If dark content (be it fic, books, films) has helped you at any point in time, either for catharsis, for escapism, for the sense you weren’t alone, for the ability to face a real trauma through the protective lens of fiction, to understand another’s trauma, to build empathy, or just to help you get through a crap day, shoot me an ask (or more than one if you need to break it up). Tell me about it. Anon is fine.
There’s a lot of purity wank around here insisting there is no value to any work that isn’t pure pastel fluff, and that’s a dangerous myth. So if you’re comfortable, please, lend me your voices.
Tag Archives: defending problematic characters
Anyway so another thing I really like about fanfiction and one of the reasons I continue to defend it is that fandom can be an amazing and supportive community when you might not have any other outlets for feedback. I don’t know where I’d be as a writer if I hadn’t started sharing my work on FF.net.
Getting feedback on your work is so, so, so important to your growth as a creator of any kind, even when it’s only to teach yourself how to ignore it and trust your instincts. And I personally would not have had an audience if I hadn’t gotten into fic writing. All of the adults in my life stifled my creativity and I constantly felt like I had to censor myself. I couldn’t show anything to my English teacher without being sent to talk to the school shrink.
And LEMMIE TELL YOU how fucking disheartening it is for a young writer to be sent to the office and feel like you’re in trouble, only to get plopped down in front of the social worker’s desk and see your story picked apart there, complete with highlights and post-it’s. I was so close to letting everything I’d ever written just stagnate in my notebooks.
Not everyone has a healthy support system at home and a lot of times fandom is the thing that’s going to push you and encourage you and don’t let anyone make you feel silly for taking advantage of that.
Somebody said Humans would be the Mad Scientist species to aliens- like, aliens watch Back To The Future, and they see Doc Brown, and they think yes this is a human scientist, they’re all that crazy, these humans do such insane things with science.
I would like to offer an alternative.
Humans are tough. We can shrug off plenty of injuries, and we recover pretty fast from most others. Hell, we find minor injuries amusing (Don’t tell me you’ve never laughed at someone getting hit in the balls).
Humans have a skewed sense of danger. We think baby anything is cute- tigers, lions, alligators, whatever, no matter how scary they grow up to be- and even then there’s people that would happily cuddle up to a grizzly. Even less adventurous humans keep vermin as pets, or snakes, or dogs, that apex predator sub-species we made.
We are fascinated by morbid and scary stuff. We have a whole genre designed to terrify people. Tons of fantasy revolves around deadly monsters, plenty of which involve romance with said monsters. Lots of grim dystopias in sci-fi. Even children’s stories involve grandmothers getting eaten or witches getting cooked in their own oven.
And if you’re on this site, you know all the jokes we make about depression or social anxiety, or joking about wanting to die.
We aren’t the Doc Brown species.
We’re the Addams Family Species.
…ACCURATE.
Oh my gosh, well… I waited 6 hours, but there was no further message, so I’m just going to answer now.
“I don’t know how to feel about Anne…”
Respectfully, I’m not going to tell you how to feel about Anne Rice. I must regretfully decline.
I know how I feel about her: that she has given us a wonderful gift and that she has committed no actual crime for which she would deserve to be boycotted. We can poke fun at her, at her books, we can critique them, bc she has set herself and her works for public review. We can feel distrustful for her past behavior towards the fandom and distrustful of her handling of her own characters. Those are all within our rights as a critical public.
I always recommend that people read the books and draw their own conclusions about them on their own merits. It’s part of what makes fandom great, that we can agree on some things, disagree on others, and have lively discussions about it all.
What I will tell you is that you don’t have to like Anne Rice to read her stories. To my knowledge, she has not committed ANY REAL LIFE ACTUAL CRIMES. People boycott actual criminals bc we do not want to financially or morally support them. IMO, Anne Rice should NOT be lumped in with REAL LIFE ACTUAL CRIMINALS.
It is not a crime that she waged war on fanfic. It was incredibly painful and it shattered the fandom, and drove us all underground for years ;A; But she was within her legal rights. Keep in mind that fandom was not really socially acceptable or understood like it is today, authors understand now that fanworks are types of fan engagement with canon and each other. She seems to understand that now, or if not, she at least ignores fanfic.
It is not a crime that she waged war on reviewers. Also painful and oppressive at the time, AR used to be very offended by critical or negative reviews of her books, and would sic her People of the Page on reviewers. Again, she now seems to understand that people are within their rights to critique her work and she can ignore them.
What she writes is not an actual crime. She has problematic elements and explores taboo subjects in her writing, refuses any editor’s advice, refuses anyone’s idea of what she should write. That’s her prerogative as a ‘music maker,’ as a ‘dreamer of dreams’ (<– like Willy Wonka!). To argue that any of her writing is a crime is, to me, a form of censorship, and I do not believe in censorship of fiction.
^^^^None of these are Real Life actual crimes. Personally, I may not accept all of her writing as canon, and I may poke fun at it, too, that’s my prerogative as a reader.
The idea that all art should be entirely unproblematic all the time…kills art. Like, I really don’t think we as readers have some all-solemn duty to constantly make sure we’re only having the ~right~ kind of fun.
But that’s just my opinion. You’ll have to draw your own conclusions and decide whether you want to financially/morally support Anne Rice by buying/reading her books, or not.
me, banging your pots and pans together at 3am: the assumption that liking problematic characters means you share their views is toxic. people should not have to constantly defend their views simply because they enjoy a character of questionable nature.
you, attempting to wrestle them from me: indeed, but there comes a responsibility with enjoying problematic characters and it is on those who consume that media to recognize and constantly acknowledge the faults of it rather than sweep them under the rug with a general “i know it’s problematic don’t worry”.
me: it seems both our sides of the argument are valid and hold merit.
you: will you please get out of my house now
your neighbor, shouting through the wall: however when the person enjoying the problematic material is constantly harassed and called out for that content and has to face regular demands to justify their appreciation of that media, then the other party needs to step back and ask what they even want from this confrontation they keep perpetuating. they need to ask themselves if they will be satisfied with any given answer and if not, they need to disengage and deal with their own issues instead of forcing other people to answer for them.
Okay, while I’m on a fucking role here:
Fandom is not activism.
Stop condemning and judging people for their fucking ships. What you like to read about does not reflect what you care about, approve of, or want for yourself in real life.
Can people be skeevy about ships? Certainly. Are there fandom trends that reflect the racism and sexism of society at large? Definitely! Does harassing individual fans for what they like help any of that? No.
Promote the ships you like, instead of using them as a stick to beat other people with.
Meanwhile, people have been into fucked up ships forever, and somehow the internet hasn’t burned down in an inferno of abuse apologism.
And do you realise what you’re saying, when you talk about young girls and women being drawn into abusive relationships because of the fic they read, or the art they draw, or the meta they write?
You’re telling them it’s their fault.
THAT. LAST. PART. I’ve been saying this for ages. Women and girls do not have to be protected from their own fantasies, and telling women that they are putting themselves at risk for liking “impure” ships or fictional relationship dynamics is 100% victim-blaming bullshit that is also pretty fucking condescending.
“Fandom is not activism” is now my life motto.
i’ve been thinking a lot about why people don’t get creepy ships and automatically expect you to apologize for liking them
and it’s just that the appeal, to them, is “oh, wow, the phantom kidnapped christine / the villain decided to spare this other character / the vampire snuck into her room, how romantic” and they think that’s super weird and indefensible
but that’s not how people genuinely think about it? at least not me and most people i know who enjoy those kinds of tropes. we’re interested in characters who don’t have a healthy concept of love, who don’t understand it, making the greatest gesture they’re capable of within the timeline of their stories, recognizing that they Feel a Feeling for someone else and struggling to articulate it. most of the time they are Horrifically Bad at this, but it’s fascinating to watch them bump up into the limitations of their emotional capacity, even as their heart is SWELLING OVER with something they can’t name. their morality doesn’t preclude them from finding someone they admire. we like to hope they’ll figure it out in time and understand how to handle their feelings in a good way, and if they don’t, imagining a scenario where they do and things end happily isn’t hurting anyone. people’s knee-jerk response is “you’re romanticizing, you’re excusing” but all that’s happening is people are recognizing that a character is having a deep internal conflict with themselves and rooting for them to make good choices. i don’t think kidnapping is romantic, i think it reveals that a character who has romantic feelings doesn’t have a guideline for how to express them, and that’s automatically fascinating to me.
ooc: btw this is p random but i felt the need to voice my opinion so if you’re not interested feel free to ignore it!!
See, I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about Marius’ personality, not only here, but among good part of VC fans who I’ve came across in the past regarding his book Blood and Gold. I would like to point some things that I find important and that maybe would help you to have a second thought about it.
I reblogged from the source and cut it for length, but give this a read, this is very well-said, and applicable to many of the problematic characters in the VC.
They were human once, they’re not perfect creatures. I think if there was one message AR really wanted us to take away from the entirety of canon, it would probably be: These characters are like us, imperfect, searching for answers, longing to belong, to love, and be loved in return.
Some choices made in pursuit of those things are impulsive, some are well-planned, some had terrible results in retrospect, but hindsight is 20/20. We can only learn from the past and try to make better choices, moving forward… ask for forgiveness for our trespasses and strive to forgive those who trespassed against us ❤
When I read Blood and Gold for the first time, I felt a slight emptiness, and that familiar feeling of disappointment in the pit of my stomach after knowing closely some of his choices and attitudes – and more than that; his true persona, after all. But after a while thinking about it, I realized that no matter how wrong he was by some of his choices, each one of them made who he truly is: selfish, yes, but compassionate, an artist, melancholic, and undoubtedly proud, but good and gentle at heart.
He is far from being perfect even though we enjoyed to believe that he was due to numerous descriptions we had of him in TVA, TVL, QOTD and Pandora. But he isn’t. He commits mistakes as everyone else, and if we were to compare him to Louis, Lestat and Armand, for example, judging by all the years that Marius is alive, I honestly don’t think his mistakes were so numerous. Some of them were intense, and most of them regrettable, yes, but I do not think that makes him a “bad character” or that he is any less of what Lestat, Pandora, Armand, etc, describe in their respective books.
Only because he was described by many as a “sage”, a “philosopher”, etc, it doesn’t change the fact that before he was turned, he was also a human. And Marius, in my opinion, is one of the most “human” vampires among the coven. His mistakes were in it’s majority also ridiculously human, being driven by the impulse of his emotions.
So I think that instead of focusing only on the bad things, you also should remember how wonderful his good side is. How loving, caring, compassionate, intelligent and cultured Marius is.
Marius was not the only one to commit mistakes. And it is good that he did because it’s a nice reminder that not even “immortal beings” are perfect, no matter how godlike they appear to be.
Therefore, my point is: instead of simply judging and saying that he is a shitty character because he was not what you thought he was, give it a second thought. No one is made only by their good sides, nor by their mistakes alone.
To like him or dislike him is personal, though. Yet, to say that his character sucks only because you don’t like it…. it’s hella stupid and makes me hella pissed.
I-want-my-IWTV 