…She went to find us a room, and I saw these Oh, Jesus Christ. [sighs] I saw these two girls in a hot tub and I was turned on, and I was staring at them. It was Whitney. It was my fucking daughter, I just as my new daughter was being born. Ugh. And, I, uh it’s the last time I saw her. I ran away. I left my daughter there, and I just took off.
So, you see, I didn’t stop myself. I wouldn’t have done. Because I am a terrible, terrible, fucking sick, bad guy. [inhales deeply] Oh, fuck.
I think… Booker would miss you, too. // A Burial at Sea fanmix
1. Never Let Me Go Florence + the Machine // 2. Dark Doo Wop MSMR // 3. Elizabeth Bioshock Infinite OST // 4. Memories Within Temptation // 5. Smoke Daughter // 6. As You Go Red // 7. You Are My Sunshine The Civil Wars // 8. La Vie en Rose Edith Piaf // 9. Caresse Sur L’Ocean Les Petits Chanteurs de Saint-Marc // 10. You Belong to Me Courtnee Draper // 11. Dead in the Water Ellie Goulding
I always loved Laurel and Quentin’s relationship (platonic or otherwise). They always came first with each other and had a very interesting dynamic. Quentin was a main character in his own right, so he and Laurel got to have all of this independence in the narrative while still being tightly associated with each other and their relationship. It was a good balance.
(They were one of the reasons it was so hard to quit Arrow.)
I had to at least skim this episode after you sent your message. The Oliver/Felicity parallels were bonkers! Laurel and Quentin had a scene about Quetin making a sacrifice to protect her, and her reassuring him that she can protect herself an make her own choices, and then Oliver and Felicity, directly following, had basically the exact same scene including a lot of the same wording.
And then there was Quentin talking about not getting used to seeing Laurel in her canary outfit, and then someone else who was there said she was dressed like a dominatrix (I think that was the word they used). I was definitely amused by that.
You would think Quentin and Laurel would look normal compared to the weird vibes between Malcolm and Thea but it didn’t happen that way.
I pursued watching it after I received two separate recommendations for it about a month ago when the entire season was released. South of Hell is a southern gothic supernatural horror show about demon possession and a battle for souls. The lead character, Maria Abascal, is a demon hunter/exorcist. She is possessed by a demon named Abigail who was put inside her by her cult-leader/devil-worshipping father, Enos. Abigail feeds on souls but Maria, though not always in control, has her eating demons so that they can help people and get by. Maria is the main character, but David, her brother, is also a main character and he’s actually the narrator for the series.
They work together on the exorcism jobs, and David knows about Abigail and is there to help Maria with her. They’re on the run from their father who is rising up with dastardly plans.
David and Maria do not have a canonically incestuous relationship, but both of them accidentally end up in incestuous relationships with other relatives (so they have that in common as well as everything else!, and hey, maybe that says something about their relationship with each other?). But even though they’re not canon, they were definitely my favorite ship of the series. They both have love interests, more than one each in fact, which means right from the start it’s not an ideal non-canon ship. And despite both being main characters, they spend a lot of time apart. But they are close, and rely on each other. They both have a lot of issues and they need each other. They take care of each other.
Spoilers…
In a way they reminded me a lot of partners, like Mulder and Scully on The X-Files or something like that. Their first phone call is always to each other, they do a lot independently but start freaking out very quickly if they don’t hear from the other or don’t know where they are. Even though they both have their love interests, they choose to turn to each other when they’re theorizing or in trouble. (As you an imagine, the trauma they went through regarding their father and the early death of their mother bonded them closely.) You see how close they are reflected in a lot of ways: Maria wants to run but she won’t go without David; she tells Abigail that if Abigail hurts David then she’ll kill herself (which could kill Abigail too, though that part of the mythology seemed a little inconsistent); Abigail tells another demon that that is possessing David not to hurt David – “I don’t need Maria killing herself if David gets hurt”, which means Abigail, who knows Maria intimately, thinks that Maria would kill herself if something were to happen to David, even if it wasn’t Abigail’s fault; and there are also any number of scenes where they are very quick to hug each other, or hug each other about a billion times.
There were a few slightly suggestive things too. In the first episode, Abigail takes over Maria’s body in order to fight a demon. After Abigail defeats demons, she’s supposed to return control back to Maria, but in this scene she doesn’t, so David goes in to interfere. Abigail pushes David down to the ground and starts groping him. She’s talking about killing him but what she’s doing with her hands is very sexual. In episode 2, a girl David hooked up with thinks that Maria is David’s wife/girlfriend, and in episode 3, a guy that Abigail hooks up with while in control of Maria’s body assumes that David is her boyfriend/husband. Which was hilarious to me, it happening both ways. David also shows a lot of antagonism towards the guys circling around Maria, particularly Revered Bledsoe, who has been trying to get Maria’s help to take care of a demon in his daughter Grace.In 1.06, Maria had been about to have sex with her neighbor/love interest Dusty, when she had accidentally said the name of her boyfriend who was killed by Abigail, which killed the mood. David arrives just after that, and Maria puts on a robe over her underwear to go to speak to him, but barely has the robe on when she first comes out.
And in 1.07, when David is possessed by a demon and Abigail is speaking to that demon, their body language conversation is just the tiniest bit flirty. What’s really hilarious is that when Maria wakes up after that, she and David are semi-spooning on the couch. The two demons cuddled up together? IT’S SO WEIRD.
The demons aren’t really like that, so I guess Abigail and the other demon just secretly ship David/Maria. As they’re waking up, David narrates: “They say siblings are the friends God gave you.” I actually am not sure if I’ve heard that before or not but I like it. He also adds: “They are the only ones who can truly see the person you are inside.” Which is a very powerful statement. David is secretly still possessed when he says that , but it’s sort of confusing because the demon is guiding is behavior but it’s still sort of him? It’s not like it is with Abigail.
As for the other incest. Well, first there are a mother and son who worshipped the devil and they both volunteered to be possessed by demons. When the son dies, the woman strokes him and calls him her beautiful boy or something like that, then she straddles the body and says, “There’s always a place for you inside of me,” and sucks the demon out of the son’s body. Like with David’s demon there’s a blurring here between the hosts and the demons.
So I mentioned Dusty, Maria’s main love interest. He is their neighbor and aggressively pursues Maria by being a ridiculous nice guy who is always there at the right time to say or do the right thing. Maria is very reluctant to get into a romantic relationship with him because of Abigail, not only this huge secret but the fact that Abigail had killed the only other man she had ever loved that way. Maria begins to give in, and goes on a date with Dusty, and then almost has sex with him like I mentioned. They kiss a few times. And she tells him that she’s only ever felt that way once before (with the guy who Abigail killed). Well, it turns out that Dusty is actually Enos, Maria and David’s father??? I guess the real Dusty gave up his body to be possessed, and so Enos possesses him but Enos is also sometimes in his own body. This was never adequately explained. Even though it’s such an out-there twist, I do feel like it was planned from the beginning because Dusty never felt quite right. He was too perfect but he lacked something interesting to make him a legitimate love interest, so I kept waiting to find out what his deal was, and his deal was that he was her father.
This show did something that I’m not sure any other show has ever done before. They aired their regular season of 7 episodes, and then made an 8th episode which was only available to download online (through iTunes, I think?). The 8th episode, you find out at the very end of the episode, is only a dream. It’s a satisfying conclusion to the season and resolves much of what happened and then turns out to just be a dream. So it’s hard to know what to think about a lot of what happened in the episode. But anyway, in the dream she is speaking to Enos and he tauntingly says (I’m paraphrasing), “They say girls all marry their fathers.”
Obviously that’s a majorly messed-up situation, and while the fact that it’s messed-up wouldn’t necessarily stop me from shipping something, I can say in this case that I don’t ship it. Maybe if Enos had been a different kind of character, it might have been more interesting, but as written/presented it’s just horror.
But there was one incestuous relationship in the show that was presented more romantically. I mentioned Reverend Bledsoe and his daughter, Grace. Well, David is left in charge of Grace after he and Maria save her from her demon. And he and Grace have romantic feelings towards each other. They knew each other in the cult and so their shared memories form a basis for them to begin a new friendship. David turns away from the girl he had currently been seeing in order to be with Grace (which was a risky proposition, because this other girl knew a big secret about him). David and Grace have sex, and David tells the other girl that he’s in love with Grace. Bledsoe, Grace’s father, forbids the relationship, but of course the kids don’t listen. In episode 1.06, Maria, Grace, and David find out that they share a mother. David and Maria’s mother (who was an angel who became human to be with Enos) left Enos for Bledsoe and had Grace before killing herself (which she hoped would take the target off everyone’s backs).
The timeline is a little unclear here. Grace was raised in the cult, but somehow their mother had a baby and no one noticed? If she ran from the cult, why would Grace end up back there? Maria is the younger of her and David, and she remembers her mother and what she looked like, which means David definitely did, and he knows a little more about the circumstances of their mother’s death than Maria does, and yet no one knew about the baby. But not matter.
As you can imagine, this is shocking news for David and Grace. They’re given a little while to be confused and frowny, but then the action picks up and David gets possessed. Possessed!David has a conversation with Grace in which he says, “I still love you…………….just in a different way,”, and it seems like Grace is maybe just a tiny bit disappointed? But there weren’t any angsty romantic scenes, just everyone being bummed out. And since David was possessed, it’s hard to know how he really feels.
Bledsoe knew the whole time that David and Grace were related. He told them not to be together but he was rather permissive about it in my opinion. If he really wanted to stop them then he could have told them the truth, and not had them spend all that time together.
The three siblings are supposed to form a kind of trinity – angel (Grace), demon (Maria, though really it’s Abigail), and human (David), which can defeat Enos.
For a while I thought Bledsoe was Maria’s main love interest. I still think that there was a charge to their scenes and that before all the big reveals their relationship seemed to be on a sort of typical romantic path, but nothing really happened between them. However, there was a demon going around who could make herself look like anyone, and she kept taking Maria’s form, and while she was doing that the demon put the moves on Bledsoe and they started making out and stuff. Then Bledoe started saying, “We can’t, it’s wrong,” or something like that, but he couldn’t stop the demon at that point. But the other showed up at that point. So that was stepcest of a sort.
And then there’s Bledsoe/Grace. His entire motivation the entire series revolves around Grace and making sure she’s safe. In the dream sequence, he trades his soul to have 30 minutes alive again (oh yeah, Enos kills him, I should have started with that) in order to save Grace.
The show has a lot of intriguing ideas and a good premise but the execution was…so/so. It was obviously made on a lower budget. There were scenes where you couldn’t tell that, and scenes where it couldn’t have been more obvious. I think the way they chose to show a lot of things ended up making it look cheap. (Supernatural has always been the best at avoiding looking cheap by showing very little.) The sound editing is particularly bad – there was always something about the voices that didn’t sound right. The show never really took advantage of the most interesting ideas it presented. I don’t think it was as bad as some people are saying, but it wasn’t great.
I can’t find anything about a season 2. I’m guessing there won’t be one, but you never know.
I don’t think Trump actually wants to bang his daughter, I just think he says things in the sleaziest way possible and “I would do her” is the best compliment he can think of.
(Though I did always think “Ivanka” was the name of his wife. Ha.)
Wow, I hadn’t heard that myth. Apparently Adonis is the middle of a very incestuous web:
Adonis’ mother was the beautiful Myrrha of Smyrna and his father, King Cinyrus of Cyprus, who was actually the father of Myrrha. This strange parentage of Adonis came about because Goddess Aphrodite was jealous of Myrrha’s beauty and caused the girl to unite with her own father.
Interesting that the best-looking man in Greek mythology was the product of father/daughter incest.
Or this version:
It is said that Adonis was born of the illicit union between King Theias of Smyrna and his daughter Myrrha. Urged on by Aphrodite herself, the goddess of beauty, love and sexual desire, who had been offended when King Theias forgot to make a sacrifice for her, Myrrha had made amorous advances towards her father but he was successfully keeping her away. One night, she managed to lure her father out into the open and there under cover of darkness she laid with him.
I’m sure you know more about the myth than what I’ve just read, but it sounded like Aphrodite and Persephone both raised him. So it was definitely a potentially adoptive mother/adoptive son incest times 2. I read a couple of versions of the myth from different sites – it’s interesting how the narratives just sort of slide right from “beautiful baby” to “they were in love with him”.
Thanks for sharing, Anon! Just when you don’t think there’s more incest left to be discovered in Greek mythology, there is.
shipcestuous3 