I’m ignoring movie!QOTD bc of reasons We can’t have a real sequel bc movie!IWTV ended w/ Lestat *riding off into the sunrise* w/ Daniel and that’s very not canon. It would be hard to wrangle the story back to canon, or harder to alter canon to allow for that ship (Lestat says he’s gonna give Daniel the Choice, pretty obviously setting it up that Lestat will turn him, and then where would that leave Armand in QOTD? Fledglingless!).
Plus, all the original actors are too old for their original roles, sadly. At one time, Tom Cruise was trying to get the rights (or had them?) for TOBT which I assume he planned to star in. All the gay backlash at the time probably helped kill that project ;A;
((BTW I wouldn’t mind casting them in other roles if they wanted it… Tom could play the Marquis de Lioncourt now…))
It’s crazy but I would love an animated feature… and then we could have the original voices back…
We could restart in IWTV:
Or we could start it in TVL and go in chronological order:
^Both by @garama . (This scene with Lestat and Armand (or is that Nicki?) didn’t happen in canon but I feel like we could scoot some silliness in there) These looks like stills from an animated feature, don’t they??! As for the original voices: Tom definitely. In fact why hasn’t he done animated voicework? It’s a crime that he hasn’t. Brad, well, I didn’t love him in his animated features (Sinbad, Megamind), so I won’t argue recasting Louis.
Someone asked me for my ultimate casting choices for a live-action VC movie awhile back and I haven’t gotten a chance to answer properly. In the meantime, you might have fun browsing my #vc casting tag ;]
//Okay, this needs to be answered OOC, because my Lestat would have to answer with my personal headcanon, b/c I think Mater is full of shit.
According to canon and Anne/Mater, her vampires do not experience sexual pleasure with their genitals. In QotD, Lestat calls his cock useless, claiming that it can no longer do what it was intended to, or some shit like that (I have a migraine and I’m not looking it up, but I’m sure @i-want-my-iwtv could give you the precise quote because she’s amazing).
Anne of course (typically) reneges on this when she wrote PL, creates a bunch of faulty science bullshit so that Lestat can jizz for science and create Viktor.
In fanon, it’s generally accepted that, yes, the vampires can have sex. There is some variation on this depending on what fic you are reading or who you are RPing with–but it’s generally agreed upon that vampire sex is 100% about the blood and sensuality, and that, even if they aren’t going to orgasm in the traditional sense, they are still going to get something pretty intense out of the entire situation.
There are some pretty amazing fics out there that make sense of all this, but since Vampire Chronicles fan fiction doesn’t technically exist, I can’t help you find them.
For my purposes, sure, Lestat has sex. Plenty of it. And it’s primarily about the blood. But there is also fun to be had with their bodies, and that’s more fun to write anyway, so there you have it.
ooc: ALL OF THIS. Also like… you can’t tell me that vampire sensation is 10x that of a human and expect me to believe that sensual touch does nothing for them. Maybe they can’t reach climax but that’s what the blood is for. Doesn’t mean sexual acts don’t work as amazing foreplay.
ooc: I’ve written about this before at some point I believe, but that’s very much my take on it too. Especially this: ‘you can’t tell me that vampire sensation is 10x that of a human and expect me to believe that sensual touch does nothing for them’
Hell yeah.
^Basically agreed with all 3 ppl here. Respect #Your headcanon may vary on this topic.
Canon doesn’t directly take on whether their dicks even work until the 3rd book, when Lestat says:
“I studied my reflection … and the organ, the organ we don’t need, poised as if ready for what it would never again know how to do or want to do, marble, a Priapus at a gate” – Lestat, Queen of the Damned
So I’ve discussed this topic at length in my tags for it: #asexuality, #asexual, #sex, #sexuality, #lets talk about sex. So check those out for more discussion on it. Ricean vampires still do feel sexual lust, it’s channeled through the experience of taking/sharing blood, and other sensually physical things.
In fanon there is a wide spectrum of whether they can have penetrative sex, some even speculate that their um… output… would be very bloody.
TL;DR: It all depends on your idea of what sex is. There are human couples who are unable (or do not want) to experience penetrative sex, and they can still be intimate with each other in other ways.
Claudia asks Louis about sex in IWTV, and he replies that it “‘…was something hurried…And… it was seldom savored… something acute that was quickly lost. I think that it was the pale shadow of killing.’”
He could have been lying a little to downplay it, so that she wouldn’t feel as bad for missing out on smtg she would never be able to experience, or maybe bc he truly felt that the experience of killing supercedes mortal intercourse. We don’t know bc #unreliable narrator.
ALL THAT SAID, if you prefer to take AR’s word as the gospel for canon, she has been definitive about it:
I think that reproductive obstacle (vampires are undead, they cannot carry a growing baby inside of dead flesh) is why Anne Rice made the choice that they could BE sexual, but not in a reproductive way.
Tom’s hair was fabulous like c’mon. I mean, maybe not the EXACT “glorious mane of pampered yellow hair” as described in book!IWTV, but I think his performance really made up for any of his physical shortcomings (pun intended, lol), like not being blond enough.
So yeah it was indeed a wig, but you know, there are a lot of reasons that the costume ppl put a wig on someone instead of dyeing the actor’s hair, and it’s not just because the actor doesn’t want to dye it. I bet Tom would have been willing to dye it if they’d asked him. He’s grown it out pretty long (the Last Samurai) and shaved his head bald (Minority Report) for roles.
For one thing, Lestat’s hairstyle and color had to be very consistent. It took 2 weeks to shoot the scene where Lestat kills the 2 women in front of Louis. Having a pre-styled wig is much faster to get on the actor than having to style their hair freshly every single time. Where Brad’s hair only had to be long and silky, that’s just an easy blow-dry; Tom’s had to have a fairly consistent shape.
Christopher Reeve wore a wig as Superman for similar reasons.
… and in Lestat’s case, it would have been inefficient to have to repeatedly dye Tom’s roots for however long his time was during the shoot lasted (I think it was several months). The vampire makeup effects took hours to apply, tracing the veins alone took 30 min EVERY DAY NIGHT:
… so saving time on Lestat’s hair styling and coloring was probably a huge help!
All that said, yes, Brad Pitt had magnificent hair during that time in his life.
He did a number of movies around that time with his own hair worn long, to the point where men were making fun of him for basically being TOO feminine (pretty eyes + big pouty lips + long silky mane = girl).
{I assume this is a question for the mun and not the muse bc of obv. reasons}
Both, both is good! All the cake and pie!
^I saw this doge in NOLA and he is very much alive, just playing dead drunk. This is me after like one slice of cake and/or pie, too.
[I am not a foodie but I have a very serious sweet tooth bc ‘MURICA. Dark chocolate bars are my fave. 2nd is white chocolate. White chocolate kitkat bars omg… Milk chocolate is kinda boring to me but I do like M&Ms and Reese’s cups. Mint choc. chip ice-cream is a real guilty pleasure *drools*]
My RL best friend is a foodie and she is gonna laugh her ass off at my vivid display of foodieism below but OH WELL.
If I had to choose, the Oreo pie at the Court of the Two Sisters in NOLA one of my absolute faves, and it is very cake-like. I wish I had a pic but I generally just do not take pics of my food so i guess i will have to go back there! While I love a slab of NYC cheesecake, after the first few bites, I need help finishing it bc it’s so homogeneous. The Oreo pie has all the stuff I like best: cream filling, crumbly dark chocolate, vanilla, various textures.
Best pie I ever had was apple pie in the middle of nowhere in Arizona. With a big scoop of melty vanilla bean ice-cream. The apples inside still had a little bite to them, and they floated in the yummy congealed filling. Flaky toasted crust. It was pretty awesome. But then again we were starving, so it might have been the old “Hunger is the best sauce” effect 😉
Plus, there is a fic floating around out there that mentions this specific type of NOLA pastry, called the “King Cake,” and henceforth Lestat has the nickname “Babycakes.”
43 seconds into listening to it and I am horrified.
It does not get better as I continue to listen to it. Does anyone speak Japanese here? Translation needed.
Nevermind I found the translation. Still does not improve it. Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way could write SUCH better lyrics.
HOWEVER, this is great, bc the more that name gets out there, the less able certain ppl are to claim sole custody of it, so WE CAN MAKE OUR OWN DAMN MERCH WITH IT.
#vc casting #Marquis de Lioncourt #Valere de Lioncourt
Apparently I need to watch Galavant bc the images and gifs I see of King Richard are so perf as the Marquis de Lioncourt, aka Valere de Lioncourt (as named in a ~top sekrit~ fanfic). He has to be handsome, of course, and have a sense of humor, and a biting wit, a mean edge. The tree does not grow far from the apple, as they say.
Ahhh, well, ALL kids are some degree of chubby if they’re healthy, that’s called baby fat!
I don’t remember her childhood story too well, tagging @roselioncourt for that, but I think it was a rough childhood before she was rescued? I pictured her as unhealthfully slender during that time. But maybe when Lestat rescued her and brought her to live with her new parental figures, there could have been a time period in which she reveled in the treats and might have gotten a little more than healthy baby fat!
Definitely hella cute & cherubic. At any size.
I didn’t see the Twilight movies well I’ve seen bits but not suffered through an entire movie on its own and Mackenzie Foy could have been a good kid!Rose.
^She got one of Uncle Lestan’s top hats and a new puppy.
^Another one of Uncle Lestan’s hats.
^Inquisitive nature. Uncle Lestan loved these kinds of pics, especially in daylight, when she seems oblivious to the camera, just letting nature charm her.
^Don’t keep her waiting if you said you were taking her to the playground. SERIOUSLY WE ARE ON A SCHEDULE HERE.
But I REALLY LOVE Suri Cruise as kid!Rose, too.
^I think her eyes are blue, more blue than Mackenzie’s anyway.
^”Oh nonono woman you did NOT just tell me they are out of black & white cookies. I would like to speak with your manager.” Suri has some attitude, she’s not just a pretty face. Uncle Lestan always said to speak up when you want something, people can’t read your mind…
^I really like this coat. Fake fur from Uncle Lestan, because she wanted a fur coat but stipulated that it couldn’t be real. She didn’t want to hurt any animals for it.
^This smile, this is what Uncle Lestan would do just about anything for! Perform whole soliloquys while doing handstands, pretend the floor is lava, make silly noises, funny faces, anything. ❤
^Bc of reasons.
^She has serious stage presence already. And not afraid to wear fancy fabrics do you realize that that is EYELET?! You know how easy it is to ruin eyelet? VERY. And navy is a pretty mature color for a kid. She’s got her “uncle’s” fashion sense already ;]
For sure! He did come across as a lot less intelligent than he had proven himself in ALL of the prior VC up to that point, but there are legitimate reasons. Which I’m gonna lay out for you, under the cut, bc SPOILER ALERTS.
When you consider the larger picture: of the ocean of crap he’s waded through up until that point, we can’t just write him off as “crazy” or “dumb.“ He’s actually wounded in many ways, so his mind can’t be firing on all cylinders.
Not the least of which was the devastating betrayal of Louis and Marius, in their refusal to help him in his hour of need.
In IWTV he was an enigmatic tyrant, in TVL he partially corrected that by revealing his backstory and the vampire origin story and showed that he is a BAMF which means he CAN BE tyrannical sometimes,…
So if he comes across as such a disgusting moron, why share this story with us? Could be for the same reason he shared TVL: to correct the record, and to try to make some sense of it, get some closure, and maybe learn something from the experience as a whole. He’s sharing it with us so that maybe we can benefit, too, and as bizarre and as big a turn-off as it is, the very least you can take from it is the tried-and-true: “BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR – YOU JUST MIGHT GET IT”which seems to be a recurring theme for him, and in VC in general.
[Spoilers ahead…]
It’s in QOTD when we see him attempt to find himself a role in the modern era, that’s also when he appears to lose some of that quick wit we loved him for, as his new SJW GF wears him down, intending to destroy the fabric of society in the name of Extreme Social Justice. He can’t dissuade her from her plans, so he eventually just stops trying. He’s practically praying for Marius internally. She is manipulating him vigorously throughout their time together, keeping him sleep-deprived and physically addicted to her, arguing her philosophy irrationally, he’s constantly reminding the reader that he’s slipping, losing himself in her, he’s actually terrified into submission to her to the point where he doesn’t know where his loyalty lies when it finally comes down to choosingsides. He was not the one to save the day in that story. He watches passively as someone else does.
Akasha’s damage was done, a part of him has been crushed… it was a major blow to his sanity and his ability to be rational about things before leaping into action. In the beginning of TOBT he’s suffering already, haunted by his past. He is not healed emotionally, not in a position to make the kind of deal that he makes with RJ, and after that, he’s even less equipped, emotionally AND physically, to try to remedy the situation that HE CREATED.
The most devastating blow is probably when Louis and Marius both refuse to help him. At that point, he’s broken mentally from that betrayal, more physically weakened, and just grasping at straws to try to get things back to normal.
So is all that an excuse for the awful, terrible things he does in that story? Absolutely NOT. But you can see that he’s crippled in many ways, so his mind can’t be firing on all cylinders.
You’re going to be disappointed in Lestat. He does some terrible, awful, things in TOBT. He’s done some terrible, awful things before it, and will do terrible, awful things after.
He’s not a #perfect cinnamon roll too good for this world. FAR FROM IT. He’s a little shit a lot of the time. There’s no way I can wave a magic wand and raise anyone’s opinion of him.
Pretty sure that ALL the VC characters are problematic in some regard. In fact, message me the characters with a list of their offensiveness. I would really like to compile a list.
What I CAN give you: If you’re disappointed in a character, does that mean it’s because you had a higher opinion of him before? Did you care about him before? Wanted to read his story? See more of him in canon?
Is it because you can see that he’s an evolving character, and though he has done bad things, he is capable of change? We don’t change overnight. People can continue to do bad things on their journey, failing bc of weakness or in an attempt to do the right thing.
With Lestat, you can rest assured that he wants to be good, but like an alcoholic, he falls off the “good” wagon. Repeatedly. It’s in his persistence in climbing back on again and again that should be considered when you’re formulating your opinion of him. If you can’t handle the failures, close the book. Unfollow his story. No one is forcing you to take the ride with him.
I think a crucial part of doing the right thing is having a better understanding of the wrong thing, a lot of Lestat’s failure comes from his inner turmoil. Even before he was turned into a monster, we can all agree that he had issues, to put it lightly.
“… Fiction is how we both study and de-fang our monsters. To lock violent fiction away, or to close our eyes to it, is to give our monsters and our fears undeserved power and richer hunting grounds.“
(a bit more under the cut)
“I don’t understand.” How many times have you read that in conjunction with a violent act?
“I don’tunderstand why he did it.” Or “I don’t understand why this happened.” Sammy Yatim, shot dead and then tasered by police on a Toronto streetcar, and even the chair of the Police Services Board asks, “How could this happen?”
….Here in Britain, our weakling government is attempting to launch a web filter that would somehow erase “violent material” from Internet provision — placing it, by association, in the same category as child pornography. Every week seems to bring a new attempt to ban something or other because it’s uncomfortably or scary or perhaps even indefensibly disgusting.
….we generally demonize violent acts and violent work. We make them Other, and we just distance ourselves. They are Other, and they didn’t come from us, and we’re just going to stand over there and shake our heads sadly. And, moreover, anyone who gets closer to it in order to experience or understand it must be a freak.
…The function of fiction is being lost in the conversation on violence. My book editor, Sean McDonald, thinks of it as “radical empathy.” Fiction, like any other form of art, is there to consider aspects of the real world in the ways that simple objective views can’t — from the inside. We cannot Other characters when we are seeing the world from the inside of their skulls. This is the great success of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter, both in print and as so richly embodied by Mads Mikkelsen in the Hannibal television series: For every three scary, strange things we discover about him, there is one thing that we can relate to. The Other is revealed as a damaged or alienated human, and we learn something about the roots of violence and the traps of horror.
… Fiction is how we both study and de-fang our monsters. To lock violent fiction away, or to close our eyes to it, is to give our monsters and our fears undeserved power and richer hunting grounds.”
// AR shared this article on FB last night, and I, for one, am fucking terrified.
I’m not leaving…
Wow, *huge sigh of relief.*
TL;DR: I read it. It’s an essay from some random person, Carmen Dominique Taxer, about how RPers of fictional characters, specifically Lestat, are somehow divorcing readers from their headcanons of the fictional characters due to the way the RPers choose to portray these characters. That Taxer herself feels she had some kind of intimate connection with Lestat that RPer’s are somehow responsible for dissolving.
[As an aside: I thought that the article was going to be an interview with AR re: the next VC and she was saying smtg like, “~Welp guys I revived him, spruced him all up, and crowned him *~KING~* and now I’m ready to //SLAUGHTER// HIM IN THE NEXT BOOK HOW D’YA LIKE THEM APPLES?? xoxo AR~" which is absolutely not what the article was about which was a huge relief]
The scary part is not the accusation of the author of the essay. The scary part could be that AR shared it on her page. But she presented it without her own opinion. In the past, presenting topics without her own opinion was an open invitation to her POTP army to descend upon whoever/whatever the topic was and crush them/it out of existence.
That doesn’t seem to be her intention here. I didn’t see her response(s), if there were any, to the feedback she got on it. She might really just be curious about how her readers might agree or disagree with Ms. Taxer.
A quick skim showed that RPers defended themselves very eloquently and respectfully. I pasted one such response below:
Hit the jump for more on this, but basically, dudes, RPers, fanfic writers, I do not sense any disturbance in our corner of the Force. Continue business as usual.
And really, I think it’s wonderful that we have Lestats to flirt and interact with, Louis’s ("Louisi”?) to tease about fire, Armands to push around, Daniels to pester, characters like Claudia and Nicolas revived from their canon deaths, etc. etc., basically, #LOVE TO ALL THE RPERS!
Kristy Ashton: “Read through it a little bit and it was a nicely written piece I felt it gave role players a very bad name.
I have been a role player going on 20 years in a large variety of platforms and not all of us ‘steal’ canon characters for our own. My characters have always and will always be original and so have my storylines because I don’t like ‘rules’ laid down for restricted storylines.
But what upset me was the reference to role players as hollow creatures. It reminds me to much how fan fic writers are seen as having no creativity. I wrote fan fiction as a teenager and I saw it as creative exercise, just like role play.
I am a writer now, creating all my own original material and characters, and not once have I ever felt bad for any of this. This article felt like shaming to me and kinda ticked me off in that way.”
I added my emphasis in bold. Taxer responded to Ashton that she herself is a role-player! She says that “the role-players I refer to specifically are not the same as the traditional rp’ers. I have a lot of respect for someone that can take on the nature of a character, but, I have met some… less than honest ones online. I woud like to clarify now, that, the manipulations referred to in this article are not every role-player I have ever met, though, far too many, so much so, that, it has caused me to lose my own passion for roleplaying. Something that saddens me greatly…
I abhor the resentment passed on role-players, and that includes the resentment I may have perpetuated here, which is why I have placed a disclaimer into the original article now.”
So she basically withdraws some of the resentment after some more rational conversation about it.
I-want-my-IWTV 