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Lestat, Louis is a sad sack of a man and doesn’t really seem to be worth loving. Ok so he’s “beautiful” that’s not enough to make a relationship last. Why is Louis worth loving?

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//ooc: This is another fairly old ask, from November, 2017. I think anon was trying to rile Lestat by calling Louis “a sad sack of a man and doesn’t really seem to be worth loving.” Limiting him to just being “beautiful.” And while it is fun to rile Lestat and see how he reacts, idk… I was kind of taken aback by this and I had too many thoughts about it to have Lestat respond flippantly, which he would have. I think Lestat either gets defensive about loving Louis, or just dismisses these kinds of comments, one less person for him to compete with for Louis’ attention, lol.

TL;DR: I think when ppl ask that, part of where they may be coming from is that THEY feel like a “sad sack” who’s maybe not worth being loved, especially by the main character in a series, a flashy glittery murder machine. They worry that even if they’re loved for being “beautiful” that that really isn’t enough for a relationship, and that’s absolutely true, if we’re defining beauty as superficial characteristics. The beauty of Louis, to me, is in his character, and the emotions of the scene. 

I’ve written a lot about what draws me, as a reader, to love Louis, probably the best stuff is in my #we appreciate and love louis in this house tag. But I’ll try not to go overboard and answer you here, anyway!

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I think the deal with describing Louis as *~SO beautiful~* is partly that, hey, it’s fun to do, like having a favorite flower, and AR takes the opportunity to remind us of it, and put the camera on him in a scene, so we know he’s present. It also serves a purpose, we usually get at least a scrap of context about him and/or the scene:

“I glared at him, at the sharp graceful angles of his imperturbable face, […] his wide-set eyes, with their fine rich black lashes. How perfect the tender indentation of his upper lip.” -Lestat, The Tale of the Body Thief

^Let’s take this line and unpack it a little:

  • Lestat glares at Louis. –> Lestat is clearly pissed.
  • Louis’ imperturbable face –> Louis is not scared of Lestat being pissed.
  • And then Lestat lavishes this extra description on him, appreciatively. Attention on the lip area, now we’re picturing him pointedly staring there, which might precede a kiss, so we can infer that Lestat desperately wants to kiss him, probably. What I get from all that is the exquisite tension of Lestat wanting someone he can’t have, someone he treasures and wants even MORE bc of the difficulty. 

It’s the tension of Lestat and other characters pining for Louis that AR wrings every drop out for us, she’s showing us how helpless these other characters are that they can only try to capture Louis with descriptions since he defies being owned by anyone. Unrequited love is a powerful thing.

Bringing these back, in case anyone else missed them and want to indulge in some Louis praise/discussion:

So, re: Anon might be identifying with Louis: 

We can find ourselves slipping into the characters we love and identify with. Some ppl find Lestat relatable in his lust for life, self-centeredness, refusal to quit, constantly screwing up and berating himself in the narrative (but rarely being able to outright apologize to those he hurts)… a flawed character for sure but an inspiring one.

I think some ppl who relate to Louis and feel less flashy, less glamorous, there’s smtg very appealing about how such a character could be so idolized by the more flashy and glamorous one. What could such a *rockstar* like Lestat find attractive in Louis?? You said yourself Louis is a sad sack. And yes, beauty is not enough to keep a relationship going. But, as I mentioned above, Louis’ beauty is often described in a context that charges it with the emotions of the scene. At least to my reading, there’s more conveyed than just eye color.

Still, why wouldn’t Lestat demand someone who was more like himself?

But here’s the thing I think a lot of ppl miss when they’ve only seen movie!IWTV, or only read a few of the books. 

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^Louis & Lestat by @garama​

I personally believe that Lestat sees in Louis a similarly wounded soul with a lust for life. At their core, neither really want to die. Louis kept getting into fights with ppl bc he couldn’t kill himself as a mortal. Lestat has stubbornly refused to die his entire life and has had plenty of reason to want death. They’ve both almost killed themselves and been brought back. There’s a similar torment in them dealing with their natures.

As an anon put it so eloquently: “I think ppl forget that Louis is just as passionate and vengeful as Lestat, it’s just that he isn’t as vocal or showy about it. He’s more intimate and intense.”

The way they communicate/express themselves, and the way they practice self-care is vastly different. Lestat builds up his beautiful shell with retail therapy, redecorating and refurbishing his dwellings, and attending all kinds of shows and making elaborate plans with his kills, just spoiling himself silly. Always down for indulging his senses. He’s chasing new experiences, learning the new slang, trying to keep himself in the latest fashions. Novelty.

Louis prefers his nights at home, low-drama, in his own creature comforts, with his books and poetry to escape into. We don’t know much of what he’s read but he seems to want to spend eternity reading. What is reading? Even if it’s nonfiction, it’s learning, being told a story, being more informed. It’s novelty, too. Escapism through the imagination.

And their personalities seem to complement each other. Lestat’s lust for adventure spices up Louis’ otherwise too-calm existence. Louis’ calm and dignified manner brings Lestat back down to earth when he gets too untethered. Their bickering is bc they care for each other, can see beneath each other’s disguises. Louis sees the frightened boy inside the frustration that makes Lestat lash out and attack first. Lestat sees the potential in Louis of someone who, if he could get over his inhibitions, could experience so much more in his life.

When AR was kind of RPing as Lestat in her #Fan Questions for Lestat series, she was asked smtg similar:

“…but if I did have to choose, the companion would be Louis. My longest most enduring friendship and love affair in this world was with Louis. And though his limitations can be maddening, they can also be as inspiring to me as his virtues… the best choices we make are not always the wise choices. Sometimes they are intensely emotional choices. And I’ve always had a deep Romantic respect for emotion. My love for Louis transcends wisdom. And I may need the pain as much as the consolation that an eternal relationship with Louis would involve.“

^This is one of those moments I talk about where I feel like she recaptures the old magic, taps into the vein (pun intended) that got us all addicted to this series in the first place. Why I can’t just discard the crackier later books. She’s not all that specific here, but it’s believable. At least, to me. Lestat admits that Louis’ limitations (and this can be so many things, things Lestat disagrees with him about as well as things Louis refuses to do) can be maddening, and inspiring. 

And he admits that his love for Louis transcends wisdom. That may be a cop-out answer, but I’ve felt that kind of love in my life. Inexplicably bound to someone, despite the math of the personalities not seeming to mesh. 

Love works in mysterious ways. Even for beautiful sad sacks and the arrogant bastards who love them ❤

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(I received this ask and chose to censor the person’s name to protect their privacy, but I wanted to respond publicly bc I felt like it was a good thing to discuss out in the open, bc I have seen similar issues come up before, so I will refer to the asker as Anon.)

Anon, while I do try to reblog cosplays here on my blog, it’s not a main focus. We both know that I have reblogged several of yours in the past, I’m so impressed with your skill and resemblance to the characters you cosplay! I can definitely understand why you feel salty about putting so much effort in and not getting the attention when someone who seems not to put in any effort gets the credit for cosplay with the #cosplay tag. 

And may it is also just a salty moment just for me salty cosplayer. I am sorry.

It’s okay, I’m sorry that you were hurt. It was not my intention to hurt anyone’s feelings. Please accept this hug from me ❤

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I feel like there are several ways of answering this, one way would be to remove that tag from the reblog of that post, and another would be to offer an explanation of my thought process on that tag. Since I really want to keep that tag on it, and I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, hopefully my explanation below will reduce some of your salt by offering more perspective on it. If you’re still feeling hurt after this explanation, I am sorry. We all come to fandom as a safe space to be creative and have a good time, and unfortunately we sometimes have different and incompatible definitions of how that works 😛

Again, it was not my intention to hurt anyone’s feelings, it was my intention to compliment the OP of that post, and sadly, when someone is complimented, it can make others feel hurt and/or envy. Maybe this explanation will address those feelings.

So why tag a post #cosplay if OP didn’t tag it #cosplay??

Anyone can tag a post with anything at all, I can tag it #lobsterface, if I have some kind of inside joke with that person, even if no one else understands it! I can tag it with #WOW AMAZING, and other people would probably disagree. One’s tags are one’s own creative expression in that way.

I want to talk about cosplayers, bc that is part of the issue here, that some appear to make “more of an effort” than others in their cosplay.

A) Keep in mind that some cosplayers have considerable advantages over others:

  • Some cosplayers are skilled at being able to sew/make their own costumes,
  • Some choose to buy their costumes, 
  • Some choose to cosplay a more modern-era time period and do not need to sew or buy difficult pieces, 
  • Some are skilled at photoshop and can change their hair color/style or create fangs or alter the scene digitally,
  • Some have access to cool locations like cemeteries or fancy architecture,
  • Some have 

    photographer friends who can stage the lighting/scene really well,

  • etc…

^All of these are great and can add to the quality of a cosplay post 😀

B) On the other hand, some cosplayers do not have these advantages, or choose not to do elaborate cosplay for their own reasons.

  • Some people might feel that they resemble the characters enough that they choose not to add anything to what they already have naturally,
  • Some people lack some/all of the skills mentioned above, 
  • Some cannot afford to buy costume pieces, but still wish to cosplay their favorite characters. 

^This group (B) are no less qualified to cosplay than the people who have the advantages mentioned above, and they have every right to make cosplay posts of their own.

EDIT: I decided to remove the part of this post that addressed a specific other blogger. I don’t think it’s appropriate to drag them into this when I am protecting the anonymity of the person who raised the issue. 

But my advice still stands as follows:

It’s a reasonable compliment that we do give to people who happen to look like the fictional characters, unfairly or not. 

So why reblog a selfie that’s not tagged as a cosplay and tag it with #cosplay? Well, it’s a compliment to the person. 

Hey dear, in honour for cosplay it makes me (i do not speak for all so just my no-one-actually-ask-for-opinion) sad that ppl got tagged as cosplay just because they have a kind of simillarities for fictional characters.

So unfortunately, this does happen, and it is a compliment. 

It is a kind of hurtful for those who bring a lot of effort for the actually costume. 

I can understand that. I’m sorry you were hurt by this. The other difficult thing about tumblr is that the tags are there to advertise as well as organize, and for my own blog, I wanted that post above to be in my cosplay tag so that in the future, if anyone asked me about X character cosplay examples, it would be included. And I think it is a good example to have because, as I mentioned above, some people do not have the advantages you might have to create/buy costume pieces, and/or some people choose not to do those in cosplay for their own reasons. 

I think you did the right thing coming to me to ask about it, and hopefully my answer will reduce some of the hurt. In this case, I don’t want to remove the #cosplay tag from that post because of the reasons I stated above, I’m sorry about that.

And… if I would dye my hair more red would civil photos also be a cosplay-tagged post? 🙁 I am confused. 

I wouldn’t recommend that you dye your hair just to have your selfies reblogged as cosplay, in my experience, reblogs are VERY subjective. Reblogging someone else’s selfies especially is something every blogger has to decide for themselves, as selfies can be very personal. Everyone has their own reasons for reblogging a post, and in my case, I reblog things to have them in my personal collection to refer to later if I want, and again, sometimes it’s also a compliment for someone.

Even with the very elaborate cosplays, you can’t predict what will be reblogged. I might put a lot of effort into a post, fic, fanvideo, and it will get very few notes. I might put very little effort in and it gets 5k notes. 

I would suggest that if you want more attention, give other people attention, that’s how this blog became so popular! It is like real life, you get out what you put into it. People tend to give attention to people who have given attention to them *hugs*

Hi, so I am confusion. Because I read Lestat the vampire and watched Interview with the vampire bedore I read the first book, so I expected Lestat and Louie to be lovers. And I am now halfway through the book where claudia trys to kill lestat for the first time and so far they absolutely hate and insult eachother but every wiki tells me they were canonically lovers so??? Do they get together in later books or.. am I reading a different book than everybody else I am so confused

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I understand your confusion! To be honest, your message is extremely difficult to answer, there is plenty of evidence that they are not lovers, as you point out in your message: they “absolutely hate and insult each other” during IWTV (and in later books, too), and yes, Claudia tries to kill Lestat 😛 Those aren’t signs of love.

In my reading of canon, they do get together, but it is always a fragile “together.” They meet before Lestat’s concert, they are together at the end of QOTD, etc., there are many times in canon when they are physically together but, it is usually thick with the tension of whether it can last ;A; Perhaps that’s another reason why the L/L shippers make so many fanworks; we just don’t get enough L/L explicitly in canon.

When Anne Rice wrote IWTV, Lestat was clearly the main antagonist (other antagonists included Santiago, the theatre vampires, etc.). Lestat was intended to antagonize Louis. At the end of IWTV, one can say that Louis has won; even if he might not be all rainbows-and-sparkles-happy about life, Louis ends the book at least as a functionally independent vampire, whereas Lestat is miserable and broken, seemingly having difficulty even hunting for mortal victims on his own (dependent on a young “nurse vampire” bringing him a victim). There is disagreement between Lestat and Louis whether that scene even happened, but, whether it did or not, by the end of IWTV-era, it seems like Louis has overcome his abuser/monster and is the stronger one of the two of them.

Still, L/L did explicitly share some intimate moments in IWTV, when Lestat fed on Louis, and sharing the intimacy of the Dark Gift (the most intimate experience for vampires), and beyond than that, Lestat tells the reader in TVL to “Read between the lines.” A relationship does not need to be explicitly stated to exist, it is up to each individual reader to decide whether they want to ship those characters or not based on their reading of the story.

Personally, I ship

Louis/Lestat and thankfully, I have found plenty of other Louis/Lestat shippers in the fandom! Anyone is welcome to reblog/comment on this post as to why they ship Louis/Lestat ❤

TL:DR; Throughout canon Lestat pines for Louis QUITE A LOT. It is my personal belief that most of this pining is to “make up for” all the awful times during the years in IWTV when Lestat abused his fledglings, when they fought back, when Lestat was frustrated at being unable to give them the truth of their vampire nature by sharing his knowledge with them. To make up for the scenes that were not explicitly described in IWTV.

1) Here’s Lestat talking about Louis, from TVL:

I fell fatally in love with Louis, a young dark-haired bourgeois planter…  Louis gained a hold over me far more powerful than Nicolas had ever had…

And why should I bother to tell of the times he came to me in wretched anxiety, begging me never to leave him, of the times we walked together and talked together, acted Shakespeare together for Claudia’s amusement, or went arm in arm to hunt the riverfront taverns or to waltz with the dark-skinned beauties of the celebrated quadroon balls?

^You could say he lied about any of this, we do have unreliable narrators. That’s up to you as a reader to decide if you believe Lestat’s account on this or not.

2) More of Lestat talking about Louis in TVL:

I kept glancing at him and away from him, as if his green eyes were hurting me. In modern parlance he was a laser beam. Deadly and delicate he seemed. His victims had always loved him.

And I had always loved him, hadn’t I, no matter what happened, and how strong could love grow if you had eternity to nourish it, and it took only these few moments in time to renew its momentum, its heat?

^This seems, again, to be very clearly stating that Lestat loves Louis. Whether that love is reciprocated is up to the reader’s interpretation.

3) In the immortal words of @high-fructose-lesbianism: “Now matter how hard you ship Louis and Lestat you will never ship Louis and Lestat as hard as Lestat does.” [X] Part of why it’s such a tough ship is that AR just does not let us have much in terms of explicit canon fluff of them! It mostly happens off-screen. Which is where fanworks steps in to satisfy that need ;] I have some more of this kind of thing mixed into my #nobody ships Louis and Lestat harder than Lestat ships Louis and Lestat tag.

4) Also relevant: Anne Rice was answering Fan Questions for Lestat at one point and she said (in character as Lestat):

“…but if I did have to choose, [my one companion for all eternity] would be Louis. My longest most enduring friendship and love affair in this world was with Louis. And though his limitations can be maddening, they can also be as inspiring to me as his virtues… the best choices we make are not always the wise choices. Sometimes they are intensely emotional choices. And I’ve always had a deep Romantic respect for emotion. My love for Louis transcends wisdom. And I may need the pain as much as the consolation that an eternal relationship with Louis would involve.“

5) I just posted a letter Anne Rice get from a queer fan who expressed how grateful he was to her for IWTV, and I don’t want to attempt to summarize it for you, please read it to see his perspective for yourself, even though he does not specifically mention Louis/Lestat as a ship.

6) Anne Rice gets this question on a regular basis. I don’t know if her answer below convinced the commenter, Romeo Naghdi, that Lestat is “totally bisexual, totally omni sexual” (which was another term for bisexual some years ago, IIRC). To be honest, I think when she answers these types of questions she is answering so that others can see her statement, even if the commenter might remain steadfast in their own opinion.

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[^X 6/26/2015]  ^Personally, I don’t know how Romeo Naghdi (and others who share his opinion) read the same books that I/we did, but I don’t care what he thinks of Lestat’s sexuality, and I would encourage you all to go with Anne Rice on this. She made her statement and then let it go. 

I am not attempting to erase any queer representation in mentioning that we have these people who headcanon Lestat as straight. I included it only to give the context to AR’s comment. 

I hope that helps, Anon! Again, anyone is welcome to reblog/comment on this as to why they ship Louis/Lestat, even though they “absolutely hate and insult each other” during IWTV!

What is your opinion on Marius/Armand’s relationship? i’ve seen posts in support and posts against and I’m ultimately in the middle because a) it is horror/gothic lit where weird/bad shit happens and b) vampires operate on a different moral code than human beings. So I’m just curious what you think.

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As @shippingisnotactivism put it so succinctly: Often times people aren’t actually interested in a debate, they are interested in making you do intellectual/emotional labour for no reason at all. [X]

I wrote this huge Wall of Text despite the above quote. If you’re a sealion, Anon, you’ve accomplished your mission to some extent, you’ve managed to get me to spend more time and effort on this response than I ever wanted to. 

I didn’t write it for you, though. I wrote it for my 15 year old self who was able to read and enjoy all the fictional problematic content I wanted. My 15 year old self loved black comedy, dark humor. I was never criticized for it. I was bullied for other things, like my wonky teeth, my hair style, my (lack of) fashion sense, which, looking at pics of myself, I can see why I was an easy target!  

Now, we have bullies who do it in a much more insidious way. They tell you that your interest in problematic content means that you endorse it in real life. I’d rather be bullied for my teeth again.

I actually did spend time crowdsourcing privately to respond to this ask, I got some good answers, but you know what? I don’t need to write a full dissertation on horror/gothic lit and/or Marius/Armand’s relationship and/or Ricean vampire sex/intimacy and/or Anne Rice’s motivations for writing what she writes and/or VC fandom’s reactions to VC ships, etc., for an anonymous person(s) on the internet. You said you’ve seen posts about it already. Being in the middle is an acceptable place to be. I’m not here to force you to one side or the other.

You’re looking for easy answers to complicated questions. It’s not my responsibility to feed you those answers. And I would hope that you would take anyone else’s response to your questions with a grain of salt, and not simply accept opinions as truth because they sound good and righteous.

These are issues with so much nuance, so many facets, and to write Marius/Armand off as simply “abusive” and “pedophilia” is extremely narrow-minded to me. To write off people who attempt to discuss these things in fiction as “abuse-apologists” and “pedophilia-apologists” is a form of bullying. If we cannot discuss problematic things in fiction in a civilized way, it won’t make these things A) disappear from fiction or B) stop happening in real life. 

If you’ve been watching/following my blog for even a few weeks, or you check out my archive, you know that I’ve reblogged plenty of Marius/Armand fanart, some of it NSFW. So I think you can do the math on what my stance is on that. 

I confess that I was never wildly into that ship, but I have always loved talent and skill in the fanart/fanfic of both of these characters, separately and together, and now my interest in it is A) to have some variety in my blog rather than always reblogging fanworks about L/L (my main ship and, arguably, the VC juggernaut ship), and B) to support anyone who loves those characters separately or ships them together, and let them know that I support them. They can like whatever fictional content they like.

It’s been said before by blogs with better rhetoric than mine, like @fiction-is-not-reality, @freedom-of-fanfic, @shippingisnotactivism, @shipwhateveryouwant, @yourshipisfine, @shipping-isnt-morality, @olderthannetfic, @bitteroldfandomqueen, @wilting-blooming, @yoonbum-indrag, etc. 

Basically:

There is no debate when it comes to my own permission to like whatever I like in fiction, and I extend that permission to everyone. It’s fictional. Period.

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^Marge Simpson is against pro wrestling here. It was an actual debate, you can google it. I’m not interested in arguing with her. I’m not even interested in calling her “a Killjoy,” even though she’s asked the viewer to do so. Unlike Marge, I’m not interested in forcing anyone to agree with any of my opinions. 

More importantly, why is she standing up there next to the TV? She wants to divert attention from it and onto herself. Marge wants the attention.

She is riding on it as a topic, and it’s an easy target, bc it is VIOLENCE. Scripted or not, we all generally agree that violence is bad. So she stands there concerned, but does she really think it’s so awful? I don’t remember the episode well enough to know if she says that pro wrestling is definitively a bad influence on its viewers. Her caption says enough: “BC THIS IS NOT TO MY TASTE, NO ONE ELSE SHOULD BE ABLE TO ENJOY IT.” 

Would she take into account that it’s cathartic for fans of pro wrestling to watch the scripted violence played out? Would she care that we love rooting for our faves and we love watching them appear to beat the crap out of the other wrestlers for dominance? Would she care that we can watch it and know the difference between violence in media and in real life? I’m thinking that if she is truly committed to her crusade against violence in pro wrestling, she would be unable to cede an inch of ground, even a molecule of nuance could topple her from her soapbox. Acknowledging that her opinion is opinion and not fact would be acknowledging that she could be wrong, and that’s unacceptable to Marge.

It’s not enough for Marge to respect the old fandom rule of #Don’t Like, Don’t Read. When there is something as juicy as a topic with a buzzword that invokes an immediate reaction to get righteous about, the argument becomes: #I Don’t Like This Thing; No One Should Read/Write This Thing (Unless they Write it the Way I Want it Written).

The points I would make, if I were making points, would be these, listed below. You can do your own further research, bc I’m not being paid for this, and have no obligation to provide sources that will most likely fall on the deaf ears of the “Marges” of fandom who are unable to cede any ground. I am not obligated to respond to arguments against this post. 

These points are for the Marius/Armand shippers and Marius fans to show my support for them by sharing some of my own thoughts.

  • “Vampires operate on a different moral code than human beings.” Anon, you wrote this yourself, and I think it’s a good point. An essay could be written on it. 

^Some of the vampires may want to abide by human moral codes, but those may be codes from the era they were turned. I wouldn’t even say that moral codes have evolved, I would say that moral codes are on a pendulum swinging from moral to immoral, back and forth. 

^Attitudes towards sex/intimacy also change during different eras. This includes the time periods during which the novels were written, what was expected in fiction then, what the cultural landscape was like, etc. 

  • The ship itself occurred during a time period in history when underage/adult relationships mlm were socially acceptable. You can argue that she should not have chosen that time period, but she’s a writer, she can choose whatever time period she wants.
  • Given the content, I would suggest that these books were written for adults who know the difference between fiction and reality.

  • These books are fiction, they are not self-help manuals. 

^If you use them as a self-help manual and are harmed, it is your misuse of them, not the author’s fault, and not the books’ fault. Like alcoholism. It’s not the alcohol’s fault if you drink it irresponsibly. 

  • Shipping is not just for wish fulfillment/idealization, but it can be. Maybe Marius/Armand is wish fulfillment/idealization for Anne Rice. 

^While it is a possibility, I highly doubt she’s intentionally trying to injure any of her readers, especially if she sees

Marius/Armand

and Marius himself as good and desirable. 

  • I absolutely do not condone pedophilia, abuse, or grooming in real life, and in my 20+ years of fandom I have never met a Marius/Armand shipper or Marius fan who condones any of those things in real life, either.
  • I do not believe that an author is required to condemn problematic elements within the text. 

^Which she definitely wouldn’t do anyway, if she sees Marius/Armand and Marius himself as good and desirable.

  • Anne Rice has similar ships with the underage/adult dynamic that don’t get the hate Marius/Armand does, oddly enough. Furthermore, she didn’t invent it, this is a fantasy that’s been around since before she was even born. 
  • There are a bunch of other kinks mixed into that ship that I don’t need to list out here for you. Anne Rice/the fans/anyone is allowed to have/explore their kinks in fiction or in consensual spaces online/in real life with other adults.
  • It is my belief that underage people (including Anne Rice) can be curious about sex/intimacy before reaching the Age of Consent. 

^Are we only allowed to be curious about it on the stroke of the first minute of our 18th birthday?? I believe Anne writes these ships setting herself as the underage character, spending decades rebelling against what she perceived was an overly repressive religious upbringing in which the adults in her life tried to convince her that her curiosity was EVIL and a disgusting form of Sinning. Making it the “forbidden fruit” just made it that much more desirable for underage!Anne. IMO, her underage/adult ships are a coping mechanism she does for her younger self.

  • I am not knowledgeable enough about horror/gothic lit to say how Marius/Armand compares to other ships in those stories, but as I understand it, the exploration of monsters of all kinds has been problematic since monster stories were invented. 

^Horror/goth lit elevated these stories to a higher intellectual level, so they were criticized on a higher intellectual level than the older monster stories. However, the criticism of exploring these concepts has always been harsher to women writers bc PATRIARCHY and how dare women explore sexual fantasies without permission?!

  • Shippers of Marius/Armand are easy targets for bullying and harassment as that ship and character tick off plenty of boxes of things we know are wrong in real life. But as I’ve said in the past, creating/consuming problematic things =/= endorsement of them in real life. Thoughtcrimes are not crimes.
  • It’s easier to attack

    Marius/Armand

    shippers and Marius fans than attempting to attack Anne Rice. Anne Rice is a published author, insulated from anything she doesn’t want to hear/read. The shippers, like me, are humans behind their screens, and we all just want to get along with each other, so getting accused of endorsing real life problematic things bc of their ship preference is something shippers are very likely to respond to. Shipper attention, while not as juicy as attention from Anne Rice herself, is a reasonable substitute for the “Marges” feed on.

Ultimately I am a #Ship and let ship person and I support the shippers of problematic fictional ships and the fans of problematic fictional characters.

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Hey I’m planning on writing a VC fic with Armand Daniel and Marius any advice on how to get their characters right?

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I can’t advise you, as we all have our own ideas about the canon characters, and “how to get them right,” a phrase I disagree with. Have you read all of canon? Do you accept all of canon into your personal headcanon? I wouldn’t force you to accept it all, I don’t accept it all. If we’re working from different text acceptance, there can be no universal “getting the characters right” authority (not even Anne Rice herself “gets the characters right,” according to the opinion of some of her fans). As an example, if I accept everything in The Vampire Armand but you don’t (or you haven’t read it yet), your fic probably won’t include/address anything that happened in TVA. That’s your prerogative as a fic writer. You are not required to include/address anything that you don’t want to.

Since no one can decide definitively if you’ve “gotten them right,” don’t be afraid to get them WRONG! Get them however YOU see them, Anon. And it’s not really that black and white; I’ve read fics where there was characterization I loved, and some that seemed out-of-character to me in the next paragraph (but again, that’s just ONE PERSON’S opinion. Another reader might have loved/hated all of it). It could be that you struggle with dialogue in general, so it might be out-of-character now, but you’ll improve by writing more fics. And like a painting, it may not be your failure; you might purposely invest more attention/effort on some aspects of your fic than on others, again, that’s

your prerogative as a fic writer. 

”Summer’s Day,” about 1879, Berthe Morisot (left) and “Portrait of Mrs. A. Lawrence Rotch,” 1903, by John Singer Sargent (right).

^Here’re two paintings done in different styles, Morisot’s is Impressionist, and Sargent practiced his own form of Realism, with some obvious Impressionist influence. An essay could be written comparing/contrasting these but briefly: just between these two works, you can see that Morisot was less interested in capturing the details that Sargent has, but both portraits are evocative to me in their own way. There’s a breathless kind of anticipation in both. They both look like women I would love to get to know better! The Sargent one might have been painted on commission, idk about the Morisot one, but in the case of a commissioned work, there is a dialogue between the artist and the commissioner. When I’ve commissioned fanart, the artist will aim to meet my requirements, but ultimately, art is nebulous, and I’ve always been pleasantly surprised by the choices my commissioned artists make within the limitations of the request!

Bc here’s the thing, fanfic is for free. And no matter how you write them, even if you just copied text out of canon, there will be ppl who will tell you you’re getting the characters wrong. Again, the actual published author “gets them wrong,” according to some fans. So if she can’t write her own characters “right,” then, like Anne herself, you’re not obligated to appease anyone except yourself.

Here are a few “advice” pairings, with narrow-minded advice first and open-minded advice second.

  • “Make sure to include a paragraph about Armand’s physical appearance or else he’s not really in it!!!” – Dye Armand’s hair purple. Have Daniel comment about how striking the color is against his skin. Write Daniel as a POC. Write Armand as if he was able to age, make an AU so that Daniel is the vampire who approaches 50 year old Armand. 
  • “Make sure to address Marius’ anger management issues!!!” – Write an AU where Marius didn’t turn Armand, maybe they met as vampires on more equal footing. Write that Marius gets angry about dumb inconsequential things like being stuck in transit and the other two tease him about being so impatient.
  • “Make sure that if there’s any dubious-consent or non-consensual sexual content at all, to condemn it in the narrative!!!!” – Have a PWP with BDSM with all 3 of them that fails laughably and one of them storms out, naked and angry. WHY NOT???

Fiction is a space where we can explore anything and everything and it does not harm anyone.

Inevitably, some ppl won’t like it no matter what you do, so please yourself.

Whatever you’re writing: Write the fic you want to read! Here’s your permit:

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All that said, I do ask for specific and trusted ppl’s advice when I’m writing a fic if I think they’ve got good ideas bc they’re invested in those characters, maybe they’ve even written fics about those characters. I’m working on a fic that I had to ask a few ppl privately about bc I wanted to bounce my ideas off of them, and gain a little insight as to my specific fic situation, but I wasn’t looking for their permission to write what I’m writing. 

Stuff I personally would like to see explored re: Armand, Daniel, and/or Marius:

  • some backstory on Daniel’s mortal life
  • some Difficult Conversations in any combination of those three characters discussing their past relationships
  • some closure on things, agreement/forgiveness may not be possible, but some closure would be great.
  • some fluff in any combination of those characters, they’ve had so much suffering already
  • I always like the fanon that Daniel has glasses even though he doesn’t need to wear them now, bc reasons
  • give them roles in a story that move the plot along substantively

WRITE THE FANFIC YOU WANT TO READ.

Speaking to the connotations of race, it’s interesting that people in the fandom want to make Daniel the black character when for so many years, a goodly bulk of this fandom has only attributive Daniel as having any value to the story when he’s attached to Armand, or made him the butt of crazy jokes. It seems awfully suspicious to me that the “best’ character” to be cast as a POC is the one so many have considered the throw-away one. If that doesn’t speak volumes, I don’t know what does.

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Race. *sigh* I keep revisiting this ask, and each time I do I feel more and more like I don’t want to engage as there are so many landmines. 

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I didn’t get into fandom for landmines, and so I maneuver around them, and the reason I’m answering this at all is for those who are thinking about topics like these but are too afraid to respond for fear of the landmines.

I’m responding bc I feel like if sharing my perspective could make just one person feel better about this, then it’s worth the risk and worth my time and effort.

THAT SAID, I’m not sure which post you’re referring to, Anon, but there was one a few weeks ago in which another Anon asked/said:

I’m up for Daniel being Black in the adaptation. His race isn’t mentioned specifically in the books, and we need diversity in an ocean of white Eurotrash fops! I don’t see any reason why not and Bryan cast the lead in American Gods as black so I’m hopeful to see some good changes in Anne’s work. What do you think?

^Here’s one person who wants to cast Daniel as POC/Black, and they seemed to be accentuating the positive. They want diversity. They compared him to the lead from American Gods being cast as black. I don’t watch that show so I don’t know if that character is the “butt of crazy jokes” or only has value being attached to another character, but it seems to me, at face value, that this Anon thinks that Daniel being cast as POC/Black is parallel with the lead of another series being cast as POC/Black, this Anon states that as being a good change.

I answered that Anon more in depth with some historical context, so you can look at that response, but basically, Anne is open to casting POC for VC characters. I’m open to it! I trust in whoever is running the adaptation to produce it in a tasteful and respectful way, and updating it to be inspiring and satisfying to a wider audience would be great, however that happens. 

TL:DR;  I think people do care about Daniel, and would love to see a character that they care about, like Daniel, be cast as a POC as a good thing. Daniel is not perfect (none of them are! Except Mojo) but he has many positive traits: he’s clever, resourceful, sassy, charismatic, capable of loving and being loved in return. I think people would love for the adaptation to show that those traits can absolutely be found in POC, too. We do need more positive representation like that.

Reminder that this is a fandom blog for entertainment and I am not here to make/agree/disagree with political statements that are potentially inflammatory. Not my focus. But I will address your points to some extent.

Speaking to the connotations of race, it’s interesting that people in the fandom want to make Daniel the black character 

I haven’t seen an enormous amount of people in the fandom wanting this change, I think one blog is dedicated to it? I’ve mostly seen interest and support for casting a POC as Akasha, since that casting in movie!QOTD was pretty widely praised. I see people talking about considering casting other characters as POC, but I don’t see anyone other than Akasha as being the main character of interest for that. 

One could criticize that choice as being bad, as it could imply that POC/Black women are villains, bc she was a villain in that movie. That’s not the message I took from that casting choice, but one could easily argue that that was a message being sent (and therefore, Bad representation, even though she was cast as a character in a position of power).

when for so many years, a goodly bulk of this fandom has only attributive Daniel as having any value to the story when he’s attached to Armand, or made him the butt of crazy jokes. 

“for so many years” covers decades of time, these books have been around since 1976. Reflecting back to when I started in this in 1993 (which was already almost 20 yrs late), I can’t say that any character has escaped being the butt of crazy jokes in all this time, and with the nature of shipping, many of the characters seem to only have value when attached to other characters. 

Re: shipping: it seems like ships are more prevalent in fanworks than fanworks portraying the characters on their own, and so it may give the impression that fandom “prefers the characters as part of a ship,” but personally, I think of shipping as the collision of 2 (or more) characters, to see how they’ll interact: in happiness, sadness, anger, all the different ways! Writing about a ship can allow a fanartist/writer/etc. to explore how each member of the ship will react in

actions/words/etc.

to the other’s actions/words/etc. So I can see how you might get the impression that “Daniel only has value as being attached to Armand,” but I think it’s more about how Daniel presents himself when he is with Armand, that’s what the fanworks are exploring.

Along those lines, however you interpret that ship, the bulk of Daniel’s post-IWTV “screentime” was in QOTD, with Armand, and after that, Daniel doesn’t get much action in canon until the more recent books (but even then, not as much as in QOTD). As the fandom does tend to ship Daniel with Armand, and plenty of it that I’ve seen (especially in fanart) is somewhat fluffy, again, I can see why you might get the impression that “he’s only valued when attached to Armand,” but really, I think Daniel/Armand shippers are fascinated with the dynamic of that ship. It’s rarely fluffy in canon. So some of them make fanworks for wish fulfillment, and that’s valid. 

Personally, I don’t think Daniel’s only value to the story is when he’s attached to Armand, but again, he spends most of his time in canon with Armand, maybe that’s why the fandom doesn’t tend to write him on his own time separately. 

Re: being the “butt of crazy jokes”: As a side note, when we joke about characters, that’s not to say that that’s always a negative act. Look, we’re currently dragging Lestat bc he said IN CANON that he loved being called a “slut,” which is really more of a layered commentary on shaming people for enjoying sex/intimacy, and he refuses to be shamed for it, he’ll turn around and take it as a compliment instead 😉

I’ve been in this fandom for over 20 years and I don’t think Daniel has gotten the worst treatment in those terms, it seems to me that there have been waves of love/interest/disdain/mockery of most of the main (and side) characters at different points in time, and from different groups of fans. So that may be your experience, and that’s absolutely valid, but I haven’t seen it that way. Of all the characters, I think Lestat probably gets the worst of being the butt of crazy jokes and he likes it bc bad attention is better than no attention.

It seems awfully suspicious to me that the “best’ character” to be cast as a POC is the one so many have considered the throw-away one. If that doesn’t speak volumes, I don’t know what does.

I’m sorry, but I have to disagree here, too. I wouldn’t say he’s a throw-away character for the whole fandom. There are Daniel RPers. As I’ve mentioned, it happens that he doesn’t have a lot of action in canon other than in books 1 (as just the interviewer, but it counts!) and 3, so the fandom does not have as much canon to work with as they do for other characters.

And again, re: the fandom choosing him as “the best character” to be cast as a POC, that seems to be Akasha, from what I’ve seen. 

Relevant to this discussion: there was a wave of love for Nicolas a few years back, for the same reasons, I think, that  @mendedpixie7 felt about Adam in Only Lovers Left Alive:

The reason I love Only Lovers Left Alive is it shows that a character (Adam) can be severely mentally ill, in this case depressed and suicidal, and still be seen as lovable and capable of being loved and loving in return without being “cured” of their mental illness, and that a mentally ill character can have other attributes aside from being mentally ill while still showing the impact being mentally ill has on his personality.

Adam from OLLA is an extremely important character to me you guys.

Similarly, I think people would love to see a character that they care about, like Daniel, be cast as a POC as being POC is often portrayed negatively in media. Fans of a POC being cast as Daniel would want (I’m paraphrasing from above): 

to see

Daniel

showing that a character can be POC, in this case black, and still be seen as lovable and capable of being loved and loving in return, and that a POC character can have other attributes aside from being POC while still showing the impact being POC has on his personality. 

Daniel Molloy from VC is an extremely important character to me you guys.

When vampires live together why are they considered to be lovers? Like Louis/Armand and Marius/Daniel. Are they feeding on each other intimately?Could they be just friends?

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^YASSS TO ALL THIS, PREACH.

I obviously endorse all of this but I think these are major points that speak directly from my heart, as well:

monstersinthecosmos:

Hi!

So one of the things in VC is that these vampires are like sappy emotional goofballs and there’s a reoccurring theme of love transcending traditional boundaries. It’s also implied over and over that they experience love on a level that is unfathomable to us as MERE MORTALS because of their big magical vampire brains.

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I do think their relationships in general can be looked at on an individual basis and their history dictates the sort of tone there—I think they’re all just super extra and will always refer to companions as lovers even when there are dramatic qualitative differences in their relationship dynamics—like for example Louis & Armand strike me as a more traditional couple model, vs. Marius & Daniel strike me more in a father/son way because Marius takes care of him. Though, it’s a little hard to speculate because we don’t see a lot of them together. But! In this world, with the love transcending boundaries blah blah, it doesn’t mean they aren’t lovers in this universe and this context, because you see the same with Louis & Claudia or Lestat & Gabrielle. And even though there are a lot of areas in the stories where sex is implied through symbolism and coding and whatever there isn’t literal sex, so when you take sex out of the equation it’s a little easier to apply these broader definitions of love to these pairs of characters. And you see it over and over again that they never just like someone, or have a crush on someone. They’re just constantly ~IN LOVE~ with each other and they’re all so obsessed with how beautiful everyone is lol.

But also re: blood/sex !!!

Something I noticed in VC fandom is that there’s sort of a spectrum of how literally people take the blood=sex thing, and when you also combine that with the spectrum of people’s sexuality and sex positivity I think we come up with some varying interpretations of these stories and characters. I’m not here to say that anyone else is wrong. This is a place where interpretation is key and it’s something so personal and that people feel so strongly about that I don’t think authorial intent often changes anyone’s minds. And having the freedom to interpret literature and art the way you want to is something that makes it enjoyable. 

Again, I think we have to take individual characters or ships into consideration with some of these questions. Like, were they feeding intimately? Until Louis v.2.0 showed up I don’t think he was. Marius and Daniel feed on each other but Marius is always very generous with his blood with his lovers because he wants them to be strong and safe. I don’t think the vampires can share blood WITHOUT it being intimate but it’s important to decide what you think “intimate” means. Because bloodsharing can be compared to sex, which is intimate in its own way, but i also see it being akin to breastfeeding, and that’s super intimate too. We have ways of knowing that these two things are different versions of intimacy and obviously the vampires would, too. But then, again, there’s the idea that the way they love each other is so much bigger than just being about sex, and their definition of intimacy is something much more infinite than we can comprehend. It’s also worth acknowledging that when they share blood they’re literally opening up a stream of their own thoughts and emotions, which is something that we IRL only experience on an implied or symbolic level when we have intimate moments with real people in our lives. So their version of intimacy is a lot more complex due to the literal mechanics of what happens to them and also that they’re canonically just super emotionally intuitive.

But like, for me? I’m happy to play along and suspend my disbelief when I read VC and accept that I have a tiny pathetic human brain and that they’re experiencing something too profound for me to understand. I accept that they love each other on a deep level where it doesn’t matter if their relationship resembles a traditional couple vs a parent and child. That Louis can consider Claudia his lover or that Lestat can consider Gabrielle his lover because of the intimacy they share is a symbol to me that they are above petty human labels, because they are not human.

Every now and then I see discussions where the blood is reduced to sex on such a literal level and it strikes me as being really crude, and to me it does a huge disservice to one of the things I love the most about this series. And that’s, yknow, like I said, something that can vary to a degree between different people. I’m a very sex-positive person, but I’m also asexual. I don’t like reducing intimacy to meaning sex. So “lovers” to me doesn’t necessarily mean sex partners and it also doesn’t necessarily mean blood sharers, either. Like we know that Louis wouldn’t take blood from the others, which tells me he didn’t try it with Lestat or Armand pre-2000. That doesn’t mean he and Armand weren’t lovers. I think it often just means “I love this person, therefore they are my lover.”

You could take the ~just dudes being bros~ attitude to them or to any set of vampires living together if you really wanted to but I really think they’re such sappy motherfuckers that they wouldn’t spend so much time around each other if they weren’t in love, with or without blood to complicate it. I also think the overuse of the word lover is an expansion on romance and not a reduction of it, so in any case where a romantic pairing is ambiguous because of the language I think it’s always better to err on the side of them being in love. 

Having said all that I will also say I’m super dying to know more about what goes on at Trinity Gate with Benji and Sybelle and we just DON’T HAVE ENOUGH INFORMATION TO KNOW. I’m curious to see if the coven/family-like nature of the household diffuses the intensity between them, especially if Louis is around to keep Armand occupied. 

So! Anyway.

Kind of a hard question to answer because I think you have to take everyone on a case-by-case basis but I would definitely say that they all feel really big passionate feelings and don’t have casual crushes on each other. If they’re living together they’re probably in love with each other, in some ridiculous vampire way that doesn’t really make any sense to me.

Why the fuck do I talk so much when I answer asks idk but 

TLDR I think companion and lover are often used interchangeably in VC because these vampires are clingy dramatic saps and that they have a really liberal definition of “lover” and apply it in ways that we don’t as real people in the real world.

Something I noticed in VC fandom is that there’s sort of a spectrum of how literally people take the blood=sex thing, and when you also combine that with the spectrum of people’s sexuality and sex positivity I think we come up with some varying interpretations of these stories and characters. I’m not here to say that anyone else is wrong. This is a place where interpretation is key and it’s something so personal and that people feel so strongly about that I don’t think authorial intent often changes anyone’s minds. And having the freedom to interpret literature and art the way you want to is something that makes it enjoyable.

…

But like, for me? I’m happy to play along and suspend my disbelief when I read VC and accept that I have a tiny pathetic human brain and that they’re experiencing something too profound for me to understand. I accept that they love each other on a deep level where it doesn’t matter if their relationship resembles a traditional couple vs a parent and child. That Louis can consider Claudia his lover or that Lestat can consider Gabrielle his lover because of the intimacy they share is a symbol to me that they are above petty human labels, because they are not human.

^Now, if anyone wants to define the vampires with human labels and definitions, that’s absolutely fine. You do you! 

I’m going to stray slightly from Anon’s ask, and focus more on the larger aspect of categorizing/analyzing//judging/defining, bc looking for concrete differences between (A)“they are considered to be lovers” when (B) “they could be just friends,” and really, I think like all questions directed at clarifying VC ships/characters/plot/etc., it’s in the eye of the beholder/reader’s interpretation of the text and discussing it with others, if they choose to, like in sending an ask to me, @monstersinthecosmos​, or anyone else.

On Analysis:

When Anne Rice said, “You’re interrogating the text from the wrong perspective!!! ;A; ” we all laughed. We still do, bc it sounded then, as it does now, at face value, like she’s a child stomping her feet and telling us we were judging her works objectively unfairly. That any negative or critical reviews could be labeled altogether as bullying, more or less.

…But really, over time, I’ve come to see this statement more as: “If you interrogate/criticize/analyze the text with a lens/rubric that the author was

(a)

not aware of, (b) not subscribed to, or (c.) was not a consideration during or preceding the time the work was written, you are very likely to find the text disappointing, and it will fail your judgment.” I think that Anne took it personally when fans were disappointed bc of this, but she steadfastly refused to accept guilt for disappointing them, and I admire her for sticking to her guns on that. There are fans who want her to include more POC, there are fans who insist that Lestat is straight, there are fans who want her to denounce all the VC and witch books bc they depict vampires and witches in a favorable light, etc. Since she cannot please everyone, she pleases her biggest fan only: herself.

I found a rubric for grading art (from thevirtualinstructor.com), probably for students in elementary or middle school, probably between 6-13 years old, I assume “S” means “student” and “T” means “teacher” but I can’t find the actual post about it, ANYWAY…

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^So this is ONE example of a means of judging a work, and honestly, for a child, I’d say it’s sufficient. I would rearrange and add a lot more it to judge an adult, but it would depend on the adult. Maybe something like Effort, which might seem to only apply to children, would still be a factor for someone recovering from surgery or doing art as therapy.

ANYWAY, so if you reread @monstersinthecosmos​‘s post there is so much to consider, especially re: the way we define “lover” and “companion” being very much in line with what I’ve added here, considering the rubric/lens from which we judge VC. 

The questions then become:

Are you looking to be disappointed? Are you looking to be impressed? What do you need from a fictional work? 

^And I think the answers to these will be different for everyone. In my experience, it’s been more enjoyable for me to take VC for what it is, and take pleasure in the acceptance, corrections, and/or manipulations (like AUs) of canon to fandom through fanworks and respectful discussion. 

To my mind, when the word of the author is not even the authority, and there are unreliable narrators, no one’s opinion supercedes anyone else’s, no matter how hard they might try to push you to agree with them. Curate your experience with fandom and your own headcanons.

Why does most of the fandom like Armand? (I’m on Memnoch The Devil, and I know what the next book is) He cut off Nicolas’s hands, killed Claudia, and kills suicidal people. (I’m not trying to shame anyone, I just want to understand why.)

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It seems like you have sort of made up your mind about him, Anon, listing those crimes 😦 If you don’t like him for those reasons, or any reasons, you are under no obligation to change your mind, but I appreciate that you want to understand why ppl do like him.

If you’re on Memnoch then you know most of Armand’s story, and you know that Armand’s book follows MtD. His book goes into his story more deeply, and from his own perspective, and I think that’s part of what ppl like about him. His narration is different than Lestat’s (most of the books are Lestat’s POV or his recording of what others tell him), and I think some Armand fans are just glad to get out of Lestat’s head!! lol. 

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[^X Bjorn Andresen, a fan fave as Armand]

In TVA, you get more detail and scenes from Armand’s mortal life and fledgling life, and some of what follows. You get how he feels about seeing Lestat in MtD and a moment of intimacy between these two alpha personalities who have had a simmering competition between them since they met.

Some ppl find that Anne Rice has done Armand a disservice in his own book by having him claim any amount of agency in what happened between him and Marius. That’s up to the individual reader to decide, what they think of that relationship, regardless of what the author’s agenda was when she wrote it. 

I do think some of the things Armand says in TVA are

somewhat

exaggerated because he is telling the story to David, who was flirting at him really hard in the beginning of that book, and I think Armand wanted to remind David that he’s not the cute bb 17 year old he appears to be, and not to mistake him as such. So the scene describing Claudia, I’m not sure I trust Armand that he really did anything to her other than do nothing when the other vampires of the theatre put her in that sun-well-thingie.

I wouldn’t say that most of the fandom likes Armand. I think that certain characters have waves of popularity, and some are talked about more than others at any given time… there was a period about two years ago, I think, that ppl were all over Nicolas, discussing him, theorizing that he might have survived, etc. 

Tom Hiddleston is talking about Loki here, I think, but the concept is captivating, and it applies to Nicki and Armand:

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[ Tom Hiddleston quotes Josephine Hart, gifs from here X]

Nicki seemed to be one of the only canon characters that explicitly had a mental illness, and that was during a time on tumblr that ppl were being more open about having mental illness and identifying with fictional characters who also had mental illness.

We are drawn to characters who have traits like ourselves, and/or those that survive, and overcome obstacles when they are faced with challenges like our own.

I think Nicki also represented some of the disillusionment ppl were feeling about the world at large at the time.

It might be that Armand has taken on more of that role, some fans also headcanon that Armand has mental illness(es) and he can also represent fans who feel disillusioned about the world at large, since the world has been so cruel to him. 

More on all that later*, so I can address the other part of your statement now.

He (1) cut off Nicolas’s hands, (2) killed Claudia, and (3) kills suicidal people. (I’m not trying to shame anyone, I just want to understand why.)

^Ok, I’m going to address each of these things, since you want to understand. I’ll take it at face value that you’re not trying to shame anyone for liking a fictional character who does those things. 

Whether you want to agree with my explanations is entirely up to you. If you judge him by human, real-world standards, yes, each of these things is maniacal and horrible. So my explanations are for FICTION.

NO CUTS WE LONGPOST LIKE MEN.

^I have to stop doing that I’m going to get in trouble.

First off, I would like to point out that I don’t think canon indicates that he takes pleasure in any of those things individually, except for the normal pleasure of that last one, vampires love feeding, there’s no getting around that 😉

(1) He cut off Nicolas’s hands, 

This seems like fairly standard vampire punishment from a coven master. @damnitarmand, an Armand RPer, responded very well to this question, I’ll reblog it momentarily.

Armand may have been trying to help Nicki in the ways he knew how. Armand had been a coven master for hundreds of years, dealt with madness from many ages of vampires, maybe this was something that helped in other cases. It could be seen as cruel from our mortal standards, but maybe that was considered a reasonable form of treatment for vampires.

Eleni writes to Lestat in TVL: 

“[Nicolas] must be watched constantly so that he does not enlarge our ranks. His dining habits are extremely sloppy. And on occasion he says most shocking things to strangers, which fortunately they are too sensible to believe.“ In other words, he tried to make other vampires. And he didn’t hunt in stealth. “In the main it is Our Oldest Friend [Armand, obviously] who is relied upon to restrain him. And that he does with the most caustic threats. But I must say that these do not have an enduring effect upon our Violinist.”

“…I tell you these things not to haunt you but to let you know that we do our utmost to protect this child who should never have been Born to Darkness. He is overwhelmed by his powers, dazzled and maddened by his vision. We have seen it all and its sorry finish before.”

^So clearly, Armand does everything he can before punishing him so viscerally, and Nicolas really was getting out of control. Eleni even notes that Nicolas is not taking to vampirism very well and would never have been turned by the coven, they’ve had hundreds of years to learn about who can handle it and who can’t, and they have their own system of psychological care, such as it is.  

When Armand does take his hands, yes, it’s bc

Armand

has been pushed to being “maddened by the excesses” of Nicki! Not maddened for nothing. There is no indication that Armand takes pleasure in it. Further proof that it’s a standard punishment is when Eleni explains to Lestat that it’s temporary:

“It has come to the worst, as I feared. Our Oldest Friend, maddened by the excesses of Our Violinist, finally imprisoned him in your old residence. And though his violin was given him in his cell, his hands were taken away. But understand that with us, such appendages can always be restored.”

^So for all of the above, I don’t consider Armand’s cutting off of Nicki’s hands as a crime but as a merciful thing that’s standard procedure, albeit probably a last resort, for restoring vampire sanity.

(2) killed Claudia, 

^Armand tried to get Claudia a new adult vampire companion when he pressured Louis into turning Madeleine. Armand even admits to Louis that he himself takes the responsibility for Madeleine:

“ `But if it’s any consolation to you … surely you realize I had a
hand in it.’
” [Armand said]

`That I did it to be free of Claudia, to be free to come to you …
yes, I realize that. But the ultimate responsibility lies with me!’ [Louis] said. 

“`No. I mean, directly. I made you do it! I was near you the night you did it. I exerted my strongest power to persuade you to do it. Didn’t you know this?’ Woe.

I bowed my head. 

‘I would have made this woman a vampire,’ [Armand] said softly. `But I thought it best you have a hand in it. Otherwise you would not give Claudia up. You must know you wanted it…

“ `I loathe what I did!’ I said.
” `Then loathe me, not yourself.’

^To me, Armand’s plan was to have Madeleine take Claudia off of Louis’ hands, so that Louis could still communicate with Claudia but not be responsible for her anymore. 

I do think that the theatre vampires, led by Santiago, had other plans in mind, and that Armand had to cut his losses and let them kill Claudia since they were bloodthirsty for it. It’s exciting to kill vampires, as Santiago has said. Armand probably knew also, as a coven master, that it was a crime to turn a child anyway, and that she would have died at some point anyway (she might have even taken her own life). 

(3) and kills suicidal people.

^In canon, yes, it’s described as Armand calling to those who wanted to die. Whether they could have been saved by actual medical care, or psychological therapy, I don’t think that’s addressed in canon. So here you might have an actual crime, of him killing innocent ppl who are consenting to death but not really capable of consenting to death.

This is his approach to the dilemma of being a vampire and needing to kill ppl on a regular basis, there’s a few options for doing it in canon:

  • Take lots of Little Drinks, if you’re capable of that, and not kill anyone, but spend like 3x the amount of time every night having to find that many more ppl to feed from. For awhile, it seemed like Louis wasn’t capable of this, since he gets so caught up in the swoon that he can’t stop. He might be able to now, tho.
  • Kill evildoers – bc “they deserve it anyway!” and you’re “protecting the innocents!”, but you still have to struggle to find the ones that deserve the death penalty, do drug dealers deserve to die for selling pot? In TOBT, Lestat kills someone who’s a serial elderly rapist/murderer, one would think that evildoer is evil enough to deserve the death penalty, but everyone is entitled to a defense attorney under U.S. law. 
  • Kill indiscriminately, anyone who crosses your path, and don’t judge, bc they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time – Louis’ method bc he won’t judge evilness, lacking the Mind Gift but also, he doesn’t think he should be making that choice.
  • Kill innocent ppl – not very nice but some vampires do that. Claudia did.
  • Kill ppl who want to die as a form of assisted suicide; they are consenting to death – Armand is doing this, at least mentioning it in TVL and again in TVA. Medically assisted suicide is a very controversial thing but it is legal in some countries, and it reduces the prolonged suffering of terminally ill ppl. From wiki: “The three most frequently mentioned end‐of‐life concerns reported by Oregon residents who took advantage of the Death With Dignity Act in 2015 were: decreasing ability to participate in activities that made life enjoyable (96.2%), loss of autonomy (92.4%), and loss of dignity (75.4%).”

Armand’s killing method described in TVL:

[Armand] had perfected the act of
killing beyond the abilities of all the Children of Darkness that he knew. He
had learned to summon those who truly wished to die. He had but to stand near
the dwellings of mortals and call silently to see his victim appear. Old,
young, wretched, diseased, the ugly or the beautiful, it did not matter because
he did not choose. Dazzling visions he gave, if they should want to receive,
but he did not move towards them nor even close his arms around them.
Drawn inexorably towards him, it was they who embraced him. And when their warm
living flesh touched him, when he opened his lips and felt the blood spill, he
knew the only surcease from misery that he could know. It seemed to him in the
best of these moments that his way was profoundly spiritual, uncontaminated by
the appetites and confusions that made up the world, despite the carnal rapture
of the kill. In that act the spiritual and the carnal came together, and it was
the spiritual, he was convinced, that survived. Holy Communion it seemed to
him, the Blood of the Children of Christ serving only to bring the essence of life
itself into his understanding for the split second in which death occurred.

I think Armand’s assisted-suicides were mostly emotionally-driven, I don’t think canon goes into much further detail about it. I would think that Armand is killing ppl who are truly beyond saving, and the time period in which he’s doing it is not one that handled mental healthcare the way we do now. So at that time, that was probably not considered a crime, but a mercy killing.

Currently, his decision to kill “those who wish to die” (and possibly, he influences that on them), yes, he might be killing innocent ppl who might have had a chance at living otherwise. 

Armand in TVA, more modern-era, is now killing an evildoer/drug addict: 

Now I had to have blood. There was no time for the old game, the game of drawing out those who wanted to die, those who truly craved my embrace, those in love already with the far country of death of which they knew nothing.

…The next [victim] was a common desperate youth, full of festering sores, who had killed twice before for the heroin he needed so badly as I needed the doomed blood inside him.”

We don’t have as much information on whether he’s more of a “kill the suicidal” or “kill the evildoer” in current canon. In the TVA example above, the victim has killed “for the heroin,” so he’s an evildoer anyway.

*SO WHY DO PPL LIKE ARMAND??? O____O

Why do ppl like peanut butter? Or not like it? Some ppl are allergic to peanut butter. There are so many reasons to like a character! 

We’re drawn to characters for any number of reasons!

I think this current crop of tumblr VC fans is talking about Armand more bc he is also a victim of CSA, has undergone an enormous amount of trauma in canon, and survived it, even becoming a coven master in the cult that brainwashed him for centuries. It’s inspiring to see a character carry the weight of all that damage and seem to overcome it and, even, become strong and confident, and even happy, at least sometimes. There’s no denying there’s a lot of sass in Armand. 

Maybe fandom wants to embrace him and comfort him and give him all the happiness they would want themselves to have. It’s easier to project it onto a fictional character, and see it reflected back when you imagine him, in fanart or fanfic. 

Imagining Armand enjoying himself, exploring technology with Daniel or playing videogames and elbowing Lestat to try to mess him up on coven game night, all of his past is still inside him but he’s trying to make the best of things, trying to have a family, such as it is, trying to find his purpose in life. Isn’t that what we’re all looking for? A home. And I think we like to see characters like ourselves find home and feel wanted, at least some of the time.

Do you have any writing tips? I’ve just started writing Loudtat fanfiction, and I’m not that good at writing. Is there any do’s and don’t’s?

Leave a comment

Hmmmm well that’s really tough! FIRST OF ALL to quote @monstersinthecosmos on a similar post: 

Dude! Just write some stuff. 😀 😀 This is a teeny little sleepy fandom and it is so thirsty for more content, just do it! You can do it! We all want you to write fic!!!!!!

…Fanfiction is awesome to flex your writing muscles a bit and get some practice in, and it’s helpful because it invites attention and feedback. It’s also easy to apply flash fiction or drabbles to fanfic because we don’t need exposition and backstory. Like, yeah! WE GET IT, WE KNOW! Quit dicking around and just jump into the story, we already want it! This is so valuable when it comes to just getting WRITING done and you really don’t even need a plot. You can elaborate on the teeniest mental images, headcanons, goofy or angsty situations, and that’s all it has to be! No one expects it to win a Pulitzer, it’s okay if it isn’t perfect!

In fact!!!!!!!!!! It shouldn’t be perfect! And you are not going to get better if you do not start somewhere!

I still get really nervous when I post fics and I doubt my abilities BASICALLY CONSTANTLY ALL THE TIME LOL but good and bad feedback are imperative to honing your craft and learning your strengths and finding things to fix. PLUS LIKE, it can really help to motivate you if you get some people on your side who like what you’re doing! Like I am consistently sappy and overwhelmed by the response to my fics and it’s what keeps me writing. 🙂  🙂  🙂  🙂

Anyway idk man, here’s an ungraceful dismount to my post lmfao but, listen!

Write! Do it! Share it with us we are thirsty.

^*APPLAUDS* Rules are made to be broken. Write the way you want! I had a teacher who told me that to begin a sentence with “And” was blasphemy, illegal. punishable by DEATH practically, but I know Anne Rice does it OFTEN, in published fiction, so that teacher was wrong. Maybe she was just trying to start us off with the rules so we could then break them. Probably that.

BTW I’ll reblog a really good graphic I saw once that described different types of fanfic.

So my advice?

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Even though I write fanfic myself, I have my own tastes about it. Writing fic is an art in itself, you’re creating smtg, like sculpture or cooking, and as such it’s very subjective. There are courses taught on writing in schools at all levels, books written about writing, so while I can’t give you a thorough and objective answer in a short blog post… I can give you this much and NO CUTS WE LONGPOST LIKE MEN.

For me, writing is about 1 or more of these basic setups, sometimes combined and interwoven:

  • (a) presenting a problem and exploring it,
  • (a) presenting a problem, exploring it, and (b) offering a solution,
  • (a) presenting a problem, exploring it, (b) offering what the author feels is a BAD solution and (c.) showing the consequences of that bad solution.

^That’s all you really need. Everything else is in service to that. Even the fluffiest fanfic has some issue, even if that issue is just, “What shirt am I going to wear tonight?” Mundane, probably, but hey, it’s still a decision that needs to be made! 😉

~My-own-taste-based advice on writing fanfic~

  • Fluff tastes better with at least a dash of angst, Angst tastes better with at least a dash of fluff, etc. A friend of mine took a cooking class and was told that salt brings out the flavor in other ingredients. I definitely think that corresponds with fic. I’m not saying to use every ingredient at your disposal, but in an angsty scene, can you toss in one character trying to placate the other by doing smtg fluffy, idk, bringing them flowers? 
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^X A flower offering might get rejected by the recipient in the scene (or it could provide ammunition!), but just the act of doing that can enhance the scene by so much. I MEAN LOOK AT THIS PICTURE. Is there not a rich story here??

  • Use epithets sparingly. PLEASE just use their names if you don’t want to use their gender pronouns. I can’t tell you how far it kicks me out of a fic when I see “the elder vampire” or “the brunette” so many times in close proximity bc it fixates the reader on those characteristics, which generally have nothing to do with the scene itself. YES I KNOW SHE’S OLDER/YES I KNOW HER HAIR IS BROWN. SO WHAT?? Even when it’s two characters of the same gender in a scene alone together, your reader can usually figure out by context which “he” you mean when you write: “he reached up and touched his shoulder” One way to do it is by leading with one of the characters in the para, so it’s clear who’s doing the actions in it, ’[Name 1] tentatively went in for a hug. He reached up and touched his shoulder.’ In the next para, the other character can take over the action. ’[Name 2] batted the offending hand away. “Don’t touch me!”’
  • “Said” is not a curse word. Go ahead and use other words for “said,” but too many ‘“Oh!” she cried’ ‘“Oh!” she moaned’ also kicks me out of a fic bc I become more aware of the writer sitting there trying to impress me. “Said” is just a notification that it’s a spoken word, let me breeze past it, it’s okay, really. Don’t let your “said” substitutes do so much of the work that the words of dialogue should be shouldering.
  • Purple prose when it matters. A fic with all dialogue and little descriptive details can read like a report. If you’re going for that, good! But purple prose adds texture and helps immerse the reader. Readers don’t need it in every para and every line of dialogue, it tends to slow down the action. It can be used to great effect, maybe describing the interior of a room gives a nice pregnant pause in the dialogue to increase the tension. Just don’t drown the reader with it unless you’re doing it for a reason.


To return to my earlier point, What is the purpose of your fic? Even if you’re just aiming for the fluffiest fic, I feel like it gives it a little extra substance if there’s some underlying thing/moment you’re exploring. 

I did a fic about Louis, Lestat, and Claudia getting ready for Halloween, but I also included some exploration of Claudia getting upset and missing her mother, and that led to her being informed that Louis and Lestat also missed their own mothers. It’s one of those defining but subtle moments in everyone’s life, when you realize your parents were also children with parents of their own. So the fic was not just about the premise “dressing up for Halloween,” but what other things that could stir up, and what we can reveal about the characters whether or not it was explicitly given to us in canon. In this instance, we didn’t get this in canon, this was in the interstices of canon.

Anon, start slow, dip your toe in, look at fic you love and try to figure out what makes it so good for you! Don’t be afraid to fail.

I’ve collected some somewhat more objective things in my #on writing tag, so you might try there, but again, those are things that I probably agree with, too 😉

My mom got me into The Vampire Chronicles a couple months back, and now I’m looking for the fandom. Why is the fandom so small? Why is there so little fanfiction? I often have to write fanfiction that I want to read. (Which is fine by me, it’s just I’m not that good at writing.)

Leave a comment

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. 

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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:

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^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. 
  • There were official VC graphic novels for a few of the first books and they are hilarious and cringey. Here’s Louis feeding on Daniel jeez… Looks like he wants a lick of the trachea first?
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  • 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?
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  • [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.
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B) The fanfic IS out there.

  • CURRENTLY, the fandom is experiencing a revival, we liiiiive!
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  • with the recently published books and AR no longer fights the fanfic writers! Woo!
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  • 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.