Entry tags:

author entitlement, authors, interrogating from the wrong perspective, person: anne rice, reviews

Amazon reviewers are interrogating Anne Rice's Dickensean principles from the wrong perspective!
...Again.

Poor, misunderstood, editorless vampire author Anne Rice (yes, I am going to take this opportunity to take a stroll through the memory lane of Anne Rice's batshittery) is once again demonstrating a skin of solid tissue paper.

According to The Guardian newspaper good ol' Rice Whine has signed a Change.org petition to convince Amazon to prohibit anonymous reviews because, the petition says:

"People have found ways to exploit this flaw in the system and are using it to bully, harass, and generally make life miserable for certain authors on Amazon. These people are able to create multiple accounts and then use those accounts to viciously attack and go after any author or person that they feel doesn’t belong on Amazon or who shouldn’t have published a book, made a comment on a forum post, etc."

Well, yes. I'm quite prepared to accept that people have been using the Amazon comments to troll their authors of choice (apparently Charlaine Harris has had death threats, which I feel suggests the True Blood fandom deserves some investigation over at

unfunny_fandom)... the problem is that Anne, of course, has form in the Department of Kind Of Maybe Overreacting A Tinsy-Winsy Bit.

Referring to an (I quote) "anti-author gangster bully culture" when interviewed by the Grauniad doesn't really help disprove that.

And hey, check out the links on this Time article - we got spotted!

[This report cheerfully cribbed, albeit rewritten, from aforementioned Time article. Sep made me do it.]

BONUS PROTO-WANK: She's bringing back Lestat, guys! And throwing some rather side-eye-worthy shade at Twilight while she's at it:

Rice [...] has previously spoken dismissively of the vampires dreamed up by Stephenie Meyer for Twilight, saying she "feel[s] sorry for vampires that sparkle in the sun", and that Lestat "would never hurt immortals who choose to spend eternity going to high school over and over again in a small town – any more than they would hurt the physically disabled or the mentally challenged".

Stock up on popcorn for October, folks!

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seiberwing
2014-03-15 02:05 pm UTC (link)

Twilight has many problems, but "the things they call vampires aren't exactly like the things I call vampires" argument is soooo dull and juvenile. They're fictional. Dracula was too sexy to be mythologicaly accurate too, guys.

And now we have to deal with all those people who think making their vampires dark and angsty and dangerous is somehow edgy, rather than the baseline for vampire fiction.

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rosehiptea
2014-03-15 09:52 pm UTC (link)

And now we have to deal with all those people who think making their vampires dark and angsty and dangerous is somehow edgy, rather than the baseline for vampire fiction.

Yes! And also people keep talking about sparkly vampires as if they're some kind of trend rather than a thing which, as far as I know, still only exists in one canon. (I know, sometimes they're just trying to avoid straight-out naming Twilight, but still.)

All the fictional vampires I can think of are very mythologically inaccurate. Probably because the mythological ones often don't have personalities at all, sexy or not.

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brennalarose
2014-03-15 10:14 pm UTC (link)

My issue is not that they sparkle. My issue is that Meyer implies that Stalking is Sexy and a Healthy Expression of Protective Love. My calling Edward "Prince Twinklebritches" is only because it's the only nickname for him that truly grasps the only redeeming qualities he seems to have as a cis-gendered, heterosexual, vanilla love interest, namely, he has pretty twinkly skin and he wears pants.

I'm Team Maccon, all the way, though, so maybe I'm biased. At least he eventually figures out that his style of romance is not winning him any points.

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	yoritomo_reiko 2014-03-15 11:00 pm UTC (link)
	As I remember, it mostly earned him whacks with a parasol and the sharp side of his future wife's tongue. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	brennalarose 2014-03-16 11:44 pm UTC (link)
	And then, his beta had to explain to him, "Human women don't do Werewolf Courtship. Try again and don't be a dick." If memory serves me right. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	yoritomo_reiko 2014-03-16 11:45 pm UTC (link)
	To be fair, MOST of Lyall's explanations to Lord Maccon ended with, "Try again and don't be a dick." (Reply to this)(Parent)

	rosehiptea 2014-03-17 02:04 am UTC (link)
	Eh, I'm not even referring to every single person who makes jokes about the sparkling -- just people who say stuff about "sparkly vampires" being all over the place like it's the default for vampires now instead of actually just being a Twilight thing. Maybe I'm splitting hairs I guess. I really should read Soulless. My son and his dad really liked it. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	kaen 2014-03-16 10:25 pm UTC (link)
	I'd kinda love to see an angsty-sexy-style vampire story where they kept the arithmomaniaweakness. All courting a woman who doesn't doesn't know the dark truth about him, she invites him in while she's making dinner, then oops! The rice bag rips and suddenly he's only the floor muttering to himself as he scoops them up grain by grain. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	yoritomo_reiko 2014-03-16 11:47 pm UTC (link)
	I actually know somebody who used this with her vampires! Look up a book by Helen Keeble called Fang Girl. It's YA, the main character is a genre savvy fangirl of vampire fiction and it's kind of a comedy send up of a lot of vampire fiction...and it's funny as hell. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	full_metal_ox 2014-03-19 09:27 pm UTC (link)
	One authentic vampire folkloric detail I've been longing in vain to see in a movie is the (Rumanian Roma, I think) concept of dhampirs as a twin brother and sister born on a Sunday--and their stipulated vampire-hunting attire is their underwear. Turned inside out. Come on--there've got to be filmmakers in Hong Kong, Japan, and/or Turkey willing to go there! (Reply to this)(Parent)

	rachelmap 2014-03-26 10:48 am UTC (link)
	Is this the basis for Sesame Street's Count? (Reply to this)(Parent)

	suzycat 2014-04-03 12:54 pm UTC (link)
	You mean... the Count isn't just random? MINDBLOWN. (Reply to this)(Parent)

beccastareyes
2014-03-18 03:32 pm UTC (link)

And if we use 'sparkly' for a synonym for 'sexy eternally-young maybe-dangerous* love interest'... well, that started long before Edward entered the scene. And maybe Rice is a bit too close to be throwing stones.

(I suppose it could also be that it is a synonym for 'My Vampires are Different!' without working with the rest of the mythos: Edward and Co. seemed convinced that their skin luster would give them away when they live in a 21st century Earth where Twilight doesn't exist, so the average joe is more likely to think 'overdid body glitter' than 'creature of the night'**. Which, again, you can be a crummy worldbuilder with no sparkles at all.)

* Granted, Edward's 'danger' seemed to be more the fact Meyer wrote him as a controlling stalker rather than any risk of killing Bella, which I gather was Meyer's intent for his danger.

** One could make a case that vampire hunters or other vampires deliberately obscured this fact for Reasons, but... well, AFAIK Meyer didn't.

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