sorry to bother you in your inbox but the Marius fandom hate has always irritated me
yes. he committed what we would consider sex crimes. as someone who has survived a sex crime:
in the original iwtv novels, louis owns slaves (!!!) and in the tv adaptation canonically targeted and murdered over a hundred young gay men (!!!) and is presented as sympathetic and understandable. either we go with "this show is about a lot of very fucked up people" or we judge them by modern standards and condemn every single one of them as an unrepentant monster. make up your minds! sexual violence is either unforgivable or a narrative tool but I'm not fond of the way the fandom switches back and forth depending on whether they like the character.
You know, I had a brainwave the other day about the way fandom approaches Marius vs Louis, so I looked up the history of the age of consent in the US on Wikipedia and it was straight-up fucking jawdropping. Walk with me on this real quick.
(CW for discussion of child sexual abuse, sex trafficking, and historical violence)
According to Wikipedia:
"In 1880, the ages of consent were set at 10 or 12 in most states, with the exception of Delaware where it was seven."
"By 1920, 26 states had an age of consent at 16, 21 states had an age of consent at 18, and one state (Georgia) had an age of consent at 14." (I searched for a reliable source to tell me what the age of consent was in 1910, when TV!Louis' story starts, but the closest i could get was a note that it was still 12 in 1890.)
"Until the late 20th century many states had provisions requiring that the teenage girl must be of "chaste character" in order for the sexual conduct to be considered criminal." (Of chaste character means, in other words, "unless she's a whore, because then it's her own fault.")
The last state to remove the chastity provision from its laws was Mississippi. IN 1998.
I think people don't realize how quickly the world has changed, and how RECENT some of these social changes and shifts in attitude are. I also think people are not very educated about the past. I think they don't realize how pervasive and violent extreme poverty used to be -- you hear about people sleeping 10 or 15 to a room, and you think that's some kind of extreme outlier or that it only happened in a few cases. People just do not understand how fucking precarious life used to be. For many, many women and girls (and young men and boys too, let's not forget about them), prostitution was about keeping a roof over your head and clothes on your back and food in your family's stomachs.
Show!Louis' story begins in 1910. Look at the dates in the bullet points again. Think of what he says about himself in the confessional scene -- his coldness, his ruthlessness, his self-professed willingness to look away from the hurt he's caused. Think about a 14 year old girl coming up to him and saying, "Mr. du Lac, my family's hungry. I need work." You really expect me to believe that businessman Louis, methodical cruelty Louis, capitalist Louis (who stuffs cotton in his ears so he doesn't hear the cries of the people he's harmed and exploited) wouldn't look at her and see a pile of money, a business investment, instead of a person? Do you think he's going to turn her away, or do you think he's going to shrug and say, "Okay, here's the rules if you're working for me." Her age would not even register to him, because it's absolutely normalized and legal in his social and historical context. She's poor and desperate, and her options are this or literally starving on the street and dying, and he knows that. He's got his own family to take care of, and he's going to do that no matter what it takes.
And yet Lestat sees his coldness and ruthlessness and loves him for it, because that's what is going to make Louis a good vampire. The resounding, repeated message we are shown over and over again (both in the books and in the show) is that a monster can be loved, can be lovable, can be deserving of our compassion, can be sympathetic (as you say), can be given the space to be understood.
Louis IS deserving of our compassion and understanding, simply because he's a person. He is interesting and complicated and he is the product of his circumstances -- and that is neither an excuse nor a condemnation. It is just a neutral fact: He is (as we all are) the product of his circumstances. We are able to make space for Louis to be a whole person, and we are even able to love him in his most cruel and ruthless moments, just as Lestat does, because they are part of the sum total of who he is. We're able to have these deep and nuanced and DIFFICULT conversations about him. We are able to hold him up and study the ways in which he has moved on from his past, and the ways in which he hasn't. We're able to draw a throughline between his exploitation of women in his mortal life and what he's doing right now with Regina in 3x05, and we're able to nod and go, "Yeah, that's mega fucked. Louis PLEASE go to therapy, PLEASE leave that girl alone."
And we still love Louis. We love him even when he's doing something which I had to watch with my hands over my face while I was peeking through my fingers and making this face: 😬😬😬
But for some reason which I find genuinely mystifying and fascinating, Marius inflames controversy and polarizing morality in a way that Louis simply doesn't. I don't know why. Is it because Marius is more longwinded and pompous and a lot of people find that irritating, so it's easier to condemn him for his crimes? Is it just that Louis looks more Exquisitely Beautiful And Sad when he's doing his crimes? Is it the racism of shrugging off book!Louis owning slaves but being unable to shrug off Marius doing it because book!Armand is white? Is it just that it's easy to hate a character who isn't in the room (as with the show until last week) because then we have a blank slate we can make into a strawman to easily condemn instead of a complex character we have to actually do the hard, uncomfortable work of wrestling with?
I don't know, I don't have an answer. But I've seen more hate for Show!Marius merely muttering "Rotten boy" under his breath than I have for Louis touching Regina's hand when she was frozen/unconscious and couldn't consent and had been given the impression this arrangement wouldn't involve physical intimacy -- a literal physical violation. It doesn't matter whether touching her hand is "not that big of a deal" or not, it's about the fact that he did it to her when she couldn't say no, that he WAITED until she couldn't say no before he acted on what he wanted. But two grumbled words from Marius is worse and needs loud, performative, casual hatred?
That's odd to me. That is odd. Does it puzzle you the way it puzzles me? It makes me feel really curious about the subconscious thought processes that people go through, and whether they are aware of the fact that they're apparently basing 90% of their so-called moral judgments on "Do i LIKE this character?" If you like him as a person, then you can understand him and find him sympathetic no matter what he's done, right? And if you dislike him as a person, let's burn him at the stake? Are we able to sit with the fact that that's maybe an impulse we should unpack before the day we're eventually summoned to jury duty?
It's not wrong to like a character who has done bad things, wicked things, monstrous things. I think in modern literature, which is so anxious about the audience's moral judgment, we're really losing out on the BENEFITS of exploring dark, difficult, violent topics through fiction. We're so worried about the state of our mortal souls (or whatever the leftist """""progressive""""" version of that is) and whether other people perceive us as A Good Person(TM) based on what we read and whether we enjoy the right character, and we are less concerned with our actual personal growth and our ability to exercise empathy and compassion towards our fellow real-life human beings.
In A Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, Jonathan Gottschall posits that the neurological function of stories is basically to be a flight simulator for the human brain. When you experience a story, your brain processes it with the same neural pathways it would use to process a real event. The benefit of this, the evolutionary reason why that helps you survive as a barely-upright ape on the savannah being hunted by lions, is that if that real event ever happens, you don't freeze in place -- you can just ACT, because you've already spent the cognitive energy deciding what to do. You've already got the script to fall back on.
You see this a lot with people saying "What would [blorbo] do in this situation?" or "By reading this book, [blorbo] inspired me to be able to solve [other problem]." Fairytales warn us about making bargains with the fae or with dragons or the devil because lawyers exist and will take advantage of loopholes in what you say. And in flight simulators, trainee pilots often go through recreations of real-life air disasters so that they've got the groundwork laid just in case something bad happens up in the sky. Probably won't be the exact same thing, but it could be something similar, and the more air disaster simulations you've run, the more tools your brain has, and the more you've practiced making mistakes where you won't face tragic, fatal consequences.
If you love Louis despite the many and varied #YIKES things he has done in the books and the show, that's a GOOD THING. It means that you have a healthy and robust sense of compassion, that your empathy muscles are strong and well-exercised. HE is a fictional character, but the benefit to YOU in YOUR very-much-real life still exists: You got practice caring about someone even though they did bad things (a necessary fucking life skill if you aren't a fascist), and you got practice holding back your revulsion long enough to at least understand where he's coming from, even if you don't approve. Loving Louis doesn't say anything about Louis -- it says something about US, about OUR hearts and OUR souls and OUR ability to confront conflict and discomfort with understanding and compassion. And every time we expose ourselves to fictional conflict, it makes it easier to confront real-life conflict without freaking the fuck out, because somewhere in the back of our minds, a neural pathway is whispering, "Oh this isn't a big deal, actually, I've seen worse. I can handle this calmly and competently. We've run flight simulations that were way worse than this."
You will probably never have to talk to a guy who committed mass murder by calmly decapitated a bunch of guys with a machete, but you WILL at some point have to ask your roommate to stop leaving their wet laundry in the machine until it stinks, or something of comparable frustration. A person with a highly-exercised sense of compassion will be a little more well-equipped with the tools to do this in a way that is kind to both themself and their roommate. And that's how you become a better person.
Loving Louis is a good thing and it makes you a better person.
Loving Armand is a good thing and it makes you a better person. (Still with me, right? No problem?)
Loving Lestat, Loving Daniel, Loving Gabrielle/a -- this is a good thing and it makes you a better person. (Still with me?)
But if I follow that with, "So therefore Loving Marius is also a good thing and it makes you a better person" then I will get instantly crucified in the town square. We've decided that he is uniquely and irredeemably evil, the very very worst monster out of all these monsters, despite the fact that if you were to write down a chart with everyone's list of crimes side-by-side, the concrete Things Marius Has Actually Done are... pretty comparable to all the other vampires, actually? Including Louis, whom we categorically love. Everyone has done A LOT of murders, book!Louis owned slaves and show!Louis was a pimp, Gabrielle/a was a terrible mother and has repeatedly abandoned her son, Lestat has committed rape and turned a child, Santino is a kidnapper and so is Armand, Pandora is a Roman (derogatory), EVERYBODY'S stalking each other...
Marius' only unique crime that distinguishes him from all the others is Being An Insufferable Yapper, and as you can see from this tumblr post, so am I. So what are we doing here? What was all this for? I still do not have answers.
Should people love Marius the way they love Louis, or at least give him the same degree of compassion and grace and understanding? Eh. I don't care. I am not invested in telling people how they should feel.
I do wish they wouldn't put their casual performative hate in the tags, though, because it would be nice if there was even the slightest chance in hell of the rest of us being able to have an interesting, complex conversation without having to wade through a bunch of people being pointlessly loud and not saying anything of substance.
