So, here’s a perspective I think some people are lacking when talking about the psuedo-“familial bond”.
Firstly, I’ve already gone into the psychology of the Westermarck Effect, and how romance within the Toa isn’t relatable to that. That’s already written up, though.
There’s another thing that I really don’t get with this, and that is that there can’t be a family dynamic among the group with romance involved.
A lot of my friends have older siblings. Some of these older siblings are married. The spouses of these siblings are referred to as brothers or sisters-in-law. Once they enter the family, they immediately fit in with and were treated as siblings by the other siblings in the family - because they were.
To me, having brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law still very much functioned as an active and core part of the family dynamic. Of course, the relationship between the married sibling and their spouse was that of a husband and wife, but that did not interfere with the family dynamic, or make it less.
So when people bring up how romance would mess up the psuedo-“family dynamic”, I feel like they’re actively missing how such a dynamic can work within a family.