just got a grand piano and you know what that means
Tag Archives: VC
… Just sayin’….
[X] Ling Ly
Oltremare, 2016
Haven Gallery
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Since I now have a working tablet and am making art fairly regularly, I felt it was only fair to create an updated version of this.
Honestly I can’t believe how gay everyone was for Louis. After reading the compilation of Louis’ descriptions, all of them are like “oh he’s so beautiful, so innocent and graceful, my eyes follow his every move, wow he’s so gorgeous”. I can’t believe everyone (including myself) is Gay for Louis
[EDIT: Tumblr ate half my post! I took out all the indented “quote” formatting to fix it]
IKR?? He tolerates it, rolls his eyes at it when he reads it, but when it gets to a certain amount…
Louis says of himself in IWTV:
“You wonder if I was a handsome man when I was alive,” said the vampire. The boy nodded. “I was. Nothing structurally is changed in me. Only I never knew that I was handsome. Life whirled about me a wind of petty concerns, as I’ve said. I gazed at nothing, not even a mirror… especially not a mirror… with a free eye.”
The compilation of descriptions of Louis that @i-see-light-blog put together are mostly from Lestat, I think, and at least one or two are from Armand, both were lovers of Louis at one point. The others who describe him are Daniel, David, and Marius.*
And I think the deal with describing Louis is partly that, hey, it’s fun to do, like having a favorite flower, and AR takes the opportunity to remind us of it, and put the camera on him in a scene, so we know he’s present. It also serves a purpose, we usually get at least a scrap of context about him and/or the scene:
“I glared at him, at the sharp graceful angles of his imperturbable face, […] his wide-set eyes, with their fine rich black lashes. How perfect the tender indentation of his upper lip.” -Lestat, The Tale of the Body Thief
- Lestat glares at Louis. –> Lestat is clearly pissed.
- Louis’ imperturbable face –>
Louis is not scared of Lestat being pissed.
- And then Lestat lavishes this extra description on him, appreciatively. Attention on the lip area, now we’re picturing him pointedly staring there, which might precede a kiss, so we can infer that Lestat desperately wants to kiss him, probably. What I get from all that is the exquisite tension of Lestat wanting someone he can’t have, someone he treasures and wants even MORE bc of the difficulty. And Louis knows this when he reads those flowery descriptions. I think Louis secretly enjoys the power that he holds over all these hopeless admirers, when he reads these descriptions.
It’s the tension of the other characters pining for Louis that AR wrings every drop out for us, she’s showing us how helpless these other characters are that they can only try to capture Louis with descriptions since he defies being owned by anyone. Unrequited love is a powerful thing.
In my reading of IWTV, Louis was not just some dishrag Lestat could toss around at will. Even before Claudia appears, Louis is setting boundaries with Lestat:
“And to Babette I came now with Lestat. He would have killed the Frenieres long ago if I hadn’t stopped him,…
…`You call me the idiot, and you’ve been the idiot all along. Do you think I don’t know why you made me a vampire? You couldn’t live by yourself, you couldn’t manage even the simplest things. For years now, I’ve managed everything while you sat about making a pretense of superiority. There’s nothing left for you to tell me about life. I have no need of you and no use for you. It’s you who need me, and if you touch but one of the Freniere slaves, I’ll get rid of you. It will be a battle between us, and I needn’t point out to you I have more wit to fare better in my little finger than you in your entire frame. Do as I say.” – Louis, Interview with the Vampire
^And this is part of Louis’s hawtness, as well. He absolutely will cut a b*tch, if necessary.
Hit the jump for a little more, cut for it’s-slightly-off-topic-but-oh-well
*I’m pretty sure the other quotes are from Daniel, David, and Marius, I’m not checking bc I’m like 90% sure.
- Daniel’s drawn to him in IWTV bc his story is so compelling, and that Louis is a vampire in the presence of a mortal who knows what he is, so he has that preternatural thing going on, mortal!Daniel is enthralled. Plus, Louis may have spellbound him inadvertently, as according to Armand:
“Louis… unable to read minds, or to levitate, or to spellbind others except inadvertently, which can be hilarious, an immortal with whom mortals fall in love…” – the Vampire Armand
- David probably has some mixed feelings about Louis, especially in Merrick, bc Lestat’s out of the picture for most of that book, and I think David is stepping into Lestat’s role in his absence, to some extent, so I think he’s trying see Louis as Lestat sees him.
- There was an artist in IWTV who painted Louis’ portrait, it makes sense that Marius, another artist who has done portraits, would also be drawn to Louis for this reason. Marius also thinks about what would happen if Louis were upgraded, and hey, I would think he’s had those thoughts about other vampires who are significantly younger than himself, for whom an upgrade really might change them. Now that I’m thinking about it, this was info that Marius confessed to Lestat when Lestat was drafting QOTD, and I bet this comment stuck in his mind, he very much wanted to upgrade Louis for awhile, but for different reasons.
What are VC fans called?
To my knowledge, we don’t really have a name, like the Potterheads for HP or the Hiddlestoners for Tom Hiddleston 😦
We’re just “VC fans.” If I’m differentiating between different vampire media, I’ll say “Ricean vampires” or “VC vampires.”
It’s an old fandom, so old that I’m pretty sure it predates fandom being the recognized thing it is today. We were also strongly discouraged from creating fanfic, so maybe that’s why we don’t have a name. VC fanfic was underground, the fandom was in hiding, we didn’t want to draw unwanted attention by having a name. The Talamasca slogan might as well be our fandom’s slogan, too: We watch and we are always here.
Sometimes I refer to us as “People Off the Page,” to differentiate us from the VC Facebook fans who Anne Rice calls her “People of the Page.” More on that here. They used to be a formidable army she could sic on other fans/reviewers/etc., but things have been peaceful for awhile now, thankfully.
I used to refer to us tumblr fans as “fanged little trash kittens” or “fanged little trash monsters” more frequently than I do now. Probably had to do with the fandom trend at one point of saying “I’m such X-trash!/I’m trash for X!” meaning that you loved X thing/character. Seemed only natural that we would be fanged trash creatures. And it’s gender-neutral.
Any variation on the words Vampire and Chronicles doesn’t wholly work for us, since there are so many other Vampire series and Chronicles series.
Lot 258 of 410: TOM CRUISE INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE PROP
Warner Bros., 1994, Lestat’s thumb talon, worn in the film by Tom Cruise while bloodletting his victims. Made of steel with engraved floral design, the talon is contained in a black coffin shaped case with the name “Neil” on the lid. The item was donated by the film’s director Neil Jordan. case 9 1/8 inches PROVENANCE: UNICEF Ireland, Movie Action For Children Auction, held at Sotheby’s New York, March 6, 2001.
It sold for $5,000! I can’t decide if that’s too much or too little for a steel ring movie prop, but at least the money went to a good cause. And at least we have a decent pic of it for the engravings… bc of reasons…
(just wanted to include the screencap in case the listing gets deleted, from julienslive.com)
Hello! How are you? Are you well? I hope so ^-^. Anyway, I’m curious what are your headcanons on Louis having a living lineage? Could his family still be thriving through his sister’s bloodline? If it is possible that he does have a line and is aware of it. Do you think he’d be a secret patron to them, like he was to his family when he was newly turned? Thank You! Sorry for the spam of questions! Have an amazing week! :D <3
Bon soir to you, thank you (I need this week to be amazing bc it’s my first 5-day week at work in awhile, bc of the holidays and the snow day last week, omg it’s gonna be rough, lol), I’m very well! Hope you are, too, and that 2018 is treating you well, so far. I’m stretching my creative muscles again, making promises to ppl about fanworks I have in the pipeline that are ACTUALLY GOING TO HAPPEN. Yissss. 2018 is going to be a more productive year ^_______^
(No worries re: the spam of questions, I’m going to treat them as one mushed-together question, hope that’s ok with you!)
Louis having a living lineage and
being a patron to it is entirely possible! Do I personally headcanon that he does, definitively? That’s hard to say… I could go either way on it. I can parallel-headcanon, and have it both ways 😉 It depends on the fanfic/fanart/etc. I’m consuming, whether I headcanon yes/no on that.
A) On the one hand, I think he’d be charmed by seeing his own mannerisms (or that of his immediate family!) in his descendants, as can happen. ❤
I know I’ve seen at least one fic that had Louis discover a great-great-great….(idk how many?)…grand-niece in NOLA, and even being just a child, she resembled Louis physically and/or psychologically, and he was deeply touched about that *u* I don’t remember whether he became a secret patron to her… I think the fic was by @gairid/ @vampchronfic, if that ficwriter sees this post, they are invited to reblog/comment the name of the fic! It was sweet without being pure fluff.
B) On the other hand, I think Louis might take some comfort in the fact that he no longer has a family to support financially or emotionally, and no family to worry about from a distance,
…which Maharet has made a career of doing with her own family bc she enjoys it. Louis is fiercely devoted to and protective of those he loves, and he chooses those loved ones very selectively. Canonically (post-IWTV), he has few ties to the other vampires in the coven, and no mortal ties other than Merrick, but she bewitched him, and admitted to doing so, so I don’t think that she really counts. If we include PL/ROA, then one could argue he has an attachment to some of the mortals in those books, including Rose.
Another thing that’s come up in canon now and then is the idea that mortal relatives/descendants can be used to try to blackmail the vampires; mortals can be taken hostage and threatened with violence unless ransom of some kind is paid for them, as happened in PL. So I think Louis would be relieved that he wasn’t unintentionally placing any innocent mortals in harm’s way simply for being related to him.
^^^ALL THAT SAID, we could always use fresh fanart/fanfic/etc., especially on this kind of rarer topic, so anyone who sees this post is invited to share their headcanons on it, too 😉
Hit the jump for just a little bit more.
Canonically, Louis tells us that his sister married, and yes, he did give her money to invest for the family:
“My sister was married in my absence, for example, while I had a `malarial
chill,‘…With dozens of miserable headaches I would receive my sister in a darkened bedroom, the covers up to my chin, bid her and her husband
bear with the dim light on account of the pain in my eyes, as I entrusted to them large amounts of money to invest for us all. Fortunately her husband was an idiot; a harmless one, but an idiot, the product of four generations of marriages between first cousins.” (IWTV)
I skimmed IWTV and I didn’t see any mention of his sister having any children.
I don’t know why AR included that the husband was the result of an incestuous lineage, that may have been normal at the time? I don’t know what impact AR intended that information to have on the story. Maybe just that the husband never questioned Louis’ strange behavior re: meetings in his darkened bedroom bc he was, as Louis said, “an idiot”? Maybe this was a little reminder of Louis’s ego, that he felt he was a better man than his sister’s husband?
BTW, Louis’s sister has a fanon name, some fans have accepted it as fanon anyway, Henriette.
Personally, I do headcanon that Louis has at least a few mortal friends in NOLA and San Francisco, like a particular barista at a coffee shop he haunts in the French Quarter, and a few other locals who have done work at Rue Royale over the years. @gairid/ @vampchronfic also has an OC, Brian Callahan, who I think Louis cares very deeply about ❤
THAT’S RIGHT MY FLEDGLINGS – WE’RE ON iTUNES!
…next step –> world domination *INSERT EVIL LAUGH* 💪
Find us on iTunes and give the podcast a listen!
(and this is me using the mind gift to make you all give it a 5 star rating….. is it working?)– R
(I’m also using the mind gift (and the typing gift) to tell you to tune in on Tuesday when we talk about Interview with the Vampire THE MOVIE)
I-want-my-IWTV 