Because the Lestat I love isn’t the one Anne’s interested in writing. The Lestat I love isn’t an infallible, untouchable prince whom everyone falls in love with at first sight. He’s a fuckup who never stops trying.
I love the Lestat who came out of an abusive home and still wanted desperately that there was good in the world, and that he could be a good person. Who wanted to make people happy and who was desperately in love with his depressed as fuck proto-hipster boyfriend. Who lived as a queer man without shame.
I love the Lestat who had panic attacks about death and the unknowable enormity of the universe.
I love the Lestat who was a victim and a survivor, who was moved not to exert his power over others but make sure they didn’t suffer like he had.
I love the Lestat who tried to take care of his loved ones even when he was spectacularly bad at it, who wore his heart sincerely on his sleeve and lived in terror of his loved ones throwing him away because they didn’t need him anymore.
I rooted for the Lestat who realized the enormity of the wrongs he did to Louis by keeping him ignorant and by indulging his need to be needed. I loved the Lestat who was willing to show all of his fears and his fuckups in print, when his whole life had been dedicated to pretending he was untouchable, just to apologize to the man he loved.
I loved a Lestat who was allowed to be wrong, to be punished, to be humbled and rejected and keep going. Whose bravado and bluster was a cover for a sincere heart, not a hard and empty shell. The Lestat I love isn’t a rapist, an autocrat, a power hungry monster. He had countless flaws, but he was meant to fix them, not wait around for the universe to concoct a reason why his bad behavior and disregard for others’ agency is okay.
I don’t know where that Lestat went. But I miss him.
This is accurate, but it isn’t just anons. It’s virtually everyone to some degree.
I don’t mean offense by that. Most of the time, people just want to help. Or they’re excited. I even do it to other girls myself sometimes. We give unsolicited advice, suggestions, “you should”s and so on.
We try to control, even in the most well meaning way, what women do with their talents. We want to have a say in a woman’s behavior.
It’s a cynical way to think, but in my experience, it’s not a big step all to go from “You should try this” to “I was just trying to help” to “Wow you’re a bitch for not letting me control you.” It’s breathtaking to me sometimes how quickly and willingly people turn on you this way because of the expectation that you exist for them rather than for yourself. And it’s a very strong expectation, one you probably don’t think you have.
But it’s there when people tell me to turn off anons or say nasty things because I’m not dealing with hate the way they want me to. It’s there when people tell me who I should draw. It’s there when people say, under their breath, “I wish she wouldn’t copy photos.” “I wish you would behave according to me.”
And we’re not shy about it, especially when we think we’re being helpful. The need to rescue (and the expectation that women need to be rescued, even if from no one else but their own inherent bad judgment or “sin”) is deeply ingrained in our society. It’s in our laws, our religion, our commerce.
Think about all the ways, even the ways you believe to be harmless or helpful or barely there, that you feel you’re allowed, entitled, or even expected to take personal sovereignty from a woman. ❤
The jealous cruelty of this anon aside… there’s such a weird expectation that artists need to be creating some kind of socially-valuable “art” at all times… or that what’s created needs to be for the consumption of others. Artists are allowed to make things for their own pleasure, things that are meaningless to anyone other than themselves, things that are practice, things that are ugly.
Happiness is valuable. It’s like, y’know, how much time do people “waste” making themselves happy? Why is it better to spend your free time watching football or playing video games or reading articles on Reddit? Why is it that as soon as you’re making something, the thing itself needs to be valuable, rather than the joy of making it?
Fanworks are valuable too, particularly for women. They’re empowering to create because you are usually taking male-created, male-marketed media and recreating for female consumption. It’s validating to consume because it gives women a place to enjoy media spaces. Its also a way to network and form communities in empty places. It’s not “wasteful” to spend time on fanworks for this reason as well.
Ugh. I wonder if guys drawing Black Widow getting nailed by aliens get these sorts of “what are you doing with your life”/“why are wasting your talent” messages. Prolly not, because this sort of hyperbolic go-kill-yourself missive is pretty much tailored to female recipients.
This is important. When I dabbled in art classes in college I had one teacher who was deadest that all our projects had to have a ‘meaning’ and be ‘socially relevant’. If you were me, and just wanted to make a faerie house full of miniature food because that sounded like a fun way to fulfill her architecture assignment, this teacher would berate you. She spent a lot of time calling me unoriginal and uncreative. She made me cry in front of the class after a particularly nasty insult suggesting what I wanted to make was meaningless drivel and that she ‘expected better of me’.
It feels shameful to admit now, but I seriously considered leaving the art field all together because of this teachers insistence that the things I enjoyed, and enjoyed making, weren’t worthwhile. And looking back now, I think that teacher did a real disservice to countless young artists. Creation itself is valuable. Every act of creation has social significance and is a product of its time. You don’t have to be political for your art to matter. You just have to love making what you make. That’s it. That what makes it art, that’s what gives it value. Anyone who tells you otherwise has bought into the bizarre status-based BS I see sometimes in the fine art world.
And if my old professor from community college happens to see this: making life-size animal sculptures out of recycled plastic in order to send a message about the environment isn’t any more unique than the faeries I wanted to make in your class. I’m glad it makes you happy, I’m glad that message resonates with you and your collectors. But try to look outside yourself and recognize putting others down when you can tell they are passionate about creating is not the right way to teach. Ever. Encourage and nurture more young artists in the world. This isn’t a race to find out who can ‘make it’ by putting people through tests. There is enough room for all of us to shine.
Look at these smart babes who follow me though
/beams with pride
Questions that I fear, chapter one. The point of the song is that we are fairly well damaged by the legacy of the romantic poets. We think of love as this thing that is accompanied by strings, and it’s a force for good, and if something bad happens, then that’s not love. And the therapeutic tradition I come from, I used to work in therapy, also says it’s not love if it feels bad. I don’t know so much about that. I don’t know that the Greeks weren’t right. I think they were: that love can eat a path through everything. That it can destroy a lot of things on the way to it’s own objective which is just it’s expression of itself. My step-father loved his family. Now, he mistreated us terribly quite often. But he loved us. Well, that, to me, is something worth commenting on in the hopes of undoing what I see as terrible damage in the way that people talk about love as this benign, comfortable force. It’s not that. It’s wild.
You are the only person who is in charge of how you feel about yourself. Nobody else can possibly do that. You get to decide if you believe you are beautiful or not, and nobody can take it away from you. If someone suggests that you aren’t beautiful, you can consider how sad it is that they have such a limited view of beauty. You can consider how unfortunate it is that they have such an exaggerated sense of self-importance that they think you should care about what they think. You can also choose to realize that it has nothing at all to do with your beauty and everything to do with their limitations.
I admit that I have a lot of nostalgia for Antonio!Armand, so it doesn’t seem as weird to me… I hope the new adaptation(s) have a more canon-compliant Armand bc I think it can be handled in a way that wasn’t possible in the early 90′s, the pedophilia inherent in an adult-looking vampire being in a relationship (of some kind) with a teenage-looking vampire, even though they are ~90 and ~400 years old, respectively.
There were a lot of good reasons for casting a non-compliant Armand, and I talk about it in my #Defending Antonio tag, @vraik captured the taboo aspect of it very well [X]:
HEY. HEY. YOU KNOW WHO I LOVE?
Antonio Banderas Armand.
I ranted about this at length once, and realized it might be worth excising that particular section from my recaps and letting it stand on its own. SO LET ME TELL YOU A THING.
“Not only does Banderas give one hell of a performance, clearly entranced by Louis and convinced his ruthlessness is an acceptable means to an end (and then Louis dumps him immediately and Banderas’ crushed look that WHOOPS OVERESTIMATED just destroyed me). It’s really genuine, maybe the movie’s best after Cruise and Dunst, and at least half his dialogue is lifted without change from the books. But all that gets overlooked, because he doesn’t look like a teenager. And there’s a certain fairness to that – Armand’s body adds a dimension to his interactions with others as much as Claudia’s does. But now let me give you a hot dose of context.
In 1994, it was still a pretty common argument to conflate homosexuality with pedophilia, particularly with gay men. THINK OF THE CHILDREN, Y’ALL. The movie already had to deal with the Claudia/Louis relationship, which only tenuously steps the worst landmines of creepiness, as we discussed, by avoiding physicality and giving mentally grown Claudia all the power. So, the filmmakers maybe didn’t want to stack, on top of that stack of gunpowder, a relationship with yet another underage character, particularly one that so played into existing stereotypes.
Then there’s the fact that, by virtue of the script, Louis’ feelings for Armand are a lot more explicitly tender and obvious than his relationship with Lestat. Back then, it was a big deal if you asked an actor to, gasp, play gay. Heavens forfend. But Banderas, in addition to being a handsome fellow and a marketable star, had also appeared in Philadelphia in 1993 (aka the movie where the Noble Gay dying nobly from AIDS is nice enough to teach A Straight to be a better person before he croaks). While their scenes were scrubbed of basically any intimacy, he was playing Tom Hanks’ lover, and apparently that was proximal enough to The Gay that he was an okay dude to ask. And then he fucking killed it with the material he was given it, in spite of the fact that the majority of his scenes were opposite the totally catatonic Pitt (who has made no bones about how much he haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaated being in this movie). He’s a champ, and a treasure, come at me.”
The fact that all the Vampire Chronicles exist in meta form within the Vampire Chronicles is actually so fucking genius and I think AR gave us a beautiful gift with which we will always be able to hand wave away any plot holes or characterizations that deviate from the norm.
Continuity error? The narrator remembers the events differently.
OOC behavior? The narrator is too dense to properly interpret someone’s feelings.
The sudden inclusion of a phrase she really likes all over the book from various people’s mouths? (ie: Lord God!) It’s not ANNE saying these words, it’s the characters picking up each other’s mannerisms.
It’s created a rich breeding ground for all types of discourse and headcanons, and we never have to be truly heartbroken by critique cause there’s always the possibility that Lestat is just being a jackass and doesn’t know wtf he’s talking about.
It also creates this beautiful sense of suspending disbelief in that the characters are all “real”
@riccardo-de-romanus is a Riccardo RPer, you might check out their archives or try to get in touch with them for Riccardo action. They use Avan Jogia as a face claim.
Anyone is free to comment/reblog this w/ their thoughts. I reached out to some ppl privately to help me with this bc I was never really all that attached to Riccardo… but yes, I thought Riccardo’s death was believable, and shocking, and heartwrenching! The fact that Armand survived that experience is a testament to his character’s strength, that he could go on after that ;A;
You’re not wrong for wanting to attach to this more or less obscure character; some RPers specifically choose less popular characters as their muse, the road less traveled and all that ;D
Other people with positive thoughts to share w/ you on Riccardo:
The thing with Riccardo that gets so tragic is that he’s one of the very few characters in TVA who’s genuinely kind and caring and not controlling or abusive in any way, he’s quite innocent, just an ordinary young man.
He welcomes Amadeo immediately and is charged with taking care of him since Riccardo is among the eldest (and Amadeo second eldest I THINK? I’ll have to look up ages). And they just become best friends/brothers and have a lot of NORMAL innocent teenage fun. So it’s like the only bits of that book which are healthy tbh xD
They pair up together for fencing because they’re evenly matched, they go to Bianca’s together and go to taverns and play cards and get drunk illicitly (XD), Riccardo helps teach him Italian and ‘rescues’ him from making a fool of himself at lessons, and they seem kind of inseparable. i think Riccardo is a few years older but I’m not sure how much.
Aaand then of course Anne uses that elaborate setup (Riccardo is really the only one of the boys she takes the time to make a distinct and familiar character) to make it THAT much more awful when he dies.
^I agree with all this. The healthiness of Marius/Amadeo vs. Riccardo/Amadeo (if that was a legit ship) is endlessly debatable.
//Just so you know, if anyone feels the need to gush over Riccardo, at any moment, anytime, you can come to me, I’m up for it, always, my askbox is open, ooc or ic.
There is little more I can add to @bloodyvampchrons ’ beautiful words but I’m going to do it anyway. I can only concur that indeed Riccardo was the only pure and innocent soul among this horde of wretched characters. His death, I would say, it’sthe most tragic and painful death among all that happens in the books, at least for me. A lot of thinks come in play to create the perfect tragedy, his wonderful personality (kind, loyal, innocent, a long etc.) was without a doubt one of them, but also all the circumstances, that was Armand himself who does it and how it happens and why. His murder was used to serve a purpose he had never agreed with but neither he nor Armand could have done anything to avoid it and really was that actually necessary because I believe in terms of fucking up Armand covering him in the ashes of the other boys should have been more than enough so really they could just have leave Riccardo the fuck alone, bastards, uncalled for, my poor boys, and you know what else…-
Anyway, as you can see, my dear friend, to answer your question “How did you react to Riccardo’s death?”Well, it totally fucked me up.
this picture of anne rice at a book signing in the 90s feels reeeeally important
OKAY EXCUSE ME GUYS, ANNE RICE RIGHT NOW ON HER LIVESTREAM WAS TALKING ABOUT HOW SHE REGRETTED KILLING ARMAND AND SHE WAS AT A MEMNOCH SIGNING AND THE FANS HAD “ARMAND LIVES” SHIRTS AND MADE HER REALIZE SHE MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE.
I MEAN. IS THAT WHAT THIS PICTURE IS. I THINK IT IS.
HAHAHAHA i love this fucking fandom oh my God. I WISH I could have been there for that
I-want-my-IWTV 