stop feeding your compulsion to actively seek out content that you know is upsetting.
stop visiting tags that upset you (you should probably blacklist them)
stop visiting blogs that you’ve blocked, and/or that you know is going to post about stuff that upsets you.
stop hate reading.
I know from experience that it can be addicting because getting angry about stuff is just a good of a distraction as any. but it’s such a pointless, self destructive, and avoidable source of negativity in your life.
♛Merci ma chérie! As always,your etiquette is perfection, no wonder they call you the Lady of the Manners. Lovely sentiment *blows a kiss*
You know my taste for sumptuous apparel and interior design so well, and with your aesthetic so closely aligned with mine, I might have to whisk you off one of these evenings on a wild shopping spree… I assume I have a standing invitation… *winks*
Peter Capaldi as Jonathan Harker, Daniel Day-Lewis as Dracula, Half Moon Theatre, Stepney,1984.
(Seen on the twitter of MrGodfrey.)
WOW SO MAYBE THIS IS (at least part of) THE REASON WHY David Geffen (and/or others in charge) wanted Daniel Day-Lewis to play Lestat in movie!IWTV.
Apparently Cruise was approached by Geffen through Creative Artists Agency head Michael Ovitz after leading contender Daniel Day-Lewis declined the part.
And you know what I can totes see DD-L being great as Lestat… but he probably felt like Been There Done That, having already played a vampire *cries* but I’ll console myself to the fact that he was also older and maybe too old for the role, too
PS. @gothiccharmschool, let me know when your time machine is up and running, we gotta see this show!
Why yes, I’ve bought my ticket, and have pretty much already planned my outfit BECAUSE I EMBRACE MY CLICHES, THANKYOUVERYMUCH.
That’s the thing that people keep forgetting: when the gothic romance novels first came out, they were pretty punk. They were very highly charged. They were sort of improper. They were bold and overt. For lack of a better analogy, they were like the Sex Pistols of that era.
Also, can we talk about how very badly I want Ashley Marie Witter to do a multi-volume illustrated version of The Vampire Lestat. I love Interview with the Vampire: Claudia’s Story.
So the essence of grimdark is that everyone’s inherently sort of a bad person and does bad things, and that’s awful and disheartening and cynical. It’s looking at human nature and going, “The glass is half empty.”
Hopepunk says, “No, I don’t accept that. Go fuck yourself: The glass is half-full.” YEAH, we’re all a messy mix of good and bad, flaws and virtues. We’ve all been mean and petty and cruel, but (and here’s the important part) we’ve also been soft and forgiving and KIND. Hopepunk says that kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion.
Hopepunk says that genuinely and sincerely caring about something, anything, requires bravery and strength. Hopepunk isn’t ever about submission or acceptance: It’s about standing up and fighting for what you believe in. It’s about standing up for other people. It’s about DEMANDING a better, kinder world, and truly believing that we can get there if we care about each other as hard as we possibly can, with every drop of power in our little hearts.
Going to political protests is hopepunk. Calling your senators is hopepunk. But crying is also hopepunk, because crying means you still have feelings, and feelings are how you know you’re alive. The 1% doesn’t want you to have feelings, they just want you to feel resigned. Feeling resigned is not hopepunk.
Examples! THE HANDMAID’S TALE is arguably hopepunk. It’s scary and dark, and at first glance it looks like grimdark because it’s a dystopia… but goddammit she keeps fighting. That’s the key, right there. She fights every single day, because she won’t let them take away meaning from her life. She survives stubbornly in the hope that one day she can live again. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” is one of the core tenets of hopepunk, along with, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Robin Hood and John Lennon were hopepunk. (Remember: Hopepunk isn’t about moral perfection. It’s not about being as pure and innocent as the new-fallen snow. You get grubby when you fight. You make mistakes. You’re sometimes a little bit of an asshole. Maybe you’re as much as 50% an asshole. But the glass is half full, not half empty. You get up, and you keep fighting, and caring, and trying to make the world a little better for the people around you. You get to make mistakes. It’s a process. You get to ask for and earn forgiveness. And you love, and love, and love.)
And THIS, this is hopepunk:
HOPE AND HONESTY IN A SOCIETY THAT VALUES CYNICISM AND DECEPTION IS SUBVERSIVE AND THEREFOR PUNK
I AM HERE FOR THIS MOVEMENT. HOPE AND HONESTY ARE DEEPLY PUNK ROCK. KINDNESS IS GOTH AS FUCK.
Yessss, that was Tom Hardy. This should explain why, for a while, I thought he’d be a great choice for playing Lestat.
I see what you mean @gothiccharmschool! He’s great in these gifs, looks perf in period costume. He’s a great actor. Yeah, too old now for Lestat but he could be cast in another VC role… Maybe age him up further, and he can play the Marquis?
Kapetria’s Tale and the saga of the Replimoids are simultaneously the most boring and the most cracky sections of the book. I cackled over the Space Birb aliens that created the Replimoids, but I don’t think I’ll ever reread those sections.
The sections about the hijinks of Lestat and his vampire court? Those are more like what I want/expect from a Vampire Chronicles book. For example, I am terribly fond of Prince Lestat, and have reread it a couple of times. Is it as good as the original Vampire Chronicles trilogy? No.
Finally, Anne Rice has stated herself (not that I can find links to the interviews where she said it) that she had been working on a stand-alone Atlantis book for over a decade, but couldn’t get it to where she was happy with it, and decided that it should be combined with a Vampire Chronicles book. I … do not agree with her authorial choices about this.
TL;DR: No one should feel they have to slog through Kapetria’s Tale in RoA. Yes, it ends up changing the whole mythology and backstory of the vampires, but … I reject those changes.
Thanks for your addition, @gothiccharmschool! Very much appreciated, and I am with you 100% on wanting more hijinks of Lestat and his vampire court! Good reminder about reading your liveblog of PLROA, I’m sure your liveblog can help me get through it.
Re: Finally, Anne Rice has stated herself (not that I can find links to the interviews where she said it) that she had been working on a stand-alone Atlantis book for over a decade, but couldn’t get it to where she was happy with it, and decided that it should be combined with a Vampire Chronicles book. I … do not agree with her authorial choices about this.
I, too, do not agree with her authorial choices about this. Here’s her quote about doing her specialty VC-mashup funtimes for PLROA:
… i, too, am unable to finish PLROA for MONTHS bc of Kapetria’s Tale! FOR THE SAME REASONS. I mean maybe it’s not boring to some ppl? But for me, I’m just… I was weirded out before by the Replimoids and getting to her tale I just didn’t want to buy more of what was being sold.
So I have been really struggling to pick it up again EVEN THO IT IS RIGHT ON MY DESK IN PLAIN VIEW, mocking me every day that I don’t just CRACK IT OPEN AND TAKE MY MEDICINE like I should if I really cared about this series (which I clearly do).
I went and asked around & skimmed ahead bc I very much like to be spoiled, and I won’t spoil you here, but from what I skimmed and from what I’ve been told, I don’t think you need to know Kapetria’s Tale to understand the rest of the book. It goes back to our vampires and their shenanigans and SCIENCE, and in the old days we might have called this all very “cracky” stuff, but the ending might even have been written before the Atlantis portion was added in, it seems to depend so little on it, but again, that’s from my spoilage.
…But currently? What are ppl’s thoughts on how PLROA ends? I would like ppl to speak freely, so there may be spoilers in comments/reblogs.
Message me privately, if you prefer, and I’ll add it to this post under a cut if it’s spoilery.
“I was working on a novel called Born for Atlantis, and I just couldn’t get it to work. I thought, “What if I could somehow combine this with Lestat and the vampires?” And it was like, everything worked. Something happens to me when I write from Lestat’s point of view. There’s no question about it. By the time I was done, it felt inevitable, like it always had been…. It was a rare experience.”
I-want-my-IWTV 