Welcome! Yes, what you see here on my blog are only opinions, which are based on my own reading of the books, my experience of movie!IWTV, and conversations I’ve had with other fans for all these years. I’m glad people have their own ideas, their own interpretations, I’ve learned a lot!
So what if one of the reasons why Louis loved Claudia so much was because Claudia somewhat resembled Louis’ wife?
It’s quite possible! Since Louis doesn’t have a wife in the books, only in the movie, we can only speculate about her. But I like to think Louis’ wife resembled the statue over her grave. I would think that Louis would have commissioned it, or been the one to choose it, but then again, it might have been in his family cemetery already.
If we look at the script, (you can do the google and you’ll find it), we get Louis’ wife’s name, Dianne de Pointe du Lac:
^BTW, I think the wife’s name is “Dianne” bc HELLO “Anne” Rice. “Die, Anne”? Maybe?
In the movie we know Louis’ wife died in childbirth and that’s all we really know about her and we never saw what she looked like. Maybe she had blue eyes and soft curly blonde hair like Claudia?
That’s definitely possible! There is a fic out there that suggests that Lestat would introduce himself as Claudia’s mother’s brother, hence their strong resemblance, and that Louis was in fact Claudia’s biological father. And that Claudia’s mother had died, and that her loving uncle was helping to raise her ❤
That’s kerosene. Used in lighting oil lamps at that time, too.
(^From a draft of the script.)
Apparently, “kerosene in its natural state is a clear, colorless liquid. To comply with U.S. federal tax law, kerosene is dyed red.” [X] Idk what colors it came in Paris in 1860-5ish, when Louis burned down the TdV… 😛
The fact that it came in a keg like that, and that alcohol is flammable, one could easily mistake it in the movie for wine. So many victims bled to death on that stage, and then considering that Lestat had told Louis to pretend blood was wine, I think it makes sense that this kerosene is amber/red in the movie, figuratively, it seems to be blood or wine, even if that color might be wrong historically.
Oh this is that guy from the Don’t Stay in School vid, I remember him! What a powerful vid this is. Still gives me chills.
I do really like his look, but idk about him as Louis. I’d still screentest him for another role, a different vampire maybe. One of the Fang Gang maybe, or a theatre vampire.
There is a lot of debate about Louis’s hair, and I’ve done it publicly and privately (recently w/ my fanfic co-writer/collaborator @wicked-felina!) this dude’s hair… it’s more of a fanon thing for him to have long silky straight hair, canonically, Louis has “wavy, curly” and “black” or “raven” hair “curling just under his ear.”
^X by @i-see-light, probably more canonically accurate for Louis.
We all picture him differently, I think that’s part of what will make it so hard to cast an actor for this role. Some ppl headcanon his hair as long and more of a chestnut-color (like in movie!IWTV), or shorter and curlier (like in Lestat the Musical), or dark, longish and silky (which I think is influenced by
movie!IWTV but trying to pay some homage to canon), or something else entirely!
We all apply our own ideals of beauty (which are influenced by our own cultures, art, families, romantic partners, and/or friends, etc.) onto these fictional characters.
I enjoy the different interpretations in
VC cosplay and fanart, for the adaptation(s), it’s more important to me if he can act like Louis, so I’ll accept hairstylings I wouldn’t normally like for the sake of good script writing from the writers, and strong ic acting from the actors ^_____^
in aaaaages (that’s what you mean, right? I haven’t seen the play), but I think Lestat would LOVE it. Both the movie and the play versions.
There is some similarity here… these two fashionable idiots who seem to succeed at everything despite breaking the rules to do it! I think Lestat would dig the aesthetics of the movie, the fashion, the music… I think he’d jab Louis in the elbow whenever Salieri gets pissy about pretty much everything Mozart does ;D
Louis might not admit it but he’d enjoy it for some of the same reasons.
I don’t know that summarizing VC will allow you to “catch up” with the fandom, you really only need to read the first 3 books and the Vampire Armand to get most of the jokes on tumblr, bc most of the jokes seem to center around:
Louis being a pyromaniac,
Lestat being an obnoxious but somehow lovable glittery murder machine,
Lestat and Louis being awesome and shitty murder dads,
Claudia being an ungrateful spoiled brat,
Armand being a little brat, or a slut, or an evul coven master, or all of the above,
Daniel Molloy just wanting to vampire plz!!!11!,
Marius being a pedo, or too bossy, or both,
Gabrielle is a bad mom and an ice queen,
Nicolas is spelled NICOLAS and he is NOT DEAD!,
Secondary characters not getting enough love from anyone!!
There are often spoilers in summaries tho, do you really want to be spoiled? I LOVE being spoiled.
We have these unreliable narrators, there is a lot of disagreement as to what canon really is, and some fans choose to ignore parts of (or entire books) in the series. We bring our own experiences to the reading, and we choose what to connect with, so I think we can agree on some things about each book, but you will probably get a different summary from any given reader. Even AR has told us to disregard the hybrid Mayfair/VC books (Blood Canticle, possibly Merrick and Blackwood Farm) when moving onto the more recent VC additions (PL and PLROA). So, for example, I have a friend who has only read the first 3 books. She doesn’t even know what happens after that bc she prefers to think it ended after QOTD. So any new vampires made after QOTD do not exist to her.#Your headcanon may vary.
Anyway, you want summaries.
http://vampirechronicles.wikia.com has a pretty good write-up for each of the books (they don’t have PL and PLROA currently, maybe they will eventually). It contains spoilers.
Lestat’s Bisexual Adventures in 18th Century France
Lestat’s Adventures with the Queen of the Vampires
Lestat’s Adventures as a Human
Lestat’s Adventures with Satan
Lestat’s Adventures in a Coma
Lestat’s Adventures with Polyamory
Lestat’s Adventures in the Deep South
Lestat’s Adventures with Not Being There At All
Lestat’s Adventures with Witches and Other Weird Shit
Lestat’s adventures with Being the Vampire Head of State
Lestat’s Adventures with Literal Fucking Aliens
(Note, Pandora and Vittorio are technically stand-alone “New Tales of the Vampires” books, but Pandora would be No. 6 of the 13 book series).
You can check my #VC Synopsis tag, which has more capsule humorous summaries.
Gonna try to do a little summary for each VC under the cut as a personal challenge.
Spoilers ahead! I’ll try to do this with as few spoilers as possible, as factually as possible.
1. Interview with the Vampire – Louis tells the story of his life and unlife to Daniel Molloy. Louis starts at the point in his mortal life just before he meets Lestat, and how his life up until that meeting influenced the unlife that followed after he became a vampire. Lestat’s reasons for choosing Louis are unclear to Louis, but he wants Louis to choose to be a vampire. Louis is under so much duress (failing health, still in emotional distress over his guilt re: a close family member’s death) that the choice is not 100% legit, Lestat can’t wait for a more opportune time and proceeds to turn Louis anyway.
The whole story could be seen as Anne Rice’s exploration of the role of religion and the reasons why terrible things happen to innocent people, the concept of punishment.
For me, it was also eye-opening bc I was 11 when I read it and it introduced the possibility of love between a same-sex couple, even if that was in more of a read-between-the-lines way.
It also has a child vampire and I hadn’t seen any media even attempt to tell a story with a child vampire before. Few media that attempt it seem to have captured the beauty and tragedy of such a creature as in this story, and she reappears in a few of the other VC. <— bc IWTV is from Louis’s POV, as told to Daniel, and then written out and possibly revised by his editors, this is the beginning of the Unreliable Narrator thing that continues throughout the series.
^ok that was too long, I’m going for shorter.
2. The Vampire Lestat – Lestat seeks to “correct the record” that Louis laid out in IWTV by giving us his own backstory, starting at his mortal youth and how that influenced the unlife that followed when he became a vampire, against his will (hence the “I’m going to give you the choice I never had,” line from movie!IWTV). There is more exploration in the role of religion and reasons why bad things happen to basically innocent people, and whether you really can make the best of a shitty situation or just give up. More about punishment. A very unique take on the origin of the vampires as a species is revealed. And the reasons why Lestat behaved the way he did (basically all secretive) in IWTV. <— This is more of the Unreliable Narrator thing that continues throughout the series, who are we to believe? Lestat or Louis? And the author’s retconning which is perceived as “making excuses later in canon for behavior that’s already happened.” Some readers really despise this. Personally, I like having the options and trusting one version of events, or none of them.
3. The Queen of the Damned – Lestat’s modern-era rock career wakes the Queen of the Vampires and she has this awesome Radical Feminist idea for world peace. She’s already gotten started on it! She upgrades Lestat physically so that he can help her accomplish her goals, but he’s not really on board. They meet with the vampires she has allowed to survive her purge and it doesn’t go very well. Also in this book, we have different narrators, more about the vampire origin story, and the Armand/Daniel ship is sailing at its best here.
4. The Tale of the Body Thief – Having suffered so much through the past 3 books, Lestat is a suicidal hamburger-brained moron and makes some very bad choices. Despite everyone advising him NOT to, Lestat makes a terrible trade with a body thief and learns quickly that he had idealized being human. He does some horrendous stuff, and wants off the Being Human ride. He has one friend who helps him set things back to the way they should be, and then he betrays that friend in a spectacularly cruel way. More importantly, Lestat also gets a wonderful cuddly doggo.
5. Memnoch the Devil – Lestat Goes to Heaven and Hell, meets Jesus Christ, meets God, meets Satan (who prefers to go by “Memnoch”) it’s all a huge interview process to decide if Lestat might work for God or Satan and it’s basically fanfic of the Bible. Some people hated it for those reasons. I found it really intriguing, bc it presents a reason why God created the earth, and why there’s suffering, why God allows suffering to go on, and where religion comes from. Like Lestat, Memnoch says he’s not the antagonist, but really the good guy in all this. When Dorothy gets back to Kansas Lestat returns to earth, there is disagreement about whether he went on a real trip or he was just fooled by a really talented spirit. Lestat is so confused that he throws a huge tantrum and then gets solitary confinement, then slips into a coma.
6. The Vampire Armand – Armand gets his spotlight and gets to really tell his story, do we believe everything he tells us?
Lots of good Italy times stuff.
Armand visits Lestat in his coma-state, and talks about that, too.
7. Merrick – Merrick is a Mayfair witch in NOLA who bewitches Louis in pursuit of his request for closure with Claudia, and hilarity ensues. Louis gets the most screentime he’s had since IWTV, but the whole book is told from a 3rd wheel’s POV, it would have been so much better from Louis’ or Merrick’s POV. Major fatal thing happens but fortunately Lestat wakes up from his coma in time to save the day.
8. Blood and Gold – Marius tells his story, as does the vampire Thorne tell his own story. Marius talks about his artistic influences and his experience with the early Talamasca and Santino and the Children of Satan. We see Daniel (now living with Marius) under a kind of spell, which Marius says is temporary.
9. Blackwood Farm – Lestat goes to the Deep South and hears the story of vampire Quinn (his story defies summary) and, with Merrick’s help, saves the day.
10. Blood Canticle – More vampire and Mayfair mixing. And Taltos. It’s a very big WTF book. But it has some very funny scenes and lines in it. It ends with Lestat promising the Dark Gift to someone.
11. Prince Lestat – Vampire scientists. A clone. Someone gets kidnapped. Ultimate Vampire Coven Gathering. Lestat is cranky, saves the day anyway. Ghosts apparently can linger on earth after death and make bodies for themselves. Characters from past books reappear. New characters are introduced. Louis writes a chapter about how OK fine, he does love Lestat. FINE.
12. Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis – I haven’t finished this but basically… the REAL vampire origin story, and it involves bird-like aliens, who were sent to earth bc the aliens feed on the suffering of mortals. The bird-like aliens didnt want to create Atlantis. in fact they were pissed because this one creature of theirs, Amel, made Atlantis with the Luracastria (i dunno i think thats how it’s spelled) and their viewing tech couldn’t see through the material. Amel made Atlantis to spite the bird-like aliens omg i cant believe im typing this. Louis and Lestat finally have some legit canon cuddletimes.
– Pandora – the story of the vampire Pandora, and why Marius is bad at relationships. Lots of good Roman times stuff.
– Vittorio – is not a VC vampire, and wants nothing to do with that dysfunctional pile of fanged crazies. @monstersinthecosmos and @vittoriathevampire could give you a better summary of that one, since I didn’t absorb it too well 😛
First of all, RIP Bill Paxton ;A; I loved him in Twister, and other movies.
I haven’t actually watched James Paxton in anything, I don’t watch him on Eyewitness, but I have seen some borderline NSFW gifs of it on tumblr, and…
I see potential… Can’t quite articulate why, not even being sarcastic. He seems to have the right blend of cockiness and tenderness, and he’s already experienced with making out with another guy on screen, and it would be gr9 to have that in the new VC adaptation.
^I mean, again, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I think this lighting is working for him, softening his features somewhat. He seems pretty w/o being like, a model. He has a boy-next-door quality. I imagine that some of what drew ppl to Lestat as a mortal was his blend of confidence, shyness, and caring, those are the things that make what would have been a slightly-above-average-looking guy into someone really gorgeous <3. Then vampiring enhanced what he already had going for him.
Hmmm, I don’t know! We only see them in the coffin (for sleeping, as you said, not like in the scene Louis gets locked into a coffin by the TdV) a few times in the film. That could be a sample size problem, maybe other nights they did change into pajamas!
1) There’s the night Louis gets turned, maybe there wasn’t enough time that night to change his clothes but he really ought to have, since his clothes would’ve gotten messy from the procedure (the whole “your body is dying” thing) maybe the filmmakers didn’t want to give him the chance to change clothes bc that would be too caring of Lestat, gotta keep the focus on Lestat being an antagonist.
2) Maybe in these shots w/ Claudia, she is dressed for “bed,” but Louis didn’t have time to change, or maybe he likes dressing in what he’s going to wear the next night… but I think it’s mostly to try to reduce the pedo taboo. He’s a faher figure, even though he’s technically her brother. If he was wearing something more comfortable or showing anymore than face & hand skin, it could be construed as … not fatherly.
IIRC, changing clothes for bed isn’t mentioned in the book!IWTV. I’ll reblog a few posts of vampires in bedclothes for ya ;D
Lestat talks about putting on a special outfit when he stays over at Marius’ house in TVL. He finds a gold mask w/ a hood, leather gloves covered with gold scales, and a blanket with gold plates on one side.
“I realized that if I put on this mask and these gloves – if I laid
over me the blanket – then I would be protected from the light if anyone
opened the lid of the sarcophagus while I slept.”
Sick meaning: the flu, viruses (like HIV), and cancer? From my understanding, no, Ricean vampires are not susceptible to these kinds of diseases. In Only Lovers Left Alive, those vampires have arrangements w/ mortal agents to get clean blood rather than risk taking victims, whose blood could be tainted w/ modern disease or drugs, which OLLA vampires are vulnerable to (but they don’t go into much detail about it). I can’t think of any other vampire media that even touches on the issue of blood diseases and/or other physical illnesses.
@anton-mordrid makes an excellent point here [X]: #1 how the fuck can you not associate HIV/AIDS with vampires, you personally literally made it a blood disease transmitted by explicitly sexual acts between your gay male protagonists.
I’m not educated enough to go any further on this issue, but if you want more on this, go to @vraik and @anton-mordrid.
Sick meaning: physically repulsed to the point of having a visceral reaction? Yes.
In TVL, Lestat tosses his cookies (ok he vomits some blood, no cookies tossed) at the sight of a pile of dead bodies the night he’s turned. (He also hurls as he’s escorted down to the Children of Darkness meeting).
“In a deep prison cell lay a heap of corpses in all states of decay, the bones and rotted flesh crawling with worms and insects. Rats ran from the light of the torch, brushing past my legs as they made for the stairs. And my nausea became a knot in my throat. The stench suffocated me.
He also says that vampires can’t stand to be around the dead bodies of their kills, either:
Revulsion at the sight or smell of death seemed part of my nature. I couldn’t watch executions any more than when I was that trembling boy from the Auvergne, and corpses made me cover my face. I think I was offended by death unless I was the cause of it! And I had to get clean away from my dead victims almost immediately.
Dead blood is not poisonous to them, just distasteful. In TVL, Lestat goes to Armand in Paris for help after Claudia and Louis try to assassinate him a second time, and Armand throws him in a locked cell with a dead mortal for dinner: “Sometime in the dark, I discovered a mortal victim there. But the victim was dead. Cold blood, nauseating blood. The worst kind of feeding, lying on that clammy corpse, sucking up what was left.”
^So clearly dead blood is not bad in the sense of being poisonous, just icky 😛
Bonjour! (Ok so now that you’ve set foot past the threshold, you’re going to have to read the books to really get involved in this fandom. There’s far too much in canon that’s not in movie!IWTV.)
But for funsies let’s consider it: Where did Lestat go and what did he do after he got control of the car? Well, geographically, he was heading away from San Francisco on the Golden Gate Bridge and dawn was approaching rapidly, so he would’ve had to stop and find shelter on the other side ASAP. He probably had to bury himself somewhere in the Kirby Cove Campground. I don’t think he would’ve had enough time to turn Daniel that night. Maybe he tied Daniel up somewhere nearby, or maybe Daniel agreed to stand by and keep watch for the day? FANFIC/FANART REQUEST.
[X] So technically, and I hate to break it to ya, but Lestat *riding off into the sunrise* w/ Daniel is not canon. They added that to the end of the movie to end on a lighter note than they might have otherwise.
In the book, Daniel goes looking for Lestat in NOLA and finds Armand instead, hilarity ensues.
Plot and ships would have had to shuffle around to accommodate a Lestat/Daniel ship. I ship them as a BroTP, if that does anything for ya.
There is PLENTY wrong with TOBT. Plenty. So much so that there are many fandom ppl who don’t consider it canon.
I’ve seen attitudes about this book change over time. In ‘94, when that book was 2 yrs old, I remember ppl telling me they felt the series had ended with QOTD, bc TOBT was written off as simply being “the body-swap episode” (many films and TV series have tried their hand at that concept, and it’s usually a wacky ride). When Memnoch the Devil came out in ‘95, ppl didn’t like that one either, too offensive for its ideas about religion, and/or too preposterous of a plot; TOBT + MTD seemed to confirm that VC had jumped the shark, and a lot of ppl decided that the series ended at QOTD.
TOBT has wackiness in it, I mean, the difficulty of peeing (with a dick) is described in such vivid detail, there’s just too much comedy in it for me to discard it all outright.
(Oh! And perfect cinnamon roll Mojo the doge is in this book <3)
(Trying not to spoil it too much here but it’s pretty obvious what happens, but POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD)
If TOBT was really just “the body-swap episode,” it could be written off as “wacky,” we could talk about the silliness of the details of the body swap, all that. We could even talk about how frustrating it was that Lestat went into a deal with a self-proclaimed THIEF and assumed that this dude would, you know, HONOR THE TERMS OF THEIR DEAL to the letter, but such were the poor state of the trust issues of our lovable but hamburger-brained moron de Lioncourt at that point in canon. He was also extra vulnerable to being taken advantage of bc he was feeling unworthy of life at all and pulled an Icarus ;A;
^So this was the cover for the edition that I read, it’s the first edition that was published. And the cover actually is relevant to this story, bc the statue you see here getting enveloped in a gray mist (it was a dull silver in real life) is The Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna in Loggia dei Lanzi. I’m not going to go into a deep comparison of this to TOBT, essays can be and probably have been written on it.
I think a lot of those ppl in 1994 who wrote TOBT off as “wacky” had not actually read it bc this book takes the body horror to a place that most body-swap episodes/films wouldn’t dare to go. There are major consent issues, sexual and otherwise. There’s rape. I think AR was exploring sin and consent, she unflinchingly went there. Some ppl in the fandom refuse to accept it as canon bc they did read it and are repulsed by how far it went with these explorations.
Personally, I always advocate reading the book, and stopping if you need to, or engaging with it however works best for you. I think there are good things in that book and I think Lestat changes through the course of the story. Improvement is not always an easy trajectory. Just like in real life,
improving oneself can be a struggle, and there are often setbacks, sometimes devastating. One could say he ends up worse than he begins this story, one could say he ends up better than he begins. Just because you read/write problematic things, does not mean you condone them.
Oprah walked out of a screening of IWTV when it was first in theatres. [X] Tom Cruise told her afterwards that he wasn’t surprised. “The movie is not for everyone.” Similarly with fiction. This book is not for everyone.
[^X The pic I chose of the statue is not from the same angle as the pic used on the cover, but you get the idea.]
I-want-my-IWTV 