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Oh my gosh, well… I waited 6 hours, but there was no further message, so I’m just going to answer now.

“I don’t know how to feel about Anne…”

Respectfully, I’m not going to tell you how to feel about Anne Rice. I must regretfully decline.

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I know how I feel about her: that she has given us a wonderful gift and that she has committed no actual crime for which she would deserve to be boycotted. We can poke fun at her, at her books, we can critique them, bc she has set herself and her works for public review. We can feel distrustful for her past behavior towards the fandom and distrustful of her handling of her own characters. Those are all within our rights as a critical public.

I always recommend that people read the books and draw their own conclusions about them on their own merits. It’s part of what makes fandom great, that we can agree on some things, disagree on others, and have lively discussions about it all.

What I will tell you is that you don’t have to like Anne Rice to read her stories. To my knowledge, she has not committed ANY REAL LIFE ACTUAL CRIMES. People boycott actual criminals bc we do not want to financially or morally support them. IMO, Anne Rice should NOT be lumped in with REAL LIFE ACTUAL CRIMINALS.

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It is not a crime that she waged war on fanfic. It was incredibly painful and it shattered the fandom, and drove us all underground for years ;A; But she was within her legal rights. Keep in mind that fandom was not really socially acceptable or understood like it is today, authors understand now that fanworks are types of fan engagement with canon and each other. She seems to understand that now, or if not, she at least ignores fanfic.

It is not a crime that she waged war on reviewers. Also painful and oppressive at the time, AR used to be very offended by critical or negative reviews of her books, and would sic her People of the Page on reviewers. Again, she now seems to understand that people are within their rights to critique her work and she can ignore them.

What she writes is not an actual crime. She has problematic elements and explores taboo subjects in her writing, refuses any editor’s advice, refuses anyone’s idea of what she should write. That’s her prerogative as a ‘music maker,’ as a ‘dreamer of dreams’ (<– like Willy Wonka!). To argue that any of her writing is a crime is, to me, a form of censorship, and I do not believe in censorship of fiction.

^^^^None of these are Real Life actual crimes. Personally, I may not accept all of her writing as canon, and I may poke fun at it, too, that’s my prerogative as a reader.

The idea that all art should be entirely unproblematic all the time…kills art. Like, I really don’t think we as readers have some all-solemn duty to constantly make sure we’re only having the ~right~ kind of fun.

But that’s just my opinion. You’ll have to draw your own conclusions and decide whether you want to financially/morally support Anne Rice by buying/reading her books, or not.

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stellasgibson:

Tumblr is so exhausting. Not everyone or everything is bad. Everyone and everything eventually fucks up and says/does something they shouldn’t but not everyone and everything should be written off because of those things. It’s so, so fucking tiring to read people having to constantly justify their enjoyment of someone or something. Liking someone or something does not mean you condone everything about it or them. 

Cutting out someone or something that is important to you or has a positive impact on you just because someone on Tumblr says they’re problematic or digs up old receipts is so upsetting and unnecessary. You do you. Enjoy what you enjoy, recognize the problems it inevitably has, but don’t feel pressure to give someone or something up if you don’t want to and if they make you happy. It’s fine. You’re allowed. 

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me, banging your pots and pans together at 3am: the assumption that liking problematic characters means you share their views is toxic. people should not have to constantly defend their views simply because they enjoy a character of questionable nature.
you, attempting to wrestle them from me: indeed, but there comes a responsibility with enjoying problematic characters and it is on those who consume that media to recognize and constantly acknowledge the faults of it rather than sweep them under the rug with a general “i know it’s problematic don’t worry”.
me: it seems both our sides of the argument are valid and hold merit.
you: will you please get out of my house now
your neighbor, shouting through the wall: however when the person enjoying the problematic material is constantly harassed and called out for that content and has to face regular demands to justify their appreciation of that media, then the other party needs to step back and ask what they even want from this confrontation they keep perpetuating. they need to ask themselves if they will be satisfied with any given answer and if not, they need to disengage and deal with their own issues instead of forcing other people to answer for them.

Hi! I was just hoping to clear things up. I follow Anne on FB and today I saw a post about Lestat. And one of the replies were something along the lines of Lestat was evil, a pedophile and incestuous. This wasn’t an accusation and the person didn’t post it in attempt to call out Lestat, it was like causally stating facts, I just wanted to know how true is this? I just finished IWTV and I LOVED Lestat, but pedophilia/incest are really 2 themes in lit that make a book difficult to enjoy for me.

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I’m sorry that you may have to stop reading the series. 

Whether there is pedophilia/incest in the novels depends on your definition of those things, and also your headcanons about the characters. 

Low-level spoiling here as a kind of trigger warning:

Incest: Technically, almost every vampire is made by a vampire to be their companion. Makers and fledglings have a parent-child relationship because of the nature of the Dark Gift. So every relationship that continues from that point is technically incestuous. Louis is Lestat’s child in this way.

The person who commented in that thread was probably referring more specifically to Lestat’s relationship with his mother, Gabrielle. While they do not have penetrative sex, they are far more intimate than a mother and son should be. I won’t spoil it further for you. You have to read TVL.

Pedophilia: There are several underage fictional characters throughout the series and they are sometimes spoken of in a sexualized manner (Claudia, for example), and/or have non-consensual, dubiously consensual, and consensual sex (well, a child cannot truly give consent, you would have to read The Vampire Armand to better understand the consent from the underage characters) with adult fictional characters. 

If those topics make it difficult for you to enjoy the books, then I think you might consider not reading them further.

I found this great essay by Warren Ellis. It might help you. 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.“

“I don’t understand.” How many times have you read that in conjunction with a violent act?

“I don’t understand why he did it.” Or “I don’t understand why this happened.” Sammy Yatim, shot dead and then tasered by police on a Toronto streetcar, and even the chair of the Police Services Board asks, “How could this happen?”

….Here in Britain, our weakling government is attempting to launch a web filter that would somehow erase “violent material” from Internet provision — placing it, by association, in the same category as child pornography. Every week seems to bring a new attempt to ban something or other because it’s uncomfortably or scary or perhaps even indefensibly disgusting.

….we generally demonize violent acts and violent work. We make them Other, and we just distance ourselves. They are Other, and they didn’t come from us, and we’re just going to stand over there and shake our heads sadly. And, moreover, anyone who gets closer to it in order to experience or understand it must be a freak.

…The function of fiction is being lost in the conversation on violence. My book editor, Sean McDonald, thinks of it as “radical empathy.” Fiction, like any other form of art, is there to consider aspects of the real world in the ways that simple objective views can’t — from the inside. We cannot Other characters when we are seeing the world from the inside of their skulls. This is the great success of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter, both in print and as so richly embodied by Mads Mikkelsen in the Hannibal television series: For every three scary, strange things we discover about him, there is one thing that we can relate to. The Other is revealed as a damaged or alienated human, and we learn something about the roots of violence and the traps of horror.

… 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.”

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hello-reylo:

jonahryan:

shobogan:

Okay, while I’m on a fucking role here:

Fandom is not activism.

Stop condemning and judging people for their fucking ships. What you like to read about does not reflect what you care about, approve of, or want for yourself in real life.

Can people be skeevy about ships? Certainly. Are there fandom trends that reflect the racism and sexism of society at large? Definitely! Does harassing individual fans for what they like help any of that? No. 

Promote the ships you like, instead of using them as a stick to beat other people with. 

Meanwhile, people have been into fucked up ships forever, and somehow the internet hasn’t burned down in an inferno of abuse apologism. 

And do you realise what you’re saying, when you talk about young girls and women being drawn into abusive relationships because of the fic they read, or the art they draw, or the meta they write?  

You’re telling them it’s their fault.

THAT. LAST. PART. I’ve been saying this for ages. Women and girls do not have to be protected from their own fantasies, and telling women that they are putting themselves at risk for liking “impure” ships or fictional relationship dynamics is 100% victim-blaming bullshit that is also pretty fucking condescending. 

“Fandom is not activism” is now my life motto.

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joons:

i’ve been thinking a lot about why people don’t get creepy ships and automatically expect you to apologize for liking them

and it’s just that the appeal, to them, is “oh, wow, the phantom kidnapped christine / the villain decided to spare this other character / the vampire snuck into her room, how romantic” and they think that’s super weird and indefensible 

but that’s not how people genuinely think about it? at least not me and most people i know who enjoy those kinds of tropes. we’re interested in characters who don’t have a healthy concept of love, who don’t understand it, making the greatest gesture they’re capable of within the timeline of their stories, recognizing that they Feel a Feeling for someone else and struggling to articulate it. most of the time they are Horrifically Bad at this, but it’s fascinating to watch them bump up into the limitations of their emotional capacity, even as their heart is SWELLING OVER with something they can’t name. their morality doesn’t preclude them from finding someone they admire. we like to hope they’ll figure it out in time and understand how to handle their feelings in a good way, and if they don’t, imagining a scenario where they do and things end happily isn’t hurting anyone. people’s knee-jerk response is “you’re romanticizing, you’re excusing” but all that’s happening is people are recognizing that a character is having a deep internal conflict with themselves and rooting for them to make good choices. i don’t think kidnapping is romantic, i think it reveals that a character who has romantic feelings doesn’t have a guideline for how to express them, and that’s automatically fascinating to me. 

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filthybonnet:

corvidium:

Am I the only goth who is really uncomfortable with “Hannibal” due to the horrible transmisogyny in “Silence of the Lambs”?

I think you have to consider Silence of the Lambs was written in 1988 and the knowledge the general public had about transsexuals let alone their attitude towards them was a whole different ball game than it is today. Thomas Harris, for the crassness on how the subject is treated, does a decent job of explaining that being transsexual does not make one a serial killer considering the time era. 

All great works of art are products of their time and will reflect that. You learn to acknowledge without it getting in the way of your enjoyment. Just like other great works of literature reflect the racist and sexist time era they were written in but that doesn’t devalue their significance.