In a startling irony, the official Interview with the vampire An account associated with the new AMC TV series just revealed a collaboration with a mobile app that will allow fans to “write their own vampire stories” featuring the series’ memorable characters. Which is absolutely incredible. Anne Rice, who wrote the famous 1976 novel on which the series is based, was known as an extremely anti-fanfiction writer, and her legal disclaimers against fanfiction are why so much early fiction contained the line, “I CLAIM NONE LEGALITY OWN THE COPYRIGHT PLEASE DO NOT SUE!!!!!!!!”
Dorian: Comics You Play! is a mobile app hosting visual novels created by community creators. Beginning October 3, fans could use officially licensed assets from AMC Interview with the vampire to create their own visual novels, and would even be compensated with virtual currency for doing so. “Create your adaptation and share it!” urged a Dorian community manager on the app’s official Discord server. “The sooner you release, the sooner you can start getting read and having your game streamed by cosplayers!” She also urged fans to join the “Write Club,” daily writing sessions for theirs Interview with the vampire
Well, all of this is causing me immense whiplash. It used to be very tough to write fanfiction for Rice. “I don’t allow fanfiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think of fanfiction with my characters,” she said wrote in 2000. After that, fanfiction.net removed its entire category for Rice’s books and banned any attempts to post works based on it on the site. have fans claims that Rice threatened legal action against them, which had a chilling effect on the fanfiction community at large.
Suffice it to say that Anne Rice, who died last year, would likely be unhappy with this turn of events. Not only can you now legally write fanfiction about Lestat and Louis glancing at each other in the bedroom, the visual novel app even is ask Creators to do this as part of a community. As a teenager I would have been so proud of how far fandom culture has come since the scary days of copyright infringement. Fan content on Dorian is monetized by the developers, and fan creators are definitely not getting a fair return for keeping their favorite IP alive. But god, I wish Rice lived to see fanfic writers create slash content of their beloved vampires.