I say birb bc it makes it more palatable for me to make fun of it but I mean bird. They’re aliens with birdlike features. Sketchy spoiler under the cut. They’re characters in:
So you should read that… but I recognize that I am slightly a hypocrite bc I still haven’t finished it, but I have skimmed and been spoiled (upon request) so I know what happens and what they are. And…
Us @ Anne:
Anne @ us:
Sketchy and incomplete spoilers under the cut.
Again, not to go into very much detail bc I don’t know much detail, from what I gather:
The aliens are birdlike and are basically part of the origin story of the vampires, it goes back to the Lost City of Atlantis (actually “Atalantaya”)
And the bird aliens’ plan is to derive energy from humans on earth using the aliens’ own creatures, the Replimoids,
and idk, it’s very involved.
Like all great utopias, Atalantaya couldn’t last forever and was destroyed,
and in the act of destruction the Replimoids were scattered
and some of them died and their souls roamed the earth,
eventually, one of the souls was able to possess a human body (Akasha) in a supernatural accident that creATED THE VAMPIRES.
Every new vampire then got a piece of this alien’s soul.
So the vampires are/were in fact humans possessed/enhanced by their share of that one (sometimes dormant, sometimes cognizant and vocal) alien soul.
I’LL GIVE HER CREDIT IN THAT IT’S DEFINITELY ANOTHER FRESH TAKE ON VAMPIRE MYTHOLOGY.
uh tbh im not like coherent at all rn but here’s the birb aliens not knowing what to do with a lil kapetria or whatever her name is, one drawing eyebrows on them bc i drew them w/o eyebrows, eating, and like leslut making out with one so
InktoberVC—Day 06: The birb aliens!
sry no fancy font manipulations bc im on mobile and like love y’all and I’m so sorry lmao just kick me out of the fandom k
Inktober vc day 6: birb aliens
I’ve never drawn the parents at all before so this was just me messing around haha. I had to go back to the book because all I remembered was weird birdlike aliens with big scary eyes so *shrug*
Also bottom left is me getting snacks in the middle of the night trying to not wake anyone up 😂
I chose Atlantaya because I can’t draw architecture from my imagination for the life of me lol. This place is way cooler for me to draw personally, and even though it’s kind of a crummy sketch, I think you can tell how I imagined it when reading kapetria’s tale haha
(Omg, if you’d written to me back in Feb. of this year, there was a blogger @somniferousdelusion, now deactivated ;A; who said Magnus was their fave character, this blogger could have been someone you might have had good convos with… Does anyone know if they just changed urls?)
No, I don’t think AR has ever been asked about writing a full novel about Magnus, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she did! What are you drawn to about Magnus? There’s plenty of room for fanfic/headcanons about him, so if you are so inclined… write it for us!
I don’t know what you’ve read so far, but as you may be aware, Magnus tells his story, albeit briefly, in Prince Lestat.
Magnus is also in Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis in a snazzy new… erm… “form”?, so we’ll probably see more of him, but my money is on AR focusing on how cool he is now, and not really digging any further into his past or forcing Lestat to have any difficult conversations with him, which they sort of briefly had in PLROA.
There was a Magnus RPer, @theycallmemagnus, gone inactive now, but you might find good stuff in their archive, might reach out to any active RPers you find there, who may be into talking about the character.
Louis spent all pages of Kapetria’s Tale reading in his “crypt,” away from the gathering, and tbh i would have much rather read about THAT than Kapetria’s Tale bc no nO no.
[^X by @life-on-night-island] Louis was MUCH happier in the crypt for those what, 5? 8? however many hours…
@monstersinthecosmos: I, too, am #mad that louis was probably reading a better book than i was at that moment
TL:DR; Anon says don’t skip it, you should read it.
I’m of the mindset that there’s something good in all the VC books even if you don’t accept them all as canon, there’s always something worth dragging out into the light and enjoying for what it is as a standalone piece, be it a quote, or good dialogue banter, or whatever floats your boat, and you may miss it if you skip over a whole section… Even if the characters aren’t our faves, there may be something in there that’s worth salvaging. @sanguinivora gave me a new diving suit for this purpose, lol.
ANYWAY so Anon wrote in 4 messages:
1) To your PLROA question: It’s true, in a way 95% of KT could be skipped. Anne Rice told it so boringly, mentioning every detail (every time they ate and what they ate) it did not even have a chance to be interesting as a story (for me it was though also too absurd).
Good to know. I mean, the vampires can’t eat food, maybe this was an attempt to make the replimoids more likeable? That they’re all impressed with the earhtly food and stuff? So her tale was interesting and absurd tho, that’s the impression I’m getting.
2) But still I don’t think that the end of the book will make actually sense if one knows not the facts one hears in KT. You know the outcome, yes, but probably not really why or how it came to be. So my advice is to read that part simply incredible fast, not trying to imagine every single detail.
Sounds like good advice. I’ll be interested to see what info does apply.
3) Otherwise I find it in a way sad that AR steals every secret. In IWTV we know NOTHING of vampires – which makes that book so strong. Then in TVL we hear the tale of the parents, which gave me chills still. But this book goes for me too far.
If I understand you right, you liked that we didn’t know the vampire origins in IWTV, and then in TVL those origins are discussed and you did enjoy that. I agree, it seems like most VC fandom ppl I’ve talked with love VC partly for its take on the vampire origin myth. I BOUGHT IT THEN AND I BUY IT NOW. And AR even leaves the possibility that there are other vampire-like beings that have a different origin story, like the mindless Eurovamps Louis and Claudia find. They doubt that those vampires were created the way they were, but it’s left unexplained.
But this book goes for me too far.
That seems to be shared by other fans, too, that she undermines the facts set up in earlier books, rather than adding to them in a richer way :-
4th message from anon has kind of a big spoiler, so it is under the cut.
4) That all the vampires are separated in the end, takes a LOT of the vampire “magic” and makes so much of the old novels in a way undone. I would never read it a second time and I will also not regard it actually as VC truth.
Yeah I agree with you, one of the things I really loved about the vampire physiology of Ricean vampires was the fact that they were all connected, and to have that severed, it just felt like a huge loss of the vampire “magic” as you put it. Amel could travel around on it and visit other vampires! It was like they really were all one creature in a way.
I would reread PLROA more for those domestic and angsty moments we get of the vampire court, Lestat squabbling with Amel in his head, the L/L fluff, of course. But for the ALIEMS? No thank you, I really hope she moves on to literally anything else… I would even accept a wurwulf/VC crossover at this point, as it would be more grounded in the universe she had previously built.
Kapetria’s Tale and the saga of the Replimoids are simultaneously the most boring and the most cracky sections of the book. I cackled over the Space Birb aliens that created the Replimoids, but I don’t think I’ll ever reread those sections.
The sections about the hijinks of Lestat and his vampire court? Those are more like what I want/expect from a Vampire Chronicles book. For example, I am terribly fond of Prince Lestat, and have reread it a couple of times. Is it as good as the original Vampire Chronicles trilogy? No.
Finally, Anne Rice has stated herself (not that I can find links to the interviews where she said it) that she had been working on a stand-alone Atlantis book for over a decade, but couldn’t get it to where she was happy with it, and decided that it should be combined with a Vampire Chronicles book. I … do not agree with her authorial choices about this.
TL;DR: No one should feel they have to slog through Kapetria’s Tale in RoA. Yes, it ends up changing the whole mythology and backstory of the vampires, but … I reject those changes.
Thanks for your addition, @gothiccharmschool! Very much appreciated, and I am with you 100% on wanting more hijinks of Lestat and his vampire court! Good reminder about reading your liveblog of PLROA, I’m sure your liveblog can help me get through it.
Re: Finally, Anne Rice has stated herself (not that I can find links to the interviews where she said it) that she had been working on a stand-alone Atlantis book for over a decade, but couldn’t get it to where she was happy with it, and decided that it should be combined with a Vampire Chronicles book. I … do not agree with her authorial choices about this.
I, too, do not agree with her authorial choices about this. Here’s her quote about doing her specialty VC-mashup funtimes for PLROA:
… i, too, am unable to finish PLROA for MONTHS bc of Kapetria’s Tale! FOR THE SAME REASONS. I mean maybe it’s not boring to some ppl? But for me, I’m just… I was weirded out before by the Replimoids and getting to her tale I just didn’t want to buy more of what was being sold.
So I have been really struggling to pick it up again EVEN THO IT IS RIGHT ON MY DESK IN PLAIN VIEW, mocking me every day that I don’t just CRACK IT OPEN AND TAKE MY MEDICINE like I should if I really cared about this series (which I clearly do).
I went and asked around & skimmed ahead bc I very much like to be spoiled, and I won’t spoil you here, but from what I skimmed and from what I’ve been told, I don’t think you need to know Kapetria’s Tale to understand the rest of the book. It goes back to our vampires and their shenanigans and SCIENCE, and in the old days we might have called this all very “cracky” stuff, but the ending might even have been written before the Atlantis portion was added in, it seems to depend so little on it, but again, that’s from my spoilage.
…But currently? What are ppl’s thoughts on how PLROA ends? I would like ppl to speak freely, so there may be spoilers in comments/reblogs.
Message me privately, if you prefer, and I’ll add it to this post under a cut if it’s spoilery.
“I was working on a novel called Born for Atlantis, and I just couldn’t get it to work. I thought, “What if I could somehow combine this with Lestat and the vampires?” And it was like, everything worked. Something happens to me when I write from Lestat’s point of view. There’s no question about it. By the time I was done, it felt inevitable, like it always had been…. It was a rare experience.”
I-want-my-IWTV 