Tag Archives: quote

I haven’t finished the VC yet but I read this quote about Lestat and was curious about what it meant. I know it’s talking about Louis and Claudia, but who else? Quote: “One will hate you for taking his life, another will run to excesses that you scorn. A third will emerge mad and raving, another a monster you cannot control. One will be jealous of your superiority, another shut you out… And the veil will always come down between you. Make a legion, you will be, always and forever alone!” (TVL)

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That’s a great quote, anon, and a very good question *u*

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[^by @garama and the illustration is more appropriate than you think; they are probably slinging insults back and forth telepathically!]

This quote was actually Armand talking to Lestat about Gabrielle and Nicolas (Lestat had not even met Louis and Claudia yet), and how foolish it was for Lestat to expect either of them to actually want to stay with him. AS IF?! We as readers also add in the fact that it could apply to Louis and Claudia, since we already know that further down the line, yes, they will choose to leave their maker.

Armand’s point is that no matter carefully chosen, every fledgling will inevitably leave their maker. The quote actually begins with: “Each time the death and the awakening will ravage the mortal spirit,” and then he goes into more reasons why the fledglings and makers end up parting. Gabrielle left because she wanted something Lestat couldn’t give her. Nicolas left for a number of reasons, some variation of madness could be part of it. Armand speaks with the knowledge of seeing many fledglings made, and he might even feel like he would not have chosen to stay with his own maker forever, if he had had the choice. 

When Armand says “And the veil will always come down between you,” that’s about the fact that the telepathic connection that can exist between vampires and mortals

(vampire!Lestat could communicate telepathically with mortal!Gabrielle before she was turned)

will be lost with the Dark Gift*

Armand had it with mortal!Daniel.

It’s a deeply intimate connection and many makers and fledglings mourn its loss. 

Armand is basically saying that you can turn however many mortals into vampires you want, but due to the act of turning a new vampire, you can’t keep them as a companion. The best and most true companionship is in finding other vampires who were turned by others. There are many reasons for finding a prefabricated vampire to love, but a major one is that the telepathic connection with them will still be possible!

*At least one fic writer, @vampchronfic, has L/L finding ways to chip away and even dissolve this limitation, and it’s bound them closer together, unlike any other ship in VC.

Gallery

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phoebe-tonkin:

“For a while she was quiet, then Elizabeth Taylor’s violet eyes were flickering and she said: ‘They spat on me in Rome.’ Who did?  ‘Ordinary people, on the streets. They crossed over and spat. It was during le scandale, when the Vatican newspaper thoughtfully said I was morally unfit to be a mother and that my request to adopt Maria should be denied. They also announced that my natural children should be taken away from me.’ But it didn’t happen. You survived. ‘Damn right I survived,’ she said with resignation. ‘I’ve been through it all. I’m Mother Courage. I’ll be dragging my sable coat behind me into old age.‘” -Life Magazine, 1969.

I thought of something the other day. Almost everything (not really, maybe half of everything)that’s happening in the VC is because Lestat wasn’t given a choice. He says it a lot and until recently I was joking “HA, you call Louis a cry baby, but concerning the way Marius made you, you’re forever complaining.” But wait a second. It’s much more than a complaint, isn’t it? If he WAS given a choice, half of the things in VC wouldn’t have happened. All the vampires that he created wouldn’t be there.

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Your question… is it a question? I’m so confused. You say Marius is Lestat’s maker and maybe that’s a typo, or maybe you accept movie!QOTD as canon, either way, it’s not my headcanon.

Lestat gave Louis the choice to be a vampire, because when Lestat was forced by Magnus into being a vampire, that was essentially a form of rape. Lestat tells Nicolas (TVL): 

“When it was offered me I said no. I tell you I said no. With my last breath, I said no.” 

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The ramifications of rape are many and I won’t go into detail here, but it had an enormous impact on Lestat’s well-being, and in his relationships with everyone in his afterlife. 

Lestat wanted Louis to choose it, to WANT to be a vampire, he wanted it to be consensual, to spare Louis the damage of what Lestat had to deal with.

When Lestat teases Louis about his “whining,” it’s partly out of frustration; he saw in Louis a kindred spirit, and in book!IWTV he explained that killing was part of the deal, and Louis accepted the Dark Gift but then, fledgling!Louis was aghast at taking human life! In later canon, Louis’ “whining” is actually just putting up any rational resistance at Lestat’s ideas for adventure. 

VC itself was born from Lestat not having a choice when Magnus forced him into vampirism, in the sense that none of the books would have been written if Lestat had chosen NOT to become a vampire. If Lestat had died the night that Magnus kidnapped him, or been released and died later, as a mortal, he wouldn’t have turned any fledglings, Louis wouldn’t have been a vampire in the 1970s to be interviewed, Louis probably would have succeeded in killing himself over his remorse about the death of his brother… there would be no IWTV, no TVL,… 

But Armand would still have existed, as would Marius, and others who existed long before Lestat’s mortal birth. Maybe VC would have been about them.

Are any of the VC vampire religious at all? I know Louis was Catholic when he was human and even asked Armand about God when he was in France with Claudia.

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There is so much discussion of this packed into VC that there is no simple answer, this is up to every reader to decide for every character. It fluctuates over time, too.

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[^X by @vampiredevelopment​]

I headcanon that currently none of the VC vampires we’re familiar with (not including PL) believe in a God/Gods, but I would say that they’re all open to proof, should there be a higher power(s). Most, if not all of them, have a healthy respect for voo doo, witchcraft, and other supernatural practices/beliefs.

Louis was Catholic as a mortal and he did struggle w/ whether, by nature of being a creature that exists by killing ppl (in direct violation of the commandment specifically about not killing ppl) he was therefore from Satan, and Lestat didn’t give him any answers on that:

“Because, you see, though Lestat had never said anything about devils or hell to me, I believed I was damned when I went over to him, just as Judas must have believed it when he put the noose around his neck.”

Hit the jump for more, cut for length.

Armand doesn’t have answers for Louis either, except to say that if Louis is from Satan, then he’s from God by default, too. Armand says: “all Satan’s power comes from God and that Satan is simply God’s child, and that we are God’s children also.”). Armand goes on to give what became the monologue in movie!IWTV about God not existing:

” `Then God does not exist … you have no knowledge of His existence?’
“‘None,’ [Armand] said.
” `No knowledge!’ I said it again, unafraid of my simplicity, my miserable human pain.
“ `None.’
” `And no vampire here has discourse with God or with the devil!’
“ `No vampire that I’ve ever known,’ he said, musing, the fire dancing in his eyes.
`And as far as I know today, after four hundred years, I am the oldest living vampire in the world.’

IIRC, Louis doesn’t talk about religion after that exchange, and AR doesn’t have him talk about it in later books, so we really don’t know what he thinks except that he goes on killing ppl so he must have reconciled it within himself. He and Lestat both like to hang out in churches, tho, so there’s that!

Armand and Lestat go through different phases of believing in God, and neither Lestat nor the others are really 100% sure about what he experienced in MtD (aka “Lestat Goes to Heaven and Hell for an Intense Job Interview, All He Gets Is This Crappy T-Shirt Veronica’s Veil”). But he does try to follow Marius’ example in slaying the evildoer, since they need to kill anyway.

Louis is indiscriminate, it’s whoever crosses his path, he doesn’t want the responsibility of judging someone’s goodness/badness, it’s more of a Savage Garden approach.

Claudia went to Europe looking for other vampires, but she was probably also hoping they had some magic/treatment that could make her body into an adult’s, Lestat dreams about it in TVL:

I dreamed of Louis and Claudia and that we were together. Claudia had grown miraculously into a beautiful woman, and she said, laughing, “You see this is what I came to Europe to discover, how to do this!”

What do Louis and Lestat think about the US election? Do they support Clinton/Trump or could they care less?

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They do care, and they probably would have intense debates about the candidates, but they wouldn’t advocate for one or the other. You can check out Lestat’s answer to this question here.

I think Louis put their stance very eloquently in QOTD (my emphasis added):  

[^Louis by @remarried]

“It’s their world, not ours,” he said humbly. “Surely we forfeited it when we lost our mortality. We have no right now to interrupt their struggle. If we do we rob them of victories that have cost them too much! Even in the last hundred years their progress has been miraculous; they have righted wrongs that mankind thought were inevitable; they have for the first time developed a concept of the true family of man.

… Don’t interfere with them. Even if they kill each other! Give them time to see this new vision realized; give the cities of the West, corrupt as they may be, time to take their ideals to a suffering and blighted world.”

Cut for length.

That was the issue that was brought up in QOTD, whether they had a responsibility to have political power and/or have influence the world or not. There was a council of sorts, and some heavy debate was had, mainly on the part of Lestat’s ultra feminist SJW girlfriend vs. literally everyone else except Lestat who mostly sat there terrified into silence and not taking sides, and it ended with the general agreement that they shouldn’t meddle in mortal affairs.

This is partly bc writing their involvement into actual historical events could be difficult if not impossible (What, did they fight in WWII? Which side? How would that even work, concealing their vampirism from their fellow soldiers??!), and partly bc AR herself wasn’t very political back in earlier canon.

(Side note: Louis and Claudia left America close to the beginning – or before? – the Civil War started, it wasn’t addressed in canon, Lestat was on his way to Paris to see Armand, and then Lestat slept through WWII…)

Even now, in the later books, AR keeps her world mostly separate from the Real World; IIRC, Hurricane Katrina was never mentioned in canon, and one would think that NOLA-branch coven founders Louis and Lestat would at least comment on that obviously devastating tragedy. At least one fanfic writer did take up the challenge of weaving in Katrina, and did it very tastefully. So it’s possible, but AR hasn’t gone there.

It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.

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ewokshootsfirst:

Samwise Gamgee and I want to send love to anyone who is struggling tonight. I know there’s a lot of people scared and hurting about the US Presidential elections.

I’ve heard people complain about Anne being really inconsistent with the continuance of the VC storylines, as in, she can’t keep the story straight to save her life. I personally haven’t noticed but maybe you have?

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Yes, we have a series of #unreliable narrators in the VC who tell the stories from their experiences, and their “facts” don’t always align. 

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[^X Remember these Social Network posters I did? I REMEMBER THEM]

There are many examples of canon “facts” being different in different books. One of the best examples of this is whether Louis visited Lestat sometime after he burned down the Theatre des Vampires, but before his interview w/ Daniel. Lestat says it didn’t happen. 

Lestat acknowledges that IWTV was inaccurate but he doesn’t hold it against Louis: 

“But this is the tale that was told by Louis in Interview with the Vampire, which for all its contradictions and terrible misunderstandings manages to capture the atmosphere in which Claudia and Louis and I came together and stayed together for sixty-five years.

… As for the lies he told, the mistakes he made, well, I forgive him his excess of imagination, his bitterness, and his vanity, which was, after all, never very great. I never revealed to him half my powers, and with reason, because he shrank in guilt and self-loathing from using even half of his own. ”

When ppl complain about the storylines/facts being inconsistent, well, I can only remind them that she wrote the books in the order in which she was exploring her characters. Did some things get lost or confused along the way? YES. I don’t read other series, so I can’t say that there is – or should be – a standard to which we hold authors and expect them to have consistent storylines/facts.

But from what I know of the Bible, considered a sacred canon by many ppl worldwide, even that text has unreliable narrators describing scenes which vary to the point of discrepancy. 

I understand that inconsistencies can pierce the delicate suspension of disbelief for some readers. The seeming concerted deviation from the pre-established VC verse is a major reason why it’s impossible for me (and others) to accept PL in its entirety. So I know that feel, bro!

Basically what I’m saying is that the #unreliable narrator excuse quiets this type of confusion for me, for the information that I accept as canon.

Tarquin Blackwood has a foot fetish pass it on

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Quinn has a foot & shoe fetish, w/ a touch of exhibitionism. That’s canon 

✔

Tarquin Blackwood, Blackwood Farm:

“She broke into a delighted riff of laughter, and as I came around in front of the table again and saw her shoes glittering there as if her feet were immortal and could carry her anywhere, I suddenly detached from all decorum and went down on my knees and bent my lips to kiss her shoes.

This I had done often with her; in fact, I had caressed her shoes and kissed them to tease her, and liked the feel of her arch in them, and I kissed that too, the thin nylon-covered skin, often and now, but for me to do it in front of Lestat was outrageously amusing to her. And on and on she laughed in a lovely soft high laugh that made me think of a crowded silver belfry against the blue sky gone quite wild.” 

That’s not canon!/Is that canon?

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We as a fandom are often asked which books are the most important in VC, which ones need to be read before the new one comes out, which books we consider to be canon…

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Every reader has to decide that for themselves. It’s great when we can agree on things, but some things are left ambiguous, either by unreliable narrators, discrepancies in the information we’re given, or simply some variation of “these characters are #ooc to me and I REFUSE ALL OF IT >:[ ”

“Reflecting on the total lack of consensus amongst my readers on which is my best book, or which is my worst, really, readers write fascinating and substantive responses to "Memnoch the Devil.” Others dismiss it as a total failure or where the whole series went wrong. Some claim the earlier Chronicles are the best; others praise the later books. A few claim my husband, Stan, was the real author. A great many readers embrace the entire series, with all its twists and turns.” Anne Rice, 11/01/2016 [X]

(I didn’t know ppl claimed Stan had written the earlier books! He certainly might have had a big influence on them, at any rate) ^@claudias-ashes pointed this out to me, and I skimmed the responses, lots of praise in there for AR. It’s good to see her acknowledging that we do not all recognize all of the books as canon, and she seems fine with that, even offering advice to writers who may find themselves in a similar situation. It’s a good stance to have, she’s not forcing anyone to accept any or all of it, so when we have our fandom debates about things, keep in mind that AR’s opinion is probably, like mine, #your headcanon may vary.

The rest of her quote is under the cut (cut for length not spoilers), along with the info that:

  • Lestat is never gonna die! well good bc he is the gotdamn Sacred Core now

  • She’s already all revved up to get started on the next VC! for better or worse

Hit the jump…

“…When I ask, “Which is your favorite book?” The responses are all over. Is this good or bad? Frankly, every author wants to be read, and for the readers to care. But why do I spark so much controversy? I’ve never fully understood. I’m passionate, the books are passionate, and I’m profoundly thankful to say the readers are passionate. But have writers ever had so much fresh and authentic feedback before? I don’t think so. You’ve got to keep your head, keep steering the boat, keep re-entering your world and finding your place there as you continue. I don’t want Lestat ever to die, not even when I die. Perish the thought. For me, he can’t die. He’s too irrepressibly alive, and I am too connected to him. I’ve tried to run away from him, but it has never really worked. Now, I don’t want to run away at all. I want to sail right into a third “Prince Lestat” book— right from “Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis,” and continue writing about Lestat as the monarch of a remarkable tribe. Vampire radio star, Benji Mahmoud with his broadcasts of news from the Vampire Court must be a metaphor for the author. What would it be like to slip into psychosis and wake up body and soul in Chateau de Lioncourt? Lovely. But the view from here is just fine.“

– Anne Rice