cloudsinvenice:

i-want-my-iwtv:

Um… so many reasons… and I haven’t read that book in awhile so I’m not the best resource for this. The fandom tends to hate on Benji bc:

• He’s a shameless Gary Stu
• He’s a child, maybe 12? Marius knows better (without spoiling anything, I’ll leave it at that).
• He smokes (not a character FLAW per se, but it seemed to be a cheap way to make him look “tough kid” or whatever)
• Emotionally/intellectually he’s flawless! He’s such an angelic person! He can do no wrong! Such characters are inherently unlikable maybe bc we can’t suspend disbelief for someone so PURE OF HEART. 
• The way he talks seems oddly teenage? I remember someone saying that as a complaint.

Mostly we hate him because (and this can all be applied to Sybelle equally) of his existence, how he came into Armand’s life, and what happened to him seemed wildly out of the VC universe and out of character for everyone involved.

Here have some fanart:

Co-existing by luizagm2

It’s also the handling of race and race relations, I think. Benji is literally a 12-year-old Arab child that Sybelle’s abusive, controlling brother bought to be a companion to Sybelle. The family had been visiting the Holy Land when the parents got killed in a car crash, and so Sybelle was depressed and wouldn’t play the piano (she was a concert pianist and her brother was isolating and exploiting her like Colonel Parker on steroids). He got Benji to look after Sybelle, and engineer her behaviour, knowing Sybelle would do as Benji asked (i.e. look after herself, play the piano), and he hit Benji anyway. 

It’s hard to explain the clumsiness of the writing, but it’s like… there’s this patina of attempts at evocative detail re: Benji’s clothing and the references he makes, but essentially the book sets up this situation where the quirky Arab kid gets bought by rich white Americans, and that’s bad because the situation is abusive, but then Armand saves them from the evil brother, so then everything’s YAY! And Benji’s such a funny little character!

I’d put it down to Anne Rice being kind of poor at handling gritty “realistic” modern situations (especially since the entire existence of Sybelle and Benji, and their entire circumstances, are there purely because she needed to retcon a character death away), and shoehorning them into her very heightened, stylised, dark fairytale, mostly historical books. So Benji having apparently been bought is talked off in hushed tones like Sybelle knows it’s a bad thing, but nobody seems very concerned to look into his origins or try and put him in touch with his family or anything. I mean, this is a kid who’s been taken across international borders illegally, presumably with fake papers! And now he lives with Sybelle and it’s all quirky and funny how he smokes like a chimney and goes out in the middle of the night in New York City and somehow this is all just… charcaterful! And okay, because he’s happy with Sybelle and Armand!

To be fair, a lot of this is basic Anne Rice tropes: a poor or ordinary child gets swept up by someone rich and given all the education/resources/stuff money can buy, and they are super-happy together and it’s a beneficial arrangement for both parties. Her books have a ton of this rags-to-riches stuff. But I think what makes it unsettling is when she crosses a cultural and racial border, with all the inherent echoes of slavery and colonialism that entails…

“Not, please understand, that I love Benji no less. It’s only that I haven’t the same overwhelming protective feeling for him. I know that Benji will live out a great and adventurous life, no matter what should befall me or Sybelle, or even the times. It’s in his flexible and enduring Bedouin nature. He is a true child of the tents and the blowing sands, though in his case, the house was a dismal cinder block hovel on the outskirts of Jerusalem where he induced tourists to pose for overpriced pictures with him and a filthy snarling camel.

He’d been flat out kidnapped by Fox under the felonious terms of a long-term lease of bondage for which Fox paid Benji’s father five thousand dollars. A fabricated emigration passport was thrown into the bargain. He’d been the genius of the tribe, without doubt, had mixed feelings about going home and had learnt in the New York streets to steal, smoke and curse, in that order. Though he swore up and down he couldn’t read, it turned out that he could, and began to do so obsessively just as soon as I started throwing books at him.

In fact, he could read English, Hebrew and Arabic, having read all three in the newspapers of his homeland since before he could remember.

He loved taking care of Sybelle. He saw to it that she ate, drank milk, bathed and changed her clothes when none of these routine tasks interested her. He prided himself on the fact that he could by his wits obtain for her whatever she needed, no matter what happened to her.”