i was on livejournal w/ cassie claire and her circle back in the day. her favorite fetishes were incest and queerbaiting,except we didn’t have a word for queerbaiting back then. to her it was just about “making the guys seem really gay together without actually making them gay.” she wrote SO MUCH POPULAR HP fic, that i admittedly read in the beginning before it started getting…. weird. then all the plagiarism facts came out and that’s what actually got her in trouble.
i’m still shocked publishers would touch her knowing about the rampant plagiarism, but i think she got around that by arguing that all fanfiction is essentially plagiarism and her original work would be different. then she used her online fanbase number count to prove she could sell books. and it didn’t hurt that her best friend was a lawyer.
and that, ladies and gents, is a little firsthand account of why us oldsters try to warn people off cassandra claire.
honestly, her queerbaiting pissed me off the most. she’d be like “i’m writing this fight scene with these two guys, i’m making it as homoerotic as possible! but of course it won’t actually ever be gay hahaha!” i literally commented on that post asking her WHY she couldn’t have actual gay characters, and she replied she was worried it wouldn’t sell.
i think she eventually added an actual gay character or two, but i’ll never forget that interaction where she literally told me she cared more about money than actual gay representation. yeah back in the year 2000 or whatever it wasn’t really ok to be gay, but still. :