I think what probably gets me deeply into my feelings about this “JKR should have just made her students Of Color to start with, she can’t ret-con and pretend she did it right the first time” is that I grew up with Anne Rice and Anne McCaffery, two female fantasy writers who hated headcanons and fandom and sued people for deviating from their original vision or doing any kinds of derivative works without their express contractual permission.
I feel like people who get irritated with her about defending black!Hermione don’t appreciate how much healthier JKR’s attitude toward the inclusivity movement in her fandom is than theirs was. Or Moffat’s is. Or Gatiss’s. Or Whedon’s. Or Green’s. Or even, until very recently, Lucas’s.
She’s not a PCR, but goddamn, at least she’s passing us the milk rather than pissing in our cornflakes.
Jo is actually almost entirely responsible for fanfiction being what it is today.
BUT WAIT, I hear older fandomers cry. X-Files, Star Trek, Xena, how dare you. And yes, I say to those fandomers, you held those banners first! Be proud of the paths you forged. But Jo–
Jo did something no author or creator had ever done before.
She was a household name who encouraged fanfiction.
When I first began writing fanfiction in 1998, it was common practice to preface your fic with this massive disclaimer about how you weren’t selling it, and it was for fun, sometimes quoting the Fair Use part of the Creative Commons act, and even begging authors not to sue. Because in those days, that was a very real danger. Eleven-year-old me had reams of fanfiction on floppy disks I didn’t dare send to archives because I might get arrested and taken to Plagiarism Jail.
And then there was Jo. And no, Jo said, this is not a private amusement park at which you may stare longingly from the other side of wrought-iron gates. It is a giant sandbox. Here are my pails, here are my toys. Come sit and play with me. Eventually you may decide you like some other sandbox better, and all I ask is that you leave my toys here for others to play with, and not try to take them with you. But why should I lock you out of my sandbox? It is, after all, far more fun to play in a sandbox with many people than by yourself.
People were boggled. They didn’t get it. They thought she was crazy. And the fans? They kept loving, and writing, and drawing, and creating, and Jo kept loving them back. Potter Puppet Pals, A Very Potter Musical, Potter!, Remus and the Lupins, all stuff Jo just kind of went “whatever, they’re having fun.”
And attitudes began to change. And then someone else threw her lot in with Jo, someone who doesn’t get a lot of credit for contributing something massive to fandom culture and should:
Stephenie Meyer.
Yeah, you read that right. The goddamn author of Twilight, who refused to sue teenage girls who just wanted Bella to end up with Jacob. (And who is way more gracious than I would be about Fifty Shades.) She actually has a fanfiction archive right on her website! I’m serious: Smeyer has links to a personally-curated list of Twilight fanfiction she personally enjoyed or found interesting. Whatever you may think of her writing, that loving attitude of “we’re all here to have fun, I love that you love my world and my characters, please enjoy” was such a departure from the days of C&D letters and page-long disclaimers.
These two women changed the face of how fandom works forever. Yes, their work is flawed. They are products of their time and upbringing. But just the fact that they embrace the concepts of “my world as I see it and my world as you see it are not the same, and that’s not just okay, that’s good” is something to be celebrated.
I have a lot of issues with Meyer, but her treatment of fans is not one of them.
This is fascinating and all credit to Meyer and Rowling for being so instrumental in changing the culture. I do just want to add that the producers of Xena actually hired a fanfic writer to scriptwrite on their final season. As it often did (with a female TV action hero, with a musical episode), Xena helped to point the way.
in aaaaages (that’s what you mean, right? I haven’t seen the play), but I think Lestat would LOVE it. Both the movie and the play versions.
There is some similarity here… these two fashionable idiots who seem to succeed at everything despite breaking the rules to do it! I think Lestat would dig the aesthetics of the movie, the fashion, the music… I think he’d jab Louis in the elbow whenever Salieri gets pissy about pretty much everything Mozart does ;D
Louis might not admit it but he’d enjoy it for some of the same reasons.
Was inspired by @sheepskeleton‘s lovely fanart so I cosplayed their Armand! Their art is gorgeous and they are super nice! And a thank you to my two roommates for running around campus at 1 a.m!
OMG GUYS LOOK AT THIS, I’m screaming :O ❤
thank you for bringing my drawing ot life <33 I feel like some modern Pygmalion, it’s soooo cool 😀
^I love it when fanworks inspire other fanworks ❤ And @sheepskeleton informed me that her fanart was based on this RP thread between @damnitarmand and @vagabonddaniel <333
There is PLENTY wrong with TOBT. Plenty. So much so that there are many fandom ppl who don’t consider it canon.
I’ve seen attitudes about this book change over time. In ‘94, when that book was 2 yrs old, I remember ppl telling me they felt the series had ended with QOTD, bc TOBT was written off as simply being “the body-swap episode” (many films and TV series have tried their hand at that concept, and it’s usually a wacky ride). When Memnoch the Devil came out in ‘95, ppl didn’t like that one either, too offensive for its ideas about religion, and/or too preposterous of a plot; TOBT + MTD seemed to confirm that VC had jumped the shark, and a lot of ppl decided that the series ended at QOTD.
TOBT has wackiness in it, I mean, the difficulty of peeing (with a dick) is described in such vivid detail, there’s just too much comedy in it for me to discard it all outright.
(Oh! And perfect cinnamon roll Mojo the doge is in this book <3)
(Trying not to spoil it too much here but it’s pretty obvious what happens, but POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD)
If TOBT was really just “the body-swap episode,” it could be written off as “wacky,” we could talk about the silliness of the details of the body swap, all that. We could even talk about how frustrating it was that Lestat went into a deal with a self-proclaimed THIEF and assumed that this dude would, you know, HONOR THE TERMS OF THEIR DEAL to the letter, but such were the poor state of the trust issues of our lovable but hamburger-brained moron de Lioncourt at that point in canon. He was also extra vulnerable to being taken advantage of bc he was feeling unworthy of life at all and pulled an Icarus ;A;
^So this was the cover for the edition that I read, it’s the first edition that was published. And the cover actually is relevant to this story, bc the statue you see here getting enveloped in a gray mist (it was a dull silver in real life) is The Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna in Loggia dei Lanzi. I’m not going to go into a deep comparison of this to TOBT, essays can be and probably have been written on it.
I think a lot of those ppl in 1994 who wrote TOBT off as “wacky” had not actually read it bc this book takes the body horror to a place that most body-swap episodes/films wouldn’t dare to go. There are major consent issues, sexual and otherwise. There’s rape. I think AR was exploring sin and consent, she unflinchingly went there. Some ppl in the fandom refuse to accept it as canon bc they did read it and are repulsed by how far it went with these explorations.
Personally, I always advocate reading the book, and stopping if you need to, or engaging with it however works best for you. I think there are good things in that book and I think Lestat changes through the course of the story. Improvement is not always an easy trajectory. Just like in real life,
improving oneself can be a struggle, and there are often setbacks, sometimes devastating. One could say he ends up worse than he begins this story, one could say he ends up better than he begins. Just because you read/write problematic things, does not mean you condone them.
Oprah walked out of a screening of IWTV when it was first in theatres. [X] Tom Cruise told her afterwards that he wasn’t surprised. “The movie is not for everyone.” Similarly with fiction. This book is not for everyone.
[^X The pic I chose of the statue is not from the same angle as the pic used on the cover, but you get the idea.]
(2/2) Also, Lestat would love it so much. He loves over the top extravagant aesthetic things and would definitely approve/appreciate of the beautiful cooking on the show.
I actually don’t watch it enough to say I’m a real Fannibal but I’ve seen some. I loved the Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Rising, and Red Dragon.
Lestat and Hannibal are both fashionistas, Hannibal favoring a more structured look with some flash, Lestat more flash with some structure… Lestat would definitely be envious of the elaborate meals Hannibal prepares. And I think Lestat and Hannibal would share a similar sense of humor, poor Will and Louis would just sit there rolling their eyes.
But oh yeah, Lestat would probably be a big fannibal ❤
[^X Lestat gifs are mine, Hannibal gifs by @lecterings]
That BTS video is a new fandom treasure and like, back in the 90′s, Tom’s publicist Pat Kingsley would have tracked the source down and made them delete it. ;A; * I love that we’re getting stuff out of private collections now!
^I think this is one of my fave shots of Brad “where did I go wrong” Pitt from that movie… which is why it was so great to see him go from that to this BAMF later in the movie:
^YISSSS PLZ
^Height issues aside (and yeah I’m sure that was an issue!), here’s my take Tom Cruise’s eyebrow concerns. The lighting is different but you can still tell the difference in his makeup/hair. On the left is a still from an earlier scene that was shot and probably had to be discarded bc the blond was too bright, orangey, weirdly smooth (I think they were going for “pampered” and “golden”). Looks like they changed it to highlights and lowlights of blond and a mussier texture to mesh better with Tom’s own coloring. So he had good reason to be concerned about his eyebrows, he probably didn’t want more footage to be wasted.
^anne’s cringey 90’s look: Hey that was in style then bc BELIEVE ME I LIVED IT! But yeah she looks a lot better these days, current 90′s-inspired looks are very different from some of the actual 90′s looks.
*Even though it wasn’t an interview specifically, it was unauthorized bts footage.
“Kingsley was adamant about keeping Cruise out of the tabloids. At press junkets, she demanded that journalists sign contracts swearing not to sell their quotes to the supermarket rags. Then Kingsley expanded her reach and insisted that all TV interviewers destroy their tapes after his segment had aired.”
I-want-my-IWTV 