Merci beaucoup! I’m good. Glad you asked this bc I haven’t done one of these in a year.
Welcome to our little corner of tumblrland, as I always say. Good to have fresh blood, pun intended of course.
[^X digging up an oldie from the archive bc reasons.]
ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE
(ﾉ^ヮ^)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧
Some ppl post IWTV or QOTD pics/gifsets or aesthetic posts, some ppl will post meta about VC and other fandoms, but I think the only other exclusively VC blogs (or as close as possible, as mine aims to be) are @vampire-chronicles-appreciation and @vampchronfic.
(The lists below are updated a little from a post I made about this a year ago, so some may be inactive now, but their archives might lead you to active ppl.)
Here are some blogs that reblog a bunch of IWTV stuff. i’m not sure about the others, but the first two make gifsets, sometimes photosets, text posts etc 🙂
♠I no longer have the issue with enclosed spaces as I once did, it was a vestigial fear from my past, but one of the things that helped me at that time was focusing on something else, even a small object like a ring or buttons could help reduce my anxiety.
Mausoleums can vary greatly in size, but the ones I am most familiar with are the small structures we had in New Orleans where members of my family are buried. The angel statue here was my mother’s idea, she always adored angels.
that’s the cutest! I’m always up for tea 😀 My favorite book is “Brødrene Løvehjerte” (The Lion heart brothers??) also all the vampire books by Anne Rice + Harry Potter for sure! movie: Interview with the vampire
FAR TOO MANY. But I can’t be all that annoyed at them bc I think it might have been translated that way in some languages. Other things have been lost in translation or changed, and that’s affected ppl’s headcanons.
Fingernails are not subject to the Rule of As-Is, my new term for the aspects of appearance someone has as a mortal that will be strictly adhered to when they are turned (like the fact that they are missing a limb, or their hair is shoulder-length, things like that).
[X Lestat left one of his vicious little thumb rings w/ me <3]
It could stay uneven/broken for other vampires in other media.
Why aren’t Ricean vampire fingernails subject to the Rule of As-Is? Well, as you say, an uneven/broken nail would be hella inconvenient for eternity! But none of AR’s vampires ever mentioned having this issue, and with so many vampires, who have known so many more vampires, collectively, surely one of them would have brought it up by now if it were a thing. So I have to conclude that fingernails are not subject to the Rule of As-Is.
[^Claudia’s aren’t long but she was a child, special exception. In Ricean vampires, their nails also have a kind of glassy sheen also my hands are prettier than Louis’ hands]
I headcanon that their nails grow to a certain length when they are turned, longer than they were in life, and will grow back to that length after being filed down. Lestat files his nails, he’s doing it in IWTV:
“And he drew
from his pocket a nail file, and, seating himself on the foot of the old
man’s bed, he began to file his long nails… I could
hear the old man talking to Lestat; Lestat, who sat with his legs crossed,
filing and filing, one eyebrow arched, his attention on his perfect nails.”
Bc in vampire lore, in general, abnormally long fingernails are considered a sign of being a vampire. This comes from the fact that when you exhume a body from its coffin (to check to see whether dead Auntie Vivienne has been turned into a vampire *gasp*), the nails appear to have continued to grow, therefore, Auntie Viv must be undead! In fact:
“It is not that the fingernails are growing, but that the skin around them retracts as it becomes dehydrated, making them appear longer. When preparing a body, funeral directors will sometimes moisturise the fingertips to counteract this.” [X]
You don’t have to get groomed before you’re turned, AR doesn’t always specify if ppl do. I doubt Frida Kahlo would have! To pluck or not, to cut one’s hair or not, depends partly on the culture you’re from and what you personally consider beautiful.
Me, I’d LOVE to never have to bother with it again, but I’d probably let it be somewhat natural under the brow, like Brooke Shields had in the 80′s, so that I’d have that option if I wanted it, bc I am a child of the ‘80′s and this is still beautiful to me:
It’s part of the package. The women who were turned before shaving one’s legs was expected (presumably it was a sneaky way to sell more razors :P) probably have natural legs. Louis doesn’t mention shaving his face before he was turned, we don’t know if Lestat has scruff.
“I could hear Lestat in his room, the sound of water splashing from his pitcher. The faint smell of his cologne came and went like the sound of music from the cafe two doors down from us.” – IWTV
^Is he shaving? Is he brushing his fangs? Maybe he does have some scruff! He didn’t mention being freshly shaven before Magnus turns him.
It definitely creeped Jesse out in QOTD, but partly bc she didn’t really know what was going on did they shave her legs, too?:
“…Was this a funeral parlor?
It came again, the fear that she was dead, locked in the flesh yet disconnected. She
heard a curious sound; what was it? A scissors cutting. It was trimming the edges of
her hair; the feel of it traveled to her scalp. She felt it even in her intestines.
A tiny vagrant hair was plucked suddenly from her face; one of those annoying hairs,
quite out of place, which women so hate. She was being groomed for the coffin,
wasn’t she? Who else would take such care, lifting her hand now, and inspecting her
fingernails so carefully.”
“A” is used in some translations, I don’t know why.
True, it is a story about a whole bunch of vampires. Why am I so picky about this… “a” just sounds wrong to me, y’know?
It ends with Louis as a vampire in isolation. Has he isolated himself to prevent himself from being manipulated by others? Or to prevent himself from hurting others? There’s plenty of reasons to isolate oneself.
Part of the point of “the” is probably that Louis actually is more special than he thinks. Like AR herself, he passively let a lot of things happen in his life, but did grow throughout the course of the novel, and by the end he’s very much gained his own autonomy, in ways he himself may not even fully realize. I think this is why AR never wrote a whole novel from his POV again, she had pretty much exorcised those demons.
It was also a great way to piss Lestat off, how dare Louis refer to himself as “THE” vampire. Lestat makes it very clear that he’s the one that should have been interviewed, giving himself “The” as the very first word in the title of his novel ;]
I-want-my-IWTV 