♛You’re not yet 20 years old? There is plenty of time for you! There is no rush. Appreciate the other flowers blooming in the garden around you, let their happiness be your happiness. See if you can learn from their example.
There is an awful pressure in this modern age that is similar to the pressure of my mortal years, that being single is somehow considered as “a failure” or “missing out.” I can’t agree with this judgment, and I hope you don’t either.
I have been in enough relationships to tell you that they are wonderful, but they are not all rainbows and
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all the time. It’s a part-time job! It takes effort! Being in a relationship is not an end point, it’s the beginning of a shared chapter with someone.
But I won’t lie to you, you might not ever find love. Or it may be right around the corner. Who can tell?
Let go of any feelings of inadequacy for this, if you feel it. Too many people think of life as a series of required chapters or items on a checklist that must be accomplished, and therefore, the failure to achieve them implies a failure in you.
Absolutely not so. “Failure.” “Success.” Let go of society’s narrow definition of these concepts. It’s far worse to settle for having someone in your life who goes through the motions of loving you, but doesn’t. Someone you don’t love. Someone you project your fantasies onto. Someone you want so badly to love you the way you need to be loved. So many people fall into this trap; locked to someone they end up despising sooner or later.
All the loves of my life were found when I pushed past my comfort zone.* One thing is certain, love won’t find you if you close yourself off from the possibility and opportunity. I found Louis in pursuit of keeping my diet strictly evildoer, and there he was, too dignified to do it himself, throwing himself to the wolves in the hopes that they would slay him. Something led me there, among all the other dens of sin I might have gone to that night. Did fate lead me to him? I like to think so.
*Not that I have much of a comfort zone to begin with *shrugs*
You are whole as you are. Look at your triumphs in this life, look how far you’ve come. Look where you want to go, what you want to do. Give yourself some love.
Hello! This was a really tough ask, and very intellectually stimulating, and opening it further, I ended up considering the larger topic of What is an author’s obligation to their readers? What is an artist’s obligation to their viewers/audience? I don’t know.
In that line of consideration, I don’t recall AR ever bringing up these specific issues in (or out) of canon, or whether she’s been asked about it. I don’t think she’s ever said anything about avoiding depicting wlw relationships… these seem like questions you could ask her directly on FB, but my prediction is that she would be unwilling to address them. My impression of her is that she enjoys praise but does not feel obligated to write anything for anyone but herself, for better or worse.
To use the word “avoiding” implies she’s aware of it as a failure on her part, and I don’t think she is aware of it.
[^Fanart by @garama, mommy!Louis w/ his parenting guide,
this looks, like a good mom, he’s forcing the other two into some kind of parent-child bonding exercise!]
Re: Coding characters as male or female, that discussion is kind of confusing to me. I’ve seen fandom discourse refer to Louis as the “mommy” in the Lestat, Louis, and Claudia family in IWTV (a little more on that under the cut). Louis is only one example of a male character who may have been intentionally written as being more of the stereotypically female role than a male; he is more protective and nurturing to Claudia like a mother would be, and Lestat seems to “wear the pants” in that household. IDK if that is sufficient as “coding a male character as female.”
why her female characters are more peripheral to the story than her male characters,
why she seems to avoid depicting wlw relationships.
I don’t want to jump to labeling her as misogynistic, but it seems like her female characters are coded as female, while the males are just characters, if that makes sense.
It seems like the men are bi and the women straight.
^This is a lot to consider, any one of which could be a whole essay of response. Anyone who has opinions on this is welcome to reblog/comment, as this is not an area of expertise for me. And, IMO, it’s not an area of expertise for Anne Rice, either.
TL;DR: I don’t think AR intended to “avoid” the topics you bring up, I believe she was more focused on her own topics (I list some under the cut). AR had posted “On My Method of Writing:” as part of a message on her page, 8/20/2003, which I found informative. A few excerpts are under the cut.
[^May 10, 2016- X] AR has said many times that she writes the books she wants to see in the world, no other intentions.
What is an author’s obligation to their readers? What is an artist’s obligation to their viewers/audience? I don’t know. We are all entitled to our own answers to that question.
Hit the jump for more, cut for length and QOTD spoiler.
negative opinions/critical analysis, it is hard, if not impossible, to please everyone, even if that’s a blogger/author’s goal. I try to compromise when I can, but that’s my own prerogative. AR seems to provide a little fanservice now and then and will write more of X, Y, Z when the POTP ask her to write more of X, Y, Z, but that’s her own prerogative.
Perhaps the misogyny some people perceive in her books is real, perhaps it’s internalized for her. She might deserve that label. I don’t know how I feel about that.
From all that I’ve absorbed over the years, she wrote about what intrigued her. This is just the first few things that come to mind of things I’ve seen in canon, in different variations, things she may have discussed outside the novels, things she has always seemed to want to explore:
Her own retail and geographical interests/fetishes (classical painting, jewelry (cameos!!), high fashion (VELVET!), low fashion, literature, Shakespeare, music and culture of the 80′s (BLADE RUNNER & BON JOVI), SCIENCE and technology (iPHONES!), interior decorating, New Orleans, Miami, Ancient Rome, Paris, etc.);
Sexuality & power;
Religion and its role in terms of meting out punishment to those who deserve it and misapplied to innocent people, punishments as fitting a crime and punishments for no crime, varying forms of punishment;
Revenge and whether it is justified;
World peace and how to achieve it;
Whether there is a God who will embrace us when we die, whether we will meet our loved ones who died before/after us, whether there is an eternal heaven and hell, etc. Whether we will get the answers to all of life’s questions;
Religion and its setup as a social group and whether it requires genuine belief in order to be part of that group;
Very hot guys and what they do w/ their dicks;
Childlike, adorable women;
Precocious young adults/teens who are interested in sex before coming of legal age;
Consent, dubious consent, and lack of consent across many different categories;
etc.
^I feel like all of her writing can be summed up as speculation on these topics (and others), exploring them to find out “what would happen if…” and presenting results which she does NOT promote, results which she DOES promote, and results she offers up to the reader’s interpretations. Misogyny can be easily woven into many of those topics w/ or w/o intention on the author’s part.
As an example of a speculative situation, involving a possible misandrist character: in QOTD, radical feminist Akasha believed she could guarantee world peace by killing off 90% of the men. She starts doing it but is thwarted before making much progress. If she could have continued, would it have been a successful plan? I believe AR is suggesting that it would not, that as enticing as the idea was, radical feminism is too extreme and would have failed. And further, that the misandrist proponent of radical feminism may have been missing a few marbles even as a mortal, in addition to being out of touch with reality as a nearly omnipotent immortal.
So my answer is that I don’t think AR intended to “avoid” the topics you bring up, I believe she was more focused on her own topics.
Re: Coding characters as male or female, that discussion is kind of confusing to me. I’ve seen fandom discourse refer to Louis as the “mommy” in the Lestat, Louis, and Claudia family in IWTV. AR has said Louis was basically written as herself (she famously said, and I can’t find the source rn but I remember it distinctly: “I’m the only woman ever played by Brad Pitt in film!”), evidence that she did see that character as female? Possibly.
“I have been writing most of my adult life, of course, but very steadily since about 1970.”
^Idk if coding gender into characters was a thing then.
“My method of writing is to develop the novel sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph and page by page with heavy rewriting and reshaping and editing as I go along,… until I had the perfected page in order to proceed to the next page.”
^I seem to recall her saying that some of her novels are planned out w/ plot points first, others just flow in the order she writes them, w/o pre-planning.
“After the publication of the The Queen of the Damned, I requested of my editor that she not give me anymore comments. I resolved to hand in the manuscripts when they were finished. And asked that she accept them as they were. She was very reluctant, feeling that her input had value, but she agreed to my wishes. I asked this due to my highly critical relationship with my work and my intense evolutionary work on every sentence in the work, my feeling for the rhythm of the phrase and the unfolding of the plot and the character development. I felt that I could not bring to perfection what I saw unless I did it alone. In othe words, what I had to offer had to be offered in isolation. So all novels published after The Queen of the Damned were written by me in this pure fashion, my editor thereafter functioning as my mentor and guardian.”
^Her editor was demoted to copyeditor
mentor and guardian
.
“…
the writing you are reading is quite deliberate, that it is informed and it is conscious, as well as being the result of intuition. It is the result of all that I am – my education, my mystic sensibilities, and the student in me. It is poured out fearlessly, and then edited, and re-edited, and subjected to merciless scrutiny. It represents, and always has, my finest efforts.”
^Her writing is all intentional and her focus is intentional.
*nods* I know that feel. When writing fic, sometimes it’s easier to write Lestat from the outside, let other characters describe things about him that even he himself is unaware of. Someone telling a story about you, describing you, they’re painting a portrait like an artist would, and it’s often much more accurate than a photograph ❤
At the booksigning 11/30/16, AR told us this comment a friend made to her re: Lestat’s portrayal in IWTV
(bc even AR was surprised that Lestat was the one she wanted to explore more!):
“You drew Louis in black ink… and then painted Lestat in flaming colors!”
^yah so I don’t have access to any photoshoppin’ tools rn but whatever… that is yours truly and @roselioncourt.
So LOTS of things happening and tbh I’m a little overwhelmed by all the info we’ve gotten in the last week, and the posts in response, some of which I’ve seen… and I was trying to keep up w/ it all on my phone the whole frickin’ time it was happening (I have 100+ tabs open *laughcries* and the phone is not a happy camper)… it’s a little overwhelming.
As Ron Swanson famously said: “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” I’m gonna whole-ass all the things when I have the time this weekend, I got all your messages and plan to do massive replies. Also need to make a post about the PLROA booksigning, I took notes (altho there is a video of it on the official VC FB).
… I also have to read the new book (!!!)… I asked for spoilers and you should know that I *facepalmed* or “Oh, Anne”’d at almost every new piece of canon information.
god i can never stop thinking about certain sculptures used in modern art and how they can be used to elicit the beautiful and terrible feeling of true and genuine horror in ways that a lot of horror movies can never do
like when you ask people “what is horror?” they’ll tend to give examples of monsters, of killers, of dark places, of sharp teeth and too many legs and lots and lots of blood. which is true, that can be used as horror! but i’d like to call that “the horror of being eaten/hurt/killed” or more succinctly “the horror of vulnerability”. it’s a horror that something, whether it’s a killer or a monster or some phenomenon, has the ability to cause us harm. we see large amounts of teeth and we think “that thing is going to tear us to pieces with those teeth” or we see spilled blood and we think “someone has been hurt, there’s a chance we can be hurt too by whatever spilled this blood”.
but what certain modern sculptures can do is elicit a very physical visceral reaction of a completely different kind of horror.
it’s “the horror that something is a thing that SHOULD not exist, and you are absolutely powerless to understand what it is, but it is existing in your space, right now, it is real and you cannot make it unreal no matter what you do”
or perhaps, in a shorter fashion, it’s “the horror of wrongness”
like one of the sculptures that made me feel this way is this sculpture here, named “Monekana” located in the American Art Museum in Washington D.C:
“okay,” you say, with a shrug. “it’s a horse made of wood? what’s so scary about that?”. but this is the lie of the photograph! a photograph of a sculpture rarely grasps the experience of standing next to a sculpture. you have to picture yourself walking into this room, practically devoid of people, and coming face to face with this sculpture that is very large and very real.
and your brain screams that “THIS IS WRONG. MAKE IT GO AWAY. THIS IS WRONG”, like at any moment you expect it to move, to twist its head, to follow you with eyes that aren’t simply there. it looks like a horse but it is no horse. you could almost argue that maybe it isn’t even an art piece at all, but it wandered in from god knows what kind of world and it’s blending in with everything else. maybe it’s fooling you. maybe it isn’t.
anyways, i’m not trying to say that this sculpture in particular is SUPPOSED to be scary, it may make other people feel nothing at all (or even positive feelings!), but what i’m trying to say is that feeling i had that day, when i saw this thing, when i felt this fearful instinct to stay away and not stare, it’s THAT feeling that i feel so many writers and makers of horror don’t completely understand. you don’t need teeth. you don’t need blood. you don’t need to make Spooky Scary Skeletons or chainsaw-wielding villains. all you need is to create something wrong in its existence, something to make parts of us fear the fact that we can’t entirely rationalize what we’re seeing.
The experience of sculpture absolutely gets lost in images. I’ve walked into museums and been like WOW THE FUCK even when I knew it was coming.
I love this subject, though. I love “implication horror.” You see something, and the realization of what it means, which often comes a few moments later, is where the real horror lies—not in how splattery or gratuitously shocking it is. The wrongness of a thing in fiction, when done well, is the best. I was watching Melancholia the other day, and what a terrifying example of wrongness horror.
Anyway this is such a great post thanks for putting the whole idea into words so well. ❤
Some points to remember as an artist who is getting harassed over content:
The Harasser probably isn’t an artist, otherwise they would just make the content they wanted to see, and would understand art and artists enough to know that content controlling is bullshit.
The button that silences this person has more power than this person will ever have. Use it. Blocking people who upset or offend you is A-okay. And the only way you can see them getting their diapers in a twist is if you go looking, which is on you. You control what you see and do, no one else.
These people wouldn’t do this in person, so remember they’re cowards behind a computer thinking they can just get what they want. They can’t. They’re not allowed.
You worked years for what you have. Have it.
I’ve been doing it and i have like, 0 hate on my inbox :>
I came from the days that blocking meant you were a whiny idiot who can’t “take criticism” so its nice to see this. There’s nothing wrong with cleaning the junky people out of your life.
JCB was a somewhat popular FC for Lestat RPers at one time, so your opinion is/was shared by others!
^He already played a vampire in Twilight, but I didn’t see that… Idk if he’d be willing to play another vampire. He looks good in period costume, I’ll admit that, and the makeup/hair team really transformed him. This is 100% better vampiry appearance than QOTD!Lestat (but that’s setting the bar preeeetty low, ROFL).
Personally, I find JCB too thin, so bony, such angular features… but I haven’t seen his acting so it’s unfair to judge him just superficially. He has a lot of theatre experience and he seems quite charming from his quotes on his IMDB page. He might be great! I would definitely screen-test him if I was in charge of things.
[^X I will say that these are some excellent silly faces and our Lestat has to be able to pull of his easy sense of humor, too!]
The fact is, we all have our own ideals of beauty and our own headcanon of these characters. It’s highly unlikely that one actor will satisfy all of our expectations, and @cdf-archive (now @coeur-de-feu) was a Lestat RPer who used JCB as a FC, and they wrote up a great post about JCB as Lestat [X], excerpt below:
“There will always be inconsistencies, everywhere you look. But it’s not really even whether or not I find him perfect. It’s his imperfections that make him perfect, to me. And perhaps that’s what Magnus found in Lestat – his imperfections gave him an indescribable yet authentic beauty and Magnus wanted to immortalize those features by turning Lestat into a vampire, even though Lestat did not want it. It was okay with Magnus that Lestat had a few things here and there that weren’t completely perfect; he found him extraordinarily beautiful, regardless.”
#Eloquent eloquence
Also, check out @cdf-archive’s actual archive to see more pics of JCB, some of them are good promos in a VC-aesthetic which you might like!
“WHAT HUGO DOES WITH EVENTS, ANNE DOES WITH PEOPLE.”
YOU PUT IT IN PERFECT WORDS. That’s exactly it, Victor Hugo’s characters are great and well drawn, but because of the third person narration, they are a little less personal; but his take on the events of Notre Dame and Les Mis (for the two best known examples), feel like actual accounts of history.
Sure, Anne’s got chararacters that are immortal walking between heaven and hell (litereally) but at the same time, they’re talking to you and just feel so real.
#eloquent eloquence #SEE THIS is what I’m talking about when I say I’m picky about other vampire media, these are strong and rich characters first, and they’re vampires secondarily.
This tumblr will go back to posting photos of gothy eye candy and cute animals very soon, because *I* need things that make me feel better, and I’m sure the rest of you do too.
With that said: what can we do now?
Stand with those at risk. Suport PoC, GLBTQ folks, women, folks with disabilities, anyone who is “other” and is going to be a target.
VOTE IN THE 2018 MIDTERMS. 33 Senate houses will be up, and all 235 seats in the House. We need to flip those.
Donate, if you can. Time, money, energy. Planned Parenthood, local food banks, local shelters for at-risk folks.
(THIS ONE’S FOR ME awwww!) Thanks bunches, Rem! <3<3<3
I actually got this message 3 days ago, but I was neck-deep (hehehe!) in birthday messages for Lestat, so I felt like this could be answered a little later, when the dust his confetti settled.
… Little did I know that the sh*t would hit the fan so spectacularly here in the US… where am I going with this, you ask? Well, in the face of such stress and anxiety and and and… all the emotions one can have in this situation… it’s so good to know my face (figuratively and literally) is loved, fangs ‘n all, and I’m still needed, and by unrelentingly plowing ahead, encouraging others to make – and making my own – fanworks, it can help us all get through this.
It isn’t just escape into a fantasy world. Fandom is letting the fantasy world supplement us, bolster us, give us hope. Fandom is drawing our friends and loved ones as close as we can, even separated by massive distance, we can at least communicate with and support eachother.
Homework assignment to everyone out there: Reach out and send a lovely message like this to someone today ❤
By the way, totally unrelated: how’s everyone’s immigration policies? Asking for a friend…
I-want-my-IWTV 
