perevision (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
perevision) wrote2013-04-02 02:32 pm
perevision) wrote2013-04-02 02:32 pm
Entry tags:
Tears of Blood - Part 2
EDIT: Forgot to link to Part 1.
Ok, so it took me forever to post Part 2 because I was going back and forth about just how much I wanted to reveal. Suffice it to say this is the condensed version, to spare all of us, and it does really get back to the TL;DR VAMPIRES GAH part.
When I was in my first year of art school in London, I met this boy. (Warning: This is the most confessional I have ever been online. You can check out of this bit now; scroll down to the next line in bold if you prefer. I will get back to vampires, I promise.)
My friend had been talking about him for a while: 'Oh, you have to meet him, you guys would get along great!' I had a picture in my head of a somewhat geeky guy, into comics and books and art, quiet and hopefully cute. I had no idea what was coming. When he walked into the room, I felt like I had hit a wall at full speed. I wish it was an exaggeration; I was dizzy and speechless. Thank God our friend was talking and we had films to watch.
It doesn't matter what he looked like. You've met one; guy or girl or fluid, you know what I mean. Maybe you were lucky and it happened to someone else, and you were the friend who lent a sympathetic ear in the aftermath.
I didn't make the connection at the time, but he was very much like my idea of Lestat: gorgeous, whip-smart, varying between self-deprecating and cocky as hell, just plain amazing. And of course, with a darkish past I only found out later, in bits and pieces, mostly from other people who knew him.
I ran over to his house as often as possible. I worked on art projects for school while he smoked and watched TV and asked me (sometimes mildly argued with me) about comics and my drawing process. We talked a lot. We went out a lot (mostly to Pizza Express). He disappeared a lot, often among a circle of adorers that later welcomed me into their post-him support group. He took me to my first ever Rocky Horror Picture Show. He had a way of giving compliments that both gave me a huge rush and left me feeling vaguely guilty, as if I'd offended him by showing him something to admire about me.
The worst part of it was that we weren't even involved.
There was no connection or relationship. There were...isolated non-sexual incidents, which in a very kind light could be called mixed signals, which kept me visiting and hoping for...I don't know what. When I finally got up the courage to ask him about it, he said breezily, not even looking at me: 'Oh, it's just a basic need I have once or twice a year.'
I wish I'd had the sense to leave right that instant and never come back. Or hurl something at his head. Instead, it took me until the very last night before he left for the States, when he asked me out for one last pizza dinner and made me a vodka tonic at his flat. I threw a roll of packing tape at him and shouted about how he made me feel like a doll, how just because people were weak to his stupid charm didn't mean he could treat us like entertainment.
He protested that it wasn't his fault, that he'd told me right at the beginning that he was kind of an asshole. He'd warned me.
'So you're poison, basically,' I said with as much sarcasm as I could, 'and it's not your fault if we choose to self-medicate? Thanks a lot.'
He took that as a compliment. He was pleased with it. I think that was when I started to understand what he was really like. I scabbed over long ago, but poison is in some way permanent and invasive, and the scar is still there.
This is what the Vampire Chronicles are about, a lot of the time. (OK, we're back to vampires, you can look now.) What people who romanticise vampires don't understand is that being a vampire IS poison. They drug people so they can kill them more easily, and to make someone live forever they basically kill them first and then drug them.
Lestat is special because while Armand and the covens and even the Ancient Ones follow rules set down for centuries or millennia, and Louis sets rules for himself, Lestat wants to break the rules as soon as he learns them just for the fuck of it. Lestat is a drug all by himself. He was like that even when he was alive. Nicolas loved him because Nicolas was a fatalistic asshole who thought Lestat would drag them both down to die in some sort of blaze of glory that would humiliate everyone concerned. But Lestat took everything and pushed back, and Nicki couldn't, so he went into the fire.
That screwed Lestat up so much that he was determined not to let Louis go the same way, and so he was manic and controlling and fucked Louis up in a completely different manner, with Claudia as collateral damage. We Twilight decriers** make such a big deal about Edward being a creepy control freak, but that is what vampires ARE. Their entire existence revolves around appetite and control.
Among all the vampires in these books though, my love and sympathy go out most to Armand, because he has lived his whole life and unlife just wanting to be kept, the way Marius kept Akasha and Enkil. He honestly believes he was made to be kept: born to it and created a vampire for it. First there was the monastery, then the Tartars and the brothel, and then Marius, and the cults. People kept calling him a leader because he was strong, cruel, vengeful, incredibly manipulative and cunning. Nobody realised that Armand learned to look for keepers. He just wanted to belong, not in the communal sense of the word but as a possession.
I thought his choosing Daniel was a sign of his growing out of it, or maybe moving from being kept to keeping someone himself, which isn't maturity but at least a step forward. But then I saw this fanart with the obvious height difference and I laughed SO HARD. Armand is a prime example of 'topping from the bottom'; he's such an imperious little shit but he just wants to be someone's precious, forever.
This only serves to illustrate their problems as a species, not just in these books: they've lived centuries, millennia, but always at the same age. They'll never know what it's like to suddenly have a hard time keeping the weight off, or to discover their boobs are migrating south, or even to live with a regrettable haircut for weeks. These are the most superficial things, but vampires don't even have superficial markers of time on their own bodies and so cannot grow without conscious effort. They are stuck, and if they don't watch themselves they'll fall into the same patterns of thought and behaviour for decades. This is why Lestat and Louis and the rest of them keep coming together and crashing into each other and apart like magnetised pinballs full of angst and hunger. They could do it forever and not even realise that it's a problem that can be addressed.
We can't afford that luxury, and we certainly don't realise that at the age we discover these books. We're either not old enough to have a pattern, or to recognise it if we do. So we think that it's all a great love story, that vampire lovers will live 'happily ever after'. (We forget it could easily be only one out of three.) That's why the Vampire Chronicles are just as 'dangerous' to read at fourteen as Twilight is. But for some reason 14-year-olds keep discovering it anyway, and we vampire romance survivors just have to live with that. At least we have the Internet now, and can relieve ourselves with fanfic and comics and interminable, self-involved blog posts. We have a support group. Which is more than the vampires seem to have, at present.
So the floor's open; I'm done. Want to share? We're here for you.
**Personally I can't stand Twilight because it's boring. Everything is presented in its most superficial aspect, able to be distilled to one word. Love is wonderful. Edward is flawless. Jacob is kind. Bella wants. And all the vampires are one-note characters, which is unforgivable for me as a vampire reader. (Sorry, I mean a reader of vampire fiction. I couldn't resist.)
Ok, so it took me forever to post Part 2 because I was going back and forth about just how much I wanted to reveal. Suffice it to say this is the condensed version, to spare all of us, and it does really get back to the TL;DR VAMPIRES GAH part.
When I was in my first year of art school in London, I met this boy. (Warning: This is the most confessional I have ever been online. You can check out of this bit now; scroll down to the next line in bold if you prefer. I will get back to vampires, I promise.)
My friend had been talking about him for a while: 'Oh, you have to meet him, you guys would get along great!' I had a picture in my head of a somewhat geeky guy, into comics and books and art, quiet and hopefully cute. I had no idea what was coming. When he walked into the room, I felt like I had hit a wall at full speed. I wish it was an exaggeration; I was dizzy and speechless. Thank God our friend was talking and we had films to watch.
It doesn't matter what he looked like. You've met one; guy or girl or fluid, you know what I mean. Maybe you were lucky and it happened to someone else, and you were the friend who lent a sympathetic ear in the aftermath.
I didn't make the connection at the time, but he was very much like my idea of Lestat: gorgeous, whip-smart, varying between self-deprecating and cocky as hell, just plain amazing. And of course, with a darkish past I only found out later, in bits and pieces, mostly from other people who knew him.
I ran over to his house as often as possible. I worked on art projects for school while he smoked and watched TV and asked me (sometimes mildly argued with me) about comics and my drawing process. We talked a lot. We went out a lot (mostly to Pizza Express). He disappeared a lot, often among a circle of adorers that later welcomed me into their post-him support group. He took me to my first ever Rocky Horror Picture Show. He had a way of giving compliments that both gave me a huge rush and left me feeling vaguely guilty, as if I'd offended him by showing him something to admire about me.
The worst part of it was that we weren't even involved.
There was no connection or relationship. There were...isolated non-sexual incidents, which in a very kind light could be called mixed signals, which kept me visiting and hoping for...I don't know what. When I finally got up the courage to ask him about it, he said breezily, not even looking at me: 'Oh, it's just a basic need I have once or twice a year.'
I wish I'd had the sense to leave right that instant and never come back. Or hurl something at his head. Instead, it took me until the very last night before he left for the States, when he asked me out for one last pizza dinner and made me a vodka tonic at his flat. I threw a roll of packing tape at him and shouted about how he made me feel like a doll, how just because people were weak to his stupid charm didn't mean he could treat us like entertainment.
He protested that it wasn't his fault, that he'd told me right at the beginning that he was kind of an asshole. He'd warned me.
'So you're poison, basically,' I said with as much sarcasm as I could, 'and it's not your fault if we choose to self-medicate? Thanks a lot.'
He took that as a compliment. He was pleased with it. I think that was when I started to understand what he was really like. I scabbed over long ago, but poison is in some way permanent and invasive, and the scar is still there.
This is what the Vampire Chronicles are about, a lot of the time. (OK, we're back to vampires, you can look now.) What people who romanticise vampires don't understand is that being a vampire IS poison. They drug people so they can kill them more easily, and to make someone live forever they basically kill them first and then drug them.
Lestat is special because while Armand and the covens and even the Ancient Ones follow rules set down for centuries or millennia, and Louis sets rules for himself, Lestat wants to break the rules as soon as he learns them just for the fuck of it. Lestat is a drug all by himself. He was like that even when he was alive. Nicolas loved him because Nicolas was a fatalistic asshole who thought Lestat would drag them both down to die in some sort of blaze of glory that would humiliate everyone concerned. But Lestat took everything and pushed back, and Nicki couldn't, so he went into the fire.
That screwed Lestat up so much that he was determined not to let Louis go the same way, and so he was manic and controlling and fucked Louis up in a completely different manner, with Claudia as collateral damage. We Twilight decriers** make such a big deal about Edward being a creepy control freak, but that is what vampires ARE. Their entire existence revolves around appetite and control.
Among all the vampires in these books though, my love and sympathy go out most to Armand, because he has lived his whole life and unlife just wanting to be kept, the way Marius kept Akasha and Enkil. He honestly believes he was made to be kept: born to it and created a vampire for it. First there was the monastery, then the Tartars and the brothel, and then Marius, and the cults. People kept calling him a leader because he was strong, cruel, vengeful, incredibly manipulative and cunning. Nobody realised that Armand learned to look for keepers. He just wanted to belong, not in the communal sense of the word but as a possession.
I thought his choosing Daniel was a sign of his growing out of it, or maybe moving from being kept to keeping someone himself, which isn't maturity but at least a step forward. But then I saw this fanart with the obvious height difference and I laughed SO HARD. Armand is a prime example of 'topping from the bottom'; he's such an imperious little shit but he just wants to be someone's precious, forever.
This only serves to illustrate their problems as a species, not just in these books: they've lived centuries, millennia, but always at the same age. They'll never know what it's like to suddenly have a hard time keeping the weight off, or to discover their boobs are migrating south, or even to live with a regrettable haircut for weeks. These are the most superficial things, but vampires don't even have superficial markers of time on their own bodies and so cannot grow without conscious effort. They are stuck, and if they don't watch themselves they'll fall into the same patterns of thought and behaviour for decades. This is why Lestat and Louis and the rest of them keep coming together and crashing into each other and apart like magnetised pinballs full of angst and hunger. They could do it forever and not even realise that it's a problem that can be addressed.
We can't afford that luxury, and we certainly don't realise that at the age we discover these books. We're either not old enough to have a pattern, or to recognise it if we do. So we think that it's all a great love story, that vampire lovers will live 'happily ever after'. (We forget it could easily be only one out of three.) That's why the Vampire Chronicles are just as 'dangerous' to read at fourteen as Twilight is. But for some reason 14-year-olds keep discovering it anyway, and we vampire romance survivors just have to live with that. At least we have the Internet now, and can relieve ourselves with fanfic and comics and interminable, self-involved blog posts. We have a support group. Which is more than the vampires seem to have, at present.
So the floor's open; I'm done. Want to share? We're here for you.
**Personally I can't stand Twilight because it's boring. Everything is presented in its most superficial aspect, able to be distilled to one word. Love is wonderful. Edward is flawless. Jacob is kind. Bella wants. And all the vampires are one-note characters, which is unforgivable for me as a vampire reader. (Sorry, I mean a reader of vampire fiction. I couldn't resist.)
wandered in via network, hi!
I also remember being 14 and finding enormous comfort in Rice's books and in her vampires, I think at the time it was that her characters were so powerful, so solid, so eternal, it was a comfort to me that people like that could exist when I myself was sort of a mess and wasn't sure how I'd make it to next year nevermind next decade. I was actually never in love with Lestat - I think it's because I read Interview with the Vampire first, so Louis was always my POV but not someone I fell for, and then I read Armand's book and COMPLETELY imprinted on him and Marius.
And I mean Marius was a pretty serious ass as well, so. But Armand's story was so compelling - I think mostly what I loved about him (and Louis and Lestat) was how their stories were all about these terrible, difficult traumas that all ended in survival and immense power and whatever. It's not that they were happy, precisely, but they had the sort of life I wanted, as a teenager. I just wanted adolescence to be over already.
Anyway, I wonder if you've seen the British show "Being Human"? That show is sort of mandatory companion piece, for me, for anyone who grew up with romanticized vampire fiction. It's actually specifically that deconstruction of the charming, angsty, weeping, beautiful vampire, and explores in very dark and serious tones what it's actually like to live as a murderer among your victims, attempt to be part of human society, get stuck in the same patterns and cycles. It's not exactly an optimistic show but it's very good at re-examining these tropes and taking apart the things you find desirable at 14.
Re: wandered in via network, hi!
I think at the time it was that her characters were so powerful, so solid, so eternal, it was a comfort to me that people like that could exist when I myself was sort of a mess and wasn't sure how I'd make it to next year nevermind next decade.
This is exactly how I felt! Somehow the notion of Lestat rock-starring his way through life in the face of everyone's threats was soothing to my constant anxiety. I loved watching them move back and forth through the ages more or less unchanged, and didn't consider the implications.
Oh God, Marius and Armand's relationship. Imprinted is the perfect word for it. I think that's what got me years later into Mary Renault. I am a sucker for that master-apprentice, erastes-eromenos kind of relationship, and all its awkward distributions of power. I'm actually making a comic at the moment that is working through some of those issues. (There are no vampires, just, um, merpeople XD) And yes, Marius is a colossal ass sometimes! I do enjoy it when he's all lecturing one second and then gets toweringly pissed off--his methods of anger management are uniquely entertaining. It's just that afterwards I didn't get to see how their relationship played out. I really wanted to see them dealing with the aftermath of what happened to them--Marius confronting his hubris, Armand working out his Electra complex...something.
Sorry, will stop rambling now except to say that I LOVE Being Human! I got up to Season 3 and it really gave me a pang to have to witness Mitchell make the choices he did. I like it a lot more than True Blood or any of the vampire things going on right now, especially for the inter-species best friend dynamics.
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I read VC at 16-17, starting with tVL -- I can't remember if I first went onto tQotD after that, or went back and read IwtV. I don't think I was in love with Lestat so much as I wanted, on some level, to emulate Lestat: and in tVL in particular, Lestat is more a rock star than he is a vampire. From his own character POV, he was a rock star because it suited his purpose, and as a sign of the age (much like Oda Nobunaga came back as a rock star in Mirage of Blaze). From my readerly POV, though I wouldn't have thought to express it this way at the time, it was the vampiricism that facilitated rock stardom, not just for Lestat but pretty much everyone who ended up in Armand's Miami house at the end of tQotD. That is, it was really a capitalist class fantasy of being propelled into the global super-elite. XD; These are the people who have perfect freedom to go anywhere and do anything -- they can literally fly under their own power -- and at the same time they exist in a sort of shadow world where they're not punished for their misbehaviour, and the masses they prey on are barely cognizant of their existence. They can only relate to each other, but they also can't relate to each other. I had the instinct, though (and I still think I'm correct on this), that the more elite you are in society, the easier it is to appreciate beauty. And the books were aligned on that point too.
There's this story about David Bowie in the 70s -- a journalist remarked that the soles of his shoes were factory-pristine, because he'd been going from plane to limo to hotel for as long as he'd owned them. He hadn't stepped in mud or on pavement for months.
It's also an exploration of the idea of immortality; warns you off, exhaustively explains the price. Like, out of all of them only Gabrielle really gets it, right? Because Gabrielle is a scorched-earth feminist story. Otherwise, as you say, all of them are precisely stuck as the person they were to begin with, and the younger they were the harder they find it. Claudia has it worst but Armand is next in line. The problem is, in the long run every human belief is illusion. XD; Five centuries later, Marius's sense of duty and Roman rationalism haven't gotten him any further down the path to enlightenment than Armand's barbarian mysticism and cruelty and teenaged love-need. It's why David's case is so interesting -- you wonder whether he'll have it the best, or the worst.
I think the thing about Louis and Lestat is, you're up to the armpits in their POVs where they seem terrible for each other and the narrative becomes this hilarious running tally of he-did-this no-he's-lying-it-was-really-that. (I learnt a lot about unreliable narration from AR.) At one point -- I was in my twenties by this point -- I took a step back and said to myself, you know, they were essentially married for like SIXTY-FIVE YEARS before it got really bad. When human beings stay married for 65 years we write a heartwarming blurb about them in the local paper. It's not an insignificant accomplishment for two people who're literally stuck at the same level of maturity they were at in their early twenties.
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Oh my gosh, I had to read this comment a million times before I could even formulate a reply, there's so much here XD There's something about the VC that opens a spigot in the psyche; no matter what else I could say about Anne Rice...
Lestat is a tremendous rock star in tVL, and that is what seduced me; which may have been AR's intention and, speaking metafictionally, was almost certainly Lestat's. It's true that vampires are pretty much power fantasies--rereading that too-short account of Armand building an empire on piracy, in QotD, I was kind of mad. I mean, it really is that easy for them. Which I guess is why they struggle so much with problems that humans often simply grow out of? And I love what you said about all human belief ultimately being illusion, and every single vampire no matter what apparent or real age having to deal with that on the same level.
And also in QotD Akasha pretty much culls them to the point that they either have to make lots more vampires or just exist and have relationships within this tiny pool, which is far more horrifying to me than blood-drinking or blowing people up with your mind. Isn't that the same thing that happened in Marius' day, when the elder put Akasha and Enkil in the sun? How did other vampires get made, after?
Gabrielle of all of them seemed the most adult to me. There was something Marius was saying about having to live out at least one whole lifetime to stay sane as a vampire, but even he can't have been more than thirty when he got kidnapped by Mael for
the Wicker Manthe god of the wood. And all his 'lifetimes' seemed to end violently: his human one, his one with Armand, and his life as Secret-Keeper. (I haven't read Pandora yet and I haven't read Blood and Gold for years; I should check.) But Gabrielle lived a whole life and pretty much had a natural death; I was fascinated by the way she described her own funeral and referred to herself distantly, when Lestat put her in her coffin. Of all of them, she does seem to grasp what you said about human beliefs being illusion; while the rest of them are still more or less the people they were, she's decided who she is as a vampire. Scorched Earth indeed.As for Lestat and Louis...
the narrative becomes this hilarious running tally of he-did-this no-he's-lying-it-was-really-that.
YES. I laughed and laughed at that comment! I'm kind of not in the same place about the 65-year 'marriage' though...my grands have had the same and it was misery and neuroses for pretty much everyone concerned. Of course they were bound by social norms, and Lestat and Louis are not; they chose to stay together--and in tVL get back together again, which really does say something for their genuine feeling for each other.
I'm really interested in where Daniel goes too; the madness was not a good sign to me but maybe it was something he had to go through, like Lestat's catatonia. Interesting to think that vampires have quarter-life/mid-life crises as well, although radically amplified--this freedom and the shock of being released from your illusions might have something to do with it.