Hi sorry me again. What are your thoughts on the weird casting choice of Antonio Banderas for Armand in IWTV¿¿? Have you considered….A meme of it!? D:

(@luthi69 beat me to the punch on that one!)

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[WWDITS/IWTV mashup by @luthi69 please reblog from the link or the source]

I admit that I have a lot of nostalgia for Antonio!Armand, so it doesn’t seem as weird to me… I hope the new adaptation(s) have a more canon-compliant Armand bc I think it can be handled in a way that wasn’t possible in the early 90′s, the pedophilia inherent in an adult-looking vampire being in a relationship (of some kind) with a teenage-looking vampire, even though they are ~90 and ~400 years old, respectively.

There were a lot of good reasons for casting a non-compliant Armand, and I talk about it in my #Defending Antonio tag, @vraik captured the taboo aspect of it very well [X]:

HEY. HEY. YOU KNOW WHO I LOVE? 

Antonio Banderas Armand. 

I ranted about this at length once, and realized it might be worth excising that particular section from my recaps and letting it stand on its own. SO LET ME TELL YOU A THING.

“Not only does Banderas give one hell of a performance, clearly entranced by Louis and convinced his ruthlessness is an acceptable means to an end (and then Louis dumps him immediately and Banderas’ crushed look that WHOOPS OVERESTIMATED just destroyed me). It’s really genuine, maybe the movie’s best after Cruise and Dunst, and at least half his dialogue is lifted without change from the books. But all that gets overlooked, because he doesn’t look like a teenager. And there’s a certain fairness to that – Armand’s body adds a dimension to his interactions with others as much as Claudia’s does. But now let me give you a hot dose of context.

In 1994, it was still a pretty common argument to conflate homosexuality with pedophilia, particularly with gay men.  THINK OF THE CHILDREN, Y’ALL. The movie already had to deal with the Claudia/Louis relationship, which only tenuously steps the worst landmines of creepiness, as we discussed, by avoiding physicality and giving mentally grown Claudia all the power. So, the filmmakers maybe didn’t want to stack, on top of that stack of gunpowder, a relationship with yet another underage character, particularly one that so played into existing stereotypes.

Then there’s the fact that, by virtue of the script, Louis’ feelings for Armand are a lot more explicitly tender and obvious than his relationship with Lestat. Back then, it was a big deal if you asked an actor to, gasp, play gay. Heavens forfend. But Banderas, in addition to being a handsome fellow and a marketable star, had also appeared in Philadelphia in 1993 (aka the movie where the Noble Gay dying nobly from AIDS is nice enough to teach A Straight to be a better person before he croaks). While their scenes were scrubbed of basically any intimacy, he was playing Tom Hanks’ lover, and apparently that was proximal enough to The Gay that he was an okay dude to ask. And then he fucking killed it with the material he was given it, in spite of the fact that the majority of his scenes were opposite the totally catatonic Pitt (who has made no bones about how much he haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaated being in this movie). He’s a champ, and a treasure, come at me.”

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.”

If Boone, et al, are *really* doing TVL as the first film, as you propose, then why not post THAT title page and let the world explode with joy, instead of indulging in a pointless mind-fuck?

If they’re causing a pointless mind-fuck, I think it’s unintentional. They leak these pics and talk about the project now and then bc we’re all so frickin’ thirsty for it! I doubt they’re aiming to provoke any negativity towards an enormous and complex project that’s in its fetal stages.

[I’m not sure if you saw my thoughts on this very issue recently, if so, sorry to repeat myself, but this is what I wrote before re: the title, and I added a little extra]

First though, it’s possible that Josh Boone & Co. don’t want people to confuse this project with the musical!TVL. And IWTV is the more recognizable title to sell it on. They intend to make a trilogy and spinoff series, and in order to do that, they need to at least include some of the first book.

Just bc the cover of the script had “Interview with the Vampire” as the title for this project, that doesn’t mean he’s redoing that movie exactly. 

I think we’ll be getting the Interview with the Vampire Lestat, this time around. What a twist!

Boone has to incorporate at least some of Louis’ story, and then get the ending of it back on canon track, bc movie!IWTV ended w/ Lestat and Daniel driving off into the sunrise*. Lestat was basically giving Daniel the choice to join him.

Keep an eye on my #VC News tag, that’s where I keep updates on this.

*If that ship (Lestat/Daniel) were to sail, then alot of canon after that would have to be reworked. 


Also, as a side note, I’ve been seeing a lot of ppl commenting on these posts about the original movie!IWTV casting for Armand, hopeful that he’ll be more accurate to canon in this new installment.

I initially felt the same way about movie!IWTV’s Banderas!Armand, that he was so very wrong. But then I considered it further and came up w/ a lot of reasons (#Defending Antonio) to justify that casting, the biggest one being that I think AR merged Santino and Armand for that movie, for a number of reasons, to make the film more palatable to mainstream audiences in the 90’s. Keep in mind that this was a time when even discussing the AIDS crisis was a very controversial topic, and portraying “taboo” things like homosexuality had to be done carefully. Topics like that still require special handling, but they’re at least more prevalent in the media 20 yrs later.

Back to Banderas!Armand (or rather, Banderas!Santino) Another major reason might have been that if they had a teenage redhead seduce Louis, it could make Louis come across as a pedophile. Another taboo topic and even less acceptable to portray in the 90’s. In the book, Louis is seduced into leaving his beloved, who looked like a child, for another underage-looking character, despite his actual age being over 90 yrs old, and these two “love-interests” actual ages being around 65 and 400 yrs old, respectively. Claudia is his daughter in a way, and more than that, in a way… one instance was sort of passable but a second relationship like that in one film (the 100 yr sail of the Louis/Armand ship) might just be too much for mainstream audiences outside the fandom.

Hopefully, in the new movie, Boone & Co. can find a way to keep Armand canon-accurate, and not need to merge him w/ another character for mainstream audience acceptance.

So really, in movie!IWTV, it’s Santino you’re seeing there, with Armand’s name and job title ;] 

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