Um…you’re correct, that is a loaded question, and ultimately my answer boils down to ‘because I’m confident in my own ability to tell right from wrong in the real world’ but sure, we can do this.

First of all, I don’t have any personal issues centered around incest, which, like, I tend to think is the important part of this?  Obviously, if you’re uncomfortable with a relationship in a piece of media, please choose to take care of yourself and not engage with it.  Ex: I have the show Rick & Morty comprehensively blacklisted because I can’t deal with it.  I don’t have any of those issues with the Borgias so…thus, I watch it.

Second of all, it’s history.  Like, okay, I know this is a pretty fragile argument, but it’s pretty much accepted historical fact that there were some…interesting familial dynamics happening with the Borgia family, as with many of the powerful families in Italy at the time.  And I generally believe that if you’re doing a messy part of history, you need to deal with the fact that it was messy.  

Third of all, I just care a lot more about whether a fictional relationship is interesting than whether it’s the picture of mental health and moral purity.  Like, I’m sorry, I just do.  The Purity Olympics that this blue hellsite likes to get into exhaust me, I have unfollowed people for it when I got too tired of watching the discourse scroll down my dash.  I care infinitely more about how interesting and complicated the relationship and the emotions are.  Even the ships that are genuinely pretty good and harmless, I generally care about them in terms of complications.  Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley is my jam, but I would be WAY less interested if they weren’t both child generals in a war they were born into and victims of possession and traumatized and scared and courageous and forced to fight separately in order to win.  The very first thing I said about Diana/Steve Trevor was “why are we even here if he’s not torturing himself with guilt for staining the purest soul he’s ever known with war”.  I’ve always been someone who loves stories for their messiness, because it makes the characters and their relationships more interesting.  And by far the most interesting available permutation of Cesare Borgia and Lucrezia Borgia’s relationship is the one in the show, where they’re so bent and misshapen by the pressures and demands of their father’s nation-spanning chess game that the only way they really know how to love is with each other.

Fourth and finally, this is the kind of complicated morally graphite stuff I grew up on.  The five other people on the internet who’ve read the Kencyrath know what I’m talking about, but more than that, this is always the kind of story I’ve loved.  For all else that it is, Harry Potter is a story about a profoundly traumatized kid and the grim reality that sometimes there is no one else to fight except for you.  The Hero and the Crown is a story about how sometimes being good at something won’t change the fact that you’re not good at the right thing and you might have to beat that into people.  Jesus Christ, Animorphs brings up the question of whether or not it’s morally okay to commit a war crime.  A lot.  The characters commit war crimes.  A LOT.

Basically, I’m an adult with the ability to make my own decisions about right and wrong who enjoys grim and messy relationships because honestly life is grim and messy.  If you yourself, anon, are not comfortable with the incest in the Borgias, then you are more than welcome to not engage with it.