In a purely literary sense, fanfic doesn’t exist. There is only fiction. Fanfic is a legal category created by the modern system of trademarks and copyrights. Putting that label on a work of fiction says nothing about its quality, its creativity, or the intent of the writer who created it.
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year went to March, a novel by Geraldine Brooks, published by Viking. It’s a re-imagining of the life of the father of the four March girls in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Can you see a particle of difference between that and a work of declared fanfiction? I can’t. I can only see two differences: first, Louisa May Alcott is out of copyright; and second, Louisa May Alcott, Geraldine Brooks, and Viking are dreadfully respectable.
I’m just a tad cynical about authors who rage against fanfic. Their own work may be original to them, but even if their writing is so outre that it’s barely readable, they’ll still be using tropes and techniques and conventions they picked up from other writers. We have a system that counts some borrowings as legitimate, others as illegitimate. They stick with the legit sort, but they’re still writing out of and into the shared web of literature. They’re not so different as all that.
i was working on a commission all day, but i’m full of caffeine so i stopped and finished this lil armand for a mix i’ve been meaning to make since. uh. august maybe lmao
i’ll post the mix soon! but my caffeine wore off and i’m feeling all 7 hours of sleep i didn’t get last night.
^Stan and Michele Rice on the left, Lestat and Claudia de Lioncourt on the right. As a side note, before this gets into the more serious topic, AR has said she based Lestat on Stan, and there is a story out there that his name was meant to be “Lestan,” but ended up as “Lestat” bc of a typographical error. I don’t have a source on that.
(In the first draft of [IWTV], Rice described Claudia as three or four years old.)… Rice based Claudia’s appearance on her own daughter, Michele, who died at the age of five from leukemia. Claudia even shares Michele’s birthday, September 21.* However, despite the intense tone of suffering and guilt evident in Louis’s telling of the story, Rice insists that she had not been aware that she had included her feelings about Michele’s tragic death. “I never consciously thought about it when I was writing the book,” she says. “I wasn’t conscious of the connection. I knew that I was using the physical beauty of Michele as the model, but Claudia was a fictional character in her own right. The character, the voice, and the things Claudia say have nothing to do with my daughter – but there’s no question that this is the symbolic working out of a terrible grief. What else can it possibly be?”
In the first version of [IWTV], Claudia eventually goes off with three vampire brothers whom she meets in Paris. She does not die. As such, it was as if Rice had attempted to give her daughter a form of immortality. Rice, however, experienced psychological problems that cleared up only after she had rewritten the ending – by killing off Claudia and taking Louis through an experience of intense grieving. This version was much more cathartic for Rice.
Hit the jump for more, cut for length, not content.
From Premiere Magazine, November 1994:
(sorry, I don’t have a link, I transcribed this from the page)
In real life, Claudia was a nickname for Michele Rice, Anne Rice’s vibrant blond daughter, who had once piled her hair on top of her head, and spoken in a smoky voice like Claudia Cardinale. She was three years old when she developed leukemia, and five when she died, in 1972.
At first, Rice soaked her maternal despair in a steady stream of sixpacks. Then she unleashed her rage unto paper, into what eventually became Interview with the Vampire. Michele was reincarnated as Claudia, the raging woman locked in a child’s body. “Louis was me,” says Rice. “That dark, brooding, melancholy person ripped from Catholic faith and tormented with guilt – that was me. I’d love to be Lestat: the wishful me, the active, the dream, the other one. Louis was the more true, autobiographical portrait of the conflicted and lost and orphaned person. That’s what the book is about. It’s about being orphaned.”
“Writers write about what obsesses them,” says Rice. “You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I’m writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.“
I don’t know who this guy is, we can’t even see his whole face in the picture, but this is it. This is my Lestat. He has the hair and the mouth, but mostly the hair.
YES, very good Lestat hair. And body and face, from what we can see. We have a mortal!Lestat, or freshly sunburned!Lestat here.
But of course we need to see more.
According to my googling this is Michał Darowski. But the bone structure doesn’t seem to match up 😦
Can anyone figure out who this is so we can see if there’s more than that gorgeous blond mane?
^[X] #Lestatuesque #no but this is seriously smtg Lestat would say verbatim #dialogue #dude as tall as me I DONT LIKE HIM DONT LIKE THAT GUY #or I want to bang him #either/or
Armie Hammer for Lestat de Lioncourt
@queenofthesavagegarden reminded me that I had considered him ages ago and now I want to bring him up again bc I think he’s got gr9 potential. I screencapped the above gifset bc I didn’t want to tack all these gifs below onto someone else’s post, but I included the source, so you can reblog that gifset from there 😉
Omg, I cannot! ;A; I didn’t read the HP books, only saw some of the movies, so I’ll turn this over to more qualified ppl.
^I do think Claudia would end up in the same house as Lestat, continuing the tradition like the Malfoy line does, but I could be wrong on that. The sorting hat would be taking a LONG time w/ Claudia, tho.
Anyone is invited to sort our beloved characters! Do the thing (ﾉ^ヮ^)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧
*gapes at you not having read them* Anyway, I feel
like trying though I always tend to change my mind on sortings as soon as I have made a choice. Here goes:
Lestat: Gryffindor.(And I don’t just say
so because it’s the house of the lion ;)) I think he is a Gryffindor because he
is ridiculously impulsive and as a result also ridiculously brave. He wants
greatness, notoriety, to be remembered and he loves people, “I want to be good
at being bad” he wants to be admired, even when his nature doesn’t lend itself
very well to admiration, thus the rock-star phase.
Louis: Ravenclaw. Louis is bookish and
rather introverted, he’s individualist and doesn’t give a hoot what other
people think, but he also tends to avoid confrontation whenever possible. He
doesn’t seem as eager to seek knowledge as most ‘claws, but the other
traits seem fitting.
Claudia: Ravenclaw. Claudia was obsessed with knowledge;
she wanted to know everything about vampires and about adulthood as well. She
was ultimately driven mad by the fact that she was kept from all this knowledge
by Lestat and by her perpetual childhood. She had no loyalty except to
herself and didn’t seem to bother at all with striving for greatness, she just
wanted to understand.
Armand: Slytherin. Armand is difficult,
because he wants so many things and he is so very contradictory in his
attitudes, but I say Slytherin because he always strives to create ‘community’,
but always in a way that revolves around him, he is the ‘Boss’ and he slides
into this role with quiet aptitude, he needs to be in control. His communities
are also often very selective and he is ruthless in keeping ‘rogues’ away. He
loves mystery and cares for the history of the vampires, but he doesn’t value
learning about past or present beyond what can benefit him personally (thus his
random fits of obsessive learning when entering a new century).
Marius: Ravenclaw: He is always learning
new things; he is obsessed with knowledge in the traditional sense and loves
being the one people come to for advice. He is also individualist to the point
where people have to leave him for their own sake and he avoids confrontations so much that he
would rather abandon someone he loves than have to be confronted with a unsatisfactory
situation.
Daniel: I just can’t decide whether he
is a Gryffindor or a Ravenclaw, because on the one hand he is a journalist and
that seems to indicate a pretty heavy thirst for knowledge, but he is also
ridiculously brave, throwing himself into risky situations because of that
curiosity and he doesn’t exactly back
down. He is difficult because much of the time we see him outside of his
interview has him being chased by Armand and/or living with him and that doesn’t
exactly represent his normal behavior.
Omg, I cannot! ;A; I didn’t read the HP books, only saw some of the movies, so I’ll turn this over to more qualified ppl.
^I do think Claudia would end up in the same house as Lestat, continuing the tradition like the Malfoy line does, but I could be wrong on that. The sorting hat would be taking a LONG time w/ Claudia, tho.
Anyone is invited to sort our beloved characters! Do the thing (ﾉ^ヮ^)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧
You’re remembering it correctly, Louis didn’t really test his own powers in IWTV in the way that you’re describing bc he was too busy existential angsting :[
He doesn’t seem to have gotten any substantial powers anyway, being Lestat’s 3rd fledgling and made such a short period of time after Lestat’s 2nd fledgling. There is also some speculation that the blood transfer needs to be exchanged more than once (how it was done w/ Louis) to ensure a stronger fledgling. Marius, for example, exchanged blood with his maker multiple times when he was turned.
A maker needs to wait a good long while between making fledglings; too much frequency will make subsequent fledglings weaker than they could have been. Plus, even though Lestat had the blood of a much older and stronger vampire when he was turned, Lestat himself was only a decade into vampiring himself. It seems the vampiric spirit discourages the transfer of powers from young vampires to their fledglings.
Armand did coerce Louis into climbing up a building once, tho!
“`Listen to me; we are going to climb to the tower,’
Armand was saying.“
`I cannot . . it’s impossible … I-‘
‘You don’t begin to know your own powers. You can climb easily. Remember, if you fall you will not be injured. Do as I do.’ ”
And he did climb it, but he didn’t seem all that thrilled about doing so.
Lestat tells us in TVL:
“I never revealed to
him half my powers, and with reason, because he shrank in guilt and
self-loathing from using even half of his own.”
Louis says to Armand in IWTV:
“I don’t see our
life as powers and gifts. I see it as a curse. I haven’t the courage to die.”
In later canon, we still don’t see Louis testing his powers, but it’s fanon that he has some and seems to have no interest in exploring them.
There’s fanon that his sense of smell is stronger than the other vampires, so that’s something!
More under the cut. Cut for length, also mild spoilers.
In TVL, Louis does admit he felt something when Akasha was in the neighborhood, so either he was sensing Akasha or sensing what other vampires were able to sense of her:
“I don’t have your powers,” he said unobtrusively, “nevertheless I felt
this thing. And I tell you it was alien, utterly uncivilized, for want of a
better word.”
Armand describes Louis’ lack of powers here in TVA:
“…unable to read minds, or to levitate, or
to spellbind others except inadvertently, which can be hilarious, an
immortal with whom mortals fall in love.”
Marius considers upgrading Louis in QOTD: but he is not authorized and you know Lestat would throw the hugest tantrum if it happened
This one was so gifted yet not gifted at the same time; [Marius] wondered if the human light would go out of
Louis’s eyes if he ever gained more power, if he ever had, for instance, a little of the blood of Marius in his
veins…
Just a little blood, and Louis might be stronger, true, but then he might lose
the human tenderness, the human wisdom that no one could give another; the gift of knowing others’
suffering with which Louis had probably been born.”
