Very cute indeed! With the amount of alcohol Louis drank that night remember he was trying to kill himself with it!, this is probably a very happily drunk Lestat:
"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.
Now I’ll frighten them away w/ my overly excited reaction here, I tried not to do it for two whole days and I just can’t stop myself!
Thanks for the follow @danyanddany <3! I am so touched bc I have loved your art ever since I was a smaller fanged little trash kitten ^,….,^ I have a few of your gorgeously drawn books, you are a major fandom treasure.
To the People Off the Page (or whatever we’re calling ourselves these days): If you can afford one or two of Dany&Dany’s books, The Lily & the Rose and Wishing for the Moon are VC must-haves [X], check them out.
Your message was the first to inform me when I got it 5 days ago! I thought it was a prank but it’s looking pretty real.
I don’t know what to think, I’ve gotten some conflicting information as to why it happened. They’re playing a lot of Angie’s movies on TV (INCLUDING MR. & MRS. SMITH BC DUH), they know we want to see her since it seems like she’s the one initiating the divorce. On the plus side, I finally got around to seeing Maleficent, which I liked. Did you know that baby!Aurora is played by Angie’s daughter Vivienne? It’s a cute little scene.
[X] IDK if this quote is really Angie, but whoever said it was right. It sucks when a relationship ends, especially when there are kids involved. It’s their business and their family’s. Sometimes relationships, whether romantic or platonic, need to end. I’ve had mutual and one-sided breakups, it hurts every time.
I hope it’s not all some big publicity stunt bc neither of them need that, their kids definitely don’t need it.
I’d still take either or both of them in the new VC adaptation, Angelina could be Allesandra… Brad could be someone’s victim! Or an evil elder vampire that gets set on fire >;} PUT YOUR FANGS BACK ON BRAD.
(Yep, I’m rereading TVA and at about 80 pages in, WOW, so much I had forgotten! There is a lot of action packed into this one book.)
“Might as well ask heaven what it sees, no human can know….”
How many times have I seen the movie/read the books? Y’know, I have lost count… re: the movie, definitely has to be more times than Neil Jordan has seen it. Maybe more times than it’s editor has seen it. The fact that I have a copy of it to pull gifs and screencaps from makes it so I can watch it frame-by-frame in excruciating detail and even re-edit parts of it to suit my needs…
BTW: This is a good official book I only read 1x and should reread, even if some info might conflict with canon info: The Vampire Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice’s “The Vampire Chronicles” This book was published in ‘93, before AR got as responsive over social media as she is now, and she is asked things to this day that she has explained in this book already, so I take this book as being more true to canon than her current answers, which may differ.
I will add that one weekend, around Halloween one year, movie!IWTV was on TV alot, and I ended up watching it 4 times in one weekend and THAT IS TOO MUCH. Even for me.
My favorite viewings are with other ppl though, where we say the lines out loud and make fun of all the stuff that can be made fun of.
As for the books, lost count on that, too 😛
Cut for length, not spoilers.
At some point I’ve gone back to all of the books to look for info, except Vittorio, which is not VC and I didn’t care much for him or his story. Some of them, I’ll admit I only read them start to finish 1x each (like BF, BC, Pandora, PL). It was never important to me to keep track of how many times I had read any of them, just that each time was a different point in my life and with that different perspective I was reading the same stories but I related to different characters and/or was focused on different things.*
I have this weird mixed feeling of being equally ashamed that I’ve read these so many times and being ashamed that I haven’t read them enough times to really qualify as An Authority. Does that make any sense? Pfffft…. I never claimed I was An Authority. I’m just doing my own thing with this addiction and trying to infect others with it and I’m happy to have you along for the ride ;]
*Just for one example, and being very simplistic about it: I related to Claudia when I was 11, and empathized with her frustrations at not being taken seriously as an adult, and later, when I had had child-care related jobs (babysitting, camp counselor, swim teacher, etc.) and was old enough to be a parent myself, I could empathize more with Lestat and Louis’s struggle to “parent” Claudia, who had a very real set of limitations and a lot of pain due largely to those limitations, and they were not at all equipped to handle any of that.
[Anon refers to this one right here] Omg, that’s so sweet of you to nudge me on that! And merci for the lovely compliments.
I was away on vacation for almost a week and mostly offline, and I decided I needed to reread TVA in order to properly provide this headcanon. So guess who’s rereading TVA? IT’S ME I AM REREADING IT. I want to see if my impression of him changes this time around, bc my headcanon of him is mostly based on IWTV and TVL.
I’m probably not going to do any major TVA analysis, unless something really strikes me, but I know Armand is a fandom fave, so I want to do my headcanon of him justice.
I had a dream in which I doubted all my artistic abilities and I sat in front of my sketches and almost cried, but then euclase showed up and said that all kind of art is amazing and with enough practice I will be able to achieve any goal I want. All I have to do is to keep going and never give up.
It was literally one of the most positive dreams I had, ever.
I-want-my-IWTV 