One of the reasons I fell out of love with her writing was her treatment of the fansโฆ (that and the opening chapter of Lasher gave me such heebie-jeebies with the whole underage sex thing I felt unclean just reading it.)
I have zero problem with fanart/fic so long as the creators arenโt making money off of it. It is someone elseโs intellectual property and people who create fan related works need to respect that (and a solid 98% of them do.)
The remaining 2% are either easily swayed by being gently prompted to not cash in on someone elseโs IP. Or they DGAFโฆ and they are the ones who will eventually land themselves in hot water. Either way: this isnโt much of an excuse to persecute your entire fanbase.
But Anne Rice went off the deep end with this stuff by actively attacking people who were expressing their love for her work and were not profiteering from it.
The Vampire Chronicles was a dangerous fandom to be in back in the day. Most of the works I read/saw were hidden away in the dark recesses of the internet and covered by disclaimers (a lot of them reading like thoroughly researched legal documents.)
And woe betide anyone who was into shipping anyone with ANYONE in that fandom. You were most at risk, it seemed, if your vision of the characters deviated from the creators โoriginal intentions.โ (Hypocritical of a woman who made most of her living writing erotica.)
Imagine getting sued over a headcanonโฆ
Put simply: we all lived in fear of her team of highly paid lawyers descending from the heavens and taking us to court over a slashfic less than 500 words long.