Anne Rice: The Srsly Wat round-up

[rebness]

A few weeks ago, I posted some absurd ranting from everyone's favourite Diminishing Returns author wherein she wondered how to 'stop manga'. I promised some hapless flist person (I forgot whom) that I'd post some of her greatest hits. Except I realised something as I picked out some great examples of the craziness on that wall... the fans on there are often way worse than her.

Here, have some of my favourite posts. Plus the Dreaded Nicki One.




Gagging right now. This was my favourite childhood poem. You've tainted it, you brown-noser.





*Wordless hand gestures*




To be fair, he was asking for it.

 



Man. I really hope people come to my Facebook page to tell me all about smiths.






This guy is the most annoying person on Facebook. He's trying to promote some failtastic vampire novel but does it by having three troll accounts who constantly reply to his posts with 'omg Lucian/Den I'm running out to buy your new book right now.' Today, he really, really wants to know what the biggest scandal of the church is.





Do not get me wrong. Louis is ~totes~ my favourite character in the entire VC but this does not diminish Nicki! I regard Nicki as hugely important to the whole Louis/Lestat tempest and believe that what happened with him haunts Lestat deeply. Why is he reduced to some dim 'adolescent'? I guess Our Conversation was about My Chemical Romance and smoking weed. >:|

 


Anne kept calling Tea Party members Tea Baggers. One of them objected because they didn't like the name. She Googled it. :D





Reads like a list of works plagiarised for the later books.

Comments

[timeofnoreply.livejournal.com]

....you don't mess with a Nicki stan on her Bad Lady Week. You just don't. :P

[rebness.livejournal.com]

Nicki stans: terrifying to the rest of fandom, tbh.

It's those creepy Marius stans we have to watch out for...

[iskra667.livejournal.com]

What's a 'stan'? I guess I'm 70 too! :D

[timeofnoreply.livejournal.com]

A 'stan' is a really rabid fan - its origin comes from the Eminem song "Stan". Becky and I were using it jokingly in reference to myself, I can assure you.

[rebness.livejournal.com]

This! ^

[timeofnoreply.livejournal.com]

Hey, someone has to counteract all the Lestat/Louis nonsense out there! :-P

Besides, I loved Nicolas when nobody else cared one bit about him. He's always been my favorite. i_sanguinity and I actually started this fascinating RP, postulating that Lestat did send him off to Haiti before the vampires got to him. I love thinking about things like that, if only because it would have been such a shake-up and prevented so much nonsense.

Marius/Armand stans honestly freak me out. I was weirded out by the whipping scene when I was 14, I'm weirded out by it now, and nothing's ever going to change my opinion that it is not sexy at all.

[rebness.livejournal.com]

Hee! It keeps the fandom interesting, for sure.

I know - I remember you championing him years ago - I'm really happy with all the fic and all the love for Nicki of late. You should feel proud. XD

Ugh, I read The Vampire Armand when I was a teenager. And my parents are Uber-liberal. They really, really didn't care about anything I said or did but I was terrified they'd crack open TVA and judge me. The whipping scenes felt so horribly abusive, but as if they written to titillate me, the reader. Never found them sexy. Ever. D:

[ukashi-goshi.livejournal.com]

Speaking of Marius/Armand...

Don't you find it incredibly suggestive that AR seems to be considering the beatification of JP2 a scandal equal to, um, CLERGY SEX ABUSE???

Yes, quibbles about sainthood are just as important as...raping children from a position of ultimate power and authority and then systematically covering it up, protecting the rapists, and ensuring they'll be in a position to commit more rapes.

Hark hark, do I hear the purr of the creeper!van's engine? >:(

[rebness.livejournal.com]

It's really strange that she considers sainthood as huge a scandal as, you know, childrens' lives being destroyed. It's bizarre.

And I know that it's currish to equate fiction with reality, etc, etc. but maybe stop positing that children are sexy and people will take your ire more seriously, Anne.

The creeper van doth appear! D:

[ukashi-goshi.livejournal.com]

maybe stop positing that children are sexy and people will take your ire more seriously, Anne.

I don't know how much truth there is to this, but all the standard guidelines about protecting your kids from internet pedophiles say that predators will often send kids child pornography in an attempt to convince them that it's normal and that everyone else is doing it.

*ahem*

(Excuse me while I go throw up now...)

[pandorasblog]

This is always the danger of Big Interesting Debates About Moral Issues. People for whom they are NOT a painful everyday reality get to stroke their chins and postulate about some abstract wrong being as bad as an actual one.

[rebness.livejournal.com]

That's true enough.

But I wonder if she realises how harmful it is? You make a really interesting and excellent point below about why it's perhaps horrible to see such things in TVA but not her Sleeping Beauty series.

My God, I read the most outlandish, abusive stuff in SB but that's the genre. I came into it expecting it and yes, I agree: you allow pr0n to be much more elastic in terms of morals.

I found it very, very hard to stomach in the context of characters I know and care about and can't explain how creeped out I was by TVA.

A member of my family was abused and to think of them picking up that book and reading those passages upsets me. Because it's somehow normalising things in a way that SB wouldn't. I despise censorship of literature (I must rant to you about university students at one university trying to get The Handmaid's Tale banned but when an author doesn't present any ambiguity - a la Nabokov - and tries to titillate me with something I find deeply uncomfortable, I do wonder at her loudly shouting about the sexualisation of children.

It's just... hypocritical. :|

[pandorasblog]

I found it very, very hard to stomach in the context of characters I know and care about and can't explain how creeped out I was by TVA.

That was my reaction - it felt profoundly OOC; it raised questions that it then insisted on ignoring; and for AFAIK the first time in the series, it generated a huge moral dilemma inadvertently. Normally these are books that pick obsessively over the right way of being; of treating others. It feels like a betrayal not to do that here, especially when the book is playing with things resonant to people's lived experiences.

One very significant thing in this is how hugely, hugely popular Armand is. I remember a poll for favourite character on the_elitist_vc which he won by a landslide - and there was no shortage of Lestat or Louis fans there. I wonder how much of his popularity is because the VC are books that are often discovered by, and taken to the hearts of, people who feel like outsiders; people whose lives have been difficult.

And if you're a young reader like that, and your life has been to a large extent determined by adults in positions of semi-benign or officially benign power over you, there's a lot of potential for identification with Armand. And it's natural at that stage to look for someone older to guide you, see your potential, whatever.

If that relationship turns into something self-serving for that mentor-figure, something abusive... it can be hard to see, especially if it also contains positive, nurturing elements, and especially if the younger/more vulnerable person has been conditioned by previous abusive dynamics.

So in Marius/Armand, there's this incredibly seductive dynamic which contains corruption from the get-go, yet it's almost an afterthought; a decoration. :/

[pandorasblog]

I still wish she'd carried on writing erotica on the side; maybe it would've kept that stuff out of the VCs. It's like she pasted the moral relativism that kinky books rely on (this is all fantasy in which everything is allowed, which suspends questions of consent and morality) onto the Chronicles, which are books about people's relationships and vulnerabilities and how people use and abuse each other, and never even noticed that she was patching together two incompatible moralities. There are consequences to having a father figure also be a lover, in a book that tries to depict emotional realism; whereas those consequences do not figure in a stroke book.

[ukashi-goshi.livejournal.com]

...you don't mess with a Nicki stan on her Bad Lady Week. You just don't. :P

You too, huh? WRONG TIME OF THE FUCKING MONTH! That and I have had SO many people pissing me off lately it's not even funny. So just insert giant howl of RAGE here.

"Nicholas" PFFFT Swear to god in fic sometime I'm going to have him verbally disembowel someone who misspells his name, just to make up for this...

[timeofnoreply.livejournal.com]

Dude, when I RPed him for a message board, he'd refuse to continue the conversation until you corrected the spelling of his name.