Hello hello~~~ This post got very long! It’s a big question!
I guess I haven’t talked about Lestat’s singing voice bc I can’t find it, but YES, #headcanon accepted, Lestat would have a kick ass falsetto voice!
I just drafted this post and it’s too long, so much more can be written and more vids could have been featured, but I’ve spen
The short answer: As with Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is music in the ear of the beholder, and your idea of Lestat’s voice is as valid as anyone else’s. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
I’m gonna offer a few responses on this, from AR, from canon, from a mutual VC fan friend of mine, and then respond to your suggestions. I had to make a cut bc the post was getting long.
SO, AR has said, on several occasions, that Bon Jovi was a big influence on Prince Lestat. She even dedicated Prince Lestat to Bon Jovi (as one of her muses). [X]
I also seem to recall Lestat mentioning a love for Bruce Springsteen in canon, but that might have been fanon. In QOTD, Baby Jenks says Lestat sings like the Boss:
Baby Jenks did love the Vampire Lestat’s music,… Yes sir, that was the one she loved… It wasn’t the words that got to her, it was the way he sang it, groaning like Bruce Springsteen into the mike and making it just break your heart.
I’m on Fire, the lyrics and the way he sings it, seem very Lestatuesque to me. Try Dancing in the Dark, also very Lestatuesque to me…
What do you think Lestat’s band would sound like now?
Well, it always sounded to me like Jim Morrison. That was the band I based it on — Jim Morrison’s voice, physical beauty, and the sound of that band in a song like “L.A. Woman.” That’s how I imagined Lestat’s band sounding. I don’t know a lot about rock music right at this moment; I haven’t listened to a stadium band in a while. I don’t know the latest stuff. I really don’t know. The main thing in emphasizing Morrison is that I’m emphasizing hard rock. It’s really acid rock. It’s not lightweight rock music and there has to be a good voice at the helm. Morrison had an exceptionally good voice for a rock singer. But modernizing it? Sure, whatever. Bring it on.
Sorry I’ve taken so long to reply to this (which I thoroughly enjoyed reading by the way).
I definitely visualised Lestat as a rock star that was heavily influenced by Jim Morrisons style. Style; referring to his vocal abilities, the way he moves on stage, the fact that he is a intelligent, complex beautiful godly Vampiresque enigma of a man. Oh, and how could I forget those infamous leather pants. Vampires love their jet black leather or black crushed velvet. As far as his fashion influence goes, he really made leather pants a rock stars trademark.
It’s like if you watch The Lost Boys, there’s a huge homage paid to Jim. For example, Michael (Played by Jason Patric) pretty much looks just like him with his chiseled jawline and curly brown hair. Then there’s a huge poster in the Vampire gangs cave. Also they play a cover of People are Strange. Jim Morrison to me was exactly how I pictured a Vampire.
As far as The Doors songs go, I can definitely hear a sense of otherworldly, deep spirituality. They just have that sound which is both timeless and touches on ancient rituals and folklore.
What Doors songs are ‘Lestatesque’ to me:
-The End (Oedipus complex, very Lestat) -Wild Child (Enough said) -When The Musics over -My eyes have seen you -Five To One -Not to touch the Earth -End Of The Night -L’America -Changeling -Waiting for the sun
Yeah, I can see why you might imagine Mojo that way! I imagined him as more of a Siberian husky, myself, when I first read the books, bc a neighbor of mine had a black & white husky… the floof and the smile seemed to be a perfect fit for Mojo to me! This one here is a Siberian husky [X]:
From TOBT:
[Mojo] was covered in deep, plush fur, beautifully golden and gray in places, and overlaid
with a faint saddle of longer black hairs. His overall shape was that of a wolf, but he
was far too big to be a wolf, and there was nothing furtive and sly about him, as is the
case with wolves. On the contrary, he was wholly majestic in the way that he sat
staring motionless at the door.
Even though it’s right there that he’s more of a German shepherd mix:
On closer inspection, I saw that he most truly resembled a giant German shepherd,
with the characteristic black muzzle and alert face.
German shepherd w/ the black saddle pattern on the back and muzzle [X]:
I can’t find it now (does anyone have it?) but I know I saw a pic of the REAL Mojo w/ Anne Rice, she confirmed that he was a long-haired German shepherd [X]:
I gotchu fam! There’s probably better pics on line but I took this with my cell phone cause it’s the back cover of one of the TOBT comics. 😀
true story, my roommate works for Warner Brothers and when they put these out at Halloween she texted me a pic of Tom Cruise’s buttons with the caption STOP LOOKING AT MY BUTTONS and it was the greatest.
she also said that Louis’s outfit was EXCESSIVELY SHINY irl.
@merrycai asked if I could post the pic of the buttons BUT I DON’T HAVE IT IN MY PHONE ANYMORE but I do have this screencap from when she wouldn’t stop texting me details on the costumes cause it was instagram worthy at the time lmao.
*hugs* Sorry this casting stuff is stressing you out, Anon. I feel ya, some of the POTP’s suggestions are really so out there I wonder how they read the same books I/we did. Some of their headcanons are also… laughable at best and downright offensive at worst, but I’m not going there.
TL;DR: I don’t think AR and CR are that easily influenced by the suggestions they ask for on FB. They’re probably trying to generate and maintain the hype so that as they make their rounds looking for a producer/showrunner/etc., they can point at the fanbase that wants it! I think they also like the attention and enthusiasm (who wouldn’t??!).
As with her writing, AR will cater a VC adaptation to her own tastes primarily, but thankfully she’s been very public about standing her ground re: making the current adaptation as faithful to canon as possible.
Anon: “I see [Lestat as] much less masculine than a lot of ppl want, I think a part of this is all the part on tumblr makes them all a lot more feminine and beautiful which I really like.”
IMO, this is more feminine: (gonna post a little bit of fanart here and if the original artists want it removed, I’ll remove it, just illustrating a point.)
^X L/L by @claquesous, kind of androgynous to me, but one could say more feminine than masculine, too.
^X L/L by @icestorming. Also what I would consider feminine.
And this is more masculine:
^X Lestat by @jodeeeart, to me, this is more heavily masculine, but there’s still some feminine elements.
Keep in mind that finding someone who looks like fanart is asking a lot; we’ll have to give the actors a chance to prove that they can ACT like the characters, and hopefully their talent will overcome whatever physical limitations some of us are bound to disagree on (I probably have the WHAT DOES LOUIS’ HAIR REALLY LOOK LIKE??!! Debate 1-2x/month, most recently w/ @wicked-felina lol).
Anon: “AR is suggesting these big hairy guys and FB and I just think.. nooo.”
I haven’t seen her suggesting “big hairy guys”… I know she liked Chris Hemsworth at one point or another, and he’s big, not really that hairy to me? But he’s bulked up as Thor right now. He seemed less built up in Ghostbusters, but you make a fair point. My headcanon of Lestat is not a huge mountain of dudebro, so to speak.
You should read @monstersinthecosmos‘s post about the VC series bc it’s got some very good points about more than the casting aspect that are worth keeping in mind. I asked permission to post a few snippets here, my emphasis added in bold:
I think the posts on FB are mostly just to get everyone excited; I’m sure they’re taking the general temperature of everyone into consideration but LIKE THE IDEA THAT MAJOR CASTING DECISIONS ARE GOING TO BE MADE FROM FACEBOOK IS JUST REALLY NAIVE AND STUPID AND IMO NOT EVEN WORTH DISCUSSING BECAUSE IT’S COMPLETELY PREPOSTEROUS.
^See, this is why I don’t go on AR’s or the OVCFB pages* that often bc it would take too much time for me to attempt to keep up with all the posts and comments, and tbh yeah, I think @monstersinthecosmos is right!
(*ppl submit links/screencaps of posts that seem to be newsworthy to me, which I really appreciate bc if it’s really something TRULY newsworthyand not just hype, I do share it here.)
BASICALLY the thing everyone needs to keep in mind is that for this to get greenlighted there has to be a viable expectation of profit.
^YES, they’re trying to generate hype and excitement in the fandom bc that’s a good thing to do when you want producers, etc., to get on board w/ your project (”Look, our audience is SCREAMING for this TV series, we have the audience READY!”) and also I think CR and AR like the attention (who wouldn’t??!).
… this has to please and appeal to like MAINSTREAM REGULAR MORTALS who haven’t read these books. It can’t only be fanservice.
^EXACTLY.
I’m kinda cautiously optimistic about all of this. I’m obviously super paranoid that it’s gonna suck and I would hate for it to be on some shit network, and I would also hate if they had to change it SO much that the core themes of the story are unrecognizable, but I’m also personally open to changes if it’s gonna make for a compelling show.
Cultural and personal tastes in beauty being one of them.
“ Yup!
The perception and definition that everyone has of beauty is a big factor. Like, recently AR posted a photo of Stephen Amell and said he would be a perfect Lestat, and that’s almost how he looks in her mind. Many people commented he was too masculine & that Lestat was more androgynous, and, to my surprise, she said she sees Stephen as androgynous, because of the symmetry of his face and how he is overall too pretty.
I personally would have never consider Stephen as androgynous, & he looks nowhere near as I imagine Lestat, but I don’t even find him attractive at all
¯_(ツ)_/¯
Another example. She said many times in the past that Matt Bomer looks exactly like how she sees Louis, while for me, the one who looks the closer as how I imagine Louis is Miles McMillan.
^Bomer
^McMillan
There is quite a big difference between them, but my “ideal” of beauty for men is more femenine/pretty/androgynous. So, it does depend a lot on what is beautiful for each person. Also, even if the actor looks nothing like the character,once he is playing the character, everything can change. That’s what happened with Tom Cruise 😛
I met a photographer in New Orleans who said Anne Rice told him she started dressing flashier because Elvis came to her in a dream and told her to. God bless Anne Rice.
You can really see the before and after of Ghost-Elvis fashion advice
I feel ya! We need more Lestat/Armand fanfic and fanart! #FANFIC REQUEST #FANART REQUEST. With and without lots of sex(ual tension) and all amounts of angst and fluff <333 and yes, @monstersinthecosmos is one of my fave fanfic writers, too.
BTW, I have one short Lestat/Armand fic on AO3… *scoots this link in…* since you’re thirsty for A/L…
A Brief Reprieve–After the events of Prince Lestat, Lestat reflects on certain aspects of his new spirit animal, snuggled up lovingly with Armand by a fire in winter. Slightly AU in that they are snuggled up together lovingly by a fire in winter!
[^Here’s a fanart of A/L for you, source unknown, even reverse-image searched. Tell me the source if you know it!]
Anon, hey, if you’re in creative writing class, then you’re learning, you’re starting out *u* You could be a writer of 10/10 A/L ff yourself someday. The laziness you feel might be more of a fear of failure; I recognize that’s what laziness is for me when I have a mountain of fanworks I intend to do and I’d just rather… y’know… rewatch an episode of the Walking Dead.
ANYWAY Lestat and Armand have referred to eachother in canon as being brothers of a sort, so I tag them #murder brothers, if you want more Lestat/Armand action in my blargh.
Writing can suck at any time: whether you’re just starting out or even when you’re a published author, but there can also be good stuff nestled in among the suck, and like I was often told about drawing, you have to get a ton of bad drawings out before you can get to the good ones. With writing, it’s plot bunnies you want, and good turns of phrase, good dialogue… Then you have to nurture your plot bunnies, and encourage them to multiply by spending time and effort feeding them or talking about them with others. It’s also like exercise, at least for me. It’s a habit/muscle that needs training and attention. It’s been enormously helpful for me to have @wicked-felina as a collaborator, bc we do push eachother to be productive ❤ Your class is probably doing that!
I personally feel like everyone can write, whether you write superficial or deep topics or anything in between, it’s all wanted in fandom. We just had a post going around about VC characters playing Dungeons & Dragons(an anon asked @monstersinthecosmos about that and others jumped in, so yes, that’s pretty superficial, but it’s still something the fandom wants to speculate about! Who knows, a fanfic about that could lead to the exploration of deeper issues.
Second, JUST WANNA PARROT THE ORIGINAL POST A LITTLE but I also want to say like. Dude! Just write some stuff. 😀 😀 This is a teeny little sleepy fandom and it is so thirsty for more content, just do it! You can do it! We all want you to write fic!!!!!!
I hadn’t written fanfiction in like, 10-11 years until just recently when I started exploring VC fandom cause I was like LOL WHERE! IS! ALL! THE! AR! MAND! SMUT!!!! and like, for me when it comes to writing (and this goes for my original writing, too) I think it’s really helpful to think of it in terms of writing what you want to read.
Fanfiction is awesome to flex your writing muscles a bit and get some practice in, and it’s helpful because it invites attention and feedback. It’s also easy to apply flash fiction or drabbles to fanfic because we don’t need exposition and backstory. Like, yeah! WE GET IT, WE KNOW! Quit dicking around and just jump into the story, we already want it! This is so valuable when it comes to just getting WRITING done and you really don’t even need a plot. You can elaborate on the teeniest mental images, headcanons, goofy or angsty situations, and that’s all it has to be! No one expects it to win a Pulitzer, it’s okay if it isn’t perfect!
In fact!!!!!!!!!! It shouldn’t be perfect! And you are not going to get better if you do not start somewhere!
I still get really nervous when I post fics and I doubt my abilities BASICALLY CONSTANTLY ALL THE TIME LOL but good and bad feedback are imperative to honing your craft and learning your strengths and finding things to fix. PLUS LIKE, it can really help to motivate you if you get some people on your side who like what you’re doing! Like I am consistently sappy and overwhelmed by the response to my fics and it’s what keeps me writing. 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
Anyway idk man, here’s an ungraceful dismount to my post lmfao but, listen!
Write! Do it! Share it with us we are thirsty.
AND OH, P.S. RE: SMUT. Just uh. You know. Don’t make it smutty until you’re ready LOL! Lots of incredible stories aren’t smutty, and there are lots of people out there who don’t want to read smut anyway! It took me forever to get comfortable writing smut and I still don’t even know if I’m doing it right LMAO. So take your time and don’t feel like your story needs smut, because it probably doesn’t!
Anon, your message sat in my inbox for over a week because I don’t remember enough about their relationship to answer this question.
I’ll open it up to anyone to answer!
I love Marius & Pandora together, they give me life and when they’re getting along it’s like the closest thing to a healthy relationship Marius has ever had in this series. Anne said she based their penchant for bickering with each other on how she and her husband Stan used to be, so I think it’s really easy to read Pandora as Marius being a Complete Dick as usual but it’s another situation where you have to take AR context into it a little bit and I think in a lot of ways she was making the point about how sometimes people can genuinely love each other while clashing during everyday domestic life.
For me personally there’s an IDEA of Marius/Pandora that has never really had a chance to happen, because they were still relatively young (in comparison to how old they are now) when they were together, and I think they were still very volatile and emotional as baby vampires at the time, and I think there’s a lot of potential for them to have a really fulfilling relationship now if they decide to. But Pandora has a really important role in Marius’s life because he’s a person who like HATES BEING DISOBEYED and one of the reasons they clash so much is that she AINT ABOUT MARIUS’S BULLSHIT and she’s always been able to call him on his garbage and refuse him and argue with him and challenge him.
And like, despite the mountain of evidence that points to Marius being a Complete Dick, I do think that within the Riceverse he truly loves the people he involves himself with, even though his version of love is often unhealthy and dangerous. And I think it’s important that even though they got on each other’s nerves and she was a pain in his ass, he loved her so desperately and pined after her for centuries.
I think in the scope of VC (and this is speaking towards like a hypothetical eternity that none of us will ever see because it would hypothetically stretch past any our lives haha) that if Marius can ever redeem himself as a person, Pandora might be the one to challenge him and drive him to change. She’s sort of a key to Marius’s past that no one else in this world can be and I think that would be invaluable when it comes to knocking him off his pedestal.
I have a lot of headcanon fantasy about how good they could maybe be for each other and it would be really satisfying for me if Marius could like, stop being a douche because I really like so much else about him as a character. And it would also be satisfying for Anne to utilize Pandora as a character because I think she has a lot of potential but she’s turned into like a ~sad vampire lady~ background accessory and I’m not a fan. And knowing AR and how these books go, she’s not gonna take advantage of this because she doesn’t seem to feel the need to challenge Marius anyway.
VC PROTIP: I know a lot of people skip Pandora but HONESTLY LIKE THERE’S SO MUCH DIRT ON MARIUS IN IT LOL like he’s such an asshole in it and I think it’s really good contextual evidence about him that’s worth reading. It’s enjoyable as a Marius fan but I imagine it’s also validating to get more material on hating him, too, if you’re on that side.
I don’t know the story of Leonardo Davinci /Salai! It’s possible AR was inspired by it, I haven’t seen her mention Salai… Did they do this kind of cute stuff?
Even the physical traits they share are not easily missed. Leonardo da Vince was, actually, blonde. Salai had auburn curls (his actual name was Giangiacomo Caprotti. “Salai” was the name Leonardo gave him. Sounds familiar?)
@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.
I-want-my-IWTV 