It’s a touchy subject, recommending blogs, as inevitably I’ll leave someone out and then they may feel, well, LEFT OUT :-
I don’t follow as many RP blogs as I used to, it was too much to keep up with the various threads, some have gone inactive, new ones have started up… All attempts to make VC directories usually fail.
However, and that said, so you know I’m not playing favorites, there are some I remember by name, and so I tagged them below, but this is an incomplete list. Let’s make this an Ask Armand and Armand RPer roundup! People Off The Page, reblog/comment with any Ask Armand and Armand RPer blog I left out 😉
(in no special order, active-status not guaranteed):
TL:DR; Anon says don’t skip it, you should read it.
I’m of the mindset that there’s something good in all the VC books even if you don’t accept them all as canon, there’s always something worth dragging out into the light and enjoying for what it is as a standalone piece, be it a quote, or good dialogue banter, or whatever floats your boat, and you may miss it if you skip over a whole section… Even if the characters aren’t our faves, there may be something in there that’s worth salvaging. @sanguinivora gave me a new diving suit for this purpose, lol.
ANYWAY so Anon wrote in 4 messages:
1) To your PLROA question: It’s true, in a way 95% of KT could be skipped. Anne Rice told it so boringly, mentioning every detail (every time they ate and what they ate) it did not even have a chance to be interesting as a story (for me it was though also too absurd).
Good to know. I mean, the vampires can’t eat food, maybe this was an attempt to make the replimoids more likeable? That they’re all impressed with the earhtly food and stuff? So her tale was interesting and absurd tho, that’s the impression I’m getting.
2) But still I don’t think that the end of the book will make actually sense if one knows not the facts one hears in KT. You know the outcome, yes, but probably not really why or how it came to be. So my advice is to read that part simply incredible fast, not trying to imagine every single detail.
Sounds like good advice. I’ll be interested to see what info does apply.
3) Otherwise I find it in a way sad that AR steals every secret. In IWTV we know NOTHING of vampires – which makes that book so strong. Then in TVL we hear the tale of the parents, which gave me chills still. But this book goes for me too far.
If I understand you right, you liked that we didn’t know the vampire origins in IWTV, and then in TVL those origins are discussed and you did enjoy that. I agree, it seems like most VC fandom ppl I’ve talked with love VC partly for its take on the vampire origin myth. I BOUGHT IT THEN AND I BUY IT NOW. And AR even leaves the possibility that there are other vampire-like beings that have a different origin story, like the mindless Eurovamps Louis and Claudia find. They doubt that those vampires were created the way they were, but it’s left unexplained.
But this book goes for me too far.
That seems to be shared by other fans, too, that she undermines the facts set up in earlier books, rather than adding to them in a richer way :-
4th message from anon has kind of a big spoiler, so it is under the cut.
4) That all the vampires are separated in the end, takes a LOT of the vampire “magic” and makes so much of the old novels in a way undone. I would never read it a second time and I will also not regard it actually as VC truth.
Yeah I agree with you, one of the things I really loved about the vampire physiology of Ricean vampires was the fact that they were all connected, and to have that severed, it just felt like a huge loss of the vampire “magic” as you put it. Amel could travel around on it and visit other vampires! It was like they really were all one creature in a way.
I would reread PLROA more for those domestic and angsty moments we get of the vampire court, Lestat squabbling with Amel in his head, the L/L fluff, of course. But for the ALIEMS? No thank you, I really hope she moves on to literally anything else… I would even accept a wurwulf/VC crossover at this point, as it would be more grounded in the universe she had previously built.
Kapetria’s Tale and the saga of the Replimoids are simultaneously the most boring and the most cracky sections of the book. I cackled over the Space Birb aliens that created the Replimoids, but I don’t think I’ll ever reread those sections.
The sections about the hijinks of Lestat and his vampire court? Those are more like what I want/expect from a Vampire Chronicles book. For example, I am terribly fond of Prince Lestat, and have reread it a couple of times. Is it as good as the original Vampire Chronicles trilogy? No.
Finally, Anne Rice has stated herself (not that I can find links to the interviews where she said it) that she had been working on a stand-alone Atlantis book for over a decade, but couldn’t get it to where she was happy with it, and decided that it should be combined with a Vampire Chronicles book. I … do not agree with her authorial choices about this.
TL;DR: No one should feel they have to slog through Kapetria’s Tale in RoA. Yes, it ends up changing the whole mythology and backstory of the vampires, but … I reject those changes.
Thanks for your addition, @gothiccharmschool! Very much appreciated, and I am with you 100% on wanting more hijinks of Lestat and his vampire court! Good reminder about reading your liveblog of PLROA, I’m sure your liveblog can help me get through it.
Re: Finally, Anne Rice has stated herself (not that I can find links to the interviews where she said it) that she had been working on a stand-alone Atlantis book for over a decade, but couldn’t get it to where she was happy with it, and decided that it should be combined with a Vampire Chronicles book. I … do not agree with her authorial choices about this.
I, too, do not agree with her authorial choices about this. Here’s her quote about doing her specialty VC-mashup funtimes for PLROA:
… i, too, am unable to finish PLROA for MONTHS bc of Kapetria’s Tale! FOR THE SAME REASONS. I mean maybe it’s not boring to some ppl? But for me, I’m just… I was weirded out before by the Replimoids and getting to her tale I just didn’t want to buy more of what was being sold.
So I have been really struggling to pick it up again EVEN THO IT IS RIGHT ON MY DESK IN PLAIN VIEW, mocking me every day that I don’t just CRACK IT OPEN AND TAKE MY MEDICINE like I should if I really cared about this series (which I clearly do).
I went and asked around & skimmed ahead bc I very much like to be spoiled, and I won’t spoil you here, but from what I skimmed and from what I’ve been told, I don’t think you need to know Kapetria’s Tale to understand the rest of the book. It goes back to our vampires and their shenanigans and SCIENCE, and in the old days we might have called this all very “cracky” stuff, but the ending might even have been written before the Atlantis portion was added in, it seems to depend so little on it, but again, that’s from my spoilage.
…But currently? What are ppl’s thoughts on how PLROA ends? I would like ppl to speak freely, so there may be spoilers in comments/reblogs.
Message me privately, if you prefer, and I’ll add it to this post under a cut if it’s spoilery.
“I was working on a novel called Born for Atlantis, and I just couldn’t get it to work. I thought, “What if I could somehow combine this with Lestat and the vampires?” And it was like, everything worked. Something happens to me when I write from Lestat’s point of view. There’s no question about it. By the time I was done, it felt inevitable, like it always had been…. It was a rare experience.”
… i, too, am unable to finish PLROA for MONTHS bc of Kapetria’s Tale! FOR THE SAME REASONS. I mean maybe it’s not boring to some ppl? But for me, I’m just… I was weirded out before by the Replimoids and getting to her tale I just didn’t want to buy more of what was being sold.
So I have been really struggling to pick it up again EVEN THO IT IS RIGHT ON MY DESK IN PLAIN VIEW, mocking me every day that I don’t just CRACK IT OPEN AND TAKE MY MEDICINE like I should if I really cared about this series (which I clearly do).
I went and asked around & skimmed ahead bc I very much like to be spoiled, and I won’t spoil you here, but from what I skimmed and from what I’ve been told, I don’t think you need to know Kapetria’s Tale to understand the rest of the book. It goes back to our vampires and their shenanigans and SCIENCE, and in the old days we might have called this all very “cracky” stuff, but the ending might even have been written before the Atlantis portion was added in, it seems to depend so little on it, but again, that’s from my spoilage.
…But currently? What are ppl’s thoughts on how PLROA ends? I would like ppl to speak freely, so there may be spoilers in comments/reblogs.
Message me privately, if you prefer, and I’ll add it to this post under a cut if it’s spoilery.
It’s a handy resource. I ought to reread it. (Y’all can get it on Amazon.)
It was probably intended to be the answers to questions AR gets alot about VC, plus some behind-the-scenes info and headcanons she had at the time. I’m not sure if it lines up with canon, but a good resource to have with your other VC books anyway!
I-want-my-IWTV 