Yes, a lot of S2B2 stuff is absolutely very invested in characters. And that _does_ tend to make it feel good to write. I know that some of the authors have had a lot more experience with the romance genre than I’ve had, though I would make a case that the few Vampire Chronicles books I have under my belt were similar in some ways. I just… didn’t want to read romance based on what I inferred from the covers of what my classmates were reading in school, and yet I remember wishing there were the sorts of partnership, friendship, and romance that I _did_ like, when I was a school kid who was digging through whatever fantasy and sci-fi I could stand. I remember being deeply disappointed in the sexuality in whichever of Asimov’s full length robot novels I read, and being far more enthralled by Ender’s relationship with Jane in “Speaker For the Dead” and in “Xenocide.”
I didn’t discover “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” until years later, and at the time, I was like “WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME READ SOMETHING WITH PLURAL MARRIAGE EWW” to Ben and he was like “SHUT UP AND KEEP READING YOU WILL LIKE THIS BOOK” and now, boy howdy, has that book influenced the way I write the dynamics of groups of friends who are in a movement. And you can trace some of these chains back from authors I love to authors they clearly love: how Connie Willis and Lois McMaster Bujold and Audrey Niffenegger make clear nods to Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, for instance. How a CRAPTON of people nod to the relationship between Holmes and Watson, for another, and that’s not just authors. It’s FASCINATING that we live in an era where there’s a fairly queerbaiting platonic male friendship version on TV, an avowedly homoromantic comedy between a straight man and a “butch homosexual” in a recent film version, an amazing friendship between a female Watson and a male Holmes on another TV show, and don’t get me started on House and Wilson. I MEAN WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE.
And don’t even get me started on all the versions of Tony and Steve, because holy CRAP. I’ll say that again: what a time to be alive.
Feelin’ this. Speaking of, have you ever read any of those god awful nerd forum debates about how women are ruining science fiction by putting their romance feelings into the creation and reception of SF? I first encountered it when I was writing about BSG. Anyway, they address precisely the sort of stuff you’re referring to here (by which I mean distinguishing “proper” hard SF, for example Asimov, from this diluted “soft” SF like the Ender series). Women and their feelings, man, is the gist, just ruining all the fun to be had in clear, clean, conceptual SF. Never mind that Orson Scott Card is a man.
Lots of feelings authors are men. Some of whom are terrible, but hell, my favorite authors include Kurt Vonnegut Jnr, James Baldwin, Junchiro Tanazaki, Joseph Heller, Albert Camus, and many other human men who have lots and lots and lots of feelings and are very interested in minute human interactions, which men also have, and write about, and have done forever (sometimes awfully). But there’s a vocal segment of the SF reading community that is adamant it’s all about ladies being soppy. For me character interaction is what I am interested in and what I like. That’s the stuff I like. I’m not hugely interested in anything when I can’t see it directly shaping and flowing through human interaction.
I have a lot to say about Anne Rice’s VC as having that “fanfic feeling” – I’ve been known to wank on about it at length but here are the two short bullet points about why I agree with you:
1) Firstly, Rice revisits, repeats, and draws out her characters, often returning to them many times. Whether that’s good or bad is your call, but she does, and it does have a kind of… doing fanfic on herself thing going on, you know? Going back to a text and delving with is common in fic (and long running sequential properties more generally, of course, but the line gets fine between those two things anyway);
2) This is the big one for me: One of the things I specifically like about fanfic, and a big factor in the works I choose to make public, is that I think fic engages with or can engage with a particular mode of psychological reflection. I react to a text, I have an emotional resonance with it, and fic allows me to think that through, to think about why that is, to interrogate it. Rice’s characters are psychological archetypes, frozen in the moment they turn. They’re psychological costumes that are easy to pick up and put on. They read like fic characters not only because of what they are in the text, but because of how they read as open to adoption.
(Pictured?)
That isn’t explained very well, because I’m tried and a bit dopey, but yes, basically. Yes I agree.
And agreed. What a time.
Tag Archives: eloquent eloquence
-_-
I just got an email from an online friend I’ve not heard from for literally years. It was not the rekindling of the valuable friendship – one that had lapsed through neglect – which I’d hoped for.
The middle and both ends of it was that I’m wasting my abilities writing fanfiction when I should be doing it professionally, and that while they’re disappointed in my lack of progress from when they knew me before, they’re not surprised by my failure.
(eyeroll) To quote an old associate of ours: what ineffable twaddle.
(“Begrudgery,” Peter said over my shoulder when he read the above: “that’s all it is.” And he’s right, because for proper begrudgery one must not only disparage another’s achievements but must suggest that one’s aware of an [allegedly] superior level of achievement which they ought to want to reach but [even if they did want to] never will.)
What you should be doing is what brings you joy. (As if there’s enough joy in the world, FFS.) That alone is reason enough to do it. That what you do brings joy to other people as well is icing on the cake.
Your “friend” seems low enough on understanding of where you’re at in this regard that I’d wonder whether they deserve the descriptor. I think you need one less “friend” like that.
(wanders off muttering)
I’m reblogging this with a little commentary of my own. When she was editing $LoveStory, the editor pointed out that it had gotten very dialogue-heavy in a manner you see in fanfic, and said something I _attributed_ to being sort of a “this is a habit one gets into when writing fanfic and one undoes when writing fiction in other contexts,” whether that was actually what she said or meant or not. Which I hadn’t even _thought_ about until then. What I responded with, because while we’re friends I’m not sure she really knew this, was something to the effect that “OH YEAH, hey, I hadn’t REALIZED that until now… but you know I’ve never finished and posted any fanfic right? I want to go do a lot of that TOO, like I don’t want to skip that experience.” (And lemme say that I haven’t looked up exactly what we said, but I did feel the pressure to “move on” from fanfic even if neither of us meant to be discussing it that way and what I was experiencing internal pressure and not anything she said. She can read this and chime in, s’all good.)
And it made me realize that I wanted to be able to both, but that I was going to resist any implication that I should in any way move on from fanfic because I was writing fiction in another context too. Cuz I _want_ the experience of writing fanfic for other people to enjoy, and the irony is that I now have 3 zine stories with original characters and a number of others in the works, and STILL haven’t posted any fanfic.
And there’s this whole other thing to discuss, about how I feel like my S2B2 stories live in this fun sweet spot of not being fanfic but feeling a lot like writing it, only you’re writing it about your own characters. Whether you _call_ that fanfic when you’re writing about your own characters or not, and I know people who don’t and people who do, it does create fiction that feels more self-indulgent at times, but man do I love it. Because honestly, I write well but I still write to indulge recreational impulses and I’m okay with that.
I actually moved on from Proper Writing to fanfiction. Or at least, from something more seemingly received as Proper Writing – my graphic novel is actually heavily ficitionalized but biographical, so really you could straight up call that Historical RPF. The thing is, though, that people didn’t, and when I started doing fanworks, and straight up treated them as valid works in my Art Scene, lots of my art friends were Very Sad about my having given up on art. That’s mostly changed now – largely because AmCap is a “crossover hit” to a certain extent – but at the same time, when people talk about AmCap, they really want me to say it isn’t fanfic, or they seem worried when they ask if it might be fanfic, like they are offending me by making a comparison between my work and a “lesser” style of work.
Which is bullshit obviously. AmCap is totally fanfic, just like Emissary and Gulfport (wip) are, which are two long fics I did this Public Art Work thing with. I started doing fanfic again (obviously I wrote literal volumes of the stuff when I was younger. I’ve even got a copy of the very first one I wrote, which was for Biggles, and I was 7) precisely because I think fanfic is a) a really particular medium in which I can do really interesting things I can’t do with other mediums, even other kinds of fiction writing, and b) oh, also awesome? That and the fact that I know my skills as a writer and they are not world building. I’m a problematizer, an analyser, and a person who, if working on a TV show, would probably make it 99% bottle episodes (there’s a reason nearly everything I write has a fight in a car in it at some point).
And okay, admittedly, I’m really selective about the fanfic I post for the world to read and the fanfic I just share around secretly on email for fun/perverse personal confessions because I basically work out my life issues with gay porn, but don’t write gay porn as well as I do other things, and I am impressively, embarrassingly fucking precious about my Artistic Legacy. Which may make what I am saying ring a little hollow, but I promise I mean it with all my heart. I might really struggle with the community aspects of fandom, because I am a sensitive baby and also hate fun, but it’s really clear to anyone who reads or writes fanfic that this is one thing the medium offers that other mediums do not, at least not any other writing medium I can think of: being able to engage with a community by writing. Doing genre play with prompts. Having fun together. Speculating and coming up with multiple scenarios. Being imaginative together. Writing to a specific audience and figuring out what makes them happy or doesn’t. Dialogue.
Fanfic also offers a lot of room for performance (like, as a community member in those dialogues, but also where it crosses over with RP, or stuff like I’ve done in the past, like maintaining a facebook account for one of the characters in a fic while writing the fic – he was the diagetic writer of the fic – and using the account to whine about having to write the fic, all very meta, I’m brilliant, etc).
So like mostly this is just to say that I’m very familiar with the firm divide between fanfiction and o!fic, but particularly I think it is incorrectly made. It’s made as if there is a difference in quality, relevance, and usefulness, rather than what there actually is, which are differences in medium. Fanfic and o!fic do sometimes differ from each other in common genres within the medium, common manners and styles used, different audiences, different possibilities, different contexts. And of course they differ in respect, reward, and perception! But these differences are interesting. Artists should be interested in them. I think it’s really short sighted of writers to dismiss fanfic; it’s a very different medium in some ways, yes, but it’s not a lesser one.
Which is a posh way of saying, OP, that I think your ex-friend is not only a bit of a dick but also not very clever.
Also, coreomajoris, it’s interesting that you should say that about S2B2! It does read like it’s very influenced by aesthetics I’m familiar with in fandom, but mostly I think makes it feel that way is the sense of fun, but also the investment in character. I remember talking about my graphic novel at one point and saying “this feels good, this feels good to write, it’s like I’m writing fanfic.”
Yes, a lot of S2B2 stuff is absolutely very invested in characters. And that _does_ tend to make it feel good to write. I know that some of the authors have had a lot more experience with the romance genre than I’ve had, though I would make a case that the few Vampire Chronicles books I have under my belt were similar in some ways. I just… didn’t want to read romance based on what I inferred from the covers of what my classmates were reading in school, and yet I remember wishing there were the sorts of partnership, friendship, and romance that I _did_ like, when I was a school kid who was digging through whatever fantasy and sci-fi I could stand. I remember being deeply disappointed in the sexuality in whichever of Asimov’s full length robot novels I read, and being far more enthralled by Ender’s relationship with Jane in “Speaker For the Dead” and in “Xenocide.”
I didn’t discover “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” until years later, and at the time, I was like “WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME READ SOMETHING WITH PLURAL MARRIAGE EWW” to Ben and he was like “SHUT UP AND KEEP READING YOU WILL LIKE THIS BOOK” and now, boy howdy, has that book influenced the way I write the dynamics of groups of friends who are in a movement. And you can trace some of these chains back from authors I love to authors they clearly love: how Connie Willis and Lois McMaster Bujold and Audrey Niffenegger make clear nods to Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, for instance. How a CRAPTON of people nod to the relationship between Holmes and Watson, for another, and that’s not just authors. It’s FASCINATING that we live in an era where there’s a fairly queerbaiting platonic male friendship version on TV, an avowedly homoromantic comedy between a straight man and a “butch homosexual” in a recent film version, an amazing friendship between a female Watson and a male Holmes on another TV show, and don’t get me started on House and Wilson. I MEAN WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE.
And don’t even get me started on all the versions of Tony and Steve, because holy CRAP. I’ll say that again: what a time to be alive.
Considering the fact that you have been around for a couple hundred years, do you still consider yourself to be a mother to the children who did not follow you into immortality? Do you still consider yourself a mother to Lestat even though he is immortal with you? Keeping in mind the role that a mother has with her children – I’m sure your relationship is entirely different now.
Now, listen closely, because I’m only going to say this once:
One does not stop being a mother.
Ever.
Your children may die, they may vanish, they may move on to lives where they never need nor see you again—but you never stop being their mother.
You may wish with all your heart to revoke the rights and so-called privileges of motherhood. You may wish them dead or wish them to love you more than they are capable of doing.
You may wish to love them less, to wrap your heart up safely from them, from not only their cruelties and their kindnesses but from the sweet, milky memories of them that cannot be lost no matter how you might try or no matter how often you turn their tattered photos over and over in your mind.
Do you comprehend what I am saying to you? No matter who I become, no matter what lands I traverse or who I might meet or how rarely I speak with my goddamn son—I will always be the mother that bore those children. That identity will always remain within me, even if sometimes it is the smallest part of who I am.
And in regards to Lestat:
The love I bear for him need not be repeated here, as I have addressed it.
The pain we cause each other need not be repeated here, as I have addressed it.
The total devotion I have for him need not be repeated here, as those who might read have no right to do so.
And the intricacies of our bond are ours. And they contain within them every label we’ve ever held between us, every touch we’ve ever shared, and every memory we’ve crafted—from the moment he began to move within my womb to the last night I visited with him in New Orleans this past summer.
He is my son.
I am his mother.
And within those titles live worlds of who we are to each other.
do you ever read a fic that is so much better than the actual canon that you get angry
Welcome to the Vampire Chronicles fandom, my friends.
#vampire chronicles #//basically fan fic is how we survive #//if you think I’m exaggerating you aren’t one of us #ooc
#TRUTH
adirotynd: #tvc #fandom woes #fanfiction means never having to say ‘tarquinn blackwood’
Why everybody hate benji? I need valid reasons!!
Um… so many reasons… and I haven’t read that book in awhile so I’m not the best resource for this. The fandom tends to hate on Benji bc:
- He’s a shameless Gary Stu
- He’s a child, maybe 12? Marius knows better (without spoiling anything, I’ll leave it at that).
- He smokes (not a character FLAW per se, but it seemed to be a cheap way to make him look “tough kid” or whatever)
- Emotionally/intellectually he’s flawless! He’s such an angelic person! He can do no wrong! Such characters are inherently unlikable maybe bc we can’t suspend disbelief for someone so PURE OF HEART.
- The way he talks seems oddly teenage? I remember someone saying that as a complaint.
Mostly we hate him because (and this can all be applied to Sybelle equally) of his existence, how he came into Armand’s life, and what happened to him seemed wildly out of the VC universe and out of character for everyone involved.
Here have some fanart:
It’s also the handling of race and race relations, I think. Benji is literally a 12-year-old Arab child that Sybelle’s abusive, controlling brother bought to be a companion to Sybelle. The family had been visiting the Holy Land when the parents got killed in a car crash, and so Sybelle was depressed and wouldn’t play the piano (she was a concert pianist and her brother was isolating and exploiting her like Colonel Parker on steroids). He got Benji to look after Sybelle, and engineer her behaviour, knowing Sybelle would do as Benji asked (i.e. look after herself, play the piano), and he hit Benji anyway.
It’s hard to explain the clumsiness of the writing, but it’s like… there’s this patina of attempts at evocative detail re: Benji’s clothing and the references he makes, but essentially the book sets up this situation where the quirky Arab kid gets bought by rich white Americans, and that’s bad because the situation is abusive, but then Armand saves them from the evil brother, so then everything’s YAY! And Benji’s such a funny little character!
I’d put it down to Anne Rice being kind of poor at handling gritty “realistic” modern situations (especially since the entire existence of Sybelle and Benji, and their entire circumstances, are there purely because she needed to retcon a character death away), and shoehorning them into her very heightened, stylised, dark fairytale, mostly historical books. So Benji having apparently been bought is talked off in hushed tones like Sybelle knows it’s a bad thing, but nobody seems very concerned to look into his origins or try and put him in touch with his family or anything. I mean, this is a kid who’s been taken across international borders illegally, presumably with fake papers! And now he lives with Sybelle and it’s all quirky and funny how he smokes like a chimney and goes out in the middle of the night in New York City and somehow this is all just… charcaterful! And okay, because he’s happy with Sybelle and Armand!
To be fair, a lot of this is basic Anne Rice tropes: a poor or ordinary child gets swept up by someone rich and given all the education/resources/stuff money can buy, and they are super-happy together and it’s a beneficial arrangement for both parties. Her books have a ton of this rags-to-riches stuff. But I think what makes it unsettling is when she crosses a cultural and racial border, with all the inherent echoes of slavery and colonialism that entails…
He’d been flat out kidnapped by Fox under the felonious terms of a long-term lease of bondage for which Fox paid Benji’s father five thousand dollars. A fabricated emigration passport was thrown into the bargain. He’d been the genius of the tribe, without doubt, had mixed feelings about going home and had learnt in the New York streets to steal, smoke and curse, in that order. Though he swore up and down he couldn’t read, it turned out that he could, and began to do so obsessively just as soon as I started throwing books at him.
In fact, he could read English, Hebrew and Arabic, having read all three in the newspapers of his homeland since before he could remember.
He loved taking care of Sybelle. He saw to it that she ate, drank milk, bathed and changed her clothes when none of these routine tasks interested her. He prided himself on the fact that he could by his wits obtain for her whatever she needed, no matter what happened to her.”
“… two wet shriveled things that had been alive, mother and daughter in one another’s arms, the murdered pair on the kitchen floor. But these two lying under the gentle rain were Madeleine and Claudia, … the hand that clutched at the child was whole like a mummy’s hand. But the child, the ancient one, my Claudia, was ashes.”
– Louis de Pointe du Lac, Interview with the Vampire
I remember when I first saw the movie this scene destroyed me. It blew me away to be honest, first, out of sympathy for the character’s loss and also for just how perfectly this one moment, Louis’ expression of grief and compassion for these two people he’s just lost, encapsulated his character.
^This commentary is BEAUTIFUL go read it. ;A; It’s probably the ideas there that drew Brad Pitt to the role, and unfortunately, alot of Louis’s internal turmoil didn’t make it into the movie.
“[Louis] doesn’t hide away or back down, but transforms that grief into a single minded, eerily calm wrath that razes the theatre and its inhabitants to the ground. (That look he gives Santiago after this moment… He doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t need to, you just know immediately, “shit’s about to go down.” and it’s all the more chilling because it’s a startling shift from Louis’ introspective empathy to something much more raw and brutal.)
I’ve never understood how anyone can dismiss him as the whiner, simply because of Lestat’s comment at the end of the movie. I took that line the way friends will dig at each other, slinging transparent insults without really meaning it.”
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.
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.
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.
^THIS
I-want-my-IWTV 