Anything bad that’s happened to me, I try to put it in my work, and afterward, I feel lighter. It’s like spring cleaning. I
think that’s what all artists do—it’s a way to communicate their
feelings, a way to use their heart and get things out.
Escapism isn’t good or bad of itself. What is important is what you are escaping from and where you are escaping to.
This is my favourite ancient meme ever and I’ve been dying (haha) for merch of it for ages, but luckily I am an artist with the power to make my dreams come true. Be cheerful and live well with this delightful skeleton reminding you of the transience of life, in apparel, or homeware, anywhere!
A blessed image. Super Chill 2000 Year Old Skeleton is genuine beauty.
yeah it’s really tough bc y’know, i do want to be there for abuse survivors but then there’s other survivors who will split my ass in two if i dare say “this blog is a safe zone for abuse survivors” where they’ll be like “you’re throwing the survivors who like billy under the bus” even though i said i’m willing to listen
To some extent, fictional characters are always a bit like getting a basic shape that is the same for everybody, but with lots of blank spaces in between to fill in. A bit like this here:
Thing is, every person is different.
We come from different cultures. We’re american, brazilian, german, polish….we’re from all over the world.
We’re at different stages of our lives. We are students, housewives, doctors, accountants, secretaries, cashiers…we live at home with our parents, we are parents, we’re single, married, we have kids, we don’t have kids, we’re straight or queer. Some of us are traumatized, some of us are not.
Some of us like pineapple on pizza. Some don’t.
And we bring ALL of that to the table: who we are, what we’ve experienced, what we know and what we don’t, what need to grow and learn. And it’s DIFFERENT for each and every one of us.
So once we start filling in those blanks? Even thought the base is the SAME for everybody, we still end up with completely DIFFERENT pictures:
And each and every one of these versions is true and valid….FOR THE PERSON WHO CREATED IT. Because it relates to THEIR experience, which is personal and subjective.
Sometimes we find common ground. Sometimes someone elses’ painting will echo our own experience, and we’ll be able to connect with them through that.
And sometimes we’ll just look at a picture and go “meh” or “ugh!”, AND THAT IS OK TOO.
So what this boils down to is this:
Some people are in a place where they draw strength from being angry at their abuser. And allowing yourself to be angry is something that some people absolutely need to do in order to process and heal from their abuse.
Other people are in a place where they need to move on to a more positive way of doing things and explore the concept of redemption and the idea of either receiving or granting forgivenness, which can be a healing experience too.
So yeah….fandom needs BOTH versions of Billy presented here.
The one that focuses on him as an abuser, the evil dragon that needs to be slain, as well as the one that focuses on him as the victim of abuse, the cursed princess who needs to be rescued.
Both have their purpose, both are needed.
Now…..all we need to learn is to respect each other and acknowledge that both versions of Billy are valid and that they can co-exist peacefully. They fill different niches, side by side.
listen binch. no one has an original style. no one pulls a unique style of art out of their ass. we get to where we are through observing others and being influenced by them and that’s how art works
First off, darkfic as an umbrella term encompasses a lot of subjects and ‘dark’ topics, abuse being only one of many. It may be therapeutic for people who’ve endured abuse, but it can also be helpful for people who’ve struggled with other forms of trauma, or with mental illness, or other negative things. Depictions of intense, dark experiences can serve as a catharsis by being a direct analog for one’s own experiences, but they can also function more indirectly as a parallel, or a metaphor. Someone who has not been assaulted, but who has struggled with mental illness, may find a story about an assault victim resonating with them as they can identify with the fear and lack of control. And someone who has never been through a specific traumatic experience, but has a lot of fear of it and cultural anxiety around it, may feel bolstered by stories of characters surviving and recovering from that experience.
So for many people, with many different experiences, there can be a direct, therapeutic/comforting benefit to darkfic.
But darkfic doesn’t need to be therapeutic.
There are, of course, other kinds of benefits. Someone who has never been abused might read a story featuring abuse (and clearly tagged for it) and because of it, identify potential warning signs in a real life relationship down the road and know to get out early before things get worse. Or, they might develop a better understanding of what abuse victims go through and as a result, have more empathy for real-life survivors they encounter.
But it’s also 100% ok to like darkfic purely for entertainment value! It is, after all, fiction.
Dark stories challenge us – and we can really enjoy that challenge. They take us to extremes of emotion and the human experience. They plumb the depths of the human id. Even someone with the most charmed life still lives in a world where bad things happen, and even the sweetest, naive person has the capacity for darkness in them. Darkfic lets all of us explore those in relative safety. It makes us feel, and can thrill and horrify us as much as any thriller or horror movie. It can make us consider our own darkness, and be more aware of it. And it can take us to a place so much worse than our reality, that when we resurface into our mundane lives, there’s a sense of relief; we’ve escaped from our escapism, and our hum-drum lives seem so much better and more manageable by comparison.
Plenty of people create dark content who aren’t abuse survivors. There are books with very dark themes that are written by, edited by, published by, and consumed and made popular by people who have not been abused, but which may prove a lifeline for a survivor – one that might not have existed if the entire genre was limited to only people with lived experience. And by accepting that anyone can produce or consume dark content, we allow survivors the protection of anonymity, by not forcing anyone to disclose and reveal their trauma in order to justify liking a work without being harassed and shamed for it. Creating an exclusive club of heavily-scrutinized creators and readers who have to be ‘this traumatized to ride’ helps no one. Hell, trying to pass moral judgement on anyone by scrutinizing the potential reasons they may have for enjoying certain kinds of fictional reading material, rather than looking at their actions toward real breathing human beings, is utterly inane. Especially when fiction – including, and sometimes especially dark fiction – can be used to expand our horizons beyond our own lived experiences make us more thoughtful, empathetic people on the whole.
I think there are many ways to make a character’s death really sad, and bc we can all have different feelings about a given character, any individual reader will be very sad about the death, when another reader might be totally indifferent (or even glad!). I’ve only written fanfic myself, and I know what makes me sad when I read/write character death, that’s about as informed as I am on the topic, DISCLAIMER: I’m not a professional writer and this is not professional advice.
💀 Some things that come to mind re: making a character’s death really sad: 💀
How they die,
How preventable their death was,
How other characters feel their loss and/or the loss of their potential,
And how much that character meant to the reader/audience, did they like the character?
I don’t know what specifically you’re doing in the Memnoch timeline… I won’t use any examples of deaths from that book in case of spoilers (Idk sometimes I’m more respectful about spoiling ppl than other times *shrugs*)
In IWTV, it was a very sad death when Claudia died. It’s portrayed differently in the book(s) and the movie, but I’m just going to address it re: the points above generally and drawing from both.
1. She died by sunlight exposure and it seemed extremely painful.
Louis would not have seen it, so he can’t describe the moment of her death in the book, but it’s shown in the movie. Leading up to the death, the tension builds and builds, all these moments where Louis, Claudia and Madeleine are hoping for Armand (or some other deux ex machina) to swoop in and save them all. It doesn’t happen. Probably one of the last shreds of hope they had was when the troupe pull Louis and Claudia apart, from that point on, he can no longer protect her ;A;
As it was so painfully underscored in Claudia’s Story, the last name Claudia hears Louis call for is “Armand,” bc calling her name won’t do them any good. But to her, it feels like a final betrayal, that he’s calling for Armand bc he cares more about him ;A;
Claudia and Madeleine get locked in the well, and when Claudia sees the sunlight approaching, she’s already starting to cry, trying to wake Madeleine to try to figure out a way out… there is none and then they can only brace themselves bc there IS NO ESCAPE ;A;!! The acceptance of their own deaths is part of the tragedy.
It’s a pretty universally nightmarish situation, even though sunlight is not fatal for ppl (most, anyway), but we can all relate to the experience. It’s like being pushed onto subway tracks and not being able to escape in time ;A;
2. Her death was a failure in diplomacy, basically. The Theatre des Vampires, led by Santiago, held a kangaroo court (although they may have felt that they were within their rights) in which they found Claudia guilty of attempted murder of her maker, and decided to punish her with the death penalty.
Louis tried to protect her from it as best he could, he tried to make a deal to save her life, but failed. In the book:
“ `Listen to me, Lestat,’ I began now. `You let her go, you free her… and I will… I’ll return to you,’ I said, the words sounding hollow, metallic.
3. It kills a part of Louis when Claudia dies. His immediate reaction is extremely sad (not even factoring in the revenge he takes after).
I have a more thorough commentary on this scene here. It’s in this moment that Louis has lost the most precious person, the one who’s told him what to do, someone he could worship and follow, someone who metered out his doses of happiness with her approval. In the movie, he calls her “my child,” Armand tries to correct him: “Your lover,” and Louis compromises with “My beloved.”
In the book, the next night, Louis finds Lestat clutching Claudia’s bloody dress and sobbing over her death, too. Even though he was the very person who testified against her! Even he could not prevent their “justice.”
“And then I saw the thing in [Lestat’s] hands. I knew what it was. And in an instant I’d ripped it from him and was staring at it, at the fragile silken thing that it was – Claudia’s. His hand rose to his lips, his face turned away. And the soft, subdued sobs broke from him as he sat back while I stared at him, while I stared at the dress. My fingers moved slowly over the tears in it, the stains of blood; my hands closing, trembling as I crushed it against my chest.
Louis was expecting Claudia to go on and live with Madeleine, that he would still be in touch with her and see her occasionally. So that potential continued relationship was destroyed, too ;A;
4. What did Claudia mean to the audience/reader…
I know I sympathized with her and very much enjoyed her overall, and I like to think that other readers/viewers agreed, and don’t totally blame her for her actions against Lestat… after all, she was a victim herself. Lestat doesn’t blame her when he speaks of her in canon. We saw the love they both had for her ❤
Is that enough to convince the readers/audience to care enough for her that her death is sad for them? All those factors help!
~💀I hope that helps, Anon! Now make us cry!💀~
OKAY LIKE HI HELLO, I realize I haven’t killed anyone in my fics in a while but my never-gonna-be-fucking-finished novel is about death and grief and was closely based on my own grief process following the deaths of two of my friends in the span of three months so. Here’s what I want to say !!!
The points @i-want-my-iwtv are all super true, but I also want to say that to write an effective death scene or to be affected by a literary death you have to try to empathize with what death really feels like IRL. So, for me? Grieving hinged (and hinges, lbr, it never really goes away) on three things:
The immensity of the concept that you will never see the person again.
That as time goes by it’s not just “missing” them because you won’t see them again but that it’s been longer and longer and longer since the last time you saw them and you miss them the way you can even miss the living that you haven’t seen in a while.
The ruined potential of everything this person had to offer the world.
This is all pretty personal and grief is super emotionally complicated so obviously different people have different experiences and I AM SO EXCITED THAT AS CREATIVE HUMANS WE ALL HAVE WAYS TO EXPRESS WHAT WE INDIVIDUALLY WANT TO SAY ABOUT IT, that’s super special and I think it helps heal people a lot. But to me that’s kinda like how I narrow it down personally.
So when it comes to a story I think it’s going to depend on the POV of the text itself and also if the grief is more directed at other characters or at us as the reader.
Things to consider:
Are you trying to make us sad for US, for our own sake, because we will missing having the character around in canon? Are we attached to them?
Are you trying to make us sad for the survivor(s) of the death who we have grown to love?
In IWTV specially I think the movie does more of a job of letting us care about Claudia as her own person because see her with a bit of a wider frame, vs. the book I think heavily weighs on us caring about Louis and feeling empathy of his loss.
So if you want to make the character’s death “really sad” I think we have to first decide who we’re feeling sad for and go from there. Are we having to survive without them as a reader or are we just empathizing with someone like Louis, that we care about and feel sorry for?
EITHER WAY an important thing to note, whichever approach you take, is that we need to understand the value of this person and what they had to offer and why someone should miss them. If you’re trying to make your reader sad for the character I think it’s important to make sure they are valuable and liked and that we will care that they are gone. I think in the IWTV novel that Claudia is sort of cold and savage and by the time they’re in Paris she’s pretty cruel to Louis, so it’s natural for me not to feel personally affected by her loss, but as a reader I know that Louis is crushed because it’s the loss of his daughter. So even if the character is cold/cruel/unlikable/etc we can still hurt for someone who cares about them anyway.
So.
IDK!
@i-want-my-iwtv had super good points but I also just wanted to add that. Grief and death are messy and horrible and I think the emotional depth and sense of loss makes all the difference.
Hmmm… I haven’t seen him act in anything so idk how he is as an actor, I watched the trailer for one of his upcoming movies, Lean on Pete, he plays a 15 yr old in that movie.
^These pics are from 2017, so they’re pretty recent. I think Charlie has an unconventional look, very unique features, with the wide nose, full lips, a prominent forehead and a soft jawline. Re: the mouth, specifically, Lestat describes his mouth as “well shaped but just a little too big for my face. It can look very mean, or extremely generous, my mouth.” Maybe Charlie’s would match that description?
The nose doesn’t match as Lestat has “a fairly short narrow nose”. Now, Tom Cruise wasn’t the right height and he did an amazing job, so sometimes talent outweighs physical deficiencies. But in Tom’s case, they could give him heels, an easier thing to adjust. Tom ALSO had a prominent nose, definitely not short or narrow. And it didn’t stop him from doing an acting job that earned him the glowing praise from Anne Rice herself, who had been very against his casting.
I don’t know if you find Charlie attractive physically, Anon, but there is a recent trend in casting unconventionally attractive actors. While I think the title is a little unnecessarily click-baity, in the article “MILLENNIAL’S GUIDE TO FILM: THE AGE OF THE UGLY ACTOR” Marina B. writes:
Sometimes there aren’t really words to explain why we find someone intriguing, they just have that je ne sais quoi that pretty boy actors can’t achieve. I feel like Adam Driver has that something special, and I’m not alone. Scorsese can back me up on this one. Scorsese can be quoted giving some serious admiration for Driver that he discovered when casting for Silence:
“I love the way he moves, his sense of himself on camera… he also has that remarkable baritone voice. He’s talented, of course, and very, very brave.” -Martin Scorsese
We also have growing antagonists. Caleb Landry Jones is for sure the go-to gross, delinquent star in film lately. He played the crazy brother in both Get Out and American Made. He goes absolutely ape shit with the roles he’s given; there is no amount of crazy that he isn’t willing to take on for a character.
^All that aside, I think Charlie Plummer looks a little too young to play Lestat yet, in both his face and his body. Lestat was a hunter in life, and had to have some muscle for that. We could get a trainer for our eventual actor for Lestat, tho!
Anon, while I always had Lestat in mind as being a conventionally attractive “pretty boy,” you might be onto something. A screen test would be the real determining factor 😉
I-want-my-IWTV 