Now that we’ve cleared those two points up, let’s finally address the elephant in the room: incest ghost babies. Going back to the “perpetrated the forbidden” line… We don’t know the technicalities of conceiving a child with a ghost; there’s no explaining this – or excusing it, for that matter – and I won’t pretend like I know the answer to this one. This is of course, the main issue folks have with this situation, and it seems as though to most people it doesn’t matter how this became a thing, only that it did does. Miu is a child of two siblings, so it’s incest by default and nothing else matters, and while I don’t want to seem like I’m discrediting these people’s feelings, I do think it’s vital to our conversation to take a closer look at the context of this. Had this been a regular case of incest, we wouldn’t be having this discussion right now – we would have all agreed that this was inexcusable, and moved on with our lives; however, it’s anything but. We’re talking about a universe of restless spirits, magical cameras, and liquid hell – nothing about it is regular, or normal in any way, and if we want to gain a deeper understanding of it, we have to operate on its logic, not ours.
To me, Miu is more of a symbolic representation of Miku’s feelings rather than a product of incestuous love. Hell, Miku doesn’t love her brother, she doesn’t want him – she’s even gone on record saying life with him wasn’t easy – she needs him because she literally doesn’t have anyone else. No one to tell her she’s not insane for seeing that which shouldn’t exist. No one to truly understand how she felt. No one to share her torment with. This isn’t some vapid anime story about a schoolgirl who wants her brother’s dick, and comparing it to one is insulting. Nothing across these three games suggests that Miku and Mafuyu’s relationship is sexual, or even romantic in any way; for that matter, it isn’t even possible to have sex with a ghost unless I’m missing something (I am losing sanity points as I write this). Whatever it was that brought Miu into this world has to have been spiritual in nature. In Fatal Frame 3‘s ending we see that ghosts can indeed interact with the living in the Manor of Sleep, as Yuu takes on Rei’s tattoos and frees her from the curse, so I imagine that something similar must have happened with Miku as well. Perhaps, Mafuyu gave her a part of his being, his life force, as a farewell, to convince her to go on living? This may sound like silly fanfiction, but it sure beats the idea of them getting down on the sand in front of the Abyss on the Horizon, doesn’t it?
This is only my personal opinion, but if there’s no sexual or romantic attraction between the people in question, or any actual physical contact to speak of for that matter, can it really be considered incest in its purest form? We can’t deny of course that at the end of the day the union of these two siblings produced a child, but since the things that make incest so gross in the first place are missing from the equation, my brain doesn’t quite make that connection. I’m not saying any of this is okay – seeing it this way doesn’t fix anything, the implications of depravity on display are still uncomfortable to me – but I definitely don’t have as much of an issue with this part as most people seem to. I do recognise that this is a problem (hell, it’s in the title), and if you see it in an entirely different light, I do understand that and wouldn’t claim you’re incorrect, but this is the way I choose to interpret this situation. I do wish they’d handled it better, though: it’s really messy and unpleasant to think about, and it ended up hurting the game in the end, as it’s severely affected people’s enjoyment of it here in the West.