Tears of Blood - Part 2
Apr. 2nd, 2013 02:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
perevisionEDIT: 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.)
no subject
Date: 2013-04-06 09:47 am (UTC)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.