Thank you for clearing that up! I remember Louis mentioning the intimacy thing but I totally forgot about Lestat. I just have a vivid memory of Armand and Daniel in bed and I guess my mind tried to fill in the blanks.
Honestly, It’s been so long since I’ve read them that I’m starting to wonder what I actually read and what my friends and I headcanon’ed.
#Your headcanon my vary
vagabonddaniel-recordedarchives:
it’s a general observation of mine…
And a probable off-topic here as well but…
The life of the VC vampires became so uninteresting in every book after Queen of the Damned that I became genuinely interested in their lives before they become vampires.
ooc: I feel like for me… it’s just that things have gotten way too easy for the vampires, if that makes sense. TotBT was still ‘Okay WtF is Stat going to do to get himself out of this’. And MtD, while I disliked it at the time, still gives the vampires massive problems. There’s a guy who claims he’s a devil! A ghost of a victim is haunting a vampire! Is there a hell?!?!
Later books, and especially Prince Lestat--and this was one of my two big issues with that book–sort of take away any of their problems. Suddenly they’re all too powerful for anything to be a real threat. And suddenly being a vampire isn’t even seen as bad! Vampires can have kids via vampire science! Maybe they can drink synthetic blood! The sacrifice for immortality isn’t there anymore and neither is the idea that it’s hard or not for everyone. It’s just handed out easily. it’s like they’ve turned from vampires into transcendent angelic beings or something, and it means there are no stakes. Want to be a vampire? Line right up! Why not! Let’s vampire everyone!
Maybe this is not where you were going, but I understand. I think as a fanfic writer or RPer, I like the cracks in canon–how did Daniel go mad? How did he get better? etc. etc. Because it’s fun to fill in the gaps with fic or RP. But I do wish we’d more of those stories in the books, because those are the stories I want. Not a world where vampires are happy-go-lucky creatures where nothing can harm them, I want to see them struggle with murdering people and wrestle with their own demons.
So their lives before they were magically super powerful do become more interesting because they weren’t flawless.
^I very much agree. Vampiring is so easy now. All one needs is a pair of fangs.
I didn’t watch/read Trublood, Vampire Diaries, or Twilight, and so I can’t really declare an opinion on them however much I want to grrrrrrr
…But at least in VC, yes, a lot has been overcome, smoothed over, dealt with, and I think that’s partly what led to the crackiness we see in later canon. It may have been a need to create some kind of conflict again, but bc the earlier books had already resolved the juiciest issues, later canon came across as less dimensional.
Again, I haven’t read/seen most of the more recent vampire media, but from what I have seen, my opinion is – and take this with a grain of salt, if you do love this stuff – these vampires seem declawed. Neutered. Their monstrosity has been watered down. Why? I don’t know. But they’re not interesting to me in that form. I can’t help but think that this has influenced Anne Rice in some way.
Hello to you! PL is meant as a branching-off of canon… so there are plot points and characters in BC that don’t exist in PL. PL is like an AU, if things had gone in a different direction after MtD.
If you really want to read PL, go ahead, right after TVA!
BUT: PL is not my favorite VC… and there will be characters in the story that you won’t be familiar with. PL tries to give some background on them, but it feels more like telling than showing :- You’ll probably have a richer, more layered understanding of them if you read the books that follow TVA first.
That’s alot of books to deal with, so if I had to make you read just one, at least read Blood and Gold before PL.
This is a very useful interactively-zoomy VC timeline!
witchyrem-ains requested this, since the original source was garama‘s deviantart page, which is all emptied out. Nice comparison here between the rough and the cleaned up-version.
(I hope it’s okay to repost, garama! You know you’re one of my fave fanartists, but it cannot be said enough <3)
Awww thank u for the compliments! I’m such a successful drug dealer, addicted a fresh victim to our beloved drug of choice, lovable dysfunctional vampires ♥u♥
shut up Claudia you know you love it you helped him WRITE that monologue…
Yes, I read all the books. Should you read all the books?
Well, if, for example, you’re not so interested in Armand as a character, I would recommend skipping TVA, bc it’s largely his story. BUT, you may miss good moments with other characters that you do like. Same goes for the other books past TVA.
Short answer is: give it all a chance, skim if you must, and decide for yourself, it’s meant to be fun, it’s not a religion, there are no chants to memorize, you will not be quizzed next Monday ;]
Y’know, that is a good question but also a tough one to answer. I’m sure there are academic articles on it (here’s one I skimmed, looks intriguing, thanks to takemetocoffin-or-losemeforever for the link!), and I did a movie!IWTV kill tally (according to the tally, 73% of the on-screen mortals killed were Caucasian).
I percolated on this with coldinhumanity, and the short answer is: Maybe, but if so, it’s unintentional. These are 200+ yr old vampires, and they have outdated conceptions of things.
In movie!IWTV: Louis kills Yvette, a poc, it was accidental. We see him struggling with it and trying to make Yvette leave him alone, but she seems to actually care about him, “Are you still our master at all? You must send away this friend of yours… they’re frightened of him. And they’re frightened of you.” I headcanon that they had a good relationship prior to his turning, maybe the best possible relationship under the circumstances.
Not saying that Louis was a fantastic slave owner, but we aren’t told negative things about him in that role, only that movie!Yvette (and I think it’s in book!IWTV, too) NOTICED his daytime absence in the fields, and seemed to want him back out there.
I think Anne Rice attempts to consider political concepts and weave them into her work if possible, but it’s not her main focus. Akasha’s idea for world peace was presented, and refuted. Was Akasha a misandrist? That’s not racism, but it’s hatred of a group of people who all share a certain characteristic having and/or being a dick, and AR strove to show us how impractical it was to try to remove them, 40% of the world’s population, in order to “improve” the remainder.
In the books, I’d say that:
I don’t think she intends to be racist, and her characters rarely have dialogue that would explicitly state such. In the narration, however, one could argue that there are implied racial opinions.
I-want-my-IWTV 