I always advise people to read the books before they judge them, but as I pointed out in that post w/ Michael Gavin’s review, some people do judge before they read. Gavin read it, and that was his opinion. I shared that link and excerpt bc a friend had shared it w/ me, and also, many of the other reviews I’ve seen so far are recaps which may contain spoilers.
BTW, I’ll be making a masterpost of PLROA recaps, please send me an ask/message me if you did/are doing recaps!
[X Louis has an easy checklist for a good evening.]
This is just a fandom blog, and yes, I do share criticism of the books on here. Criticism =/= censorship. I’m sorry that one bad review could prevent you from reading a book. There are other VC blogs (#VC fandom hunters) that you can reach out to, maybe they’ll respond differently.
The thing is, yes, you actually might hate it! BUT, there may be one line in it that you love, and that will have made the book worth reading.
It’s just a book though. It’s not the end of the world.
You can enjoy IWTV as a stand-alone book! You can do whatever you want! It’s your life.
However, The Vampire Lestat is a response to that story, it’s all the things Lestat wanted to tell Louis but couldn’t, and it only really mentions IWTV briefly. TVL is almost a standalone book but it ends on a cliffhanger, so it makes you want to go on to the next one. And the next, and the next, so that’s sort of why I read all of them.
I would always recommend reading at least the first 3 bc those are generally, fandom-wide, considered the best.
12 books is not that many when you have a lifetime to read them. I’ve re-read all of them except Vittorio (only 1x for him), so they’re more like 36+ books for me. I read them for different things when I re-read them. People read the Bible over and over and look for different things in it.
Just about any of the books could be stand-alones, you can pick based on which characters you like best. The Vampire Armand could be a stand-alone book, he goes deeper into his story, which he gave in previous books. Some books give a different perspective on previous events in the series (what we call the “unreliable narrator”).
Most stand-aloney: The Vampire Armand Blackwood Farm Prince Lestat Pandora Vittorio the Vampire
No, they don’t really date in canon *cries* You gottaread between the lines!
[^from Mad Magazine. Date night used to involve getting all dolled up, sharing a nice French “wine” and then pretending to eat dinner and this is where alot of my sense of humor originally came from btw]
They had a very intense and rocky beginning that seemed to skip over the dating phase directly to marriage, then parenting, and then the separation for around 100 years.
I wouldn’t say they “date” in canon in the conventional sense of the word. There are certain moments they have together like that heartbreaking little scene when they met the night before Lestat’s concert (TVL), and another time when Lestat drags Louis against his will to go pester David Talbot for the first time (QOTD) 😛
…But in a more general sense, they do sort of Netflix and chill together. From Tale of the Body Thief:
“It’s amazing how often he came to visit me in my overheated and brilliantly illuminated rooms downtown. There he watched my giant television screen for hours. Sometimes he brought his own films for it on disk or tape. The Company of Wolves, that was one which he watched over and over… There were many other films which delighted him. But these visits could never be commanded by me, and they never lasted very long. He often deplored the “rank materialism” in which I “wallowed” and turned his back on my velvet cushions and thickly carpeted floor, and lavish marble bath. He drifted off again, to his forlorn and vine-covered shack.”
You’d think, for one of the fandom’s main ships, there would be more of it explicitly canon. There just isn’t, sadly. Part of why it’s such a tough ship is that AR just does not let us have much in terms of fluff of them! It mostly happens off-screen. Which is where fanfic steps in to satisfy that need ;]
It’s not my fave VC, but not my least fave VC, either. It’s growing on me.
As I answered in a recent Ask re: Merrick, idk, I would always advocate reading the books, as cracky as some of them can be, bc there are always moments that are really great! Single lines worth digging up, some phrasing that hits you #Right in the Feels. Don’t you want to know what happens? You don’t have to agree with it but the ride is always at the very least stimulating… you can always just skim it for plot points if reading it is too much of an investment.
As to whether it’s “just plain awful”? I wouldn’t agree w/ that, bc there are some gems in it that you can’t get anywhere else. At the risk of being redundant, my short answer: I think AR can still capture that old quality we all fell in love with, albeit in slivers. Which is why I can’t disregard any of the books entirely. It’s still hard for me to accept Prince Lestat as canon, I might never, but there are moments and lines of dialogue in it that are SO VERY GOOD. Moments where I’ve had to pause and smile, because it was as if the old Lestat, from IWTV or TVL, actually graced us with his presence, if only for a moment.
… Also I admit I very much dig Lestat’s new accessory ;D
It also has some worthwhile development re: the spirit that basically created vampires in the first place.
who uses Jordan Sörbom as a FC), @antoineandthepiano, and @roselioncourt, all of whom RP new characters from PL (technically Antoine was in IWTV but he has a larger presence in PL so I count him as new) and care way more about them than I am capable of currently.
I didn’t find many of the new characters very engaging, I would bet we’ll get more depth on them in later books, and/or they were created for what I like to call “canon-fodder” so that AR has a bunch of chars to kill in the next book(s), since she can’t kill the core group we all love so much! She tried to kill a few of them and had to bring them back ;]
Spoilers and probably unpopular opinions re: Viktor under the cut. And really I prefer not to make unpopular opinions but sometimes I gotta.
I find Viktor to be a kind of watered-down Twilight knockoff. He seemed to be an answer for all the POTP who had pestered AR for years to give Lestat a biological son… and the romance between him and Rose came off as pretty forced to me, again, a YA couple like in Twilight for fanservice. Not that YA can’t be well done, just that I didn’t really buy AR’s stab at it. Other ppl may have and they are welcome to ship their hearts out!
Idk, I would always advocate reading the books, as cracky as some of them can be, bc there are always moments that are really great! Single lines worth digging up, some phrasing that hits you #Right in the Feels. Don’t you want to know what happened to Louis, David, and Lestat, before PL? You don’t have to agree with it but the ride is always at the very least stimulating… you can always just skim it for plot points if reading it is too much of an investment.
If you like Louis, especially yes! This is a story he gets a starring role in. It’s cracky but heartbreaking, and it changes the dynamics of the relationship between Louis and David, and between Louis and Lestat, and also there’s a strong FEMALE character?! Who is NOT a Mary Sue (ok she has some Mary Sue elements but whatever I liked her)? Woah.
It also changes Louis physically, gives him the powers we see him use in PL, and it also allows him to experience a new level of intimacy with Lestat (and others potentially) that he refused to have before. It changes him emotionally, but we don’t get too deep into the specifics on that, but I think we’re starting to see those effects in PL.
My main issue with it is that it would have been SO MUCH MORE fun from Merrick’s (or Louis’!) own POV, rather than David’s. David was largely a third wheel and I didn’t really care about his youth in the jungles. More interested in the voodoo that Merrick could do, and especially how she used it on Louis ;A; <—Hopefully not really spoiling anything there bc I’m being really general in that statement.
[^Melodie Monrose as Merrick and Jackson Rado as Louis de Pointe du Lac]
I don’t remember if Merrick spoils any other major plot points from books that come before it, I don’t think so. I recall it as being almost a standalone novel.
That’s a really long answer, we don’t know ALL that much about his backstory, just that he was a Marquis (never named) in a little rural village in France, so he has some local power/respect in title, but he’s really poor, is not a particularly good husband or father, he’s blind by the time Lestat is 21… and we know that he treated Lestat BADLY during his childhood. Louis described a little of his time living at Pointe du Lac in book!IWTV.
In short:
For more, read The Vampire Lestat (the Marquis is in the beginning)(gif below used for humor, not intended to be rude!) The Marquis is not mentioned again in any later book. He does not get to vampire.
There is some fanon that the Marquis’ physical abuse of Lestat extended further, but that’s not in canon. If that were true, it could be part of Lestat issues with relationships and consent.
So Louis’ emotional connection to Lestat, and the fact that it wasn’t really visible in IWTV.
The really short answer is that I believe in Louis’ love for Lestat so much that I can’t quite pinpoint the evidence for it! I think it’s from reading further books and seeing Louis from other ppls’ POV, who can describe his love better than he might be able to admit.
“Louis, the watcher, the patient one, was there on account of love pure and simple. The two had found each other only last night, and theirs had been an extraordinary reunion. Louis would go where Lestat led him. Louis would perish if Lestat perished.” – Khayman, Queen of the Damned.
TL;DR: You gonna have to read The Vampire Lestat to get that connection.
These are actually pretty appropriate here:
So, yes, I think you’re somewhat right when you say that in book!IWTV and movie!IWTV, it seems like the only feelings Louis has for Lestat are:
a “range from hatred
to disinterest,
to pity,
with no real love besides the initial wonder.”
Louis is baffled by a lot of the things Lestat does in IWTV, he disagrees with Lestat’s philosophy (which is unclear in IWTV in both versions), and until Claudia rebels against their maker, Louis stays with Lestat because YES, he is still fascinated with him, he doesn’t know of any other vampires, and he’s sure he can pull more of the mysteries of life out of Lestat about vampiring, and his place in the scheme of things (whether vampires work for God or Satan is a big question).
^At the end of IWTV, Louis does meet up with a very incapacitated Lestat. Lestat says in the next book that this scene never happened.
Whether they met like this or not, Louis clearly is “empty” at the end of IWTV, and he wants to find Lestat, but how’s he going to do that? Check the Yellow Pages? It would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
IWTV is like a Batsignal from Louis to Lestat to call him out of wherever he’s hiding. Some of the story is embellished (or maybe even invented) to paint Lestat as a bizarre antagonist. This is all to get him ANGRY ENOUGH to rise up out of hiding and FIND LOUIS. Whether to retaliate physically, and finally end Louis’ misery, or correct the record by putting out HIS side of the story, and everything he couldn’t tell Louis during IWTV.
Which is exactly what The Vampire Lestat is, and that’s why you need to read it ❤
Well GET CRACKALACKIN’ AND #READ THE BOOK! A lot of answers will be funnier on this blog when you know more canon.
Fair warning, Lestat did not enjoy the book. He really didn’t. But there was quite a bit in the book that didn’t make it into the movie, and several things had to be changed, so it really behooves you to #read the book.
#VC Free Advertising: BTW this is a new tag, in which I will tag posts like this, which I can use to defend myself from copyright infringement claims, bc this blog is actually free advertising for the VC, rather than being detrimental to sales of the books, I’m actually making free advertising for them ;D
So please tell me if you are buying or reading the books because of my blog, it would be a big help to know *u*
I-want-my-IWTV 