^This is like the only time they hold hands in the movie ;A; not ghey enuf
I think I can say w/ 100% certainty that AR did not set out to write the Vampire Chronicles as we know it now. When her original short story of IWTV was published in 1973, she didn’t plan for a 2014 VC that diverged from canon, sinking several ships in its wake (including Lestat/Rowan).
No, I don’t think the VC relies on Lestat’s romantic relationships specifically to keep the series interesting and keep ppl connecting with him. There are ships in canon other than whoever Lestat is throwing himself at! Armand/Daniel, for example. Marius/Pandora. Marius/Amadeo.
Of course, I’m sure some readers need the romance in VC in order to stay interested/connected to it, and that’s fine, too, but I would ask them to consider looking deeper.
TL;DR: Lestat is all about love, yes, but not necessarily in pursuit of specific ships. He’s filling a void that was made in his childhood and no one seems to be enough to fill it other than simply the pursuit of it. AR does throw in a little fanservice now and then, but I think she writes for deeper reasons, and the romance aspect – or lack thereof – is part of her exploration.
Hit the jump for more. I also address your doggie headcanon 😉
AR wrote the first short story basically to ask why her daughter died of leukemia. She wanted to interview God, the Devil, and/or Death himself. She wanted to know: Was she and/or her husband being punished for being bad Christians, or was their daughter a bad Christian? When a parent loses a child they want to know why. So she made Louis, and he answered her, “There was no reason, that girl was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don’t serve Heaven or Hell, I was just hungry, I’m sorry, I feel like shit. Also, blame Lestat.”
Then she had to interview Lestat and find out where the evil comes from. How evil can he be, when he was forced into vampiring, totally against his will?
Everything else that followed in the series stems from that central question. Why do bad things happen? Why do people do bad things? What if the person doing the bad thing did it accidentally? Or they feel terrible about it? What if they are trying to change and be better? Why do they want to be better?
Lestat strives to be good bc he wants love. He is making up for an enormous void, his formative years spent mostly unloved and untouched, a childhood in which the only love he got was from his animals, the teachers in the school he briefly went to, the theatre troupe he ran off with, and a teensy bit from his mother. When he expressed himself, he was often shot down, and with beatings.
He knows the equations he’s been taught:
Be Good —> Get Loved.
Give Love —> Get Loved.
Be in Control —> Take Love.
So I think his huge heart is a hungry one, he can’t get enough, and he can’t seem to get enough from one person. I think he’s afraid of commitment. To commit to one person is to risk that person having too much control.
Having lots of relationships, well, I do think AR was doing a little fanservice when she set him up with women. That was probably a response to so many POTP begging her to set him up with a woman for a change.
But I on the other hand, I feel like alot of his dating record is unsurprising. Who can predict their future lovers? I think we can all learn from our past relationships, and that improves subsequent ones. Lestat does tend to repeat some mistakes and he does have issues with consent in relationships, but he at least is good at confessing these things and presumably working on them.
We all agree Lestat is a dog person!
He had a pack of them as a mortal, and yes, I think he’d love to own a bunch of fluffy dogs that make him happy! But dogs do not like vampires:
“I’d expected to hear from [the dog] before this time, for surely it would pick up my scent, know instinctively that I wasn’t human, and then begin to sound its natural alarm of growls and barks. Dogs had done that enough to me over the centuries, though they don’t always. Sometimes I can entrance them and command them. But I feared the instinctive rejection and it always sent a pain through my heart.” – Lestat, Tale of the Body Thief.
That’s part of what made Mojo so special, that he seemed to override whatever natural dog instinct with love for Lestat ❤
Lestat also has expensive tastes in terms of furniture and fashion, and that’s incompatible with having a pack of dogs. People with even one dog have to dog-proof their home to some extent or risk sacrificing things to a curious doggie.
And plus he’s a wanderlust, he likes to just up and leave for long periods, and he can’t leave a pack of dogs with Louis to babysit. Plus, he knows he can’t be there for all those puppies during the day when they need to be walked and run around, so I would imagine he would have to set them up to be taken care of on someone’s huge farm or wherever so he can play with them occasionally when he needs a good dose of animal therapy ❤
//So five hundred years ago, I took requests for fics. sheepskeleton asked to see something about Daniel emerging from his madness and the transitory period under Marius’ care, where their relationship turned from caretaker and mad man into something more even-footed and solid. I have no idea if I’ve done that justice, but here I offer a series of vignettes spanning several months, of Daniel slowly crawling out of that hole under Marius’ careful watch.
It’s about 1,900 words, and mostly under the cut to spare your dash. Thanks to damnitarmand for a quick beta read. Sorry for any typos I’ve missed. I’m sure there are plenty.
—–
It sounds cliche, but the first time I really emerge from the haze of madness, the colors of my model world look brighter. Clearer, too, like I’ve been seeing through fogged up lenses and suddenly the glass is clean. I set down the paint brush. I’ve been painting tiny green pine trees and gluing them to a mountain. It looks good, exactly like the world seen from a plane. That real. Who knew the reporter boy was secretly a miniatures prodigy?
Cold washes over me, making my ivory skin tingle. Just how long have I been here, putting together model worlds and laying tiny train tracks? From the look of things, a while. But I don’t know. And that’s fucking terrifying.
I stand, pushing back from the table. The sleeves of my gray shirt are covered in splotches of paint and glue. I push them up over my elbows. My jeans are marked with more paint streaks, and paint covers my hands. It’s under my fingernails. Suddenly I feel itchy and need to wash. I find the restroom down the hall and scrub, paint turning the water in the sink blue, green, and then a muddy brown. I stand there washing until the water runs clear but it’s not enough. I still feel dirty so I keep washing, standing over the sink like Lady Macbeth, watching soapy water swirl down the drain until Marius comes and turns off the tap.
He gives me a hard look. Serious, but not angry.
“Come, Daniel,” he says, and puts his arm around my waist.
“There was paint…” I start. I glance back at the sink as he leads me toward a bedroom. I recognize it, vaguely, as my own. The one given to me when Marius brought me here. The bedspread is a deep purple and the curtains are thick, with heavy blinds behind them to block out the sun. I have not slept here often. Usually I pass out in front of my craft table. He walks me to the bed and pulls off my shoes.
“I can do that,” I say, sharply.
“Of course,” he says, but not like he really believes it. When he leaves, I pull the purple cover over my head and cry and I don’t even know what I’m crying about.
ooc: btw this is p random but i felt the need to voice my opinion so if you’re not interested feel free to ignore it!!
See, I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about Marius’ personality, not only here, but among good part of VC fans who I’ve came across in the past regarding his book Blood and Gold. I would like to point some things that I find important and that maybe would help you to have a second thought about it.
I reblogged from the source and cut it for length, but give this a read, this is very well-said, and applicable to many of the problematic characters in the VC.
They were human once, they’re not perfect creatures. I think if there was one message AR really wanted us to take away from the entirety of canon, it would probably be: These characters are like us, imperfect, searching for answers, longing to belong, to love, and be loved in return.
Some choices made in pursuit of those things are impulsive, some are well-planned, some had terrible results in retrospect, but hindsight is 20/20. We can only learn from the past and try to make better choices, moving forward… ask for forgiveness for our trespasses and strive to forgive those who trespassed against us ❤
When I read Blood and Gold for the first time, I felt a slight emptiness, and that familiar feeling of disappointment in the pit of my stomach after knowing closely some of his choices and attitudes – and more than that; his true persona, after all. But after a while thinking about it, I realized that no matter how wrong he was by some of his choices, each one of them made who he truly is: selfish, yes, but compassionate, an artist, melancholic, and undoubtedly proud, but good and gentle at heart.
He is far from being perfect even though we enjoyed to believe that he was due to numerous descriptions we had of him in TVA, TVL, QOTD and Pandora. But he isn’t. He commits mistakes as everyone else, and if we were to compare him to Louis, Lestat and Armand, for example, judging by all the years that Marius is alive, I honestly don’t think his mistakes were so numerous. Some of them were intense, and most of them regrettable, yes, but I do not think that makes him a “bad character” or that he is any less of what Lestat, Pandora, Armand, etc, describe in their respective books.
Only because he was described by many as a “sage”, a “philosopher”, etc, it doesn’t change the fact that before he was turned, he was also a human. And Marius, in my opinion, is one of the most “human” vampires among the coven. His mistakes were in it’s majority also ridiculously human, being driven by the impulse of his emotions.
So I think that instead of focusing only on the bad things, you also should remember how wonderful his good side is. How loving, caring, compassionate, intelligent and cultured Marius is.
Marius was not the only one to commit mistakes. And it is good that he did because it’s a nice reminder that not even “immortal beings” are perfect, no matter how godlike they appear to be.
Therefore, my point is: instead of simply judging and saying that he is a shitty character because he was not what you thought he was, give it a second thought. No one is made only by their good sides, nor by their mistakes alone.
To like him or dislike him is personal, though. Yet, to say that his character sucks only because you don’t like it…. it’s hella stupid and makes me hella pissed.
Bonsoir à toi, aussi, mon avocat gris 😀 Rereading the whole series, my gosh what a challenge and what fun! oh if only i could lay around reading books all day and sipping iced tea or an adult beverage that would be heaven siiiiigh…..
#pffffft Shut up Gaston #you’re like illiterate ok #Augustin de Lioncourt
Not sure which specific book you’re referring to, or if you meant that as kind of a silly observation, but I really enjoy how she jumps around! When you really consider these breaks in the “main” story, they’re like side dishes to a meal. When you really consider them you’ll find that those breaks are not so “random” after all, even if they are not connected to the actual plot. Not every piece of a story needs to be connected to the actual plot in order to make a story enjoyable. In fact it can keep you guessing, wondering whether you should keep this information in mind as the tale unfolds, or whether it was put there to throw you off the trail a bit!
Of course, #your headcanon may vary. If you choose not to accept some of these side stories, that’s fine, too.
There are alot of stories-within-stories in the VC. Characters tend to dig deeper and interview eachother. At one point, we have Lestat telling us what Marius told Lestat about what an Egyptian vampire told Marius about the origin story of the vampires written down in archives! That’s like 4 levels?! Interviewception.
In QotD,
from the beginning
Lestat tells us straightup that the story will be laid out like that:
“So we will move out of the narrow, lyrical confines of the first person singular; we will jump as a thousand mortal writers have done into the brains and souls of “many characters.” We will gallop into the world of “third person” and “multiple point of view.”
And by the way, when these other characters think or say of me that I am beautiful or irresistible, etc., don’t think I put these words in their heads. I didn’t! It’s what was told to me after, or what I drew out of their minds with infallible telepathic power; I wouldn’t lie about that or anything else.
I can’t help being a gorgeous fiend. It’s just the card I drew.
The bastard monster who made me what I am picked me on account of my good looks. That’s the long and short of it.
And accidents like that occur all the time.
Now, be assured: though I am leaving you, I will return with full flair at the appropriate moment.”
It depends where your headcanon stops in canon. If you accept all of canon, according to Anne Rice, “Daniel
and
Marius love each other very much” in Prince Lestat. daniel-james-molloy asked Anne Rice that question explicitly and was answered without a definitive Yes or No:
Yes, Daniel was romantically involved with Armand in QotD; Armand is Daniel’s maker. So if your headcanon stops at that book, then they are still a couple.
Armand was romantically involved with Marius in TVA and B&G; Marius is Armand’s maker.
Other people might accept all of canon, so for them, Daniel/Marius might be a real ship. They’re living together. Armand is living elsewhere with other vampires.
But the vampire couple in Only Lovers Left Alive live apart and still love each other deeply, so it all depends on what your own headcanon of what a ship is. Can it survive long-distance? Can it survive polyamory? Does it have to be monogamous?
I-want-my-IWTV 