This is only one side of the phenomenon: you have antis demanding that fanon content educate people, then that adults in fandoms take care and protect children, and what does it all tell you?
These teenagers are being left alone on the internet and are projecting the parenting they’re either not receiving or are not receiving as they need on perfect strangers on the web. They legit believe that they can make the internet space they like safe by demanding that the adults in it become their surrogate parents.
Sorry, random teenager on the internet, I’m not your parent, I’m not your teacher, and nobody owes you anything. Fandom is not a safe space. Internet is not a safe space.
Tag Archives: Anonymous
Every time I watch Interview With The Vampire and Antonio Banderas (I think that’s how you spell his last name) shows up, all I can think of is, “L’Oréal, Because you’re worth it.”
for you, Anon, because he’s worth it
we don’t talk about his bad wig ok we just don’t
(Same anon who asked about The Vampire Chronicles Because her sister loved it.) Dean Winchester and Lestat would have the same taste in music for sure.
(Anon refers to X] I bet they would! @lokitapendragon, any specific songs Lestat and Dean would rock out to in the car together?
*Cracks knuckles* OH HONEY.
“Pour Some Sugar On Me” by Def Leppard. Lestat belts it out with a heavy French accent and Dean mocks him loudly. Dean cannot sing it to save his life.
“Highway to Hell” by AC/DC. Dean tries and fails to imitate the semi-screaming. Lestat laughs, both at the lyrics and Dean’s horrible singing.
“Wanted Dead or Alive” by Bon Jovi. Lestat plays this song on repeat until Sam and Louis and literally everyone else begs him to shut it off (Lestat CANONICALLY loves Bon Jovi so there.) Dean’s emotions are horribly mixed because it still reminds him of the days before he went to Hell.
“Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor. Neither of them understand how cheesy everyone else finds this song, or why everybody starts laughing when they strut into the room in their shades with it as a soundtrack.
“Don’t Fear the Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult. Lestat seduced and killed victims to this song when it was still new and playing on transistor radios. Dean remembers it from childhood when his dad used it to drown out the sounds of a hunt for toddler Sammy, who got left in the car.
“Heat of the Moment” by Asia. Dean plays this one around Lestat because for some reason it makes Sammy freak out. Louis thinks it’s the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard. When Sam walks in he actually punches the cassette out of the stereo. Lestat asks Dean what set him off.
“Paradise City” by Guns ‘N’ Roses. If Dean’s hearing hadn’t been blown away by all the years of shooting guns with no ear protection or Lestat was mortal, they would both destroy their eardrums cranking this one.
“Rock You Like a Hurricane” by The Scorpions. I don’t know, I have mental images of them both walking into some skeazy bar (both hunting, just for different things?) while this is playing.
I could go on indefinitely so I’ll stop it right there.
^NICE! (Also I love all these songs, BTW)
^I think they’d both agree on this ;D
(Same anon who asked about The Vampire Chronicles Because her sister loved it.) Dean Winchester and Lestat would have the same taste in music for sure.
(Anon refers to X] I bet they would! @lokitapendragon, any specific songs Lestat and Dean would rock out to in the car together?
Is it bad that every time I think about Marius I just hear That’s Amore by Dean Martin??? It’s become a reflex
I don’t see the connection, Anon? Explain?
I just checked your Buffy The Vampire Slayer tag, and I saw the Buffy vs Louis post. I’m gonna write that fanfic. I’ll let you know when I’m finished with it. -Diana De Pointe Du Lac
Wow, that’s an old one! But yes, give us Buffy vs
Louis, plz *grabby hands*
^Brad and Kristy Swanson, 1988 (X @vintagesalt) . She was Buffy in the original movie (1992) and she’ll always have a place in my heart as Buffy ❤
…BTW Rutger Hauer (one of AR’s picks for Lestat ages ago) was a vampire in that BtVS movie!
But yeah,
Buffy vs Louis
B R I N G IT O N :
hey I don’t know how to break this to you or anne rice but Lestat -I came out of a hole in the ground after hundreds of years of sleeping just to live a Rockstar aesthetic- de Lioncourt absolutely would have an instagram and I don’t know why we’re not talking about that
Oh he totally would! He’d be posting constantly, you know how big of an attention whore he is.
I’m highkey hoping that the VC TV series somehow works in the social media, creating a FB, Twitter, IG, etc. for the character(s!) and teasing us leading up to the premiere and then have this stuff keep going through the production, have Lestat commenting on the episodes as they come out even ;D
Side note: I also want them to cast a Lestat who can sing and send him on an actual tour before the series starts so we can have actual Lestat concerts and get actual Lestat concert merch PLEASE!!!!
I’ve seen a few fan-made instas for him and a few of the other characters on here… @teambratprince did one, I’ll reblog it momentarily. I can’t remember where I saw the others.
Don’t worry about it. Text communication is difficult to interpret, I understand. Who among us hasn’t gotten a text and went “what the hell does that mean” lol. Keep doing you and thank you for lending your time to me in any capacity! Have a great night!
♥
♥
♥ THANK U SO MUCH! ♥ ♥ ♥
P.S. come off anon, don’t be a stranger!
I’m sorry if you thought I just was goading you or wanting you to do the heavy lifting for me when it came to thinking. That wasn’t my intention. I’m just fairly new and overwhelmed to this fandom and saw your blog as something interesting and relatable, non-shaming and knowledgeable. I apologize for being a bother, that wasn’t the intent. I have my own opinions, have been searching for all kinds of information and opinions. I apologize again, thank you deeply for your answer.
Hi Anon, thank u for coming back! You’re welcome for that answer (so good to know you appreciated it), but gosh, I’m so sorry for misreading your intentions
*hugs*
It’s so easy to misread unintended emotions into text, especially when it’s such a short note. I apologize if my answer came off as crushing to you specifically.
I’ve seen so much Discourse from anti-shippers lately that I may be a little predisposed to seeing it in innocent asks, too. Engaging with the question itself could invite Discourse, so my response was more about supporting shippers as a general rule.
I absolutely never intend to shame other fans, I hope that much came through in my response and in my other posts. I do want my blog to be seen as something interesting and relatable, non-shaming and knowledgeable, but I’m absolutely not the authority on VC. Even the “Marges” of the fandom have every right to do what they do, I just choose not to engage with them. I wanted to make a point of identifying them for others, like you, so that you know that their way is not the only way, and they are not the authority on VC, either.
Your being fairly new and overwhelmed to this fandom, let me tell you, it’s a series about murderers, lovers, wacky shit, silliness, some religious stuff mixed in heavily, re-invention of the vampire origin story, etc. It’s not for the faint of heart but if you can manage not to take it too
seriously
you’ll probably have a better time. Please don’t let this one little interaction deter you from reading the books and/or making friends here, bc I’ve met some of my best friends through VC, honed my own writing, shared headcanons, etc., and I would wish all the good aspects of fandom on every new fan ❤
P.S. To answer your previous question a little more gently, Marius/Armand appeals to some fans bc of the taboo nature of it. It disgusts some fans bc of that, too. There’s no right or wrong. My opinion is that I like exploring scary things in fiction even if they’re dressed up to look good, so I would say it’s a perfectly decent ship to ship, even if Anne Rice holds it out as an ideal relationship.
Again, I’m not well-educated on the horror/goth lit aspect so I can’t fully address that, but I would think that Anne Rice had read some of those, and was inspired by them, that she felt her writing (especially in IWTV) was a natural update and/or extension of those characters/tropes/stories.
Marius himself is a character who is probably largely based on the benefactor characters in Dickens that Anne Rice has always loved. She mixed that in with some Daddy kink, some *healing dick* trope, and overall Father-knows-best sort of attitude, and that’s basically Marius. Is he a pedophile? That’s for the reader to decide. Again, I don’t want to make that distinction for you. I’m not interested in getting into a debate about it with the “Marges” of fandom, and tbh, I would recommend that you don’t try them, either, especially being fairly new and overwhelmed as it is.
Have an open mind, read the text yourself. Try to enjoy what you can. It’s a buffet, you don’t need to like all of it 😉
What is your opinion on Marius/Armand’s relationship? i’ve seen posts in support and posts against and I’m ultimately in the middle because a) it is horror/gothic lit where weird/bad shit happens and b) vampires operate on a different moral code than human beings. So I’m just curious what you think.
As @shippingisnotactivism put it so succinctly: Often times people aren’t actually interested in a debate, they are interested in making you do intellectual/emotional labour for no reason at all. [X]
I wrote this huge Wall of Text despite the above quote. If you’re a sealion, Anon, you’ve accomplished your mission to some extent, you’ve managed to get me to spend more time and effort on this response than I ever wanted to.
I didn’t write it for you, though. I wrote it for my 15 year old self who was able to read and enjoy all the fictional problematic content I wanted. My 15 year old self loved black comedy, dark humor. I was never criticized for it. I was bullied for other things, like my wonky teeth, my hair style, my (lack of) fashion sense, which, looking at pics of myself, I can see why I was an easy target!
Now, we have bullies who do it in a much more insidious way. They tell you that your interest in problematic content means that you endorse it in real life. I’d rather be bullied for my teeth again.
I actually did spend time crowdsourcing privately to respond to this ask, I got some good answers, but you know what? I don’t need to write a full dissertation on horror/gothic lit and/or Marius/Armand’s relationship and/or Ricean vampire sex/intimacy and/or Anne Rice’s motivations for writing what she writes and/or VC fandom’s reactions to VC ships, etc., for an anonymous person(s) on the internet. You said you’ve seen posts about it already. Being in the middle is an acceptable place to be. I’m not here to force you to one side or the other.
You’re looking for easy answers to complicated questions. It’s not my responsibility to feed you those answers. And I would hope that you would take anyone else’s response to your questions with a grain of salt, and not simply accept opinions as truth because they sound good and righteous.
These are issues with so much nuance, so many facets, and to write Marius/Armand off as simply “abusive” and “pedophilia” is extremely narrow-minded to me. To write off people who attempt to discuss these things in fiction as “abuse-apologists” and “pedophilia-apologists” is a form of bullying. If we cannot discuss problematic things in fiction in a civilized way, it won’t make these things A) disappear from fiction or B) stop happening in real life.
If you’ve been watching/following my blog for even a few weeks, or you check out my archive, you know that I’ve reblogged plenty of Marius/Armand fanart, some of it NSFW. So I think you can do the math on what my stance is on that.
I confess that I was never wildly into that ship, but I have always loved talent and skill in the fanart/fanfic of both of these characters, separately and together, and now my interest in it is A) to have some variety in my blog rather than always reblogging fanworks about L/L (my main ship and, arguably, the VC juggernaut ship), and B) to support anyone who loves those characters separately or ships them together, and let them know that I support them. They can like whatever fictional content they like.
It’s been said before by blogs with better rhetoric than mine, like @fiction-is-not-reality, @freedom-of-fanfic, @shippingisnotactivism, @shipwhateveryouwant, @yourshipisfine, @shipping-isnt-morality, @olderthannetfic, @bitteroldfandomqueen, @wilting-blooming, @yoonbum-indrag, etc.
Basically:
There is no debate when it comes to my own permission to like whatever I like in fiction, and I extend that permission to everyone. It’s fictional. Period.
^Marge Simpson is against pro wrestling here. It was an actual debate, you can google it. I’m not interested in arguing with her. I’m not even interested in calling her “a Killjoy,” even though she’s asked the viewer to do so. Unlike Marge, I’m not interested in forcing anyone to agree with any of my opinions.
More importantly, why is she standing up there next to the TV? She wants to divert attention from it and onto herself. Marge wants the attention.
She is riding on it as a topic, and it’s an easy target, bc it is VIOLENCE. Scripted or not, we all generally agree that violence is bad. So she stands there concerned, but does she really think it’s so awful? I don’t remember the episode well enough to know if she says that pro wrestling is definitively a bad influence on its viewers. Her caption says enough: “BC THIS IS NOT TO MY TASTE, NO ONE ELSE SHOULD BE ABLE TO ENJOY IT.”
Would she take into account that it’s cathartic for fans of pro wrestling to watch the scripted violence played out? Would she care that we love rooting for our faves and we love watching them appear to beat the crap out of the other wrestlers for dominance? Would she care that we can watch it and know the difference between violence in media and in real life? I’m thinking that if she is truly committed to her crusade against violence in pro wrestling, she would be unable to cede an inch of ground, even a molecule of nuance could topple her from her soapbox. Acknowledging that her opinion is opinion and not fact would be acknowledging that she could be wrong, and that’s unacceptable to Marge.
It’s not enough for Marge to respect the old fandom rule of #Don’t Like, Don’t Read. When there is something as juicy as a topic with a buzzword that invokes an immediate reaction to get righteous about, the argument becomes: #I Don’t Like This Thing; No One Should Read/Write This Thing (Unless they Write it the Way I Want it Written).
The points I would make, if I were making points, would be these, listed below. You can do your own further research, bc I’m not being paid for this, and have no obligation to provide sources that will most likely fall on the deaf ears of the “Marges” of fandom who are unable to cede any ground. I am not obligated to respond to arguments against this post.
These points are for the Marius/Armand shippers and Marius fans to show my support for them by sharing some of my own thoughts.
- “Vampires operate on a different moral code than human beings.” Anon, you wrote this yourself, and I think it’s a good point. An essay could be written on it.
^Some of the vampires may want to abide by human moral codes, but those may be codes from the era they were turned. I wouldn’t even say that moral codes have evolved, I would say that moral codes are on a pendulum swinging from moral to immoral, back and forth.
^Attitudes towards sex/intimacy also change during different eras. This includes the time periods during which the novels were written, what was expected in fiction then, what the cultural landscape was like, etc.
- The ship itself occurred during a time period in history when underage/adult relationships mlm were socially acceptable. You can argue that she should not have chosen that time period, but she’s a writer, she can choose whatever time period she wants.
- Given the content, I would suggest that these books were written for adults who know the difference between fiction and reality.
-
These books are fiction, they are not self-help manuals.
^If you use them as a self-help manual and are harmed, it is your misuse of them, not the author’s fault, and not the books’ fault. Like alcoholism. It’s not the alcohol’s fault if you drink it irresponsibly.
- Shipping is not just for wish fulfillment/idealization, but it can be. Maybe Marius/Armand is wish fulfillment/idealization for Anne Rice.
^While it is a possibility, I highly doubt she’s intentionally trying to injure any of her readers, especially if she sees
Marius/Armand
and Marius himself as good and desirable.
- I absolutely do not condone pedophilia, abuse, or grooming in real life, and in my 20+ years of fandom I have never met a Marius/Armand shipper or Marius fan who condones any of those things in real life, either.
- I do not believe that an author is required to condemn problematic elements within the text.
^Which she definitely wouldn’t do anyway, if she sees Marius/Armand and Marius himself as good and desirable.
- Anne Rice has similar ships with the underage/adult dynamic that don’t get the hate Marius/Armand does, oddly enough. Furthermore, she didn’t invent it, this is a fantasy that’s been around since before she was even born.
- There are a bunch of other kinks mixed into that ship that I don’t need to list out here for you. Anne Rice/the fans/anyone is allowed to have/explore their kinks in fiction or in consensual spaces online/in real life with other adults.
- It is my belief that underage people (including Anne Rice) can be curious about sex/intimacy before reaching the Age of Consent.
^Are we only allowed to be curious about it on the stroke of the first minute of our 18th birthday?? I believe Anne writes these ships setting herself as the underage character, spending decades rebelling against what she perceived was an overly repressive religious upbringing in which the adults in her life tried to convince her that her curiosity was EVIL and a disgusting form of Sinning. Making it the “forbidden fruit” just made it that much more desirable for underage!Anne. IMO, her underage/adult ships are a coping mechanism she does for her younger self.
- I am not knowledgeable enough about horror/gothic lit to say how Marius/Armand compares to other ships in those stories, but as I understand it, the exploration of monsters of all kinds has been problematic since monster stories were invented.
^Horror/goth lit elevated these stories to a higher intellectual level, so they were criticized on a higher intellectual level than the older monster stories. However, the criticism of exploring these concepts has always been harsher to women writers bc PATRIARCHY and how dare women explore sexual fantasies without permission?!
- Shippers of Marius/Armand are easy targets for bullying and harassment as that ship and character tick off plenty of boxes of things we know are wrong in real life. But as I’ve said in the past, creating/consuming problematic things =/= endorsement of them in real life. Thoughtcrimes are not crimes.
- It’s easier to attack
Marius/Armand
shippers and Marius fans than attempting to attack Anne Rice. Anne Rice is a published author, insulated from anything she doesn’t want to hear/read. The shippers, like me, are humans behind their screens, and we all just want to get along with each other, so getting accused of endorsing real life problematic things bc of their ship preference is something shippers are very likely to respond to. Shipper attention, while not as juicy as attention from Anne Rice herself, is a reasonable substitute for the “Marges” feed on.
Ultimately I am a #Ship and let ship person and I support the shippers of problematic fictional ships and the fans of problematic fictional characters.
I-want-my-IWTV 