LOTR's Arwen And Aragorn Are Related (& Why It Doesn't Matter For Their Romance)

The thing is, you don't wake up in the morning and know what the day has in store for you. Some days you win a $5 pull tab or realize that you're still kind of drunk from the night before. Those are good days. Then there are other days, when you get to work and find out that you'll be explaining why it's fine that Viggo Mortensen's character in "Lord of the Rings" was all about kissing his aunt (Liv Tyler). Like the old saying goes, "Some men are born great, others have assignments about aunt-kissing thrust upon them." Let's dive in.

Where to start?

Aragorn is Arwen's nephew. No point in drawing out the reveal; we'd might as well rip off the bandage. Arwen has a dad (Hugo Weaving), and her dad had a brother, and that brother had 62 generations of offspring, and then out popped Aragorn, and he kissed his aunt.

But was it a big deal? The title of this article would have you think that it wasn't, so, you know. Let's try to piece that together.

Okay.

So after sacrificing any hope of having normal search algorithm results ever again, some cursory Googling on the topic has revealed that, to most people who've put thought into defending it, Arwen and Aragorn's relationship is cool. Why? Because she is much older than him. It's what legal scholars refer to as "The Reverse DiCaprio Defense."

The thought process seems to be that Arwen was born so very, very long ago that, when you think about it, she's barely even Aragorn's aunt at all. If anything, she's ... his great, great, great, great aunt, which is ... better? Like, if you were going to live for thousands of years, and your cousin had a kid, and that kid had a kid, and so on for centuries and centuries, eventually it would be acceptable for you to marry one of those kids. It's like how everyone is uniformly fine with 105-year-old Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) marrying 18-year-old Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1," only this time there's incest.

Look, if you're reading this, you probably already have an opinion on the matter at hand. If the whole thing seems uncouth, you're likely responding reflexively thanks to some preconceived notions about whether or not it's okay to kiss your aunt. If you're on team "kiss your aunt," on the other hand, it's probably because you have a deep emotional connection to the world of "The Lord of the Rings," or, you know, to your aunt. Either way, considering that time when Liv Tyler made out with Ben Affleck while her dad and Aerosmith sang about it in the background during "Armageddon," this is only the second creepiest family-related movie romance that the actress has been involved with.