It’s not my fave VC, but not my least fave VC, either. It’s growing on me. 

As I answered in a recent Ask re: Merrick, idk, I would always advocate reading the books, as cracky as some of them can be, bc there are always moments that are really great! Single lines worth digging up, some phrasing that hits you #Right in the Feels. Don’t you want to know what happens? You don’t have to agree with it but the ride is always at the very least stimulating… you can always just skim it for plot points if reading it is too much of an investment. 

As to whether it’s “just plain awful”? I wouldn’t agree w/ that, bc there are some gems in it that you can’t get anywhere else. At the risk of being redundant, my short answer: I think AR can still capture that old quality we all fell in love with, albeit in slivers. Which is why I can’t disregard any of the books entirely. It’s still hard for me to accept Prince Lestat as canon, I might never, but there are moments and lines of dialogue in it that are SO VERY GOOD. Moments where I’ve had to pause and smile, because it was as if the old Lestat, from IWTV or TVL, actually graced us with his presence, if only for a moment.

… Also I admit I very much dig Lestat’s new accessory ;D

It also has some worthwhile development re: the spirit that basically created vampires in the first place.

Re: Viktor & Co.

[Fanart of some of the main chars in PL by @remarried/@nightislandofficial]

For specifics/headcanons about Viktor, go to @viktor-de-lioncourt (Viktor RPer

who uses Jordan Sörbom as a FC), @antoineandthepiano, and @roselioncourt, all of whom RP new characters from PL (technically Antoine was in IWTV but he has a larger presence in PL so I count him as new) and care way more about them than I am capable of currently.

I didn’t find many of the new characters very engaging, I would bet we’ll get more depth on them in later books, and/or they were created for what I like to call “canon-fodder” so that AR has a bunch of chars to kill in the next book(s), since she can’t kill the core group we all love so much! She tried to kill a few of them and had to bring them back ;]

Spoilers and probably unpopular opinions re: Viktor under the cut. And really I prefer not to make unpopular opinions but sometimes I gotta. 

I find Viktor to be a kind of watered-down Twilight knockoff. He seemed to be an answer for all the POTP who had pestered AR for years to give Lestat a biological son… and the romance between him and Rose came off as pretty forced to me, again, a YA couple like in Twilight for fanservice. Not that YA can’t be well done, just that I didn’t really buy AR’s stab at it. Other ppl may have and they are welcome to ship their hearts out!

More here.