I’ve been very frustrated by the gender discourse in this fandom, which often seems far too rigid. But these passages reminded me of why I loved these books so much when I read them, so many years ago, and why they still remain important. The show is also playing with gender, and I’d love to see more of that play in the fandom.
That was part of what bled into the characterization of Claudia, the idea of being less worthy of respect just because of your body or how you are perceived by society.
“I saw Claudia as a woman in a child’s body,” says Rice. “There are women who are eternally called girls - cute, sweet, adorable pinchable, and soft- when in fact they have a strong mind that’s very threatening” - The Vampire Companion
‘Let tears gather in your eyes. You haven’t tears enough for what you’ve done to me. (...) Monsters! To give me immortality in this hopeless guise. - Claudia, Interview with the Vampire
Claudia is brilliant and dangerous. Yet her fathers treat her as a "doll", a child. Part of her character arc is fueled by rage, caused by this constant paternalism.
Of course, Lestat gave me a doll as usual, the replica of me, which as always wears a duplicate of my newest dress. (...) And what should I do with it? Play with it as if I were really a child? "Is there a message here, my beloved father?" I asked him this evening. "That I shall be a doll forever myself?" - Claudia's Diary, The Queen of the Damned
There is a great interview in which Anne talks about the rage in the character of Claudia, I'll try to make a gifset of it for this week ^^.
Still, it is wild to see some interviews (old interviews) of a bestselling author, in which the host asks things like: "what does your husband think about you writing "x"?".
Which, you know, sometimes can be pertinent (e.g. what does your husband think of you featuring his poems in your books), but in some other cases...
Something I think gets lost in the discussion of gender in Anne's work/her view of self is the context of the time in which IWTV was written and published.
IWTV wasn't published until 1976.
Women in the United States were not legally allowed to have a credit card or get a home loan in their own name, without their husband's approval, until 1974. Laws were just being put into place regarding discriminating against women in hiring and discriminating in pay for women. Most women still couldn't get birth control without their husband's approval. There was no such thing as no fault divorce, or even the concept of marital rape.
While there was no law against a woman getting a driver's license on her own, in the 60s and 70s it could still depend on where you lived and who was working the DMV that day. Anne herself did not have a driver's license and did not drive because Stan would not permit her to drive.
I wish I could remember the exact interview, because she did talk extensively about how in her early days of writing their mutual friends would just refer to her as 'Stan's wife'. 'Stan's wife' wrote a book. 'Stan's wife' is getting published. 'Stan, how is your wife getting on with her book?' being asked while she's in the room. No matter how libertine we view the 1970s, socially women still weren't really looked at outside their roles as wives.
Interview with the Vampire was published right on the cusp of women getting important financial rights, labor rights and marital rights (many of which didn't even come until decades later). So I think Claudia's pent up rage at being a woman trapped in a child's body and Anne's desire to make vampires something that are not male or female but something other is so, so timely and we don't really consider that context enough.
Sorry I cannot even the finale & the Transfem Jax headcanon I cannot even. I was going to wait for the internet release for screen grabs but I cannot even!!!!
So I watch the whole thing and the HINTS my god!!!
Jax saying “i told my mom something so personal & she just laughed at me.” The ribbon immediately following. THE PAIN AND FEAR OF BEING SEEN driving literally everyone away!!!
Wearing the maid suit “ironically” and screaming at the locked door that never gets opened. A long song about “isnt she beautiful” WHILE STARING AT JAX
I was waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting. But of course, in the end, neither Jax or the human counterpart came out as female.
I was mad because. why not let Jax come out??? After all these hints????? I know I tend to do Trans readings into things because I Am Trans and I like my Trans Headcanons, but this was all but textual!!
But like.
Pomni’s “I can fix him”
I heard that and immediately went “no you fucking can’t”
I remember like, people online, beating at the eggshells of what they hope is another trans person like them. Thinking if they just smash their fists hard enough, they can drag the half formed balut baby trans out and it will instantly solve everything. They think their destructive actions good; if only they were dragged from the shell sooner, they could have been happier sooner.
And no, Pomni, a person’s growth does not work that way.
Jax is given everything Jax needs to examine themself. Theyre given space. Comfort. Love. Unconditional love and warmth. A little nest where they’re allowed to just… sleep on it. To think. To explore. Both in and outside the circus. Outside Jax found Zooble’s bar — a bar run by an enby, someone who could mentor and nurture this little egg, and let them become whoever they want to be.
Idk. I feel like its more. Let Trans Youths Be. You cannot crack open an egg and think the chick inside will instantly fly.
And you can’t love what this Trans Kid WILL be. Thats no better than the mom forcing her mysoginist ideas on her son.
You have to love this kid as they are right now.
Isnt she beautiful? Right now? Right as we have her? Here and now and exploring and questioning and abrasive and angry. Right now Jax choses to be male — but whatever he will become is beautiful, whatever that looks like. You have to be patient and give him space and use the pronouns he’s fucking chosen.
And you know, looking back, even if she eventually hatches into a beautiful woman, the time of her life spent male was still beautiful.
Its a metaphorical low point in ones life that leaves one forever changed — its not shown as something one comes back from easily. And leaves you forever changed.
Seriously, happy swimmy abstractions playing in the water as their edges smoothed out…..
Does that look like death to you??? Jfc.
So people saying “they just watched a trans woman die on screen” I am like
No?
You watched a baby egg have a big moody and get a happy little nest to sleep in and incubate.
I did find it fascinating how MUCH was expected of the audience.
Not just Trans Jax, but pretty much everything with Caine’s sequence & what all the block building & code ripping was metaphors for. The reveal having to put 2+2 together for “ya’ll brainscans” (at first). Hell, Zooble & Gangle’s relationship being relatively low key (no onscreen kiss or whatever).
Basically asking for people to woosh every other plot point lol.
Sorry I cannot even the finale & the Transfem Jax headcanon I cannot even. I was going to wait for the internet release for screen grabs but I cannot even!!!!
So I watch the whole thing and the HINTS my god!!!
Jax saying “i told my mom something so personal & she just laughed at me.” The ribbon immediately following. THE PAIN AND FEAR OF BEING SEEN driving literally everyone away!!!
Wearing the maid suit “ironically” and screaming at the locked door that never gets opened. A long song about “isnt she beautiful” WHILE STARING AT JAX
I was waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting. But of course, in the end, neither Jax or the human counterpart came out as female.
I was mad because. why not let Jax come out??? After all these hints????? I know I tend to do Trans readings into things because I Am Trans and I like my Trans Headcanons, but this was all but textual!!
But like.
Pomni’s “I can fix him”
I heard that and immediately went “no you fucking can’t”
I remember like, people online, beating at the eggshells of what they hope is another trans person like them. Thinking if they just smash their fists hard enough, they can drag the half formed balut baby trans out and it will instantly solve everything. They think their destructive actions good; if only they were dragged from the shell sooner, they could have been happier sooner.
And no, Pomni, a person’s growth does not work that way.
Jax is given everything Jax needs to examine themself. Theyre given space. Comfort. Love. Unconditional love and warmth. A little nest where they’re allowed to just… sleep on it. To think. To explore. Both in and outside the circus. Outside Jax found Zooble’s bar — a bar run by an enby, someone who could mentor and nurture this little egg, and let them become whoever they want to be.
Idk. I feel like its more. Let Trans Youths Be. You cannot crack open an egg and think the chick inside will instantly fly.
And you can’t love what this Trans Kid WILL be. Thats no better than the mom forcing her mysoginist ideas on her son.
You have to love this kid as they are right now.
Isnt she beautiful? Right now? Right as we have her? Here and now and exploring and questioning and abrasive and angry. Right now Jax choses to be male — but whatever he will become is beautiful, whatever that looks like. You have to be patient and give him space and use the pronouns he’s fucking chosen.
And you know, looking back, even if she eventually hatches into a beautiful woman, the time of her life spent male was still beautiful.
And not becaus you assume your thoughts must be common knowledge. When you become aware of the scale of your ignorance, you feel eternally on the cusp of real understanding.
Happy Birthday, @dduane and I want to urge people to read the collected "The Tale of Prince Ivan the Not-Too-Experienced" which is available on Amazon!
I bought a TON of Eclipse Comics (wrongly credited to Epic Comics on Wikipedia, btw), and this story from the anthology series The Dreamery is fantastic. I loved The Dreamery so much. I still have all the issues.
@pangur-and-grim literally thought this was another sad sack Cameron fanart but alas, its another sopping wet blonde prince in Unfortunate Circumstances.
people gotta come to terms with the fact that we can't get all the luxuries all the time anymore. this is like two weeks of food. (some more some less)
I kinda wanna do this, I mean buy this stuff and see how long. Can stretch it. But I live with roomies and I'm not sure how down with it they'd be.
Atomic shrimp on youtube dose some very strict budget challenges (going back a few years) and some losser ones lately. I've wanted to try something similar for a while.
i mean i'm doing it right now because of poverty reasons. it's really not bad, especially if you enjoy routone. just your meals will go from tasty crunchwrap supremes to kinda bland but easy.
Either groceries are WAY cheaper where you are or you live in the USA and are using a very different dollar that's worth way more than my dollar, but that's a great grocery basis either way. Obviously you need to vary the vegetables sometimes for nutrition reasons.
You can remove the blandness by splurging on a different bottled spice or sauce when you can afford it, and rotating through those with your meals.
I live 25km from a major city in Australia and I would pay an absolute minimum of $101 AU for those grocery items, none of which are rare or difficult to obtain here, and I omitted the treat. That’s a minimum of $72 US with today’s exchange rate, and I actually trust my country to have a functioning food safety division. Even so I’m not actually convinced you wouldn’t die of malnutrition or mercury poisoning eating that much tuna and zero greens for an extended period.
“We can’t get all the luxuries all the time any more” there are ZERO luxuries on that list my friend and while I’m glad you felt able to survive on it when you made that post I really hope you’re getting more and better food now and are not experiencing related health problems.
Obviously most of these prices are high even for the cheap stores, but this one got me:
2lb ground flaxseed ($4)
I do not believe that there is anywhere in the entire world, besides an actual flax farm, where you can buy two POUNDS of ground flaxseed for less than ten pounds of potatoes.
(The carrots and potatoes are close to accurate here, but that's it. For the rice and beans, that's almost right for one pound, not four. And I live in an area with a low cost of living in the US. So neither this, nor the lister, has any bearing on OP's prices.)
I'm in a small city in Virginia. I went just now to my local Kroger's website, and prices are as follows:
4lb jasmine rice, cheapest available 7.68
2doz eggs $4.00
2lb butter $7.00
4lb dry beans (cheapest possible--store-brand pinto beans) $5.00
Not sure what a bunch of bananas would weigh, but I'm usually spending about $3.00
4lb oats, cheapest store brand: $10.88
2lb ground flaxseed are you nuts. Are you goddamn serious with those prices. No. Ten dollars.
10lb potatoes, cheapest variety available (russet): $7.00
10 cans tuna, cheap store brand in which you frequently find stuff in that isn't tuna, $10.00
2lb carrots, whole, $2.29
Peanut butter, cheapest available, the one with the preservative that makes it taste kinda like hot dogs, $3.00
A little treat would usually be a candy bar. Those are all three dollars now.
That's $72.85.
I live in a place that's pretty LCOL. And to be clear, I wouldn't actually buy most of this stuff at these prices, or in these amounts, because I have the incredible privilege of 1)good food storage 2)a deep freezer 3)access to a car that lets me, get, say, 50lb bags of flour, and so I can wait for good sales and damaged-goods discounts on large amounts of things, and then use it bit by bit throughout the year. It's *possible* to spend less than the national average on food, but it means you're spending a lot more brainpower on it, and that you have to have at least the privilege of time to pull it off.
I really just hate this snide bullshit. "have to come to terms with the fact that we can't get all the luxuries anymore." When I was growing up, "luxury" was *two* packages of Buddig lunchmeat that week. Things are much worse now. This isn't about fucking luxuries.
Fox-bright is pretty accurate to most of American’s experience (or at least my american friends & me). Grocery costs have risen 50% pretty much across the board. I’ll do grocery runs that are just Milk, Bread, and Eggs for my family, and thatll still be 25$
It’s A Necessary Function For Being Happy, Same As Eating And Sleeping Well.
hey folks lmfao so long story but im in some kind of art competition where the winner gets like $20k & i assume johnny depp is also here somehow? his name’s on it idk what his involvement is. anyway this would be pretty cool cus then i could finally fix the rest of my teeth & have my rent handled for a little while. long shot but hey who knows!
i think this is like some kind of daily voting thing where u gotta get voted for Every Day? man idk im just here lol anyway gimme a vote if you would like to support my fix-my-teeth endeavors, they’re still milking me dry for the crown i got & are trying to tell me it’s like $4000 for a deep clean & im like buddy im a millennial do i look like i have $4000
I think fanfiction as a medium is different enough from mainstream literature in the tools it offers writers that it's a shame that it's not talked about more often. And it's not me saying "fanfic is better than books xD" because that sort of mindset is a symptom of people who aren't particularly well read in either medium. I'm just speaking of like... The little things you get to do with a fanfic that you genuinely can't really do in an original story.
I had a big fanfic in a previous fandom where one of the big reveals was the involvement of a kind of infamous villain, whose presence was built up to and foreshadowed through the whole fic until his reveal without ever mentioning his name, so that the name drop would be a gut punch. It worked especially well because of who the villain was and his presence in that fandom space specifically (it's very complicated) and if it was an original story this reveal wouldn't work at all the way it was written in the fic. Because if you don't have a predisposition to think about that character and his relationship to the hero in a very specific way, then just seeing their name won't do much to you; the reveal and the recontextualisation it pushes upon you hinges on your previous knowledge of the source material.
I think it's an interesting tool fanfic authors are given. One of my favorite fanfic of all time is partially a re-imagining of its source material's canon, and something it does is introduce antagonists much earlier in the story or deepen npcs' stories. It then works to evoke a tragic irony that again wouldn't work if you didn't know the source material, and it's something the author obviously has a lot of fun with.
You could call it cheap or a crutch and I mean, yeah, sure, it is a little bit: the fanfic relies on previously established emotional bonds and stakes to achieve its goal, and in some cases it saves the author from having to 'properly' build up its stakes. But I think it's INTERESTING that it has that tool at its disposal. I think it's a fun thing to play with and I think these built in expectations and emotional bonds are especially why I find story driven aus in particular to be fascinating in the amount of ways you can play with them. You know??
I have seen exactly one published novel pull off the kind of info drop OP describes and now that I think of it, it was technically fanfiction for the author's own other series of novels.
I need Feminism because Patriarchy takes kind, sweet, loving little boys, and hammers them with stories about how kindness is a weakness; and that sweetness is to be ridiculed; and that love is a stupid thing; and it turns them into monsters; and I watched it happen to the boys alongside me growing up and to the children of my friends; and now this system of systems wants to take my sweet boy who loves without restraint and hammer him into shapes that will hurt him so that Executives and Statesmen can wield him as a weapon and I want to protect him but this world is owned and engineered by very clever men with no kindness or sweetness or love left in their hearts and I am so so afraid for him but I have it within my power to show him a home where the man and the woman are equals and friends and if that makes me some kind of political radical then so be it but I cannot believe that as I approach my 5th decade of life that we are still grappling with the notion that All Humans Are People.
My little wolf is seven and he is so full of love. He also like watching videoes of the earth exploding. But when I’m upset he asks to play his favorite video games with me, and dammit, that does cheer me up a lot.
About a year ago @elodieunderglass wrote a series of posts about an extinct type of horse, the Irish Hobelar. She ended it with art and a story, and beautiful words: he threw his heart over and she follows it still; and they’ll never land!
It made me think about the kinds of stories we tell, and why, and what the best, most heart-wrenching ones have in common. All of them mean something. The journeys those characters take, that we take with them, they all meant something — it’s why we tell these stories again and again, even if they’re sad. We’re all reaching out to tell each other that everything we do matters, even if the ending is sad or tragic or you never finished what you set out to do — it all matters.
So I told this story again. And I linked it to stories I love, stories it reminded me of, quotes I’ve heard that have stuck with me and made me look at life differently. Because it’s not the ending. It’s how they got there. It’s what we’ll remember. And this story deserves remembering. Your stories deserve remembering. I hope we all keep writing them.
Credits, links, and the full image without text below.
The original post references this discussion on medieval cavalry and this series of posts about the origins of Hobelar. Quotes unattributed below are from these posts.
“This was always going to happen. She’s been dead since the beginning.” from the Orestia, by Aeschylus
“Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.” from War of the Foxes by Richard Siken
“This story happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” and "a strange thing about stories..." are from the Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith novelization by Matthew Stover
On the Siege of Calais is on the Internet Archive
“The Hobelar is something of a sideshow…” is from the essay Re-thinking the Origins of the ‘Irish’ Hobelar by Robert Jones
“Eurydice, dying now a second time, uttered no complaint against her husband. What was there to complain of, but that she had been loved?” from Ovid’s Metamorphoses
“People really be like ‘that’s not realistic’ as if the entire universe isn’t a living miracle beyond human comprehension” by Twitter user omgsidewalks
"We only look sad because you can't imagine a stillness that's not" and "you are here on this earth forever. Nobody seems to tell you this." are from the book Rough Magic by Lara Prior-Palmer
"What about the rest of us? What about the nobodies..." is from Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo
"all the war did was identify the spear that would not break" is from Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson
"Get in loser we're living past the end of our myth" by tumblr user aridante
All handwritten text (in the paper cutouts) was written by me, and all art was hand-drawn in Procreate. You can find the full art (without text) here!
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