Gently Play On Your Heart Strings

Yes I’m

Yes hmmms ow

Eh

Helluva Boss + Text Posts

This is harder and harder for audiences to grasp, and I sympathize, honestly, because we have become more keen over the last couple of decades, and we've noticed how many stories have been sold to us as an ideal we should reach for that would be harmful to us if we did so - stories intending to propogandize values centered around control or subjugation

but you have to learn to recognize when that's what is happening and when a work is simply clumsy, indulgent fantasizing shared with others, and how to settle your jerking, trigger-happy reflex when you notice something in a work of fiction that shouldn't be emulated in real life. That's not what fiction is. That is not, at base, its purpose or intent.

recognizing that a situation would be abusive if it were real does not mean that all stories where those situations happen are inherently ABOUT abuse. Unless we have reason to believe the writer is indeed trying to propagandize societal control on some level, then the story is about what the writer says it's about, because it's not real

there's no one with agency involved, there is only what the fictional fantasy writer wanted to happen in their fictional fantasy world. You being able to identify "if these two people existed this relationship would be abusive" doesn't change the intent of the text. It's GOOD that you can identify that! It's actually excellent! It's a necessary component to experiencing fiction and keeping yourself safe in the real world, but it doesn't change the intent of the text

You are absolutely, Capital R Right: if these people existed and treated each other this way, it would be abusive. But they don't exist. They are Anne Rice's Barbies, and she makes them kiss rough and mean and murderous and underage and incestuously, but through it all they remain Barbies, and she had zero responsibility to explicitly designate those Barbie relationships as abusive for the benefit of a reader who feels like they can't trust a text unless it spells things out for them in real-world morality parables.

Credit: not raynna on TikTok

While I understand working off the assumption that there’s ALWAYS a perpetrator/victim dynamic in cases of incest (especially parent/child incest) and I think that’s basically always the irl situation, I also feel like in this specific case with how VC vampires work, the issue is more complicated and can’t be seen as fully parallel to human cases of incest.

Firstly, I would say that the idea of Gabrielle grooming Lestat in any way is not really compatible with book canon. Lestat’s wound here is clearly neglect from his mother. She simply was not giving him the time and attention required for parenting, let alone grooming (and seemingly wanted him FURTHER away from her which is kind of the opposite of grooming). I don’t think there’s any reason to believe there was a sexually inappropriate or even emotionally incestuous relationship between them as humans, nor do I think the physical incest would have ever occurred without the addition of vampirism to their relationship.

The emotional distance between them and their forced isolation as humans never fostered a typical mother/son bond between them to begin with, and the extreme dynamic shift the takes place when Lestat becomes Gabrielle’s maker completely recontextualizes their relationship within the framework of VC vampirism. The fact that it took place to begin with perverts the mother/son relationship irrevocably. The shaky-at-best parent/child relationship gets eclipsed immediately by the inherently sexual act of turning and the parental role of a maker to a fledgling. The maker/fledgling dynamic is already pseudo-incestuous by nature.

This total breakdown of established roles and boundaries for them and the new lack of the outside pressure from their human situation allows them to redefine their relationship to each other essentially however they please, healthy or not. Lestat has never been able to connect with Gabrielle as a mother and son. It’s not within either of their emotional abilities to act as vampire father and daughter. Their personalities and the intensity of their ties to one another would never allow for friendship. They see each other as mutual extensions of the same being. Parental boundaries never existed for them because that’s never how they related to each other.