LITERATURE MEME
↳ [1/10] FAVORITE CHARACTERS – LESTAT DE LIONCOURT“Ah, come now. I look like an angel, but I’m not. The old rules of nature encompass many creatures like me. We’re beautiful like the diamond-backed snake, or the striped tiger, yet we’re merciless killers”
Tag Archives: monster
Armand after his little tussle with Lestat in TVL. I thought it was just the most wonderfully written violence, I loved the idea of Armand’s beautiful face broken in two because of Lestat’s beating. So wonderful.
Louis de Pointe du Lac by Gabriel Soares
I haven’t seen bicuspids like these since… since… Lestat?
The passage you copied under the fanart.. wow. Later books always make me forget how terrifying Armand was in TVL.
Yes, Armand really can be terrifying. Why do you think Lestat’s so wary around him? This happens in later canon to remind you, tho:
“I had the heart and held it as I’d seen Pandora hold it. I drank from it. Oh, it had plenty of blood. This was magnificent. I sucked it to pulp and then let it fall” – TVA, Armand healing after going into the sun
If I knew how nice Lestat was to people that had nightmares about him, maybe he wouldn’t have plagued so many nights of my childhood (I saw IWTV when I was around seven with my sis, waay to early for some scenes) :D
Awww, I’m sure it wasn’t his intention to be your nightmare material! He’s very apologetic, both to you, and to anyone else he’s frightened. He says Tom’s portrayal was actually much kinder than the truth and he’s grateful certain things were toned down or left out entirely.
He’s not responding to this message directly himself bc he’s feeling a little defensive about it. Lestat takes issue w/ the adults who let you watch that movie at such a young age, like the adults who made him go on that fun field trip to the witches’ place where innocent people were burned to death. Adults sometimes don’t get how impressionable children are, or they don’t care. Lestat’s guilty of terrifying his own fledglings, but there was usually a good reason for it. Like knocking some sense into them!
Lestat’s also reminding me that Louis told that story to Daniel, who was an adult (at least legally) at the time, and Louis intended that story to get to Lestat, to provoke him and raise him from wherever he was hiding. It was intended to portray Lestat as both a sweet dream and a beautiful nightmare, anything less might not have pissed him off enough to resurrect him ;]
When I was a kid, I sought out scary stories, bc even though I got nightmares from them, the stories themselves gave me a path through the terror and provided the catharsis of the resolution at the end. Even if it was an unhappy ending, the book/movie ended, and the monster had no more story to tell. It was empowering for me, and I think the way I see monsters like Lestat (bc he IS a monster, let’s not forget that) now is through radical empathy, asking again and again what made him as nasty as he was in IWTV? So many things. Knowing where that kind of behavior comes from is insightful and can give you the keys to dealing with difficult ppl in real life, bc they are EVERYWHERE and they come in endless variations!
“Cassidy licking blood off the floor” appreciation
somehow I find this moment hot as hell
Hi! I was just hoping to clear things up. I follow Anne on FB and today I saw a post about Lestat. And one of the replies were something along the lines of Lestat was evil, a pedophile and incestuous. This wasn’t an accusation and the person didn’t post it in attempt to call out Lestat, it was like causally stating facts, I just wanted to know how true is this? I just finished IWTV and I LOVED Lestat, but pedophilia/incest are really 2 themes in lit that make a book difficult to enjoy for me.
I’m sorry that you may have to stop reading the series.
Whether there is pedophilia/incest in the novels depends on your definition of those things, and also your headcanons about the characters.
Low-level spoiling here as a kind of trigger warning:
Incest: Technically, almost every vampire is made by a vampire to be their companion. Makers and fledglings have a parent-child relationship because of the nature of the Dark Gift. So every relationship that continues from that point is technically incestuous. Louis is Lestat’s child in this way.
The person who commented in that thread was probably referring more specifically to Lestat’s relationship with his mother, Gabrielle. While they do not have penetrative sex, they are far more intimate than a mother and son should be. I won’t spoil it further for you. You have to read TVL.
Pedophilia: There are several underage fictional characters throughout the series and they are sometimes spoken of in a sexualized manner (Claudia, for example), and/or have non-consensual, dubiously consensual, and consensual sex (well, a child cannot truly give consent, you would have to read The Vampire Armand to better understand the consent from the underage characters) with adult fictional characters.
If those topics make it difficult for you to enjoy the books, then I think you might consider not reading them further.
I found this great essay by Warren Ellis. It might help you. Here’s a taste, with my emphasis added in bold:
“… 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.“
“I don’t understand.” How many times have you read that in conjunction with a violent act?
“I don’t understand 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.”
Up too late so have some Orion.
This was a commission for the lovely @nelehgrimm. I love mermaids, so mermaid + creepy is ideal!
Check this out! Isn’t this the coolest thing you’ve ever seen?
Ah! I love it. Especially that expression. The smile is so marvelously unsettling, hehe.Again, thank you so much @alvadee!
I-want-my-IWTV 