Lestat usually initiates w/ Louis so at the moment of contact, Louis might not appear to be all that into it, bc he’s pleasantly surprised! He gets into it quickly though ;D
I agree, weird question, but honey, ucametotherightplace ^________^
Vampiring can be very busy! All the entertainment (concerts, galleries, fashion shows), the charity balls, the netflix & chills, and they still have to wedge murder in, too.
[@vampchronfic helped out on this answer! Much appreciated *u*]
Jesse and Pandora arrive early and always ask the host(ess) if they need any help setting anything up.
David and Marius are always on time. Perfectly.
Louis is on time when he is not being dragged into lateness by Lestat.
Armand is variable; sometimes on time, sometimes fashionably late, but he always leaves first. His reasons are never questioned.
Daniel is on time when he goes with Marius or Armand, but on his own, always late (still consistently arrives before Lestat).
Lestat is always late bc he takes forever to dress up and dress Louis up and is easily distracted. It’s gotten to the point where Brian* has to lie that an event is an hour earlier than it really is just to get Lestat there /close/ to the starting time.
David chastises Lestat every time, Lestat laughs and laughs. David sends Lestat fancy watches with alarms set, accompanied by notes like, “So you’ll know the time. At ANY altitude.”
(*Brian Callahan is one of @vampchronfic‘s OC’s that I have come to aggressively accept into my headcanon.)
Gabrielle is never expected to go to anything (she moves around too much to be sent an invite and pays no attention anyway) unless she is in the presence of someone who got an invitation. She has little tolerance for mingling, but she does like David. They swap travel stories and he can usually impress her with his depth of knowledge of ancient ruins and natural wonders.
(ooc; I commissioned this piece from @alvadee and I LOVE IT omg this fanartist better raise their prices or else I’m gonna commission them so much moar that is a very real threat)
So, Sybelle! A rare one for ppl to ask about and rarely chosen for RP. I remember there was @sybelle-the-appassionata, but it looks like they’re on hiatus. There was also @play-the-appassionata, looks inactive now, but their archive might have smtg for you!
I don’t really have positive or negative feelings towards her, but in light of later canon, she’s become more solid, more believable, and I do hope AR develops her some more. There’s more to Sybelle than being ANOTHER beautiful blonde woman-child, and having a name of Greek derivation; Sybelle means “prophetess, oracle.” Does she foresee things in canon? Not so much, IIRC, but maybe that has yet to happen.
^While I was thinking about your ask these last few days, I saw this Visual Development from Tangled by Claire Keane
In fact I think the comparison is more than reasonable; Sybelle also seemed isolated in a tower, and further isolated herself with her obsession with the piano, specifically, Beethoven’s Appassionata.
We have Sybelle to thank for waking Lestat from his coma, so I set my alarm to one of the stronger sections of the Appassionata,
you really cannot ignore it or shut it out, and it’s NOT the most pleasant thing to wake up to. It works though, it really works. IT COULD WAKE THE DEAD. I had to change it after a few weeks, but try it!
Just try and tell me that Valentina Lisitsa isn’t basically Sybelle, just look at her! She’s just older.
For more on Sybelle, try my#sybelle and #the vampire sybelle tags. There’s a little fanart, cosplay, some meta by other ppl, some mentions of Benji (since he’s kind of part of her package deal!) and spoilers.
Eva Green for which character? I confess I haven’t done a whole lot of consideration for this bc genderswapping is very hard if you’re doing it for serious, but I threw some together for fun *u*
^Louise de Pointe du Lac maybe? She has death-glares down to a science, she has the right kind of delicate but strong features, and a lot of dignity about her.
^Taylor Swift for Lestelle de Lioncourt [bc of this post right here] – I’m sorry @queenofthesavagegarden, Margot Robbie is beautiful and a great second option, but for me, Taylor is also a singer and that’s a big part of the requirement for me! ;A;
^Kristen Stewart as Nicola de Lenfent if she would be willing to play another vampire! A sassy one, this time. In a lesbian ship.
Hit the jump for moar.
^Gillian Anderson as the cruel bully Marquise Valerie de Lioncourt.
^David Bowie as Gabriel de Lioncourt (hey you didn’t say they had to be available ;A;) CAN U IMAGINE if Taylor!Lestat got to turn her dad, Bowie!Gabrielle?? How magical??!
^Sendhil Ramamurthy as Akashad, King of the Damned.
^We have fanart of Mariella de Romanus and Andrea? Hmmm? [Source unknown]
Any one of your issues would be enough to be legitimately sad about but having them all at once is cosmically unfair *frowns* I wish I could swoop in, take you in my arms, and solve all your problems for you. But that would be doing you a disservice, because it would steal the feeling of satisfaction that you’ll get when you overcome these things with your own power.
You know, and please don’t take this the wrong way, bear with me for a moment; this reminds me of those exasperated people you see in crowded public places like shopping centers, sometimes with a number of brats hanging off of them, or some other burdens, or they’ve dropped their enormous coffee-desserts across their shoes, and you see them gaze skyward, cell phones glued to their heads, reporting to whoever will listen: “God is testing me. HE’S TESTING ME.” They say it as if God was becoming a real nuisance, deriving some kind of sick pleasure in throwing obstacles at them. Do they deserve their obstacles? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Life is full of them, and you get them either way. Sometimes I myself am the obstacle when an evildoer meets their end.
Whether you believe in God (or Goddess!), a non-specific spiritual entity, or nothing at all, we’re all tested. It just rarely comes in the form or at the time we would prefer it to, does it?
I could cheerlead for you – in authentic uniform or in the nude – until the break of dawn, and you would absolutely enjoy it as long as it lasted, and the memory of it, believe me. But eventually, the joy wears away and you’re left with the weight of your obstacles once again.
In my experience, you have to tackle each of your obstacles to earn your power back and have the wheels going your way again.
There will be times in your life when it feels like the whole world has turned its back on you. It happens. Better to get accustomed to pulling yourself back on your feet, dusting yourself off, and getting ready for another round. It’s better when we have supportive friends and family, but there were many times in my life when I was all I had. And I succeeded. It can be done.
Let’s get down to brass tacks, as they say:
Your health is not improving? Find out whether it’s in your power to fix it. Is it as simple as getting more sleep? Better hydration? You’d be surprised how effective sleep is in curing crankiness, I remember this from my devoted mortal bandmates, as I nearly drove them mad rehearsing them into sleep deprivation. If it’s something you can’t fix, find a way to get to a professional who can guide you in this regard.
Best friends are excellent heartbreakers. They know your weaknesses and they know where to place the knife and turn it. If this is the end of that friendship, take time to heal and be glad it’s over, you’ll have that part of your life open for a new best friend when and if you’re ready for it. If this is not the end, take time to heal anyway, and try to heal with this person, if possible. But don’t let them hurt you again. Don’t become their punching bag.
The number of times my creative work I worked hard on was torn apart by critics is just… I’ve lost count *ragged sigh* I could never even start the count. It seems like every creative contribution I’ve made to anyone has unleashed harsh criticism. I take the constructive criticism to heart and have to let the rest roll off, otherwise I’d give up altogether. My creative output has always been mainly for myself so at the end of the night, as long as I’m happy with it, it doesn’t really matter what anyone else thinks. Art, music, and writing are all highly subjective. But occasionally, someone will point something out in my work that might be rephrased to better capture what I’m trying to express, and it endears me to that person who dared to suggest the improvement, that they dared test my infamous short fuse. I am trying to take this kind of constructive criticism better, believe it or not.
I wish you the best, know that I’m supporting you from afar.
Ricean vampires, unfortunately, are condemned to enjoy the Deathsleep which renders them unconscious for the daylight hours. The plus side being: no snoring can wake them! Not that they can snore, since they don’t breathe. But still.
Louis, IWTV: “Numbness came over my limbs, and then the paralysis of oblivion.“
Louis, IWTV: “You see, I wasn’t sure then why I awoke each evening when I did, whether it was automatic when the deathlike sleep left me, and why it happened sometimes earlier than at other times.”
In movie!IWTV, yes, Claudia is awake right at dawn and seems fully conscious, as she tiptoes carefully around the sunlight.
^It was too perfect a moment not to include in a movie about lonely ppl, that singular act of a daughter climbing into bed w/ her mommy!Louis (bc we all know he’s the mom) rather than sleep alone! ❤ And purely platonic at that point in the movie.
There is a fic out there that suggests that Ricean vampires do awaken during the day when they are under extreme emotional duress, and it’s a very disorienting state to be in, they can’t function very rationally, as nocturnal animals also act erratically in daylight.
Hit the jump for a bit moar, and spoilers.
(Similarly, Louis seems to be painfully awake as Claudia and Madeleine burn in the sunlight ;A;)
When movie!Louis takes revenge on the Theatre des Vampires, it’s right before dawn, and he is perfectly able to function right up until he leaves the safety of the theatre, and it’s the sunlight more than the fact that it’s daytime that saps him of any functionality. But that was part of the plan, revenge, then suicide.
Ricean vampires can, however, fight in that unconscious state: Lestat says Gabrielle defended herself in her sleep: “And those mortals who did find us during the daylight hours, unless they exposed us to the sun at once, were doomed. For example, outside Palermo she had slept in a cellar far below an abandoned house, and when she had awakened, her eyes and face were burning as if they had been scalded, and she had in her right hand a mortal, quite dead, who had apparently attempted to disturb her rest.”
Amount of sleep needed seems to be related to the age and/or power of the vampire, and Louis, being weaker, needs more beauty sleep than the older and stronger ones.
Even in a place like Alaska in which nighttime extends during the winter months, Ricean vampires are still susceptible and want to fall into a reasonable Deathsleep rhythm.
In QOTD, Akasha purposely chases the night around the world, preventing Lestat from falling into the Deathsleep. Whether it was bc she had too much to do in too little time, or she was purposely using sleep deprivation as another means of controlling him (or both), we don’t know, but Lestat reflects on it:
“We’d been following the night around the world, perhaps, or rather moving at random in it, as Akasha maybe didn’t need at all to sleep.
I needed it, that was obvious. But I was too curious not to want to be awake. And frankly too miserable.”
Akasha tells him, a little bit later, that he requires sleep for his upgrades: “But you must sleep now. You are young still and fragile. My blood’s working on you, changing you, perfecting you.”
Vampires in other media, like Only Lovers Left Alive for example, CAN stay awake during the daylight hours if they feel like it, and they do sleep in beds. Are they trying to imitate mortals? Maybe!
^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-want-my-IWTV 