At the same time, when Anne Rice was known in the 90s for cracking down on fanfic it was almost framed as acting against queer culture, which we were just then being trained not to do. The same para-academic rediscovery of a useful queer history that looked to pre-Code films and drag performances looked to ‘60s slash zines

But really having seen it in full bloom the thing she was really suppressing was fujoshi culture, shipper culture and I’m… a bit more sympathetic? Which maybe I should interrogate, I think it’s important that gay men have a culture playing to their tastes but not unappealing straight women?

At least sympathetic to a sort of moral droit argument, that the author has some claim on the way her creation is handled.

Like, Rice herself is a total Decadent fujoshi, the books in original form are a bunch of hunks having dramatic Romantic emotions around each other, conjured from her desires and aimed at an audience of similar women. It was subtexty yaoi from the start, and what if she just wanted her creation to be that, and not a sort of franchise of amateur tales about improbable anal lube she didn’t even get paid for, you know?