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

[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. :/