with a burning passion

The rise of AI slop & the endless waves of books that feel written to spec by people who are terrified of their own audiences has given me a new appreciation for Anne Rice. It's not even that she didn't give a fuck; she cared passionately and was famously, publicly hurt by the reception of at least one of her novels, but she never let that distract her from her mission of writing whatever the fuck she wanted. No one could write Anne Rice's books except Anne Rice. They are singularly, entirely hers and while I won't pretend she was a perfect person or it's wrong for readers to be offended or uninterested in spending their one and only life on earth reading something that offends them, I also think her work is valuable and humane and also often hilarious and it's not a crime to have a muse you adore.

i love when people talk about media "normalizing: whatever their personal sexual bugbear is because i just think hey remember when game of thrones was the most popular tv show in the world for like eight years and somehow failed to normalize incest? but i mean maybe a twitter artist with 2,000 total followers is gonna tip the scales

AMC really struck gold with the unreliable narrator idea because now people will insist that any flaw in the storytelling is actually a genius premeditated reflection of a fallible narrator, any pacing issues are actually a genius premeditated reflection of a characters psyche, and any lack of character development is actually a genius premeditated reflection on a characters refusal to face their own trauma, and having cheap looking production is actually a genius premeditated reflection of a characters memories, and any unwarranted deviation from the source material is actually a genius premeditated lie that will be proven false at some unspecified point, and any poor handling of sensitive subjects is actually a genius premeditated commentary on the characters own failings, etc, etc.

I know this has definitely been said before by many people significantly smarter than me, but Death Note remains philosophically and thematically undefeated if only because people keep watching the series about how you cannot use The Book That Kills People for good and it will inevitably corrupt you, and say "Nah, I'd just do it right." That people keep saying this despite just how obviously you cannot Just Do It Right really does further the series' messages about punitive justice and the state monopoly on violence.