Have been unavoidably detained by the world

I’ve never loved the phrase “back on my bulls***,” but it does apply to the last six weeks. I have fallen back into Anne Rice. Or back into myself with a focus on Anne Rice.

The plot

In early June I decided to set aside a Saturday to read through my old Mary Sue series—DS9, the Vampire Chronicles, BtVS, an original fic—and see if I could dredge up some feelings. Well, it worked, and then I had a bunch of feelings to deal with. The next day I checked in on my favorite Vampire Chronicles tags on the AO3 and found a doozy of a story and then there were more feelings.

Then I gave seasons 1 and 2 of Interview with the Vampire a second try and found them much more enjoyable on rewatch. I read the last book in the series, Blood Communion, which I’d either missed or hadn’t wanted to bother with back when it came out, given the travesty that was Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis. I’ve been keeping up with IWTV season 3, a.k.a. The Vampire Lestat season 1. I’ve dipped into some show meta on Reddit and Tumblr. And I’ve immersed myself in fic, including for the show, for which I’d had zero interest in consuming fanworks until last month.

It turns out that waiting 2-4 years to read show- and show-and-book-hybrid fic means there’s a lot of excellent stuff out there to devour. The new canon means it’s an active fandom again. My current state of mind means I want to bask in it.

The feelings

How I feel, or at least how I felt at first, during this descent back into vampires is inextricable from—or fittingly adds to—the multiple layers on which the books and show and fic operate.

First and strongest, there was this sense of seeing myself across time. ( More on that. )

Then there are the differences that arise between how I and the culture around me read the books in the '90s (and before me, in the ’70s and ’80s) and how we read them in the 2020s. The show plays with this. Fic does too. I am so curious about how much fannish purity culture plays into what now seems to be a common—maybe even typical—characterization of Marius as a detestable perpetuator of abuse and self-righteous egotist. “Bloviating asshole,” I summarized it in a comment to a story by the second author I encountered who did this. It’s at once funny and a fair interpretation and painful and not my Marius. ( More on Marius/Armand in fic, in my own writing, and on the show as an example. )

Recommendations will have to wait for another post, as will everything that’s happening with Armand/Daniel.

Yet another demonstration of how the fannish brain is crafted to hold multiple conflicting realities simultaneously.

The layers

What I’ve kept exclaiming about to people regarding the show, including in the three-ish years before I wanted to spend time thinking about it from “within” the story or read fic, is how it plays with metanarrative and remixing in a way that’s utterly in the spirit of the books while enriching them.

( Oops, I wrote an essay. )

Speaking of attention spans. Thank you for reading whatever part(s) of this interested you!

Thank you to swizzlespoon for help achieving cut text (technically, details text) on the post page.