//ooc; I don’t know enough about the science with blood, but in my opinion, yes, humans taste different to vampires based at least partially on that person’s diet, and I headcanon that they do things to affect the flavor when they feel like going to the effort, like getting their victims drunk or aroused or terrified or whatever.
If placed before him, yes, I think Lestat would have to have previously tasted that blood if he’s trying to identify it. And it would have to be somewhat fresh, I would think dead or dried blood loses a lot of its flavor (and it’s pretty unappealing to vampires anyway).
With mortals, Ricean vampires are supposed to have perfect memories, and I do think Lestat has his favorite types of mortals and/or ways to flavor them with specific drinks/foods/ or provoking them into specific emotions, and he has favorite mortals he visits repeatedly for Little Drinks (unbeknownst to them, probably).
Werewolves might have something of the wolf taste in them and that would be noticeable to a vampire as odd for a human. So yes, I think Lestat could tell if someone was a werewolf.
With witches, I think they would fall under the “if Lestat has tasted their blood before, he can identify them,” but I don’t think there is anything specific to witch blood that would let him know it’s a witch, since witches are mortals who practice a religion. I don’t know enough about witches to know if it changes their blood physically, but if it does, vampires would probably notice.
♛We did sing to her, lullabies of our own childhood that we could remember. These were obscure songs known only to our caregivers, we both had nurses in childhood – neither of our mothers sang to us, although Louis recalls now that his sister sometimes sang to his brother when he was very young.
But if we really wanted her to fall asleep, a better solution was for me to play her a piece on harpsichord or piano while Louis held her, bundled up in her favorite blanket, and brushed her hair. She’d be out cold in minutes.
Or even something more lively like this piece:
//ooc; IDK what song the 2nd video’s song is.
We’re not too sure of what lullabies exist now that they might have sung to Claudia… but @takemetocoffin-or-losemeforever shared this piece, apparently from Louisiana:
You’re right, yes, they did do that in canon, but there is fic in which they eventually brought Mojo to live with them in their home, around the clock, until he grew old (I assume they still dumped him on the little old lady when they went on trips and couldn’t bring him along). So I’ve accepted it as my headcanon ;]
♛Minnesota, hm? We do travel to places to ski and romp in the piles of white stuff that we wouldn’t get in New Orleans. Might have to go there next…
We love lounging in a cozy cabin to watch the snow fall outside the windows… nothing quite like the inner peace and contemplation snowfall can bring.
Yes, we love snow. Most of us aren’t bothered by the cold. Louis is, and he will allow me to bundle him in enough layers so he can ski with us, or build snowmen and igloos. However, when he’s warm enough from a fresh kill, he just might strip off enough layers to regain flexibility of movement, he is a masterful snowball assassin, slinking around the forest like a ninja!
I call Armand “Panchino” sometimes and he doesn’t know why…
♠(Louis) It took me some time to warm up to him, and he to me, since our first meeting had gone so badly, but he became a loved member of our home. Lestat does not usually bring home animals. He has plenty of other ways to drive me crazy. As a mortal, I loved horses, and still ride them now. There is a cat who visits. We kept caged birds for some time. In general, I don’t like to keep animals.
[X] Animals instinctively reject us and it is rare to find one who sees us for who we are rather than what we are, and Mojo was such a creature. He could absolutely understand everything we said, and he spoke to us in his own way, we learned his huffs and barks and those happy whines when we would both give him our full petting attention. Lestat still makes some of those noises, secret code sounds which only we know. Mojo has left an indelible mark on us.
*sighs* Mojo was in a way our furry son, and we had to make the hard decision to give him mercy at the end of his life. Letting him go was painful, to say the least.
♛”Claudia, did Louis really gave that to you? Please don’t lie to me, ma petite…” Lestat sighed. He reached out to pet the dog’s soft floppy ears.
“No, we cannot keep a puppy. Who would play with her all day when we’re asleep? It wouldn’t be fair to her.” More truly, Lestat was concerned about the inevitable damage to their home during the day, and, that Claudia might get hungry one night and kill the poor animal herself. This had happened before with a rabbit, she spent nights sobbing remorsefully over it, and none of them needed to endure that again.
♛I usually like start off my holiday gatherings in a large group social setting, with our mortal social circles mingled with the coven, dancing and live music, then gradually move locations and shed people as the evening wears on, making smaller and smaller circles of interaction, from the impersonal to the more personal, coven-only at some point… I dream of having a heated blood fountain at one of these and Marius keeps shooting me down! He has such a limited idea of fun.
All this until, if I play my cards right and behave myself well, it ends up with just Louis and I alone together in a secluded little spot, or back home, tangled together somewhere with enough time before dawn for a little celebration of our own, if he lets me if we feel like it.
(It’s this line, right?) “Rise, Armand, we must leave here. They have come!”
[^I don’t have a pic of Armand from the scene you mentioned, so have Claudia in a library w/ a bunch of studious older dudes who are probably concerned about what an 11 yo is studying for all these hours so late at night]
Armand’s Venice flashback was in Mind-Gift-Vision™ (or whatever you want to call it!), blasting out of Armand at Lestat and Gabrielle like water from a fire hydrant, and Lestat later transcribed it all for us about 200 yrs later. The Mind Gift is not exactly like reading a book; it seems to be more about sharing images, snippets of sound and feeling. Why did Lestat use Armand’s name in that quote and not “Amadeo”? Some ideas:
Lestat wrote it 200 years after experiencing it, and yes, vampiric memory is supposed to be perfect, but he also went through a few assassination attempts, so it’s possible that a few brain cells were lost along the way.
If Lestat ‘heard’ an “Amadeo,” in the vision, maybe he thought he must have misheard bc he knew Armand as “Armand,” and transcribed the name he knew.
Maybe Armand concealed the name Marius gave him, maybe it was too painful for him to share that information with someone who had just wrecking ball’d his coven like Miley Cyrus in a red velvet tank top & undies.
Maybe Armand had been successfully brainwashed to the point of sealing off that name off from his memory after all those years with the Children of Darkness, to remember it after Lestat left Paris at that time.
Or it was our usual *~unreliable narrator~* situation, assign the blame to Armand or Lestat 😉
… Or, LASTLY, and most likely, it was AR who hadn’t come up with the “Amadeo” part yet. *sighs*
I can understand why discrepancies and discontinuities can be jarring, and people do bash the authors of novels for delivering what the readers see as some kind of inferior product :-
IMO, I don’t think an author, artist, or musician is obligated to serve to you a complete and perfect story/picture/song, w/ complete and perfect facts. AR has never said that was her intention. Even the Bible has discrepancies.
Instead of being jarred out of the story, why not make our own headcanons? You can call them “excuses” if you want 😉 Like I just did above. It’s reasonable to assume Armand didn’t want to share that name. It’s reasonable to assume Armand didn’t remember it in that moment, or that Lestat failed to catch that detail, or thought it was incorrect.
Fanworks can criticize but they can also repair what’s confusing, can fill in the interstices of canon (check out this types of fanfic diagram!). You can engage with the material to criticize it, or you can engage with it to repair it, so many ways to engage with canon and, specifically, its discrepancies.
People doing this with fanfic, fanart, and meta-analysis have made the VC so rich! Shared ideas have cured many things that were jarring for me. The missing musician vampire bothered me for so many years, and then, before PL was even a twinkle in AR’s eye, I had at least one strong answer for his disappearance and it gave me a new appreciation for him, for Lestat, for his part in the fabric of the story.
Your headcanon is up to you. You can enhance canon with it. You have that power. Ask other people for their ideas, they can help, too.
Now I’m not saying every discrepancy can be explained, but it is somewhat more manageable in the earlier books. I would love to see people do it with the later books! With the larger things… that are harder to explain.
Hit the jump for more, cut for length.
Some of my favorite art misleads or leaves things out. Here’s, basically, fanart of Jackie O by Al Hirschfeld:
^She has the slightly cartoonish distortion all around, there are strong gesture lines, there are detailed areas (the necklace, the hair, etc.), there’s her face w/
distorted features, and then there are missing lines. The back of her left arm, most of her right arm, but you as the viewer can fill those in yourself. They’re not drawn but they’re there.
It’s not a photograph, it’s an artist’s interpretation of his subject, how she occupies space, maybe how she moves through it, her inner spirit.
Idk, not everyone likes Hirschfeld. I’m sure some people do not consider it to be Art. We all have our own experiences and our own ideas of what Art and Beauty and Good Writing are. Fanworks are a form of engagement with Art.
♛I bare my soul to you so thoroughly and so often for so very long and you want to put me on medication *sigh*
[X] My initial reaction is offense, you’re right about that, but I know you meant it in good faith. Perhaps it’s because Armand has suggested it so many times as an insult, and I detest that there’s a connotation that anyone “on pills” or “seeing a shrink” is somehow lesser for doing these things. Who the f&ck decided that wearing glasses to improve one’s vision was acceptable but needing extra chemicals to improve one’s brain functions was somehow an indication of being some kind of, I don’t know, freak of nature?! Oh right, wearing glasses will get you bullied, too *tosses up hands*
Here’s the thing that I maybe failed to convey to you or that some of you chose to misread.
I grew up with neglect and physical abuse on a regular basis. Directly proportional to any time I wanted to strike out and try to find what any child craves – affection, love, support. I had so little of those things. I starved for them. Do you know what it’s like to have to sit at the dinner table and be polite to someone sitting at the head of the table who less than an hour ago beat you to the ground, your face on the cold stone floor, and ridiculed you for crying about it? You’re wearing bruises from it, you have some bandages, you taste your own blood in your mouth from your split lip with each bite of the food that YOU brought home to this person? Trying not to shake or cry. This person who asks you to play chess with him after dinner as if nothing happened?
this is one perfect, powerful, gut wrenching introspection on the character and thank the Gods for Coven Leaders like @i-want-my-iwtv for being here and giving us posts like this one.
♛I bare my soul to you so thoroughly and so often for so very long and you want to put me on medication *sigh*
[X] My initial reaction is offense, you’re right about that, but I know you meant it in good faith. Perhaps it’s because Armand has suggested it so many times as an insult, and I detest that there’s a connotation that anyone “on pills” or “seeing a shrink” is somehow lesser for doing these things. Who the f&ck decided that wearing glasses to improve one’s vision was acceptable but needing extra chemicals to improve one’s brain functions was somehow an indication of being some kind of, I don’t know, freak of nature?! Oh right, wearing glasses will get you bullied, too *tosses up hands*
Here’s the thing that I maybe failed to convey to you or that some of you chose to misread.
I grew up with neglect and physical abuse on a regular basis. Directly proportional to any time I wanted to strike out and try to find what any child craves – affection, love, support. I had so little of those things. I starved for them. Do you know what it’s like to have to sit at the dinner table and be polite to someone sitting at the head of the table who less than an hour ago beat you to the ground, your face on the cold stone floor, and ridiculed you for crying about it? You’re wearing bruises from it, you have some bandages, you taste your own blood in your mouth from your split lip with each bite of the food that YOU brought home to this person? Trying not to shake or cry. This person who asks you to play chess with him after dinner as if nothing happened?
This person who then acts surprised when no, you don’t want to play chess or sit with him and hear about old family history, because all you would be doing is looking at his hands and thinking about how different they look when not folded into a fist. That you sometimes flinch when he gestures at all with them.
To go without praise or being hugged by a family member for months.
Fine, skip all that. Say that I should have grown some balls and a thicker skin and been beyond all that.
Not sure if you remember this part, but I was an orphan when I was first turned into a vampire. My maker gave me the most intimate experience I’d had up until that point, life-altering really, and then left me the barest set of instructions, a big old box of cash, a big old musty castle, and then orphaned me on the spot. I’ve made several vampires of my own since then and let me tell you something else you may not know: the blood shared between a maker and a fledgling is binding. So even if I’d gotten over my shitty childhood, here I was freshly neglected, freshly wounded by this bond being made and destroyed in the span of less than an hour. Sifting through his ashes. Another shitty parent for Lestat.
I’m not rehashing the rest of my unlife for you but suffice it to say I don’t think my high-highs and low-lows are the result of a malfunctioning lump of fat and blood in my skull.
I do see a therapist privately (and for couples therapy with Louis) and that’s been improving things gradually. Progress is not smooth, it’s erratic, but I’m learning and practicing tools to help me in many ways.
Nicolas, he might definitely have benefited from modern medicine in this regard. I wonder whether he would also have taken offense, or if he had really considered it and embraced the magic of modern science, would it have saved his life? I think so.
I-want-my-IWTV 