To be entirely fair (and I write this with the utmost respect to you, you are not one of the people who do this) there are some fans of Bottom!Lestat, Femme!Lestat, and Mother!Lestat who seem to be just as gender essentialist and homophobic as some (as you said, not all) of the Bottom!Louis, Femme!Louis, and Mother!Louis fans they despise. Some of them have preferences that are set in ‘straight’ relationship templates, but they want Lestat to be the feminine person and Louis to be the masculine person, and their upset is not with gender essentialism or homophobia but that some people in fandom favour the opposite dynamic. Some fans who see Lestat naturally as a Femme and reject Louis as a Femme do so because they think the image of a feminine or Femme Louis is revolting, and that has everything to do with Lestat’s whiteness and Louis’s Blackness.
Many Femme!Louis fans are as passionate and perhaps acerbic and defensive as they are because this fandom has been no more kind to them than it has been Femme!Lestat fans: Predominantly Black Femme!Louis writers were put on a list to shame and mock them in 2023. A Femme!Louis writer was harassed to such extent by some fans for the decisions he made in his fic that he stopped writing for Loustat and turned against the fandom. Black Femme!Louis fans have been called white men’s whores, race fetishists and porn addicts. I appreciate that many Femme!Lestat and Bottom!Lestat fans have been harassed, shamed and mocked as well and I am sorry for it. It’s quite horrible. And I do not want to make excuses for their behaviour, but I saw that some of the fanfic writers who have been hostile to you for your masculinity meta were some of the same fanfic writers who had been called race fetishists, white men worshippers and harassed for writing Femme!Louis. Hurt people hurt people, and all that.
I’d say the harassment evidences how much transphobia there is in fandom, as even nominally queer communities are rife with gender essentialism, homophobia and reflexive disgust of non-conforming queer bodies and that is true regardless of if Louis or Lestat is the subject. With Louis, one must consider the role anti-Blackness plays as well.
This is where your other anon may have touched on a fallacy and where they may need to unpack some of their own presuppositions: topping is not the only way one can care for one’s sexual partner, and bottoming is not the only way one can be desired. A top can be feminine and a bottom can be masculine, or neither can be feminine or masculine, or both. In essence, it does not matter how IwtV stages Loustat’s sex scenes because they will be loving, tender and passionate with one another no matter what. It speaks volumes that they’ve had several love scenes in which who topped and who bottomed was debatable, but the love and passion between them was unmistakeable.
I appreciate the respect, anon, as well as the context, and yeah, of course, there are people on both sides engaged in the same rhetoric. I understand that, just as I understand that there is an undercurrent of (and often overt) anti-Blackness in this fandom which denies Louis any trait that isn't stereotypically masculine, and contributes to the racism in this fandom more broadly. That's important to acknowledge and it's important to tackle, of course it is, and I hope I do my own part in the ways that I can on here.
And look, I'm open about the fact that I don't really engage in the broader discourse within this fandom, so I don't think I can comment on meta or the many and varied things that are happening on other blogs or social media threads, but one of the areas I do engage pretty broadly is in fanworks, and I don't know. I absolutely hear what you're saying, but when I'm scrolling through ao3, it's pretty clear that the dominant preference and understanding of these characters is not the version of Louis and Lestat you're arguing is as endemic as the one the previous anon was talking about.
Again, I can appreicate that it exists though, and that things happened before I joined the fandom that have influenced the ecosystem, and I'd never deny the experiences of people who went through that, but in saying that, I hope you wouldn't deny mine either.
Because it's terrible that that happened to the writer(s) / clique you know I'm talking about, but they weren't hostile to me, anon, they doxxed me. Look, I don't want to play the victim, I'm conscious of the race politics in all of this, just as I'm conscious of how I want to engage in fandom, and a lot of this I didn't post at the time, because I didn't think it served anyone or anything, but I was sent my full name, my brother's name and birthday, information about my estranged father's workplace, my sister's name and information and, as many people know at this point because I did post about it, a threat to send her and my 7 and 8 year old nephews smut that I had written for consenting adults, in between getting people sending anons on the regular calling me a racist bitch. I had to talk to my family, I had to tell my workplace what was happening, because that felt like the logical next step in the harrassment, I had to talk to a lawyer, the latter two of which was pretty humiliating, but hey, at least now, legally, in Australia, it's considered assault (and I hope the person who threatened my nephews lives every day with the fact that a part of them was willing to at least threaten child sexual assault if not commit it for the sake of a personal opinion).
I appreciate you citing someone who quit the fandom on the other side of it, but honestly, right then, in the thick of it? I was going to too. Would you feel it gave more weight to my harassment if I left the fandom or stopped posting fic? And would it mean more or less if I too lashed out at those I know were behind it?
Because here's the thing - I rebuke your idea that hurt people hurt people, anon. It's fun in fiction, but it's a cop out in reality. It has never and would never cross my mind to treat people the way that they treated me. Them doxxing me doesn't make me feel empowered to dox others who disagree with me. In fact, I feel even more disgusted by it having been a victim of it myself. I hope that's a testament to my character, because I do actually think how you choose to behave after being harrassed is a testament to yours, and if you decide it gives you a free pass to be cruel to others for the simple act of disagreeing with you - - God. I don't even know what we're doing here at all.
I agree though that there is a lot of transphobia in the fandom and TERF rhetoric across the board, but I actually think you and the last anon are in agreement about the fact that equalising things like top = dominant = masculine is inherently false. It was, at least in my reading, their main point and their criticism of the broader fandom that that is the way people handle it, and that that's inherently a fallacy, as you said. But yeah, agreed too that who's doing what to who doesn't actually matter, and that their love and passion for one another is what does.
