2018 is approaching (three hours more to go where I am, so pls tag your 2018 spoilers) and I decided I want to make a toast.
Not as in toasted bread, of course, the kind of toast with glasses and alcohol. Unless you don’t do the alcohol thing like me, you can have something else. I’m gonna go with sparkling water.
An internet tumblr fandom toast.
I want to raise my virtual imaginary glass of sparkling water (which is quite fancy btw) to all the lovely people in this fandom.
To the new ones and the old ones, to the ones who multifandom and the ones who keep things neat and tagged (teach me ur secrets), to the ones who cosplay I adore you like that lady in the theater, u know, this one
To the fanfic writers, all of you, no matter how angsty the fics get, thank you for taking so much time of your lives to create the things you create and share them with us, I would fight Lestat outside the Palais Royal for any of you and your fics. Like easy peesy, I’ll read out loud one of the heartbreaking ones and bitch will drown in his own tears. Yall savage.
To the fanartists, like, how could I possibly express my feelings for yall, have you seen what yall do???? Like????? Thank you for giving me backgrounds for every single one of my devices, you are all so brilliant and creative and talented it’s insane, and if it were up to me, you are the artists I would put in the Chronicles. Like, Botticelli? Idk her. But have you seen the VC fandom artists tho? Damn. Idk who the renaissance artists are, but they must have used the VC fanarts for refference. Fight me.
RPers. I need to talk about you. Have you all got any idea how hard it is to explain to my friends why am I squeeling like a piglet when I read your scenes? Idk how the things are called but listen, they are wonderful. Like, don’t fuck with me like that man, yall be the vampires for real, there is no other possible explanation to how sublime yall are. That ain’t no roleplay, those are actual Lesty and Lou there. Keep fighting me I can do this all night.
I am grateful for this lovely bunch of kiddos I had the pleasure of running into here at tumblr. I am grateful for the VC Inktober for giving me a reason not to be salty over my lack of Halloween, for the Secret Santas who gave us all so many beautiful gifts in so many different forms, and to all those wonderful people who make it happen! The mods and admins who take the time to organize so many different people and make sure no one is left w/o their present and who also make presents themselves like yall are actually irl Santas and I love you all so much.
YALL KNOW WHAT ELSE I’M GRATEFUL FOR? THE BADASS COVEN OF THE INARTICULATE like I know my tags speak for themselves and there’s literally no way in Hell I can put words to how happy the podcasts make me and like it’s so cool? Four people from ALL OVER THIS BITCHASS WORLD getting together T W I C E a month and making time from their actual irl lives to not only discuss for over an hour about the vampires but also edit the podcast, make sure it sounds right and organizing the entire thing with the topics yall gonna go over and sharing with us your points of view and opinions in this beautiful way bc like, it could have just been a blog with four admins but yall went LOL NOPE and made the PODCASTS LIKE DISCUSSING THINGS WITH EACHOTHER WITH YOUR IRL VOICES listen I am very passionate about COI, I will FIGHT GABRIELLE BARE HANDED AND BLINDFOL… ‘k maybe not Gabs, who fucks with her, but you get where I’m going.
Anyways, this got long. What I’m trying to say is that I’m very grateful and happy that I get to share time with you guys. You are all great. I hope you have as good of a year as I did by sharing it with you.
To another great year with you and many more, to a VC series before 2019 and to you all ❤️
[Give us some of your first impressions, who are your faves? What are your ships? And um, excuse u, 5 books in 2 months when you have Real Life, too, that’s not slow to me, heck, when I reread just one of these books it takes me at least 2 months, squeezing it into my “Copious Amounts of Free Time” and I hope this blog isn’t spoiling you too much, if spoiling bothers you I frickin’ love being spoiled, myself).
Awwww thank u! What a lovely thing to tell me. Welcome to our little corner of tumblrland mmmm fresh blood….
So I try to keep this thing purely VC, and I have my self-imposed post limit, so I think for A LOT of my followers, they probably are like you, and see a post from me, and go, “Oooh a VC blog, I should foll- oh yeah, I already follow it!” Sometimes I even see smtg reblogged from me on my own dash and I go, “Oooh! New VC fanart! I should reblo- I ALREADY REBLOBBED IT!”
I used to have a rule about reblogging stuff only once so I wouldn’t have duplicates in my archive, but the audience changes, there’s tons of new ppl out on tumblr every year, so WHY THE HECK keep some awesome fanart from their dash just bc I reblogged it 2 years ago??! So I reblob stuff from my own archive sometimes, usually when I’m in there looking for smtg else and I find an old fave that PPL SHOULD SEE! ❤
BTW if you want some more VC stuff, we recently did a @vcsecretgifts, that archive has a bunch of VC fanworks in it and you can find more VC blogs that way ;D
Awww, you are very welcome to all of that! What a lovely message to send me. Notes like these keep this blog alive… and you made my night, I’m cry! ^______^ Come off anon!
I’m honored that ppl ask for my opinions on VC, it gives me the opportunity to dig around and find the information/resources, I have a nearly photographic memory for some of this stuff *laughs*… many asks make me sit back to reflect and remember what it is about this series that keeps me here… I can only speak to my own reasons, but I draw a lot of inspiration from these characters and their stories.
Am I a genuinely sweet and friendly person? I try to be the blogger and the person I want to see in the world, whether online or in the real world. Which means I still make mistakes, but I learn, and try to improve.
My tags! They used to be a lot sillier and I’ve toned them down, but I keep them as organized as I can so that I can find previous answers! It was just for my own organization originally but I’m so glad you appreciate the tags! I plan to have a legit ~Navigation~ page so that major tags are all lined up and easily accessible, so you can go right to, for example, the #VC News tag and see what the latest news is. I don’t reblog everything from the Official VC FB page since so much of it is teasing and fluff, so if I reblogged/posted smtg here, it’s bc I felt like it was ACTUALLY newsworthy, or there was smtg we could talk about specifically.
P.S. And thanks for reminding me, I have to catch up on my tagging, during the last two months I’ve been off-and-on-line, when you see #Tag later it’s bc I was on mobile cruising the dash ;D
Thanks again, Anon. Very sweet of you to say that *hugs*
@wicked-felina and I are trying to include as many canon-compliant details as we can (hello Armand flirting w/ the blender, lol), and I personally have to satisfy my RL best friend who is a coffee aficionado (gotta prove to her that we know wtf we’re writing about, lol)… We’re using most of the ideas we come up with but we do have some spin-off chapters that may come later when the fic is finished.
…Psssst we would also love fanart of any of it, if anyone is so inspired…
I didn’t think a coffee shop AU was possible for VC either, but yes, from all the lovely comments we’ve been getting on it, it is working ^______^
(Loving the angst too. Even in a coffee shop AU, these idiot boys manage to fuck everything up, lmao.)
^This is why it’s working, bc we’re absolutely devoted to keeping them as IC as possible. Some canon-diversion has been necessary, and being AU, it’s naturally got a more comical bent, but yeah… we’re trying to keep them IC ;D
We love this pile of dysfunctional vampires hipsters.
"I don’t like myself, you know. I love myself, of course, I’m
committed to myself till my dying day. But I don’t like myself.“ – Lestat, Memnoch the Devil
In context, Lestat’s saying this to Dora, and she doesn’t really address it. He’ll do this occasionally, verbally toss out some bit of raw self-reflection and it goes dismissed or ignored by whoever is with him at the time, but we as readers grasp it and hold onto it bc we know he’s just given us something valuable!
TL;DR: Lestat is a survivor of a lot of crap which has made him somewhat bitter and underdeveloped in some areas, but he takes all the negativity he experiences and uses it as fuel towards a more productive purpose. This makes life worth living for him, and it’s one of the major reasons why those of us who love him, love him ❤
I think Lestat’s admitting something powerful here, that yes, he’s flawed, to the point of being truly unlikable. His family treated him like crap for most of his childhood, and he had to give himself all the positive attention that they wouldn’t. He parented himself for the most part, so he understandably has issues asking for and accepting affection. He had to build up his ego from the very little positive attention he got. Much of that famous bravado he displays is a performance, but he’s been doing it so long and so well that he’s usually able to convince himself it’s authentic.
He knows he can be a bastard, most of that is a defense mechanism against being hurt further. People have tried to kill him on more than one occasion! It’s one thing for enemies to try to kill you, but it really hurts when the ppl you love try to kill you.
He’s a survivor of child abuse (the beatings from his father and brothers whenever he tried to improve his life), neglect (his mother was not very motherly to say the least), was abandoned as a fledgling vampire (and @vampchronfic suggests in a recent fic that the bond between maker and fledgling is deeper than I had previously considered in the form of a physiological bond) and he had to figure everything out on his own – including whether he could survive making a vampire companion,… I could go on, but it depends on where canon stops for you. He parented himself as a vampire, too.
So why be devoted to himself? Even though he was an innocent victim of all this abuse and neglect, when he was mortal, he became the provider for his family. He was the one who could hunt and he literally put food on the table. He was the one who had to save the village from the wolves. So I think it’s deeply ingrained in him to take all the negativity he experiences and use it as fuel towards a more productive purpose. Hunting was something he was praised for, but more importantly, the act itself gave him pleasure, asserting control over nature in this way. Every kill was something earned.
He carried this through to vampiring immediately, choosing to hunt the evildoer, taking them down brings him the same good feelings that hunting for his family and protecting the village did.
Occasionally he does still kill innocents, and he does hurt those he loves. He has issues with consent and accepting affection. Deep down, he does love ppl and wants love in return. He’s definitely at a better place now than when we first met him in IWTV.
Thank you for your loyalty, if you’ve been following me this long then you know when I’m recycling old answers/pics at this point :O … I aim to keep content as fresh as possible, and drag up the old stuff only if it’s a reeeeally good fit *u*
You have indeed been following me for almost 2 yrs! I love seeing familiar names in my Activity feed, and I ALSO have all the “X is now following you” messages (bc I am a little bit of a borderline hoarder)(in a good way), so here’s yours, from 5/31/14, the day you hit that Follow button and jumped into our trashpile improved your dash:
So Louis’ emotional connection to Lestat, and the fact that it wasn’t really visible in IWTV.
The really short answer is that I believe in Louis’ love for Lestat so much that I can’t quite pinpoint the evidence for it! I think it’s from reading further books and seeing Louis from other ppls’ POV, who can describe his love better than he might be able to admit.
“Louis, the watcher, the patient one, was there on account of love pure and simple. The two had found each other only last night, and theirs had been an extraordinary reunion. Louis would go where Lestat led him. Louis would perish if Lestat perished.” – Khayman, Queen of the Damned.
TL;DR: You gonna have to read The Vampire Lestat to get that connection.
These are actually pretty appropriate here:
So, yes, I think you’re somewhat right when you say that in book!IWTV and movie!IWTV, it seems like the only feelings Louis has for Lestat are:
a “range from hatred
to disinterest,
to pity,
with no real love besides the initial wonder.”
Louis is baffled by a lot of the things Lestat does in IWTV, he disagrees with Lestat’s philosophy (which is unclear in IWTV in both versions), and until Claudia rebels against their maker, Louis stays with Lestat because YES, he is still fascinated with him, he doesn’t know of any other vampires, and he’s sure he can pull more of the mysteries of life out of Lestat about vampiring, and his place in the scheme of things (whether vampires work for God or Satan is a big question).
^At the end of IWTV, Louis does meet up with a very incapacitated Lestat. Lestat says in the next book that this scene never happened.
Whether they met like this or not, Louis clearly is “empty” at the end of IWTV, and he wants to find Lestat, but how’s he going to do that? Check the Yellow Pages? It would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
IWTV is like a Batsignal from Louis to Lestat to call him out of wherever he’s hiding. Some of the story is embellished (or maybe even invented) to paint Lestat as a bizarre antagonist. This is all to get him ANGRY ENOUGH to rise up out of hiding and FIND LOUIS. Whether to retaliate physically, and finally end Louis’ misery, or correct the record by putting out HIS side of the story, and everything he couldn’t tell Louis during IWTV.
Which is exactly what The Vampire Lestat is, and that’s why you need to read it ❤
I-want-my-IWTV 