I have a little doubt, are ricean vampires racist?

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Y’know, that is a good question but also a tough one to answer. I’m sure there are academic articles on it (here’s one I skimmed, looks intriguing, thanks to takemetocoffin-or-losemeforever for the link!), and I did a movie!IWTV kill tally (according to the tally, 73% of the on-screen mortals killed were Caucasian). 

I percolated on this with coldinhumanity, and the short answer is: Maybe, but if so, it’s unintentional. These are 200+ yr old vampires, and they have outdated conceptions of things.

In movie!IWTV: Louis kills Yvette, a poc, it was accidental. We see him struggling with it and trying to make Yvette leave him alone, but she seems to actually care about him, “Are you still our master at all? You must send away this friend of yours… they’re frightened of him. And they’re frightened of you.” I headcanon that they had a good relationship prior to his turning, maybe the best possible relationship under the circumstances.

Not saying that Louis was a fantastic slave owner, but we aren’t told negative things about him in that role, only that movie!Yvette (and I think it’s in book!IWTV, too) NOTICED his daytime absence in the fields, and seemed to want him back out there. 

I think Anne Rice attempts to consider political concepts and weave them into her work if possible, but it’s not her main focus. Akasha’s idea for world peace was presented, and refuted. Was Akasha a misandrist? That’s not racism, but it’s hatred of a group of people who all share a certain characteristic having and/or being a dick, and AR strove to show us how impractical it was to try to remove them, 40% of the world’s population, in order to “improve” the remainder. 


In the books, I’d say that:

  • Anne Rice began the first one in the style of the Victorian-era gothic novels she loved, and emulated the way those novels exoticised anything that could be exoticised, such as, exotic people. 
  • The whole series are basically white men from the capitals of Europe.
  • She has had some non-Caucasian vampires (I won’t spoil anything by mentioning them by name), who are typically from places that western history acknowledge as good and impressive, like Ancient Egypt and India.

I don’t think she intends to be racist, and her characters rarely have dialogue that would explicitly state such. In the narration, however, one could argue that there are implied racial opinions.  

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