The Addams family was, in fact, both magical and supernatural for its depiction of a healthy, loving, supportive, and fun married m/f couple.
This is now officially an Addams family appreciation post
In order to depict such purity and love in a m/f relationship, one must first set the foundation that these people are odd and not the norm. (per media standards)
They cared about their children, their children’s interests, and wanted the kids to always be true to themselves. How peculiar!
Gomez and Morticia never showed negative jealousy towards each other’s past love interests. Even going to far as complimenting them for being special to their true love. How bizarre!
They could forgive almost any character flaw in a friend or relative. The only thing that could not be forgiven was betrayals and pastels. Weird amirite?
Morticia is a woman’s woman. She allies herself with other women instead of competing with them. She even seeks to understand women different from herself and her beliefs. Strange.
Gomez wants Morticia to have whatever Morticia wants. He doesn’t give her permission, he actively supports her and motivates her. Fa-reaky.
Do you think this show was social commentary, stating that what we believe a normal life is is unattainable so long as we continue living life the way society expects, and when we live life the way we need to is when we live authentically despite what makes us different
New Orleans is the girlfriend you can’t keep up with.
She’s a holy trinity of French, Cajun and Creole. Eclectic and electric and awake and always singing. Her voices rumbles like a street car, whispers like a barely-perceptible breeze through boughs of oak and it wails like brass horns during a summer storm.
And she tastes so good. What is that taste? It’s like seventeen flavors hitting your tongue at once. Spices fresh arrived from the Silk Road, alien seafood and I don’t know what the hell chicory is but fill up my cup.
But you can’t keep up.
Stay up. Take it straight up Turn up. Wake up the next morning without feeling like you’re gonna throw up.
So you break up.
She isn’t the one who got away.
She didn’t leave. You did.
She stayed. She played. She loved you.
Post-NOLA, life is muted. Is it even really life or is it getting through one day and then, the other and then another?
The Crescent City haunts you. Like the priest in the alleyway who haunts the rain or Julie of Royal Street.
So, you go back.
She hasn’t been waiting. Of course not – life to be lived, not endured.
Besides, she didn’t come to play with you hos. She came to slay, bitch.
Upon your return, she’ll embrace you tight and tell you that she missed you. It’s warm and damp. All drowsy heat and magnolia sweet.
You know you can’t stay. That your time together must be temporary because you aren’t sure if your soul is equipped to survive this much fever dream euphoria.
But that’s OK.
Because you know you can always come back and when you do –
New Orleans will be there for you – calling you ‘baby’ with a plate waiting.
Hey anon! I’m sorry that this took so long, but I’m very passionate about my boy Daniel
Favorite thing about them: Daniel is the most real out of the entire cast of characters in the series, to me. He is the one with the most real thoughts, the most real concerns, the most real emotions, and the most real motivations. It makes him the most down-to-earth being out of the entire coven, yes, even with his flaws. The other vampires have motivations to either suppress internal conflicts (David, Gabrielle, Louis), or to live up to expectations of who they think they should be (Armand, Marius, LESTAT especially). Daniel, at his core, is honest, for better or for worse, and that makes him very compelling in a literary series where both of the central narrators have their authenticity questioned by fans.
Least favorite thing about them: More like, my least favorite thing Anne did to him which was to complete push the easily most interesting character and the most narratively USEFUL character to the side. Daniel, not Louis or Lestat, is the audience’s window to the vampire world. He’s the one that is eased into his transition and our experience of that transition is open for our comprehension needs (which also is the reason why his “insanity” later makes NO sense). David cannot be argued the same as he is not as invested in the vampire world as Daniel was, and his transition was sudden and “unwanted.” It is also because of Daniel’s honesty that we can trust his vision into this world the most. And none of this was utilized.
“there is a very black and white viewpoint on him, especially when it comes to his mental illness, his addictive habits, and his queerness. i don’t think daniel leans feminine or masculine in his queer expression. i don’t think the fans have to 100% sympathize with daniel’s substance addiction, and refuse to condemn it or look at it objectively, in order to have compassion for him as a character and for his struggles that lead to said addiction. i don’t think daniel needs to be painted so tragically–he has a degree of ownership in his decisions and recognizes and even loves the weight of them, but these decisions should be considered open-mindedly by us as well. daniel is not evil, but daniel loves the dark, and we should not forget this.“
I used to think tension and conflict were the same thing. I mean don’t they go together?
Well, a lot of the time they do, but it’s entirely possible to have one
without the other. They often go hand-in-hand, but they aren’t the same
thing. Conflict doesn’t necessarily equal tension, and tension doesn’t
equal conflict.
Lately I’ve been editing stories that seem to have so much conflict and
no tension! I don’t care about the conflicts. I don’t care about the
characters. Because there is no tension.
Tension isn’t the conflict.
A couple of months ago, I wrote this post on Mastering Stylistic Tension. In the comments, Becca Puglisi said:
I learned a long time ago that while conflict and tension are often
considered to be synonymous, they’re different. Tension is key for
winding up the character’s—and therefore the reader’s-emotions.
I admit that for some reason I read it as “Tension is the key for
winding up,” and my mind filled with an actual image of a key winding
something up. Tension winds up. Conflict is problems that collide.
Tension doesn’t need problems to collide, tension is often the promise or potential for
problems colliding. My oldest brother pointed out that there are action
movies that have conflict after conflict, but no tension. They are a
spectacle–blasts, explosions, fire. Then, he went on to say, there are
movies like Jaws that have scenes that work largely off tension.
I said in my Mastering Stylistic Tension post, “In some ways, it’s not the conflict itself that draws readers in, it’s the promise of conflicts,” which is often the tension.
Tension invests us personally in the story. We feel it. It’s
anticipation, it’s hope or dread for what will happen. It’s a tangible subtext or undercurrent for what could happen.
Tension is defined as a straining or stretching; intense suppressed emotions.
Conflict means “to come to a collision;” to fight or contend.
So tension may suggest a conflict, but it is not the conflict itself.
Conflict may be an object, but tension is the key winding it up.
Sometimes writers try so hard to put in so much conflict to make their
stories interesting when what their story needs is tension for the
conflicts they already have.
I’ll give an example from my own experience.
Last year I was working on a sequence of flashbacks for my novel. While
not the main purpose of the flashbacks, it was important that I
illustrate a romantic relationship in them, because the relationship
itself is important to a main character and what happens in the present
timeline. I was stuck trying to figure out how to communicate the
uniqueness and complexity of the relationship in such a short space. In
an old, old version of this story, I had planned to use a lot of
romantic gestures to convey the relationship, but in working on these
flashbacks, I realized that the romance and the conflict it brought
(which deals with “forbidden love”) wasn’t as powerful as the tension it could have.
I scrapped the idea of the characters touching and kissing, and instead focused on their powerful desires to touch and kiss when they weren’t allowed or able to; I gave one of
the characters a particular reason and a personal commitment to not give
the other affection.
The scene immediately became more interesting. The tension was palpable,
their desires electric, but because they could not give into their
desires, the tension couldn’t release, regardless of how much they or
the audience wanted it to.
The conflict is forbidden love, but the tension is held in the drawn out moments of a desire that can’t be manifested.
This is one of the reasons that sexual tension can be so powerful in
stories. It’s not the colliding problems that come with being with that
person, it’s the subtext and undercurrent of wanting to be with that
person, but not being with them. Once the couple is together, that
tension ends.
Likewise, some of the best dialogue comes from tension, not straight-up
conflict. It comes from subtext, from what’s not being directly said.
Once the dialogue becomes direct, the tension ends and the problems
collide in conflict. Tension often comes before direct conflict. And if
that isn’t happening much in your story, it should.
As Mindy Kaling once explained, sometimes the best tension comes from
the characters trying to avoid conflict, from them trying to stop it
from bubbling out into the open. The closer the conflict gets to the
open and the harder a character tries to stop it, the stronger the
tension gets. It winds up, tighter and tighter. We as an audience
anticipate its release.
That’s what draws a reader into the story.
So make sure that your story has tension and conflict, and not just one
or the other. If you have a story with a bunch of conflict, but your
readers aren’t interested, you may need more tension. If you only have
tension and no conflict, the reader may end the story feeling cheated.
Use both.
Nicolas could not contain what was occurring within him, and often his deterioration became destructive and difficult to conceal from mortals. Despite the fact that I did not directly claim leadership in an official capacity, I had a position to maintain and I had already protected him on numerous occasions, whether he realised such or not, as had Eleni. I had to prove that the threats that I made were not just threats if someone stepped out of line, or be seen as ineffective and suffer further challenges. I could not exclude Nicolas from that.
On the occasion where I took his hands, it was take his hands or take his life; based on the transgressions involved, it could have seriously compromised our position in Paris had it not been corrected swiftly. He was so far gone that others began to talk of precisely that, and I could not allow it. Taking his hands limited him in a way that imprisonment could not possibly have achieved; he had escaped imprisonment before when it was imposed upon him. Imprisonment meant nothing to him because the true oubliette existed in his mind, and that was inescapable. It gave me control over him enough that he could not possibly leave and potentially worsen the situation. It also proved that I was willing to back up my threats and that I would not respond with inaction if I was questioned.
The choice that I made meant that he lived. It does not necessarily follow that it was a choice I made gladly, regardless.
I really think that antishipping is a movement that’s gaining ground with the younger & newer arrivals to fandom spaces; a kind of ‘cool trend’, so to speak. In aggregate, antishipping culture is beautifully constructed to be particularly appealing to teenage or college-age people – and especially American people – who are marginalized, oppressed, often social outcasts in real life and often under-educated about their own marginalized identity, and I kind of wanted to get into why.
a brain still growing – until the age of 22-25, the frontal lobe of the brain does not finish development. the frontal lobe handles higher reasoning skills and complex problem-solving. Thus: the growing mind is particularly prone to incomplete reasoning, black and white thinking, and total empathy failure, making it hard for those under 25 to fully comprehend the impact of their actions, sympathize with others, or tackle social problems with nuance. Truly comprehending that others come from entirely different worldviews or have entirely different experiences and that being different doesn’t make them wrong and that most deep-seated problems need complex solutions that require nuance tends to come with this final brain growth. (Not always, of course. but often.)
escaping religious/Christian fundamentalist tenets but not their mindset: for a religion supposedly based on forgiveness, organized Christianity is not very forgiving. Everyone is a sinner & a single sin is enough to doom you to eternal hellfire, if you don’t do the right thing you’ll face Judgement in heaven/your salvation is always uncertain, and sinners must be cast out from your midst: the moral/communal purity that organized Christianity often demands can take years to deprogram (and this is not to mention the gender essentialism, homophobia/queerphobia, and anti-sex/anti-kink messages, accompanied by a strong undercurrent of anti-intellectualism to discourage self-education on these subjects!) teens just breaking away from this toxicity are especially unequipped to untangle themselves & tend to take the same purity standards with them to a more liberal cause instead (such as enforcing ‘social justice’ in shipping), with a side-order of internalized, unexamined anti-lgbt/sex/kink/etc rhetoric that dovetails rather neatly with exclusionist rhetoric.
the particularly adolescent vulnerability to peer pressure (the need to belong & the fear of being ostracized): teens are particularly inclined to be influenced by friendships and maintaining social ties. antishipping is a highly cohesive, insular culture with enforced rules of conduct, striking clear in/out lines & engaging heavily in use of peer pressure. antishippers are encouraged to break ties with those who don’t conform to their rules of conduct, so existing friends are pressured to become antishippers themselves or risk losing their friendsgroup. once ‘in’, friends will abandon you for not keeping the party line & persecution of outsiders is encouraged, further strengthening the need to conform.
to stop antishipping is to lose your entire social media community/support structure and potentially endure a hate-mob of your former associates. In other words: it’s easy to become an anti in order to keep your friends and almost impossible to quit without losing everything, and teens are especially vulnerable to this kind of social structure.
an American (and to a lesser degree, western European) post 9/11 cultural shift from prioritizing personal freedom to prioritizing communal safety; those under the age of 20 were 3 or younger or not yet born when the shift happened. antishipping prioritizes communal ‘safety’ (‘bad’, ‘dangerous’, or ‘inappropriate’ things must never be mentioned to protect people from hearing about them and being either corrupted or harmed) over personal freedom (allowing ‘bad’/’dangerous’ things to be discussed, and it is up to the individual to personally decide what content to avoid).
of course, all of this is conjecture based on my own experiences and observations, and it’s not a set of rules – just circumstances that I believe absolutely encourage young fandom members to end up falling headfirst into antishipping and either never notice how hurtful it is or never get the courage to leave it behind. And I think there’s a lot more the popularity/prevalence of antishipping today, but this post is already longer than I meant it to be.
(I always go light on racism when i talk about antishipping because while antis frequently accuse shippers of racism, it’s disingenuous to class racism as the same kind of oppression as lgbt+-phobia & misogyny, particularly in America – they’re related, but not the same. Centering non-white (and especially black) voices does not get the same focus as centering lgbt and women’s voices in fandom, and I think it’s easy to dismiss legitimate charges of racism as ‘anti bullshit’ when we class all these types of marginalization together.)
But like why is there still this concept that males don’t like cute mushy romantic shit and being emotionally taken care of? Just the other day I was cuddling with my boyfriend and after admiring him for awhile I told him, “Your eyes are so beautiful, they look like mini oceans” and I swear to god I heard him squeak in embarrassment and saw his cheeks actually begin to blush. Sometimes he likes being the little spoon and although I’m half his size I’m always happy to play jet pack. If he’s having a bad day he knows he can lay his head on my shoulder and just bawl his eyes out and I won’t think any less of him. Guys have emotional needs and want to feel loved and taken care of too yanno.
DO👏🏻THIS👏🏻SHIT👏🏻
And men aren’t less than men for doing things like this.
So I was re-watching Interview with the Vampire for the umpeenth time today and I found this little gem I thought I’d share with the fandom.
[Image description: part of the audience at the Théâtre des Vampires.]
Our dear vampirefan stands up, and please look at the reaction of the dark-haired lady in white and red in the right half of the screenshots.
[Images description: the same people, looking embarrased and slightly shocked. A woman in red and white looks bewildered. She gawks around and moves a hand to her cheek.]
Like, all the rest are making their way through second-hand embarrasment for the vampirefan while the lady in white and red is completely freaking out.
And even after Santiago answers, when people are laughing like ‘Yeah, the vampfan’s sooo embarrasing,’
[Images description: the same people. Most laugh or grin. The lady in white and red hasn’t changed her expression.]
the lady in white and red is still freaking out.
And I started laughing and had to replay the same sequence who knows how many times because I found it hilarious.
Seriously, look at her.
[Image descripton: cropped image of the lady’s face, eyes and mouth wide open in shock.]
I love her.
^WELL DONE. YES.
[Image description: gif of the moment the lady in red cries out “I adore you!” with the other lady’s eyes and mouth opening in shock as she turns to the look at the stage for Santiago’s reaction.]
This lady in red (VELVET???) came with binoculars so she could inspect it all closer than she’s allowed, she wants to see if the bites are real, if the blood is real… I think a case could be made that sheknows it’s all real, or hopes it is. The 4th wall may be broken for her.
Armand fans: please reblog and rant about why you love him. I remember a point where I found him intriguing but I carry Lestat’s grudges more than he does I need you guys to remind me why Armand is cool.
smol
face like an angel
cute grumpy bf
eclectic taste in music
canonically kinky
adorably curious about dumb shit
waaaaay the fuck smarter than he looks
powerful telepath
easily the most interesting character in VC like even on a surface level he’s always the dichotomy between how painfully physically gorgeous he is against the atrocities he’s committed and how he’s retained this almost innocent beauty and how disarming it can be when he does cruel things from behind that face but like even when he’s been cruel it’s so easy to explain his behavior by the layers and layers of trauma from his life both as a human and as a young vampire and despite all of it and despite how emotionally stunted he was for such a long time and it’s such a satisfying character arc that other vampires don’t tend to get in this series due to AR either abandoning her characters or getting sloppy with her writing but it’s so wonderful the way he opened up to Daniel and evolved so much as a person in that short time and it’s so heartbreaking that like i really think he’s such a good dude on the inside and it’s been so buried by all the terrible things that happened to him and the mechanisms he had to adopt just to survive and he can be a little bratty like face it I really think he’s the ACTUAL brat prince and he’s a complete fucking troll and sometimes I think it’s still a symptom of his centuries living underground and being emotionally repressed because it’s like he doesn’t know to express himself from not being able to for literal hundreds of years but even when he’s a salty little fucker he really cares about the people in his life like even with Lestat it’s like they’re always gonna be bros and rivals but they need each other to endure and Armand would be crushed if anything happened to Lestat and even when he acts like an asshole he’s opened up when it counts like even in the new books he opens his homes to everyone and takes in Antoine and he’s just a really fucking good dude that’s been through a lot of legit garbage and I love him
I-want-my-IWTV 
