very soon the entirety of the tumblr dashboard will be consumed by insane people being insufferable over AMC's interview with the vampire. fortunately i am one of those insane people
Tolkien only has two kind of elves: Enderenwen the fair, who's eyes hold centuries of pain and yet his gaze is as kind as the first sun in spring, his mother was a nightingale and his father a seabreeze, flowers grow wherever he walks;
And Finwendulenfinfedë, who has killed half of his entire family and is here to fuck shit up
read this and remember it. read this and remember that she is going to use the profits of her fucking ego-stroking reboot to decimate trans rights. read this and remember that every time you pay into her IP, you are emboldening her to hurt us more.
our lives matter more than your fucking nostalgia.
trans lives matter more than your fucking nostalgia.
the thing of it is - at the end of the day, it all boils down to a rather simple fact: the majority of western (particularly usamerican) leftists have next to no knowledge of contemporary eastern european politics & interrelations (let alone their broader historical context, going back hundreds and hundreds of years). that, and they operate within a blissfully naïve paradigm that is still firmly rooted in their never truly unlearned sense of american exceptionalism. & so they genuinely believe that imperialism - and interventionism, and expansionism, and self-serving and deeply cynical state-sanctioned propaganda - are concepts uniquely applicable to their own immoral neck of the woods. & so they gleefully swallow the self-satisfied bosh of dyed-in-the-wool nationalists stemming from formerly imperial (and currently openly aspiring to regain that title) countries & then proceed to pat themselves on the backs for sticking it up to the empire. & so it goes.
I think I’m falling behind in pop culture can we stop writing books and making movies until I catch up. something crazy is about to happen to gilgamesh
definitions of grooming: a quick & dirty analytical comparison
tagging this for vampire chronicles only because i don’t think the star wars folks will know what the ever loving fuck is going on unless you happen to be in the niche position of being in both fandoms, but i think a lot of people at least have a sense of the narrative of star wars whether you grew up watching it or you’ve absorbed the major plot beats through cultural osmosis. but i’ve been brooding on this comparison and contrast in how i’ve seen the concept and definition of grooming discussed in both of my current fandoms
i’m gonna start with star wars and tie it into vc in a second, bear with me please! so for me relapsing into star wars as an adult and noticing just how many Dark Adult Themes are built into the foundation into of what george lucas once called “children’s movies” has been a fascinating experience lmao reevaluating my favorite piece of preadolescent media blows my mind because a lot is subtext, but a lot is not, in fact a lot is extremely explicit! for example, i absolutely agree with how this user frames it: [the relationship between Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader and Sheev Palpatine is one of the most hideously abusive relationships ever realized in fiction] as well as the addition below it -> [It’s also probably the most substantial depiction of grooming I’ve ever seen in the PG-13 action/sci-fi blockbuster genre]
now as for where vc comes in?
well, i guess i’ve just been cooking in the trenches of vampires chronicles fandom tumblr for three solid years and i can’t remember a time when there wasn’t Discourse™️ about marius de romanus being a groomer, manipulator, and abuser—tbh this whole thing came about because it occurred to me that i feel like a lot of the discourse surrounding marius positions him as being a groomer somewhere in the same realm as a selfish, abusive, reprehensible villain like palpatine!
but there’s multiple definitions of grooming, my friends. it’s wild to me that an all-ages pop culture phenomenon like star wars features a front-and-center portrayal of what actually is a horrific abuser-victim relationship. it gives us a heartbreakingly clear example of grooming used as manipulation and coercion (what palpatine does to anakin/vader from the time he’s nine until he’s twenty-two when palpatine succeeds in breaking him down so systematically that vader essentially becomes his enslaved enforcer up until his death at palpatine’s hands decades later) vs. grooming as a much more neutral term—third definition down on merriam-webster’s (marius stating in his book that he groomed amadeo/armand for vampirism)
you want a guy that was purposely written to be a villain? palpatine is your guy! george lucas explicitly calls anakin/vader palpatine’s victim. palpatine grooms him from the time anakin is a nine year old child, isolates him, radicalizes him, and uses him as a custom-designed weapon to further his own agenda, finally spending the next twenty years torturing him physically, spiritually, and psychologically. star wars not your vibe, you want a vc analog? okay, i raise you santino and the children of darkness (no hate to my santino girlies lmao if you can’t tell, i’m very much a proship blog 🫶🏼)
george lucas famously said about anakin/vader: [“I like the idea that the person you thought was the villain is actually the victim, and that the story is really about the villain trying to regain his humanity.”] and this was actually the route anne ultimately took with armand as a character, insofar as the ‘villain as the victim’ arc goes (not to say they’re mutually exclusive, george right there labels vader as both victim and villain, because he is without doubt a villain; anne said armand was the villain in the first two books but that he became a good person in qotd through his relationship with daniel, etc etc)
[Star Wars is not about morally complex situations where it's hard to tell who the villains are. Star Wars is about how easy it is to become one of the villains] and [#it's about how easy it is to become one of the villains but also that you can ALWAYS choose not to be no matter how far down you are #that part ISN'T easy - in fact it's very difficult - but it's worth doing] — imo this is the biggest strength of star wars, because it makes what is a space opera/greek tragedy palpable to a broad audience! and obviously vc, which was written as a gothic horror series for an adult audience, is more morally grey, of course i get that. and i understand that grooming takes on different forms and there’s a wide variation. i have lived three decades of life somehow. it is two very distinctly different genres and scenarios that i’m trying to compare here… but they do share some similarities, enough that anne rice could take something away from it and use it in her own creation (you think i’m being hyperbolic? she got some of her inspiration for qotd from darth vader LOL i can’t make this up, i wish i was making it up 💀)
and as clear as george lucas was on palpatine being anakin’s abuser and jailer, anne rice was just as clear on marius being armand’s savior and liberator (she called him a hero, actually). your closest star wars analogs to marius de romanus are either qui-gon jinn: the man who freed nine year old anakin from slavery and brought him before the jedi council to be trained as a jedi knight because he saw the potential in him and/or obi-wan kenobi: the man who following qui-gon’s death, subsequently dedicated the next thirteen years of his life to raising anakin and guiding him, forming an attachment to him that was so strong it blinded obi-wan to anakin’s darker qualities—george lucas used the word “seduced”, which is crazy work—and who never stopped loving and honoring and mourning the memory of anakin even after he rejected obi-wan’s teachings and became darth vader, even though in his heart anakin skywalker died when anakin took on the name darth vader and swore his loyalties to palpatine (under extreme physical, emotional, mental duress btw don’t get me started on the obikin x marimand parallels)
in summation:
the jedi grooming anakin to become a jedi knight ✅
palpatine grooming anakin by isolating him radicalizing him and abusing him ❌
marius grooming armand to become a vampire ✅
santino grooming armand by isolating him radicalizing him and abusing him ❌
finishing this off with the usual round of disclaimers because i know where i am:
1) i said vampire chronicles and not amc’s interview with the vampire. i’m not discussing marius’ character or his relationship with armand as it’s portrayed on the show—those are two very different beasts and this has nothing to do with that. it would be a very different essay if i was going to go in that direction
2) i have read TVA and B&G, i know there is a sexual element to marius and armand’s relationship, however in my opinion this does not constitute either definition of grooming. there is no manipulation and coercion involved and it has nothing to do with marius wanting to turn him into a vampire, it occurs because armand wants it and finds pleasure in it
3) this is me engaging in a creative exercise and making a case for my own interpretations—you’re welcome to do the same for yours, it’s a free country man!
Darth Vader Helped Inspire Anne Rice's Queen of the Damned
The idea for the theme of this novel came to Rice on a plane: "I was watching one of the Star Wars movies. I think Luke Skywalker was fighting with Darth Vader, and Vader was saying: “Give in to the dark force inside you”. It was horribly cliché. That’s when it came to me that Queen of the Damned ought to be. Essentially the queen should have an extremely good idea, but it should be evil. The real evil in the world is always a complex and seductive thing that sounds brilliant." - The Vampire Companion
Everyone's all "ohhh 2026 bring back physical media" until I start talking illuminated manuscripts and then suddenly we're not on the same page anymore
“this post contains mature content” it’s picture of a classical nude. it’s a photorealistic painting of someone’s hands. it’s a gifset of a kpop idol smiling. it’s a moodboard featuring someone’s bare shoulder. it’s a film still of a non-graphic bloodstain. it’s a photograph of a non-white girl sitting on a counter wearing a short skirt. it’s a meta about how sexuality is depicted in a tv show. do you see what’s happening here. the vilification of the body. the sanitizing of violence. the whitewashing of presentation. i hate it i hate it so much
The Silmarillion fandom is genuinely insane. Like, you hang out on tumblr, read fic on AO3 and you think, yeah. Lots of people have read the Silmarillion. It’s Tolkien. Everyone’s read Tolkien. Barnes and Noble has a whole bunch of the HoME and also a bunch of books by people writing about the legendarium. This is mainstream, surely.
But then you actually touch grass and talk to normal people. Not even that, you talk to people who self diagnose as hard core Tolkien fans. And. None of them have read the Silmarillion. The Silmarillion is famously a book that nobody reads.
And yet. On AO3 The Silmarillion and Other Histories of Middle Earth has more works than The Lord of the Rings. Think about that. That’s baffling. It’s ridiculous. Like I realize that LotR fandom is split a bit by the movie, but still. The Silmarillion has almost four times as many fics as the LotR movies. Everybody has watched the movies!
I need to know what percentage of people who actually read the Silmarillion went on to write fic or draw fanart about it. Because it must be insane, surely. Like, I’m pretty sure the Silmarillion wins some kind of record in this department.
Thinking about the fanfic bell curve where on one end you have “Perfect, needs no improvement or elaboration” (LotR sits here) and on the other you have “So bad it’s no fun to even think about” with the middle being the fanfic zone. But I think there may be a secret fourth Silmarillion option. Which is a book that is perfect* but simultaneously non existent. It’s not even a real story! The language is super pretty and deeply incomprehensible (especially to people who, unlike me, were not raised from early childhood on both the Bible and classic literature). And it’s more of an outline and an abstract painting of cultural and world building vibes (not cultural and world building facts and information) than an actual narrative. There are story hooks galore. There are vivid and fascinating characters, but their lives are glossed over and you only get one or two paragraphs of prose that will reorder your brain chemistry and haunt you forever. There are countless more characters who only exist as names, the implication of whose existence is fascinating. All of this is deeply frustrating, both to casual readers who just want a Normal Enjoyable Book, and super fans who want All the Lore. But it is catnip to anyone who engages in transformative work.
*I am aware that not anyone who is a fan of the silm thinks it’s perfect
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