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allthe-lace-and-velvet:

(Part II)

Part I: The Coven Master, owner of the Théâtre des Vampires (1700s)

“[…]I saw a small figure appear. Compact it was, the figure of a young boy, not a man. […] And the creature was not human. […] His face was shining white, and perfect, the countenance of a god it seemed, a Cupid out of Caravaggio, seductive yet ethereal, with auburn hair and dark brown eyes.”

                                                                       – Lestat (‘The Vampire Lestat’)

  • Model: Björn Andrésen

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.”

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goforthandthrash:

from electric blossom by torkil gudnason

“I looked down at the ground and saw flowers of complete perfection;
flowers that were the flowers that our flowers of the world
might become! … I was unsure
suddenly that our spectrum was even involved. 

I mean, I don’t think our spectrum of color was the limit! I think
there was some other set of rules. Or it was merely an expansion, a
gift of being able to see combinations of color which are not visible
chemically on earth…

“Sapphirine!” I cried out suddenly, trying to identify the greenish
blue of the great leaves surrounding us and gently waving to and fro,
and Memnoch smiled and nodded as if in approval, reaching again to
stop me from touching Heaven, from trying to grab some of the
magnificence I saw.”
– Lestat, Memnoch the Devil

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vintagegal:

Interview with the Vampire (1994) dir. Neil Jordan

^Consider this tho: an actor (Stephen Rea) pretending to be a vampire (Santiago) pretending to be an actor pretending to be a vampire [X by ouija—bored]

…pretending to be a ballerina…

Hello, I need the VC fandoms help remembering something. In the IWTV movie, there are the scenes where claudia has dolls and rejects them, and where she cuts her hair and learns it does not grow back. Question: where were these in the books?(1 of 2)

(2 of 2) I remember these scenes somewhere in the books pretty vividly, but I just reread IWTV over again and couldnt find them. Did i dream them being in the books after years of watching the movie?


So actually, I couldn’t remember either, so I just skimmed IWTV, and neither actually happened quite that way in that book. But it’s still sort of canon bc Anne Rice wrote the script, and she was trying to incorporate later canon stuff where she could. 

In QOTD, Claudia mentions it in her diary: “Of course, he gave me a doll as usual, the replica of me, which as always wears a duplicate of my newest
dress. To France he sends for these dolls, he wants me to know. And what should I do with it? Play with it
as if I were really a child?…

He has given me thirty such dolls over the years if recollection serves me…

They would crowd me out of my bedroom if I
kept them. But I do not keep them. I burn them, sooner or later. I smash their china faces with the poker. I
watch the fire eat their hair.”

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[X] In IWTV, Claudia crushes a doll in front of Louis and she talks about being disappointed in baby dolls… she was pretty spoiled by her dads, so I would bet she got them at other times than just her “birthday,” too! Maybe the fanciest ones were received annually.

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^The haircut thing is actually something Gabrielle experienced in TVL. She had cut it and the next night it had grown back to its full length it had been when she died:

Her long heavy hair had slipped over
her shoulders again, and exasperated, she took hold of it in both
hands. Then suddenly she made a low hissing sound, and her body
went rigid. She was holding her long tresses and staring at them. 

“My God, ” she whispered. And then in a spasm, she let go of her
hair and screamed.

The sound paralyzed me. It sent a flash of white
pain through my head. I had never heard her scream. And she
screamed again as if she were on fire.

Hey, I forgot what happened to Lestat former band or Mater just never mentioned them? Like, what happened to that musicians? They were on the highest moments of fame and success and them BOOM their vocalist went m.i.a. Idk, I just caught myself thinking about it today. That must have been so confusing for them

Lestat tells us in QOTD that they survived and moved on w/o him:

“[The Coven was] relieved that the Vampire Lestat had died in the pages of the newspapers; that the debacle of the
concert had been forgotten. No provable fatalities, no true injuries; everybody bought off handsomely; the
band, receiving my share of everything, was touring again under its old name.”

Slightly on topic: @everlastingporcelain​ got a t-shirt for bangin’ Lestat’s mom! [X]

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