Yes, and I have already detailed this in my memoir The Vampire Lestat. It was in the the days following the wolf hunt when I returned home feet-dragging like a jaded warrior, eyes haunted by ghosts of the battlefield. Gabrielle came to me as I lay curled in my room, still wearing the clothes of that blood-soaked day. She whispered her understanding, likening my fight with the wolves to childbirth. We’d both been to a special circle of hell, and we had both done it alone. There could be no greater cognizance between us than in that moment.
Of course, this was the same time she told me she was to die and my heart cried a love for her as it never had.
Women are socialized to make men feel good. We’re socialized to “let you down easy.” We’re not socialized to say a clear and direct “no.” We’re socialized to speak in hints and boost egos and let people save face. People who don’t respect the social contract (rapists, predators, assholes, pickup artists) are good at taking advantage of this. “No” is something we have to learn. “No” is something we have to earn. In fact, I’d argue that the ability to just say “no” to something, without further comment, apology, explanation, guilt, or thinking about it is one of the great rites of passage in growing up, and when you start saying it and saying it regularly the world often pushes back. And calls you names.
Blood loss in fiction is often written very unrealistically. So here’s a short guide about blood loss and the effects to help you out a little.
First of all: The average healthy adult human body contains around 5 litres of blood. A healthy person can lose 10%-15% of their total blood volume without experiencing any difficulties and blood donations usually take 8%-10% of the donor’s blood.
Now let's get to the facts about blood loss:
Class I Hemorrhage | 0%-15% | Minimal blood loss No change in vitals, you may experience anxiousness. In almost all cases blood transfusion won’t be necessary. You will LIVE Class II Hemorrhage | 15%-30% | Mild blood loss Rapid heart beat and decrease in pulse pressure. Rapid breathing. Skin may start to lose temperature and start to look pale. You may feel anxious, irritable and confused. In most cases blood transfusion won’t be necessary. You will LIVE Class II Hemorrhage | 30%-40% | Moderate blood loss Heart rate increases. Shock. Mental status worsens. Blood pressure drops. Lightheadedness/dizziness. Nausea. Blood transfusion is necessary. If you get help in time, you will LIVE Class IV Hemorrhage | >40% | Severe blood loss Symptoms intensify. Probably unconscious. Aggressive resuscitation is required to prevent death. Losing >40% of your total blood volume may be fatal, you will probably DIE.
The chances of surviving after losing 3 litres of blood are REALLY low, the average person doesn’t survive this, so please don’t write a scene where a character loses that much blood without dying. It’s not really realistic.
“You are so clever, aren’t you, Sherlock Holmes. So very clever. Perhaps I should keep you…”
~~~
when i was 12 or 13 i got way into the vampire chronicles and ended up reading so many awful vampire novels because of it and p much nothing topped lestat okay
what a little bitch
also there were only four books nothing after body thief counts you can’t convince me otherwise memnoch who da fuck is that idek
And Lestat would be SO into Sherlock and would turn him and then be completely surprised when their relationship became a clusterfuck. But he’d still hold out hope! 😀
I have shared many already, have I not? But, then, you want a happy memory. There were so few in that house.
Lestat mentioned briefly in his book that I used to show him picture books of the places where I’d travelled before I was wed to the Marquis: Rome, Paris, Madrid, Athens, etc. And I do remember doing this, when he was very, very young—his little body tucked into my lap as I sat, cross-legged, upon my bed, a large book spread open before us.
He was always very taken with the colours of the paintings in the books—he has always had a great love for colour—and his small fingers would trace the images of ships, mountains, animals, running down and over the pages as I explained to him (sometimes in French, sometimes in Italian) what each place was and what it was like there.
Can you imagine it? Are you a mother? That sweet weight of his little body against my own, the smell of babyhood still in his hair, his voice forming words that were a charming amalgamation of French and Italian as he attempted, as toddlers do, to ask questions of me. The small gasps he might elicit at certain images as the pages turned, the trills of laughter at the animals, the way his body would shift as he would lean back to look in my face, as if searching to make sure these places were truly real and not some fairy tale I was constructing.
Very few of his companions are aware, I think, that that child still exists. That child is ever-present, hidden just behind the eyes of the man, waiting to be thrilled or wounded. I’d hazard to surmise that the few who see it are the ones who tend to stay by his side, despite his failings.
This is a fun question. I grew to type everything properly in french in my texts so I’m bad at this but here is what I remember or still catch in other people’s texts.
How To (Badly) French Text 101 – The basics
MDR: Mort de rire (Dying of laughter)
SLT: Salut (Hi)
BJR: Bonjour (Hello)
DSL: Désolé(e) (Sorry)
JTM: Je t’aime (I love you)
RPZ: Représente (Represent. It’s some kind of a joke)
OKLM: Au calme (chill)
TKT: T’inquiètes pas (Don’t worry)
DTC: Dans ton cul (in your ass)
VTF: Vas te faire (go fuck yourself)
RAF: Rien à faire/foutre (I don’t care/give a fuck)
SMS: A text/message
And that’s all I could think of
I always loved “plop”, which is a common greeting in French MMOs, basically “salut”. You might enter a battleground on World of Warcraft and see a million people saying “Plop!” “PLOP” in the chat, which sounds ridiculous in English.
I remember asking “Why is everyone saying “plop” and “murder” (MDR)?”
My French friend also taught me some more:
TG: Ta guele (Shut up)
PTN: Putain (F*ck)
STP: S’il te plaît (Please)
Also: BSR: bonsoir (good evening) CAD: c’est-à-dire (that is to say) A+: à plus tard (see you later) EN+: en plus (on top of that)
Oh, Mon Dieu. That child was a terror. He was mobile by approximately four months, a terrifying three months before any of his brothers had been, rolling and crawling as quickly as he could propel himself to do so.
By six months he was walking and was causing trouble as one could not believe, opening and falling into cupboards, climbing up into trunks (and vanishing until we could find his location via his tearful cries later), and finding his way into every mess and mud puddle and body of water he could locate.
//Okay, this needs to be answered OOC, because my Lestat would have to answer with my personal headcanon, b/c I think Mater is full of shit.
According to canon and Anne/Mater, her vampires do not experience sexual pleasure with their genitals. In QotD, Lestat calls his cock useless, claiming that it can no longer do what it was intended to, or some shit like that (I have a migraine and I’m not looking it up, but I’m sure @i-want-my-iwtv could give you the precise quote because she’s amazing).
Anne of course (typically) reneges on this when she wrote PL, creates a bunch of faulty science bullshit so that Lestat can jizz for science and create Viktor.
In fanon, it’s generally accepted that, yes, the vampires can have sex. There is some variation on this depending on what fic you are reading or who you are RPing with–but it’s generally agreed upon that vampire sex is 100% about the blood and sensuality, and that, even if they aren’t going to orgasm in the traditional sense, they are still going to get something pretty intense out of the entire situation.
There are some pretty amazing fics out there that make sense of all this, but since Vampire Chronicles fan fiction doesn’t technically exist, I can’t help you find them.
For my purposes, sure, Lestat has sex. Plenty of it. And it’s primarily about the blood. But there is also fun to be had with their bodies, and that’s more fun to write anyway, so there you have it.
ooc: ALL OF THIS. Also like… you can’t tell me that vampire sensation is 10x that of a human and expect me to believe that sensual touch does nothing for them. Maybe they can’t reach climax but that’s what the blood is for. Doesn’t mean sexual acts don’t work as amazing foreplay.
ooc: I’ve written about this before at some point I believe, but that’s very much my take on it too. Especially this: ‘you can’t tell me that vampire sensation is 10x that of a human and expect me to believe that sensual touch does nothing for them’
Hell yeah.
^Basically agreed with all 3 ppl here. Respect #Your headcanon may vary on this topic.
Canon doesn’t directly take on whether their dicks even work until the 3rd book, when Lestat says:
“I studied my reflection … and the organ, the organ we don’t need, poised as if ready for what it would never again know how to do or want to do, marble, a Priapus at a gate” – Lestat, Queen of the Damned
So I’ve discussed this topic at length in my tags for it: #asexuality, #asexual, #sex, #sexuality, #lets talk about sex. So check those out for more discussion on it. Ricean vampires still do feel sexual lust, it’s channeled through the experience of taking/sharing blood, and other sensually physical things.
In fanon there is a wide spectrum of whether they can have penetrative sex, some even speculate that their um… output… would be very bloody.
TL;DR: It all depends on your idea of what sex is. There are human couples who are unable (or do not want) to experience penetrative sex, and they can still be intimate with each other in other ways.
Claudia asks Louis about sex in IWTV, and he replies that it “‘…was something hurried…And… it was seldom savored… something acute that was quickly lost. I think that it was the pale shadow of killing.’”
He could have been lying a little to downplay it, so that she wouldn’t feel as bad for missing out on smtg she would never be able to experience, or maybe bc he truly felt that the experience of killing supercedes mortal intercourse. We don’t know bc #unreliable narrator.
ALL THAT SAID, if you prefer to take AR’s word as the gospel for canon, she has been definitive about it:
(there is a space here for no good reason thanks Tumblr!)
I think that reproductive obstacle (vampires are undead, they cannot carry a growing baby inside of dead flesh) is why Anne Rice made the choice that they could BE sexual, but not in a reproductive way.
All of that and I want to add my two cents
If we think about it, they are being “sexual” in a reproductive way. Their reproduction it’s done it by means of blood interchange, it’s the vampire’s way to carry on the species, so to speak. So for me, it makes perfect sense that their sexual act it’s precisely blood interchange as well.
Sex is for reproduction after all (from a biological point of view), intercourse is the human way and blood the vampire way. So sexual organs may not be involved for them, but that’s about as far as the difference has to go, I think. All the other aspects of sex that we add to it wouldn’t have to change or be excluded for them.
So I would say vampires do have sex, they just don’t need sexual organs to do it. And I might say that’s also why they don’t seem to mind genders at all.
// Coming in again, because why not? Not as if I added much the first time around.
Excellent points made by everyone so far! I just had some thoughts on sexual preference that occurred to me.
First off, as everything here, there’s no definite answer to any of this, it’s all up to how any individual interprets it or wants to play it out.
We all know that vampires can canonically find literally anyone attractive (how sexual that is is up for debate), especially when they are after their blood or while they are actually feeding from them. It seems to be impossible to drink someone’s blood without being intimate to some degree, even if the only intent is to kill them. Gender, looks, personality, everything seems to not really matter at that point.
So much for feeding. I think with sexual – or maybe romantic is a better word – preferences, vampires can have those same as humans have, they might just on the whole be more open-minded, in part maybe due to the different views and vision granted by the blood. And, obviously, many of them really discover that they don’t mind genders at all, if they haven’t already figured that out before they were turned.
As far as sexual organs go, I could see that while they are obviously not needed for the intended biological reason of reproduction, they are probably still sensitive spots when handled in pleasurable ways. Sex isn’t just about doing things that lead to climax after all, so for vampires every contact other than the actual blood exchange might well just be a kind of foreplay, but, hey. Foreplay is fun!
@perladivenezia: thank u for that addition, I meant “reproductive” in a mortal way, and you brought up a REALLY GREAT POINT, in how “reproductive” can be considered in a vampiric way.
@darknessmolten: “As far as sexual organs go, I could see that while they are obviously not needed for the intended biological reason of reproduction, they are probably still sensitive spots when handled in pleasurable ways.”
YES. That, plus everything else you added, very well-put.
I’m ignoring movie!QOTD bc of reasons We can’t have a real sequel bc movie!IWTV ended w/ Lestat *riding off into the sunrise* w/ Daniel and that’s very not canon. It would be hard to wrangle the story back to canon, or harder to alter canon to allow for that ship (Lestat says he’s gonna give Daniel the Choice, pretty obviously setting it up that Lestat will turn him, and then where would that leave Armand in QOTD? Fledglingless!).
Plus, all the original actors are too old for their original roles, sadly. At one time, Tom Cruise was trying to get the rights (or had them?) for TOBT which I assume he planned to star in. All the gay backlash at the time probably helped kill that project ;A;
((BTW I wouldn’t mind casting them in other roles if they wanted it… Tom could play the Marquis de Lioncourt now…))
It’s crazy but I would love an animated feature… and then we could have the original voices back…
We could restart in IWTV:
Or we could start it in TVL and go in chronological order:
^Both by @garama . (This scene with Lestat and Armand (or is that Nicki?) didn’t happen in canon but I feel like we could scoot some silliness in there) These looks like stills from an animated feature, don’t they??! As for the original voices: Tom definitely. In fact why hasn’t he done animated voicework? It’s a crime that he hasn’t. Brad, well, I didn’t love him in his animated features (Sinbad, Megamind), so I won’t argue recasting Louis.
Someone asked me for my ultimate casting choices for a live-action VC movie awhile back and I haven’t gotten a chance to answer properly. In the meantime, you might have fun browsing my #vc casting tag ;]
