LOLWHUT?! was my reaction and here’s the vid, since you made me watch it:
[X] Look, I get what she was going for, she tried to be silly! Maybe she’s seen Zach Galifianakis’ Between Two Ferns and wanted to get in on that action.
I think it’s supposed to be cringey and some ppl love that kind of comedy. I like some of his eps, others are too cringey for me.
I’m glad that she’s willing to look silly! There was a long time where she had almost no sense of humor, I mean, “I am cooperating in every way that I possibly can!” she really is!
Re: “Lestat transcends gender,” comment, idk, she probably doesn’t know the right language to use, but I think she means that gender is not a limitation for him re: pursuit of love, that he’s not restricted by his own gender (but I think he does identify as cis male). @queenofthesavagegarden is a different gendered version of that character.
Thanks for the info! Wow, we are going to be spoiled w/ all these TV adaptations… all the glorious bingeing…
The whole gender thing for Eli is ambiguous in the films, and, from what ppl who have read the books have told me, also ambiguous in the book.
From what I’ve heard about the book, the character is referred to with female pronouns until the ritual castration is revealed, and then the character is referred to with male pronouns. It is up to every reader’s interpretation to determine gender of the character at any point. If the author wanted us to have a definitive answer, I feel like that answer would have been made less open to interpretation.
amadeo-child-of-the-renaissance said: //Adding it here: Eli himself doesn’t mind being addressed with female pronouns. Please keep that in mind. Best regards- a genderfluid person.
skeletalroses said: I ~have~ read the book (and seen the Swedish film), and Eli did not seem to me to identify as a cis boy. I could certainly see agender or something as an alternative to the transgirl interpretation, but I’d be pretty skeptical of calling Eli a cis boy.
Re: Eli saying “I’m not a girl,” in the films, annabellioncourt said: yeah the book (original and translation to english) and the american film call her “her/she” and its 90% clear she means “not human” in this film.
Hopefully, the TV series will clarify this debate, if it is important to the creators/director to do so. Even without an answer to this, the story is still very compelling and I’m excited to see more of these characters!
I’m so flattered you consider me a VC expert, but I’m not a Let Me In/Let the Right One In expert, I’ve only seen the two movie adaptations, and from what I can tell, the vampire rules in it are different than the VC vampires rules.
I do have a post about my thoughts on Eli and that story here.
Among other great things, this vampire story also brought back the idea of having to be invited in, and without that permission, the vampire in question would start having physical reactions! Like a severe allergic reaction! We got the blood tears that not many vampire movies want (or are able) to tackle.
I think Lestat and Armand both would find Eli intriguing and would want to compare all the physiological differences in their vampirism, test those rules, and generally try to get Eli to push at the limits, and maybe learn something new. Whether they would embrace her and add her into the coven, that I don’t know. #Fanfic request! #Fanart request!
Eli seemed to need/prefer a human companion. I should read the book, it would be great to have some backstory re: if there had been any other vampires in Eli’s life, whether Eli had ever considered turning someone… whether that was even possible given Eli’s trapped-in-a-child/tween-body thing. I think Eli at least had a maker in the book version, but I don’t know why they were separated.
Hello! This was a really tough ask, and very intellectually stimulating, and opening it further, I ended up considering the larger topic of What is an author’s obligation to their readers? What is an artist’s obligation to their viewers/audience? I don’t know.
In that line of consideration, I don’t recall AR ever bringing up these specific issues in (or out) of canon, or whether she’s been asked about it. I don’t think she’s ever said anything about avoiding depicting wlw relationships… these seem like questions you could ask her directly on FB, but my prediction is that she would be unwilling to address them. My impression of her is that she enjoys praise but does not feel obligated to write anything for anyone but herself, for better or worse.
To use the word “avoiding” implies she’s aware of it as a failure on her part, and I don’t think she is aware of it.
[^Fanart by @garama, mommy!Louis w/ his parenting guide,
this looks, like a good mom, he’s forcing the other two into some kind of parent-child bonding exercise!]
Re: Coding characters as male or female, that discussion is kind of confusing to me. I’ve seen fandom discourse refer to Louis as the “mommy” in the Lestat, Louis, and Claudia family in IWTV (a little more on that under the cut). Louis is only one example of a male character who may have been intentionally written as being more of the stereotypically female role than a male; he is more protective and nurturing to Claudia like a mother would be, and Lestat seems to “wear the pants” in that household. IDK if that is sufficient as “coding a male character as female.”
why her female characters are more peripheral to the story than her male characters,
why she seems to avoid depicting wlw relationships.
I don’t want to jump to labeling her as misogynistic, but it seems like her female characters are coded as female, while the males are just characters, if that makes sense.
It seems like the men are bi and the women straight.
^This is a lot to consider, any one of which could be a whole essay of response. Anyone who has opinions on this is welcome to reblog/comment, as this is not an area of expertise for me. And, IMO, it’s not an area of expertise for Anne Rice, either.
TL;DR: I don’t think AR intended to “avoid” the topics you bring up, I believe she was more focused on her own topics (I list some under the cut). AR had posted “On My Method of Writing:” as part of a message on her page, 8/20/2003, which I found informative. A few excerpts are under the cut.
[^May 10, 2016- X] AR has said many times that she writes the books she wants to see in the world, no other intentions.
What is an author’s obligation to their readers? What is an artist’s obligation to their viewers/audience? I don’t know. We are all entitled to our own answers to that question.
Hit the jump for more, cut for length and QOTD spoiler.
negative opinions/critical analysis, it is hard, if not impossible, to please everyone, even if that’s a blogger/author’s goal. I try to compromise when I can, but that’s my own prerogative. AR seems to provide a little fanservice now and then and will write more of X, Y, Z when the POTP ask her to write more of X, Y, Z, but that’s her own prerogative.
Perhaps the misogyny some people perceive in her books is real, perhaps it’s internalized for her. She might deserve that label. I don’t know how I feel about that.
From all that I’ve absorbed over the years, she wrote about what intrigued her. This is just the first few things that come to mind of things I’ve seen in canon, in different variations, things she may have discussed outside the novels, things she has always seemed to want to explore:
Her own retail and geographical interests/fetishes (classical painting, jewelry (cameos!!), high fashion (VELVET!), low fashion, literature, Shakespeare, music and culture of the 80′s (BLADE RUNNER & BON JOVI), SCIENCE and technology (iPHONES!), interior decorating, New Orleans, Miami, Ancient Rome, Paris, etc.);
Sexuality & power;
Religion and its role in terms of meting out punishment to those who deserve it and misapplied to innocent people, punishments as fitting a crime and punishments for no crime, varying forms of punishment;
Revenge and whether it is justified;
World peace and how to achieve it;
Whether there is a God who will embrace us when we die, whether we will meet our loved ones who died before/after us, whether there is an eternal heaven and hell, etc. Whether we will get the answers to all of life’s questions;
Religion and its setup as a social group and whether it requires genuine belief in order to be part of that group;
Very hot guys and what they do w/ their dicks;
Childlike, adorable women;
Precocious young adults/teens who are interested in sex before coming of legal age;
Consent, dubious consent, and lack of consent across many different categories;
etc.
^I feel like all of her writing can be summed up as speculation on these topics (and others), exploring them to find out “what would happen if…” and presenting results which she does NOT promote, results which she DOES promote, and results she offers up to the reader’s interpretations. Misogyny can be easily woven into many of those topics w/ or w/o intention on the author’s part.
As an example of a speculative situation, involving a possible misandrist character: in QOTD, radical feminist Akasha believed she could guarantee world peace by killing off 90% of the men. She starts doing it but is thwarted before making much progress. If she could have continued, would it have been a successful plan? I believe AR is suggesting that it would not, that as enticing as the idea was, radical feminism is too extreme and would have failed. And further, that the misandrist proponent of radical feminism may have been missing a few marbles even as a mortal, in addition to being out of touch with reality as a nearly omnipotent immortal.
So my answer is that I don’t think AR intended to “avoid” the topics you bring up, I believe she was more focused on her own topics.
Re: Coding characters as male or female, that discussion is kind of confusing to me. I’ve seen fandom discourse refer to Louis as the “mommy” in the Lestat, Louis, and Claudia family in IWTV. AR has said Louis was basically written as herself (she famously said, and I can’t find the source rn but I remember it distinctly: “I’m the only woman ever played by Brad Pitt in film!”), evidence that she did see that character as female? Possibly.
“I have been writing most of my adult life, of course, but very steadily since about 1970.”
^Idk if coding gender into characters was a thing then.
“My method of writing is to develop the novel sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph and page by page with heavy rewriting and reshaping and editing as I go along,… until I had the perfected page in order to proceed to the next page.”
^I seem to recall her saying that some of her novels are planned out w/ plot points first, others just flow in the order she writes them, w/o pre-planning.
“After the publication of the The Queen of the Damned, I requested of my editor that she not give me anymore comments. I resolved to hand in the manuscripts when they were finished. And asked that she accept them as they were. She was very reluctant, feeling that her input had value, but she agreed to my wishes. I asked this due to my highly critical relationship with my work and my intense evolutionary work on every sentence in the work, my feeling for the rhythm of the phrase and the unfolding of the plot and the character development. I felt that I could not bring to perfection what I saw unless I did it alone. In othe words, what I had to offer had to be offered in isolation. So all novels published after The Queen of the Damned were written by me in this pure fashion, my editor thereafter functioning as my mentor and guardian.”
^Her editor was demoted to copyeditor
mentor and guardian
.
“…
the writing you are reading is quite deliberate, that it is informed and it is conscious, as well as being the result of intuition. It is the result of all that I am – my education, my mystic sensibilities, and the student in me. It is poured out fearlessly, and then edited, and re-edited, and subjected to merciless scrutiny. It represents, and always has, my finest efforts.”
^Her writing is all intentional and her focus is intentional.
^This is not how you win someone over to your opinion.
[^XLogical Fallacy Referee] Not sharing your opinion is not a sign of “being ignorant.” As of now, all of your asks will be deleted. If an Ask sounds remotely like something from you, it will be deleted. This is a fandom blog for entertainment, not a US Presidential Debate.
Since this is our last exchange, I’ll answer for the sake of showing my followers that I will not be bullied by an anonymous person:
As previously stated twice now: I did not read the book, I saw the 2 film adaptations. Based on my interpretation of them AND what readers of the book have told me privately, I concluded that Eli can be referred to with female pronouns. I’ve repeatedly stated that that’s just my opinion and I have NEVER tried to force it on anyone else.
I added to the original post that Eli’s gender is ambiguous, which is a compromise, even though I disagreed with you.
An anonymous person cannot convince me of a “fact” when even the author of the original book has not convinced 100% of their readers of said “fact.” The author could tell me to refer to Eli with male pronouns and I might still
politely
refuse. Why should the author care what one reader thinks? Anne Rice has had to deal with FAR worse from her readers.
I linked to David Lowery, at least one example of another person who also found it ambiguous, so unfollow me and inform that blogger, and many others, of your truth.
I think my biggest “huh” moment with respect to gender roles is when it was pointed out to me that your typical “geek” is just as hypermasculine as your typical “jock” when you look at it from the right angle.
As male geeks, a great deal of our identity is built on the notion that male geeks are, in some sense, gender-nonconformant, insofar as we’re unwilling or unable to live up to certain physical ideals about what a man “should” be. Indeed, many of us take pride in how putatively unmanly we are.
Viewed from an historical perspective, however, the virtues of the ideal geek are essentially those of the ideal aristocrat: a cultured polymath with expertise in a vast array of subjects; rarefied or eccentric taste in food, clothing, music, etc.; identity politics that revolve around one’s hobbies or pastimes; open disdain for physical labour and those who perform it; a sense of natural entitlement to positions of authority (“you should be flipping my burgers!”); and so forth.
And the thing about that aristocratic ideal? It’s intensely masculine. It may seem more welcoming to women on the surface, but – as recent events will readily illustrate – this is a facade: we pretend to be egalitarian because it suits our refined self-image, but that affectation falls away in a heartbeat when challenged.
Basically, the whole “geeks versus jocks” thing that gets drilled into us by media and the educational system isn’t about degrees of masculinity at all. It’s just two different flavours of the same toxic bullshit: the ideal geek is the alpha-male-as-philosopher-king, as opposed to the ideal jock’s alpha-male-as-warrior-king. It’s still a big dick-measuring contest – we’re just using different rulers.
It’s just two different flavours of the same toxic bullshit: the ideal
geek is the alpha-male-as-philosopher-king, as opposed to the ideal
jock’s alpha-male-as-warrior-king.
You’re right that I am not deeply involved in issues of gender, though I can understand being/growing up nonbinary/transgendered/gender-fluid/etc. in a culture that seems to only understand/reward the male/female binary would be very difficult, especially in certain parts of the world. The Armand post (about whether he might be androgynous and/or agender) got a good number of Likes, but most importantly, @jeffer-sin‘s comment (”i’m agender/genderfluid and i totally agree with this post thank you”) confirmed that I
answered it sensitively, as I always strive to do, especially with topics like these.
Re: Misgendering Eli, I feel like this is a headcanon discrepancy between us. Your points serve to convince you that she is not female, but they do not convince me. As always, #your headcanon may vary, so please do not take my opinion as law.Even an author can’t force an idea on their readers; people still ask AR whether Nicolas and Lestat were gay lovers! Some people clearly have a different headcanon than the author, but their headcanon is still valid.
This Wiki post describes the issue of Eli’s gender: “The original film ultimately leaves the character’s gender ambiguous, as the scene showing Eli’s scarred genitalia is not explained. …In the 2010 film it is quite clear that Abby was born female…”
One of your points was the “I’m not a girl" scene. ^This is the one from the original film and I interpreted that line of dialogue as meaning that Eli is not human. In context, Eli seems not to know what a “girlfriend” is, or what “going steady” entails (even though Eli is centuries-old, maybe this is feigning ignorance for Oskar), so roadblocking Oskar from a romantic (maybe sexual) relationship seems a little premature. Oskar is 12 and I don’t remember him ever pressuring her in a sexual way, again, no reason for Eli to roadblock him against a romantic/sexual relationship at this time. Once Eli has an understanding of what “going steady” means, the moment ends with Eli agreeing to “go steady” and holding Oskar’s hand as they fall asleep. This little bit of tenderness may not fall under “romantic” in the traditional sense of the word, but it seemed like a sign of love and care which had nothing to do with gender. But that’s my own interpretation.
You mention Eli’s genital mutilation, but that is not explained in the films. From what I’ve read of the book, the character is referred to with female pronouns until the ritual castration is revealed, and then the character is referred to with male pronouns. It is up to every reader’s interpretation to determine gender of the character at any point.
I’m sorry that we disagree on this, and I understand that some people might not headcanon Eli as female. This is a blog that is here to highlight a certain fandom and is focused on entertainment, and where I do my best to keep it politically-neutral, fair-minded, and civil. That is my prerogative on my own blog.
If anyone is interested in more headcanons and interpretations, check out the links below. I am sure there are many many more, but these are good for a start:
David Lowery, a blogger, has a brief but good review addressing the gender issues.
We have to look at those words first. “Because the language of gender is still evolving, a lack of consensus on terms and definitions means it is up to the individual person to decide how to define themselves.” [X] My personal understanding of ‘agender’ is someone who is neither masculine nor feminine internally, and, to a variable extent, neither masculine nor feminine externally, either. A lack of the gender binary altogether.
‘Androgynous,’ however, I understand as being “partly male and partly female in appearance.” – more external. I see ‘androgynous’ as someone who may be perceived as both externally, or able to pass for either gender to a variable extent.
In TVA, David tells Armand “You’re sweet, boylike and pretty as a girl.” Mortal Armand is amused that potential buyers thought he was a girl, but then it pisses him off when Allesandra admires his beauty: “ ‘…a fairy’s child planted by moonlight in a milkmaid’s cradle to thrall the
world with his girlish gazeand manly whisper.’ Her flattery enraged me…”
So #your headcanon may vary, but I headcanon Armand as being capable of passing as a girl (and sometimes pushing at that envelope for his own purposes), but he’s very satisfied in his own masculinity. It doesn’t seem to be something he ever addressed or was ever confused about in canon, other than the fact that sometimes it angers him when he’s perceived as feminine, and at other times, he’s used it to his advantage.
^I guess that counts as Armand being androgynous, but not agender.
I’m hoping Tumblr can help me out here. I’m looking for stories with non-binary/genderqueer protagonists. Any medium: books, comics, TV, movies, fanfiction (any fandom), whatever.
The key part of this is protagonist. I’m finding things which have non-binary/genderqueer characters but they are always supporting cast. I’m looking for stories where they are the main character. Or, if not the main, then close enough to it in terms of their significance to the story. (Such as Aaron Burr in Hamilton, or Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.)
I’m interested in anything which falls under the label non-binary or genderqueer, so genderfluid, bigender, agender, transgender, and so on are all welcome.
Any pointers are much appreciated. And if you don’t know of any, a signal boost would be appreciated as well. Thanks!
♛ I’m not shocked by this confession, and normally, your confessor (your religious figure, mentor, spiritual father, etc.) forgives someone’s confession with some kind of absolution. No one’s forgiveness is needed here, you’ve done absolutely nothing wrong. A confession is something given from a place of guilt or shame and you should feel neither. Please don’t feel guilt or shame, forgive yourself *hugs tightly*
On a personal note, some have speculated that my mother is transgender, too. If she were to confess such, I wouldn’t be surprised. Admittedly I was shocked the first time she wanted to dress as a man, but that was a night of shocking exploration and I was somewhat emotionally drained already.
If she wanted to be called “Gabriel” and have he/his pronouns I would be more than happy to use them. Whether he physically altered himself, I would accept him, in any form, with open arms. He would probably resemble me even more than Gabrielle does now, and imitation is the highest form of flattery, is it not?
I’ve seen the transgender people step into the light in recent times, but they have always existed. You are not alone. I hope you are, or will be, comfortable in your transition and that your loved ones support you, as I would.
I-want-my-IWTV 