Hello hello~~~ This post got very long! It’s a big question!
I guess I haven’t talked about Lestat’s singing voice bc I can’t find it, but YES, #headcanon accepted, Lestat would have a kick ass falsetto voice!
I just drafted this post and it’s too long, so much more can be written and more vids could have been featured, but I’ve spen
The short answer: As with Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is music in the ear of the beholder, and your idea of Lestat’s voice is as valid as anyone else’s. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
I’m gonna offer a few responses on this, from AR, from canon, from a mutual VC fan friend of mine, and then respond to your suggestions. I had to make a cut bc the post was getting long.
SO, AR has said, on several occasions, that Bon Jovi was a big influence on Prince Lestat. She even dedicated Prince Lestat to Bon Jovi (as one of her muses). [X]
I also seem to recall Lestat mentioning a love for Bruce Springsteen in canon, but that might have been fanon. In QOTD, Baby Jenks says Lestat sings like the Boss:
Baby Jenks did love the Vampire Lestat’s music,… Yes sir, that was the one she loved… It wasn’t the words that got to her, it was the way he sang it, groaning like Bruce Springsteen into the mike and making it just break your heart.
I’m on Fire, the lyrics and the way he sings it, seem very Lestatuesque to me. Try Dancing in the Dark, also very Lestatuesque to me…
What do you think Lestat’s band would sound like now?
Well, it always sounded to me like Jim Morrison. That was the band I based it on — Jim Morrison’s voice, physical beauty, and the sound of that band in a song like “L.A. Woman.” That’s how I imagined Lestat’s band sounding. I don’t know a lot about rock music right at this moment; I haven’t listened to a stadium band in a while. I don’t know the latest stuff. I really don’t know. The main thing in emphasizing Morrison is that I’m emphasizing hard rock. It’s really acid rock. It’s not lightweight rock music and there has to be a good voice at the helm. Morrison had an exceptionally good voice for a rock singer. But modernizing it? Sure, whatever. Bring it on.
Sorry I’ve taken so long to reply to this (which I thoroughly enjoyed reading by the way).
I definitely visualised Lestat as a rock star that was heavily influenced by Jim Morrisons style. Style; referring to his vocal abilities, the way he moves on stage, the fact that he is a intelligent, complex beautiful godly Vampiresque enigma of a man. Oh, and how could I forget those infamous leather pants. Vampires love their jet black leather or black crushed velvet. As far as his fashion influence goes, he really made leather pants a rock stars trademark.
It’s like if you watch The Lost Boys, there’s a huge homage paid to Jim. For example, Michael (Played by Jason Patric) pretty much looks just like him with his chiseled jawline and curly brown hair. Then there’s a huge poster in the Vampire gangs cave. Also they play a cover of People are Strange. Jim Morrison to me was exactly how I pictured a Vampire.
As far as The Doors songs go, I can definitely hear a sense of otherworldly, deep spirituality. They just have that sound which is both timeless and touches on ancient rituals and folklore.
What Doors songs are ‘Lestatesque’ to me:
-The End (Oedipus complex, very Lestat) -Wild Child (Enough said) -When The Musics over -My eyes have seen you -Five To One -Not to touch the Earth -End Of The Night -L’America -Changeling -Waiting for the sun
“Listen, keep your eyes wide,” Lestat whispered to me, his lips moving against my neck. I remember that the movement of his lips […] sent a shock of sensation through my body that was not unlike the pleasure of passion.
A dull roar at first and then a pounding like the pounding of a drum, growing louder and louder […] until it seemed to fill not just my hearing but all my senses, to be throbbing my lips and fingers, in the flesh of my temples, in my veins. Above all, in my veins […].
You see, while some people are very much excited for a new show about our pompous king of the assholes (and I say this as a term of endearment, having loved Lestat since I was a depressed teenager living in New York, shuffling through my mom’s fiction section) we need to pause and remember this:
Anne Rice does not support fan fiction or anything that is not glowing praise.
Read it again, slowly.
Anne Rice does not support fan fiction or anything that is not glowing praise.
This is difficult for younger fans to understand, but let’s take a walk down memory lane.
She has threatened to sue writers in the past. She is one of the most prolific writers of our generation, and she does not support people using her characters for their own work.
In fact, in 2000 she went on a binge-attack against her fans. She threatened legal action against fans who wrote or drew her characters, but especially those who wrote with them. She sent them weeks of harassing letters and doxxed them on the internet.
Let me repeat that.
She doxxed people who wrote fan fiction.
She harassed them online and threatened to contact employers.
She used her fans to outright attack other fans.
This isn’t even something she can just shake off now, with the comment of “It was so long ago” because she did this to a writer who wrote commentary on her story in 2013.
In 2013.
While it was not that she wrote fan fiction, she still shows that she has no respect for people who are in fandom.
Remember those disclaimers used in fan fics, at the beginning? “I do not own …. ”? Yeah, a lot of that has to do with the fact that Anne Rice and others like her would attack fandoms and threaten them, and was in hopes that they would just leave us alone. She didn’t.
In short: Do not trust Anne Rice. I love her writing, I have read every book she has even written, but I do not trust her.
You shouldn’t, either.
Anne Rice was and still is a bully. Don’t support her work.
She’s been like this since Geocities was the big place to have spec (that’s what fics used to be called, specs, as in speculative fiction) pages back in the mid 90s.
She use to threaten to sue anyone she found posting specs anywhere, and there was a whole underground network of people to share specs and fan art (which she also would threaten to sue over).
Anne Rice has always been kind of a twat about fan works based on her mediocre writing.
She’s harassed people quite recently. @jennytrout Wanna gossip?
What was that? “Raise your hand if you were ever personally victimized by Anne Rice?”
DISCLAIMER: this is not about fanfic, but it is about what she can do to you.
So, I totally idolized Anne Rice. Fully and adoringly so. One day, she shared one of my HuffPo articles with her “people of the page” and it was probably the greatest day of my entire career.
But she has this thing where she’s OBSESSED with bad reviews. At one point, she complained about a bad review she got for Interview from the New York Times or some such thing like forty years ago. She used it as an example of how reviews can hurt authors. I was like, seriously, lady, you have how many millions of copies of your books sold? How many movies have been made from them? *People try to find your house to take pictures of themselves in front of it.* But okay, everybody has their quirks. I just kind of rolled my eyes over it.
Not long after that, she made a post about this website that was made by a writer who apparently wasn’t getting the sales numbers or accolades they so richly deserved. The problem wasn’t like, the nature of the business or anything, nay, my friends, nay, but the fact that people–BULLIES!–left mean reviews on Amazon. So these people whom Rice so admired would make posts where they would reveal Amazon/GoodReads reviewers names and home addresses and such. One post even mentioned something like, “Between this time and that time every weekday, they go for a walk by the sea wall.” Scary, scary shit. And Rice LOVED these people.
I don’t know why I took it upon myself to argue with her. I really don’t. Maybe because I respected her so much and her support of the site was so disappointing? This was the result.
So, I’m a bully. Big whoop, right? And my feelings were a little hurt, but hey, never meet (or follow on social media) your idols, right? Lesson learned, and it wasn’t like this could destroy my fond memories of how much I loved her books, right?
So, fast forward, I think it was the next year, or at least a few months later, when I wrote a post about a dumb $0.99 Kindle book about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings in a BDSM relationship. A pathetic little troll with too much hair gel and not enough parenting ran to his goddess Anne Rice to tell her how mean, mean, mean I was being. She posted a link to a blog post made about me on the reviews-are-bullies site and said something to the effect of someone needing to teach me a lesson or someone needed to show me how it feels or something like that. To THREE. MILLION. PEOPLE.
As a fan of Anne Rice, I am confident in stating that many of her fans are not okay people. And they heeded the command of their “queen.” Yes, they referred to her as such, flooding me with emails, tweets, FB messages, anywhere they could reach me. They posted my address, screenshots of google earth images of my house, they threatened to kill me, they made graphic threats against my children, one charming gentleman on parole from his assault sentence offered to make a necklace of my teeth to present to “my queen.”
When confronted about the fact that she had unleashed all of this on me, her response was basically: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
She insisted she hadn’t done anything wrong, she couldn’t control what people were doing, and oh yes, it’s terrible that people are saying this, but she NEVER. ASKED. THEM. TO. STOP. In fact, she joined her “people of the page” in mocking my appearance, mourning the horrible lives my children must have, and continuing to insist that my “prison tats” indicated that I was a member of a gang (I have “TIME LADY” tattooed across my knuckles in the 11th Doctor era Doctor Who font). Egging them on with this coy, “Well, we shouldn’t say things like that, we’re better than that, BUT” bullshit.
This all went on for weeks. Some of these people still occasionally pop up to threaten/antagonize. So, yeah. Steer clear. She holds a grudge, she can and will mobilize her fanbase against you, if she dislikes you she will ruin you, and she doesn’t care if her readers literally kill you.
I’ve seen this post going around and yes, I agree, do not trust Anne Rice. I get no satisfaction from adding to this post, I get no pleasure in Call Out culture, but it’s important information that needs to be shared.
The way AR sicced her zealous fans on these reviewers, her behavior was most unfortunate and beneath her. I hope it’s behind her now, but with the new series coming (maybe. *rolls eyes* it’s been 84 years) there will inevitably be less-than-glowing reviews and those reviews have a right to exist.
Another example of AR siccing her fans on a reviewer was the Punishing Pandora fiasco, in which Kayleigh Herbertson, a blogger, tore up her own physical copy of Pandora and made it into other art, which, hey! It’s her copy of the book, she should be allowed to do as she pleases with it! AR was Not Impressed with any of this project, and sicced her fans on the blogger. As
Herbertson wrote:
Edit: It has come about that this post has been shared by Anne Rice herself, leading to a lot of angry comments (though also some very thought provoking ones). Please note that I am a small scale blogger, with less that 100 followers. Whilst I’m sorry to offend the masses of Anne Rice fans now flooding my page, please keep this in mind. My original intention was to buy a beaten up book second hand to turn into craft once reading it. This happened to be Pandora. I’m sorry for not mentioning this from the word go but I can’t believe that Anne Rice has been so affronted to share this to her Facebook Page knowing how biased her fan base would be when reading my post and the result that this would cause.At this time I choose not to remove this post or the comments, the only difference is that a well-known author has singled out a single post from a tiny blog for her followers to demonize. Thank you for your time.
In my opinion, it is never acceptable to threaten to or cause real harm to real people over fictional works. We have a right to review works put out into the public domain and an author should know that they risk criticism. We have a right to buy a copy of their book and turn it into f*&’ kitty litter if we want to. That’s among our rights as a consumer of the book.
This is a VC fandom blog and I try to accentuate the positive, and encourage fanworks, etc. I try not to criticize AR herself, but this is a very important thing to inform new fans about and to keep in mind, if you lived through these times. I’ve also mentioned the war on fanfic she waged on her fans in the 90s. Not a pretty part of our fandom’s history but it happened and we should be mindful of it.
It seems like she has stopped encouraging this kind of behavior, and I hope for the sake of the fandom she will keep in mind the influence she has over her more zealous fans and continue her current attitude of ignoring what she doesn’t approve of.
I-want-my-IWTV 