♛Merci, my hair is magnificent, is it not? No real routine, just rinse the blood and dirt out after a kill, if there is any to be rid of… Louis doesn’t like scented products. Perhaps the blood and the dirt are good for one’s hair? Hmmm…
Interviews & Rec (11/?)
I haven’t actually watched him in anything, I don’t watch him on Eyewitness, but I have seen some borderline NSFW gifs of it on tumblr, and…
I see potential… Can’t quite articulate why, not even being sarcastic. He seems to have the right blend of cockiness and tenderness, and he’s already experienced with making out with another guy on screen, and it would be gr9 to have that in the new VC adaptation.
^He’s also pretty w/o being like, a model. He has a boy-next-door quality. I imagine that some of what drew ppl to him as a mortal was his blend of confidence, shyness, and caring, those are the things that make what would have been a slightly-above-average-looking guy into someone really gorgeous <3. Then vampiring enhanced what he already had going for him.
[^X]
So yeah I would screentest him! Send his name over to AR.
[X]
Some borderline NSFW gifs of him under the cut, more of this kinda Lestat/Nicolas ship: #philkas at @jamespaxt0n ❤
[X]
[X]
I don’t recall that he ever mentioned having a last name, or that he took on Marius’ last name at any point…
[^X Björn by gampy (Björn is a fandom fave for Armand)]
Opening this up to anyone, was Armand ever given or has he ever mentioned taking on any specific last names? I can’t even think if he’d ever shared aliases, as Lestat often does…
Well I can’t help but agree with you, anon!
“I can’t decide whether u should live or die….”
(^To be fair, that attack was in self-defense)
♛Advice to “young naive mortals” before they agree to become one of us…
*laughs* Well, Louis would simply say, “Don’t.”
[^X @phantom-evil]
I can’t speak for Daniel’s transition, but from what he told me, what made it into the record that I compiled as the novel Queen of the Damned… he originally wanted the Dark Gift because he fell in love with Louis’ story, and wanted a seat at our table, so to speak. When he met Armand, it became about wanting to be with Armand, made so much more frustrating because of Armand’s struggle to accept Daniel, whether to bring him over.
Then, when that had been overcome, there was Daniel as a fledgling; there are so many physical and emotional changes that happen to a vampire during that time that few of us really experience it as a very “graceful” time. I famously vomited up my own blood and then, in a state of delirium, licked it off the stone floor of a filthy cell full of rotten corpses! Among many other grotesque things that happened in those first nights.* Two exceptions to the awkward fledgling phase: Gabrielle and Claudia, who both bloomed in their own ways, very gracefully, as fledgling vampiresses.
Advice…
One thing is for sure, satisfaction is not guaranteed, ma petite. In every sense of the phrase.
The process itself is dangerous. It’s called the Dark “Trick” for a reason. Your maker has to kill you first. It’s extremely erotic, but extremely painful. They have to actually forcibly pull your life away entirely – and you’ll fight them through it if you want to survive – and then feed a demon, a kind of cancer, into your body and soul. We still don’t know if it’s contamination or evolution. And it doesn’t always work.
There are worse things than death.
//ooc: *@gairid/@vampchronfic has such a beautiful and tragic story about another thing Lestat did in those first nights, that you really should read it, We Are Our Own Saviors (Chapters 15-16). #Damn you and your perfect headcanon perfection ;A;
Lestat continues after the jump, cut for length.
♛The other aspect of being a vampire: Killing. Few people seem to realize how customer-service oriented this lifestyle really is. You’ll have to kill people, or practice the Little Drink (most fledglings have difficulty stopping mid-kill). If you are able to master it, you’ll spend even more nightly time pursuing more victims than just the few that would satisfy you if you killed them. Killing means you have to find fewer, but still, victims. Louis refused to choose, feeling unworthy of making that choice. Could you do it? Really? Or, you can not choose. As he later was able to embrace. Could you do that?
Louis’ practice of drinking animal blood as a substitute for human blood for his first few years, I’m convinced that’s one of the reasons he was so weak for so long. And so cranky! For whatever reason, animal blood is just not as satisfying for us as human blood is, and I would speculate that it has something to do with the difference in souls. Not to say animal souls are lesser; Mojo had more soul than so many humans I’ve met. But there is a difference. So the animal solution is the vampire equivalent of eating fast food, and it takes its toll.
Those are the main concerns, that young naive mortals should consider seriously before they agree to become one of us. There are many more, but these seem to be required for everyone. Should you be offered the choice to take the Dark Gift, your maker would be having these conversations with you, specific to you, and to them, about other considerations.
It may only seem like one person, but they send a lot of messages and overwhelm you with clearly wrong but seemingly well supported info.
The trick they’re trying to pull has two steps:
1. Overwhelm
2. Colonize
Overwhelm: By sending you lots of messages all at once they intend to trigger anxiety and cause you to give less than waterproof answers. From here they can deconstruct your answers with a combination of technicalities and fallacies.
Colonize: By making you answer publicly they spread their ideas through your blog. Further by making you look bad they make an example of you and by ganging up through your asks they isolate you from support.
The response?
Block them all.
And after that optionally you can publicly debunk their argument without their input.
People who use these dogpiling methods don’t deserve your blog as a platform.
Important.
They want your time and energy and attention. Delete their asks immediately and block.
Block early, block often. Trust that they will be return to pee in your inbox again, and pull out the flamethrowers.
(ooc; Not sure how serious you are, but, Reminder: if you have already taken something or done something to harm yourself please call 911. If you haven’t done anything and if you’re thinking about suicide, please talk to the suicide hotline 1-800-273-TALK (8255) in the U.S., to find a suicide helpline outside the U.S., visit IASP or Suicide.org. Please read Suicide Help.)
♛My dear, I’m so sorry to read this message. My heart aches for you.
[X by @gifsfortc]
There are times when yes, the loneliness overtakes me. I do feel emptiness at times, moreso in those times I was betrayed by the ones closest to me. Not to revisit that… but the emptiness you are describing seems to be a deeper one than what I experienced. Again, my heart aches for you.
Sometimes solitude is needed, just to get to know myself once again, so that I can return to my loved ones.
Because that’s really the answer, at least for me, time spent with your loved ones has healing properties. Do you have any pets? Or know anyone who does? I’ve found that rolling around with a sizable dog (or several!) can also cure me of many of these gutwrenching feelings, those insidious negative voices that creep in. The healing power of dog cuddles may not be complete but it is still substantial.
If you don’t have anyone you can go to, there are professionals out there who can help. One group is called the
Samaritans.
The Dark Gift is not, generally, a quick fix. You bring yourself with you, and all your own experiences, all your own baggage. It enhances who you already are, for better or worse. I found that out with my beloved Nicki. Knowing what I know now about him, would I still give him the Dark Gift? I desperately want to say yes, but I don’t think it “fixed” him. Not by a long shot. It made him into another version of himself. Purified him. It seemed to release him from his life-long act of being a civilized person, which he detested.
In the absence of everything else I’ve suggested, one other cure: Stories. Read. Watch movies. Listen to music. Eat your favorite foods. Read my first book again, and see how I dealt with obstacle after obstacle, take inspiration from my example. Or, and I can’t believe I’m suggesting this: read Louis’ book. Know that he experienced similar feelings to yours. He survived it.
You are not alone. Get the help you need, or cure yourself, or both! Validate yourself if no one else will. Care for yourself as if you were your own best friend. There were so many times when that’s all I could do for myself, for years. Decades, even. If I had given up, at any of those times, I would not be here to offer you this: I survived. So can you.
[^Portrait of moi by the amazingly talented @vaciel, it’s a WIP, I hope they finish it someday]
(Let’s assume I don’t get to choose or stay w/ my maker, and I don’t get to choose to be w/ the VC characters bc then this answer would be impossibly long. I’ll respond to those aspects in separate posts if anyone is interested.)
What would I do with my immortality? SO MANY. Vampiring: I would probably be the slayer of the evildoer, following in Lestat’s footsteps, but I’d also want to try wild animals like his mom does… I would write all about it, for sure. Every power and every limitation. The killing part of it would probably be tedious some nights and I would complain about having to go to those seedy places for my victims, and I would probably get into situations that would be somewhat out of my control and get shot in the back and I’d come home and complain about it even louder while my mom, a doctor, extracts the bullet fragments and stitches me back up and says “I told you so,” in so many words. “What, what did you tell me, Mom?” “Be careful what you wish for, obviously.” idk if I would turn my parents but it would be hard not to bc I love them.
We’re assuming I figure out the financial aspect bc currently I do not spend enough time and energy on that… I would need a good cash flow to support my adventures and artistic pursuits. I’d commission artists of all kinds, I’d maybe put together a studio collective, let ppl work at night with me or they could work during the day, I don’t really mind, as long as their work gets done. Probably have multiple projects of different kinds going on at any given time.
I wish I could say I would work on social justice causes, and maybe I would. I wouldn’t want the kind of exposure that might make me a target though, so if I did try to make the world a better place, it would be through my studio’s works, or financial support, or some other private way.
Emotionally, I would need a companion or two, so I would immediately turn my best friend into a vampire, she can have it now or wait until later but she does not has my permission to die. I have other friends I would want to bring with me, but I would be very selective, bc you’re stuck w/ these ppl for eternity, or they go mad and suicide, or the Dark Gift doesn’t work… soooo, I’d be picky about them.
Well I found it! In TVL, when Armand is telling Lestat and Gabrielle his story:
“In quiet allegiance to the Dark Ways, Armand
continued to serve. Yet in the centuries of his long obedience, Armand
kept two secrets to himself. These were his property, these secrets,
more purely his than the coffin in which he locked himself by day, or
the few amulets he wore. The first was that no matter how great his
loneliness, or how long the search for brothers and sisters in whom he
might find some comfort, he never worked the Dark Trick himself.
He wouldn’t give that to Satan, no Child of Darkness made by him.”
Hit the jump for more, cut for length.
Still in TVL, that quote above is right after he’s gone over how he’s seen so many vampires die:
In this particular, let
Armand observe that there was no vampire then living who was more
than three hundred years old. No one alive then could remember the
first Roman coven. The devil frequently calls his vampires home….He had witnessed
the inevitable dissolution of covens, seen immortality defeat the most
perfectly made Children of Darkness, and it seemed at times some
awesome punishment that it never defeated him. Was he destined to
be one of the ancient ones? The Children of the Millennia? Could one
believe those stories which persisted still?
He’s also mentioned that the Dark Trick is not an exact science (also TVL):
But
let Armand understand here also that the effect of the Dark Trick is
unpredictable, even when passed on by the very young vampire and
with all due care. For reasons no one knows, some mortals when Born
to Darkness become as powerful as Titans, others may be no more
than corpses that move. That is why mortals must be chosen with
skill. Those with great passion and indomitable will should be avoided
as well as those who have none.
So Armand’s reasons for refusing to turn Daniel, if you trust him to be honest about the ones he’s giving, seem to be that:
There is a vague repeated cry of
danger, but no one seems to know whence it comes. They only know that we are being sought out and
annihilated, that coven houses, meeting places, go up in flames.“ – QOTD)
Later, in QOTD, Daniel refers to it as a vow, maybe that’s he terminology Armand used when he told Daniel about it:
[Daniel says:] “Of course I believed you. The vow you made, you explained everything. But Armand, this is my question, to
whom did you make this vow?"Laughter.
^He made the vow to himself ;A;
[Armand says:] "So you would have me break my vow. You would have what you think you want. But look well at this
garden, because once I do it, you’ll never read my thoughts or see my visions again. A veil of silence will
come down.”
1. I think this is definitively where Daniel realizes Armand’s not going to turn him:
Then the realization had come to Daniel as they stood together in the ruined dining room with its famous
murals of ritual flagellation barely visible in the dark: He isn’t going to kill me after all. He isn’t going to do it.
Of course he won’t make me what he is, but he isn’t going to kill me. The dance will not end like that.
2. Then Armand starts trying to get Daniel to understand his reasons for not wanting to give him the Dark Gift
“Give me what I want,” Daniel had demanded.
“I’m giving you everything you could ever ask for."
"Yes, but not what I have asked for, not what I want!"
"Be alive, Daniel.” A low whisper, like a kiss. “Let me tell you from my heart that life is better than death.”
3. … which intensifies:
Ugly fights, terrible fights, finally, Armand broken down, glassy-eyed with silent rage, then crying softly but
uncontrollably as if some lost emotion had been rediscovered which threatened to tear him apart. “I will not
do it, I cannot do it. Ask me to kill you, it would be easier than that. You don’t know what you ask for, don’t
you see? It is always a damnable error! Don’t you realize that any one of us would give it up for one human
lifetime?
Welcome to our little corner of tumblrand, and mon dieu, a compliment like this is pure gold. PURE GOLD. As is our AU! Pure gold ;D
[X @yallpacino: when you find a really good alternative universe fanfiction]
If you love our Signature Blend, @wicked-felina also has another great VC AU (WIP) you should check out, The Grim Brothers. It’s a “VC take on Red Riding Hood,” as heartfelt and fun as our AU, it was one of the first AUs I really loved ❤
Hit the jump for more, cut for length.
“and it’s sad to see so little fan activity,”
Yeah, the war on fanfic crushed us in the 90′s + AR’s war on her fandom (and critics in general) in the early 2000′s drove us all underground, and only recently are things picking back up. We are making fanworks tho, you can check out our recent blast of them from our @vcsecretgifts exchange, the #2016 VC Secret Santa… and also:
“but this little gem is just so precious and makes up for it; it’s uplifting to see it regularly updated and cared about and I just wanted to (immensely) thank you for writing about these drama queens~ <3″
Merciiiii! We are loving writing it, too, some of the scenes, it’s as if we’re right there with them, witnessing the drama firsthand. I’m not sure I can let @wicked-felina go back to writing her solo stuff too soon after this is finished…
I-want-my-IWTV 