What she says: I’m fine
What she means: I love you so much and I want to declare it to the world but public extreme expressions of love short of marriage proposals are looked down upon or made fun of by society and I’m worried people are going to judge me but I’m content being by your side because there’s nothing I love more
you: I love you me, and intellectual: I love you unconditionally and the fact that I see myself as more intuitive does not change that at all, and, in fact, sometimes enhances my love for you
Did you know that I will climb nearly 90 degree angles to announce my deep love for you from the top of the highest mountains. Because I crave that affection.
Me, on a date: how do you feel about wholesome memes? My date: I love them so much as it is my deepest desire to have that kind of connection with someone Me: *pulling breadsticks out of my purse* I stole these from Olive Garden and want to share them with you
Come one guys join in on this In case you haven’t noticed this whole meme is already a wholesome version of a past meme, the “what will be the first meme of 2015” meme So this meme is a meme of itself
I came out here to have a good time and I’m honestly feeling so loved and supported right now.
this kind of wholesome subversion of memes looks like a lot of
fun
jewishbookwyrm: i have made a wholesome meme tumblr: you fixed a really bad trend is what you did. look at it. it’s got love and support.
are we doing loving memes?
friends, we might be
“Tumblr a pit of hate and despair” factoid is incorrect. Wholesome Georg, who posts support and friendship from a cave is representative adn should be counted.
maybe the real wholesome memes were the friends we made along the way
Tag yourself I’m wholesome subversion of memes
2017 but every time I love and support my friends it gets faster
I awake in the morning
mind: refreshed
heart: open
friends: online
I am forcibly removed from loneliness and isolation.
2018 is approaching (three hours more to go where I am, so pls tag your 2018 spoilers) and I decided I want to make a toast.
Not as in toasted bread, of course, the kind of toast with glasses and alcohol. Unless you don’t do the alcohol thing like me, you can have something else. I’m gonna go with sparkling water.
An internet tumblr fandom toast.
I want to raise my virtual imaginary glass of sparkling water (which is quite fancy btw) to all the lovely people in this fandom.
To the new ones and the old ones, to the ones who multifandom and the ones who keep things neat and tagged (teach me ur secrets), to the ones who cosplay I adore you like that lady in the theater, u know, this one
To the fanfic writers, all of you, no matter how angsty the fics get, thank you for taking so much time of your lives to create the things you create and share them with us, I would fight Lestat outside the Palais Royal for any of you and your fics. Like easy peesy, I’ll read out loud one of the heartbreaking ones and bitch will drown in his own tears. Yall savage.
To the fanartists, like, how could I possibly express my feelings for yall, have you seen what yall do???? Like????? Thank you for giving me backgrounds for every single one of my devices, you are all so brilliant and creative and talented it’s insane, and if it were up to me, you are the artists I would put in the Chronicles. Like, Botticelli? Idk her. But have you seen the VC fandom artists tho? Damn. Idk who the renaissance artists are, but they must have used the VC fanarts for refference. Fight me.
RPers. I need to talk about you. Have you all got any idea how hard it is to explain to my friends why am I squeeling like a piglet when I read your scenes? Idk how the things are called but listen, they are wonderful. Like, don’t fuck with me like that man, yall be the vampires for real, there is no other possible explanation to how sublime yall are. That ain’t no roleplay, those are actual Lesty and Lou there. Keep fighting me I can do this all night.
I am grateful for this lovely bunch of kiddos I had the pleasure of running into here at tumblr. I am grateful for the VC Inktober for giving me a reason not to be salty over my lack of Halloween, for the Secret Santas who gave us all so many beautiful gifts in so many different forms, and to all those wonderful people who make it happen! The mods and admins who take the time to organize so many different people and make sure no one is left w/o their present and who also make presents themselves like yall are actually irl Santas and I love you all so much.
YALL KNOW WHAT ELSE I’M GRATEFUL FOR? THE BADASS COVEN OF THE INARTICULATE like I know my tags speak for themselves and there’s literally no way in Hell I can put words to how happy the podcasts make me and like it’s so cool? Four people from ALL OVER THIS BITCHASS WORLD getting together T W I C E a month and making time from their actual irl lives to not only discuss for over an hour about the vampires but also edit the podcast, make sure it sounds right and organizing the entire thing with the topics yall gonna go over and sharing with us your points of view and opinions in this beautiful way bc like, it could have just been a blog with four admins but yall went LOL NOPE and made the PODCASTS LIKE DISCUSSING THINGS WITH EACHOTHER WITH YOUR IRL VOICES listen I am very passionate about COI, I will FIGHT GABRIELLE BARE HANDED AND BLINDFOL… ‘k maybe not Gabs, who fucks with her, but you get where I’m going.
Anyways, this got long. What I’m trying to say is that I’m very grateful and happy that I get to share time with you guys. You are all great. I hope you have as good of a year as I did by sharing it with you.
To another great year with you and many more, to a VC series before 2019 and to you all ❤️
Hey, welcome to our little corner of tumblrland! Share your fanfic with us, step out into the light, Anon! I’m often critical of my own writing, and I often have a beta reader, a dear friend who gives me constructive criticism and even rewrites lines if I ask her to do so, like an editor, a beta can offer a huge improvement on one’s writing. Maybe you’d like to find a beta reader?
-PREAMBLE SORRY BUT I MUST- and no TL;DR for it-
Sometimes when ppl ask those questions, Why is the fandom so small and Where is the fanfic b/c I can’t find it, it’s argument bait, I’m sorry to say.
But I’m taking it at face value that you are somewhat or totally unaware of our history, that your mom might not know, and that you are not putting out bait for argument. I’ll try to give you a synopsis in good faith, and hope that other ppl see this post as such. I’m not interested in taking sides, reopening those old wounds for the millionth time. I think of us as the bastard children of fandom, beaten in to a corner by a formerly abusive parent, and we are survivors of that. As such, I would hope that we could offer each other even more compassion than other fans in other fandoms. It doesn’t always work that way. Things can be misread and emotions misinterpreted; this is a text-based communication so we are cheated of facial and verbal cues, it is far too easy to misread intention.
What draws ppl to VC? From what I’ve learned over the years, a lot of us felt marginalized in one way or another and we related to something in VC, we drew strength from it as we were struggling with something in real life. It helped at a time that we needed it. It might still help us. Some ppl just like the purple prose! For real!
Whatever the case, and however you choose to engage with canon or fandom, no one’s relationship to the books or characters supersedes anyone else’s. Not mine, not yours, Anon. We all have our own personal relationship with it. I hesitate to use the word “valid,” bc no one needs “validation” to love a book series or character(s). No one can be “invalidated” for loving a book series or character(s).
I was in fandom before the internet, and even tho, as I’ll mention below, it was with only one other flesh-and-blood friend, we had our own 2-person fandom! We liked what we liked. We didn’t agree on everything, we still don’t, but it was always civil, and any argument was always based on curiosity and trying to gain a better understanding from each other. It was never about this public display we have now on tumblr and other social networking sites of idk, “My 10K notes means my opinion supercedes yours!”? I don’t subscribe… Unless those 10K notes are turning into dollars, then we’ll revisit it, lol.
What even is the point of my blog? It’s for entertainment, my own experience, a collection of other ppl’s experience, and fanworks. When ppl say that I exert all this influence on an army of ppl, I am, in actuality, preaching to a big pile of cats, that’s how it feels. I serve catnip to cats. That’s the intention, anyway. They don’t even Like some of it, I’ll get like 5 notes on this post, lol. I have no need to be Right. I have no need to be anything other than a brief reprieve from how insane Real Life is and can be.
Fandom isn’t a contest. No one is keeping score. No one even knows your follower count unless you tell ppl (and I wouldn’t, bc even if you only have 10 more followers than smne else, it generally leads to envy).
TL;DR for the below info: The fandom was small, but it’s growing now, and there is fanfic, try here on tumblr, and try Archiveofourown.org (AO3). Fandom, however, like Real Life, takes your own work to make what you can of it.
FRICKIN’ WALL OF TEXT™ NO CUTS WE LONGPOST LIKE MEN
A) The fandom is was small bc:
^Gawds this is gonna be me on the outside eventually, it’s me on the inside sometimes lol.
It’s an old fandom, over 40 years old! IWTV, the first book in the series, was published in 1976.
Back then, fandom was just the ppl you could gather together, physical mailing lists, idk. It progressed to zines, probably, like other fandoms, but you had to know who was making them. I wasn’t born yet so I don’t know!
As the internet was born, ppl began to find each other on webrings, but even then, it was hard, bc Anne Rice did not approve of fanfic. So you had to know where to look or be lucky enough to stumble upon it.
By the early 90′s when I came into VC, there were some fic sites like Rotoli dela Lune (IIRC?) but AR waged a #war on fanfic, sending threatening cease & desist letters to writers, and that made everything EVEN HARDER to find.
Of course, the IWTV movie in 1994 (in development hell for nearly 20 years) did bring in a wave of new fandom ppl, but they really only found whoever they physically met bc of the movie, and the VC books that were out at the time. Meeting in the audience at the movie? Or in bookstores in the Fantasy/Horror section under R, maybe? Probably?
[X] And TBH the movie got backlash bc it was reviewed as being too gay to some, and as not gay enough, but overall, it did well financially and is still considered smtg of a cult classic bc they drag it out and show it on TV leading up to Halloween or whenever Tom and Brad have new movies out ;D (one near-to-Halloween weekend I watched it 4 times, and that was too many, even for me).
Which was my situation, I had my one VC friend, we met in middle school bc I saw her reading QOTD on the bus, I pestered her that morning, and she had to tolerate almost 20 years of my fannish behavior ever since, all directed at her like a fire hydrant, and then she forced me to start a Tumblr and here we are.
*ahem*
We had another small influx of fans with movie!QOTD in 2002, but as the story was barely tethered to canon, and for a number of other reasons, idk if it was the blockbuster ppl had hoped it would be. STILL, there are fandom ppl who find it nostalgic, or love it and embrace it even admitting its canon non-compliance. So I try not to trample it too hard, but trampling it hard was once encouraged! anyway… suffice it to say, someone(s) has to watch it with me and mock it to help me through it, lol.
In 2012, we got a graphic novel of Claudia’s POV during IWTV called Claudia’s Story. You can find it on Amazon.
B) The fanfic IS out there.
CURRENTLY, the fandom is experiencing a revival, we liiiiive!
with the recently published books and AR no longer fights the fanfic writers! Woo!
AR has a FB page and an official VC FB page, where she communicates with her People of the Page and whoever else comments on her posts.
There’s also a thriving community of ppl here on tumblr, who make fanart, write fic, do podcasts, write meta, cosplay, etc. Dig around in my archive and you’ll find them. We just did a @vcsecretgifts exchange and there’s fanfic in there.
Another great place to find fanfic is archiveofourown.org (AO3). You can set up an account and post your fanfic there, and I bet you’ll find readers who want what you have to offer!
There’s also fanfiction.net, and wattpad, but I don’t know those sites very well.
^^^All this taken into account, the thing is, anon, fandom is not an open door.
Fandom is not a ballroom with everyone listing their url name down and committing to staying or even having civility, we can’t make a VC RP directory bc inevitably ppl aren’t invited for whatever reason, and feel left out, or they move on to another fandom anyway. It’s not everyone extending their dance-cards for you to sign your blog url for a dance with EVERYONE. We have had arguments and in-fighting, call-out posts, cliques… there are heated posts about certain characters or ships still getting reblogged with their 10K+ notes and an implication that if you “like” those certain characters or ships, that you’re contributing to real world harm.
Fiction’s affect on reality is a debate that’s started before the internet and will go on as long as we are capable of communicating. Societies have waves of being more or less pure, like a pendulum. That’s not the focus of my blog.
All debates aside, fandom is what you make it, it’s not guaranteed easy friendship. I once thought it was, but I learned the hard way that it’s very much like real life. You have to do the work of finding and reaching out to those ppl who you find a spark of connection with, and actively nurture that spark. On a public site, you have to extend yourself and show some opinions and thoughts, gush about what you love, reblog from ppl who you relate to, and gradually build your own network of friends. Nothing is handed to you. No one will crowd into your inbox bc your url sounds cool (well, maybe a few urls get attention bc of that!)(there is an exception to every rule).
So whenever I say “Welcome to our little corner of tumblrland!” I mean it, I do welcome all, and I hope that I’m going to see you flourish as you make your way into the space. Are you a new fanartist, or writer, or someone who’s supportive even if they don’t have the skills to create fanwork of their own? A combination? Show us, and reach out, and if we’re compatible, we’ll reach back.
^I love this fanart, he’s got his brother’s raven hair and green eyes <3, but Paul is described in canon as “He had the smoothest skin and the largest blue eyes. He was robust, not thin as I am now and was then… but his eyes… it was as if when I looked into his eyes I was standing alone on the edge of the world… on a windswept ocean beach. ” (IWTV) Not sure whether it’s canon or fanon but Paul was supposedly blond. He was 15 when he died.
I have a few other things collected in my #Paul de Pointe du Lac tag, like this portrait I think is pretty canon compliant:
Also, I know there is a fanart somewhere of Armand ranting that Marius is not Lestat’s sire.
Hmmm that is a very tough one, I know I’ve seen a fanart or two like that over the years, I’ll try and dig around in my personal archives for that. I do think Armand would take more issue at that than the idea that Lestat might have been Daniel’s maker.
I mean, and I shouldn’t go here but I will, bc I think this is one of the reasons I can’t watch movie!QOTD w/o someone with me, cracking jokes at it…
Marius gets unfairly mashed together with Magnus in movie!QOTD, essentially, bc he turns Lestat w/o consent. Therefore, Marius takes on the burden of having raped Lestat into being a vampire and there is no explicit reconciliation or apology for that crime whatsoever, but he and Lestat are kicking it together in Modern Times, with Lestat seemingly bitter at him and Marius seemingly smug back? It’s ooc and uncomfortable. I think Armand would be more annoyed at Marius taking on Magnus’ actions than he would be pissed at Lestat getting to claim Marius as his own sire, since QOTD!Lestat doesn’t seem all that thrilled with that pedigree.
BUT ANYWAY if anyone out there has fanart in which Armand is ranting about Marius not being Lestat’s sire, plz send it to me, or reblog and tag me!
I have one of Lestat and Armand fighting over Marius, and @garama‘s Antonio!Armand w/ QotD!Marius which is not quiiiite what you’re asking for but might like anyway… that I’ll rebagel after this…
So would [Armand] also rant that Lestat is not Daniel’s sire? Since I know people tend to confuse the movies Queen of the Damned and Interview with a Vampire since they state completely different sires from the books.
Ppl may blend together certain things, but I think anyone who’s seen the movies AND read the books takes the books as more true to canon, and the movies as adaptations, which is what they are. But if ppl only see movie!QOTD, I can’t really fault them for taking that info as their own canon, if they like it.
In MY opinion, since you’re asking: Armand will rant about it @ Daniel in private, but Armsy doesn’t tend to rant about anything he’s personally invested in when he’s in Lestat’s presence, preferring to keep a calm, collected, and unflappable profile as much as possible. Lestat knows this and loves to pester Armsy at any opportunity. There’s A LOT of joking around in the coven about those movies and how Daniel narrowly escaped having Lestat as his fictional maker…
Lestat: “You’d have liked that, wouldn’t you?” *makes a kissy face @ Dan*
Daniel: “Not saying I’d have liked it exactly, but it might’ve sped things up a little…”
Armand: “Are you saying I took too long, Daniel? I had my reasons…”
Lestat: “Dude I see someone I love, I turn them THAT NIGHT,” *snaps his fingers* “If I can possibly manage it, or the very next night, or at least that weekend, gotta strike when the iron is HOT!”
Armand: “Or else they might come to their senses and run as far away as they can get from you?”
Lestat: “HEY!”
Daniel: “I did run from you, Armand…”
Armand: “HEY!!”
Marius and Louis just sit back and watch all this, wishing that they had popcorn they could eat.
We have *~several~* redheaded characters to choose from, anon! Age is relative tho, there’s youngest in actual years, then there’s youngest in appearance.
****Opening my overcoat to reveal the gingers****
The Vampire Armand
He’s probs your best bet, being the youngest in appearance, he was turned into a vampire when he was 17. He’s one of the main characters and pretty easily recognizable even to ppl outside VC fandom. He’s over 400 yrs old now. Other characters often compare him to the youths in Botticelli’s paintings; so pretty, he mentions that he’s mistaken for being a girl at least once in his mortal life.
[^Portrait of a Young Man 3., Botticelli, and I think the expression is very Armand, he’s pretty much the sassy teen of the series but as grumpy as an old man]
I would never be anything but the seventeen-year-old boy you see now… [but] I am not a waif and never have been. I am a strong child. – Armand, The Vampire Armand
^X@amadeo-child-of-the-renaissance found this, another Botticelli angel Armand, with a face that’s more canon-compliant IMO 😉 AR bases Armand off these Botticelli angels and they have varying straight and curly hair, usually wavy at least.
Armand’s hair is described as curly when he was mortal and when he was a fledgling, so I think that’s the natural state of it.
Armand can be dapper or grungey depending on his mood, so the crucial aspect is really his hair, and if you want extra credit, you may want to carry a blender around, that’s sort of the fandom joke about him and Daniel going nuts over blending stuff in QOTD.
Here’s some Armand cosplayers (they’re mixed into that link) you might wanna check out 😉
Other redheads in the series… bc I don’t wanna hide the rare VC ladies under a cut! NO CUTS WE LONG POST LIKE MEN
^I’m not wild about her portrayal in the QOTD movie but anyways… she’s a little over 30 when she’s turned, and it was 1985, so she is technically younger in age than Armand. He will always look younger than her, tho.
Cosplaying Jesse Reeve would involve smtg about her being a Talamascan, maybe, or carrying Claudia’s diary? She finds it in QOTD.
^The redhaired twins. You might go to @redhairedtwin, a Maharet RPer, for descriptions of the twins.
^X Maharet (left) and kid!Jesse (right) in the QOTD movie. I headcanon Maharet and Mekare as being younger in appearance than we see Maharet in the movie, but idk right now how old they were when they were turned (I don’t have my books to check either). Early 20′s, early adulthood, I think. Maharet and Mekare are technically the oldest on this list but they might look the same age or younger than Jesse.
Cosplaying one of the twins means a bloody mouth or bloody eyes.
^poor Madeleine in the the IWTV movie barely had any screentime, she got a little more in the book, but she’s rarely mentioned in later canon. Louis’ first fledgling, made to take care of Claudia so he can go bang Armand move on with his afterlife. She’s a more obscure character, but she’s A REDHEAD SO SHE COUNTS!
If you want to cosplay her, carrying a doll that looks like Claudia, or wearing a locket with a portrait of a Claudia look-alike, that’d be a good accessory 😉
I think that’s all the relevant redheads in VC, but if anyone can think of more, feel free to reblog and add!
Mona Mayfair
@sheepskeleton said: Do we keep pretending that Mona doesn’t exist? xD Because I’m on board with that tbh, but I think she is also a young redhead 😉
RIGHT So Mona Mayfair is from the Mayfair Witch series and appears in the crossover Mayfair/VC books that AR refers to as “hybrids,” but since AR said that those books “haven’t worn well over time,” she has asked us to disregard them as part of VC canon.
!!!But Mona Mayfair is technically a cosplayable VC character, should you choose to accept those books as canon.!!!
~ SPOILER ALERT ~ <– wow, a real warning, and not a sarcastic one tossed on to add salt to a rant, what a thing.
^RPer @opheliaximmortal used to use Kate Mara as a face claim and I think that’s perfection. That RPer might give you a better description of the character, bc I just barely remember her, aside from her being Young, Pretty, and a Redhead, but just a warning, there’s NSFW text and images on her blog.
Mona is 18 when turned. In her early/mid teens, she favors tartan skirts and blouses and hair ribbons – she thinks of it as her disguise because she’s obvs doing a lot of things not expected of a schoolgirl. Once she transforms in Blood Canticle she dresses up in Aunt Queen’s high heels (she’s 18 here, so again, a late teen/early 20s fan could cosplay this well) and some kind of fancy dress; basically she goes out on the town all glammed up so that could be fun as well.
Mona was so awesomely sassy in Blood Canticle:
Lestat: “I told her to change clothes. That short sequined dress was just too damned distracting. And we had some heavy matters to address immediately.”
[argument ensues]
Mona: “ ‘And I know why you’re so fired up over Rowan, she’s the first adult female other than your own mother who’s ever caught your attention for more than five minutes, and Hello! Lestat Discovers The Opposite Sex! Yeah, females do come in grown-up sizes! And I happen to be one of them, and this is not the Garden of Eden, and I am not taking off this dress!’ ”
Sarcastic Spoiler alert: she doesn’t change her dress.
Also, re: Jesse:
Jesse’s 35 when turned, Jesse’s chapter in QotD has some descriptions of what she typically wears – I THINK she goes with flowy skirts when she’s in London “or jeans when she was in the States”, because Anne Rice thinks jeans haven’t arrived in Merrie Olde Englande yet, lol.
Also, a really cool cosplay detail for Jesse would be a silver Celtic bracelet, because Mael gives one to her as a gift.
Also, re: Maharet & Mekare:
…bizarrely Maharet and Mekare could be as young as 16!! So a late teen could pull them off.
We have *~several~* redheaded characters to choose from, anon! Age is relative tho, there’s youngest in actual years, then there’s youngest in appearance.
****Opening my overcoat to reveal the gingers****
The Vampire Armand
He’s probs your best bet, being the youngest in appearance, he was turned into a vampire when he was 17. He’s one of the main characters and pretty easily recognizable even to ppl outside VC fandom. He’s over 400 yrs old now. Other characters often compare him to the youths in Botticelli’s paintings; so pretty, he mentions that he’s mistaken for being a girl at least once in his mortal life.
[^Portrait of a Young Man 3., Botticelli, and I think the expression is very Armand, he’s pretty much the sassy teen of the series but as grumpy as an old man]
I would never be anything but the seventeen-year-old boy you see now… [but] I am not a waif and never have been. I am a strong child. – Armand, The Vampire Armand
^X@amadeo-child-of-the-renaissance found this, another Botticelli angel Armand, with a face that’s more canon-compliant IMO 😉 AR bases Armand off these Botticelli angels and they have varying straight and curly hair, usually wavy at least.
Armand’s hair is described as curly when he was mortal and when he was a fledgling, so I think that’s the natural state of it.
Armand can be dapper or grungey depending on his mood, so the crucial aspect is really his hair, and if you want extra credit, you may want to carry a blender around, that’s sort of the fandom joke about him and Daniel going nuts over blending stuff in QOTD.
Here’s some Armand cosplayers (they’re mixed into that link) you might wanna check out 😉
Other redheads in the series… bc I don’t wanna hide the rare VC ladies under a cut! NO CUTS WE LONG POST LIKE MEN
^I’m not wild about her portrayal in the QOTD movie but anyways… she’s a little over 30 when she’s turned, and it was 1985, so she is technically younger in age than Armand. He will always look younger than her, tho.
Cosplaying Jesse Reeve would involve smtg about her being a Talamascan, maybe, or carrying Claudia’s diary? She finds it in QOTD.
^The redhaired twins. You might go to @redhairedtwin, a Maharet RPer, for descriptions of the twins.
^X Maharet (left) and kid!Jesse (right) in the QOTD movie. I headcanon Maharet and Mekare as being younger in appearance than we see Maharet in the movie, but idk right now how old they were when they were turned (I don’t have my books to check either). Early 20′s, early adulthood, I think. Maharet and Mekare are technically the oldest on this list but they might look the same age or younger than Jesse.
Cosplaying one of the twins means a bloody mouth or bloody eyes.
^poor Madeleine in the the IWTV movie barely had any screentime, she got a little more in the book, but she’s rarely mentioned in later canon. Louis’ first fledgling, made to take care of Claudia so he can go bang Armand move on with his afterlife. She’s a more obscure character, but she’s A REDHEAD SO SHE COUNTS!
If you want to cosplay her, carrying a doll that looks like Claudia, or wearing a locket with a portrait of a Claudia look-alike, that’d be a good accessory 😉
I think that’s all the relevant redheads in VC, but if anyone can think of more, feel free to reblog and add!
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.)
(Omg, if you’d written to me back in Feb. of this year, there was a blogger @somniferousdelusion, now deactivated ;A; who said Magnus was their fave character, this blogger could have been someone you might have had good convos with… Does anyone know if they just changed urls?)
No, I don’t think AR has ever been asked about writing a full novel about Magnus, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she did! What are you drawn to about Magnus? There’s plenty of room for fanfic/headcanons about him, so if you are so inclined… write it for us!
I feel like if you want a book about Magnus you must be fascinated with him in some way, so I don’t mean to trample you if you do, but from all my time in fandom, I can say that Magnus is probably considered among the Absolute Worst if not THE MOST Problematic character in the whole series.*
>>>Quick interlude, on the subject of Problematic characters: I found this great essay by Warren Ellis. Here’s a taste, with my emphasis added in bold:
“… Fiction is how we both study and de-fang our monsters. To lock violent fiction away, or to close our eyes to it, is to give our monsters and our fears undeserved power and richer hunting grounds.”
*….Which could be good for him bc AR has been taking the Absolute Worsts and putting them on pedestals lately. I don’t know what you’ve read so far, but as you may be aware, Magnus tells his story, albeit briefly, in Prince Lestat.
Magnus is also in Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis in a snazzy new… erm… “form”?, so we’ll probably see more of him, but my money is on AR focusing on how cool he is now, and not really digging any further into his past or forcing Lestat to have any difficult conversations with him, which they sort of briefly had in PLROA.
There was a Magnus RPer, @theycallmemagnus, gone inactive now, but you might find good stuff in their archive, might reach out to any active RPers you find there, who may be into talking about the character.
// Hey, just adding my 2 cents here, after 10 yrs in this fandom I don’t think there’s any kind of general consensus on who’s the “worst” character in the VC series, and I don’t think it’s really a relevant question either. We see Magnus as an antagonist because he’s mortal!Lestat’s personal bogeyman and Lestat is the narrator, but the same could be said of many beloved characters in the series if their stories were told from a different perspective.
As someone who read the series, spotted the former cult leaders and torturers and went “THIS ONE. THIS ONE IS MY BABY”, don’t feel bad about liking Magnus’ character just because he’s a villain.
He’s a brilliant medieval alchemist who successfully attained eternal life (how many alchemists can say that they actually ACHIEVED the Ultimate Goal??) by figuring out how vampires turned each other and then replicating the process by capturing a vampire and “stealing” the Blood! And then he lived for centuries and eventually went mad! It could be taken straight from an early 20th century horror story à la H. P. Lovecraft or M. R. James, and I for one think it’s awesome.
(ETA: original post edited after reblog, so consider reblogging from OP)
Great addition, @bloodyvampchrons! (The part I removed when I edited the post is under the cut.)
I will 1,000% defend anyone’s interest in any fictional characters, for any reason. @awareofwhatsaforementioned did not express anything other than an interest in learning more about this character, specifically: whether the author would write more about him. That’s all.
Not all fiction is written as propaganda. Not all fiction is written for wish-fulfillment. Fiction may not exist in a vacuum, but it also is, in the end, just a story. It can be shelved, burned, critiqued, enjoyed, by any reader who encounters it.
Problematic characters are there to antagonize, to provide friction, obstacles, whatever the author intends for them to do. Maybe even to be a Hate Sink:
“A Hate Sink is a character whose intended role in the story (the role the authors made for him/her) is to be so despicable that the audience wants him or her to fail just as much as they want the heroes to succeed. However, this individual doesn’t have to be the main villain of the story, or even a villain at all.
…A Hate Sink [provides] an easy target for the reader/audience/player’s contempt where there may not be one, and can serve as a foil to more likable Anti-Hero or Anti-Villain characters.
Essays and books have been written about it, so I’m not going into it in depth, but the issue I see again and again on tunglr dot com is Black and White Morality. From TVTropes.org:
“Good versus Evil. White hat versus black hat. The shining knight of destiny with flowing cape versus the mustache-twirling, card-carrying force of pure malevolence. The most basic form of fictional morality, Black And White Morality deals with the battle between pure good and absolute evil.
…- Motivation: The villains never have a sympathetic motivation for their actions. There aren’t any Well-Intentioned Extremists,… Rather, their intentions are entirely for the sake of Evil (and may involve taking over or destroying the world).”
^Even the most horrific fictional crimes might be done by a character thinking he is doing the right thing, in his own mind.
“In Real Life, seeing the world in absolute Black and White Morality is considered normal for small children, but seen as a far less healthy trait in adults. A person who regards the people around him as entirely good or entirely evil has this.” – Black and White Insanity – TVTropes.org
Every reader can interpret the text differently, and very little is known of Magnus’ intentions. Before you cry MURDER/RAPE APOLOGIST, any reader exploring the reasons for a character’s crime =/= making excuses for it.
Creating/Consuming/Exploring dark fiction and problematic characters =/= endorsement of these things in real life.
People are accountable for actual crimes, not thought crimes.
Give me 100,000 fans like @awareofwhatsaforementioned. In my opinion, the greatest fandom crime is to chase other fans away from fandom by shaming them for having an interest in dark fiction or problematic characters.
I won’t engage in pointless unwinnable debate over what a fan is allowed to be interested in, but to make someone feel ashamed enough about what they’re interested in to the point of making them leave a fandom is a loss to us all. Think of all the friends and discussions they miss out on, all the fanworks they never get to see, or MAKE.
I want the longfic of Magnus’ backstory. I want the fanart of him as a kid, as a monster, all of it! If I’m the only one, so be it. But I don’t think I’m the only one. As I said in my original reply:
There’s plenty of room for fanfic/headcanons about Magnus, so if you are so inclined… write it for us!
I feel like if you want a book about Magnus you must be fascinated with him in some way, so I don’t mean to trample you if you do, but from all my time in fandom, I can say that Magnus is probably considered among the Absolute Worst if not THE MOST Problematic character in the whole series.*
>>>Quick interlude, on the subject of Problematic characters: I found this great essay by Warren Ellis. Here’s a taste, with my emphasis added in bold:
“… Fiction is how we both study and de-fang our monsters. To lock violent fiction away, or to close our eyes to it, is to give our monsters and our fears undeserved power and richer hunting grounds.”
*….Which could be good for him bc AR has been taking the Absolute Worsts and putting them on pedestals lately. I don’t know what you’ve read so far, but as you may be aware, Magnus tells his story, albeit briefly, in Prince Lestat.
♛You know, it took me some time to embrace having a tree indoors at all, you have to remember that it was immigrants who brought that tradition over to the New World; it was probably the early 1800′s that it was widespread enough that we simply had to have one, too.
Having a living tree indoors, shedding pine needles and sap and possibly serving as a Trojan horse to spiders and such, was not something I wanted! All that kindling, it was the same fire hazard that it is today. But Claudia wanted it, and so we started having them for her. In those early years, we made ornaments by hand to go with those given us as gifts by friends and neighbors: crystals, blown-glass baubles, figurines… Our own handmade ones were always more valuable to us than the finest artisan ones, Louis still has a few of them, and we handle them with great care.
…Got a little distracted there.
Fake trees were a thing in the mid-1800′s, I recall some that were made with goose feathers dyed green. Other artificial tree methods followed, but we continued with the real thing. The scent of pine was endearing to us by that time.
Currently? I would think that Claudia would lose her shit, as they say, over the myriad synthetic versions of the holiday tree, the LED lighting running cleverly through the branches.
So to answer your question, it varies on the year, but I think there’s something to be said for getting an artificial tree that’s flame-resistant, and can be easily recycled after use. There’s something deeply depressing about walking the streets the month following Christmas and seeing all the corpses of trees that were invited into people’s homes, loved briefly, and then tossed out on the curb like so much trash.
I suppose that puts me on the side of artificial, so there’s your answer.
I-want-my-IWTV 