Trope: Suddenly, My Brother Is A Siscon
Trope Symptoms: obsessive brothers in the way of romance, clueless sisters/sister figures, a reincarnator or transmigrator step or adoptive sister changes the story a bit too much, frequently set in a BL novel transmigration series, boundaries pushed but not crossed,
Genre/Sub-genre: Boys Love (sort of), romantic fantasy
As Seen In: Touch My Brother and You Die (Webtoon), Brother Knows Best, The Villainess is a Marionette, Villainess Is Changing Her Role to a Brocon, Here Comes the Silver Spoon, My Next Life As A Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom, Lady Rose Just Wants to Be A Commoner, The Viridescent Tiara, Taming My Villainous Little Brother
“Rosalite, my sister!”
Yay! It was the big boy version of Mr. Asterion. This handsome silver-haired snack must’ve been fighting me as he was covered in blood. Oh no, there are so many cuts on that pretty face… I hope they won’t scar.
“Sister, why did you draw a blade?”
I don’t know. Why don’t you ask your dad why he had this thing locked away in the basement in the first place? By the way, you’re using a sword again! It looked like he had an affinity for becoming a swordmaster, considering it happened every time. I had so much I wanted to tell him, but I was too busy hacking up blood. I had to ask him what his wish was.
“I-I don’t need anything if I just have you…”
Is he for real? Maybe he is… he did always follow me around. The silver-haired and handsome Mr. Asterion held me tight as he confessed his love. Apparently, he had been watching Rosalite since before she turned sixteen, so when Rosalite entered the House of Roxburg after being raised at her maternal grandmother’s place… I could feel my consciousness slipping due to heavy blood loss.
But I understood now. Mr. Asterion, you were abnormally infatuated with your own sister. Damn, author, you have to share this type of detail in the novel, not just keep it to yourself!
I didn’t even have the strength to throw up any more blood, so I closed my eyes. I hated this third-person narration. I hated sucky plot twists even more. And I absolutely despised the author of Asterion of the Starry Blue Night.
Morpho. Touch My Brother and You Die: Volume I (Light Novel) (pp. 24-25). Editio Publishing. Kindle Edition.
I’m working with the most basic definition of a siscon where a character (usually a guy) has an over-the-top obsession with their sister that shows itself as an extreme sister complex (which gets shortened to “siscon” in the popular parlance). Being a siscon isn’t inherently romantic, but it is deeply obsessive. The siscon’s goal is to remain the only person in their big sister’s eyes and to have a relationship with her that no one else can take away or change.
I’m purposefully keeping this separate from the “Raise Your Love Interest” trope that I see as parallel to this one because even though those characters are also often siscons, their interest is a) clearly romantic, b) eventually reciprocated, and c) not “complicated” by biological relation.
In “Raise Your Love Interest” stories, as we’ll get into in the future, the characters aren’t usually biologically related but are usually step-siblings, foster-siblings, or were raised together for some purpose and the brother character usually claims to have never seen the older female lead/sister as a sibling. Siscons in Korean and Japanese web novels or cartoons/manga are usually biologically related to the sister they’d give anything to secure and they’re relatively unlikely to succeed in making their relationship romantic. There’s also limited raising going on there.
As opposed to what’s going on in the series that inspired this piece: Touch My Brother and You Die.
In Touch My Brother and You Die, a transmigrator has been trapped on an endless reset loop as Rosalite, the older sister of Asterion, the titular character in Asterion of the Starry Blue Sky. Despite her best efforts to keep her baby brother alive and well past a certain age, Asterion’s sunfish self just keeps dying before his twentieth birthday… and when he does? Rosalite restarts her life at sixteen.
In her last life, the one the series is set in thus far barring any more accidental deaths/purposeful murders, Rosalite decides to do things her way. Which starts with getting rid of one of the men frequently responsible for Asterion’s childhood trauma and some of his deaths, their cousin Dylan. Across the series, Rosalite essentially whips Rion into shape as her assistant, protecting him from the capture targets that otherwise would be ultimately responsible for his deaths (or hers) while consolidating power as the heir to the Roxburg family.
“I don’t know if it’s the duke’s one-night mistake or the maid’s, but in any case, I’m accepting and bringing you, a mistake, into the House as the official son of the duke and my little brother, where I will work you like a horse until you die.”
Morpho. Touch My Brother and You Die: Volume I (Light Novel) (p. 34). Editio Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Along the way, however, one thing that happens? Rion’s siscon tendencies – already clearly present in the original novel via the quote I open this piece with – balloon to an incredible and frankly horrifying amount.
Rion starts out timid, trembling when Rosalite so much as looks at him funny, but quickly evolves to a character who is an open and proud siscon… to everyone but the woman herself. Rion does things like lie about his ability to dance so that Rosalite can take him under her wing, try to get in the way of her relationship with her fiancé Glen, and in the manhwa he even handmakes a doll at 1:3 scale that’s modeled after his sister and has some unspecified “special features”. (Different from the novel, where a maid sews the doll for him and it doesn’t seem to be any different from a normal doll.)
To put it lightly? Rion is a little freak and everyone knows it.
Everyone… except for Rosalite who literally stuffs her fingers in her ears and hollers rather than reckon with that fact.
Rion is an extreme example of the kinds of siscon brothers we see in these series, but he’s far from the only one.
Siscons are a staple in even contemporary series, and in the world of romantic fantasy webtoons, you basically can’t read a series without slamming into a passionate siscon. There’s even an itty bitty siscon in one of my favorite manga series, An Observation Log of My Fiancée Who Calls Herself a Villainess, and he’s so shocked at the end when he’s told that he’s not going to get to marry his big sister Bertia. That little kid is easily one of the cutest siscons out of the lot, by the way, because he’s super unlikely to escalate his behavior to something dangerous or disquieting. (Bertia’s husband and son being yanderes helps there too.)
Siscons are kind of fascinating to me because they’re a Bataillaean extreme of sibling love. They exemplify sibling love taken to its farthest and least logical level because even when they’re complicated and terrible yanderes, their love for their sisters really just… drives them to do the wildest things.
I just returned to The Villainess is a Marionette and the relationship between the main character and her half brother Regev remains one of the most stressful and amazing things I’ve seen. Regev has been a yandere siscon from day one. The empress’s son with her lover, Regev was obsessed with his loving older sister Kayena to the point of isolating her from the people around her and, shortly before the start of the webtoon, poisoning her. In fact, as the webtoon progresses (halfway through the novel as available on Tapas as well), he winds up destroying their relationship by crossing boundaries and killing someone that Kayena loves in order to isolate her further.
Regev repeatedly stakes his claim on Kayena in front of her actual love interest (who, spoiler alert, is his younger half brother). He plans to scare away all of her potential husbands and actively claims her – by grasping her hand, resting his head on her body, holding her close, et cetera – in ways that make it clear that he actually holds the second male lead position in the series… even though he is Kayena’s blood brother.
Where Asterion is clearly and purposefully limited in the intimacy he’s allowed to have with Rosalite in their novel, the world of The Villainess is a Marionette made it so that Kayena couldn’t escape Regev. He’s actually the person she sees the most aside from her maids and her love interest.
Now, I don’t think siscons are narrative poison.
Obviously.
I read a huge amount of webtoons and siscons are just kind of… extra spice. Because you don’t know what they’re going to do or how extreme the sibling love will be. Most series don’t see the siscon succeed at shifting the sibling bonds. Even in something like Your Majesty, Please Spare Me This Time where a main character is revealed to be someone else’s child… the siscon that develops in the romantic fantasy setting… doesn’t get the girl. In that series, in particular, the sister instantly rejects the potential that she and her brother could even be a thing. No matter what changes in their relationship… that aspect won’t.
The prevalence of siscons (and, to a lesser extent, brocons) in webtoons and webnovels does make me wonder… why.
Why siscons?
Why a pseudo-romantic sibling relationship? What is the appeal to the writer? What was the first siscon creator thinking about?
With something like the “Raise Your Love Interest” trope – and we’ll talk in more detail about that– it’s clear that it’s a desire to have a moldable love interest who isn’t beholden to the systemic problems of the patriarchy. But… what is the appeal with siscons? I don’t even know what the full draw is for me, and I read webcomics with at least one siscon in it on a regular basis.
What are your thoughts on siscons? Do you find them to be narrative poison, or do you eat them up with a spoon?
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