Hmmm, he’s not my headcanon of Armand, but maybe for Riccardo? Or an unnamed de Romanus lost boy? @lostsoulofvenice RPs as Riccardo. @perladivenezia (Bianca RPer), @riccardo-de-romanus (another Riccardo) what do you think?
@riccardo-de-romanus is a Riccardo RPer, you might check out their archives or try to get in touch with them for Riccardo action. They use Avan Jogia as a face claim.
Anyone is free to comment/reblog this w/ their thoughts. I reached out to some ppl privately to help me with this bc I was never really all that attached to Riccardo… but yes, I thought Riccardo’s death was believable, and shocking, and heartwrenching! The fact that Armand survived that experience is a testament to his character’s strength, that he could go on after that ;A;
You’re not wrong for wanting to attach to this more or less obscure character; some RPers specifically choose less popular characters as their muse, the road less traveled and all that ;D
Other people with positive thoughts to share w/ you on Riccardo:
The thing with Riccardo that gets so tragic is that he’s one of the very few characters in TVA who’s genuinely kind and caring and not controlling or abusive in any way, he’s quite innocent, just an ordinary young man.
He welcomes Amadeo immediately and is charged with taking care of him since Riccardo is among the eldest (and Amadeo second eldest I THINK? I’ll have to look up ages). And they just become best friends/brothers and have a lot of NORMAL innocent teenage fun. So it’s like the only bits of that book which are healthy tbh xD
They pair up together for fencing because they’re evenly matched, they go to Bianca’s together and go to taverns and play cards and get drunk illicitly (XD), Riccardo helps teach him Italian and ‘rescues’ him from making a fool of himself at lessons, and they seem kind of inseparable. i think Riccardo is a few years older but I’m not sure how much.
Aaand then of course Anne uses that elaborate setup (Riccardo is really the only one of the boys she takes the time to make a distinct and familiar character) to make it THAT much more awful when he dies.
^I agree with all this. The healthiness of Marius/Amadeo vs. Riccardo/Amadeo (if that was a legit ship) is endlessly debatable.
//Just so you know, if anyone feels the need to gush over Riccardo, at any moment, anytime, you can come to me, I’m up for it, always, my askbox is open, ooc or ic.
There is little more I can add to @bloodyvampchrons ’ beautiful words but I’m going to do it anyway. I can only concur that indeed Riccardo was the only pure and innocent soul among this horde of wretched characters. His death, I would say, it’sthe most tragic and painful death among all that happens in the books, at least for me. A lot of thinks come in play to create the perfect tragedy, his wonderful personality (kind, loyal, innocent, a long etc.) was without a doubt one of them, but also all the circumstances, that was Armand himself who does it and how it happens and why. His murder was used to serve a purpose he had never agreed with but neither he nor Armand could have done anything to avoid it and really was that actually necessary because I believe in terms of fucking up Armand covering him in the ashes of the other boys should have been more than enough so really they could just have leave Riccardo the fuck alone, bastards, uncalled for, my poor boys, and you know what else…-
Anyway, as you can see, my dear friend, to answer your question “How did you react to Riccardo’s death?”Well, it totally fucked me up.
@riccardo-de-romanus is a Riccardo RPer, you might check out their archives or try to get in touch with them for Riccardo action. They use Avan Jogia as a face claim.
Anyone is free to comment/reblog this w/ their thoughts. I reached out to some ppl privately to help me with this bc I was never really all that attached to Riccardo… but yes, I thought Riccardo’s death was believable, and shocking, and heartwrenching! The fact that Armand survived that experience is a testament to his character’s strength, that he could go on after that ;A;
You’re not wrong for wanting to attach to this more or less obscure character; some RPers specifically choose less popular characters as their muse, the road less traveled and all that ;D
Other people with positive thoughts to share w/ you on Riccardo:
The thing with Riccardo that gets so tragic is that he’s one of the very few characters in TVA who’s genuinely kind and caring and not controlling or abusive in any way, he’s quite innocent, just an ordinary young man.
He welcomes Amadeo immediately and is charged with taking care of him since Riccardo is among the eldest (and Amadeo second eldest I THINK? I’ll have to look up ages). And they just become best friends/brothers and have a lot of NORMAL innocent teenage fun. So it’s like the only bits of that book which are healthy tbh xD
They pair up together for fencing because they’re evenly matched, they go to Bianca’s together and go to taverns and play cards and get drunk illicitly (XD), Riccardo helps teach him Italian and ‘rescues’ him from making a fool of himself at lessons, and they seem kind of inseparable. i think Riccardo is a few years older but I’m not sure how much.
Aaand then of course Anne uses that elaborate setup (Riccardo is really the only one of the boys she takes the time to make a distinct and familiar character) to make it THAT much more awful when he dies.
^I agree with all this. The healthiness of Marius/Amadeo vs. Riccardo/Amadeo (if that was a legit ship) is endlessly debatable.
Hit the jump, cut for length.
Re: your attachment to him, I’m noticing this more now with other obscure characters, too. There seems to be a tendency for fans to attach to characters like Riccardo who aren’t in canon as much as the major ones. I would suggest it’s because we don’t know as much about these characters, less has been written for them, and so they are available for our own projections, to some extent. If we do know their history (like Quinn) but their POV hasn’t been done as much as say, Lestat’s, maybe ppl want to know how they’re handling things that occurred outside whatever their own story was.
//Okay, this needs to be answered OOC, because my Lestat would have to answer with my personal headcanon, b/c I think Mater is full of shit.
According to canon and Anne/Mater, her vampires do not experience sexual pleasure with their genitals. In QotD, Lestat calls his cock useless, claiming that it can no longer do what it was intended to, or some shit like that (I have a migraine and I’m not looking it up, but I’m sure @i-want-my-iwtv could give you the precise quote because she’s amazing).
Anne of course (typically) reneges on this when she wrote PL, creates a bunch of faulty science bullshit so that Lestat can jizz for science and create Viktor.
In fanon, it’s generally accepted that, yes, the vampires can have sex. There is some variation on this depending on what fic you are reading or who you are RPing with–but it’s generally agreed upon that vampire sex is 100% about the blood and sensuality, and that, even if they aren’t going to orgasm in the traditional sense, they are still going to get something pretty intense out of the entire situation.
There are some pretty amazing fics out there that make sense of all this, but since Vampire Chronicles fan fiction doesn’t technically exist, I can’t help you find them.
For my purposes, sure, Lestat has sex. Plenty of it. And it’s primarily about the blood. But there is also fun to be had with their bodies, and that’s more fun to write anyway, so there you have it.
ooc: ALL OF THIS. Also like… you can’t tell me that vampire sensation is 10x that of a human and expect me to believe that sensual touch does nothing for them. Maybe they can’t reach climax but that’s what the blood is for. Doesn’t mean sexual acts don’t work as amazing foreplay.
ooc: I’ve written about this before at some point I believe, but that’s very much my take on it too. Especially this: ‘you can’t tell me that vampire sensation is 10x that of a human and expect me to believe that sensual touch does nothing for them’
Hell yeah.
^Basically agreed with all 3 ppl here. Respect #Your headcanon may vary on this topic.
Canon doesn’t directly take on whether their dicks even work until the 3rd book, when Lestat says:
“I studied my reflection … and the organ, the organ we don’t need, poised as if ready for what it would never again know how to do or want to do, marble, a Priapus at a gate” – Lestat, Queen of the Damned
So I’ve discussed this topic at length in my tags for it: #asexuality, #asexual, #sex, #sexuality, #lets talk about sex. So check those out for more discussion on it. Ricean vampires still do feel sexual lust, it’s channeled through the experience of taking/sharing blood, and other sensually physical things.
In fanon there is a wide spectrum of whether they can have penetrative sex, some even speculate that their um… output… would be very bloody.
TL;DR: It all depends on your idea of what sex is. There are human couples who are unable (or do not want) to experience penetrative sex, and they can still be intimate with each other in other ways.
Claudia asks Louis about sex in IWTV, and he replies that it “‘…was something hurried…And… it was seldom savored… something acute that was quickly lost. I think that it was the pale shadow of killing.’”
He could have been lying a little to downplay it, so that she wouldn’t feel as bad for missing out on smtg she would never be able to experience, or maybe bc he truly felt that the experience of killing supercedes mortal intercourse. We don’t know bc #unreliable narrator.
ALL THAT SAID, if you prefer to take AR’s word as the gospel for canon, she has been definitive about it:
(there is a space here for no good reason thanks Tumblr!)
I think that reproductive obstacle (vampires are undead, they cannot carry a growing baby inside of dead flesh) is why Anne Rice made the choice that they could BE sexual, but not in a reproductive way.
All of that and I want to add my two cents
If we think about it, they are being “sexual” in a reproductive way. Their reproduction it’s done it by means of blood interchange, it’s the vampire’s way to carry on the species, so to speak. So for me, it makes perfect sense that their sexual act it’s precisely blood interchange as well.
Sex is for reproduction after all (from a biological point of view), intercourse is the human way and blood the vampire way. So sexual organs may not be involved for them, but that’s about as far as the difference has to go, I think. All the other aspects of sex that we add to it wouldn’t have to change or be excluded for them.
So I would say vampires do have sex, they just don’t need sexual organs to do it. And I might say that’s also why they don’t seem to mind genders at all.
// Coming in again, because why not? Not as if I added much the first time around.
Excellent points made by everyone so far! I just had some thoughts on sexual preference that occurred to me.
First off, as everything here, there’s no definite answer to any of this, it’s all up to how any individual interprets it or wants to play it out.
We all know that vampires can canonically find literally anyone attractive (how sexual that is is up for debate), especially when they are after their blood or while they are actually feeding from them. It seems to be impossible to drink someone’s blood without being intimate to some degree, even if the only intent is to kill them. Gender, looks, personality, everything seems to not really matter at that point.
So much for feeding. I think with sexual – or maybe romantic is a better word – preferences, vampires can have those same as humans have, they might just on the whole be more open-minded, in part maybe due to the different views and vision granted by the blood. And, obviously, many of them really discover that they don’t mind genders at all, if they haven’t already figured that out before they were turned.
As far as sexual organs go, I could see that while they are obviously not needed for the intended biological reason of reproduction, they are probably still sensitive spots when handled in pleasurable ways. Sex isn’t just about doing things that lead to climax after all, so for vampires every contact other than the actual blood exchange might well just be a kind of foreplay, but, hey. Foreplay is fun!
@perladivenezia: thank u for that addition, I meant “reproductive” in a mortal way, and you brought up a REALLY GREAT POINT, in how “reproductive” can be considered in a vampiric way.
@darknessmolten: “As far as sexual organs go, I could see that while they are obviously not needed for the intended biological reason of reproduction, they are probably still sensitive spots when handled in pleasurable ways.”
YES. That, plus everything else you added, very well-put.
I-want-my-IWTV 