Hello, Vampire Chronicles fans.

Sit down. We need to have a chat.

You see, while some people are very much excited for a new show about our pompous king of the assholes (and I say this as a term of endearment, having loved Lestat since I was a depressed teenager living in New York, shuffling through my mom’s fiction section) we need to pause and remember this:

Anne Rice does not support fan fiction or anything that is not glowing praise.

Read it again, slowly.

Anne Rice does not support fan fiction or anything that is not glowing praise.

This is difficult for younger fans to understand, but let’s take a walk down memory lane.

She has threatened to sue writers in the past. She is one of the most prolific writers of our generation, and she does not support people using her characters for their own work.

In fact, in 2000 she went on a binge-attack against her fans. She threatened legal action against fans who wrote or drew her characters, but especially those who wrote with them. She sent them weeks of harassing letters and doxxed them on the internet.

Let me repeat that.

She doxxed people who wrote fan fiction.

She harassed them online and threatened to contact employers.

She used her fans to outright attack other fans.

This isn’t even something she can just shake off now, with the comment of “It was so long ago” because she did this to a writer who wrote commentary on her story in 2013.

In 2013.

While it was not that she wrote fan fiction, she still shows that she has no respect for people who are in fandom.

Remember those disclaimers used in fan fics, at the beginning? “I do not own …. ”? Yeah, a lot of that has to do with the fact that Anne Rice and others like her would attack fandoms and threaten them, and was in hopes that they would just leave us alone. She didn’t.

In short: Do not trust Anne Rice. I love her writing, I have read every book she has even written, but I do not trust her.

You shouldn’t, either.