(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.