#vraik

Just One More Page

To: @Atowerdweller and @Vraik

From: @mx-indrik (Khristian)

22. your favorite part of canon that everyone else ignores

I guess my answer to this is more like "my favourite part of canon that I feel is deeply unexplored", and that has to be the night of the Cow Palace concert in TVL - what happened in the early hours, where Loustat were reunited? did Lestat have to persuade Louis to change into a stupid matching costume, or did he turn up like a cute little groupie? what did the band think of Louis and how did Lestat introduce him?? - and then, what happened in the last late hours, where Lestat and Louis and Gabrielle were all hanging out together? what did Gabrielle have to say about Louis, meeting him for the first time? what did Louis think of Gabs after reading Lestat's book? and why on earth did Gabs and Louis decide to sleep separately from Lestat???? I want to know EVERYTHING

24. topic that brings up the most rancid discourse

@vraik replied to your photoset “is this… not just IWTV though.”

OBJECTION JESS THAT SONG IS ARMAND AND LESTAT THROUGH AND THROUGH

THE OVERSIGHT IS A WASTE. And yet Louis is STILL the only character to so much as pay lip service to “I know that was wrong now” for like a single second, meanwhile there sits marius like “anyway then I had my slaves pack up my stuff” and nobody says jack on a character or meta level. (Like obv all the major dudes are racist up to me including Daniel, they were all white when they were alive. But Anne isn’t capable of even beginning to consider that)

i def think louis and the wasted potential of his racism is still better than whatever was going on with marius. i guess it gets me because louis is actually a good character and that the racial aspect was considered in the first place meant in another world there was genuinely a chance of it being explored in a substantial way instead of weak lip-service that still manages to be racist.

Corny I don’t go here but I’m pretty sure you’ve drawn me a Lestat so ��✨

Seconding Sailor J; I think you might also like Kyle Kallgren/Brows Held High and Dan Olson—they’re friends and colleagues of Lindsay’s and also film essayists (Jourdain Searles, who’s Kyle’s partner and appears in some of his vids sometimes, is also a v solid podcaster and writer). Oh, and GenghisKait (and Shaw) are a pair of Canadian YouTubers who mostly LP old adventure and horror games. They’re really soothing and charming.

Thanks for the question! First off, though, as a disclaimer: I am nowhere near an Expert on Anne Rice Fandom Shenanigans, as in the relative scheme of things, I am an infant in this fandom’s timeline (I’m twenty). Asking the lovelies, @vraik or @anton-mordrid or @i-want-my-iwtv would be best, as they’re Certified and Respected Olds and were around in the Dark Ages of the Internet,  for the Spec Massacre. Certified Olds or people with more Know please add to this post if I’ve missed something or to add your two cents.That being said, the reason why Anne Rice is a bit quarrelsome (I don’t want to use “cr*zy”) is because, well, the kindest way to put it is that she’s a bit of an ego-maniac. 

During the fledging days of fan-fiction on the World Wide Web, Anne Rice declared that all fan fiction was stunting to her writing process, illegal, immoral, (*insert here*) and all fan-fiction of her works should be PERMA-BANNED 5EVA. To the point she had a team of lawyers sent Cease-And-Desist letters to fan-fiction writers and FanFiction.Net pulled all works in the Vampire Chronicles tag and still doesn’t allow works to be published under that category. That’s also where the putting-disclaimers-before-fics originated from, btw. You can read about it on the FanLore.org page. 

It’s funniest because Anne Rice literally wrote Jesus Christ fan-fiction and Sleeping Beauty BDSM smut AUs. (Both of which are awful, sorry, I’d rather read sexier and much better written fan-fiction).

I’m not sure exactly when she dropped the whole fan-works issue, but when I initially went searching for VC fan-fiction as a fledgling in 2010, I found absolutely nothing outside of snippets on DeviantArt or hidden within ancient late 1990s dot.com websites and geocities pages.   

She even put a full-page advertisement in a newspaper urging people not to see the Interview With the Vampire movie because it starred Tom Cruise as Lestat, which she quickly redacted.

She also straight-up refuses to have an editor. For any of her works. As someone whose been writing since I was about eight-years-old and is currently doing a Creative Writing degree and hoping to do a publishing masters, this is mind-boggling.  Anne Rice refuses to have an editor at all – she has an “agreement” with her editor that she isn’t to touch “a single word” of the manuscript or change it in anyway. This is phenomenally stupid and the complete opposite of what an editor is supposed to do. If you ever want to publish – DO NOT DO THIS. We are here to help, not hinder. It’s probably why all her novels starting at the Tale of the Body Thief have weird rambling plots, no to little character development, out-of-character behaviour of key characters, and a sense of naff about them. (Though this is my opinion and you can have a different one; I’m just Salty). EDIT: to answer your question, there is a consensus the series seems to death-spiral worse and worse either with TotBT or after TotBT; I’m in the with category. It does come down to opinion, I love the Pandora and Vittorio novels, but other than that, I don’t consider any others “true” VC novels. 

Nowadays, Anne has mostly stuck to being a dictator on her FaceBook page with her “People of the Page”. She replied to one of my comments once, but I honestly can’t remember what. It’s not uncommon for people to get blocked and banned from her Page for the most benign of comments, and she occasionally reposts fan-art of her characters she likes. 

With the new VC television series in the works, a lot of people (myself included) are waiting in a sense of trepidation about new fans coming into the fandom – not because “ew new fans!” (I love new fans, please come, we want you) but because of how they’re going to be received by Anne. New Fandom is different to Old Fandom, and fans are more comfortable creating works and sharing them more boldly than the Specs of Old, and also with holding content creators and their works Responsible for “wrongs” or whatever – both of which should be said, Anne’s works are kinda racist, kinda sexist, sometimes feels it fetishises homosexual men, and sexualise teenagers/children.