Awww what a sweet thing to say! Yeah I’d be pretty sad if this blog disappeared, too.
(If this blog is ever shut down w/o warning, I’ll set up a new blog (or ask a few specific ppl here) to post the info of whatever happened to me and tag it #iwantmyiwtv, but hopefully we won’t have to deal w/ that.)
REALLY? omg this makes my heart happy. JUST THIS ONE REACTION made the vid worth doing… *hugs Anon*
I have other ideas in the pipeline JUST YOU WAIT at least one of them, just talking about the CONCEPT makes me laugh so I know it’s worth the effort.
You’re so welcome, glad you enjoyed it! Answering asks is so much fun for me, it makes me consider my own current and previous thoughts, sometimes I even ask around privately for more ideas… and try to write it out as best I can, it gives me an excuse to make fresh gifs/memes, sometimes it inspires others to make fanworks… and I always like to hear back from the original asker that the effort was appreciated *u* ((No, you only get one question per quarter. Pffft. Of course you can ask more!))
“in general, how do we as a base know what is unreliable information or not when it comes to our narrators because from what I’ve always gathered, they have the earnest desire to convey the truth as they can see it.”
You would think that, but just like in real life, people can narrate a story for their own motivations.
TL;DR:
The characters telling their stories don’t always have the earnest desire to convey the truth, so it’s not always clear what the reliable information is! When we have accounts of the same event where the details align, that seems to be the best way to confirm it’s canon, bc even Anne Rice can’t always answer fan’s questions about canon stuff to everyone’s satisfaction.
When there’s conflicting details, we have to rely on headcanons, which ppl can choose to agree on or not, hence the fandom phrase, #Your Headcanon May Vary.
For example of facts aligning: I think we can all agree that Armand was the unspoken leader at the Theatre des Vampires bc Lestat left him there in a position of authority in TVL, which is where Louis found him some 80 years later in IWTV, confirming that that was Armand’s role there.
In the scene above,
IDK at that point in canon whether Lestat believes in a God, but if not, he’s deliberately lying to Claudia, bc she’s never going to see her mother again. Even if he does believe in God, he still doesn’t know where his dead go! He’s trying to answer her in a way that will keep her calm and complacent. He knows Claudia’s mother is dead, he saw the corpse in the movie. But she is still a child and he doesn’t want to scare her or depress her, or make her feel guilty about killing, which she just did!
I also think he’s a little taken aback bc she’s asking him for the whereabouts of her biological mother just minutes after he turned her into a vampire, a process that’s been compared to birth. It’s the most intimate act a vampire can experience. His smile falls right after she asks bc in a way it seems like he’s a deflated that she wants her biological mother, it’s like she’s already saying, “You’re not my REAL dad!” It might also remind him of his own mother who abandoned him ;A;
Re: Lestat P.1: In TVL, Lestat tells Armand:
I’m still not 100% clear on this, bc of the double negatives. Can we translate it to “I’m honest with those I don’t love.” –> “I lie to those I love.” ? He spent some 65 years lying by omission to Louis and Claudia about the other vampires, and all the secrets he knew. So who’s to say he doesn’t also lie to his readers, “those I don’t love” ? How much does he really love his readers?
Re: Louis: I’ve always felt, and there are others who share this opinion, who gave me this opinion, that IWTV was dictated to Daniel from Louis with the intention of pissing Lestat off enough that he would rise from wherever he was hiding and find Louis. While I don’t think Louis intentionally LIED, I do think he might have embellished some things, exaggerated here and there, left out certain things, in order to achieve his goal. And it WORKED because…
Re: Lestat P.2: The Vampire Lestat was Lestat’s rebuttal to IWTV, containing all the secrets he couldn’t tell Louis during their time together, so I’m inclined to believe that Lestat earnestly wanted to correct the record and win Louis back, since he still loved Louis.
Re: Armand: TBH, I don’t know Armand’s story well enough, what I believe and what I don’t, in all of canon, to say that he’s a liar. I think, like Louis and Lestat, he embellishes, he lies by omission, and he tells people things when he wants a certain reaction out of them. He lied to his coven when he was a leader all those years since he never really believed in serving Satan. Or did he? It seems like he didn’t.
There is a particular scene that Armand describes in TVA that is questionable, as to whether it happened.
How he tried to “help” Claudia the night she died (fanart by @sheepskeleton here, if you dare, it’s gorey). Personally, I sometimes believe it’s the truth bc Armand does like… experiments! But then I also remember how David was flirting excessively with Armand in that book, and so it’s possible that “this story was just something that Armand made up; somehow trying to intimidate the others, displaying the cruelty he could be capable of.” (quote from @annabellioncourt)
Louis does not approve of making vampires himself, that’s for sure! But yes, Louis wanted to be with Armand and Armand didn’t want Claudia as part of that equation and she knew it.
So, right, IDK what Louis was thinking about how it could possibly work out w/o making her a new adult vampire companion. He had little choice in that. He couldn’t bear to think of her out there on her own, she clearly wasn’t going to be invited to join the Theatre des Vampires, and she couldn’t make an adult vampire herself. There was a line in book!IWTV where she tells Louis: “ ‘Can you picture it?’ she said, so softly I scarcely heard. “A coven of children? That is all I could provide…” <– whether she could actually turn a child is not known. We don’t know of it happening successfully anywhere else in canon before or after that point. Louis probably would not have approved of that, either.
Worth noting here is that in the first version of IWTV, Claudia wasn’t killed off by the Parisian coven (from the Vampire Companion):
“In the first version of [IWTV], Claudia eventually goes off with three vampire brothers whom she meets in Paris. She does not die. As such, it was as if Rice had attempted to give her daughter a form of immortality. Rice, however, experienced psychological problems that cleared up only after she had rewritten the ending – by killing off Claudia and taking Louis through an experience of intense grieving. This version was much more cathartic for Rice.”
In movie!IWTV, Armand’s origins aren’t explicitly stated, just that he’s an Old World vampire. He could very well be Spanish, that’s Banderas’ actual ethnicity. So we don’t know. Just bc Louis and Claudia meet him in Paris doesn’t mean he’s French; he tells them he’s 400 yrs old, he’s probably lived elsewhere.
On my recent post about Antonio!Armand, @slow-read shared this opinion: “I would like to add that Antonio’s accent also gives one a sense of age, otherness and it sounds (or sounded) exotic to the audience? It was perfect for Armand-the-oldest-living-vampire-in-the-world. *-*” The
ppl behind movie!IWTV might have chosen Banderas and made the character this way rather than a more canon-compliant actor bc they wanted him to be more convincing as
Armand-the-oldest-living-vampire-in-the-world to audiences who had not read the books. Filmmakers then (and now) want a movie to appeal to wide audiences. I was a kid then, but it seems to me that fandom (and specifically, trying to please the fanbase as a primary objective) wasn’t as much of a consideration at that time.
In the books, Armand comes from a place called Kiev, which according to AR is in Russia and according to the google is in the Ukraine, but idk. Then he spent years in Italy which is where he got most of his mortal education, so he may have picked up some of that accent from his teachers and friends… and then he lived in Paris for many years so he might have consciously tried to pick up some of that accent in order to blend in.
Anyone is welcome to answer this with what you think Armand’s accent is like!
I HAD NOT SEEN IT THANK U!
It’s so fun to see at least this shot from the other side of the door, lol…
I’ll transcribe it somewhat for y’all:
The narrator is all about the *~secrecy~* like of course Tom Cruise wanted to keep the secrecy of his costumes and makeup and whatever, so as not to spoil the surprise! We have closed sets all the time these days and back then. I don’t think that was just Tom, I think everyone involved in making the movie wanted that secrecy.
^X Bruh.
Hit the jump for more, cut for length.
Narrator:
“But some insiders say this behavior is just another example of Tom Cruise’s well-known perfectionism, a perfectionism that proved wrong those critics who thought he was too light-weight to star in Born on the Fourth of July. He ended up getting an Oscar nomination for it.”
♛We do have magnificent long and sharp fangs, some of us even have more sharpened teeth than the usual two.
Oh yes, French kissing other vampires can be a
deliciously painful experience! We are all masochists by nature of what we are, whether or not we were in life.
Kissing mortals is a little more difficult, best to keep those kisses less intense, unless they know what we are, and then really, we just have to be careful with them. It can be extremely pleasurable for mortals, more than you might think.
Bless his sweet inexperienced heart, Louis was trying to kill this evildoer through her tongue! Would have taken ages, good thing I finished her off for him.
♛Guilty of being anaemic? That’s not necessarily under your control. I’m not a doctor, and I don’t study blood like our scientific brethren do… I know what I like to drink, though, and for me, the physicality of the blood is merely the carrier for the moment that I’m locked to my victim, to take what I really require, which is their essence, their soul. I don’t discriminate based on taste; I would just prefer it to be living! (Dead blood is not poisonous, but it’s so so distasteful.)
I’m sure that I have tasted this already, apparently anaemia affects a quarter of the population. One of the causes of it is blood loss, so I’m sure I’ve been the cause of it for some of my Little Drink victims *grins* Oh well…
Other causes of anaemia are dietery, genetic or infections, and as far as I know, whatever the engine is that makes me what I am defends me perfectly from all of these. I’ve never had an illness in that sense. It’s physical food and drink that I can’t handle, but that just comes back the way it came. Very unattractive when that has happened. I can take little sips of real drinks, yes, but none of it has ever had much taste to me.
I won’t lie, I love trying new flavors of blood, Little Drinks from partygoers, and I have a taste for bourbon by proxy now. Drugs? Not as much, as I’m wary of allowing myself into that far of an altered state of mind. Potheads, yes, when I’m in the mood for a gentle kind of high.
As for your question though, I do notice variation in the taste and texture of different blood types, but I usually don’t know the reason. Something a little flatter about blood with less red blood cells or smaller red blood cells, perhaps the closest comparison would be champagne that has gone a little flat, but all mortal blood is still preferable to animal blood. There’s more in it that we need than the physical substance; we need the soul as well.
Although I have met many animals with much more soul than some of the evildoers I have to get involved with, human souls are just more nutritious for us, for whatever reason. Even Gabrielle has confessed to me that she ends up needing to hunt indigenous tribes every so often on her travels, to supplement her usual non-human intake.
Wow, good rec, anon! Got the aesthetic down, the right amount of candles, locket w/ a girl’s face in it, torches! Angsting, damp, long-haired brunet men in period costume! And a violin too! Nice.
♛Bon anniversaire, mon chéri! You have been so loyal and caring to me for so long… what a sweetheart, it means so much to me. I hope you celebrate your life well, with your loved ones, and fall asleep satisfied and exhausted from it all *blows a kiss*
I-want-my-IWTV 