I’m “kind of an awesome vc expert”? Awww, that’s very generous of you
❤️ I’m not special I’ve just read all these books and talked about them for like 20 yrs ;,D
I don’t think that AR has ever canonically stated what happens if a vampire eats/tries to eat food… I’m not even sure if it’s canon of fanon at this point but I headcanon that they can swallow little sips of liquids other than blood. But not much.
^This is from What We Do in the Shadows, and it’s probably not projectile vomiting like this for Ricean vampires… but it’s hilarious (but GROSS) so WATCH IT (if you can handle the gross). For these and the Ricean vampires, eating people food is bad, but not lethal.
Ricean vampires lose alot of digestive anatomy when they’re turned. So their bodies just can’t metabolize food. Cooking smells are repulsive to them, as Louis describes it in IWTV:
“The slightly nauseating smell of cooking meat… I caught the sweet smell of the spices and the fresh green of marjoram and bay; and then in a wave came the horrid smell of the cooking meat, the blood and flesh decaying in the boiling fluids.“
So if they were to try a bite of a plate of food, it might be like trying to force yourself to eat something inedible, like an old soapy sponge. Unless you’re really determined to eat a thing, you’ll want to spit it out.
I would guess that eating a whole plateful of food would just make them throw it back up, no enjoyment in or out 😛
Not sure about other vampires, like The Vampire Diaries, Tru Blood, 30 Days of Night, Daybreakers, etc.
I seem to recall the Lost Boys vampires were able to eat Chinese food? I don’t remember.
[…and just started wondering if Anne Rice has ever addressed what would happen if a pregnant human was made into a vampire?]
Lestat does have a dream about going back to the Auvergne and turning his whole family into vampires, infants included D-: Other than that, no other mention in canon and not in any interview or book signing I’ve heard of. Maybe my followers know? Interesting question!
My thoughts on it under the cut in case of too gorey for some ppl. But in short, I don’t think that the baby would become a vampire, bc it REALLY couldn’t fend for itself. Claudia was a child but at least she could had mental capacity, could talk, was ambulatory, and had teeth that could be transformed into fangs.
(I don’t think I’ve seen any vampire babies in any other media EXCEPT for the one in Twilight, she had rapid growth or smtg? It was confusing.)
Hit the jump for more, possibly squicky thoughts, but no graphics.
I’d think that any unborn child would be, sadly, dumped along with the other organs and materials the new fledgling doesn’t need or can’t use as a vampire. Even if the mortal is turned before giving birth past/on their due date. If the infant survived that forcible removal, I think it would either (A) still be mortal or (B) die… bc I think the mortal has to be at some level of development for the vampiric parasite to take hold.
Maybe that’s why we don’t have vampire dogs/cats/etc., bc whatever parts they’re missing, an infant would be missing those, too. A brain development thing maybe? I don’t know!
I caught up again, and I’m thinking a lot about Lucy today, and how I don’t think I’ll ever be 100% certain how I feel about her vampiric self. I’ll be the first to admit that the vampiric Lucy speaks to the fact that Bram Stoker really seems to enjoy creating monstrous women and assigning hyper-violent deaths to them, and this no doubt reflects his rather misogynist views regarding acceptable gendered behavior. At the same time, I also think a lot about how Lucy became a vampire in a world that didn’t necessarily see a continuity between a person before they were a vampire and a person after they were a vampire. I think there’s a tendency nowadays to view vampires as essentially human beings, albeit ones with a radically different biology and an unfortunate diet, and I’m not sure if 19th century readers would come naturally to that assessment.
A lot of my interest in the novel revolves around how it might have been received at a time when philosophical materialism seemed like a scary and threatening thing, and how that impacts the book’s ideas about the brain and the soul. While I don’t agree entirely with Anne Stiles absolutely marvelous essay on the topic, I find something very compelling about her insinuation that Lucy as a vampire is the natural end of Ferrier’s brain science: an entity that acts, however complexly, according to the stimuli provided by an infernal vivisector. I do believe that Lucy as a vampire retains some part of the human Lucy, given her reaction to Arthur, but I’m very unconvinced by attempts to wholly explain her vampiric self as an emerging part of her human subconscious. Besides the fact that a lot of these arguments hinge on really awful victim-blaming insinuations about how Lucy somehow desires her own assaults, I think that Dracula’s role as a mesmerist/hypnotist is often overlooked in the equation. I mentioned earlier Wells’ assertion in The Island of Dr. Moreau that hypnotism is the mental equivalent to the physical self-altering vivisection Moreau perpetuates, and I think that there’s a precedent with Trilby that would indicate that the mesmeric process (at least in fiction) can create a sub-personality that’s something between the mesmerist and the mesmerizer, a second self intermixed with that of one’s violator that may operate on its own even out of its originator’s influence.
This read-through I thought a lot about the actual emergence of the vampiric self, and how Lucy, even not knowing what it was seemed driven to resist it. The back and forth with the garlic and her final plea to Van Helsing are seriously absolutely terrifying to me in the context of the vampiric Lucy as the sort of construct described. I’m not certain how aware Stoker was of all the implications of this sort of thing (He had one source that mentioned both double personalities and mesmeric control but we can’t prove he read it), but I think that for the period it would be possible to see the vampiric Lucy as being in some way an extension of the Count, a parasitic personality that’s a mixture of the human Lucy’s memories and Dracula’s mesmeric will. I still enjoy a lot of the literature, fic, and analyses that maintain human Lucy and vampiric Lucy are functionally one and the same, but that thought of the emerging vampire as something inflicted by an outsider is something that resonates with me deeply, and it’s one of the few ideas from the novel that genuinely causes me to have trouble sleeping at night.
It’s three years since I wrote this, and I realize that I successfully defended a thesis in which this text post was teased out into a full chapter.
ELI AND OSKAR… Oh my god what can I say except I want them to be happy together forever. ; ;
Eli is given the ability to fly with strange membrane wings- but those wings are never discussed further in the book than when a passerby notices Eli take flight and has to duck. Much like Eli’s toes, which grow long for claws, I imagined bat wings and long fingers to be the solution here.
ANYWAY. I imagine Eli is being sneaky and swoops down after a hunt for a hug.
This was a 3 hour piece. 1 hour sketch and 2 hours rendering.
Why couldn’t Claudia access the full extent of her vampire powers? Are they really that biologically discriminate?
^They don’t all automatically get all the vampiric powers, and some powers are only “earned” over time (like the cloud gift, which is flight). Some vampires automatically do get certain gifts upon being turned, like Lestat and the mind gift, but Louis didn’t get that one (debatable somewhat, as
Armand notes in TVA that Louis can spellbind others inadvertently but that might also be bc Louis is just too adorable and dreamy for anyone to handle).
We don’t know just how strong/gifted Claudia was, I don’t think there are any scenes that explicitly talk about her abilities. She was most likely stronger than her mortal self, even if she was weak compared to other vampires. Even if she had the mind gift, she would not have been able to read Lestat’s mind, and he wouldn’t be able to read hers, due to the barrier between fledglings and makers. But she might have been able to read Louis’ mind, since she’s his sibling. We don’t know.
Not sure where you’re at now, but in TVL there’s some discussion about fledglings and strength when Armand tells Lestat what he knows about the Dark Trick, and later, Marius that tells Lestat what he knows about it. Claudia is not specifically mentioned at the time, bc she doesn’t exist yet in the story.
The Dark Gift is not an exact science, and even makers with gifts cannot purposely give/withhold them to/from their fledglings :- Armand mentions in TVL:
But let Armand understand here also that the effect of the Dark Trick is unpredictable, even when passed on by the very young vampire and with all due care. For reasons no one knows, some mortals when Born to Darkness become as powerful as Titans, others may be no more than corpses that move. That is why mortals must be chosen with skill. Those with great passion and indomitable will should be avoided as well as those who have none.
The Dark Gift in unpredictable, despite all good/bad intentions; it’s the vampiric form of pregnancy. But there are things about the procedure that can affect the strength of the fledgling:
Whether the blood is transferred
between maker and fledgling
once (for Louis and Claudia) or multiple times (for Marius) – IIRC, Marius doesn’t tell Lestat this in TVL, but multiple times seems to make for a stronger fledgling. Why didn’t Lestat do it multiple times for Claudia? I think Claudia was already in such bad physical shape that Lestat didn’t want to risk it. Plus, he had already turned 3 fledglings using the single transfer procedure, he probably felt like that was good enough.
Age and/or power of the maker – Lestat was only ~15 yo vampire himself when he turns Claudia. That’s still almost a fledgling himself, even tho he had been turned with powerful blood from a 300+ yo vampire.
Timing of making previous fledglings of the maker – Marius tells Lestat that the gift is weaker from the Maker to fledglings if given close in time period. Lestat had already made 3 vampires in his 15 year time, each one was weaker in strength than the last. It seems like whatever the Maker’s power, it’s outweighed by this timing issue.
The fledgling’s diet after turning – Louis was feeding on animals for the first 4-ish years of vampiring, which is like bad junk food, and probably not drinking the volume of blood he needed, either. Claudia seemed to have a voracious appetite, but she did have the body of a child, so it’s possible that she was physically unable to consume the amount of blood needed for the vampiric parasite to really transform her body properly. Possibly another reason why vampires generally don’t approve of turning children.
So one of the things in VC is that these vampires are like sappy emotional goofballs and there’s a reoccurring theme of love transcending traditional boundaries. It’s also implied over and over that they experience love on a level that is unfathomable to us as MERE MORTALS because of their big magical vampire brains.
I do think their relationships in general can be looked at on an individual basis and their history dictates the sort of tone there—I think they’re all just super extra and will always refer to companions as lovers even when there are dramatic qualitative differences in their relationship dynamics—like for example Louis & Armand strike me as a more traditional couple model, vs. Marius & Daniel strike me more in a father/son way because Marius takes care of him. Though, it’s a little hard to speculate because we don’t see a lot of them together. But! In this world, with the love transcending boundaries blah blah, it doesn’t mean they aren’t lovers in this universe and this context, because you see the same with Louis & Claudia or Lestat & Gabrielle. And even though there are a lot of areas in the stories where sex is implied through symbolism and coding and whatever there isn’t literal sex, so when you take sex out of the equation it’s a little easier to apply these broader definitions of love to these pairs of characters. And you see it over and over again that they never just like someone, or have a crush on someone. They’re just constantly ~IN LOVE~ with each other and they’re all so obsessed with how beautiful everyone is lol.
But also re: blood/sex !!!
Something I noticed in VC fandom is that there’s sort of a spectrum of how literally people take the blood=sex thing, and when you also combine that with the spectrum of people’s sexuality and sex positivity I think we come up with some varying interpretations of these stories and characters. I’m not here to say that anyone else is wrong. This is a place where interpretation is key and it’s something so personal and that people feel so strongly about that I don’t think authorial intent often changes anyone’s minds. And having the freedom to interpret literature and art the way you want to is something that makes it enjoyable.
Again, I think we have to take individual characters or ships into consideration with some of these questions. Like, were they feeding intimately? Until Louis v.2.0 showed up I don’t think he was. Marius and Daniel feed on each other but Marius is always very generous with his blood with his lovers because he wants them to be strong and safe. I don’t think the vampires can share blood WITHOUT it being intimate but it’s important to decide what you think “intimate” means. Because bloodsharing can be compared to sex, which is intimate in its own way, but i also see it being akin to breastfeeding, and that’s super intimate too. We have ways of knowing that these two things are different versions of intimacy and obviously the vampires would, too. But then, again, there’s the idea that the way they love each other is so much bigger than just being about sex, and their definition of intimacy is something much more infinite than we can comprehend. It’s also worth acknowledging that when they share blood they’re literally opening up a stream of their own thoughts and emotions, which is something that we IRL only experience on an implied or symbolic level when we have intimate moments with real people in our lives. So their version of intimacy is a lot more complex due to the literal mechanics of what happens to them and also that they’re canonically just super emotionally intuitive.
But like, for me? I’m happy to play along and suspend my disbelief when I read VC and accept that I have a tiny pathetic human brain and that they’re experiencing something too profound for me to understand. I accept that they love each other on a deep level where it doesn’t matter if their relationship resembles a traditional couple vs a parent and child. That Louis can consider Claudia his lover or that Lestat can consider Gabrielle his lover because of the intimacy they share is a symbol to me that they are above petty human labels, because they are not human.
Every now and then I see discussions where the blood is reduced to sex on such a literal level and it strikes me as being really crude, and to me it does a huge disservice to one of the things I love the most about this series. And that’s, yknow, like I said, something that can vary to a degree between different people. I’m a very sex-positive person, but I’m also asexual. I don’t like reducing intimacy to meaning sex. So “lovers” to me doesn’t necessarily mean sex partners and it also doesn’t necessarily mean blood sharers, either. Like we know that Louis wouldn’t take blood from the others, which tells me he didn’t try it with Lestat or Armand pre-2000. That doesn’t mean he and Armand weren’t lovers. I think it often just means “I love this person, therefore they are my lover.”
You could take the ~just dudes being bros~ attitude to them or to any set of vampires living together if you really wanted to but I really think they’re such sappy motherfuckers that they wouldn’t spend so much time around each other if they weren’t in love, with or without blood to complicate it. I also think the overuse of the word lover is an expansion on romance and not a reduction of it, so in any case where a romantic pairing is ambiguous because of the language I think it’s always better to err on the side of them being in love.
Having said all that I will also say I’m super dying to know more about what goes on at Trinity Gate with Benji and Sybelle and we just DON’T HAVE ENOUGH INFORMATION TO KNOW. I’m curious to see if the coven/family-like nature of the household diffuses the intensity between them, especially if Louis is around to keep Armand occupied.
So! Anyway.
Kind of a hard question to answer because I think you have to take everyone on a case-by-case basis but I would definitely say that they all feel really big passionate feelings and don’t have casual crushes on each other. If they’re living together they’re probably in love with each other, in some ridiculous vampire way that doesn’t really make any sense to me.
Why the fuck do I talk so much when I answer asks idk but
TLDR I think companion and lover are often used interchangeably in VC because these vampires are clingy dramatic saps and that they have a really liberal definition of “lover” and apply it in ways that we don’t as real people in the real world.
Something I noticed in VC fandom is that there’s sort of a spectrum of how literally people take the blood=sex thing, and when you also combine that with the spectrum of people’s sexuality and sex positivity I think we come up with some varying interpretations of these stories and characters. I’m not here to say that anyone else is wrong. This is a place where interpretation is key and it’s something so personal and that people feel so strongly about that I don’t think authorial intent often changes anyone’s minds. And having the freedom to interpret literature and art the way you want to is something that makes it enjoyable.
…
But like, for me? I’m happy to play along and suspend my disbelief when I read VC and accept that I have a tiny pathetic human brain and that they’re experiencing something too profound for me to understand. I accept that they love each other on a deep level where it doesn’t matter if their relationship resembles a traditional couple vs a parent and child. That Louis can consider Claudia his lover or that Lestat can consider Gabrielle his lover because of the intimacy they share is a symbol to me that they are above petty human labels, because they are not human.
^Now, if anyone wants to define the vampires with human labels and definitions, that’s absolutely fine. You do you!
I’m going to stray slightly from Anon’s ask, and focus more on the larger aspect of categorizing/analyzing//judging/defining, bc looking for concrete differences between (A)“they are considered to be lovers” when (B) “they could be just friends,” and really, I think like all questions directed at clarifying VC ships/characters/plot/etc., it’s in the eye of the beholder/reader’s interpretation of the text and discussing it with others, if they choose to, like in sending an ask to me, @monstersinthecosmos, or anyone else.
On Analysis:
When Anne Rice said, “You’re interrogating the text from the wrong perspective!!! ;A; ” we all laughed. We still do, bc it sounded then, as it does now, at face value, like she’s a child stomping her feet and telling us we were judging her works objectivelyunfairly. That any negative or critical reviews could be labeled altogether as bullying, more or less.
…But really, over time, I’ve come to see this statement more as: “If you interrogate/criticize/analyze the text with a lens/rubric that the author was
(a)
not aware of, (b) not subscribed to, or (c.) was not a consideration during or preceding the time the work was written, you are very likely to find the text disappointing, and it will fail your judgment.” I think that Anne took it personally when fans were disappointed bc of this, but she steadfastly refused to accept guilt for disappointing them, and I admire her for sticking to her guns on that. There are fans who want her to include more POC, there are fans who insist that Lestat is straight, there are fans who want her to denounce all the VC and witch books bc they depict vampires and witches in a favorable light, etc. Since she cannot please everyone, she pleases her biggest fan only: herself.
I found a rubric for grading art (from thevirtualinstructor.com), probably for students in elementary or middle school, probably between 6-13 years old, I assume “S” means “student” and “T” means “teacher” but I can’t find the actual post about it, ANYWAY…
^So this is ONE example of a means of judging a work, and honestly, for a child, I’d say it’s sufficient. I would rearrange and add a lot more it to judge an adult, but it would depend on the adult. Maybe something like Effort, which might seem to only apply to children, would still be a factor for someone recovering from surgery or doing art as therapy.
ANYWAY, so if you reread @monstersinthecosmos‘s post there is so much to consider, especially re: the way we define “lover” and “companion” being very much in line with what I’ve added here, considering the rubric/lens from which we judge VC.
The questions then become:
Are you looking to be disappointed? Are you looking to be impressed? What do you need from a fictional work?
^And I think the answers to these will be different for everyone. In my experience, it’s been more enjoyable for me to take VC for what it is, and take pleasure in the acceptance, corrections, and/or manipulations (like AUs) of canon to fandom through fanworks and respectful discussion.
To my mind, when the word of the author is not even the authority, and there are unreliable narrators, no one’s opinion supercedes anyone else’s, no matter how hard they might try to push you to agree with them. Curate your experience with fandom and your own headcanons.
I-want-my-IWTV 
