with her brother. And Keith after meeting with Mira and accepting her on his side makes her wear a dress and all dinner looks like... a date. When Keith becomes good they share some sweet moments and she even BLUSHES then they talk. Squint at the final ending, they live together and their interaction isn't unlike those of newly married couples, and Gus is nowhere to be seen, so...
  • Betrayal Knows My Name: Touko and Tsukumo are rather close. Also, if you count the equation 'Zweilt partner = Couple'...
  • Bleach: Yuzu is a bit too into Ichigo after the time skip. There are multiple scenes that can be interpreted as her having a crush on her big brother. In the epilogue, as Karin implies that Yuzu has no problem with her nephew Kazui rooting around in her room being given a "free pass" like Ichigo.
  • In Boy's Abyss, Loser Protagonist Keiji's mother Yuko gives off some heavy Parental Incest vibes towards the middle of the series. She openly talks to Reiji about normally unmentionable things like her period or sex, she doesn't react when he walks in on her nude, she likes to sleep in his futon with him, and she becomes incredibly possessive of him. It turns out that she's been grooming Reiji to be complacent and willing to stay in town for her, and seeks to have a mutual suicide with him not unlike a lover's suicide. She even gets mad at him when his supposed last thoughts aren't about her, but of Nagi.
  • Chobits: It turns out the tragic backstory that forms the basis of Chii ending up on Hideki's doorstep is that she and her "twin" were created as Replacement Goldfish for the children that her creators could never have...except Freya, the older of the two, fell in romantic love with her creator and had a Heroic BSoD over the fact that 1) he's already Happily Married and 2) he sees her as his daughter.
  • CLANNAD:
  • Chrono Crusade:
    • Joshua is very obsessed with his older sister Rosette after he gets Chrono's horns and they turn him insane. It's later revealed to (probably) be because of a forgotten promise to himself that he would grow up "as fast as he could" so he could protect Rosette, but the way he talks about her and embraces her when they reunite really makes it seem like he has a thing for her. It doesn't help that he calls Fiore, whom he seems to have a crush on, "sister" at one point in the story. (And in fact, in the anime version he actually mistakes Fiore for his sister most of the time, but still has a few shippy scenes with her.)
    • In the manga version, Aion brings the severed head of Pandaemonium so close to his face it almost looks like he might have been kissing her. (His back is turned in the panel prior, so it's hard to say for sure.) It's later revealed that Pandaemonium is Aion's mother.
    • A (possibly) accidental example in the anime version: Chrono and Aion are portrayed as having been close friends in flashbacks, with Chrono saying at one point that Aion was "like a brother" to him. However, a later flashback has Aion bringing Chrono's face so close to his that they almost kiss. This scene is infamous among fans of the original manga, since Chrono and Aion are actually twins in the manga version.
  • In Copernicus Breathing, this is implied to have gone down between Bird's Nest and his younger brother Michel before Michel died. Although, since Bird's Nest isn't always a very reliable narrator, and the entirety of being a trapeze artist in the manga gives off an erotic Subtext this is still very much up in the air.
  • A Cruel God Reigns: This is played with throughout the series with Jeremy and his mother Sandra. Although mostly Played for Laughs in the thoughts of the other characters, there were a few quick hints that suggest serious subtext-a few panels that creepily seem to show Sandra kissing a very young Jeremy on the lips after telling him to call her by her first name after the death of his father, and thoughts from Jeremy along these lines:
    Jeremy: I loved Sandra. She was my best friend. No. She was my lover.
  • Akihiko and Haruhiko Beppu from the second season Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE! are fond of touching each other, getting extremely close to each other, draping themselves over one another at the beginning of their duet sequence, and the ending theme just kicks things into overdrive.
  • Mukuro in Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School is shown to have incestuous feelings for her younger twin sister Junko as she blushes and moans when talking or thinking about her, especially when she's being insulted or hit.
  • The director of Digimon Adventure episode 21 intended this for Hikari and Taichi.
  • Digimon Frontier joked a bit about twins Koji and Koichi's relationship with a scene where Koji as MagnaGarurumon gallantly saves Koichi from Crusadermon's clutches. The two brothers then proceed to look at each other intensely as Koichi thanks Koji for rescuing him and Koji says how glad he is that Koichi is safe, all with Love Bubbles for a background and an approving Lampshade Hanging by Crusadermon.
  • D.Gray-Man:
    • The game has Komui and Lenalee Lee has the room, that Komui designed for her. Their moments during the zombie arc don't help either.
    • Mana and Nea, though it's complicated since both of them are halves of the Millennium Earl. In their reunion, they embrace closely, touch each other's faces tenderly, and Mana even says that although he has a mission to complete he has always felt the need to be with Nea more strongly than anything.
  • The manga for .hack//Legend of the Twilight. The anime, however, removes the subtext, causing fans to dub the series as .hack//Twincest.
  • The Elder Sister-like One has a lot of ship tease between Chiyo and Yuu, though they technically aren't siblings in any real sense of the word (she's a Great Old One who made a contract with him to act as his older sister rather than an actual relative). This isn't helped by the fact that the series was originally hentai before it was picked up for serialization (or the fact that said hentai is apparently canon).
  • Final Fantasy: Unlimited has brothers Shiroi Kumo and Akai Kiri, who are so obsessed with each other that anything one of them does has something to do with the other in some way, shape, or form. At the start of the series, it has been twelve years since they've last seen each other, and hell, Kiri's been dead all that time, too. Their reunion features a lot of Say My Name and furiously clashing swords. Let's not even get into the soul dragons.
  • Veronica from Franken Fran might have a thing for her older sister Fran, with it occasionally implied and joked about. For example, the chapter "Right And Left" ends with Veronica keeping Fran's mindless extra body in her room and spending a lot of time alone with it for... reasons. The original run even ended with a bonus chapter in which the Madaraki siblings are in a QnA session, and one of the questions for Fran is if she's aware of Veronica possibly having a crush on her. Fran immediately brushes it off by saying that Veronica's just overly-reliant and has a habit of attaching herself to literally anyone who shows her a shred of affection.
  • Gou from Free! has a thing for muscles. Apparently her brother Rin is no exception. She doesn't drool over him like she does Haruka but she seems a bit too into his swimmer's physique.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) focuses heavily on the Elric brothers and their extreme devotion to each other (ironically, considering it's the second anime that's called Brotherhood), and downplays their relationships with other characters. Ed has at least three love interests but none of them get anywhere on screen. He spends a majority of the series, and especially The Movie, focusing on Al.
  • In The God of High School, after Ilpyo uses his Charyeok to take on a Naruto-esque Bishōnen kitsune-hybrid form, his cousin Seungah has a massive nosebleed and passes out with a smile.
  • Otori Itsuki and Hiragi Tsubasa from High School Star Musical have a fair amount of ship tease between them before it's revealed they're brothers. And even past that, the teasing between them continues.
  • Manga serialized in Manga Time Kirara are usually known for their Les Yay. Castle Town Dandelion, however, have lots of incest subtexts instead of homoerotic ones. Provided the cast being a Massively Numbered Siblings (9 of them), several pairing exists, sometimes doubles as twincest.
  • Chiaki and Kana from Minami-ke seem to show rather unsisterly affections towards Haruka, regularly fawning over her and showering her with praise. Perhaps it might be because she's their Parental Substitute, but the Beach Episode is very suspect, where they're incredibly eager to see her in a bikini.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam, there are rather questionable actions Gihren Zabi takes in the series concerning his sister Kycilia. Firstly there's the indifferent behavior Gihren has towards Garma and Dozle's deaths, and having no qualms with killing Degwin, but yet specifically stating that he plans to rule the new Zeon with "dear sister". Then also going out of his way to make sure Kycilia was warned about the Solar Ray firing by a messenger so she wouldn't be killed, the same weapon that intentionally killed daddy. And of course there's the dark tone of voice he used when Kycilia dared to mention having Char pilot the Zeong, saying "Char, once again. You're obsessed with him." Not coming to the logical conclusion that Kycilia might have chosen Char due to his newtype potential, but getting emotional over it instead. Completely one-sided, it's a mixture of Gihren imagining sexual tension to feed his fantasy because she shares some of his beliefs but of course cannot say anything about it. Kycilia is of course unaware of any of this conflict and rather cares more about their dead dad. Can lead to No Yay for obvious reasons.
  • In the Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin version of Char's first encounter with Sayla their fight scene is staged in such a way that it looks uncomfortably like he's trying to force himself on her. To his (very small) credit he does get a very subtle Oh, Crap! moment when he realizes who she is.
  • Maria no Danzai: Mari Nagare was once a happily married woman and loving mother; Mari was heartbroken when her son was killed. When she learned that her son Kiritaka Nagare was inhumanly tortured by a satanic group of bullies and was killed in a prank gone wrong, she snapped and swore that she would destroy her son's bullies. Mari threw away her previous life by divorcing her husband, changing her name to her maiden name, Maria Akeboshi, cutting off contact with her friends, getting plastic surgery, and two years later, she's a nurse at the bullies' school to kill them off secretly. Maria definitely didn't take her son's death all too well, but her grief reached disturbing levels two years later. When she gets home, she strips down to her underwear prays to her son's shrine and cradles a picture of him but imagines she's holding him alive and well. And she's STILL in her underwear.
  • In Monster, it's played with between twin siblings Johan Liebert and Anna/Nina. Johan has quite the obsession over Nina, and she is probably the only person in the world that he cares about enough for people to try to hold Nina hostage knowing that it'll lure Johan out and he's willing to eradicate his existence merely to make her happy; Nina initially cannot remember Johan due to a post-traumatic induced amnesia, and when he begins sending her anonymous "romantic" emails (e.g., "I was born to smother you with flowers."), she assumes that it's from a secret admirer. At the end Nina confronts Johan and emotionally tells him that no matter what he does she would always forgive him, even if they were the last two people in the world.
  • In My-HiME, there is some between Mai and her younger brother Takumi. Yuuichi and Akira both suspect that Takumi has a sister complex. Takumi is initially Mai's most important person (needed to summon her Child, although by the time he dies, Yuuichi has replaced him), and she becomes upset when he, seeking to become independent, appears to be drifting away from her.
  • Naruto
    • In Chapters 589 and 590, Sasuke and Itachi both admit that they love each other, and the word for 'love' is the deeply romantic aishiteru. Yes, you can argue it was done in a brotherly way.
    • Neji and Hinata often give this vibe, every time they have screentime together. Although they are supposed to come off as cousins (though they're technically half-siblings), they strangely give a romantic vibe mixed in that apparent familial affection.
      • In Canon, Neji's reaction upon seeing Hinata the first time was to remark about her beauty. Mind you, they were 4 and 3, respectively, at the time.
      • Rock Lee's Springtime of Youth series, where Neji imagines the story of Romeo and Juliet, in which he casts himself as Romeo and Hinata as Juliet, or as they call each other in his fantasy: Nejio and Hinaette. Neji gets so angry when he hears about Hinata trying to date Naruto that it's not even brotherly protection anymore, but plain jealousy, because he attacks Hinata furiously, saying: "Never...you and Naruto...doing things like that...it's...an infamy!". He also imagines Hinata in a spandex suit that Guy-Sensei tries to dress her with, at one point, and Hinata asks him in his fantasy How do I look, Neji?, before Neji snaps out of it quickly, snatches the suit from Guy-Sensei and tears it apart.
      • Issue 20, where he hears the girls talking about Hinata's breasts getting bigger, and he has a severe nosebleed at that, while the other guys yell at him to get a hold of himself. See this. And this.
      • In episode 17, the imaginary Neji and Hinata embrace lovingly as their lines are something like this:
        Hinata: O, Nejio, Nejio, wherefore art thou, Nejio?
        Neji: Hinaette...my life were better ended, than death prorogued...wanting of thy love!
    • Upon meeting his mother for the first time, Naruto mentions how attractive his mother is. The English dub toned down this by having him instead say "I can't get over how beautiful you are, Mom".
  • Ouran High School Host Club
    • Played With in that Tamaki, the self-declared Team Dad of the club, acts overprotective towards Haruhi. Then he slowly starts realizing that he's falling in love with her, but adamantly keeps trying to play the Papa Wolf card.
    • There's also the Hitachin twins, Hikaru and Kaoru. While they do share a very strong bond, they play up the incestuous subtext when performing their duties for the club. The relationship is a lot more developed in the manga, where, even though it's still clearly brotherly, it can be interpreted as something else. Kaoru sacrifices so much for Hikaru it's not hard to think of his interest as slightly romantic.
  • Oshi no Ko: Twins Ruby and Aqua Hoshino are, respectively, the reincarnations of Sarina Tendouji, a girl who died of cancer, and Gorou Amamiya, the doctor who took care of her. While the pair are unaware of each other's previous identities, the fact that Sarina was explicitly in love with Gorou, and the fact that Aqua has quite the sister complex towards his twin sister make their relationship come across as something far less platonic.
  • PandoraHearts: Gil's younger brother, Vincent, is extremely possessive of him.
  • Yui & Ui from K-On! are VERY close. Both are extremely affectionate towards the other, Ui has ended up crying at the realization Yui will be/is gone on vacation. Ui's character song is literally titled "Lovely Sister LOVE" while Yui wrote what amounts to a love song to Ui...
  • This is the point of Please Twins!, although the two girls promise that whichever one is the sister can't be romantically involved with Maiku. Until they KNOW, though, both girls are very protective of another girl having a possible relationship with their possible brother. Of course, the series certainly implies that their promise wouldn't necessarily preclude the two girls being more than friendly with each other, especially given the amount of time they spend "skinshipping" together in the bath.
  • Revolutionary Girl Utena has several examples:
    • Nanami has an extreme case of Big Brother Worship towards her big brother Touga and is hostile towards anyone who shows affection towards him, arguing she's the perfect girl for him. There's also an instance of her peeping on him in the shower. However, the concept of actual incest confuses her, and the time when it's hinted that they might be Not Blood Siblings she becomes distraught because she thinks it means she's no longer special.
    • Anthy and her brother Akio at first appear to be another case of Big Brother Worship, then it ends up it's not subtext but text, and ends up being a case of Akio sexually abusing his sister.
    • A lot could be read into the Kaoru twins' relationship, Kozue likes to tease Miki by pushing her breasts into his back when he's carrying her, and her comments about them being wild animals is suspect, and she acts really jealous of Miki's crush Anthy and tries to sabotage their relationship. It's even more blatant in the manga, where Kozue takes over Nanami's characterization.
  • Sailor Moon:
    • The Sailor Moon Cloverway dub creates an interesting inversion with Haruka and Michiru/Amara and Michelle. The romantic subtext is meant to be there... but they're not supposed to be cousins in the original. The company that decided to make them cousins did so for the exact reason of preventing there being any openly gay people in the show, without actually changing enough other stuff to even try and hide how they feel for each other, just hoping no one would think it's odd for two cousins to be THAT devoted to each other.
    • Chibiusa seems to have a crush on her future-uncle Shingo and a positively Freudian relationship with her future mother Usagi (who she looks down on) and her future father Mamoru (who she idolizes).
      • Then when she gets corrupted into becoming the evil Black Lady , she gets smitten with Mamoru and attempts to seduce him , and nearly succeeds , except heā€™s too loyal to Usagi to cheat on her.
  • The second episode of Saishuu Shiken Kujira has a scene with Mutsumi being woken up by his younger sister knocking on his door. As she's just as tired as he is, she falls on top of him as he goes to open the door, and he then spends a few moments thinking of how nice she smells, until he snaps out of it.
  • In Episode 5 of Servant Ɨ Service, Hasebe shows up at his sister Kaoru's house with his drunken coworker Lucy. When Hasebe says he and Lucy need a place to stay for the night, Kaoru immediately thinks that her younger brother is trying to proposition her for a three-way. She doesn't seem to hate the idea, either.
  • In Sing "Yesterday" for Me, Shinako sees Rou and his father as family and treats Rou like a little brother that she feeds and cares for. She is still emotionally committed to Rou's brother, her dead crush, which would make Rou her brother-in-law. However, Rou has romantic feelings for her that he demands she reciprocate, and while she doesn't feel the same way, she refuses to give him space or sharply reject him, and even breaks up with Rikuo because she's afraid of hurting Rou's feelings, which emboldens Rou to keep pursuing her. The result is a weird quasi-romance between the two with strong Brotherā€“Sister Incest undertones, even though they're not actually related.
  • In Space Pirate Mito, Masatsuki seems jealous of Aoi for going out with his sister. When his sister Mutsuki kissed him while she was controlled by the Big Bad, he seemed to enjoy it too much.
  • Rito and Mikan in To Love Ru, particularly on Mikan's part, getting jealous and lonely when Rito pays attention to other girls. Then there is the time Rito said that he thought of Mikan as "a special existence beyond even a sibling".
  • Venus Versus Virus has two twin characters, Lola and Layla, who have a... very close bond. It's a driving force in both the manga and anime, though for different reasons between the two. Layla is very into Lola and wants to "become one" with her. Lola is unnerved by Layla's attachment.
  • The Way of the Househusband: Tora and his sister Koharu. While none of their interactions so far can really be seen as romantic, they usually appear together to serve as a parallel to Tatsu and his wife Miku (with Tora and Tatsu getting into petty bickering while the ladies get exasperated by their antics) make them seem more like a couple than probably intended.
  • Throughout When Marnie Was There Marnie and Anna develop a close Pseudo-Romantic Friendship. They dance together, declare their love for each other, rowboat together, and overall act very romantic. They turn out to be related. Marnie is Anna's grandmother as a Cute Ghost Girl. It's clear that they weren't meant to come off like they're in love but they do nevertheless. It doesn't help that at least Anna doesn't know, Anna still comes off as Ambiguously Gay when she gets mad at Marnie's male love interest, and Anna has several direct parallels to Marnie's love interest.

    Comic Books 
  • In Captain Atom, the experiment that transformed Captain Nathaniel Adam into Captain Atom also catapulted him eighteen years forward in time, by which time his infant daughter had grown to young adulthood, whereas he was still physically and emotionally twenty-six. Of course, she did not remember him or recognize him and thought of her stepfather as her father, and did not know he had returned. So when he went to meet her and try to get to know her, without revealing who he really was, she thought he was trying to pick her up, and clearly was attracted to him, even though she turned him down. Later, after she found out the whole story, she started to have dreams in which he was a knight in shining armor rescuing her. Sometime after that, she got romantically involved with his best friend, who was also her godfather. All things considered, there was pretty clear subtext that her feelings for him were not altogether daughterly.
  • In Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules, Jonathan Storm has a crush on the comic book character Vapor Girl, unaware that she's based on his sister Susan Storm. If it comes to that, in the real Marvel Universe, Johnny married (a Skrull impersonating) Alicia Masters, who looked so much like Sue that in her first appearance her own family couldn't tell them apart if Alicia wore a wig.
  • The villainous Puppeteer Parasite Abyss from Les LĆ©gendaires considers the former villain Tenebris to be his sister, due to both of them having been created artificially by their "father", the Evil Sorcerer Darkhell. However, the way he acts toward her (referring to her as "his" Tenebris, openly stating he loves her, restraining her with suspectly tentacle-like energy structures and forcibly opening her mouth with it...) sounds a lot more like some kind of twisted romantic love/sexual desire rather than brother affection...
  • Madame Mirage provides a peculiar example: after her sister Angie is murdered, Harper creates a hyper-sexualized holographic version of her, the eponymous Mirage, to avenge her. Harper's explanation is that with everyone paying attention to the impossibly well-endowed Femme Fatale Mirage, no one would be looking for scrawny little Harper. Except that Mirage still looks just like a hyper-sexualized version of Harper's sister Angie, when Harper could just as easily made her look like someone not connected to Harper in any way. So it kind of comes off as Harper acting out her repressed lust for Angie.
  • In the Mega Man (Archie Comics), Ice Man is shown to persistently have a crush on Roll. ...In spite of the fact that they were both created by Dr. Light, and by proxy, siblings.
  • Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver of The Avengers have this in spades. Pietro has always been extremely overprotective of Wanda, showing jealousy whenever someone showed romantic interest in her, while on Wanda's side, the thing that finally made her snap and declare "no more mutants" at the end of House of M was Pietro being beaten into a pulp by Magneto (their father). And that's just the mainstream 616 universe; Ultimate Marvel takes it a little further than that...
  • In The Simpsons comic "The Simpsons Winter Wingding 2" there is a story titled "VSI: Valentine Scene Investigators" where Lisa receives, anonymously, a letter Valentine. Later Bart admits he wrote it only to encourage Lisa because previously she was depressed at not receiving a letter Valentine. At the end of the story, the whole school laughs at them both.
  • Superman:
    • Superman and his cousin Supergirl had some of this in the Silver Age. According to several long-time Superman and Supergirl fans, "There is a LOT of subtext to the older SG stories if you know where to look".
    • In Action Comics #260 Clark has Kara disguise herself as a superheroine from another dimension, and she and Superman proceed to have make-outs (in front of Lois), all to fool some dim alien invaders. They even get married.
    • The infamous Action Comics #289 where Superman falls in love with a woman identical to an adult version of his cousin. The really crazy part? Supergirl set the two up because her cousin told her that if he ever got married, it would be to someone just like her.
    • In Action Comics #270, Superman asks his sixteen-year-old cousin to take off her clothes. In context, he wants Kara to put on her civilian clothes because he is going to give her a costume-compressing device and he needs to show her how it works. Taken out of context... well...
      Superman: Take off that Supergirl costume right now! And remove those boots, too!
    • Krypton No More has this scene wherein Superman is walking out of the shower half-naked as a woman is waiting for him, her long legs being highlighted as her face remains tantalizingly darkened...and she happens to be his cousin. Even her "I hope you don't mind me waiting for you" line sounds suggestive, yet still writer Gerry Conway seems completely unaware of the seductive tone he is setting.
    • In Superboy 1949 #80, Kara travels to the past to meet Superboy, and Clark looks a tad smitten with his cousin. And that is before they aim two strangely-phallic spaceships at each other.
    • The Superdictionary has Kara and Clark deserving a rest. Maybe it's just hard to make her look unsexy, but... that looks far from innocent, and the repetition, though intended to drill the definition into a kid's mind, really makes it sound like she is saying "We deserve a rest, nudge nudge wink wink," and the big blue boy scout just isn't getting it yet.
    • In Supergirl story Many Happy Returns, Kara and Superboy Kon-El -Superman's clone- meet and are eyeing each other right away. Kara is blatantly smitten with him.
  • V for Vendetta. Evey Hammond attaches herself to various father figures as Replacement Goldfish for her Disappeared Dad. The trope is even lampshaded in her Nightmare Sequence, where she sleeps with her own father.
  • Wonder Woman:
    • Apollo is generally a Satellite Character to his twin sister Artemis and shows signs of romantic interest with her. She does not reciprocate as she is a virgin goddess entirely uninterested in such things. This is switched around and played up much overtly in the New 52 where Artemis' incestuous crush on Apollo is very blatant for something that's not said outright.
    • In mythology Hippolyta is the daughter of Ares and the Amazon Queen Otrera. While her parentage is generally left vague this is essentially her assumed parentage in all DC realities unless otherwise stated. When Wonder Woman's fatherless conception was gotten rid of for the New 52 the writers made Zeus her father and did nothing to Hippolyta's parentage meaning that Diana is the result of her mother having sex with her own grandfather, even if it's never actually addressed in the comic leaving it entirely in the subtext. This also means that Hercules raped his own niece when he forced himself on Hippolyta.
  • In X-Man, there was a very strange example, even by the standards of both this trope and the Grey-Summers family with Nate Grey and Maddie Pryor, as epitomised in this cover. Maddie is the clone of Jean Grey and biological mother of Cable, and Nate is the teenage Age of Apocalypse counterpart of Cable, created from Jean and Scott's DNA. And yes, she is holding him with a suggestive expression while licking her lips, and yes, the cover does say "If Madelyne Pryor can't have Nate... No one will!". Now, this is where it gets really weird...
    • First, after Nate wound up in the main Marvel Universe at the end of Age of Apocalypse, he instinctively reached to Jean (he'd met AoA Jean and recognised a connection between them, but didn't know the details). Being a Reality Warper, he accidentally resurrected Maddie as an amnesiac psychic ghost who happened to leech off Nate's powers to exist. He was physically 17, she was somewhere in her twenties. Both were unaware of his heritage and there was a LOT of Ship Tease between them: he described her green eyes as 'beguiling' and talked about how she made him smile, and Maddie noted how there was something 'special' between them, remarking that their meeting was 'destiny', with more than one Almost Kiss between them.
    • Later, Maddie was lured away by Selene, regaining both powers and memories, whereupon she popped in and out of Nate's life, acting as a textbook Tsundere towards an often bewildered Nate, acting incredibly jealous whenever any woman showed even the slightest sign of interest in him (which was frequently), to the point of murdering her main theoretical rival, Threnody, after going on how she needed him — which Threnody wryly commiserated with. Even after Nate figured out just who she was to him, and seemed to step very firmly back from any romance, Maddie's attitude didn't change all that much (as the cover shows). They eventually DO fully consummate their romantic/sexually attraction to each other and formally become lovers off-panel during a timeskip , but soon after, Madelyne gets secretly murdered and impersonated by YET another alternate reality counterpart of hers , an evil version of Jean Grey who had conquered and enslaved her own parallel Earth and even created a sex slave/consort for herself , her own son , an alternate reality counterpart of Nate Grey, but when he rebelled against her for her tyranny , she sought to replace him with AoA Nate

    Fan Works 
  • An Arm and a Leg has subtext between Elsa and Anna. Elsa's isolation, combined with her strong affections towards Anna, leads to one-sided implications on her side. It doesn't go anywhere beyond Elsa confessing her confusing attraction to Anna.
  • The Touhou Project doujin At Chirei portrays the main characters as a family, with sisters Satori and Koishi as the parents and Orin and Okuu as the children. Koishi closing her third eye and going to explore the surface is treated very much like a divorce, with the confused children caught in between, and twice Yuugi comforts a distraught Satori with what sounds very similar to relationship advice.
    Satori: Really, what's so good about the surface? Can't we just live quietly down here together? I'll take responsibility for Koishi...
    Yuugi: I get that you love her and all... but you take it a bit far sometimes.
  • In Child of the Storm, this is touched on a couple of times with Harry and Jean Grey, his maternal second cousin and her twin sister, Maddie Pryor, though it's limited to Harry being uncomfortably aware of how drop-dead gorgeous she is. Harry finds it uncomfortable, partly because she shares his mother's red hair and green eyes, but mostly because she acts like the big sister he never had. Eventually, this (mostly) fades, but he retains a certain appreciation for her looks.
    • In the sequel, Harry ends up having a psychic chat with Maddie, Jean's long-lost twin sister, in a kind of dream-landscape, and since she's 'wearing' a nightie, spends most of the scene trying not to stare at her legs. Later, the spirit of the Fallen Fortress taunts him about this, implying that he dwelt rather more on how short and thin her nightie was than is appropriate and that while he comforted her, he also considered 'comforting' her. Harry admits that it isn't exactly wrong, but is unfazed.
    • Diana, Harry's paternal third cousin, also appreciatively notes his good looks on a couple of occasions, and after Harry/Carol, Harry/Diana is the Fan-Preferred Couple. Of course, even if it wasn't a distant enough relationship to be genetically insignificant, Diana also comes from the Greek pantheon, which, as per canon, is somewhat... flexible... when it comes to incest (though In-Universe, it's seen as the weird habit that gets brought up at all the family arguments).
  • It is hinted in Hero High: Sphinx Academy that Lady Karen has stronger feelings for her brother than is typical for siblings, especially given how much she likes it when he dotes on her. And the author isn't shy adding subtext for Ben and Gwen.
  • In How I Became Yours: Rise of the Agni Army, brother-and-sister Kuzon and Lilith share a room despite being in their late teens/early adulthood, their beds not five feet away from each other. And Kuzon's dialogue to Lilith regarding her bad dreams sounds closer to what a concerned boyfriend would say, not a big brother.
  • Linked in Life and Love: Half-sisters Ruby and Yang enter into a poly relationship with Weiss and Blake. While Ruby and Yang are explicitly not dating each other, it's still the first question everyone asks.
  • In The Masks We Wear (Avatar: The Last Airbender), some of the interactions between the royal siblings are implicitly not of familial love.
  • Played for laughs in The Meg's Family Series with uncle and niece (but close age-wise) duo Stewie and Maddie. Stewie's future self claimed that he took her to prom, they thought they were married for a chapter (and Stewie decided he was willing to make it work!), and when they got high off of pot smoke he suggested that they get married. Maddie even has a cutaway gag of her future wedding where he's the groom (though she admits this is because most of the males she knows are related to her).
  • Mi Tru Lov: In chapter 13, Moscow reveals that Russia, her brother, promised to marry her if she killed Kawaiilyn or Japan. It is (thankfully) subverted when Moscow dies of shock.
  • Parentheses Anti Fluff Drabble shows how paranoid Gwen is about whether subtext exists or not.
    Though she didn't often think of it herself, and never, ever allowed herself to seriously dwell on it (except late at night, when she was trying to get to sleep, and she couldn't help it then), Gwen knew how he felt about her. She was 99.99 percent sure that Grampanote  didn't know, and there was no way on earth anyone else could know, so that meant it was just her and Ben, their secret, their secret that didn't exist because neither of them would admit it existed except in their heads, where no one else could hear or suspect.
  • In Prodigal Son:
    "What do I say to her?"
    Fishlegs shrugged.
    "We're married, right?"
    "No. You're dead, remember? It's a complicated legal situation. If anything, she's like... a sister."
    Hiccup turned a very putrid shade of green.
  • Razputin Vodello AU: With Norma as Raz's honorary sister and Frazie his actual sister, the both of them like to Squick him out by getting affectionate around him, since he's basically watching his two sisters kiss each other.
  • In Seven Days in Sunny June Due to No Social Skills human!Twilight Sparkle's innocent gestures of affection towards her foster sister Sunset Shimmer and her cousin Octavia Melody end up like this, to the point where an innocent statement that Twily makes is clearly very, very wrong.
    Sunset: Youā€™re sleeping in here?
    Twilight: Great idea! Itā€™s always better when sisters are together, right?
    Sunset and Octavia: [simultaneously] Twily, do you know where that comes from?
    Twilight: I heard some guys mention it at the mall the other day while we were in Spencerā€™s, why?
    Sunset: Itā€™s the name of a series of pornos where sisters ā€“ umā€¦
    Twilight: Ewwww! You guys areā€¦. Thatā€™s gross!
    Sunset: [to Octavia] She really doesnā€™t get out much, does she?
  • In Whispers, Arcanus's mother jokes that girls will fall all over him — and that in her youth, she might have been one of them. The chapter ends before we see his reaction.
  • Chapter 66 of You Got HaruhiRolled! has Imouto attempt to invoke the Brotherā€“Sister Incest trope, by stealing her brother Kyon's cell phone and making it difficult for him to contact his friends, so that he will be forced to spend time with her instead. Her inner monologue about it is one of the most disturbing things in the whole fic, and that's saying something.
    Next time, Imouto thought to herself with a devious smile on her face, maybe you won't be so eager to ditch me at the house all by myself, Kyon. Maybe you've learned your lesson for now. Or not. You won't be able to leave me for those silly friends all the time, big brother. Oh, no. I'm the one who really loves you. Not any of those harpies. If I ever see any of them steal you away from me, then I'll claw their eyes out. [You're] my big brother, Kyon. I'm your cute little sister. And I'm going to be your little sister for the rest of your life, Kyon. Forever and ever and ever...

    Films — Animated 
  • This trope creeps into An American Tail in an eerily interesting and squicky way when you consider the song that the two siblings Fievel and Tanya sing to each other, "Somewhere Out There", was turned into a straight love song by Linda Ronstadt in an effort to make it a Break Away Pop Hit, and not a single word needed to be changed. (In real life, mice have no issue with incest, and seem more inclined to mate with members of their litter than they are with non-relatives.)
  • Finding Nemo: Anyone familiar with clownfish biology is unlikely to avoid the creeps when watching it. Namely, and don't open the spoiler if you value your childhood, only the alpha pair in a clownfish colony reproduce. What's more, the only female is the alpha female: when it dies, the alpha male morphs into a female and the second-in-line male becomes the new alpha male and sires the new clownfish babies. In Finding Nemo, the rest of the family (colony) is destroyed: all that remains is Nemo's dad Marlin (now destined to become Nemo's mom), and the only-other-male-of-the-colony Nemo, destined to become his new mom's reproductive partner. And when you think how small the colony was in the beginning... Coral, Nemo's actual mom, might have been the brother or father of Marlin.
  • If Frozen (2013) were rewritten as a romantic love story between Anna and Elsa, very little would have to change. The whole film is about them repairing their relationship, Elsa hiding her powers can easily be read as an allegorical coming-out story, she has serious Power Incontinence for the first time when Anna announces her engagement (when it's established this happens because of pain and fear), the trolls' song about how love is used to heal and help others (intended to be about to Kristoff) makes much more sense in reference to Elsa, the act of True Love that saves Anna from being frozen is her attempted Heroic Sacrifice to save Elsa, and her "I love you" to Elsa is more romantic than any interaction she has with Hans or Kristoff. Hell, even the merchandise ships it. Also, it's really common for these Disney movies to end with the princess kissing or embracing her lover, Frozen ends with Anna kissing Kristoff but then going ice skate holding hands with Elsa, Intertwined Fingers and everything.
  • Humorously averted in The Incredibles. Dash is appropriately grossed out when he realizes he spent the night sleeping with his arm wrapped around his sister, Violet. The sequel has a deleted scene where Violet turns invisible to stop some robbers in a restaurant, but she's wearing her regular clothes that don't turn invisible with her. After she turns invisible, Dash sees all of her clothes in a pile on the floor.
  • Justice League: Doom has this with Ma'alefa'ak attracting Martian Manhunter's attention by taking the form of a seductive blonde woman and buying him a drink. Even after J'onn figures it out, Ma'alefa'ak continues to act seductively to him. While not mentioned in the movie itself, J'onn and Ma'alefa'ak are brothers in the comics.
  • Cousins Jessie and Gabriella from Miracle in Toyland are touchy-feely in a way that's odd for cousins. They act more like love interests, except a few lines clarify that they're cousins. There's also a scene where Gabriella hugs Jessie in a manner more fitting for lovers.
  • There is some of this with Sally and Dr. Finklestein in The Nightmare Before Christmas possibly. In the DVD Commentary, Tim Burton refers to Sally as a daughter — yet there's lines in-film like "You're mine, you know!" and "You can make other creations!" that really doesn't sound like a rebellious-daughter/overprotective-dad relationship, but like something else entirely. Consider that the creation Dr. Finklestein makes to replace Sally looks awfully like a wife — that looks exactly like him — and that an alternate ending had Oogie Boogie be Dr. Finklestein, jealous that Sally chose Jack over him. In an earlier script, the father/daughter relationship was a lot more obvious with lines like "I'm grown up now. I'll have to leave sometime"... yet there are bits like The scientist smiles, feeling Sally under his sway again that sounds rather creepy.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • 17 Again (2009): Maggie has the hots for Mike, the cool new boy at school. However, she's not aware that Mike is actually her father after having his age magically reversed.
  • All That Jazz flaunts this trope so flagrantly. Joel Gideon is a ceaseless womaniser and his daughter is a blossomingly beautiful young lady. In more than one scene she deliberately makes him feel awkward by talking about sex. The scene where they dance together shows how comfortable they are with each others' bodies in a non-sexual capacity. By placing the ideas of "family" "dancing" and "sexuality" in our minds the film highlights how un-confused the issues are in the minds of the characters. Dancing is not sex, dancing is dancing.
  • Avengers: Age of Ultron features Wanda and Pietro, discussed in more detail in the comics section. Their actors, learning about this, deliberately played them as a little too touchy-feely just for fun. Helps that the actors were fresh off of playing a married couple in their last movie.
  • Back to the Future: Lorraine as a teenager is strongly attracted to Marty McFly, not realizing he is her future son. However, she changes her mind after kissing him because it feels "weird".
  • The Barretts of Wimpole Street: Elizabeth Barrett is an invalid with delicate health, and her father Edward exercises a dictatorial control of her life, forbidding her to climb stairs, deciding what she eats and drinks, forbidding all contact with Elizabeth's admirer Robert Browning. It gradually becomes clear that Edward's fixation on his daughter is not about her health but about something far darker. After more or less admitting that he repeatedly raped his late wife, as well as commenting about how Sex Is Evil And He Is Horny, Edward embraces Elizabeth and starts saying some most un-fatherly things about how they have to be together forever. It's after this little talk that Elizabeth decides to get the hell out and go away with Robert. The studio demanded the Incest Subtext be toned down but Charles Laughton later said they couldn't tone down the "gleam" in his eye.
    "For the love of heaven, my darling, don't let this raise any further barrier between us....My darling, in our new home we shall draw close to each other again. Nothing and no one can come between us, my child, my darling.
  • Beyond Re-Animator: Considering the way he compares Laura to his late sister Emily, it's heavily implied that Dr. Phillips may have secretly harbored incestuous feelings towards his sister.
  • Black Sunday: Asa and her servant Javuto are brother and sister in the original Italian version, with the incestuous subtext being played up.
  • Blade (1998): As a vampire, Blade's mother shows a more-than-motherly interest in her own son to indicate how depraved she's become since Frost turned her.
  • Blazing Saddles: When all the citizens of an isolated town all share the same last name, something isn't right.
  • The Chronicles of Narnia: In the beginning of the third film, there is this scene where Lucy sees a girl flirting with a boy, then she does the exact same gesture that girl did... in front of Edmund. This results in him frowning confused and asking her what she's doing, to which she widens her eyes and blurts 'nothing' guiltily, giving the impression that she actually tried to flirt with him for a moment. (The explanation is given later.) When Edmund is tempted by evil again, he stares hungrily at Lucy and attempts to lure her into becoming rich and powerful along with him, clearly showing that she's the only person he wants beside him when he plans to obtain power, with lines like "Lucy... we'd be so rich, no one could tell us what to do... or who to live with". It's even funnier knowing that Georgie Henley (who played Lucy) really did have a huge crush on Skander Keynes (who played Edmund) in the first film. Of course, they aren't related in real life.
  • Conan the Barbarian (2011): Daddy's Little Villain tells her father (who is seeking to resurrect his dead wife) that she can do everything her mother could — she's referring to her magic powers, but there's a clear sexual vibe as well. It's only subtext until he cradles her face in his hand and she starts sucking on his thumb. At that point, it becomes damn clear that she would be happy substituting for her mother in every possible way. He winds up rejecting the offer.
  • In the French-Canadian movie C.R.A.Z.Y., the tension between the main character Zac and his older brother Raymond can be interpreted as being of a sexual nature. It's strongly implied that Zac, well, takes pleasure out of seeing his brother having sex with different girls on multiple occasions. It's clear that Zac is, indeed, gay, and Raymond teases Zac by proposing to give him a blowjob.
  • Cries and Whispers: Agnes, Karin, and Maria are all sisters. At one point the normally touch-averse Karin allows Maria to pet her face and Karin seems to derive almost orgasmic pleasure from this. Maria then tries to kiss her, but Karin panics and pulls away. In a flashback, we hear how Agnes loved their mother dearly and is still kind of obsessed with her 20 years after her passing. In a later scene she forces a kiss on Maria, who is noted to look extremely like their mother (they are played by the same actress).
  • Crimson Peak hints at this, with Lucille being incredibly jealous of Thomas's new wife. Edith eventually starts to suspect that they may actually be married and pretending to be siblings as part of a money-making scheme. She's Right for the Wrong Reasons — they are a couple but actually related as well. To the point where Lucille had already been impregnated by her brother at least once.
  • Calvin Candie and his sister in Django Unchained seem a little too close for comfort, and neither has a significant other that's mentioned in the film, although Candie states that his sister is a widow and it is implied Sheba is Candie's mistress.
  • Doom has this to a nearly staggering level regarding the fraternal twins John "Reaper" Grimm and Dr. Samantha Grimm, a Brotherā€“Sister Team who are the film's primary protagonists and serve as The Not-Love Interest to one another. The romantic subtext is so blatant that when the team of Marines John is serving in meet Sam for the first time and learn she and John share the same last name, John's teammates ask how the hell he "let such a fine piece of ass walk away" and an exasperated John has to growl that she's his sister, not his ex-wife (despite virtually everything else in the film suggesting otherwise). Easily the biggest indicator of Ship Tease between the two can be seen in with the film's ending, which has a battered and bruised John gently carrying an injured Sam to safety in a Bridal Carry while she unconsciously nuzzles his neck affectionately. The whole scene is framed as if they were a Battle Couple who have decided for a Relationship Upgrade after surviving such a traumatic ordeal.
  • In the movie Emily, the relationship between Emily BrontĆ« and her brother Bramwell is like this—they have a much closer relationship with each other than with their siblings, and frequently get into mischief together, such as using drugs and spying on people. When he's sent away as punishment for his troublemaking, he bids her farewell in a manner almost identical to two Star-Crossed Lovers being torn apart, with him even declaring that he can't bear to look at her because it will break his heart. Later, when her ex-lover has a My God, What Have I Done? moment over breaking her heart and gives him a letter of apology to give to her, he burns it(to be fair, he could also be invoking Big Brother Instinct and wanting to keep her from being hurt again, but it ultimately comes across like plain and simple jealousy).
  • Enter the Void seems to have this as a running theme:
    • It's heavily implied between the protagonist Oscar and his sister Linda. He watches her while she's asleep (in the nude no less) and he is repeatedly shown watching her while she's at work dancing in the strip club. There are also several instances where she kisses him and it's a little more than a peck on the cheek. And then there's the scene where Linda leans against a wall suggestively and asks Oscar if he thinks she's beautiful and if he sees her as a woman instead of a little girl. Aside from that, Oscar flies into the bodies of her lovers while she has sex with them, watching the act from their point of view. He even flies inside of her body during the climax and we get an inside view of her vagina during intercourse.
    • There are also very strong Oedipal implications with Oscar and his mother, who died in a car crash along with his father when he and Linda were kids. In at least one flashback, Oscar spies on his parents while they're having sex. When he has sex with an older woman in the present, he immediately flashes back to being breastfed. In the climax, there's a sex scene involving the same woman; when Oscar flies into the man's head to see things from his POV, she's replaced by his mother. And then there's the Ambiguous Ending which implies Oscar has been reincarnated as Linda's child, with the final shot being her nipple.
  • EuroTrip: Twins Jenny and Jamie have no problem with the prospect of attending a nude beach together (although he later objects to her flashing motorists for a lift) and later end up making out in a nightclub after getting hammered on absinthe.
  • While the book had no shame about portraying actual incest, the Flowers in the Attic film relegates the Brotherā€“Sister Incest to subtext at best. Also there is the scene with the father giving Cathy her music box when she's alone in her bed, topped off with giving her a ring in a posture that looks very like a proposal.
  • The Funhouse starts off with a Shout-Out to both Halloween and Psycho. The Final Girl takes a shower while her little brother dons a mask and fake knife to scare her. He sees her completely nude and slowly draws the knife down past her breasts, to her navel, before showing that it's a fake knife. She is angry that he played a prank on her but doesn't seem disturbed that her brother just had a lingering view of her naked body. Later, he spies on her as she talks to her parents and silently follows her to the carnival in a stalker-like fashion.
  • Ginger Snaps. Specifically, when Ginger is heading towards full transformation, she crawls over to and on top of her sister and whispers "It's like we're not even related anymore..."
  • Hellboy II: The Golden Army: Prince Nuada seems to have a lot of sexual tension going with his sister Princess Nuala. It's particularly evident in the scene where Nuada learns of the attraction between Abe and Nuala; Nuada's reaction is more like that of a jealous lover than a brother defending his sister's honor. The presence of implied incest was confirmed by Nuada's actor.
  • High School Musical: Sharpay and Ryan Evans have a disturbingly close relationship. Their first duet is a love song rearranged to sound less romantic. When Troy and Gabriella sing it correctly, it's clearly a love song. A joke is made at one point saying that if Sharpay could play both Romeo and Juliet, her brother would be out of a job, which means that the twins have no problem playing romantic roles with each other. The song "I Can't Keep My Eyes Off of You" (never made it to the movie — it only appears on the first CD) is a quartet with duets between "Troy" and "Gabriella" and then "Sharpay" and "Ryan" (with only a few parts being the four singing together). The video includes a few moments from the movie put in shippy context.
  • House of Wax (2005) is filled with twincestuous subtext between Nick and Carly, to the point where it's obvious from a mile away. Notably, there's a bit of tension between Nick and Carly's boyfriend Wade that comes across almost like jealousy. The underlying arc of the film also has the two siblings reconciling in a manner evocative of estranged lovers, with Nick getting to rescue Carly the way a boyfriend would before she then saves him (effectively cementing the two as a Battle Couple in all but name). Suffice to say, it's little wonder why Nick and Carly are the Fan-Preferred Couple.
  • Played for Drama in Into the Dark: Pure, the Daughters' Day-themed episode of the holiday-based horror Hulu horror movie anthology series. It's about a weekend-long "purity camp", run by an evangelical preacher which is disrupted when the girls summon Lilith. The girls take disturbingly wedding-like photoshoots with their fathers, complete with white dress, (purity) ring, and couple-y poses, during which the main character Shay is visibly uncomfortable. Some of the dresses they have actually are wedding dresses; the preacher's daughter Lacey has a dress that came with a veil, which the cameras linger on ominously. And, of course, the point of the weekend is for the girls and their fathers to sign a contract in which the fathers promise to guard the girls' purity until they're married and it's time to hand it over to their husbands. Combined with how controlling many of the fathers are, the pastor's weird touchy-feely-ness and habitual one-on-one "chats" with the girls, the unseen but traumatizing "Box", the fact other adults are not allowed to come (not even the girls' mothers), and the literal cage kept around for "disobedient" girls, it all winds up pointing somewhere very gross. It's to the point where it comes across as a relief that Lilith shows up to ruin the party.
  • Lady in a Cage: There's something very creepy about middle-aged Cornelia's relationship with her grown son Malcolm. They call each other "darling". She kisses him on the lips and asks him if he left her any more of his "love notes". In fact he did, but it's a "Dear John" Letter in which he says "Release me from your beauty. Release me from your love." Randall—the bad guy who more or less kidnaps Cornelia—picks up on this when he reads the note and wonders if maybe she still breast-feeds Malcolm.
  • The 1992 French movie The Lover, adapted from the eponymous novel by Marguerite Duras. The elder brother has a predatory interest in his sister, while the sight of the Girl dancing intimately with her young brother drives the Chinaman to jealousy.
  • The Prentiss family in both film adaptations of The Manchurian Candidate. (In the original novel, the incest is quite explicitly mentioned.) The 1962 film shows a very possessive and not at all chaste kiss between Eleanor and her son Raymond, and the 2004 film features heavy subtext in every scene that shows them together, including some very ambiguous touching and kissing moments. In the novel, Raymond's mother had an incestuous relationship with her father. When her brainwashed son is under her control, she remarks how much he looks like her father and makes him do what she wants.
  • In the French movie Les mariĆ©s de l'an II, Jean-Paul Belmondo plays a Frenchman from Nantes who is trying to get a divorce from his wife at the height of the Reign of Terror. In the course of the resultant misadventures, the two spouses for a time hook up with other partners, the wife with an aristocrat leading a group of royalist guerilla fighters in the VendĆ©e and the husband with that aristocrat's sister (who is also her brother's comrade in arms). When they find out, it is not just the husband and wife who become very jealous of each other, but also the brother and the sister. In the end, the new pairs break up and the aristocratic siblings ride off together, remarking on how one won't let the other have a romantic partner and how they are both doomed...
  • Night of the Demons (1988) has a scene in which the Final Girl is scared by her brother who had been hiding in her closet while she was changing clothes. At that point, she was topless with a very sheer bra that didn't leave much to the imagination. He seems a little too delighted in seeing her breasts and tells her she has "bodacious boobies". Later, he refers to her as his "beloved sister" and asks her date if he is going out with her because of her "big cha-chas".
  • This is brought up in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. Tad Pringle points out that, since he is just as much in love with Daisy as Doctor Chabot is, perhaps he (Tad) might make a suitable match for her. When Dr. Chabot points out that Tad is Daisy's brother, Tad responds with, "Only by marriage... she's my step-sister, not my blood-sister."
  • The Canadian indie movie Punch has a female lead with an Electra Complex because her mother died when she was young and grew obsessively attached to her father out of fear. She still lives with her father despite being old enough to move out, but he's wise enough to refuse her although he doesn't really know what to do with her. When he introduces her to his new girlfriend, his daughter's reaction is to punch her in the face.
  • The first love interest in Le SamouraĆÆ was cast because she looked like she could be the sister of Alain Delon, and Melville wanted that sort of awkwardness in their relationship. Made even more bizarre because she was Delon's real-life wife.
  • In William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Tybalt and Lady Capulet are shown making out at the party, and the latter seems particularly hard hit by Tybalt's death.
  • In The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Magenta and Riff Raff are very sexual with one another desite being brother and sister.
  • In Scanners III: The Takeover, there is a bit present between Helena and Dr. Monet, her adoptive father. After she goes insane, he confronts her while she's nude in a hot tub. She accuses him of adopting her because he just wanted a girl all to himself, and then uses her psychic powers to drown him.
  • In both Scarface (1932) and Scarface (1983), Tony Camonte/Tony Montana takes My Sister Is Off-Limits to an insane degree, to the point that he kills his best friend when he finds them in bed together, convincing his sister, Gina, that it's actually this trope. This is because their dynamic is loosely based on the historical Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, who had such rumors floating around about them even at the time.
  • At the end of Serenity, River is shown watching curiously from an air vent as her brother Simon is having sex with Kaylee, and given her psionic talents, there's innuendo that she's also telepathically reading their sensations.
  • The two Charlies in Shadow of a Doubt, being uncle and niece. The Young Charlie tells her Uncle that they have a special bond, that they are soulmates if you will. After that point, Uncle Charlie gives Young Charlie a wedding ring. When the relationship sours, Uncle Charlie tries to kill his niece by choking her.
  • Shame is about a man named Brandon with an extreme sex addiction, who is either viewing porn, looking for sex, jerking off, or indeed doing the deed. He lives with his sister Sissy, and while they don't have sex in the film, they have a pretty close relationship that hints at an unspoken trauma between them. Notably, their first scene together has Brandon accidentally walk in on her taking a shower, and she seems more angry about him disrupting her privacy rather than him seeing her naked, even throwing her towel at him! Later on, she starts dating someone and Brandon seems unusually protective of her when that occurs.
  • In Sharknado 2: The Second One the way Ellen playfully teases her daughter Mora in Times Square about her short skirt, pulling it back down herself; and the way she is pressing herself against her daughter's back on the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, Ellen and Mora's level of closeness can seem a little creepy.
  • A Simple Favor: A very strange example where there is incestuous subtext to actual, textual incest. Stephanie's "deep, dark secret" is that she had sex with her half-brother after she met him for the first time at her father's funeral (and may or may not have had an ongoing sexual relationship with him). Said brother is said to be the spitting image of her father when he was younger, and the only reason they got close in the first place was because Stephanie was vulnerable after losing "the only person that understood [her]" and felt like her half-brother "[saw] her" in the same way her father did.
  • In Snow White & the Huntsman, Queen Ravenna's relationship with her brother Finn flirts with incest several times. Especially when Ravenna bathes in front of him, and later he gives her a not-so-brotherly kiss on the shoulder.
  • Between Claudia and her brother Gustav in Snow White: A Tale of Terror. She kisses him at one point, though he's rather terrified. It's also clear Frederich saw his late wife when he danced with Lilli. So does Claudia.
  • In Sodom and Gomorrah, Queen Bera of Sodom and her brother, Prince Astaroth, behave very flirtatiously with each other; in one scene, they play bite each other's fingers (drawing blood in Astaroth's case), and their dialogue suggests that there was a time when they went even further than that.
  • Star Wars
    • Fans noticed Princess Leia Organa's later claim that she had "always known" that Luke Skywalker is her brother. Does that include when she gave Luke a big kiss on the mouth in The Empire Strikes Back? Though in context it appears she did it to make Han jealous.
    • The Rise of Skywalker Emperor Palpatine is also very suggestive in seducing Rey to the dark side to be his Sith Empress/apprentice and he her master, even commenting to his grandaughter that he has engaged in practices considered "unnatural".
  • These Are the Damned: King uses his sister Joan to lure men away to be mugged by his gang, but that doesn't stop him from giving them a savage kicking for being interested in his sister in the first place. According to Joan, he once locked her in a cupboard for a week for trying to run off with a man, and he promises retribution on any man who shows an interest in her, refusing to let her date even members of his own gang. While giving him hell over this, Joan also points out that he's never had a girl himself, implying that she's the only subject of his interest.
  • Tromeo and Juliet: Capulat seems more than a little creepy with his daughter Juliet, to the point that it's easily read as repressed desire for her.
  • Vertical Limit has a plot of Peter climbing K2 to save his younger sister Annie. If you took all the references to their father out of the script, it would come across as a romance instead. This trope is probably the reason Peter gets a kiss out of nowhere from the only other female in the film.
  • War of the Worlds: Ray and his daughter Rachel become very close over the course of the film, with Ray seeming to see her as a Living Emotional Crutch and often showing jealousy when he sees someone else bonding with Rachel. They have some very emotionally charged scenes such as when Ray tearfully sings her to sleep and kisses her hair, or when he embraces her intensely before he murders Ogilvy to protect her, and when getting her to sing so she doesn't hear it, he kisses her hands while kneeling in front of her. Afterwards Rachel emotionally gets into Ray's arms and we cut to them sleeping in each other's arms at night. It's also notable that Rachel has the same role in the story as the protagonist's love interest in the 1953 film, being the character he fights to protect from the aliens.
  • In We Need to Talk About Kevin, the titular character is The Sociopath with an Oedipus Complex. He deliberately ensures he's Caught with Your Pants Down by his mother on multiple occasions, and despised his father and younger sister for taking her attention away from him to the point of murdering them both. At several points he's compared to an abusive husband towards her.
  • In The Wind (1928), Letty moves in with her cousin and his wife down South. No incest actually occurs; however, Cora becomes jealous of Letty, not helped by the fact that her husband is so invested in his attractive younger cousin.
  • The VVitch has Caleb, who is heavily implied to be lusting after his older sister Thomasin, occasionally staring at her chest. He never acts on it and seems like a good kid otherwise. It's probably a result of entering puberty in an isolated area; Thomasin is literally the only female around besides Caleb's mother and his seven-year-old sister Mercy.

    Light Novels 
  • Bakemonogatari: A good portion of Nisemonogatari has this. Araragi says at one point "If you weren't my sister, I'd fall in love with you." Then there's the infamous toothbrushing scene, which in true Shaft style gleefully toes a very thin line between subtext and text.
  • Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks? loves speculating over this, portraying how Masato is confused by the thought of his mother's sexual attractiveness, or how she suddenly takes offense when he says that he was not going to look under her skirt.
  • Mairu and Kururi from Durarara!! seem to go past subtext. The two share a kiss in the second OVA and are particularly touchy-feely with each other if their dialogue in the chatroom is anything to go by. Even when the two of them kiss Aoba, Mairu is more excited about her Indirect Kiss with Kururi than anything else.
  • In Infinite Stratos, the main character Ichika Orimura is suspected of this in regard to his older sister, Chifuyu, who looks "better than a model" in his own words. This came to a head during the Beach Episode when she comes out wearing a skimpy black bikini that he inadvertently picked out for her and his subsequent reaction to it. Charles, one of the girls vying for Ichika's affections, is not amused and even slightly downcast at the thought of having "Orimura-sensei" as a rival. The girls talk with Chifuyu later that night and she declares (after a stiff drink) that they should strive to "get to her level"' to have Ichika for themselves. Chifuyu herself isn't immune to the speculation, especially after this confession to a fellow teacher:
    Chifuyu: It's not......like that......no, didn't I say before that I don't have special feelings towards that guy, but how can I say it......a little brother should belong to his older sister, right?
  • Maria Watches Over Us is notorious for being incredibly gay while never really having any couples. Yoshino gets paired up with her cousin, Rei, and they have a really close bond.
  • Loads in Oreimo. Being that Brotherā€“Sister Incest is the Elephant in the Room of the series, which results in a constant Will They or Won't They? between Kyousuke and his sister Kirino. The anime turns it up a notch, the manga turns it up even further.
  • As the title suggests, Sister Princess is full of this, particularly with the older sisters to their brother: one actively flirts with him, one gets from him a hairpin that used to be another man's gift to his wife, and one was his lover in a previous life. Oh, and all of them get to have a fake wedding with him. And that's just the start.
  • Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle has Lux and Airi. Airi's best friend Noct repeatedly talks about how much she cares for her brother (in a manner that suggests more than just familial love). Yoruka, a Shipper on Deck for Lux with anyone else, at one point reassures Airi that she doesn't have to worry as marriage between siblings isn't uncommon for royals. Arguably the biggest sign is that Airi appears on the cover of one volume... in a series that generally has a Girl of the Week format.
  • In The Way to Protect the Female Lead's Older Brother, Roxana Agriche's interactions with her half-brothers, Dion and Jeremy, particularly the former, are quite heavy on the subtext. This is not helped by the fact that Agriches are canonically mentioned to have engaged in incest in previous generations.

    Literature 
  • Black Heart by Eric Van Lustbader. One character gets into the habit of perving on his sister every night while she masturbates. He doesn't react well on finding out she's started having sex with a boyfriend instead.
  • The Cat Who... Series: In book #6 (The Cat Who Played Post Office), Penelope and Alexander Goodwinter, the sibling lawyers who initially handle Qwill's inheritance, are very close and in her final letter, Penelope all but states that she is in love with her brother; at the very least, Penelope is a Clingy Jealous Girl.
  • In Children of Dune royal twins Leto and Ghanima use their Genetic Memory to roleplay as their parents (one of whom is dead and the other missing and not part of their lives), but they find the idea of their actually mating repellent. Though there are rumors that the Bene Gesserit intend for them to mate with each other as part of their eugenics program. At the end of the book, they do legally get married, but it's clear this is entirely political and Ghanima's eventual children are actually fathered by Farad'n Corrino.
  • In the Chronicles of the Kencyrath series, there's plenty of in-story subtext between Jamie and her brother Torisen, to the point that characters comment on it. One fan theory is that their mother Jamiethiel had the power to deliberately get pregnant with twins, and literally made Torisen as the perfect mate for Jamie, so she would become blood-bound to him before her uncle Gerridon could claim her.
  • In A Cry in the Night, part of the reason Erich becomes fixated on his future wife Jenny is because of her uncanny resemblance to his dead mother. And then on their wedding night he asks her to wear his mother's nightgown. Yeah...In fact, Jenny mentions he only makes love to her when she's wearing the gown.
  • Lampshaded, deliberately played up, and generally mocked in The Dresden Files. Harry and Thomas live together for quite a while and are often Mistaken for Gay by the (many) people who don't know they're half-brothers. This is made even worse by Thomas's sense of humour, the facts that he's pretending to be a flamboyantly Camp Gay French hairdresser and that he's a White Court vampire, so even straight guys are attracted to him. Much of the humour is basically Thomas playing up to the stereotype that Queer People Are Funny and taking advantage of the bigots (and non-bigots — it seems to be genuinely quite convincing In-Universe) that dismiss him as harmless because of that, something which Harry ends up using to his advantage in White Night.
  • While Flowers in the Attic and the entire Dollanganger Series has quite a lot of actual incest going on, some things are still relegated to subtext. There are hints here and there that Christopher is sexually attracted to, or at least very confused by, his mother.
    • Garden of Shadows also has Malcolm's obsession with his mother, the first Corrine Foworth, who abandoned him. It's worth nothing that his rapes of both Olivia and Alicia were triggered by them being in Corrine's room and during the former one, he whispered her name the entire time.
  • Katsa and Raffin of the Graceling Realm series are cousins. They're extremely close, call each other things like "my dear" and had even once considered getting married, but didn't for reasons having nothing to do with being related.
  • In Charlaine Harris' Harper Connelly series, Harper and her stepbrother Tolliver get intensely jealous of each other's lovers, none of whom are ever more than brief flings, frequently share hotel rooms and when they don't always make sure to have connecting rooms. They are slowly raising money to buy a house and neither of them ever considers not living together in it. In the second book when Harper finds herself thinking about having kids and realizes that she can't imagine them being raised by anyone but Tolliver she realizes her feelings for him and it nearly destroys her.
  • Rook and Thom in Havemercy. They were supposed to be a canon couple but the authors couldn't get a gay incestuous couple past the publisher. As a result of this their relationship dynamic is filled with UST and Slap-Slap-Kiss tendencies.
  • The Hound of the Baskervilles: Stapleton is disturbingly possessive of his sister Beryl, making quite a scene when he catches Sir Henry proposing to her (although he later apologizes, claiming the idea of her sister leaving after living with him for so long made him overreact). It makes a lot more sense when you learn she actually is Stapleton's wife. He claimed to be unmarried in the hopes of seducing the current Baskerville, but failed to control his own jealousy.
  • Cassie in The Intruders behaves very hostile towards her mother Amanda's new fiancĆ©e. She doesn't much like his sons either but her behaviour towards him seems more like jealousy. Her brother Joel says a curiously worded line about Cassie not wanting to "share" their mother.
  • 'Lot' and 'Lot's Daughter' by Joseph Ward Moore, a father flees with his family from an impending nuclear war. However their conversation in the car convinces him his wife will be unable to cope with living in a post-apocalyptic society and his sons will eventually grow beyond his control and turn to barbarism. So he abandons them at a filling station and drives on into the wilderness with his adolescent daughter. In the Bible after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and his wife being turned into a pillar of salt Lot keeps the Israelite's line going by impregnating his daughters. In the sequel story the pair are depicted surviving in the wilderness with a young son and no explanation as to his parentage.
  • In A Murder Is Announced, Patrick and Julia Simmons have this, mildly. Explained when it turns out that "Julia" is not Patrick's sister Julia, who is elsewhere, but his lover Emma Stamfordis.
  • August and Scarlet from Of Fear and Faith. With August, it's made clear that he is attracted to her, although he hates himself for it and tries to suppress it. Scarlet's a little more ambiguous. She's very flirty and teasing with him, although this could just be a part of her personality (she flirts with Kavik immediately after meeting him as well) and she clearly enjoys making August uncomfortable. August also mentions that Scarlet flirted with him when they were kids, so make of that what you will.
  • In The Outsiders, the Curtis brothers have so much of this going on, it's incredible.note  Ponyboy describes Sodapop as 'looking like a movie star', and they also sleep in the same bed with much cuddling and even late-night talks about love. There's also the way Ponyboy describes his brothers' relationship can be really reminiscent of a couple of teenage parents. And we should not forget that scene when Soda is giving Darry a back massage.
  • In Ɩverenskommelser by Simona Ahrnstedt, Edvard has sexual fantasies about his cousin Beatrice. But luckily for her, as he's a serial abuser sociopath, he never acts on these fantasies.
  • Patience and Sarah:
    • Sarah's sister, who she shares a bed with and sometimes kisses, is very jealous of Sarah's lover Patience. It's implied that her feelings for Sarah are similar to Sarah's feelings for Patience.
    • Martha is less horrified to find Patience in bed with another woman and more horrified that the woman — who Patience was sleeping with — isn't a member of Patience's family.
  • In Polgara the Sorceress, Polgara really loves her twin sister Beldaran, and gets very jealous when the Purpose decrees that Beldaran must marry Riva Iron-Grip to establish the Rivan Line.
  • Josh and Sophie Newman in The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, especially as the series progresses. Sophie is a Morality Pet for Josh, and she's always the one who can bring him around when he's contemplating a Faceā€“Heel Turn. Neither character gets a love interest either. Though in the final book it's revealed they aren't actually related.
  • The Silmarillion:
    • Aredhel is oddly fond of her cousin note  Celegorm. Tolkien himself said they're Just Friends, but that doesn't stop the shippers.
    • Fingon, Aredhel's brother, and Maedhros, Celegorm's brother. They're very close and Fingon even rescues Maedhros when he's captured by Morgoth. Their tale actually draws some parallels to the tale of Beren and LĆŗthien, the most legendary love in-universe. And here Tolkien didn't specify anything.
    • FĆ«anor is... very interested in Galadriel, the daughter of his younger half-brother, Finarfin. Or maybe that should be he's interested in her hair; he asks her repeatedly for a strand of it.
  • Sleeping Murder: At the end of the book, Miss Marple suggests this was the killer's motivation, as they only had his word that the original victim slept around or that his actions were more "jilted lover" than "protective brother".
  • The relationship between Gudrun the Sorceress and her son Kari in The Snow-Walker Trilogy is bad enough as it is, but the (rare) interactions between them are somewhat eyebrow-raising. Gudrun also has the power to effectively Mind Rape people and, while she rarely interacts with her son in person, other characters accuse her of tormenting him and whispering to him in his dreams, though they never elaborate further than that.
  • While A Song of Ice and Fire has quite a lot of explicit and confirmed incest between certain characters, there are also certain points which fit this trope.
    • During one of Arianne Martell's POV chapters, she remembers that when she was younger (though we don't know exactly how young) she was travelling through the desert with her uncle Oberyn and her cousins, and she daydreamed about a desert bandit kidnapping her and having his way with her. Judging from the description of the bandit, she imagined him looking a lot like her uncle Oberyn. She feels very uncomfortable about remembering this, so she is clearly aware of what such a daydream implies.
    • Arianne attempts to invoke this trope by dressing in a revealing outfit when expecting to have a confrontation with her father to make the situation really awkward for him.
    • Aeron "Damphair" Greyjoy has a deep-seated hatred and terror of his brother Euron, and associates him with the scream of a rusted hinge, and memories of waking up in the night and thinking "Euron has come again". Though it is not stated explicitly, one can assume that he was sexually abused by his brother which was all but confirmed in a preview chapter for The Winds of Winter.
    • When Victarion Greyjoy and his niece Asha are arguing over who might rule the ironborn, she offers to help him rule as his Hand of the King. Since this is not a tradition of the ironborn (and Victarion is quite thick), Victarion at first thinks that when she talks of "ruling beside him" she means being his queen. He finds himself getting aroused at the thought before reminding himself that she is his niece.
    • Teased with Asha and Theon, when he first arrives at Pyke. They go on a horseback ride together and there is a lot of fondling going on and she even grabs his erection a few times. This was done deliberately by Asha posing as a shipwright's wife named Esgred in order to find out his plans. When Theon finds out who she really is, Theon is incredibly disturbed.
    • Though they are not related by blood, Littlefinger is Sansa Stark's uncle through marriage, and it is very clear to her and the reader that he is sexually interested in her. Not only is he legally her uncle, but she is currently pretending to be his daughter, and addresses him as "father".
    • When Tyrion is confronting his sister, Cersei, about her twincestuous relationship with Jaime, he says that it "seems unfair that she should open her legs for one brother and not the other". While he was clearly trying to enrage and mock her, if he had been aware of their incest while growing up with them, it would make sense that his own sexuality might be affected by it. While he is planning his revenge on his family from exile he mentions that he wants to rape and murder his sister. While he would be quite happy to kill her, it is unknown if he was being serious about raping her, and—even if he was—it would probably be from a wish to hurt and degrade her as much as possible rather than from any true sexual desire. On the other side, when Cersei's paranoia gets really bad she's prone to nightmares, which often feature Tyrion in disturbingly sexual situations.
    • When Cersei has taken who she thinks is Tyrion's mistress as a hostage, and Tyrion has her youngest son under his own control, he tries to ensure the woman's safety by saying that whatever happens to her would happen to his nephew, including any beating or rapes (though it is made indisputably clear to the reader that this is just a bluff rather than a serious threat, not least because Tyrion actually likes his youngest nephew).
    • In the fourth book it's implied that Joffrey may have abused his younger brother Tommen in a sexual way. He gets interrupted before he gets to say more about it.
  • The relationship between brother and sister Quentin and Caddy in The Sound and the Fury. Quentin is obsessed with his sister's virginity and purity. At one point he lies and claims to have committed incest with Caddy and be the father of her illegitimate child in order to shoulder the blame with her. He later commits suicide due to his heartbreak over Caddy not being pure. Caddy names her daughter after him.
  • Splinter of the Mind's Eye is a Star Wars Expanded Universe novel written after A New Hope, but before Luke and Leia were known to be twins. And Han Solo is nowhere to be seen. Consequently, there is an amazing degree of UST in the book, though Luke nobly refrains from kissing Leia while she's asleep and vows to protect her from everything, including himself.
    The Princess caught him with a hand, her weight halting his slide. Now Luke rolled clear, came to a panting stop on her chest.
    For a long moment they lay like that, suspended in time. Then their eyes met with a gaze that could have penetrated light-years.
    • The comic book adaptation — which came out after Return of the Jedi — doesn't have nearly as much subtext, since it has much less in the way of narration. But the twins hold or touch each other often, and when Luke thinks he's dying he tells her he loves her.
    • The idea that she'd 'always known' throws this line into a new light.
      The Princess grew aware of how tightly she was clinging to him. Their proximity engendered a wash of confused emotion. It would be proper to disengage, to move away a little. Proper, but not nearly so satisfying.
  • The Sunne in Splendour: The novel takes place during the Wars of the Roses, and when young Anne Neville is forced into marriage with Edouard of Lancaster, she observes that her Prince Charmless of a husband is uncomfortably close to his mother, Margaret of Anjou.
  • In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout imagines herself marrying Jem when she misunderstands the concept of double first cousins, and doesnā€™t seem too uncomfortable at the thought. The scene where Jem unbuttons his shirt and shows her his chest hair while ā€œgrinning shylyā€ also seems rather flirtatious. It doesnā€™t help that Atticus claims the Finches to have an ā€œincestuous streakā€ due to their habit of marrying their cousins.
  • The Vampire Chronicles has Lestat and his mother Gabrielle. Lestat is clearly Gabrielle's favorite, she even refers to him as the male part of her. The first person Lestat turns into a vampire is Gabrielle, and during their time as vampire companions, Lestat referred to them as lovers.
  • There's some implications of Royal Inbreeding in Varjak Paw. The Contessa seems to be the only Mesopotamian Blue breeder and the breed descends from one sire. It's worth noting that cat breeds tend to start off with a lot of inbreeding.
  • Warrior Cats:
    • Brambleclaw and Hawkfrost are half-brothers. Brambleclaw chose to trust Hawkfrost over Squirrelflight, his Love Interest, and trusted Hawkfrost completely up until he tried to make him kill his leader. Even though it was hinted at that Hawkfrost was evil.
    • The Clans don't allow breeding with cats outside of their Clan. It's against their code to breed with cats from other Clans, pet cats, or non-Clan stray cats. Though incest pairings rarely appear (and when they do, it's usually only noticeable if you look at their family tree note ), it's a given that there is some sort of inbreeding.
  • Wuthering Heights has an Inverted example: a canon couple implied to be related. Catherine and Heathcliff are a couple caught in a Destructive Romance, as well as adopted siblings—but it's suspected by several characters that Heathcliff is Mr Earnshaw's bastard son, and that's why he was adopted. We never find out whether that's true or not.

    Live-Action TV 
  • 7th Heaven:
    • In the pilot episode Mary asks her brother Matt to help her practice kissing. Their father walks in on them before anything happens. Reportedly, the script actually called for them to kiss, but Jessica Biel and Barry Watson refused to do it.
    • The seven siblings all had active, obsessive interests in the sex lives of their brothers and sisters.
    • In the episode in which Lucy gives birth, brother Matt takes her shopping and the store employees assume they are married. Rather than say "He's my brother," Lucy replies that they are not married, leaving the store employees to assume they have a sexual relationship. While in labor in a stuck elevator, Lucy insists on Matt (in training to be an OBGYN) be the one to deliver her baby even though there are trained, non-related paramedics in the elevator.
    • This infamous scene, when Ruthie is "dancing" in her room, and the dad comes up. The entire scene—particularly when Ruthie sees her dad watching, and smiles at him in a very un-daughter-like fashion. Given Stephen Collins was later accused of (and admitted to) sexual indecency with three minors, this becomes very creepy in hindsight.
  • One 30 Rock episode ends with Jenna reconciling with her mother by singing a slightly altered version of Captain & Tennille's "Do That To Me One More Time" together. Lyrics like "Kiss me like you just did" are sung while gazing into each other's eyes.
    Liz: How are you not moved by this?
    Jack: Because I'm listening to the words.
  • In Almost Royal the two main characters, who are brother and sister keep referring to each other as "friends with benefits" to their handler's annoyance. The only reason it's subtext is that being both British and rather dim-witted they may not realize what it means in American terms. Maybe.
    Poppy: We're close
    Handler: You're not that close
    Poppy: We are.
  • Altered Carbon:
    • Takeshi Kovacs's relationship with his sister Reileen Kawahara is rather ambiguous. She behaves like a Clingy Jealous Girl towards him and is determined to kill anyone who becomes romantically involved with him, but other than stealing Kristin Ortega's body so she can bathe naked in front of him, it's unclear if her obsession with him extends to the sexual.
    • Due to the nature of the setting allowing for Brain Uploading, it's generally hard to pin down the social mores regarding incest since genetics is theoretically a non-issue. For instance, the daughter of a very wealthy woman is shown to use her mother's spare bodies to have sex in them. The protagonist who discovers this is only interested because of her possible role in a murder investigation.
  • This is played for laughs quite a bit on Arrested Development. The idea of incest is very deliberately prominent in show, probably to emphasise both how messed-up the Bluth family is, and how obsessed all the family members are with themselves.
    • Buster very clearly has some kind of Oedipus Complex, and is too much of a Manchild to stop himself from saying things that very heavily hint at it. Whenever he gets into an actual relationship, he treats it the same way he does his relationship with Lucille.
      Buster: Sister's my new mother, Mother. And is it just me, or has she gotten hotter?
    • Lindsay, when she finds out she's adopted, is convinced that Michael has always harbored a crush on her. As soon as G.O.B. discovers this news, he immediately tries to hit on Lindsay, but she slaps him in the face.
    • George Michael has a not-altogether unrequited crush on Maeby, his cousin.
    • Maeby and Steve Holt fool around in Season 3, though she calls it off after discovering they're related.
    • G.O.B. and Michael have a slight love/hate relationship, but G.O.B. is also slightly obsessed with his brother. He wrote a song about him, in which he sings, "Everything I do, I do for you," and gets very upset when Michael gets angry at him (which he does fairly frequently). G.O.B. is very physically affectionate with Michael, more so than with anyone else in his family. He loves touching Michael in any way he can, whether it's a hug (which Michael mostly denies, somewhat aggressively), or a hand on the shoulder, or just having their faces uncomfortably close together. In the episode 'Making A Stand', he hugs Michael tightly, and says, "If you feel something moving down there, it's just the bird," but Michael sees said dove walking across the counter during the hug. The implied incestual element in their relationship has even spawned multiple fanfictions.
    • In season 4, G.O.B. asks the unwitting George-Michael to do a favour for him, which ends up being pretending to be his boyfriend so he can get into an exclusive gay club to foil Tony Wonder's performance. G.O.B. admits easily that he tried to first convince his brother Michael, but had no luck. When George-Michael realises the plan, he immediately tries to back out, but G.O.B. doesn't let him leave without a reason. He pretends that they've had an argument, and kisses him just before he can finally get away.
    • At an office Christmas party, Michael attempts to bond with Maeby, his niece, by singing a karaoke duet with her. The song they choose is called "Afternoon Delight", but Michael eventually realise as the song goes on that it's a duet about having sex in the afternoon. He immediately cuts the performance off by awkwardly declaring that he is going to get himself a drink and calling for a toast, and quickly tells Maeby that she should leave the scene in the other direction because it will look "worse" if she follows him. Later, George-Michael and Lindsay also sing the song together, again unaware of the sexual nature of the song.
    • In the episode "Shock and Aww", George Micheal harbors a massive crush on his ethics teacher. Lindsay notices George Micheal's interest in his teacher, but she mistakes his feelings and thinks he just admires his teacher and sees her as a replacement mother-figure. Lindsay then tries talking with him about his feelings, and inadvertently makes a lot of unfortunate double entendres much to George Micheal's discomfort:
      Lindsay: Ah, sounds like you'd like her to be more than just your teacher. There's nothing wrong with that. Although... I must say I'm a little hurt that you haven't considered me.
      George Michael: (gobsmacked) ...You're my aunt.
      Lindsay: That doesn't matter. Aunts can fill that role. Teachers can fill that role. And, someday, you're going to find the right woman to fill that role. But until then... I'll be right across the hall.
      (Lindsay walks away with a big smile on her face)
      Narrator: Lindsay had never been more proud of anything she had said in her entire life.
      George Michael: ...Yikes!
  • In the CW show Arrow, Oliver and his sister Thea. There is an inordinate amount of chemistry between the actors; reportedly they'd met each other prior to the series starting and developed a playful friendship. She starts off rather cold towards him when he returns but warms up upon learning the full details of his experience; the exact same story and dynamic is what they use for Laurel in the show, his actual love interest.
  • In Ash vs. Evil Dead Ash is offered a threesome with a beautiful mother and daughter in the episode 'Home'. In the episode 'Family' he leers over the character of Rachel, thinking she is his daughter.
  • In Bates Motel, a prequel to the first film version of Psycho, Norma and her son Norman have an uncomfortable amount of tension between each other. They both freely admit each other are the most important people in their lives, they do stuff together all the time, they both have the same tastes in music and movies, they both get really jealous when the other shows romantic or sexual interest in someone else, and they often sleep in the same bed and spoon.
  • Ben and Kate is a show about a brother moving in with his single-parent sister to help her raise her daughter, so this was inevitable. They are sometimes mistaken for a married couple in the show as well.
  • Beverly Hills, 90210: According to IMDb: On the special, Beverly Hills, 90210: 10-Year High School Reunion (2003) Shannen Doherty revealed that the hardest thing about doing the show was pretending that Jason Priestley, whom she referred to as "being so hot", was her brother. She then revealed that, years later, people often approach her and ask her about the "weird incestuous vibe" between Brandon and Brenda, their characters. She said her response is always "Uh-huh, you better believe it!"
  • Played for Laughs quite a few times in The Big Bang Theory:
    • Howard appears to have some kind of oedipus complex. He's accidentally called his wife Bernadette "Ma" at least twice, to his embarrassment. One time when Bernadette yelled at him in his mother's voice, he claimed she sounded "sexy". One episode lampshades it: Howard mentions having to rub ointment on his mother, and when asked why she couldn't do that herself, Howard responded: "Because we have a deeply unhealthy relationship." He later imagines them both in the roles of Norman and Norma Bates from the film 'Psycho'. He also confesses to having sexual relations with a female cousin at a family gathering.
    • Sheldon theorizes that Leonard wants to be with Penny because she's the opposite of Leonard's "first romantic attachment", meaning his mother.
    • One time when Leonard and Penny are about to have sex, Leonard mentions that if his mother were there, she would tell them that having sex is their way of making up for the intimacy they didn't receive from their parents. Penny asks if that means Leonard is subconsciously trying to have sex with his mother, and instead of denying it, Leonard tries to justify it by saying that Penny is also "having sex with her father". Of course, she freaks out and kicks him out of her apartment. Leonard's psychiatrist mother, Beverley, had previously observed that if he wanted to have sex with Penny he should wear the same cologne as her father.
    • When Leonard attempts to write a murder mystery he realises the beautiful, blonde, strident heroine with whom his character has a love/hate relationship actually represents his mother. Uncomfortable that he has depicted them flirting with one another he abandons the book.
  • All over The Borgias, but well, there's a reason for that. You've got the main one — Cesare/Lucrezia — which becomes canon in Season 3. But you've also got other examples which are most limited to subtext:
    • There's Vannozza/Cesare, who spend the most time together of the parents/children and whom Cesare brings to Lucrezia's wedding despite his father's wishes.
    • There's Cesare/Juan, with Juan getting the life Cesare wants and Cesare reluctantly cleaning up his brother's mistakes.
    • There's Rodrigo/Lucrezia, with their cuddling and kissing and the way Lucrezia clearly has her father wrapped around her little finger.
  • The Brady Bunch always had something between step-siblings Greg and Marcia, which is made obvious in the movie.
  • One version that completely threw writers for a loop occurs in Brothers & Sisters. After patriarch William Walker dies, it's revealed that he's had a mistress named Holly for years, and that they had a daughter named Rebecca together. Unfortunately, Emily VanCamp (who played Rebecca) and Dave Annable (who played youngest Walker sibling Justin) had such incredible romantic chemistry that the incest subtext became impossible to avoid; it didn't help that VanCamp and Annable started dating while they were on the show together. As such, alterations were made, and it was eventually revealed that Rebecca wasn't William Walker's daughter (Holly had another lover on the side). While this allowed Justin and Rebecca to pursue their romance, it also forced the writers to introduce William's actual illegitimate son, Ryan, who quickly became the most hated character on the show.
  • Buffyverse:
    • Buffy and Joyce both seem overly physically affectionate when it comes to Dawn (and one another), constantly kissing, cuddling and nuzzling her, stroking her hair so much you wonder it doesn't fall out. The way she kisses Dawn in "The Gift" is very much not sisterly, which Joss Whedon jokes about in the DVD Commentary. "Tough Love" draws explicit parallels between Buffy/Dawn and Willow/Tara. .
      Willow: I have to look after [Tara]. She's my girl.
      Buffy: [stroking Dawn's hair] I know what you mean.
    • And in "Intervention":
      Buffy: I love you, Dawn. You know that, right?
      Dawn: Yeah. I love you too.
      Buffy: I love you...really love you.
      Dawn: [nervous grin] Gettin' weird...
      Buffy: Sorry. But it's important that I tell you. Weird love's better than no love.
    • Also in 'The Gift' Buffy declares to Giles that Dawn is more than a sister to her and that their relationship is "physical". Joss Whedon comments that with Riley gone Dawn is essentially Buffy's love interest for season 5.
    • Dawn also shows signs of this with her mother substitutes Willow and Tara in "Real Me". She wants them to teach her the stuff they do together, and is promptly told to go to her room. In "Him", Willow is perving on a scantily clad girl dancing at The Bronze, only to discover it was Dawn.
    • In "Lies My Parents Told Me", Spike's relationship with his mother (whom he sired so they could be together forever) is called out explicitly as incestuous desire—granted, it's by her while newly vampirized and the accusation horrifies him (even being a soulless vampire himself at the time) to the point that he stakes her, making it also subverted.
      • Crosses over into Oedipal transference with the behind-the-scenes subtext that the actress who played his mother was cast partly because of a resemblance to Sarah Michelle Gellar, and the character's name in Anne—Buffy's middle name.
    • In third season episode Dopplegangland alt-universe Vamp Willow is clearly interested in Willow, licking her neck and and using her "HANDS!".
    • Crossing over to Angel, Drusilla has sex with Angel several times and frequently calls him "daddy" (because he sired her) and she also calls Darla "grandmother", whom she shares a lot of Les Yay with, including a threesome with The Immortal in 'The Girl In Question'. Gunn has an awkward scene with his sired sister Elana offering to sire him so they can be together forever in 'War Zone'. There is implied child abuse between Bethany and her father in 'Untouched', Connor impregnates his possessed pseudo-mother Cordelia in 'Apocalypse Nowish' and their "child" Jasmine now grown to adulthood deep kisses her grandfather Angel in 'Peace Out'.
  • Castle: Richard Castle and his daughter Alexis are extremely close, largely due to his raising her by himself but sometimes it seems to go beyond this. One episode opens with her sitting on his lap which is fine for a little girl but she's college age. The same episode has a scene where he talks to her about the breakup of her long-distance relationship and asks "Does this make you feel any better?" She says "No, but this does." and proceeds to cuddle with him. Another episode, which takes place at a science-fiction convention has him see her in a very skimpy cosplay outfit. After confronting her about it he walks away saying "I can't unsee that!" Later on they have an awkward scene together in which they agree not to discuss the matter, the implication being that it might bring up feelings neither wants to acknowledge.
  • All of the sisters in Charmed get a load of this. They spend a lot of time holding hands, stroking each other's hair, lounging around on one another's laps and saying how much they love each other. Also, Phoebe taught Prue french kissing apparently, and Piper and Prue had a lot of married-couple type habits from all the years they've spent living together. Piper and Phoebe also end up dancing naked together around a Wiccan bonfire in the episode 'Witch Trial'.
  • Cheers: Sam reunites with a beautiful former girlfriend and her now gorgeous teenage daughter and schemes to have a threesome with them, Norm toasting him as "The man who keeps the dream alive". Sam also tries to have a threesome with Rebecca and her actress sister Susan (Marcia Cross).
  • Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: it's never exactly clear from the scripts whether Lucifer actually wants to make Sabrina his "child bride" in addition to secretly being her father, but Luke Cook's performance in their scenes together runs the gamut from "deliciously sleazy" through "David Bowie in Labyrinth " all the way to "go ahead, call me daddy."
    • It's also hinted as early as episode 2 ("we will have failed him [beat]... and the Dark Lord!") that Zelda's feelings for her late brother Edward were a little bit more intense than would be considered appropriate in the mortal world: she apparently couldn't stand his wife; she constantly refers to him in a way that makes him sound more like her high-school boyfriend or her late husband than her brother, often followed by a reaction shot of their younger sister Hilda pointedly refusing to engage; and her taste for "Dark Confession", combined with the knowledge that Edward felt called to the High Priesthood from a very young age, really makes you think. Their meeting in the space between life and death after she's been shot in Part 3 does absolutely nothing to discourage the impression: there's just a lot of gazing and hands on backs, and at one point she turns to him excitedly and stops abruptly, as if restraining herself from going in for a kiss. Same creative team as Riverdale.
  • In Coronation Street Julie and Jason get drunk and spend a night on the couch together. When Julie's mother Paula finds out about this she is horrified...and drops the bombshell that Jason and Julie are actually related as Paula had sex with Jason's grandfather when she was fourteen and got pregnant with Julie. It's then quickly revealed that Jason and Julie didn't actually sleep together.
  • Criminal Minds: In-Universe in one episode. A young brother-sister pair moves to a new town with their grandparents after their parents die, and it quickly becomes obvious that they're the most important people to each other. The town is especially suspicious of the younger brother's seeming obsession with his sister. They do things like go to the movies and school dances together, which are often done on dates but have perfectly innocent explanations (the local sheriff specifies that every kid in town goes to that dance, with or without a date). The BAU team recognizes that the trauma at such a young age likely made the boy incapable of properly bonding with anyone but his sister since she was the only constant in his life. Nothing incestuous is ever confirmed by the episode, but the townsfolk believe it enough that a group of grown men beat up the teenage boy and the sheriff convinces his grandparents to send him away for his own protection.
  • In the Dallas : in the first season farmhand Dusty Farlow is having an affair with Lucy Ewing. When it is later revealed that Lucy's father Jock is his father that means they are half brother and sister but it is never mentioned again.
  • In the Degrassi: The Next Generation movie thing where Fiona, Declan, Holly J and Jane go to New York, Fiona gets so jealous of her Declan's relationship with Holly J that she full-on kisses Declan on the lips. Though that was partially a rash decision Fiona did while she was drunk.
  • In the Dollhouse: episode 'Haunted' Adelle's old friend Margeret downloads her personality into Echo so she can attend her own funeral and see what everyone truly thought about her. Her son later deep kisses her, telling her he's noticed her checking out his body and she admits it but claims it is subconsciously and due to "Too much wine". In 'Stage Fright' Adele offers a Dollhouse client twins to "relieve his tension".
  • In Eureka, Jack Carter and his daughter Zoe have a... strange relationship. Many of their scenes are shot and written like a couple squabbling, then reconciling later. It's repeatedly established that Jack cares more for her than Jo, Henry, and even Alison by a huge margin, risking his life for her over and over again, while being immensely controlling and restricting about her love life. For her part Zoe also values him more than anyone else, always going to him in times of crisis. It's worth mentioning that Jack's ex-wife (Zoe's mother) looks very similar to Jack's sister.
  • In Faking It twins Pieter and Petra seem far more interested in each other than in Shane and Liam who are trying to pick them up. Shane is shocked to see them holding hands while flirting with him and Liam, Petra agrees to take Liam home but only if he dresses in her brother's clothes and when Shane and Liam leave the twins seem relieved.
  • In Firefly, Simon and River's relationship is greatly textured, mixing sibling, parent, doctor, and lover roles with the necessary abandon. Simon and his mei-mei are all each other have in the world. And when River's upset or sick, it's her brother's bed she curls up in. She also had a Father, I Want to Marry My Brother moment in a deleted scene. See also the "Film" section for what happened in the cinema film...
    Simon: It's just not something brothers and sisters do. I mean, on some planets... but only pretty bad ones.
  • Friends:
    • This is a plot point in the episode "The One with the Inappropriate Sister". Rachel's date Danny seems to just be extremely close to his sister, until at the coffee house when he licks icing from her fingers, then she drops it on his pants and wipes it off, then they go upstairs to change pants. When Rachel finally goes to break up with him, Danny and his sister are about to take a bath together.
    • Another episode has a cousin of Ross and Monica played by Denise Richards that is so stunningly beautiful that Ross forgets he's related to her and makes a pass at her. That's probably why she isn't seen at the wedding.
    • Siblings Ross and Monica have no problem with hugging, kissing, holding hands and sitting near each other. The closeness they have is not unnoticed by the other four main characters and is cause for some jokes. Moreover, Ross was Monica's first kiss (he thought she was Rachel). It Makes Just as Much Sense in Context.
      Monica: You were my Midnight Mystery Kisser?!
      Ross: You were my first kiss with Rachel?!
      Monica: You were my first kiss ever?!
      Chandler: What have I married into?!
      • By the way, there is a scene where the dialogue between the two is so loving that Phoebe teases by suggesting to them go to a hotel room.
      • There was also an episode where Monica brought it up solely for squick purposes.
        Monica: Here's a few things you can discuss: mucus, fungus, and the idea of me and Ross doing it.
    • In 'The One Where Chandler Can't Cry" Phoebes twin sister Ursula has become a porn star and invites her sibling to join her, stating that "People are really into twin stuff".
    • During season four Phoebe acts as a gestational surrogate for her half-brother and his wife (as a way of writing in Lisa Kudrow's pregnancy). Phoebe was artifically inseminated but the show mines a lot of humor from her not explaining this clearly to people and leaving them to think the worst.
      Phoebe: The father is my brother.
      Nurse: ...Okaaay.
      Rachel: (to Phoebe) I am so going to miss watching you freak people out like that.
  • The Gifted (2017)
    • The show is based off of Marvel Comics where Andreas and Andrea von Strucker have a canonically incestuous relationship. The TV show doesn't come out and say it, but it sure seems like they're lovers here too. Andreas is confirmed to be the great-grandfather of the main characters, by way of his son Otto. The show mostly uses the phrasing "your great-grandfather and his sister" to refer to them, but no mention is ever made of the baby mama this implies, and Otto says that both Andreas and Andrea raised him together — which naturally raises the question of whether Andrea was his mother or not. And the "grandfather and his sister" shtick is dropped on two occasions.
      Madeline Garber: Reed's grandparents were monsters. They murdered thousands. (episode 2.09)
      Reeva Payge: You know, your grandparents understood what it takes to create a homeland. (episode 2.16)
    • The main characters, Lauren and Andy, inherited their powers (called Fenris) from Andreas and Andrea. Many of the conversations about their bilateral superpowers could be read as conversations about a romantic relationship, if one lacked knowledge of the context.
      Lauren: No. Andy, don't. We can't do this again.
      Andy: You're wrong Lauren. We're meant to be together. Fenris is our destiny.
  • Gilmore Girls featured in one episode the family of a Harvard alum, and his two children, a boy and a girl, who are weirdly close — from color-coordinated outfits to alluded shared showers. When Lorelai and Rory come over to their place for lunch, Lorelai mercilessly mocks the issue in Rory's ears, much to the latter's chagrin.
  • On Gotham, Penguin's relationship with his mother included such moments as her helping him bathe — as a healthy, uninjured, adult. Then there was Fish's relationship with Liza, which paired very sexualized behavior with explicitly parental forms of address. Tabatha Galavan also hints she is in a sexual relationship with her half brother Theo and Alice states that she was sexually abused by her brother Jervis Tetch aka 'The Mad Hatter'.
  • While Hannibal never explicitly states it like in its literature counterpart, the constant abuse Mason Verger inflicts on his sister takes a clear incestual subtext when he starts talking with Margot about how they need to think of the next Mason generation. When he goes on to say how his son would be her heir as well, and that a child would bring them closer together, it's pretty obvious what his intentions are. If you wanted to be absolutely sure, he also throws in how he has viable sperm.
  • Heroes:
    • The Petrelli brothers. The amount of subtext between Nathan and Peter made Petrellicest the most popular slash pairing in the fandom.
    • During one point when Claire is with her long lost biological father Nathan, they share a motel room together after he gets hammered trying to drink some frat boys under the table for money. They act more like a couple than a father and daughter, even a pair that were Long Lost Relatives.
    • Peter and Claire may be uncle and niece, but between the way their first meeting comes off like a Meet Cute with a little Rescue Romance thrown in (since that's also the episode where he saves her from Sylar), their other love interests generally being considered underwhelming at best, and the way they still act way closer to each other than one would expect an uncle and niece to be, it's not hard to see why the Abandon Shipping for this pairing was pretty minimal compared to other similar situations. It certainly didn't help that their actors even dated in real life.
    • It's impossible to watch Maya and Alejandro Herrera without thinking about it, especially during the flashback where she expresses dislike for his wife before catching her cheating on Alejandro.
    • There is sort of an aversion with Sylar and Angela. Sylar gets captured at Primatech and while he's drugged out, Angela creepily touches him and then tells him that she's his mother. But it turns out that Angela was lying and that they were not actually related at all, making the Sylar/Angela subtext into just regular creepy subtext.
  • Hope & Faith has the titular two sisters being involved in a couple of moments. One episode has Faith pretend she and Hope are a lesbian couple. And another implies that Hope gave Faith a complete spray tan—this is given a Squicky reaction from Hope's husband.
  • House: in 'Fools for Love' the team deal with a boyfriend and girlfriend who inexplicably develop the same incredibly rare genetically inherited condition at the same time. The boy eventually reveals that his father was a racist who committed suicide when he discovered his son was dating the daughter of their African-American housekeeper. House suggests that his father wasn't actually a racist at all, that he only objected to THAT black girl as she was actually his daughter and they were half siblings experiencing Genetic Sexual Attraction.
  • How I Met Your Mother: Barney ends up unknowingly grinding against his female cousin at a nightclub. When Marshall reads a letter written by his teenage self it describes his perfect woman as tall, blonde with an "awesome rack". His wife Lily points out that she is actually none of these things but it is a perfect description of his mother, much to Marshall's distress. In an advert for the final season we learn that Ted's teenage son and daughter have been trapped on the sofa listening to his story for so long that they've started having lustful desires for one another.
  • Interview with the Vampire (2022): In "A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart", Claudia is sexually frustrated because she doesn't have an immortal companion and lover like Lestat and Louis are to each other. Envious of their union, she asks which of her vampire fathers will fuck her. Lestat's response strongly suggests that he would have if she had the body of an full-grown woman.
    Claudia: WHICH ONE OF YOU GONNA FUCK ME?!
    Lestat: Well, you're not my type. I like a fuller figure.
  • Twins Dennis and Dee Reynolds from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. In "Dennis and Dee Get a New Dad" they are explicitly accused of sleeping with each other by Frank. Furthermore they are cast as love interests in Charlie's "The Nightman Cometh" play. Charlie initially casts Dennis as the villain to avoid the incestuous implications, but Dennis wants to play the hero instead and has no problem with the fact that his sister plays the love interest. Dee, however, complains, and the initially planned kiss between their roles is changed to an embrace. In addition, during the episode "Frank's Back in Business," the siblings along with Mac discover that a patron has left his wallet at the bar, leading Dennis to assume the patron's identity. When they show up to a baseball game via the tickets in the wallet and that person's associates assume that Dennis is the patron and Dee is his wife, the two have no problems playing along with this ruse. Dennis even states that he "gets off" while pretending to be another person, and when Dee questions the ruse, he asks Dee if she wants to "get off" with him. There's also the scattered moments in the series where Dennis expresses his care for Dee's well-being in a way that almost sounds like a grand declaration of love, and while Dee herself seems to brush them off most of the time, it is implied she does return the sentiment. Word of God confirms as such, saying they're secretly in love with each other.
  • Kamen Rider:
    • Kamen Rider Kabuto has a lot of Ship Tease between Tendou and Hiyori, although Hiyori is a Worm so they're not blood-related, but she's mimicking the girl who would have been his sister. Even Tendou's dark self's existence revolved around her while again, they're technically not blood-related: Dark Tendou is also a Worm, but he is a mimic of Tendou. Early on in the show before The Reveal, some of the characters, like the owner of Bistro La Salle and Juka, refer to them as boyfriend and girlfriend. Tendou doesn't deny this. Hilariously, Sean Wiig, the actor of Tendou's child self, even believed that Tendou and Hiyori were dating.
    • Ship Tease involving siblings (and, in one case, an uncle and niece) is very common in Heisei-era Kamen Rider series. Prominent examples are Taiga and Wataru in Kiva, Ryotaro and Hana in Den-O, Maki and his sister and Hina and Ankh (who is possessing her brother's body) in OOO, and Philip and Wakana in Double.
    • Kamen Rider Ghost and Kamen Rider Saber both have sibling characters that are obsessed with each other. Makoto fantasizes about his sister Kanon sometimes for one, and Reika tends to find herself in a murderous rage out of jealousy if anyone dares so signs of liking her brother Ryoga (even if they don't mean to). Ask Mei, who Reika tried to kill on several occasions over this. It's always Played for Laughs though.
    • Kamen Rider Revice takes this to a whole new level with the Hyper Battle DVD. To lure out a Deadman who has been terrorizing weddings, George decided to set up a fake wedding between Ikki and his younger brother Daiji (with Daiji as the bride). It should be noted that they also have the youngest sister Sakura, and both Daiji and Sakura get upset about how Sakura's not the bride (while it can be understood that she's upset because she's a girl and wants to wear a pretty dress, it would still be her brother Ikki as the groom anyway, so it really raises a few eyebrows). Ikki is, for some reason, unusually eager about kissing his younger brother. And later on, Ikki trips on Daiji's dress, causing an Accidental Kiss between them. It has to be seen to be believed.
  • Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:
    • One episode involves a girl who made a celibacy pledge getting pregnant and being terrified that her father would kick her out if he found out. When dad eventually accepts that it was consensual sex (he VERY strongly wanted to believe she was raped so she wouldn't have broken her pledge), he says that she betrayed him, leaving some icky implications, though it's pretty clear that he never actually abused her.
    • In another similar episode a girl collapses at her purity ball and it's learned she's pregnant. The detectives are convinced her brother is the culprit. It turns out it's the family pastor (who had gotten another sister pregnant before, which child was being raised as a sibling by the parents) who tried to marry the girl to avoid being charged with statutory rape.
  • Married... with Children has Bud and Kelly. Bud always rags on her skankiness, Kelly has many comments about his sex life (she seems to be jealous of his blow-up doll). She enjoys when he acknowledges her hotness or achievements. "If you weren't my brother..." Kelly comments after Bud does something really nice. In one episode, she seductively leaves lipstick marked kisses on him. Together they create the Bundy Bounce and she has him drooling. A date (Corey Feldman) disses Kelly cause she won't put out, so Bud purposely gives him the measles. Kelly cruelly gets revenge for Bud on a girl who humiliated him. When Bud discovered Kelly's knack for counting cards while in a Vegas casino, he got down on one knee right there and shouted, "Marry me! Damn the law!"
  • Malcolm in the Middle: Reese kissing Malcolm, saying he wants them to be together forever, and getting jealous over Malcolm's relationship with Stevie.
  • Merlin:
    • Half-sisters Morgana and Morgause. Their secret meetings can be seen as not unlike secret lovers having an affair. According to Word of God, it was intentional — Morgause was meant to stand as Morgana's love interest. Although, due to the revelation of Morgana being Uther's daughter, we can't be sure if Morgana and Morgause are actually related anymore. They certainly seem to consider themselves sisters, though.
    • Due to the aforementioned revelation, Morgana and Arthur's season one Ship Tease retroactively counts as this.
  • Modern Family: Gloria's smothering relationship with her son Manny has been jokingly called out as this at times. "Crying Out Loud" has Manny dating a girl named Kylie whom Gloria gets insanely jealous of and it is pointed out that Kylie acts quite similar to Gloria, even wearing a bikini just like one Gloria has.
  • On NCIS, Troian Bellisario appears in two episodes. In the first, "Red Cell" in season 2, DiNozzo and Todd go to McGee's apartment to bring him in to work early for a meeting, and spend several minutes making fun of him for being a nerd; after they leave, Bellisario walks out of McGee's bedroom in her pajamas and takes over the computer game McGee had been playing. The joke being that, unbeknownst to Todd and DiNozzo, McGee had gotten this gorgeous woman into bed the night before. Then, in the season four episode "Twisted Sister," it is revealed that Bellisario's character is actually McGee's sister. And, to add just one more interesting wrinkle, the executive producer of NCIS? Donald Bellisario. And Sean Murray, McGee's actor is Bellisario's stepson. Making them step-siblings in real life.
  • In The New Adventures of Old Christine, there's a lot of incestuous subtext between Christine and her brother Matthew. There was even a scene in which Christine made out with him, though it turned out to be a dream.
  • Nip/Tuck: Christian not only has a threesome with a pair of beautiful identical teenage twin sisters but also has group sex with an attractive mother and her gorgeous teenage daughter.
  • On The Originals:
    • Klaus and Rebekah, starting from the moment they first appeared together on the parent show The Vampire Diaries. In one episode, Cami asks if they're dating. Klaus has a history of hating—and killing—men Rebekah is interested in, and considers himself her constant and basically the only man worthy of her and the only man she's allowed to love. He's also jealous of Marcel and Rebekah's relationship, which is in itself pseudo-incestuous (she's not really his aunt, but Klaus is the closest thing he has to a father). When Klaus can't kill her new boyfriend like he normally does, because this time it's his adopted son, he spends centuries keeping them apart, daggering Rebekah to punish her not only for 'betraying' him but also for 'taking' Marcel away from him. And then there's the actor's comment [1] that Klaus 'feels left out' and 'insecure.' And this sentiment being confirmed onscreen in season 4 with the line "How could either of you love each other and still have room for me?"
    • Freya and Finn Mikaelson toy with this line as well. Nearly all of their interactions in season 2 seem to give off romantic vibes, and Finn only stays with his family after being brought back a second time for Freya.
    • Finn and Esther's relationship had quite remarkable Oedipal undertones.
    • Freya and Elijah being basically married.
    • Kol wooing Freya back in the day when he didn't know they were siblings. Freya using his romantic/sexual interest for her own benefit. Later he found out the truth but it didn't cause any troubles and both of them are really chill about it.
    • While not as creepily possessive of him as he is of Rebekah, Klaus gets quite touchy about Elijah paying too much attention to other people as well. Klaus arranges circumstances so Elijah's girlfriend Celeste ends up murdered. He claims to have done it simply out of boredom, feigning ignorance that her death would hurt Elijah, but it's quite clearly feelings of jealousy and betrayal that spurred him to get rid of her. Elijah even blames himself, saying he should have known 'abandoning' Klaus in favour of Celeste would lead to that result. He also spends quite a lot of time gazing wistfully at him across a piano bar after the events of the season 4 finale where the siblings are magically forced to separate and Elijah loses all his memories, despite the risk that bringing two pieces of The Hollow so close together poses and Elijah, ya'know, not having any idea who he is anyway. One of the writers [2]even joked on twitter that Elijah definitely thought Klaus was hitting on him since he couldn't recognise him as his brother.
    • Elijah's insane levels of devotion to Klaus.
      • Despite frequently being on the receiving end of Klaus' abusive paranoia, he continually sacrifices everything and everyone else in his life to put Klaus first, makes seeking Klaus' redemption his primary purpose and seems adrift whenever something interferes with that goal, and always eventually forgives him no matter what he does (which includes things like compelling Elijah's innocent girlfriend to kill herself in front of him to pay Elijah back for daggering him once, even though Klaus has daggered everyone numerous times.)
      • In season 5, there is a scene where he recalls Klaus asking him to run away from Mikael with him when they were children. He refused to leave Kol and Rebekah behind. Over 1000 years later, despite the massive and unpredictable changes it would have made to their lives, including likely never seeing the rest of their family again, he tells Hope he regrets it.
      "'Niklaus begged me to run away with him, but I told him that I would never leave Rebekah and Kol at the mercy of Mikael. So we stayed. And, of course, it was a mistake. We should've run away together..."'
      • At the end of season 4, he goes to the extremes of intentionally erasing his own memories because he either doesn't believe he can trust himself to stay away from Klaus with willpower alone, or considers doing so to be unbearable torture, or a combination of both.
      "'My disease has always been this blind devotion to my brother. A thousand years, and whenever he has needed me, I have been there. And no matter what I do, I'm at the complete mercy of that devotion. I can't do that anymore."'
      • In the finale, it is obvious that the biggest reason for Elijah choosing to unnecessarily sacrifice himself alongside Klaus is that he simply couldn't stand to live in a world without him.
    • Tristan and Aurora de Martel are both pathologically devoted to one another, which is used against them leading to their downfall.
  • On Penny Dreadful, Caliban's attitude toward his creator/father figure is an uncomfortable blend of "angry rejected child" and "spurned lover."
Al Rawabi School For Girls: Layan's brother Hakeem is really touchy about his sister's sexuality, acts like a Control Freak when he hears her on the phone with someone who's voice he isn't familiar with, and believes that him and his other brother Khalil are entitled to barging into her room and going through her things, even stating that Layan doesn't "need privacy". When he mistakes her for sleeping with another man, he kills her. A bit of Values Dissonance is at play here, since in Arab households what he's doing is seen as preserving familial honour, but Westerners who watched the series were pretty squicked out and wondered if there was more at play.
  • There's a heavy implication, particularly in Season 1, that Sir Malcolm may have actually crossed the line with his daughter Mina; he also forced his son to participate in various sexual atrocities during their travels "to prove he was a man."
  • Fittingly, in Season 2 he becomes embroiled with Evelyn Poole, a centuries-old witch whose relationship with her daughter is explicitly sexual and who seems to relate to her long-estranged sister more as a spurned lover than anything else.
  • In the Sanctuary episode "Nubbins", Henry is clearly thinking of other things when Ashley asks him if "he's had a chance to check out her Nubbins," and again when she says "Don't you just want to squeeze them?" While they aren't biologically related, they were raised by the same woman in the same household, making them adopted siblings.
  • In Scrubs Eliot Reid recounts in the episode 'My Quarantine' that as an adolescent girl her father, Dr Simon Reid, took her to watch him work at his hospital and she was so impressed she developed some "complicated" sexual emotions about him afterwards. Notably many of her sexual partners such as JD and Keith are doctors like her father. In the episode 'My Best Friends Baby's Baby and my Baby's Baby' JD opposes putting his unborn daughter up for adoption as he fantasises hooking up with her in a bar when she is an adult, the pregnant Kim commenting "You think if it's a girl you'd doink her?" and JD replying "I know I will". JD actually describes his own mother Barbara as "sexy" when describing her positive attributes and when Turk introduces his mother to Carla it strikes him how similar they are in personality.
  • In the Seinfeld episode 'The Junk Mail' George plans to shock his parents by pretending to have a sexual relationship with his female cousin Rhisa but she turns out to be genuinely really into it.
  • In Shake it Up there's a line where Tinka tells her brother Gunther (who's her dance partner) they can't get married. He looks heartbroken.
  • In the American adaptation of the show Shameless, siblings Fiona and Phillip essentially end up as the father and mother figures of their four younger siblings, being that their mother has been gone for some time and they eventually kick their deadbeat father out of the house. Although each has a respective love interest, Fiona loses interest in hers and is heavily disapproving of Phillip's love interest in what could easily be interpreted as jealousy.
  • Six Feet Under, Billy and Brenda are a pair of unusually close twins with many incestuous undertones, culminating in her throwing him out of the house after she has a sex dream about him in the final few episodes. At one point Claire comments that it's weird that Billy and Brenda end up dating a brother and sister but he points out to her that she and Nate are doing the same.
  • Skins
    • The Fitch twins in the second. Seems to be mostly one-directional from Katie to Emily. This is odd because Katie is supposed to be the straight one, while we know Emily is gay.
  • Once Upon a Time:
    • Cora and Regina's relationship has some seriously incestuous undertones, especially on Cora's part. Cora murders her daughter Regina's fiancĆ©e, Daniel, and then marries Regina off to King Leopold, who is still pining for his dead wife Eva, after manipulating the situation so that Regina places the blame for Daniel's death on Leopold's daughter, Snow. Thus, Regina will be trapped in a loveless marriage with no source of comfort but Mommy Dearest. After Regina banishes Cora to Wonderland and later sends Captain Hook to assassinate her, Cora prepares to return the favor until she hears Regina's tearful confession of love (which itself sounds like a monologue to a lover and not a parent) made over Cora's coffin. Cora thus goes into hiding and decides to allow her daughter to cast the Dark Curse, even though she knows that it will not bring Regina the happiness that she so desperately seeks, and will instead cause her to lose everything, because "then she'll need me... And me, I'll help her pick up the pieces." Also, upon arriving in Storybrooke, Cora breaks into Regina's home and sniffs her clothing. Once she and Regina reunite, she's also kind of creepily physical with her as well.
    • Season Four introduces Anna and Elsa, bringing all of the subtext from their film and more along with them.
  • Prison Break:
    • Business magnate Terrence Steadman and his sister, Vice-President and through succession President, Caroline Reynolds, made an audiotape recording one of their conversations that sounded quite intimate. This is later used by series protagonist Michael Scofield to blackmail Reynolds, specifically mentioning they "might want to keep [it] in the family", a reference to incest.
    • There's also Michael and Lincoln's relationship. While they're not to the same extent as Sam and Dean, they both go to insane lengths to help each other.
  • Cheryl and Jason Blossom from Riverdale are twins with a very close bond. Cheryl even considered Jason to be her soulmate, the two have a lot of romantic-laden flashbacks as well, and characters in-universe (some as an insult, some genuinely) comment on it a few times. It doesn't help that one of the writers is involved with Afterlife with Archie, which explicitly has them being incestuous.
  • Parodied and subverted in the Series Finale of Schitt's Creek when Alexis Rose wears a wedding dress to her brother David's wedding and she is walking him down the aisle. At first, she insists it is simply a full-length white gown that came with not a veil but a tulle headdress that she chose not to wear, but she realizes it is a wedding dress at the wedding. This is a callback to an early episode centering around the town sign that shows a brother and sister in a sexually suggestive pose.
  • In The Sinner, Cora and her younger sister Phoebe were still cuddling and caressing each other as teenagers, well past the age where it could be considered innocent.
  • Star Trek: Picard: Narissa and her brother Narek have an unusually intense relationship, with Narissa acting possessive of her brother in a way that makes their mutual snark look more like Belligerent Sexual Tension than usual Sibling Rivalry. It's visible enough that fans have nicknamed them the "Romulannisters."
  • Supernatural:
    • Brothers Sam and Dean have an extremely close relationship that includes a serious lack of personal space, sharing a room for most of the series, being completely inseparable and acting like a broken-up couple when they are apart for any length of time, jealousy whenever anyone else gets close to either brother, a mock "wedding" in which they stand at an altar and both declare that no one else is more important to either of them than each other, and total insanity whenever one brother believes the other has died. Dean is extremely protective and possessive of Sam, and Sam has given up pretty well everything he's ever dreamed of for Dean and tends to go bonkers whenever he thinks Sam might reject him. By later seasons the brothers are often paralleled to (and compare themselves to) romantic and married couples, such as Amelia and Don in Season 8. This is joked about several times; in "The Monster at the End of This Book", Sam and Dean discover a series of novels detailing their exploits has accumulated a fandom, including in-universe Sam/Dean shippers. In the episode "The Real Ghostbusters", the two guys Cosplaying as Sam and Dean turn out to be a couple. There's a few episodes where the brothers get confused for gay lovers, and Sam and Dean don't always correct the mistake.
      Zachariah: You know Sam and Dean Winchester are psychotically, irrationally, erotically codependent on each other, right?
    • The angels in the series are canonically all siblings, making all angel/angel attraction incestuous to some degree. Early on there is some Ship Tease between Castiel and Anna and in later seasons, an angel named Hannah develops a crush on Castiel. There's also plenty of tension between Lucifer and Michael, who are written to mirror Sam and Dean (see above) and later the angel Anael becomes enamored of Lucifer. There's also a couple of incidences of angels falling in love and trying to live normal lives on Earth, which never ends well for them.
  • In the Two and a Half Men episode 'Walnuts and Demerol' Charlie is informed the girl he is dating may be his half-sister. She wishes to continue a sexual relationship but this proves to be his limit. In the later episode 'Bazinga that's from a TV show' Jake finds himself simultaneously dating an attractive mother and daughter and wonders aloud if he could possibly have them both together, something Walden considers "Adorable".
  • In the Victorious episode "Birthweek Song", Tori's present to her sister Trina is a hot song-and-dance number which includes her sitting on her sister's lap. Whilst wearing an extremely short sparkly cocktail dress.
  • In The Waltons, there were a few instances when John-Boy (the eldest son and narrator) and his mother, Olivia seemed to share more than just parent-child closeness. One notable example is the birthday episode when he reads a poem to her, a love poem nonetheless. They interact more like a couple during that scene than a mother and son.
  • The relationship between Justin and Alex (Jalex) on Wizards of Waverly Place is filled with lots of subtext. By the time The Movie aired, everyone including the writers knew about the pairing and ensuing fandom, so the subtext from The Movie onwards is ship teasing and put there by the writers. It got to the point where some Executive Meddling occurred to reduce the amount of Jalex scenes and plots in a later season. It didn't help that the actors for Justin and Alex have been very very cuddly with each other at times, including New Year's kisses. Then there's the episode where everyone's memories of Justin being related to Alex is erased, which among other things results in their mother saying they'd make a good couple.
    Theresa: Justin is a great catch. You should go out with him.
    Alex: Eww, gross.
    Theresa: That's exactly how I felt about your father when I first met him and, now, he's my big cuddly bug!
    Alex: Eww, grosser.
    • Not to mention the episode "QuinceaƱera", where Alex and Justin switch bodies with their mom and a dance instructor, respectively, who proceed to share a very flirty dance in the siblings' bodies.
  • Word of Honor: Zhao Jing and the Scorpion King act much more like lovers than father and son (adopted father and son, but still). When the Scorpion King sees Zhao Jing with another young man he reacts like he's just caught Zhao Jing cheating on him.
  • In Xena: Warrior Princess, there is a huge amount. Ares the God of War lusts after Xena and has sex with her body whilst Callisto is possessing it. However in 'The Furies' she ascertains that he is actually her father. He also has an affair with her daughter Eve/Livia who is therefore his grandaughter and also with his niece, the goddess Discord. Xena also has had sex with Hercules who would be her uncle. It is hinted that Ares has an affair with his sister Aphrodite (as he does in Greek mythology) and Zeus and Hera are husband and wife AND brother and sister (as in Greek mythology).
  • You (2018): The relationship between the Quinn twins is very co-dependent. In season 2, we mostly see the ways that Forty depends on Love, while her dependency on him is left mostly implied. Season 3 flips this on its head. Love loses her brother to death and becomes an Angsty Surviving Twin, also struggling with a new baby and a failing marriage. She becomes attracted to Theo, who mirrors a lot of Forty's qualities. The capstone is a scene where she gets drunk, takes a bath, and imagines/hallucinates Forty there in the bath with her. They cradle each other naked in the bath while doing Headbutt of Love.
    Forty: Oh, Lovey. You're not happy because Joe [her husband] isn't your soulmate. I am. There is one person who understands what you have been through.
  • Young Sheldon, when it is revealed than Mary Coopers' illicit crush is the character of Dalton from the film 'Road House' her mother Meemaw points out how much he resembles her own son Georgie.

    Music 
  • Many of the great love-ballads of the 1970s were duets performed by the brother/sister duo The Carpenters. Richard did not get along with Karen's husband (who she was in the process of divorcing when she died), and Richard didn't get married until after Karen died.
  • The rock band Heart acrimoniously fell out with their first record label Mushroom after Mushroom printed a single-entendre magazine advertisement that blatantly implied that their core members, the sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson, were incestuous lesbians.
  • Liam and Noel Gallagher of Oasis had this in spades. The most obvious example being the kiss at Loch Lomond in 1996. Yes, there was tongue slippage.
  • Some may read the narrator of Billy Idol's White Wedding as more than just a protective brother.
  • Singer Salvador Sobral and his sister LuĆ­sa Sobral have a penchant for singing together on really romantic songs written by the latter, such as Amar Pelos Dois, about promising someone to love them even if they don't love them back, Prometo NĆ£o Prometer,about not being able to stop loving each other or to forget each other, or SĆ³ Um Beijo, about falling in love with each other after sharing a kiss. She also wrote a song for him in English called I Might Just stay Away, with lyrics such as "Cause someday when I grow old, I'd be so glad that I was strong and didn't fall for those lips, fall for those eyes, fall for the love of my life".
  • Blue Ɩyster Cult's song "Dominance and Submission" is about sexual escapades on a road trip at new year of 1964. The two named characters featured are Charles and Suzy, brother and sister, with a viewpoint character thrown in as the third. The lyrics are vague enough that any number of interpretations can be made about Charles and Suzy's involvement.

    Newspaper Comics 
  • Accidentally invoked in Doonesbury in July 2012 as Jeff and Zipper followed Alex's updates on Facebook about her honeymoon with Leo. Jeff made several comments such as "That could have been me standing next to her" and "Too bad Alex is with Leo instead of me." Unfortunately, it should have been Zipper making those comments, as he was the one with the longtime crush on Alex; Jeff is Alex's half-uncle (his older half-sister is Alex's mother). Cartoonist Garry Trudeau later explained on his website that he had "inadvertently mixed up the two boys during the course of the week. ... Apologies to the many horrified, genealogically astute readers who noticed."

    Professional Wrestling 
  • This was one of the original plans for the Sable/Tori feud back in 1999 where Tori was going to be revealed to be Sable's sister, making the stalking that little more creepy. They scrapped that idea and just made Tori an obsessed fan instead.
  • Kayfabe siblings Paul Burchill and Katie Lea debuted a controversial angle in 2008 that implied incest between the two of them, with Katie calling Paul "beautiful" and talking about how she enjoys watching him inflict pain. Paul's catchphrase would then be "whatever Katie wants, Katie always gets."note  WWE just happened to be going PG that year so the incest part of their pairing was dropped before anything big happened.
  • In 2014, it was implied that Samuel Shaw previously had sex with his mother, a redheaded woman named Christy. It was also implied to be the reason he was interested in a redheaded TNA interviewer named Christy, to the point he threatened to commit suicide if she wouldn't agree to date him.

    Tabletop Games 
  • In Dungeons & Dragons continuity, the co-rulers of the fourth layer of Hell are Belial and his daughter Fierna. Both are embodiments of Lust, and it is rumored that they have an incestuous relationship.
    • In the Forgotten Realms setting, the story of the creator goddesses, the siblings SelĆ»ne and Shar, reads like a couple who had a very bad breakup.

    Theater 
  • Pick a Eugene O'Neill play, any Eugene O'Neill play. Odds are you're going to encounter a seriously dysfunctional family vibe, owing to O'Neill's own deep-seated mommy issues, and the fact that he was heavily influenced by Greek theatre, home of the original Oedipus and Electra. The subtext is particularly heavy in Mourning Becomes Electra, a theatrical trilogy which moves the plot of the classic Oresteia to Civil War-era New England. To try to sum up the tangle of dysfunction: Lavinia Mannon appears to be totally in love with her father, General Ezra Mannon, and hateful to her mother Christine. Christine murders Ezra, so she can be with the handsome young sailor Adam Brant, but also dotes on her son Orin in an entirely unmotherly way. Orin (suffering mental trauma from his time on the battlefield) returns the affection, but Lavinia manages to enlist him against his mother by informing him about Christine's affair, which sends him into a rage which clearly has more to do with jealousy than any kind of familial loyalty. After Christine is driven to suicide, Orin seems to waver between wanting to kill his sister, and wanting to sexually dominate her. Suffice it to say, Eugene O'Neill was not a happy man.
  • Sam Shepard's plays often deal with this. Sometimes it goes far past subtext.
  • Rampant in Electra. Electra's relationship with her dead father is slightly unhealthy and has some incestuous undertones. Her relationship to her brother is all undertones. (In Freudian psychology, the female equivalent to the Oedipus complex is called the "Elektra complex". The more you know.)
  • Hamlet:
  • Like Hamlet, Gabe of Next to Normal is terribly possessive of his mother. They even slow dance together at one point. Given that Diana's in the grips of severe delusions and manic episodes, she probably doesn't care about the implications of holding her son a bit too close.
  • In some productions of Pippin, Fastrada and her son Lewis display this.
  • The script for Road explicitly states that Louise's brother should invoke this. She's understandably freaked out.
  • It's not in the original play, but Romeo et Juliette: De La Haine a l'Amour has Tybalt in love with his cousin Juliette as well. The Darker and Edgier Hungarian adaptation expands on this by having him also suffer from severe UST with his aunt Lady Capulet. (And from epilepsy. He's troubled.)

    Video Games 
  • In Baldur's Gate II, the Player Character can romance his companion Jaheira. What makes it slightly uncomfortable is that she's his godmother and a friend of his father, although the player didn't meet her until he was already an adult.
  • The Lutece Twins from BioShock Infinite. The tone of their voxophone recordings are very suggestive. You can explore the Luteces' house later in the game, and there is only one bed. Of course, it's later revealed that they're not actually twins. They're actually alternate universe versions of each other.
  • BlazBlue:
    • Ragna the Bloodedge and Jin Kisaragi, though Jin's Crazy Jealous Guy behavior takes this close to being canon. Usually Ragna is portrayed as being a Celibate Hero, but Jin is obsessed with him thanks to Yukianesa warping his feelings. Unfortunately for Ragna, the game developers frickin' LOVE using Yukianesa to warp Jin's feelings.
    • The Murakumo Units, robot clones of Ragna and Jin's little sister, Saya, who are programmed to get as close to Ragna as possible in order to merge their respective incomplete Azure Grimoires for the purpose of forming a complete one. Of course, getting "as close as possible" is taken to its logical extreme and the Double Entendres are about as subtle as a nuclear warhead in a restaurant. Nu-13 is flat-out yandere for Ragna, treats their battle as foreplay, ends it by impaling both herself and Ragna on a BFS and appears to consider their mixing blood as a union of some other bodily fluids. In the sequel, Nu-13's soul is installed into the chassis of an "uninstalled" older Unit, Lambda-11, and the more violent aspects of her obsession with Ragna disappear, implying that it's the Murakumos' programming that distorts their feelings. It's not-so-subtly implied Noel Vermillion, a.k.a. Mu-12 also has a crush on Ragna, which makes it possible that the Murakumos' love is also just a program.
    • In Chronophantasma, this is implied through Izanami's interactions with Ragna. Izanami is an all-powerful death goddess who is possessing the body of his little sister, Saya, and Izanami spends a good portion of the game trying to make Ragna "hers" and get him to join her side. She offers him the head of one of her most powerful servants, Yuki Terumi, as payment for his loyalty, knowing full well that Ragna wants to kill him.
  • Crystar: You really don't have to look hard to see this between Rei and Mirai. The two are pretty much each other's whole world due to their lack of parents and Rei's whole quest is to bring Mirai back to life. Mirai is even worse as she'll do anything to make sure she's the only person in Rei's life, including lying and murder.
  • The Coffin of Andy and Leyley revolves around a brother-sister duo in The Masochism Tango with each other resulting from a codependent relationship, with significant Belligerent Sexual Tension. By Chapter 2 it potentially moves past subtext.
  • Yuka Mochida from Corpse Party has a sort of crush on her brother. In one of the bad endings, as she is dying, Yuka confesses to her brother and asks him to lie to her about his feelings to make her feel better.
  • Trish in Devil May Cry is an Artificial Human created by the Big Bad of the first game specifically to resemble Dante's late mother, and she's initially set up as a Love Interest for him. However, nothing comes of it due to her being Demoted to Extra and Dante's status as a Celibate Hero.
  • Dirge of Cerberus, a sequel spin-off of Final Fantasy VII has a lot of this between brothers Weiss and Nero.
  • Disgaea 5 has Void Dark being very protective and obsessive for his sister Lieze. He went as far as to try and kill Killia when he believed Killia stole his sister away from him but accidentally kills his sister when she takes the blow for Killia. While Killia believes that Void went off to become The Galatic Conqueror for no apparent reason, Void became the villain for the sole reason of reviving his sister and apologizing for what he did to her. Alas, this meant the destruction of over 70% of the Netherworlds and the deaths of millions of demons that the revelation when Void's plan succeeds causes Lieze to be horrified at her brother's actions. It's to be noted that in post-game, all of Void's negative traits were forcibly removed by Killia during the final boss but his love for his sister remained and it doesn't help that Lieze doesn't stop him from clinging to her and actively encourages it instead.
  • Furiae toward Caim (one-sided) in the US version of Drakengard — in the Japanese version, it was less subtext and more text.
  • The Fatal Frame games seem to love this trope, especially the second game, which may as well be called Fatal Frame 2: Twincest.
  • Final Fantasy X: Ignoring Brother's blatant crush on his cousin Yuna, his sister Rikku has a few Les Yay moments with Yuna herself including a Hot Spring scene where she looks down at Yuna's boobs and says "I know who's got it going on".
  • This is something of a running theme in Fire Emblem:
    • Downplayed with Duma and Milla in Fire Emblem Gaiden, with Milla accompanying Duma in his exile to Valentia out of love, and initially they desire to build a utopia together on the new continent. She also seals the Falchion after Rudolf defeats her with it, even in a degenerative state, as she wished to protect her brother from death.
    • Clarine and Klein from Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, who are somewhat patterned after Lachesis and Eldigan from Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War (sans tragedy and confirmation of romantic feelings). Clarine will tell every other man she supports with that they can't compare to her charming and handsome brother, throws a fit when another healer treats him, and compliments him directly for being the best-looking man in their Ragtag Bunch of Misfits. (It is, at least, one-sided, as Klein gets rather frustrated with her antics.)
    • In Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, Priscilla wavers between this and standard Big Brother Worship with her older brother Raven. She also reminds him of a Childhood Marriage Promise from when they were very young, though it's part of her attempts to convince him to stop acting like she's a total stranger. The fact that she and Clarine are both of the Troubadour class is lampshaded in Fire Emblem: Awakening.
    • Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones has the twin siblings Eirika and Ephraim, whose in-game supports all but outright spell it out. Both Innes and Lyon view Ephraim as an obstacle to forming a romantic relationship with Eirika (although to be fair, they are both a little lacking in normal social skills, for different reasons). Their end-game weapons are even named after a pair of incestuous twins from a Wagner opera. If you finish the game with the A support, the ending changes and it's implied they ruled the kingdom together as king and queen. The English version of Fire Emblem Heroes even has a fourth-wall-breaking moment in the Paralogue where the twins first appear in which he addresses the rumors surrounding his relationship with his sister.
    • Fire Emblem Fates has several examples:
      • The Avatar can marry any one of his/her adoptive Nohrian siblings and his blood-related Hoshidan siblings, and while it can be eventually revealed that the Avatar is Not Blood Related to the Hoshidans either, almost all of them were raised to think otherwise.
      • Camilla is rather attached to her adoptive brother/sister, the aforementioned Avatar, and as said above is one of the Male Avatar's prospective love interests.
      • Camilla's half-brother Leo, whom she's implied to have helped raise, desperately desires Camilla's affections and is revealed through a guide to have once been in love with her. He can also be a prospective love interest for a Female Avatar, who is his adoptive sister too.
      • And finally, the Male Avatar and Azura get enough Ship Tease to qualify as each other's Implied Love Interest, despite being maternal cousins. In their defense they didn't actually know they were related...but they also don't particularly seem to care when they find out.
    • Fire Emblem Heroes has a few examples, though all three involve villainous influences and none of them are mutual:
      • Freyja, the Big Bad of Book IV, describes her and her older brother Freyr's love as "deeper than most siblings" and rejects all other advances from other gods in favor of him. It's very one-sided on her part, however, as while Freyr cares for her, he won't put her above humanity and commits Suicide by Cop to help take her down.
      • Ɠtr, The Dragon of Book V, starts out as a case of Big Brother Worship for his adoptive brother FĆ”fnir before it's eventually revealed that he has been intentionally sabotaging FĆ”fnir's attempts at recovering his memories of his life before he met Ɠtr, just so he won't leave him. FĆ”fnir himself is largely aloof to Ɠtr and eventually kills him due to being Brainwashed and Crazy, but even while dying, Ɠtr just tells him he's there for him.
      • In Book IV, the dark elf Plumeria puts the cast under the influence of a Love Potion. Alfonse, the only male character in the party, gets hit on by Peony, then Mirabilis, then his sister Sharena calls to him, at which point Alfonse has caught on to the effects of the spell and cuts her off in a panic. Subverted, eventually, in that the "Alfonse" in that scene and the rest of Book IV is actually another character with false memories. That said, Alfonse and Sharena's real relationship averts this trope.
  • Golden Sun:
    • The "Golden Sun Gag Battle" 4koma doujinshi featured a comic in which Ivan uses his new "Reveal" power to spy through the clothes of Feizhi and Hama. In its defense, "Gag Battle" was published before The Lost Age was released, with the news that Hama is Ivan's sister...
  • GreedFall features the protagonist De Sardet and their childhood friend and cousin Constantin D'Orsay. De Sardet is easily Constantin's most important person, though De Sardet is eventually revealed to have been adopted and even after Constantin pulls a Faceā€“Heel Turn, he still tries to spare De Sardet and makes a We Can Rule Together offer, which De Sardet can accept. In the DLC sidequest, Constantin's new fiancĆ©e will even ask a female De Sardet if she herself hadn't thought of marrying him.
  • Infinite Space has The Hero Yuri and his sister Kira who have so much subtext that quite a few people refuse to believe they're actually related. This is a plot point as not only are they not siblings, they're not even humans to begin with as both of them are created by The Overlords. Yuri is an Observer, a being that explores the galaxy and sends data back to The Overlords while Kira is a Tracker, a being that tracks whatever an Observer does. The reason why they have so much subtext with each other is that The Overlords have no idea how to create relationships.
  • Adelheid and Rose Bernstein from The King of Fighters. From Rose's part, she's extremely clingy to her "Dearest Brother" and he's the only one who can keep her Rich Bitch instincts somewhat at bay, like in 2003 where Rose goes APESHIT if Adel's defeated and he has to tell her not to kill his opponents. On Adel's part, when Rose started hiding things from him in XIII, he was extremely worried and distressed as he had vowed to help and protect her, and at the end of the game when Rose collapses after being freed from Botan's brainwashing, Adel catches and holds her in his arms in a way that reminds more of a boyfriend catching his girlfriend than of mere siblings. The extended intro to XIII features a brief scene of Adel and Rose waltzing together in front of Rose Stadium, set to oddly romantic-sounding music and complete with fireworks.
  • In Kingdom Hearts III, when Sora is with Kairi in the tunnel of light, he pictures Elsa and Anna, alongside Official Couple Rapunzel and Eugene. If, as others have speculated, he was imagining these pairs in comparison to himself and Kairi (romantically), then drawing a parallel between them and the sisters has some... unfortunate implications.
  • Mega Man (Classic): The titular protagonist (real name Rock) and his sister, Roll. They were built by Dr. Light to serve sibling functionality, but there's a lot of subtext (specifically on Roll's end) implying that they romantically love each other.
  • Metal Gear:
    • Liquid Snake and Solid Snake. Not so much in Metal Gear Solid, although he's such an enormous Large Ham that most of his lines sound flirty, but in Metal Gear Solid 4 there's Squicky scenes where he sniffs Snake's hair, blows kisses at him, and grapples him from behind while Snake is helpless and simply begging him to stop. Although, when they do actually kiss, Liquid is definitely not Liquid anymore.
    • Emma and Otacon have a severe subtext thing going on in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. First, when Emma reminisces about Otacon, she talks about their childhood and how they'd play house — with Emma as the wife and Otacon as the husband — and she seems very fond of remembering Otacon as the husband. Second, while she's dying, she mentions that she wants Otacon to look at her "as a woman". This is fairly one-sided on Emma's part since Otacon only ever sees her as his little sister. Plus, Not Blood Related. If that helps.
  • Eve from NieR: Automata is heavily dependant on his brother Adam. When Adam dies Eve's grief drives him to try and wipe out everything on earth, and in route B it's revealed, in his own words, that he didn't mind the fighting but he never wanted Adam to get hurt, and he never wanted to lose him. All he wanted was for them to be together.
  • Alfred in Resident Evil ā€“ Code: Veronica has an unhealthy devotion to Alexia which sure seems like incestuous feelings, plus his habit of dressing up in her clothes. Alexia is aware of this and exploits them to her own ends.
  • Creepily invoked in Shin Megami Tensei II when you find out that Hiroko, the heroine is actually your protagonist's mother. The two are pretty close already, work together, are the same age, never stray from each other (she follows you on all game paths), and the whole thing is an expy of you being Jesus and her a Virgin Mary.
  • Shining Resonance:
    • According to Rinna, Lestin always obsessed over his sister, Kirika, so much that the people of their home village began to wonder if he was secretly attracted to her. One skit even has Kirika ask him why he's never shown interest in any other women, besides her. Lestin replies that his duties don't allow him time to pursue a relationship with anyone, but he assures Kirika that he'll consider it in the future... after he's found her a suitable husband.
    • The aforementioned skit unlocks the "Sibling Love" trait for Lestin, which is marked by a ā™„ icon on the Bond diagram. It also makes the same 'wedding chime' sound effect as the one that signifies when any of the girls has reached max affinity with Yuma. If you equip it, the Bond diagram will show Lestin blushing while Kirika smiles sheepishly.
  • Suikoden:
    • In Suikoden Tierkreis, Chrodechild and Fredegund... really care for each other, though the subtext mostly comes from the latter. Asad hilariously lampshades this near the end of the game, where he states he initially considered Meruvis as his rival, but now sees Fredegund as a larger threat.
    • Suikoden V has Frey and Lymsleia, despite the latter being ten years old. Early in the game, Lymsleia thinks she'll have to marry Frey if he wins the Sacred Games for her hand (Miakis was having a little fun with her), and later she asks if she can sleep with him. ...no, not that way, she's just cold and scared in an unfamiliar place. In the Golden Ending, Frey is appointed Commander of the Queen's Knights, the traditional position of the Queen's husband.
  • Summertime Saga: While there used to be several canon incest storylines (these were changed because Patreon objected), some are more ambiguous.
    • Crystal and her nephew Clyde are white trash hillbillies who are implied to be a thing. While it turns out to be an Innocent Innuendo when the MC goes in for further inspection, Clyde also casually admits he'd like to see his cousin Roxxy's tits, so who knows?
    • After a tiresome day at the tattoo parlor, MC can catch Grace masturbating with her younger sister Eve lying next to her, asleep. Grace has a slight freak-out when she notices him, and says she just hasn't had any release for a while.
  • Played for Laughs in Asuka Kazama's ending in Tekken 5. Asuka defeats Jin Kazama (her cousin, although she wasn't aware of the connection until 6) and, trying to wake him, accidentally undoes his Devil Jin transformation. When he tries to get up in a hurry, he trips over her and lands face-down in her boobs. There's no way to really interpret Asuka's initial facial impression afterwards; it could be shock, embarrassment, or begrudging attraction... but then she turns violently angry and punches him for being a "pervert."
  • Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. Cheryl really loves her daddy. Even if there were no incestuous feelings, the appearance could not have been accidental.
  • This is the impression many get upon playing through the story of Soulcalibur V. Not only is Patroklos saddled with an oedipus complex for his deceased mother Sophitia (to the point that Elysium, the spirit of Soul Calibur, can manipulate him purely by assuming his mother's form and beckoning to him), but his interactions with Pyrrha tend to carry an incestuous undercurrent as well. Patroklos grew up raised by his father Rothion, who told him stories about his mother, spurring Patroklos to follow in her path as a holy warrior, whereas Pyrrha was stolen away from her family at a young age (and thus has no memory of them), but their affection, which should be a strong case of storge, goes on a crash collision and veers right into eros territory. And then there's official art such as this...
  • Tales Series:
    • Tales of Symphonia: Mithos is just a little too obsessed with his sister. To the point where he's spent the last four millennia trying to bring her back to life. Note that her actual lover was much more sane.
    • Ludger and Julius Kresnik from Tales of Xillia 2 to varying degrees, depending on the player's dialogue choices. They're shown to care for each other deeply. Julius purposefully rigged Ludger's test at the beginning to make sure he didn't get into Spirius, and spends the rest of the game doing everything he to protect his brother at the cost of his own well-being, to the point where he sacrifices himself for Ludger. He even admits that Ludger's stubbornness is what he loves about him. In the bad end of the game, Ludger kills the rest of the party and forsakes the entire world to save Julius, even though Julius is dying and won't have much longer to live anyway. And then Julius reveals that maybe this was what he wanted, too.
    • Oscar Dragonia and his half-sister Teresa Linares in Tales of Berseria have a boatload of subtext that their feelings for each other go beyond familial. The earrings Teresa wears were meant for Oscar to give to "the woman who is most important to him", AKA his fiancĆ©e; he insisted that Teresa keep them even after she explained who they're supposed to go to, and she even blushes when he says how good they look on her. Oddly enough, the subtext actually helps to humanize them. Oscar was the Spare to the Throne and Teresa was the product of an extramarital affair, so they were both neglected by the rest of their family growing up except for each other.

    Visual Novels 
  • 11eyes:
    • In the main game, the main protagonist Kakeru and Kukuri Tachibana. Indeed, Kakeru had an older sister who killed herself before the events of the game, while Kukuri Tachibana is Kakeru's sister from an alternative world. If the player wants, Kakeru and Kukuri can end up together. Averted in the anime, where the two of them have no romantic feelings.
    • In the prequel of the game in Resona Forma, Benedictus seems a bit too fond of his younger sister. The game later shows he died by fighting against the main antagonist Lieselotte. The way he died was by an illusion created by the witch which showed him raping his younger sister before killing him, which turned him mad before being killed by the witch. The illusion is showing him his most important person, while his comrades died by a romantic love due to said illusion.
  • In Dra+Koi there's a running gag about the protagonist's mother wanting to jump his bones and being horrified at how he now seems to have a girlfriend, though the fact that the girlfriend happens to be a crazy dragon that's immune to all attack and can blow up cities doesn't help.
  • In Mystic Messenger, a scene of Jumin's backstory heavily implies that when he was growing up, one of his stepmothers tried to sexually groom him.
  • Prince Liam from Princess Debut constantly lets the protagonist (for whom he is one of the possible love interests) know how much she reminds him of his sister. And how he loves her very, very, very much.
  • Umineko: When They Cry:
    • Ep. 5 has this between Battler and Rosa: "Even though she was my aunt, she gave me a wink that would have made a man's heart jump."
    • Battler tells his cousin Maria (9 years old) several times that she will have to let him fondle her when she grows up. She agrees cheerfully. The TIP "Game Master Battler" has him order all of his aunts to wear skimpy outfits and serve him, though this is Played for Laughs.

    Webcomics 
  • Grim Tales from Down Below gives us Mini Mandy, who seems to only want to get her brother's praise.
  • The subtext in Absolute Hot Sister is very obviously this. It seems Ellen is really intent on starting a relationship with her brother, even suggesting they sleep in the same bed (she Sleeps in the Nude, of course) and shower together. Later strips tone it down a bit to focus more on Ellen's role as an Innocent Fanservice Girl.
  • Homestuck:
    • There's some of this due to the enforcement of Everyone Is Related near the end of Act 4. Dave and Rose had a rather snarky-flirty thing going on occasionally before it was revealed they were ectosiblings, while John and Jade were also quite close, including one early flash of John falling asleep and seeing Jade in his dreams while romantic music played. (Of course, that was because he had finally awakened on Prospit and was seeing the future, but still.) Dave also apparently used to make sexual comments/Dave metaphorgottens loaded with sexual innuendo and double entendres about Rose's mom to freak her out. Later, Rose reveals that the "choice babe in the pajamas" Dave asked about was actually the teen version of their biological mother and Dave complains about the game deliberately setting them up with family members:
      DAVE: all these fuckin
      DAVE: momtraps and sistertraps
      DAVE: what a joke i hope skaia gets to have a good laugh over shit like this
      DAVE: wait i forgot skaia doesnt laugh it just "sees" and "knows"
      DAVE: its like a huge blue perv thats mad jazzed for kidcest
    • And then in Act 6 Act 6 Act 3, Caliborn starts getting a bit odd regarding Calliope, his dead sister—whom he personally had killed—who shared the same body as him. It's complicated. Boy, cherubs sure are weird!
      NOT TO IMPLY THAT ANY OTHER ASPECT OF HER IS LIKE YOUR SISTER. LIKE BEING ATTRACTIVE. WOW. WHAT? READ INTO STUFF MUCH? YOU DECIDE YOU HAVE TOO MUCH TIME ON YOUR HANDS. YOU STOP THINKING ABOUT THIS TOPIC STARTING AS OF IMMEDIATELY.
    • Cherub's entire mating process revolves around finding someone who was like their other half to fill the void.
  • JL8: A significant subplot centers on Power Girl having a crush on Superboy. It wasn't until after writing it that the author was informed that Power Girl is technically his cousin, since in the mainstream DC continuity Power Girl is (usually) an alternate universe version of Supergirl, who is Superman's cousin.
  • The Heaven episode in The Order of the Stick subverts this with the deceased Roy Greenhilt and his mother, who (in afterlife reassuming her appearance at the age of 19) Really Gets Around. When she offers Roy to let him place his head in her lap while reading him his favorite children's tale, he is visibly disturbed by the idea and politely declines.

    Web Originals 
  • In Adventures in Jedi School, Anki and Villiane (who are brother and sister) partake in tongue-touching.
  • The Gemini monster from the online game UniCreatures is a pair of magical twin sisters. In their early forms, they don't look particularly yay-y, but in their final stage, they embrace delicately in a Yuri-like pose, and have Flavor Text about how they "find time just for the two of them."
  • Channel Awesome:
    • Doug Walker and his brother Rob. They managed to go from "I love you, man, you're a kick-ass brother" to "Gay and incestuous! You heard it here, folks!" in about two minutes, via a discussion of Doug's balls. The DVD also has Doug stripping slowly out of wet clothes while Rob films and hums supposedly stripper music, bantering back and forth with lines like "I'm saving this for our honeymoon" and "You know you want this shit."
    • Discussed in The Nostalgia Critic's review of A Kid in King Arthur's Court, where two sisters are sitting in bed, with soft background music playing, talking about how they're in love. With other people, mind you, but the Critic is still very excited.
  • The YouTube channel "Geek and Sundry" features plenty of this between siblings Felicia and Ryon Day, who are not afraid to make quite raunchy and explicit sexual references during their video game play-throughs together. Seriously, read the comments on the videos — a disturbing number of fans assume they're girlfriend/boyfriend rather than brother/sister, and an even more disturbing number of fans know they're siblings and ship them anyway.

    Western Animation 
  • Adventure Time: Accidental on the part of the Ice King, who ruins a heartfelt hug by trying to kiss Marceline in the episode "I Remember You" after she tells him that she likes having him around. This startles and disgusts her, as before the crown that the Ice King wears completely drove him to madness, he acted as a surrogate father to her in the years following the Mushroom War when her actual father showed no interest in raising her. While he does remember just enough to know that Marceline is important to him, he's become too senile to actually remember why.
  • In The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, Tom manages to have a few choice moments with his brother Alan and have a dynamic with his sister Anne that sometimes screams "they'd be strongly hinted at as a couple if they weren't siblings".
  • The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Dress", Darwin develops a massive crush on his adoptive brother Gumball in his mom's wedding dress without realizing that it's him. Much later in "The Matchmaker", Teri questions Darwin over who he's kissed, and when she finds out through a Fully Automatic Clip Show that he's kissed Gumball five times (including the aforementioned episode), she questions "what's up with you guys?" In "The Shippening", Sarah draws a genderbent, human Gumball marrying a human Darwin, which comes to life.
  • American Dad! has this with virtually every member of the Smith household.
    • Steve and Hayley. At one point, Steve had unknowingly purchased a naked picture of Hayley and masturbated to its image several times before being alerted to who it was. Then there's the episode where Roger convinced Steve that he was adopted. One of the first things he did was kiss Hayley saying that "we've been waiting to do for years".
    • Stan has, on multiple occasions, mentioned that he doesn't mind if Steve or Hayley engage in both mildly and highly flirtatious acts with him because "he's their dad". These include allowing them to squeeze his glutes as he flexes his muscles, allowing Steve to look at his groin while he is wearing well-fitting underwear, etc.
      Stan: Go ahead, kids, give 'em a squeeze! It's not weird, I'm your dad.
      Stan: I'll go get help, and you guys can look at my ass as I walk away. I think you'll be pleased.
    • Hayley enters a relationship with Stan's CIA body double and doesn't at all seem disturbed that he looks exactly like her father (but does mention at one point that she gets "freaked out" when he talks like him). Francine is understandably mortified, but Stan isn't disturbed at all when he finds out, believing him to be the best boyfriend Hayley's had. Naturally, circumstances eventually lead Stan to have to impersonate Bill and go on a "date" with Hayley so that he can dump her.
  • The title character of Archer seems to have this kind of relationship with his mother. He gets an erection at the thought of his mother dying and is claimed to yell out her name during sex, and that's just from the first episode. In "A Going Concern", when Malory is about to get married, Lana points out that he's upset because his mom's "leaving [him] for another man". And this exchange from the first season episode "Killing Utne":
    Malory: [about a bell] Oh, that's right. I kept it on the nightstand to wake nanny whenever Sterling wet the bed.
    Cheryl: Wait, whose bed?
    Woodhouse: It was always "don't ask, don't tell."
  • Arcane: For several North American audience members, the relationhip between Jinx and Silco was uncomfortable due to her delayed maturity and understanding of boundaries and his apparently genuine indulgence and affection. Many people in other countries noted that this affection was more normal for their cultures, and was not uncomfortable. As Fortiche is a French company, this may not have been intentional.
  • Arthur:
    • "Is There a Doctor in the House?" has Arthur and D.W. trying to look after their parents when they get sick and do the house's chores themselves. They have an Imagine Spot where their parents never get better, with them having to take over their parents' jobs, clean the house and take care of Kate themselves, with D.W. bemoaning the fact that they're "terrible parents."
    • In "Mom and Dad Have a Great Big Fight", Arthur and D.W. fear their parents will divorce. D.W. tells Arthur that they can't be separated and should run away and find their own place to live, saying they only have each other and they don't need anyone else.
    • "Kiss and Tell" has D.W. obsessed with getting her first kiss, and Nadine brings up the fact that she's already kissed Arthur.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender:
    • Avatar: The Last Airbender has Azula and Zuko and their relentless Foe Romance Subtext, especially on Azula's part, constantly acting like The Vamp around Zuko. (Though to be fair, she acts that way around everyone.) A scene in "The Awakening" (appropriate music added) involves Zuko barging into Azula's bedroom to confront her, while Azula gets way too close for comfort wearing nothing but a robe. In "The Earth King", there is a scene where Zuko dreams about a serpentine dragon encircling him closely and whispering in his ear with Azula's voice, in a tone that can only be described as extremely seductive. The exact words are "It's getting late, are you planning to retire soon, my lord?... Relax, Fire Lord Zuko. Just let go. Give in to it. Sleep."note  Members of the cast and crew often joked about it in various ways. Once when discussing fan pairings at a convention the crew put up a picture of Zuko and Azula on screen and just let the crowd react without saying anything. Azula's voice actor was once asked "if you went on a life-changing journey with Zuko, what do you think would happen?" Her in-character response? "I'd get pregnant."
    • The Legend of Korra: In "The Coronation", a Republic City hotel staff member apologizes to Creepy Twins Eska and Desna, saying that they were mistakenly booked in a room with only one bed. Eska tells him that it's not a mistake: "Desna sleeps in the tub." But then Eska turns her head and looks right at the audience for a second, as if to say "I know what you were thinking."
  • Camp Lazlo: The Feud Episode between twin brothers Chip and Skip has the Jellies try to get them to make amends, so they enroll them in a buddy matching program to get the two to reconcile. At the end, they have a "graduation ceremony" that is played out to resemble a wedding, including vows to be the other's "best buddy". At the end of the episode, there's a heart-shaped Iris Out when they put their arms around each other.
  • Dee Dee and Dexter from Dexter's Laboratory invoke this trope once in a while, especially since Dee Dee seems to prefer Dexter over every guy that may be a possible Love Interest, as every time guys (particularly Mandark) flirts with her, she sticks to Dexter. One obvious scene is the one in which Dexter and Mandark compete to save Dee Dee and, after she is saved by both, she is disgusted by Mandark, but kisses Dexter on the cheek. In another episode, Dexter becomes a teenager to seduce a girl he likes, but guess who ends up attracted to him instead? Dee Dee.
  • Magica and Poe from DuckTales (2017) are very close and affectionate towards each other, giving each other pet names. In order to use their magic, they are required to hold their hands. They sit together on thrones like a king and queen, and Magica describes them as having made "beautiful magic" together. It probably doesn't help that Edgar Allan Poe, who Poe is named after, married his cousin.
  • Family Guy contains several scenes in which Peter attempts to molest Meg. That is, when she isn't occupying her position as the family Butt-Monkey. Meg herself has a disturbing amount of scenes in which she and Chris engage in sexual acts. In "Halloween on Spooner Street", she and Chris kiss for the first time, and even though they are initially disgusted, several lines later in the series suggest that they may have continued this habit. At one point, Meg asks Chris if "he wants to continue practicing French kissing", and in "Fresh Heir", she walks into his bedroom wearing a towel saying "Our bath is ready". Stewie has once shown interest in his grandfather, Carter Pewderschmit, in terms of wiping his buttocks after a trip to the bathroom. Chris, in addition to Meg, has shown interest in Lois. In "Big Man on Hippocampus", Peter loses his memory and believed it was fine to have sex with anyone, including his kids. Meg stated he'd done so before as a joke, but everyone took it too seriously because of her Butt-Monkey status.
  • In the penultimate episode of Gravity Falls, Dipper's Rousing Speech to his twin sister Mabel urging her to come with him out of Mabeland and grow up with him sounds pretty close to a Love Confession of the romantic variety. There's also a brief moment where the two twins look like they're about to kiss before they instead perform a "sincere sibling hug" as a Platonic Declaration of Love.
  • He-Man and She-Ra are basically all over each other when they appear together. When riding on horseback He-Man hugs her very tightly from behind, looking a bit more comfortable than a normal sibling would. (But then again, He-Man rides a horse this way with everyone, including men.) The song "I Have The Power" that was created for the "Secret Of The Sword" movie where Adam and Adora first met sounds so much like a love duet it's a little unsettling. It is catchy, though: "Somewhere out there someone needs me. I don't know how or where, but believe me. I'll walk the universe to find her. For better or for worse beside her".
  • In the Invader Zim episode "Bolognius Maximus" where Dib's DNA was slowly being turned into bologna, he tastes himself and later asks his sister Gaz to taste him, saying that he's "delicious". Gaz slowly backs away whilee looking visibly disturbed.
    • "Dib's Wonderful Life of Doom" features Dib apparently getting into many flings with women throughout said "wonderful life", with one of them bearing a strong resemblance to Gaz...
  • In Iron Man: Armored Adventures, Rhona and Andy Edwin's relationship seems rather close for siblings, with Andy being fanatically devoted to serving his sister. To be fair, Andy's actually a robot that Rhona created.
  • In an early episode of Johnny Test, the girls give Johnny a pheromone booster that makes him more attractive. While Susan doesn't act affected, Mary gives Johnny an infatuated look while calling him adorable.
  • The Justice League episode "Metamorphosis" brings this out in spades for Simon Stagg and his daughter, Sapphire. When he shows up to her apartment, he's carrying flowers and checking his breath, as if he's a suitor. When he finds out she's engaged to Rex Mason, he tries to have him taken out of the picture entirely. And when a failed attempt to use the Metamorpho process results in his consciousness being transferred into a building-tall blob of slime, J'onn says that the creature is driven only by "pure desire" — and guess who he goes after first?
  • Lilo & Stitch: The Series has Stitch fall in love with a fellow experiment, Experiment 624 "Angel", who essentially is Stitch's Distaff Counterpart. What makes it particularly uncomfortable for some is how Stitch refers to the other experiments as his cousins, and being both created by Jumba, a sort-of "father" to Stitch, essentially makes him and Angel closer to siblings.
  • Martin Mystery has multiple moments of Ship Tease between step-siblings Martin and Diana. This is only made worse when one knows the original comic, where they were never step-siblings and instead dated for years and eventually married.
  • In Maya & Miguel, a PBS Kids cartoon about two bilingual Latino twins and their diverse group of friends, the titular twins Maya and Miguel are often portrayed as very, very close. Of course, they can't be more than ten, but they hold hands and kiss one another on the cheek, which is as much as any of the married couples on the show do. One obvious episode is 'La Neuva Cocinita'. The intro is a voiceover with Maya talking about how she and her brother are like yin and yang and they perfectly balance one another. Later, in a flashback from Abuela Elena, she remembers when she and her husband ran a restaurant together and there is a black and white sequence of Elena and her husband running the restaurant. Later, when Maya and Miguel are running a restaurant in imitation of their grandparents, the montage of the twins is completely identical to the flashback from Elena and her husband ā€” down to Maya kissing Miguel on the cheek.
  • Mega Man (Ruby-Spears): Mega Man and Proto Man had something going on beyond rivalry, even without taking into account that last fight scene in "Bro Bots" (or hell, the entire episode). They spend just as much time trying to convince the other to defect to their side as they do shooting at each other, and Proto won't let any other Wily-bot touch Mega ("Just remember—Mega Man is mine!") Plus, he seems rather disinterested in getting his sister to join Wily.
    • This scene. Is there something more subtexty than hold handsing and asking for a "real brother relationship"?
  • In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • Twilight stated (in song) that her brother, Shining Armor, was her Only Friend prior to the show (even though he's introduced in the finale of Season 2), and that they were very close. As such, her extremely negative reaction upon learning of her brother's marriage (via a letter she received a day or two prior to the wedding) and her ensuing scrutiny and harsh criticism of the bride-to-be are very easy to interpret as jealousy.
      Applejack: Think maybe you're being just a tiny bit possessive of your brother?
    • Also, during the reprise of "Big Brother Best Friend Forever", Twilight creates figments of herself and Shining Armor that look suspiciously like the figures of Shining Armor and Cadence that go on the wedding cake.
    • It's mostly said jokingly, but when you have Applejack and Big Macintosh Promotion to Parent for their little sister, tongues will wag. Nobody, even fans of the 'ship, took it seriously until "Where the Apple Lies," which depicts the parents already gone — AJ and Mac are arguing over who will take over the farm from Granny Smith — but no evidence of Apple Bloom's existence. The character was presumably offscreen doing infant things like sleeping, but that didn't stop a slew of fans from going "Wait, we were just kidding, don't tell me she's really their kid!" after the episode aired.
  • Phineas and Ferb features a song called "Gitchi-Gitchi-Goo". It's sung by siblings (Phineas and Candace) with hearts in the background, glitter dust, etc. Part of its lyrics are "bow-chika-bow-wow" — "Bow Chicka Wow Wow" is commonly known as the verbalization of typical '70s porn music. By siblings. The extended version includes these lyrics accompanied by a number of tender looks on Candace's part:
    Phineas: Oh I don't know what to do.
    Candace: I don't know what to do.
    Phineas: But I think I'm getting through.
    Candace: I think I'm getting through.
  • The Powerpuff Girls have some subtle examples, while their relationship is platonic. One of them involves sleeping in the same bed, with a certain level of comfortability.
    • In "Boogie Frights", during the nightclub arc, Blossom is shocked, while Buttercup encourages a previously frightened Bubbles to party it out, and they dance with each other, bumping hips. In addition, when both of them get scared and hug each other, Buttercup is cradled in Bubbles' arms bridal-style, and Bubbles seems to enjoy it.
    • In "The Powerpuff Girls' Best Rainy Day Adventure Ever", this line when Blossom (who is pretending to be Mojo Jojo) decides to remove the video game Bubbles and Buttercup are playing, leading to a fuming Bubbles and Buttercup!
    Buttercup: Let's get it on!
    Blossom: (nervously laughs then flees)
    • The title and plot of the episode "Twisted Sister" involves the Girls collectly creating their own Powerpuff Girl, which ends up looking as mentally and physically repelling as real-life incest-born children are considered to be.
    • In the episode "That's Not My Baby", the Girls are fulfilling the role of caretaker, after a baby while trying to find his mother. They even took turns feeding him milk (through a bottle of course).
  • Phil and Lil of the Rugrats, which is a bit strange since they're only one year old. One episode has the babies put on a High-School Dance in the garden and Phil takes Lil. Another episode has them pretending to be lovers in a soap opera. They have strange reactions when they see each other in the buff in "Naked Tommy". When Chuckie discovers that a girl picks on him because she has a crush on him, Lil shoves Phil; when he asks why she did it, she responds "it's because I like you" and they both giggle. It's still apparent in All Grown Up!: Phil doesn't take it well when Lil moves into a different room in order to become more individual in "Coup DeVille" and Lil even kisses him when they make up at the end (on the cheek, of course, but Phil's reaction to it suggests that he liked it a little too much). His reaction to accidentally seeing her in her training bra in "Separate, but Equal" isn't very typical of a brother. In "A DeVille House Divided", Phil starts hanging out a lot with his sister's best friend, which makes Lil upset because her friend was taking away her brother's attention from her.
  • The Simpsons:
    • In the episode "Little Girl in the Big Ten", Lisa speaks with a college girl (Carrie), and Lisa almost admits that she thinks Bart is cute.
      Lisa: I share a house with a couple of girls, couple of guys.
      Carrie: Guys, huh? Are they cute?
      Lisa: Well, Bart's kinda—- NO!
    • Again in "Dangerous Curves", they start bickering Like an Old Married Couple with Maggie like a surrogate daughter.
    • A promo for "Large Marge" included scenes of Marge's new breasts giving Bart confused feelings, but these were removed from the actual episode.
  • The fifth episode of Superjail! had this exchange, though it's more likely a throwaway joke:
    Twin 1: Would you like to accompany me to the concert show tonight?
    Twin 2: Are you asking me out on a date?
    Twin 1: Maybe. (this is followed by their creepy laughter)
  • In Superfriends, the Wonder Twins were more Like an Old Married Couple than any siblings. Not that real siblings never act in a manner fitting that trope, but these two were really written like a couple in an old-time sitcom sometimes.
  • Even when they were enemies, Karai and Leo from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) have a habit of flirting with one another. However, Karai is the biological daughter of Hamato Yoshi, the man who would later become Master Splinter. Leonardo's anthropomorphic features are due to the mutagen mutating him with Splinter's human DNA, thus making him his son. When you think about it, that makes Karai Leo's half-sibling!
  • The first episode of ThunderCats (1985), WilyKat at one point tells his sister WilyKit "You're beautiful when you snarl." It seems Moral Guardians caught on to this, as it was cut from later airings and the DVD.
  • Coincidentally, the first episode of Thunder Cats 2011 has this exchange between Tygra and Lion-O, who are now adoptive brothers:
    Lion-O: I'm gonna ring that bell.
    Tygra: And I'm gonna ring yours. (wink)
  • In Transformers: Animated, Jetfire and Jetstorm are twin flying Autobots who call each other "brother" instead of their real names, are very protective of each other, share a friendly rivalry that doesn't really mean anything, and are almost never seen without the other (presumably because they might die as a result). Plus, they can Combine.
  • In the 2013 adaptation of Vicky the Viking, Ylvie acts like she has a crush on Vicky. In the English dub, she's Vicky's cousin, but she still acts like she's attracted to him.
  • Teddington and Tina of Viva PiƱata. They are conjoined twin siblings who dislike each other and are constantly at each other's throats like an old married couple. They both live together and sleep on the same bed (though not because they want to). The episode "Wrath of the Wrasins" takes this a step further. when the two have their personalities inverted and start being nice to each other and agreeing on everything. Teddington even refers to his sister as "sweetie" and "darling".
  • TJ from WordGirl has a crush-like obsession with the title character. He has no idea that it's the superhero alter ego of his (adopted) older sister, Becky.
  • Yin and Yang from Yin Yang Yo!. Particularly scenes like the one in which Yang tells his sister: I don't have to listen to you, you're not hot anymore.

 
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The protagonist of A Christmas Puppy and his mother are...a little too close for the Cinema Snob's liking.

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