Idk what you’re intending to do with these screencaps, here ya go, use them tactfully! And link me when you make your thing 😉
These screencaps are almost funny enough w/o any dialogue at all! Reminds me of a meme I did FOUR YEARS AGO (omg I have been on here awhile??) so I’ll rebagel it for you, Anon.
^I had to flip Dan horizontal so he’d have better eye contact w/ Louis, but if this looks ‘off’ to you, that’s probly why. Anon, you might prefer to do the google and grab a pic of River Phoenix looking disgusted from My Own Private Idaho or whatev bc he was originally going to be Daniel.
[It’s a great reminder of canon characterization as too often fanon has casted him as a beautiful, frail flower destined and carried by Lestat’s will.] *nods* Yep.
I think we can blame movie!IWTV for some of that fanon, bc he’s shown at his weakest in that movie, when he was struggling emotionally about vampiring, and the film also emphasized his appeal to other characters (like the scenes where Santiago is stroking his hair while deciding his punishment, and when Lestat literally sweeps him off his feet with the first bite), and the film took a number of important BAMF-moments/lines from him (like the one I mentioned in that post). Consequently, there are fans who base their headcanon of him mainly on the movie interpretation, even after they’ve read the book(s), since it left such a strong impression for them.
[I love that he knows he’s beautiful and he lowkey manipulates the fuck out of people and that he isn’t a delicate pretty face, like you said, he can still cut a bitch! He’s equally if not alot more dangerous than the rest.]
^YEP. In his speech to Madeleine about her wanting to be a vampire, he acknowledges “Do you find us beautiful? Magical?” He knows how he appears to mortals and other vampires. He’s calling her out on her request as being flimsy and uneducated, that she is completely out of her depth and has no idea what she’s really asking for, it’s not just a makeover!
We use the word “manipulative” on tumblr as having a negative connotation, and I wouldn’t say that Louis manipulates for nefarious purposes. I think he’s tactical. He wants to keep the peace in this scene:
“I wish you would play the music,’ I said softly, unobtrusively, but as persuasively as possible. Sometimes this worked with Lestat. If I said something just right he found himself doing what I’d said. And now he did just that: with a little snarl, as if to say, `You fool,’ he began playing the music.” (IWTV)
I don’t think Louis finds himself particularly attractive, I think when he calls himself handsome in IWTV, it’s his acknowledgement that others find him attractive; it still baffles him that they do. He absolutely recognizes it as a tactical advantage, he just doesn’t explicitly preen about it like Lestat does. No need 😉
Hit the jump for a little more re: the “frail flower” trope, under a cut for respect to the anon bc I this anon isn’t fond of it.
As you mentioned, you may not be fond of it, and that is absolutely fine! It’s not for everyone. I know I can’t read those trashy romance novels at the supermarket. They’re unappealing to me. But I get that they have an audience, bc they’re still there, still selling!
With Louis, other than all those loving descriptions of him from other characters, I think it’s worth noting that there are truly very few canon moments wherein he’s a *~a beautiful, frail flower destined and carried by Lestat’s (or whoever else’s) will,~* yes, it’s that damsel-in-distress, bodice-ripper kind of trope. Is it as effective if he’s always pursued and never caught? I think some readers, like myself, need a bite of carrot now and then. It’s a subjective thing. We should be glad AR hasn’t turned him into the smut vehicle so many other characters became *sigh*
It’s a fantasy to be carried off by some angelic stranger, it’s been around since ppl have told stories. We can identify with Louis, or we can identify with Lestat, both sides of the fantasy is appealing in its own way. In shipping them, you get to have both. So I understand the appeal, but again, it’s not necessarily for everyone. Not everyone likes shipping, period, and that’s absolutely fine, too!
Feel free to send me rants about this mournful-yet-will-cut-a-bitch-while-looking-like-an-angel angel (<— NICE), bc #we appreciate and love louis in this house, as @13bels so eloquently tagged that post ❤
[EDIT: Tumblr ate half my post! I took out all the indented “quote” formatting to fix it]
IKR?? He tolerates it, rolls his eyes at it when he reads it, but when it gets to a certain amount…
Louis says of himself in IWTV:
“You wonder if I was a handsome man when I was alive,” said the vampire. The boy nodded. “I was. Nothing structurally is changed in me. Only I never knew that I was handsome. Life whirled about me a wind of petty concerns, as I’ve said. I gazed at nothing, not even a mirror… especially not a mirror… with a free eye.”
The compilation of descriptions of Louis that @i-see-light-blog put together are mostly from Lestat, I think, and at least one or two are from Armand, both were lovers of Louis at one point. The others who describe him are Daniel, David, and Marius.*
And I think the deal with describing Louis is partly that, hey, it’s fun to do, like having a favorite flower, and AR takes the opportunity to remind us of it, and put the camera on him in a scene, so we know he’s present. It also serves a purpose, we usually get at least a scrap of context about him and/or the scene:
“I glared at him, at the sharp graceful angles of his imperturbable face, […] his wide-set eyes, with their fine rich black lashes. How perfect the tender indentation of his upper lip.” -Lestat, The Tale of the Body Thief
Lestat glares at Louis. –> Lestat is clearly pissed.
Louis’ imperturbable face –>
Louis is not scared of Lestat being pissed.
And then Lestat lavishes this extra description on him, appreciatively. Attention on the lip area, now we’re picturing him pointedly staring there, which might precede a kiss, so we can infer that Lestat desperately wants to kiss him, probably. What I get from all that is the exquisite tension of Lestat wanting someone he can’t have, someone he treasures and wants even MORE bc of the difficulty. And Louis knows this when he reads those flowery descriptions. I think Louis secretly enjoys the power that he holds over all these hopeless admirers, when he reads these descriptions.
It’s the tension of the other characters pining for Louis that AR wrings every drop out for us, she’s showing us how helpless these other characters are that they can only try to capture Louis with descriptions since he defies being owned by anyone. Unrequited love is a powerful thing.
In my reading of IWTV, Louis was not just some dishrag Lestat could toss around at will. Even before Claudia appears, Louis is setting boundaries with Lestat:
“And to Babette I came now with Lestat. He would have killed the Frenieres long ago if I hadn’t stopped him,…
…`You call me the idiot, and you’ve been the idiot all along. Do you think I don’t know why you made me a vampire? You couldn’t live by yourself, you couldn’t manage even the simplest things. For years now, I’ve managed everything while you sat about making a pretense of superiority. There’s nothing left for you to tell me about life. I have no need of you and no use for you. It’s you who need me, and if you touch but one of the Freniere slaves, I’ll get rid of you. It will be a battle between us, and I needn’t point out to you I have more wit to fare better in my little finger than you in your entire frame. Do as I say.” – Louis, Interview with the Vampire
^And this is part of Louis’s hawtness, as well. He absolutely will cut a b*tch, if necessary.
Hit the jump for a little more, cut for it’s-slightly-off-topic-but-oh-well
*I’m pretty sure the other quotes are from Daniel, David, and Marius, I’m not checking bc I’m like 90% sure.
Daniel’s drawn to him in IWTV bc his story is so compelling, and that Louis is a vampire in the presence of a mortal who knows what he is, so he has that preternatural thing going on, mortal!Daniel is enthralled. Plus, Louis may have spellbound him inadvertently, as according to Armand:
“Louis… 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…” – the Vampire Armand
David probably has some mixed feelings about Louis, especially in Merrick, bc Lestat’s out of the picture for most of that book, and I think David is stepping into Lestat’s role in his absence, to some extent, so I think he’s trying see Louis as Lestat sees him.
There was an artist in IWTV who painted Louis’ portrait, it makes sense that Marius, another artist who has done portraits, would also be drawn to Louis for this reason. Marius also thinks about what would happen if Louis were upgraded, and hey, I would think he’s had those thoughts about other vampires who are significantly younger than himself, for whom an upgrade really might change them. Now that I’m thinking about it, this was info that Marius confessed to Lestat when Lestat was drafting QOTD, and I bet this comment stuck in his mind, he very much wanted to upgrade Louis for awhile, but for different reasons.
To my knowledge, we don’t really have a name, like the Potterheads for HP or the Hiddlestoners for Tom Hiddleston 😦
We’re just “VC fans.” If I’m differentiating between different vampire media, I’ll say “Ricean vampires” or “VC vampires.”
It’s an old fandom, so old that I’m pretty sure it predates fandom being the recognized thing it is today. We were also strongly discouraged from creating fanfic, so maybe that’s why we don’t have a name. VC fanfic was underground, the fandom was in hiding, we didn’t want to draw unwanted attention by having a name. The Talamasca slogan might as well be our fandom’s slogan, too: We watch and we are always here.
Sometimes I refer to us as “People Off the Page,” to differentiate us from the VC Facebook fans who Anne Rice calls her “People of the Page.” More on that here. They used to be a formidable army she could sic on other fans/reviewers/etc., but things have been peaceful for awhile now, thankfully.
I used to refer to us tumblr fans as “fanged little trash kittens” or “fanged little trash monsters” more frequently than I do now. Probably had to do with the fandom trend at one point of saying “I’m such X-trash!/I’m trash for X!” meaning that you loved X thing/character. Seemed only natural that we would be fanged trash creatures. And it’s gender-neutral.
Any variation on the words Vampire and Chronicles doesn’t wholly work for us, since there are so many other Vampire series and Chronicles series.
Indeed, we have Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis (PLROA). It’s the most recent book. We’re expecting at least one more installment after this one, no date has been given yet.
@bluestockingcouture — Ok I can’t phrase this very well, but tumblr won’t let me tag them, so I made a link to my reblog of their post in which they share that they wrote a 1,800 word review of PLROA that quotes Rousseau, so you might want to check that out on goodreads. (spoiler cut is there)
Here’s another by Kirkus Reviews2016-10-19. (spoilers in full view)
To be honest, near the end of PLROA I had to put it down bc it was about to launch into a monologue from a new character who I don’t really feel much affection for, and so I still haven’t finished it, but I am thoroughly spoiled as to what happens bc I love being spoiled.
There were many moments where I smiled bc it reminded me of the way the characters behaved in earlier books, there’s some development as to their current status, there’s some great little moments between them, and I think it’s worth reading for those gems.
I’ve always been able to read VC and cherry pick the things that I like (a good chunk of dialogue here or there, or something that seems to give more clarification to the established world/characters, etc.) and I have a flexible headcanon, so I can accept or not accept things based on the fanfic I’m reading, too, depending on what canon it relies on.
Having said that, PLROA feels very much like what would happen if one novel you were working on needed life support and you added your much more popular character(s) into it as a means of rescuing it.
“I was working on a novel called Born for Atlantis, and I just couldn’t get it to work. I thought, “What if I could somehow combine this with Lestat and the vampires?” And it was like, everything worked. Something happens to me when I write from Lestat’s point of view. There’s no question about it. By the time I was done, it felt inevitable, like it always had been…. It was a rare experience.”
^Anne Rice, Entertainment Weekly (August 5, 2016) [X] I’m glad that she shared that with us, because it explains why she brought these things together. Even if she hadn’t admitted as such, I think we would have been able to piece that together.
Some things are good on their own, some ideas can be brought together and the result is wonderful alchemy! But I think in this case, it felt like someone had dumped a river of ketchup on an icecream sundae. PLROA might count as what the fandom used to lovingly call the Vampire Crackicles.
Back then, we could have a good time, even when canon was wild. We could make fun of Lestat being a huge baby about his foot size in Blood Canticle:
Seldom did I see my feet in black socks. I knew almost nothing personally about my feet. They looked rather small for the twenty-first century. Bad luck. But six feet was still a good height.
Or, also in Blood Canticle, Lestat fixated by ice cubes:
…the sparkle in the ice cubes, the Miracle of the Ice Cubes.
^Our old familiar canon Rice Caps! Why can’t these things be funny anymore?
Or are the wacky things in PLROA too wacky to even find endearing? We do tentatively joke about PLROA, but not as robustly as we did over those older Vampire Crackicles. Maybe in a few years we’ll be more vocal about it, bc there will be even crazier canon. Lestat goes to Mars! Lestat ages backwards like Benjamin Button! Lestat accidentally destroys Alaska!
So IDK, I always recommend that ppl read the books before they judge them, but I think it’s easier to enjoy the wackiness if you can take it less seriously.
Awww, thank you! That’s very kind of you. (I was hoarding this ask for a few days, sorry for the delay in reply.)
It warms my heart to see the fandom active, too! It’s always been waves of more or less engagement, but recently there does seem to be something of a renaissance. If the VCTV series happens, we’ll probably have even more engagement!
#InktoberVC and the @vcsecretgifts exchange both stimulated great fanworks, I’m planning on setting aside a chunk of time to go through and reblog those Dec. gifts here (I haven’t had a chance to read all the fics yet!) ❤ I’m hoping that more calls for fanworks get rolling in 2018, too, and I’ll make an effort to promote them. We can’t wait 9 months until the next #InktoberVC ;D
In this world in a time when we’re on the brink of nuclear war bc of reasons I can’t attempt to tackle on a blog for entertainment and there are people in power tirelessly dedicated to stripping away our rights one by one, people
determined to widen the class divide, people dehumanizing other real life people, and there is unpunished crime on a daily basis, I come here for an escape and to offer the same to anyone who likes this blog.
I hope 2018 is a better year for all of us, online and offline, Anon. *hugs*
Armands are hard for me to stumble upon in real life, bc the whole ~Botticelli angel~ thing makes my headcanon of him so illustrational that few humans can achieve the look! I’m sort of married to Bjorn Andresen, who is not a Botticelli angel. WHY DID HE HAVE TO AGE it’s so unfair.
I also really like Matthew Clavane, who is a model but looks like someone you might just see on the street:
@sheepskeleton likes Clavane as Armand. Check out their archive to see more models and other non-model ppl that have an Armand feel ;D
You might also try my Armand+cosplay search, and you’ll see some human ppl cosplaying as him mixed into that search, does that count?
Just out on the street, it’s easier for me to find Claudias, bc there are plenty of young girls with excellent blonde hair with the perfect amount of curls, I live near Alvin Ailey, a famous dance school, so especially in the spring/summer there are girls of all ages in that area. I like to consider what kind of backpack she’d wear, what outfits. I saw a kid with a backpack covered with sharks today, I think Claudia would love that.
Lestat lookalikes are easy to find, too. 6 foot tall blond guys, especially with an arm slung around another guy, since I live near Hell’s Kitchen in NYC, a LGBT+ friendly neighborhood. I love seeing them in the summer sitting at outdoor tables, their hair in manbuns or half-buzzed looks, tank tops showing off their biceps *u* Shades and wolfy smiles.
Who else? Um, idk, I almost always feel like I’m VC casting. There’s one homeless guy that I pass on a regular basis that always makes me think he’d be great as Lestat’s father. Ornery-looking. But great silver hair.
I’m sorry, Anon, I’m not familiar enough with Alice Cooper to know what Lestat’s opinion would be 😛 you might ask @workin-them-clockwork-angels, I got an ask from them awhile back, I think they’re a fan of both!
BTW I think Alice Cooper played a vampire?? In a movie called “Suck” (2009) ?! You might like that 😉
There are a bunch of other musicians in it too?? These are the ppl whose names I recognize:
I-want-my-IWTV 