Tag Archives: TVL
The last dance for Nicolas!
These two play such amazing roles in The Vampire Lestat and I wish there had been more insight into the two of them dealing with one another in Armand’s book. I imagine this scene as a final, hateful, farewell… Perhaps there is an ounce of sadness or even relief in the both of them.
I also included two wip stages in case you find those things interesting.
My fanart of Vampire Lestat from Anne Rice’s “Vampire Chronicles.”
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➸La Marquise
“She was Gabrielle. And all her life came to her defense, the years and years of suffering and loneliness, the waste in those damp, hollow chambers to which she’d been condemned, and the books that were her solace, and the children who devoured her and abandoned her, and the pain and disease, her final enemy, which had, in promising release, pretended to be her friend.. Beyond words and images there came the secret thudding of her passion, her seeming madness, her refusal to despair.”
Close Quarters
“So what if we had to sleep on lumpy pallets, and the neighbors woke us up with fighting.” -Lestat, The Vampire Lestat
Was it the first night? The second? Third? It had all been a whirlwind to me, the excitement of arriving in Paris, the world suddenly such a different place from where I’d spent the last 21 years. People everywhere, the stench of shit and piss in the streets, the sounds of horses and church bells and music everywhere. How I loved it.
We’d rented a tiny room at the top floor of a building–one bed, two windows, a shelf and a basin in which to wash. Such a small space! Such heaven to me, such cramped and glorious beauty.
The first night we’d made wild, happy love, tumbling into the lumpy, uncomfortable bed twisted and entwined and endlessly delighted in each other. The bells of a church chimed the hour in the distance, the moonlight spilling into the little window and onto the floor of the flat. I remember this image as I drifted off to sleep, a strange thought coming to me that I hoped my mother was okay, that she was becoming well again, perhaps.
It was maybe an hour later that I was roused, abruptly, by shouts. The wall above our head thudded as something hit it–something heavy.
“Nicolas–” I shook him, then, his eyes snapping open.
“What is it? What the hell–?” He sat up, nearly conking heads with me, both of us turned to face the wall behind the headboard.
The screaming continued, followed by the shattering of glass. I know my eyes widened, then–I’d experienced plenty of abuse and yelling in my years, yes, but never had I been privy to the violent fighting of complete strangers, not in such an intimate way. I’d grown up in a damn castle, for God’s sake–the walls were thick and the place devoured sound.
Then Nicolas began to laugh.
I snapped my eyes to his, “How can you laugh? It’s terrible!”
He fell back against the bedclothes, snatching my pillow as he laughed and throwing it at me.
“Welcome to Paris, Lestat.”
So I noticed in the movie IWTV when the vampires go to sleep in their coffins they don’t wear pajamas, why is that?
Hmmm, I don’t know! We only see them in the coffin (for sleeping, as you said, not like in the scene Louis gets locked into a coffin by the TdV) a few times in the film. That could be a sample size problem, maybe other nights they did change into pajamas!
1) There’s the night Louis gets turned, maybe there wasn’t enough time that night to change his clothes but he really ought to have, since his clothes would’ve gotten messy from the procedure (the whole “your body is dying” thing) maybe the filmmakers didn’t want to give him the chance to change clothes bc that would be too caring of Lestat, gotta keep the focus on Lestat being an antagonist.
2) Maybe in these shots w/ Claudia, she is dressed for “bed,” but Louis didn’t have time to change, or maybe he likes dressing in what he’s going to wear the next night… but I think it’s mostly to try to reduce the pedo taboo. He’s a faher figure, even though he’s technically her brother. If he was wearing something more comfortable or showing anymore than face & hand skin, it could be construed as … not fatherly.
IIRC, changing clothes for bed isn’t mentioned in the book!IWTV. I’ll reblog a few posts of vampires in bedclothes for ya ;D
Lestat talks about putting on a special outfit when he stays over at Marius’ house in TVL. He finds a gold mask w/ a hood, leather gloves covered with gold scales, and a blanket with gold plates on one side.
“I realized that if I put on this mask and these gloves – if I laid
over me the blanket – then I would be protected from the light if anyone
opened the lid of the sarcophagus while I slept.”
Within the canon of the Vampire Chronicles, can vamps get sick?
Sick meaning: the flu, viruses (like HIV), and cancer? From my understanding, no, Ricean vampires are not susceptible to these kinds of diseases. In Only Lovers Left Alive, those vampires have arrangements w/ mortal agents to get clean blood rather than risk taking victims, whose blood could be tainted w/ modern disease or drugs, which OLLA vampires are vulnerable to (but they don’t go into much detail about it). I can’t think of any other vampire media that even touches on the issue of blood diseases and/or other physical illnesses.
@anton-mordrid makes an excellent point here [X]: #1 how the fuck can you not associate HIV/AIDS with vampires, you personally literally made it a blood disease transmitted by explicitly sexual acts between your gay male protagonists.
I’m not educated enough to go any further on this issue, but if you want more on this, go to @vraik and @anton-mordrid.
Sick meaning: physically repulsed to the point of having a visceral reaction? Yes.
[^Horror Vacui, Exploring the darkness (2/?) by @sheepskeleton]
In TVL, Lestat tosses his cookies (ok he vomits some blood, no cookies tossed) at the sight of a pile of dead bodies the night he’s turned. (He also hurls as he’s escorted down to the Children of Darkness meeting).
“In a deep prison cell lay a heap of corpses in all states of decay, the bones and rotted flesh crawling with worms and insects. Rats ran from the light of the torch, brushing past my legs as they made for the stairs. And my nausea became a knot in my throat. The stench suffocated me.
He also says that vampires can’t stand to be around the dead bodies of their kills, either:
Revulsion at the sight or smell of death seemed part of my nature. I couldn’t watch executions any more than when I was that trembling boy from the Auvergne, and corpses made me cover my face. I think I was offended by death unless I was the cause of it! And I had to get clean away from my dead victims almost immediately.
Dead blood is not poisonous to them, just distasteful. In TVL, Lestat goes to Armand in Paris for help after Claudia and Louis try to assassinate him a second time, and Armand throws him in a locked cell with a dead mortal for dinner: “Sometime in the dark, I discovered a mortal victim there. But the victim was dead. Cold blood, nauseating blood. The worst kind of feeding, lying on that clammy corpse, sucking up what was left.”
^So clearly dead blood is not bad in the sense of being poisonous, just icky 😛
My favorite part of The Vampire Lestat is that he was angry Louis wrote a book that made him look over dramatic so he wrote his own book where he comes off ten times more over dramatic than Louis ever did
Nicki & Lestat
The Vampire Lestat:
The cold seemed worse in Paris… I was never so glad of the fur-lined cape as I was then. I wrapped it around Nicolas and held him close to me when we went out together, and we walked in a tight embrace through the snow and the rain.
Cold or no cold, I can’t exaggerate the happiness of these days. Life was exactly what I thought it could be.
I-want-my-IWTV 