#my byronic hero essay has been popping off again recently and i get so anxious when i pick up my phone to all the notes after the whole

[pynkhues]

I think you explained something I've been pondering over for a while, namely why so many loustat fic writers hates lestat lol. Like I'm always taken aback by how often lestat is written as louis' sex toy who only exist to serve him and fulfill his (self-insert) fantasies or an evil patriarchal abuser who needs to be punished (or both). There's so many other ships they could pour ttheir energy into, if they truly see him as an evil racist abuser and louis as his helpess victim why even ship them. I'm actually fascinated by this fandom Christian-like obsession with punishment, paying for your sins, martydom and having an redemption arc. I find it interesting that people who consider themselves to be atheists and are anti-religion still succumb to this mentality. The prevalence of fics when louis needs to punish lestat (apparently killing him wasn't enough), make him suffer, lestat has to grovel at his feet, stop killing humans and only then he will deserve pure moral louis and then they will be "even". I find this attitude to be so immature, like this is not how relationships work irl, and yes it's a show about toxic vampires but, in my understanding it was never loustat dynamic to begin with. Something about moral purity in a show about vampires is just so funny to me.

Y'know, I actually think the main reason I've taken a big step back from reading fic and checking ao3 is because a few months ago, I opened two or three Lestat x Louis fics in a row that all had an author's note where the writer said that they hated Lestat. The concept of that alone honestly baffles me - not the hating Lestat part, I don't care what characters people do and don't engage with on the show - but the idea that you could write fic - and fic where Lestat is one half of a relationship - while hating the character is just wild to me. Why are you writing characters you don't like? Why are you shipping characters when you don't like one of them?

I just - - it really shocks me. As someone who's been writing fic for literally 20 years at this point, I can honestly say I've never written for a pairing where I haven't liked one of the characters, and it generates a lot of questions in me about the current state of fandom, the projection, the virtue signalling, the purity culture, and what that dictates about how people are willing to engage with stories.

But yeah, I guess more to your point, I don't disagree. I actually don't necessarily think it's unique to this fandom though? In the last fandom I was super active in - Good Girls - the main ship was a straight one between a gang leader (Rio) and a 'housewife' / mother of four (Beth) who'd resorted to a life of crime and found she had an aptitude for it after her husband lost their house, and there was an enormous sense of Beth needing to be punished sexually and otherwise in fic, especially after she shot Rio in the (admittedly underwritten) s2 finale.

It's kind of funny in that sense, because I have largely put the GG scenario down to internalised misogyny, especially given the volume of fans who watched the show exclusively for Rio, and who ended up feeling like Beth didn't 'deserve him', but it does feel different with IWTV. Not entirely maybe - I do think there's a sense of Lestat needing to 'earn' Louis back for instance which isn't necessarily tied to gender, but tied to a very shallow view of what relationships are, just as I think there is a cultural load and systemic connotations brought to scenes of violence, particularly intimate partner violence, when the person perpetrating is white (i.e. Beth shooting Rio, who is Latino, carries different weight than Rio shooting her white husband, and kidnapping her white sister, same with Lestat dropping Louis vs Louis slitting Lestat's throat + bashing a white man's head in after projecting Lestat's face onto him).

I think that's all important to talk about and to consider and reflect on, just as I think the insane amount of gender essentialism, TERF rhetoric, and feminisation in a gay ship is, but I agree that it feels married to a degree of moral purity and - I'd argue - it gets twisted up simultaneously with fetish, kink and fanon to make a bit of a melting pot of Stuff that feels difficult to reduce to any one thing.

I don't know if I think it's steeped in immaturity exactly - the people I know of writing some of the things that perpetuate a lot of these tropes and who have harrassed me and others I know are mostly in their late 20s and 30s - but I do wonder how much of it is tied to an isolated perspective of relationships and the world? I really do think you can tell when people don't often hear perspectives outside of their own in their day-to-day life, or, hell, I think people tell on themselves more than they realise in how they might phrase things, even on anon. I still joke with my sister about the doxxing attempt I got where one anon asked me if [my sister's first name] knew I wrote BDSM, which was meant as a clear threat, when my sister had literally sent me excerpts of the werewolf porn she was reading that day, lol. We also both talk about sex a lot, so like.

It wasn't an issue for me, but y'know, the sense I got was that the anon obviously thought I should be ashamed and my sister would be disgusted, and like - - I don't know. Most of my friends have read the smut I've written, man, and my sister doesn't care (my brother either now - given I told him what I wrote in the process of all of that, and he now finds it very funny to ask me loudly about my erotic fanfiction when we're on the train, so y'know, haha). It just felt very telling to me about how people like this think, how they feel about sex and smut, and also the relationships they have in their personal lives because, well, I guess from how they act, they wouldn't be talking to people in their real lives about any of this.

Is that Christian puritanicalism, is that immaturity, is that isolation, is that inexperience, is that something else, I don't know! It does feel wide spread in this fandom in particular right now, but I do think it's kind of everywhere, and I think the nature of this show having adapted this story as something both outright queer and diverse is pulling a lot of people towards it who might actually be more interested in the optics than the content.