As many have pointed out, it's genuinely hilarious and quite telling how Liam blocks so many fans yet leaves the gcesters untouched, even when they openly post fanarts or replies to him on X. People often say he’s just using X without thinking (sometimes he is), but I believe he actually maintains a very specific boundary. He refuses to tolerate any judgment or condemnation directed at his family even if it's just teasing to get Liam's attention. Yet, he consistently ignores or pretends not to notice the gcest content and even leaves some genius notes for us from time to time. He seems a surprisingly comfortable with the fact that many see his relationship with Noel as something beyond mere brotherly love. In other words, it appears that gcest content doesn't actually cross the line for him.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say he endorses the gcest contents, and I personally am not trying to dismiss the negative feelings to gcest that people have. But the fact that Liam occasionally leans into the bit and plays along with us is something we simply can't deny, can we?
A Personal List of Films That Remind Me of Noel and Liam
This is a list of my favorite movies about siblings that remind me of Noel and Liam. I have selected pieces that either focus on sibling bonds or depict relationships that are implicitly or explicitly incestuous.
It’s basically just a kind of personal memo for myself. I might add more later if anything else comes to mind.
Brotherly (2018)
Based on a true story of how an incestuous relationship formed between two brothers in 1970's Ohio. It tells of their abandonment by their alcoholic parents and how the brothers turned to each other for comfort. (URL)
-I...don’t really think this should be on the list, since it’s based on a real story. But I still had to bring it up because the younger brother’s monologue feels way too close to things Liam has said about Noel leaving him in interviews over the years. It’s only about ten minutes long and you can watch it on Youtube, so I really recommend watching it.
Do Começo ao Fim / From Beginning to End (2009)
Two brothers develop a very close relationship as they are growing up in an idyllic and happy family. When they are young adults their relationship becomes very intimate, romantic, and sexual.
-The main characters are biological half-brothers, there are sex scenes, they even exchange rings, and on top of that, it has a happy ending. I don’t know if this is normal for Brazilian movies, but I was totally shocked. The characters grew up in a wealthy happy family and hardly ever fight, but I still got strong gcest vibes from this film. Especially the way they flirt in front of their friends, making them feel awkward, or their public displays of affection, it reminds me of Noel and Liam flirting when they were young.
Shame (2011)
Successful and handsome New Yorker Brandon seems to live an ordinary life, but he hides a terrible secret behind his mask of normalcy: Brandon is a sex addict. His constant need for gratification numbs him to just about everything else. But, when Sissy, Brandon's needy sister who works as a singer, unexpectedly blows into town, crashes at his apartment and invades his privacy, Brandon is finally forced to confront his addiction head-on.
-One of my personal most gcest-ish movie. The brother and sister aren't straight-up incestuous in this movie, but their heavy sexual closeness and total codependence feels so gcest to me.
The Dreamers (2003)
In 1968 Paris, film-loving twins Theo and Isabelle befriend American student Matthew during student protests. While their parents travel, they pull him into a month of sensual exploration, until reality intrudes.
-I ended up watching The Dreamers because I came across a Dreamers AU with Andy as the main character (it's really good), and after finally seeing it, I totally got why it would inspire someone to write an AU. Something about the dynamic really feels familiar to me, the dom older sister and sub younger brother, and the younger brother being so fixated on his sister.
Goodbye Gemini (1970)
A pair of unnaturally close twins whose relationship becomes strained and dangerous after they enter Swinging London’s party scene and encounter a predatory outsider.
-To be honest, it’s a really weird movie, but seeing the younger brother so smitten with his older sister and constantly insisting that they should be together made me think, “That’s so Liam…”
Bonus: This is obviously not a story about actual brother and sister, but I still wanted to bring it up because it’s one of my personal favorite films.
わが恋せし乙女/Waga koi seshi otome (1946)
A baby girl is taken in by a family in the countryside and raised with an older boy as though they were real siblings. She grows into a beautiful woman gifted with a fine singing voice. When her older brother returns from the war, he realizes that he has fallen in love with the girl he has always regarded as his sister, and comes to dream of marrying her. But the young woman already has another man she wishes to marry.
-This is obviously not a story about actual brother and sister, but I still wanted to bring it up because it’s one of my personal favorite films. It’s old, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad.
You know, if you asked me who I want to hear an interview from most right now out of all the Oasis members, it’s not Noel, Liam, Gem, or Bonehead. It’s Andy Bell.
Honestly, I personally felt like he didn't have much of a reason to return to Oasis. Bonehead was right there supporting Liam’s solo career from the start, and Gem has been a staple in HFB. So it was easier to guess those two would be back. But Andy?
After Oasis and Beady Eye, he returned to his original "mothership," Ride, reconciled with his friends, and seemed to be living such a happy, peaceful life as a musician.
As an AndyLiam person, I secretly hoped he felt like "no one but me should be Liam’s bassist," but seeing how fulfilled he looked in Ride, I’d made peace with the idea that he might never come back to the Oasis drama.
He never seemed like the type to hold a grudge with Liam & Noel, but he also didn't seem like the type to ditch Ride just for returning to Oasis. I’d also heard he wanted to help with Liam’s solo work but was turned down. So I believed he's no longer connected to Oasis and I had honestly braced myself for the possibility of a new bassist for the reunion tour.
But here he is. He’s back. And he isn't just "back", he’s doing everything. He’s still in Ride (THEY ARE GOING TO COME TO JAPAN THIS FALL), he’s busy with his solo DJ sets, he’s running his electronic project GLOK, and now there are even rumors he was spotted at the studio where Liam and John were recording(!!).
That means Andy Bell is currently juggling Oasis, Ride, and GLOK, while potentially helping Liam with his solo endeavors. Yet, he hasn’t done a single interview since the reunion was announced. We have no idea how he’s feeling. His wholesome Instagram posts are lovely, but they only tell half the story.
Seriously, who I want to hear an interview from most right now out of all the Oasis members is Andy.
I think the reason Liam kept making incestuous jokes and being so stubbornly, overly affectionate with the sexual body touches to his brother is simply because he knew Noel loved those kind of jokes. Like, Noel genuinely looked so happy when Liam did it to him, right?
And...It's just my personal opinion, and maybe I only think this way because I'm the youngest of three sisters and close to the middle one, but I believe that Noel was the one who started the incest jokes, and he probably started them at a pretty young age. I mean, IMO, the youngest kid always copies the middle sibling if they're close.
You do the same jokes your brother does without fully grasping what it means or caring about how other people view it. Before you even have a sense of social rules or ethics, your older brother, who knows just a tiny bit more about the world than you do, thinks it’s funny and teaches it to you. And you just take it as, "Ah, that's how things are," or "I got it! THIS is fun, right?" and you just always want to copy the same jokes your older brother did because you know they make him laugh and make him love you back. And it becomes his habit.
And the thing is, you keep doing it even long after the older brother has gotten bored of it, or realized that their jokes are actually a bit too messed up and stopped. You're just left wondering, "Why did he stop doing these?" while you keep going, trying to make him laugh just to feel that love from him again.
Then, after some time passes and the older brother gets enough breathing room to feel nostalgic about those old sensitive jokes, he suddenly starts making them again. That’s when the younger one goes, "I knew he still loves this jokes and still makes him laugh, and when I do it, he's happy and loves me back!" It basically triggers making the habit even more rock-solid.
In our family, it obviously wasn't incest jokes, but the exact same kind of dynamic actually happened with my middle sister and me.
I’ll be honest: I used to be uncomfortable with incest ships (sorry to anyone who likes them). 1) I have older sisters. 2) incest fiction almost always comes with childhood trauma or some kind of pathology attached. And 3) it often ends tragically. So it just wasn’t my taste.
But the more I dug into these two, the more I felt like, “I don’t understand what I’m looking at.” There’s too much obsession, too much volatility, and too much physical behavior that doesn’t add up if it’s only brotherly love. Then the moment I allowed the possibility that there’s something beyond “brotherly love” between them, suddenly everything clicked. I mean, if you insist it’s nothing more and nothing less than pure sibling affection, there are just too many parts that remain impossible to explain. Even I, someone who used to avoid incest ideas, ended up thinking, “Wait, isn’t this exactly what it is?”
So, setting aside the whole “incest is a crime” or “it’s ethically wrong” debate for a moment, and not as irony or a dunk, I’m genuinely interested in how people who see them as “nothing but brothers” interpret their extreme, messy love-hate bond.
Okay, Okay. I’ve cracked the code. Seeing Noel’s obsession with Matthew McConaughey just confirmed it. Am I the only one who thinks McConaughey, Paul Weller, Johnny Marr, AND Liam all share similar facial features? What I’m trying to say is: Noel clearly has a "type." He’s a sucker for men with slightly long faces, heavy eyelids, a strong bridge of the nose—all paired with a unique sense of humor.
I often feel like Noel always chooses to tell us the most plausible or emotional or believable story instead of what's actually happening, and Liam always tells us the most plausible or emotional truth but in such a ridiculous way that it's hard to take seriously. And they're both basically telling us the same story, but both way are so chaotic that we fans have to solve the puzzle using the oddly pieces they've given us.
@alighttoburnalltheempires shared their thoughts about my article on how differences in impressions of the Gallagher brothers arising from translation may influence gcest fanfics and it is really interesting!
As I mentioned before, I haven't been able to follow all of their interviews, so I might just be mistaken. To confirm this, I took a closer look at some actual translation articles and videos.
Sorry if my English is off. Additionally, please note that this will be a lengthy post.
First of all, I think it’s fair to say this: in Japanese, we can’t really translate fuck accurately.
When fuck appears in novels, books, or interviews, it’s usually translated as “kuso (クソ）”. But the thing is, fuck, shit, bad, terrible — they can also be translated as “kuso” too. It’s not that we don’t have swear words, but I think there’s no exact equivalent to fuck that carries the same weight or flexibility.
Even the person who supervised the subtitles for Oasis: Supersonic said in an interview that it was tough to translate fuck correctly. She said something like, “The Gallagher brothers clearly use fuck as an essential part of how they speak, and if you leave it out, you lose something important. But it’s impossible to translate the exact nuance of what they say naturally into Japanese.”
So in Japanese, we often just keep it as fakku (ファック), written in katakana, the script used for foreign words written phonetically. For example, when the Supersonic book edition came out, the translator decided not to translate fuck or fucking at all and just left every fuck as fakku (ファック) or fakkin (ファッキン), because he thought it was impossible to capture the full nuance in Japanese. (But honestly, the translation feels terrible.)
And I think this is probably an important point:
Many of the translated interviews with Noel and Liam published in Japanese magazines are based on overseas articles where their swear words have already been edited out before translation.
So we Japanese people only get to see the Gallagher brothers through Japanese media, which is basically censored.
But that doesn’t mean fans in Japan are unaware of their attitude. There are some viral memes and videos that even non-Oasis fans have seen. My favorite and also famous one is this pic that “I like Fukuoka (one of the prefectures in Japan) because it’s got fuk in it,”.
There’s also the “Gallagher Insult Karuta,” a kind of card game made of their most famous insults.
Also, I think “色違いは持ってるか？もう一枚買っちゃえよ！(Do you have this shirt in other colors? Just get another one. )” is the most famous one. It's from an interview Noel did when he came to Japan for HFB tour, and it's seriously hilarious. You should definitely watch it.
The most famous example, though, might be that YouTube channel that translates the brothers’ lines into Osaka dialect. Osaka-ben is a regional dialect from the Kansai (west) region, and it’s known for sounding stronger or rougher than standard Japanese. IMO it fits Liam’s strong accent.
Then, how about translations in magazines or articles that reach a wide audience?
Interviews with English-speaking artists in Japanese magazines tend to be written in a similar tone. I'm not sure but it seems there’s some kind of common editorial rule or something in the industry.
So, even Noel's speech in a late tone was almost always written like “-dayo ne”, “-janai kana”, or “-dakara ne”. As for Liam and Noel in the 90s and 00s, their words were translated using endings such as “da” or “da ze”, giving them the tone of a boy. And it's interesting that it seems they translated it Noel sounds a bit rougher than Liam. Liam's was generally translated using phrases like “-ne, “-yo, and “-sa. But anyway, it depends on the publication and sometimes is written in the same tone as Noel's.
The best example is the interview video from their first visit to Japan in 1994. You can actually read "クソ(shit)" in the subtitles, but most of them were translated by soft tone, with endings like “-jan,” “-kana,” "-ne" or “-yo.” Their tone is like beautiful bad boys straight out of a shōjo manga. Kind of a bit rough, but somehow really cute and even a bit strangely polite.
Additionally this 2009 article on Liam talking about Oasis breakup , this 2013 article on Beady Eye (an interview with Andy, Liam, and Gem) and this 2011 interview video almost completely uses a uniform tone for all of them.
Regarding not translating swear words, these examples are not from a magazine, but you can see it on this 2000 interview and the interview video Beady Eye did during their visit to Japan for Summer Sonic 2011.
In the 1st one, Noel clearly says “shit,” and in the 2nd one, Liam definitely says “fuck”, but these don't appear in the subtitles, and the overall tone of the subtitles is completely standardized.
(By the way, Liam in this 2nd one is adorable)
By the late 2010s and into the 2020s, though, the tone in translations finally started to sound a little rougher. For example, this 2018 article actually includes fuckin’ translated into Japanese ("あいつは、バック・バンドでハサミで演奏してくれたりとか、ファッキン綿あめを食べてるみたいな女と（バンドを）やりたいとしか思ってないんだろうよ。").
Maybe because of the change in translation style in the 2020s and the influence of those videos that translate their speech into Osaka dialect, there’s been an apparent rise in fanfics lately where Liam and Noel talk in a much rougher tone.
The few examples shown here might look like they only have minor differences, but tone differences in Japanese are a big deal. We have like twenty ways to translate brother, and around seventy for I or you, and the same “I love you” can sound completely different depending on whether it’s “aishiteru yo,” “aishiteru ze,” “aishiteru be,” or “aishiteru zo.”
Little differences like that pile up, and I think those tiny choices in Japanese publications might have influenced fans, which could explain why old fanfics feel a bit different from the impressions I get from them when they speak English.
