This blog is a multifandom mess with added sprinkles of personal stuff, politics and just...random things idk :D
I write, I make edits, I also do other creative stuff sometimes, everything with the surprise bag of AuDHD (non-)motivation which equals very short phases of consistency until I run out of fuel.
Chronic illness team yaaaaay (EDS)
I speak German, English, and I remember some school-Spanish, but not enough to use it actively. Dabbled into like four other languages but not even close to enough to speak and understand really anything. ADHD curse :D
Talk to me if you want ^_^ I love to read infodumps especially if it's stuff that also interests me but I also just love witnessing people's passions in general.
I love music!
A tier list of fandoms/blorbos/ships that you'll find here or that I just like a lot:
Tier 1: Absolute Hyperfixations
- IWTV/TVL and Vampire Chronicles. Favourites are Armand and Lestat, favourite ships are Devil's Minion and Lesmand (and yes also Loustat but I don't feel the need to post about them much)
- Mozart l'opéra rock and Amadeus 1984, and any other version of Mozart and/or Salieri I come across, including the irl historial people
Tier 2: Long time favourites aka past hyperfixations that always return at some point
- Good Omens. Favourite is Crowley and Aziracrow lives in my heart
- Doctor Who, favourite doctor is 10 (and 14). Love 13 and 15 also
- Sherlock Holmes. BBC show or any other version honestly. Johnlock!
- Elisabeth (the Musical). Rudolf and Elisabeth are both my favourites but my favourite ship is Todolf
-Tanz der Vampire. Love Herbert the most, also the Count. Favourite ships are Herbert/Alfred and Count/Alfred
Tier 3: Things I love but that somehow never really got to the point of hyperfixation or that were hyperfixations for a week or so
- Sandman, I adore Dream/Hob
- Our Flag Means Death. Edward Teach kickstarted my acceptance process of being non-binary AND a trans man :D
- Hamilton (was thinking if I should put that one tier higher cause i do listen to it and sing it a lot but I don't engage with the fandom on Hyperfixation level)
- Star Trek TNG. Data is my blorbo there <3
- Other musicals like: Rebecca, Les Miserables, Next to Normal, Rudolf Affaire Mayerling, Artus Excalibur, Dracula, La Legende du Roi Arthur, uuuuuuhm....others too :D
- other stuff I've forgotten and will edit later
Tier 4: Things I enjoy occasionally and may get passionate about if poked, but not always and sometimes I even forget that these things exist or also just things I liked in the past
- Vikings! Haven't finished the show yet. Love Athelstan and Ragnar/Athelstan as a ship, also Ragnar/King Ecbert have insane (toxic) chemistry hihi
- Okay here it comes, I'll out myself as medical/EMS tv shows fan: Grey's Anatomy, Call the Midwife, New Amsterdam, 9-1-1, The Good Doctor, Transplant, uuuhm...have watched others probably!
- Lucifer! Castle! Those weird half-police-proceduals-half-personal-story shows. Also Mentalist, Criminal Minds (Spencer Reid <3)....uhm.
Okay I watch a lot of shows! Don't get me started on games too (or do hihi)
Hello, tumblr! I saw something on here the other day that worried me, so I decided to Do Science about it. But I can't do it alone: I need your help to build the dataset!
Here's what I need you to do:
If you see a post with a "mature content" label, and it's 2026, DM me a link to the post.
Yes, that's really it.
I am hoping to collect several thousand such posts, so that I have a decent sized dataset. I do not care what the post is about; if it's labeled as "mature content", I want to add it to my dataset.
If I get 10,000 posts in my dataset before August 31st 2026, I will post my preliminary findings then. I won't feel comfortable calling my findings "settled" before 2027, unless I get over 50,000 posts.
I am not talking about that unless I have results to share. That would bias the results.
I did write them down and I did share them with a trusted contact who can prove that I wrote them down the same day I made this post. (While I did so before I made this post, I am not sure they will be able to provide proof of that, because I did so on the same day.)
OP are you interested in...?
Do you have to click through to see the post? Does the clickthrough contain the words "mature content"? Then yes.
OP are you interested if the post is about...?
I am interested in the mature content labels, not the content of the post. Is there a clickthrough that contains the words "mature content"? Then yes.
Yes, please. I felt really silly when I noticed I forgot to include that in the original post.
Is it okay if I send you my own posts?
Yes, those are perfect for what I'm looking for. I actually need to do some processing on a post to make it useful for testing my hypothesis, and this makes it easy.
Are you looking for "potentially mature content" also, or just "mature content"?
I want both, please. Anything that throws up a blocking screen that you have to click through. The distinctions between them are one of the things I am hoping to study.
Does it matter when the post was made originally?
Technically no. There's no way to respond to this without introducing some bias in the results, and I don't want that. However, I do collect some data on a post as part of making it useful to me, and that data is easier to collect if the post is recent.
What if I request content label review on a post after I send it to you?
I need to see the mature content label to be able to use the post. Because the mature content label hides the content of the post, it is very hard to use a post that no longer has a mature content label. You could send me a screenshot, but people could use that to lie to me.
Basically, it's more work for you to make it usable to me.
OP are you a transphobe? It would ruin the experiment for me if you're a transphobe.
I promise I'm not a transphobe and not doing this for transphobic reasons. You should still double-check that I'm not a transphobe for yourself, though. I am not sure that this study will have the useful effects you're hoping for; I am studying something specific, and it may not be what you hope.
I am so disappointed about how TVL ended. Need to rewatch it a few times but yeah I'm angry too about things but most of all I am afraid right now. That they will cancel the show because people (rightfully) criticise the season too much instead of making the next season better. I am scared of people leaving the show behind them on mass and the fandom falling apart cause finding this show is one of the things that saved my life probably in '24 and the thought of losing the fandom-
And I am sad. I shouldn't feel this kind of sad about my favourite show :(
And I almost feel *mocked* by the show
Still I love some details and references but yeah. Idk.
Lestat! The Musical did a better job of transporting his backstory from the book to something visual and thats basically TVL and IWTV mashed together weirdly
Sometimes I feel like the only person in the world who loves Louis, Lestat, Armand, Daniel, and Claudia. I don’t care what crimes any of them commit, they’re all my babies.
I kind of want to post my thoughts about the TVL season but then I don't because I don't have the whole context yet and I haven't thought about it enough and I'm not sure how much of my criticism would be "But it's different in the books :<<" and I want to be fair to the show. But anyways I am enjoying it A LOT, it's for sure the highlight of my every week. And I am playing the songs on repeat, sorry MLOR you have been replaced as top songs I'm listening to lol
Yeah I'll take uhhhhh the Devil's Minion combo, extra large, with a large side of Lesmand, uhhhh medium Louclaudia no pickles, a small Nickistat, and a Gabistat snack wrap. And hold the Loumand on all of that. Are you guys still out of Loustat?
I think people need to understand that everyone has to unlearn misogynistic behaviors and thinking patterns. Cis women and trans women and cis men and trans men and anyone who doesn’t fall under those categories are all completely capable of being misogynistic and actively hurtful to women. Trans men are included in this, obviously, but when you only call for trans men to unlearn this mindset, you are no longer being progressive and fair. You are singling out a minority.
it pisses me off to see cis women saying 'trans women are misogynistic because they were raised as men' and trans women replying 'no we aren't because no we weren't!' and i'm sitting there staring at the camera like it's the office. because like women are ALL raised to be just as misogynistic as men. it's a notable goddamn feature of the patriarchy.
like if you are marginalized it is in your own self-interest to interrogate and deconstruct the cultural narratives that position you as subnormal. this is what starts a lot of queer people on wanting to reform the world into something more compassionate and egalitarian.
but it's not the marginalization that makes you any more or less ethical than anyone else. it's the work. you gotta do the actual work.
I feel like part of the problem is a really popular misunderstanding of bigotry.
Misogyny is not just prejudice experienced by a woman. It is not simply something that happens TO a woman. It has nothing to do with the woman. It’s about the misogynist.
Bigotry is not determined or defined by the target of that bigotry. The bigotry is stored in the bigot.
Misogynists will be misogynistic towards any person they associate with femininity, including cisgender men.
When a misogynist cis man tears another man down for liking something he thinks is girly, he is still being misogynistic.
A cis male coach telling his cis male student he runs like a girl is being misogynistic.
A cis woman punishing her son for wanting a “girl” toy or policing her boyfriend’s hygiene habits and interests for anything she considers emasculating, is being misogynistic!
When a woman gets in a car accident and is injured more severely because the safety testing on that car was only done using crash test dummies and models based on men, she’s experiencing misogyny.
When the medication she takes for her injuries doesn’t work right or has unexpected side effects because it was only tested on men, she’s experiencing misogyny.
When the tools she uses at work that are the wrong shape for her hands, and the jumpsuit that’s part of her uniform which she has to take off completely to use the bathroom, and all the spaces she moves through and everything within them are designed with the assumption that an average male body is the only body that matters— she is experiencing misogyny.
Misogyny is the belief that women are inherently inferior, and the systems and institutions built around that belief. It can be experienced by anyone, and anyone is capable of having misogynistic beliefs and doing misogynistic things.
Bigotry is not about the target. It’s about the bigot, and what the bigot believes, and the way those bigoted beliefs have shaped our world.
I don’t care what race gender or sexuality you are, you were raised with racist, sexist, homophobic beliefs. Because it’s literally impossible not to be.
And the harder you try to cling to the idea that misogyny is something that happens TO women, rather than something coming FROM misogynists, the more blind you’ll be to your own misogynistic beliefs, and all the ways everything in our society is a product of or directly reinforces those beliefs.
whats interesting about the take that the word femboy is used derogatorily towards trans women to masculinize them is that its true, but it also applies to trans men. trans men are also labeled as femboys in an effort to feminize us. also, the word butch is also used derogatorily towards trans men in order to feminize us, BUT the word butch is also used derogatorily towards trans women to masculinize them. and all of these terms are used against nonbinary people to force them into a gender binary/expression that they dont want. and all of these terms can be used by all of these groups and the people who use them are valid, but they are also used derogatorily towards trans people who DONT identify those ways in an effort to misgender us. interesting stuff
Hey, sorry, I just saw a post where you mentioned Anne Rice having abuse apologia (pedophilia and incest) in her work and I was wondering if you could explain that a little more? I’m kind of afraid to google it
hi! i assume you’re referring to my post on the show’s treatment of incest as a theme?
in any case, i hope that i can clarify a little. i’m actually gonna turn to a couple academic sources, because i’m lazy and i don’t feel like writing too much.
but, before i even get into the books, some background on anne rice.
while i do believe rice's fictional work does reproduce a discourse of abuse apologia, particularly with regards to pedophilia, and that you can arrive to that conclusion simply from reading the text, without any extraneous knowledge about the author, ultimately my opinion of rice’s fiction is inseparable from my knowledge of her real-life beliefs, more specifically, her defense of child molester carleton cajdusek and of a bdsm erotica novel about thomas jefferson and sally hemings.
in august 1997 she left this message on her "fan voice mail" still transcribed and public on her official website as it was at the moment of her death, over 20 years later:
O.K. I just read a book I recommend. It's called THE DEADLY FEAST by Richard Rhodes. The book centers around a man named Carleton Gajdusek. Carleton Gajdusek is a Nobel Prize winner and he's in prison--apparently for fondling a 14 year old in a shower. I have not seen the court record and I'm not in any way qualified to judge what goes on. All I want to say is that I highly recommend that you get the book. That the contribution of Carleton Gajdusek to medicine and to science has been fantastic and that I personally am looking into the whole question of child molestation, children's rights, because it concerns me. I remember being a young adult, and I remember being real angry that I wasn't allowed to do things that other adults were doing. I was working full time and I was living in a rooming house and I didn't like being classified as a teenager, because somebody wanted to sell me something expensive. I know I sound angry--I am. I am angry. But we've got to revise our concept of teenagers in this country. If we want to stop the crime in this country we've just got to realize that 14 and 15 year old people are adults, they are not children. And leading them to believe that there is a fundamental difference between play killing and real killing.
in 2015, an author by the name of "Fionna Free Men" published on amazon an ebook called Thomas Jefferson's Mistress, a "Werewolf Fetish Vampire MILF Sex Slave" [sic] about sally hemings, which you can see on webarchive here. author jenny trout published a call to boycott this book, and anne rice in turn called for people to organize against this boycott. there are screenshots and more details here. the situation isn't as clear cut as anne rice going on record to say writing bdsm erotica of a real enslaved child's systematic rape and abuse by the grown man who owned her is perfectly okay, but that she of all people would use her platform to speak up in defense of this bullshit, in my opinion, speaks to how little her ideology had changed since 1997.
i’ve failed to find a full copy of Anne Rice and Sexual Politics: The Early Novels by James R. Keller (and i would be endlessly grateful to anyone who found it for me), but this extract articulates my position fairly well —that is, that you can’t separate the art from the author when the author so intentionally sought to make herself one with her art:
In Michael Riley's Conversations with Anne Rice, Rice asserts that she finds the pictures of naked children in Vogue "very erotic." She then goes on to describe the "sensuous enjoyment" that she experiences when showering her children with kisses and hugs, initially a rather bold admission from a mother and a mainstream writer. However, in her subsequent explanation, she very rapidly distances herself from any impropriety, so much so that she completely eviscerates the concept of the erotic, implying that she means nothing more unconventional than maternal affection, an interest in watching her son grow “big and strong". The backpedaling is very clear in the exchange. The author wants credit for the shocking suggestion, but she does not want to face the social stigma that would attend such an admission. (...) the author wants to raise eyebrows and to perpetuate an outrageous public persona, and yet at the same time, she does not want to be taken seriously. In her fiction and in her initial assertions about children, she appears to be endorsing pedophilic desire. (...) The author even offers a defense of such sexual desire in her biography Prism of the Night, where she suggests that some children are mature enough to negotiate a sexual relationship with an adult and that sometimes the child is even the aggressor. If Rice were to leave these ideas in the world of her fiction, there would be no issue. However, she clearly considers the idea a philosophical position about sexual repression in our society, and she even flirts with the concept in the public characterizations that she makes of her family. Yet as with other issues, the ideas are not ones that she is entirely capable of owning. (...) The argument that she is not obliged to be what she writes does not particularly apply because authors of erotica have often been defined by the stigma associated with their subject. Also, the effort to define her public image as an eccentric and a sexual dissident erases the dividing line between her fiction and her reality.
he goes on to put rice’s eroticization of pedophilia within the chronicles in context, breaking down the unmistakably homophobic rhetoric that permeates the entire series, in a couple of pages which i found to make a very solid argument:
Here we must move away from our concentration on family politics to address those myths that are commonplace within right-wing, homophobic discourse. Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles perpetuate many of the most troublesome and hostile stereotypes, even those that have proven most effective in impeding the progress of homosexual demands for social equality. Perhaps the most destructive of all heterosexist delusions involves the association of gays and lesbians with pedophilic desire. (...) In such a volatile political environment, Rice's portrayal of same-sex desire between adults and adolescents, a passion that seems to lie at the heart of her vision of vampirism, should not escape interrogation.
george haggerty makes a similar argument, and you can read his essay here:
Rice makes it immediately clear, however, that this world of male-male desire cannot be satisfying. For all the homoerotics of these volumes, Rice seems unable to create a bond between two men that is more than the symptom of a corrupt and corrupting culture.
there’s still something to be said about how the vampires in the chronicles serve as both object of abjection and subjects of identification, which the next essay i’ll mention touches on but doesn’t explore in depth. in the vampire chronicles, vampires are meant to be at once repulsive and attractive to readers, functioning as sympathetic heroes while they behave as evil monsters.
this anti-hero role allows rice the kind of plausible deniability that keller lays out: her vampires can be a homophobic caricature and a (poor) attempt at “gay representation” at once, because it’s up to the reader to decide whether to identify with the monster or reject this identification. this is a technique that vladimir nabokov executes very well in lolita, where we are compelled to identify with the pedophile narrator so that we can understand a predator’s mindset, and there are moments in the chronicles where i’d argue that rice pulls it off, but she overwhelmingly fails in her attempts to walk that line, and the overall result of the series is one that reads as straightforward abuse apologia. i’ll circle back to this later.
now, back to the specific topic of pedophilia and incest.
while i wouldn’t say i agree with every strand of reasoning in this essay, and it’s definitely very 1990s sex wars feminism, i think “Abuse and Its Pleasures: Compensatory Fantasy in the Popular Fiction of Anne Rice,” by Annalee Newitz breaks down the issue very well in these choice passages:
…the heroes in Rice’s novels have in common one basic trait: they feel marginalized or abused, but learn to use their victimhood as a form of empowerment. Her characters often become powerful, wealthy, or famous by taking up the tools of their oppressors—and revaluing their victimization as something pleasurable and special. (...) By representing abuse within a contained, fictionalized setting, one might say that Rice generates a therapeutic “safe space” in which readers can experience and master their anxieties about abuse. And to a certain extent, I want to allow for this possibility in my analysis. But there is also something deeply troubling about the way Rice invites readers to deal with their anxieties. For ultimately she offers what I will call an “anti-therapeutic” resolution to abusive situations: her abused characters gain power by sustaining and even celebrating their trauma.
newitz says:
Louis and Claudia become inseparable, and Louis considers their relationship to be a union between “Father and Daughter. Lover and Lover” (Interview). Rice offers many descriptions of Claudia’s childish sensuality, heightening our sense that it is precisely her status as a child that makes her so sexually alluring to her “parent” Louis.
and later, writing in the sibling, parent-child, and cousin incest in the mayfair witches books, she adds:
By blurring the line between parent and child, Rice generates a fictional space in which children can be cast as perpetrators of child abuse.
this essay precedes the publication of the vampire armand by a couple years, but the rhetoric in that book, and the way armand is written from the vampire lestat onwards all fall squarely within the pro-pedophilia discourses that newitz and keller above describe. armand is “seductive” and “irresistible” precisely because of his “youth” and “innocence,” elements which become integral to his character as the chronicles go on. the first section of his solo novel is dedicated to lengthy erotic descriptions of his sexual encounters with marius, which are presented as pleasurable and desirable and, of course, distinctly different from the violent rapes and beatings that he’s been through.
marius is his owner but a benevolent one and, like mona mayfair, armand is made out to be a sexually precocious child that seeks out and seduces his abuser, demanding for their sexual intimacy to grow and eventually asking to be made into a vampire.
while there are moments in the book that invite a reading of armand as a victim in denial, presenting the reader with a disfigured perspective of the abuse he endured to cope with his own trauma, once put in context with rice’s other work and her personal politics it’s impossible to interpret this novel as anything but propaganda: she was very aware of her platform and reach when she publicly stated that she believed children of fourteen should legally be considered adults when it came to sexual consent, and not two years later she wrote the vampire armand. the connection can’t be ignored.
another aspect of her work that i think could lend itself to a dual interpretation if read in isolation, but ultimately only serves as evidence of the deeply-held ideologies she’s reproducing in her books, is her sympathetic portrayal of abusers. again from newitz:
While Lestat is a cold and manipulative character in Louis’ story, we discover in The Vampire Lestat that Lestat has himself been used and hurt. Like Lasher, Lestat tells a story about his painful intimate relationships which is intended to solicit readers’ sympathy and make his crimes against Louis and Claudia both understandable and forgivable. In these monster stories about child abuse, all of the characters ultimately appear to be victims in the end. Rice invites readers to feel deeply ambivalent about characters who are abusive: at any moment, we might discover that these abusers are victims too, and therefore we cannot hold them responsible for their cruelty to others. The safe space where Rice stages and masks sexualized child abuse is therefore a safe space for both perpetrators and victims. It is a space where the line between victim and perpetrator is impossible to draw, and therefore Rice makes it impossible to judge whether or not child abuse is in fact abusive at all.
(you can find the full book, Creating Safe Space: Violence and Women's Writing, ed. Tomoko Kuribayashi and Julie Tharp, on anna’s archive.)
yes, yes, depiction is not endorsement and so on and so forth. of course, abuse is one of the most prevalent themes in the gothic and there’s no doubt that making the monster a sympathetic object of desire is a staple of the genre. it’s up to us to triangulate the topics portrayed in her novels, the treatment these topics receive, and what we know of rice’s real-life beliefs to interpret her work.
one of the aspects we can analyze when looking at treatment are narrative patterns and, while simplistic, punishment-reward goes a long way. in rice’s vampire chronicles, victims of rape and abuse must fit one of a very narrow selection of roles. keep in mind that the chronicles both make vampiric assault akin to and distinct from sexual assault, so the allegory gets muddy at times, but here’s how i would break it down:
good survivor, gets rewarded: they are violated against their will and firmly refuse the assault, but they don’t overindulge in “whining” and dwelling on what’s happened to them, insteading choosing to embrace it and move on (e.g. lestat, david, marius)
bad survivor, gets punished: either they “ask for it,” sometimes changing their mind at some point, which makes them “deserving” of the bad things that happen to them following (e.g. lewis, merrick, armand); or, particularly in the case of children, even if they did not “ask for” the initial violation (e.g. claudia, armand, merrick) they are later revealed to be, as i mentioned, cunning and seductive, and thus similarly “deserving” of their downfall
revenge on the abuser, gets punished: following from the first division, “bad survivors” are shamed, punished or outright destroyed for taking revenge on their abusers or for wanting to overthrow the abusive institution (e.g. claudia, akasha)
forgiveness for the abuser, gets rewarded: on the other hand, “bad survivors” get a sort of narrative redemption, and “good survivors” cement their position in this role, by forgiving and loving their abusers, often recognizing the abuser had only good intentions all along (e.g. lewis with lestat, lestat with magnus, armand with marius)
these overarching discourses that run through the entire chronicles, coupled with the eroticized depiction of abuse and particularly child abuse, to me solidify the interpretation of the chronicles as uncritically reproducing abuse apologia and pedophilia apologia as the only viable one. trying to read the chronicles as a whole as a critical, self-aware narrative simply doesn't hold.
however, i think there might be more merit to an interpretation of rice's treatment of incest as critical. but the overwhelming fetishization and eroticization of the subject across her books, alongside with the portrayal of most of her victims of incestuous abuse as seductive and, if not “initiators,” then willful participants, ultimately leads me to conclude that, if she was trying to construct a purposeful problematization of incest, she failed.
(now we’re circling back around!)
just like she failed in her attempts to toe the line between a sympathetic villain who’s portraying their victim from a distorted perspective, and outright villainizing and narratively punishing said victims.
(not that i believe all victims should get happy endings or all abusers should get their narrative comeuppance, of course. actually, let me make a general disclaimer, since i’m releasing this answer into the wilderness: going back to nabokov, there are people who read lolita all the way through and still came away from it still identifying with humbert humbert, and i don’t think that’s a failure in the writing, but in the reading. not even the most skilled of writers are spared from being misinterpreted… and anne rice wasn’t among the most skilled of writers, though she did have a couple strokes of genius. art as a whole would be poorer if bad artists didn’t get to make and share stuff, just like it would be poorer without haters and critics. so anne rice got to write some ideologically indefensible bullshit, and we get to call her an abuse apologist on the internet! such are the wonders of free speech.)
anyway, i think that’s pretty much all i have to say on the topic, so, sorry for the wall of text, i hope this answered your question. and if it didn't, or if you just want to read a bit more, i definitely think newitz’ piece and the part of keller’s essay “Interrogating the Vampire: Heterotextuality and Queer Reading” that’s available for preview here are both worth it.
ps: and again, if anyone can find me that book, or that essay, in full, i’m very curious to know what conclusions the author reaches.
I knew about the Gajdusek shit but the sally hemmings stuff is. yeah. Trout has some more screenshots of the whole fiasco here. I agree that the stuff about her kids was definitely a lot of her just fucking around for attention, but she definitely was putting some real beliefs there. for all the deserved hype her books get as queer texts, it's always been striking for that she was comfortable describing adult/adult f/m or adult/child pairings in actual sexual detail, but used the blood drinking metaphor as a shield elsewhere.
Gajdusek was always particularly chilling thing for me, especially since the part about Gajdusek specifically abusing a child in the shower reminded me of the whole marimand bath scene, and Marius "helping" a child from another country lines up a lot with Gajdusek's MO
I don't think the parallels were deliberate, but it's hard not to miss them. (also pretty striking that most of Gajdusek's victims appear to have been children of color from the Pacific, and we all know AR's track record of sexualizing brown and Black children like Merrick. like I said, coincidence, but says a lot about the kids who are more likely to get sexualized and ignored than others)
Like people defend a lot of the iffy stuff in these books by referring to "it's just fiction" and "historical context" but she was one hundred percent writing them from the belief that contemporary teens in real life should be sleeping with adults, and it shows. you can't fully understand her work without knowing that. I like to think she was at least wrestling with these issues and trying to confront the underlying darkness in her own books, but the fact that she did stuff like have Lestat forgive Magnus and Armand forgive Marius (although in a way abused children being socially compelled to "forgive" abusive parents is a very spot-on depiction of how these things can go down, despite the fact this wasn't her intent) sort of undercuts that.
also in regards to her defense of irl abuse I remember one person defending her going to bat for Gajdusek (this person was also insisting that the show was Evil and Misogynistic for...depicting fictional rape) with these
I'd like to think that this shows an improvement in her views from the nineties, but then again, her phone message clarified she didn't think teenagers count as children. It's unclear whether she's bothered by the church's abuse of children in general or only those who were younger than adolescents. the child-teenager distinction is a form of csa apologia that I don't think get discussed enough--I remember having a fight with my aunt a couple years back over a man in our town getting arrested for attempting to meet up with a teenager, and she kept saying he wasn't attracted to "actual" children (she also said I should empathize with this man because I'm autistic and she thought he was, too, so loool)
but anyway, while Anne Rice's revelations about the csa scandals most likely had at least some effect on her decision to leave the Catholic Church, it sucks that she didn't take the opportunity to dig into abusive relationships like marimand in her last trilogy, especially since people use their reunion at the end of that as "evidence" that Marius Never Abused Armand Ever.
but then again, writers can't control how people perceive their work even if they try, and whatever AR was trying, it wasn't well thought out. I think, if I can get a bit armchair psychologist, what happened here is that she considered csa in the Catholic Church to be primarily a case of failure in organized Christianity (it definitely was) and not how it was example of how putting people on pedestals and excusing their behavior, which happens in a lot of settings, not just religious ones.
anyway, thankfully most people in the fandom are able to read these books without having to loudly to insist that everything their faves do is Correct and Right and you're the real creep for not immediately agreeing. and like I said, the show has done everything it can to put this culture of good victim/bad victim in a more discerning spotlight. the trial episode was a really good takedown of victim blaming culture in regards to domestic violence (and how it intersects with racism) and I hope we see something similar in regards to csa. at the end of the day Anne Rice is dead and gone and her opinions don't really matter in the grand scheme of things, but it's the perpetuation of these opinions we need to wrestle with.
