i swear to god this is not a vc blog
Tag Archives: convalescence
They need to hurry with the show! I’ve been waiting forever.
I KNOWWWWW… beLIEVE me, I know that feel.
…and yet, I, personally, wouldn’t want them rushing it out just bc they CAN, like with movie!Queen of the Damned. I mean, hey, I don’t know the backstory on that production, so maybe they DID put a lot of thought and effort into that movie… and let’s not forget that ppl DID enjoy that movie and even now they find it nostalgic, ppl liked it as an adaptation or as a standalone (if they hadn’t read the books, they probably weren’t judging it for being non-compliant w/ canon), for whatever reason (Aaliyah! Was actually great, IMO!). So I’m not the arbiter of taste, and neither is any one fan. I’m glad some ppl enjoyed it bc hey, maybe whatever success that movie had is part of why we may get the VCTV series! And whatever failure it had, that can be learned from (like, maybe, don’t rewrite canon to the point of switching around makers for whatever reason, like making Marius Lestat’s maker? BC that just screws up so many connections, among other issues?).
If the VCTV series happens at all, it’s inevitably going to disappoint some fans no matter what it does or doesn’t accomplish, no matter how canon-compliant* it is or isn’t. There is NO PLEASING EVERYONE! Our headcanons DO vary. Everyone projects their own ideals of beauty and everything else onto these stories, the act of reading a story involves adding your own experience, supplying it with your own imagination.
(*Altho, AR has said that she DOES want to make it as canon-compliant as possible, and hopefully that means she won’t try to shoehorn in the later ALIEMS into the story before they contaminate it come in much later in the series.)
I think it’s great when we can agree on some things, like I would say we all agree that Lestat’s red velvet cloak was RED in color, but then we could debate DARK RED or BRIGHT RED until we are blue in the face so like… even little details like that can be a point of disagreement *shrugs*
ALL THAT SAID, it would be WONDERFUL if this adaptation gets like a B+ with the majority of the fandom, that’s how low I’m setting the bar lol.
“¡Qué confuso y feo era este hombre inmortal de rostro pulido y brillante que se agachaba y hablaba tontamente, y chillaba como una vieja acartonada!
-Sí, Lestat- dije en voz baja-, he venido a verte.”
Do you think there could be any possibility that Lestat is undiagnosed type II bipolar? I’ve noticed the same patterns in him that I see in myself, and it makes it hard to read the books recently because he is so chaotic in such an eerily familiar way that it unsettles me.
Yes, it’s quite possible that Lestat is
undiagnosed type II bipolar (is that grammatically correct? Or would you write “Yes, it’s quite possible that Lestat is undiagnosed as having type II bipolar personality disorder”?). You might want to ask some Lestat RPers for their thoughts on this, too.
I don’t know enough about diagnosing bipolar to say for sure what I think, in the past I’ve written that I didn’t think Lestat was bipolar specifically, but that he might have PTSD. Now, I feel like I don’t know enough about either of those to make a definitive statement. I don’t think AR has ever addressed it in any interviews, on FB, or at a booksigning. Anyone is welcome to reblog/comment on this post.
Anon: “I’ve noticed the same patterns in him that I see in myself, and it makes it hard to read the books recently because he is so chaotic in such an eerily familiar way that it unsettles me.”
I’m sorry that this makes it hard for you to read the books recently, Anon. Does anyone else out there have bipolar, or specifically type II bipolar, and have advice for Anon about this?
@mendedpixie7 wrote about Adam from Only Lovers Left Alive; and I feel like the similarity of Adam to Nicolas (and Lestat, I think, too) seems striking, and I hope this quote helps you in some small way, Anon:
The reason I love Only Lovers Left Alive is it shows that a character (Adam) can be severely mentally ill, in this case depressed and suicidal, and still be seen as lovable and capable of being loved and loving in return without being “cured” of their mental illness, and that a mentally ill character can have other attributes aside from being mentally ill while still showing the impact being mentally ill has on his personality.
Adam from OLLA is an extremely important character to me you guys.
If the scene didn’t take place at all how did Louis get such an accurate description of Lestat’s condition? If I recall correctly Armand mostly spent time with Lestat after he and Louis had parted and even if he had visited once before why would he give Louis the full disclosure? It’s not like Louis can take images from Armand’s mind either. Louis might have exaggerated the patheticness of the conversation to get a reaction from Lestat but it’s hard for me to believe that they didn’t meet at all
Re: @firelight-fading‘s post: “How many of you actually feel that Louis’ visiting Lestat at the end of IWTV and the conversation that followed actually happened? Lestat insists that it didn’t, but both him and Louis are unreliable narrators…”
Hey, look, you are free to believe in whichever unreliable narrator you want! Clearly we don’t all agree on this. I still don’t know what I believe, but I lean towards it happening, that they met, just maybe not as Louis described it.
Anon says: If the scene didn’t take place at all how did Louis get such an accurate description of Lestat’s condition?…
It’s not like Louis can take images from Armand’s mind either.
^Louis had seen a pretty battered Lestat around 1865, and then he thought Lestat was destroyed in the TdV fire, so he’s probably guessing that his maker looks like toast now, if he’s in fact still alive.
Lestat acknowledges in TVL that Armand came around to pester him in NOLA, which, yes, is presumably after Armand and Louis went their separate ways. But Armand could have visited Lestat before that separation, or gotten the information from another vampire who had seen Lestat in NOLA. They’re probably not the only vampires in New York during the time that they’re there.
Anon says: even if he had visited once before why would he give Louis the full disclosure? In IWTV, Armand tells Louis that Lestat is in NOLA:
“Then, finally, Armand urged me in another way. He told me something he’d concealed from me since the time we were in Paris.
“Lestat had not died in the Theatre des Vampires. I had believed him to be dead, and when I asked Armand about those vampires, he told me they all had perished. But he told me now that this wasn’t so. Lestat had left the theater the night I had run away from Armand and sought out the cemetery in Montmartre. Two vampires who had been made with Lestat by the same master had assisted him in booking passage to New Orleans.
^So how Armand knew this, we don’t know, but I assume he read it from Lestat’s thoughts when he visited Lestat in NOLA prior to Armand’s separation with Louis, or from another vampire who had seen Lestat passing through NY.
Armand wants Louis to see Lestat for himself bc he wants Louis to “come back to life.”
” `You care about nothing …’ [Armand] was saying. And then he sat up slowly and turned to me so again I could see that dark fire in his eyes. `I thought you would at least care about that. I thought you would feel the old passion, the old anger if you were to see him again. I thought something would quicken and come alive in you if you saw him . . . if you returned to this place.’
^Sorry Armand, fail on that 😛
Whether Louis actually met with Lestat the way he described it in IWTV is up for debate, but Louis might have gotten such an accurate description of Lestat’s condition verbally from Armand. Perhaps, as you say, Louis might have exaggerated the patheticness of the conversation to get a reaction from Lestat, as he was trying to provoke Lestat into coming out of wherever he was hiding.
Or maybe Louis just wanted to tell his story to another soul, like confession, and get some feeling of absolution from the act of telling, maybe it felt good to invent this portion for no good reason. I don’t personally think that’s very IC for Louis but… who knows?
Can we just look at this for a minute….
Two vampires who had been made with Lestat by the same master had assisted him in booking passage to New Orleans.
^This used to really irritate me, these two vampire siblings of Lestat who never appeared again in canon, I have to assume Armand invented them for whatever reason (make Louis jealous that he didn’t help Lestat himself?) or that Daniel’s publisher added them in for whatever reason *shrugs*
Just because I’d like to see if there is a general consensus…
and because @i-want-my-iwtv‘s recent post got me wondering…
How many of your actually feel that Louis’ visiting Lestat at the end of IWTV and the conversation that followed actually happened? Lestat insists that it didn’t, but both him and Louis are unreliable narrators…
Personally, I think it did, however, I think Louis put in some of his own scenes within his telling of the moment to provoke Lestat. That’s why Lestat says it didn’t happen, because it didn’t fully to the extent that Louis said it did.
I actually got the Barnes and Noble edition of the first three novels of the Vampire Chronicles for Christmas, so I’ll eventually be reading back soon to see if my opinion changes or if something suggests otherwise.
Yes, I’d like to know what ppl think about this, too! Pls comment/reblog with whether this happened, or if it happened differently than reported ;D
You know in Interview With The Vampire Louis talks about having ran into Lestat broken in their old home – while in The Vampire Lestat Lestat says it never happened? What’s your thoughts on it? Was Lestat too damaged to remember at the time? Was Louis kicking sand in Lestat’s face to get him to come to him?
Ooooh good question! In IWTV, Louis says that he did visit Lestat (and it was in the movie).
We have #unreliable narrators and it’s hard to say whether it happened, or happened in a different way than described…
They do agree that Lestat was in hiding and pretty decrepit. Louis describes Lestat as being holed up in some crumbling old house some short distance away from their old Rue Royale flat, which Lestat does confirm in TVL:
“And I spent the last years of the 1800s in complete seclusion in the old Garden District a block from the Lafayette Cemetery, in the finest of my houses, slumbering beneath towering oaks.”
I answered it more in depth on this post, in which I said that I trusted Louis’ account. Lestat refusing to kill a baby would be in character for him. That Louis would invent this just whole scene to provoke Lestat out of hiding is less in character for him, but possible. He did leave a lot out, and leaving out information is lying by omission.
Your headcanon may be that it happened, and someone else’s may be that it didn’t. Even if AR says one way or the other, there are readers who will still hold onto their own headcanon. #Your headcanon may vary on this one.
[X] Some nights even his lucky rocketship underpants don’t help ;A;
I loved reading the part in Interview where Lestat is just utterly washed up and weak, it was so scary and so close to the edge of a catharsis for me- This kinda alternate-universe Lestat that Louis invented was one hell of a nightmare.
Anyway, he doesn’t look as horrifying in this as he did in my mind when I read this part, but maybe I’ll draw that as well in the future sometime…
Pattern is from some virus laden vector website.
IDK what made me want to draw this quote from Venture Brothers with Armand and Lestat in Paris (u know the part) but it’s already done and I can’t take it back
I-want-my-IWTV 