enigmaticdiary

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Oh my god how did she make a book even more boring than queen of the damned

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I read tale of the body thief in two weeks snd and I really liked it. Im not sure how i did that, but i did. I want to make a long post for both qotd and totbt respectively before I get further in memnoch and start to forget shit

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The queen of the damned update: final

I finished it

I didn't like it

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so many louis misreads are just antiblackness. like accepting uncritically that he was a literal pimp (he was more of a madame / landlord / eventually the sex workers formed a co-op) and then so many people stack another lie on top of that, that louis being a pimp is *actually* recreated anywhere in his dynamic with armand.

on the show it is so clear that the master/servant thing is their mutual fantasy of the relationship as constructed by armand’s manipulations!

like i get that daniel called louis a pimp in a piece of dialogue but think for a second why daniel might’ve been wielding gender roles and antiblackness to make louis squirm. he is not being literally descriptive. characters on iwtv have complex motivations for everything they say and they are influenced by racial power dynamics.

anyways i was talking to @transmutationisms about this and he pointed out that armand’s experience of being sold into sexual slavery bore so little resemblance to the sex work that louis ran in new orleans that the only commonality is that they were both involved in the sex trade but to such different extents that it cannot be neatly replicated as “louis was a pimp and armand was a whore and now they’re really acting that out”. that assumption is so layered with antiblackness and bizarre gendered expectations and incuriosity about sex work that it nearly erodes the story being told on the show entirely. disrespectful!

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Queen of the damned update

The queen of the damned is the most interesting but boring book ive ever read in my life. But that isn't really saying much because i haven't read that many books in my life as of yet but currently it holds that title for me. I don't know how to describe it it's not necessarily a bad book and it's not Not good, but its not good or enjoyable in the same way iwtv or tvl has been for me.

I get its function right now in the grander story, it's a LOT of world building, a lot of new characters and histories to explore either in the remainder of this book or in books to come, but most of it has felt truly out of nowhere and overwhelming without the parts of the previous books that held my interest that it's been hard to really get into it.

the only chapter ive enjoyed in full was the devils minion chapter and even that felt so totally isolated from most of the set up that had been going on. Jesus, half of the book has really just been set up. i just want to get this over with I've really been reading this book since May or something, and all i really feel so far is neutrality that borders on resentment because i was hoping for another story to be really invested in but i just haven't gotten it. But maybe it'll get better in this second half

In any case some of my finer thoughts on things i have gotten past. As of writing this post i am 251 pages in. Marius and armand have just reunited.

Devils minion

Like i said i liked the devils minion chapter, regardless of my own feelings towards the fans of it in the realm of the show. the fandom has absolutely no bearing on my following thoughts, the show has a little bearing, but truthfully, not much. The show characters are so different to their book counterparts (daniel especially) that im able to seperate my feelings far enough as to not impact my enjoyment of the books. Anyway:

I thought the dynamic between armand and daniel was really fun and interesting, the fucked up vampire/human love of it all. I really liked armand chasing daniel all over the world, that the fascination in daniel was being treated like a game. But I kind of honestly lost interest in it when armand turned daniel. The genuine romance that AR tried to write between them didn't feel earned or deserved really, on Daniel's half.

Theres always been a strange air of superficiality in ARs writing to me, that's just how the tone of her writing comes off to me. Not in a bad way, i really like her writing, it speaks to me (because it's similar to how i write) and i like when scenes or interactions or whatever are able to transcend the superficial fantastical air and feels like something more genuine or believable. But armands romantic feelings for daniel, the desire to forsake his reservations about turning him and then doing so anyway didn't transcend past that threshold of genuineness for me. i just wasn't sold, is probably the simplest way for me to put it.

and i think it really just has to do with the fact that daniel is a bit of a nothing character to me. a character only really half realized, whose characterization has fully been at the whims of the characters around him (louis, armand, and inadvertently lestat as well) like. I don't know, he's just a guy to me. he was a cute boy in iwtv, gone for tvl, and comes back in qotd and in the chapter that he is reintroduced, given a name to his identity, there's not much space given to him and him alone before he meets armand and then by the end of the chapter, becomes a vampire at his now immortal companions hand.

the only concrete thing about daniel that stuck with me was his naïveté as well as selfishness to become a vampire/become more deeply involved with their kind, but once we see him again he gets just that. so now why do i care about him, why should I? I get why a character like daniel having such close proximity to armand in the way that he does can serve for insight into armands character, but like... it just circles back to my interest in armand alone, not daniels future as a vampire, or the path that their romance could take.

Anyway my thoughts boil down to: it's a fun chapter in isolation. The appeal of their dynamic that i was really into at the beginning of the chapter were lost by the end of it.

Talamasca and jesse

i like jesse, kind of. I don't dislike her at all from a general character standpoint, but at present im just a bit frustrated because of how separate she feels as a TVC character. I found it really amusing how meta her chapter felt, having a character who initially views the vampires as something completely fictional and improbable despite the fact that she literally sees ghosts. Like.. girl, you're fine with this one paranormal feat but not the other? but seeing this more """realistic""" perspective get broken down as she gets entrenched in the "fiction" of the in-world iwtv and tvl books was really fun.

But i thought her debut chapter was a slog for a large part of it, mainly just because of, once again, how seperate i feel it is from the things ive been enjoying tvc for.

David has me a bit charmed right now. Thats all i can really say about him at present.

Talamasca is funny to me. Like whats their end goal other than being nosy? Just a bunch of nosy ass bums 😭

Akasha

why are you white

Other stuff

i like khayman, pandora and maharet.

I like that post-akasha beating the shit out of him, marius is now disillusioned and resentful to both akasha and lestat because I too would be pissed off at both of them. Like i took care of you for 2000 years and then you suddenly feel like getting off your ass because of this dude that i invited into my house a single time? i would fucking CAVE lestats skull in but to be fair I want to do that all the time anyway.

I want to know more about marius and armand's history and their dynamic, past what we've already been given. Ive gotten past my initial burning resentment of marius —and don't get me wrong, i still don't like him. But i don't like lestat either and im still deeply fascinated by him. Im just at the point now where i can engage with his character past my personal distaste for him. Like there's a love between marius and armand, duh. And im really just... interested in it, from an objective standpoint. It's a core relationship and its here to stay, so I want to see what i can try to get out of it.

Like i dont know how to describe it, other than no I don't ship them. The dynamic is absolutely written romantically but at the same time, i get an absolutely bizarre adoptive father son type of love between them, just that the lines of intimacy between them has been breached and warped on account of the fact that marius is Most definitely a pedophile.

...This is way too complex for me to be able to get across properly so Im just going to stop trying for now. I really wish i was reading the vampire armand right now!

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Louis does have internalized homophobia yes but nonblack ppl in this fandom have a tendency to overstate it bc they don’t want to focus on the main issue he faces, which is antiblackness in a violent white supremacist world that believed he was savage and inhuman long before he ever became a vampire. Nonblack ppl are unable to view Louis as a multifaceted character who exists outside of his nonblack love interests, and because he is black they cannot imagine him as “relatable” by any means other than his queerness, so by only focusing on his struggles with his sexuality, they can circumvent having to engage seriously with his blackness and the plain reality that this is the superstructure that defines his life and the show.

You see ppl claiming that internalized homophobia was the main reason he fled to the church in 101, as if his Black mother wasn’t blaming him for the death of his Black brother who just committed suicide, as if his Black sister wasn’t dismissing his trauma in favor of remaining the golden child, as if he wasn’t struggling with his exploitation of Black women, as if he wasn’t dealing with the crushing cognitive dissonance that WEB Dubois called “twoness,” the fact of Black American men knowing that they are human, that they have personhood and interiority and complexity and fullness in a place that denies that over and over, in a place that deems you 3/5ths human, and Louis is part of the very first generation of Black Americans who were recognized as legally human rather than animals. And on top of that he is gay, which adds second burden on top of his Blackness, but it is concretely more dangerous for him to be a gay Black man than it would be to just be a gay [white] man. When he leaves Lestat’s house after their first time, it matters that he says “you couldn’t be an openly gay Black man [in new orleans]”—if the writers wanted to just say you couldn’t be an openly gay man they would've written that, but the phrasing is in such a way that the viewer knows these things are intertwined for Louis, and the choice to say openly gay Black man rather than “You couldn’t be Black and openly gay” tells us that his gayness is tethered to and informed by his Blackness, not the other way around.

But like most of the people that Louis encounters, whether it’s blatant white supremacists like the aldermen, or his white European partner who is constantly micro aggressive to Louis and their Black child and dismisses Louis’ struggles with racism bc he thinks that “not seeing color” is at all possible or safe for Louis in the way it is for him, or his nonblack Asian partner who uses Louis’ racial trauma to lynch him and his daughter and leverages his own separation from race to gaslight Louis to believing he is an aggressive irrational angry Black man for eight decades—like these ppl, nonblack (and some of Black fandom) is only interested in leveraging Louis’ trauma as a result of antiblackness to paint him as irrational (think of all the nonblack poc who speak over Black ppl in this fandom and assume that they operate with more “rationality” than Black ppl in fandom bc they don’t see things in black and white lmao) or they minimize the racism he faced and how it all frames his entire arc, from the first episode to the last, to pretend that vampirism suddenly granted some post racial paradise wherein Black viewer’s perception on microaggressions or benign racism is simply an attempt to make everything about race and minimize what white ppl go through (think of all the white Lestat fans who refuse to view Louis as anything other than gay, bc to engage w the racial power imbalance between him and Lestat is to paint a more complicated picture of their white fave that will reflect on them in ways they don’t want to admit, because then they’ll have to realize they’re not watching the show beyond color, that implicit antiblackness and racism permeates every single thing they say, and they have to face the culpability of whiteness in ways the show demands of Lestat and that they can’t face in themselves) or just straight up white supremacists who would replace louis with a King Kong caricature of an abusive and savage Black animal that is overly aggressive and takes out his anger through on a cultured, emotional, and lovelorn feminized white blonde for no reason other than his innate brutality (think of the racists claiming that Louis coerced Lestat into reproduction, that Louis provoked Lestat into violence by refusing to recognize Lestat’s delicate emotions, that claim Louis preyed on Armand’s child sexual abuse).

If Blackness is the primary sphere through which Louis navigates the world, then not only are the nonblack villains of both seasons fully culpable as benefactors in a world built on the foundation of antiblackness and the denial of logic and reason to Black ppl, not only is their abuse heightened by the politics of racial violence that Black ppl experience at the hands of white colonizers who even if they consider themselves liberal, refuse to see beyond self serving white guilt, and at the hands nonblack ppl of color who gladly and eagerly accept racial hierarchy so long as Black ppl remain on the bottom, but Blackness as primacy rather than his gayness and attraction to men aligns him first and foremost with Claudia—and since some of these women or socialized as women viewers can relate to Claudia’s girlhood and womanhood in understanding the solidity of her subjugation, Louis’ alignment with Claudia through the shared primacy of Blackness fully challenges any equivocating on abuse or manipulation or violence. If Louis is first and foremost Black, then he is first and foremost a victim of systemic oppression that they cannot flatten to mutual toxicity in interpersonal romantic relationships, and then Lestat’s actions must be read in this context, Armand’s actions must be read in the context. When they’re all three gay men, then nonblack gay viewers who are usually women or socialized as women can place these gay men on equal or nearly equal levels of culpability and flatten the power dynamics and violence that determine the nonblack abusers’ violence against a foundationally subjugated protagonist.

For all that (usually nonblack) ppl in this fandom claim to love monstrosity and to be unapologetic about Lestat and Armand’s villainy, they don’t actually want to deal with what the show is telling us enables their monstrosity—racism, patriarchy, classism, ableism etc at every level and always overlapping. If they accept that the abuse is intertwined with permanent and varying degrees of antiblackness, then the show showing us that Lestat only cheats on Louis with white women is no longer a coincidence but a white partner who is attracted to the opposite sex cruelly leveraging their privilege against his Black homosexual partner, and it’s not just an irrational and desperate love defining this dynamic, but a conscious homophobic degradation and racist microaggression that solidifies Lestat as a monster not because of the vampirism, but beyond it. If they accept that the abuse is intertwined with antiblackness, then Armand directing the lynching while he has a sexual relationship with Louis is not just a result of a desperate and broken mind weighed down by trauma, but the deliberate use of antiblackness by a nonblack man to maintain his power by enabling and enacting white supremacist violence against two Black people who are literally disenfranchised within a racist community, and then so too is Armand also a monster beyond the vampirism.

Not only do nonblack viewers refuse to recognize that Black characters possess interiority full stop, but they refuse to recognize that Louis possesses interiority through his Blackness, that being Black and reading him as a Black character first and foremost is already enough, and already gives us a full and rich framework to work through, even before all the other full-bodied aspects of his characterization come into play. There is a distinctiveness to Black queerness, to Black femininity or masculinity, to Black disability, to Black healing, to Black redemption, to Black joy and pride and fullness. The show is fully aware of the vast and infinitely unique nuances of Blackness, and to levels that television rarely sees, but nonblack and white viewers would rather claim that the only way to recognize Louis’ nuance is to make him into the racist caricature they’re more comfortable defaulting to for the Black ppl they do or don’t (usually don’t!) encounter in their real life and media, and I don’t think it’ll ever be less harrowing as a Black viewer to recognize how fully this fandom still isn’t ready for an openly gay Black protagonist. The overwhelming majority of ppl in this fandom never got over their anger at Louis being racebent into an unapologetically Black character and that the show is keeping him as a protagonist instead of sidelining him entirely for whiteness in a way that makes them more comfortable, that keeps this "just fandom," that enables their commitment to keeping Black people out of their escapist media, and no matter how direct the show is, no matter how much context or good faith we provide, they're never going to be ready and they are always going to hate Louis simply because he is Black. But when has the world ever been ready for Black anything? Louis is still the titular vampire. 

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WAIT THIS WASNT EVEN IN REGARD TO THE NEW EPISODE BUT I JUST GOT SPOILED HELPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP

How it feels to resist the urge to blacklist armand daniel and armandaniel off my feeds after i see the 90th devils minion post after every episode and no mention of or any sort of care given to louis

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could no longer resist 💔

How it feels to resist the urge to blacklist armand daniel and armandaniel off my feeds after i see the 90th devils minion post after every episode and no mention of or any sort of care given to louis

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episode 14

I dont have a lot of thoughts right now if im being honest because I'm still. frankly in shock about everything that occured in that episode. Just want to get these out while Im still awake and still feel this all extremely fresh. This isn't an episode analysis or anything. Just my feelings.

My feelings, right now. um. I won't say catatonic because I have gripped desperately onto my will to continue functioning but I certainly feel close to it. Felt far closer to that right after the episode ended (25 minutes ago as of me typing this sentence).

Is it embarrassing to admit that this episode left me like... physically affected? beyond crying and heart hurting. Like. I felt physically Numb. I still kind of do. Like i got ejected out of my body and i didn't realize it until I made the move to get out of my chair. I don't want to get into that further. But aside from that, i cried too. More than I thought i might.

I dont really cry at stuff! I haven't cried this season at all. (Edit: Sorry I lied i absolutely have cried this season. During ep 10 i believe) I think I cried once when I was watching season 1. I cried once while reading tvl. Like a single tear each, probably. I get really upset and emotionally invested when I'm engaged with things but I don't... cry. I was on the verge of tears for most of the episode if I'm being honest, but once claudia spoke up after Lestat's apology, the first tear fell.. And I kept crying until the end of the episode.

I was fucking mad. I was real fuckin mad. And thinking about it all is making me really mad again. It was hard for me to not feel like i was also up there on the stage with them. The psin of the trial hits differently when you're a black viewer. That shit was racist. to the core. Up and down fuckin racism and i was seething through the whole thing watching this. Essentially public lynching. I'm crying again!

I can't even think about it all clearly it's all so much to think about and trying to put my thoughts together so soon after the episode is making me confused because all my thoughts are just flooded with how horrifically angry i am.

It's a show yeah and I'm always embarrassed to be upfront with how deeply fiction can impact me but when claudia and madeleine died. I didn't feel like i was sitting in my chair in my room watching an episode of a tv show. i felt like i was in that theatre, helpless, watching a part of me die up there!!! it feels like something died in me!! and it's so fucked up because I knew what was coming i was preparing myself the whole season and i feel like me trying to brace myself just made it all the worse because there was no way I would have ever come out of this episode feeling any different to how i currently do. blind, unbraced, it don't matter.

God fuck this show, man

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How it feels to resist the urge to blacklist armand daniel and armandaniel off my feeds after i see the 90th devils minion post after every episode and no mention of or any sort of care given to louis

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I forgot i have this blog to talk abt iwtv. I will talk.

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Hey, sorry, I just saw a post where you mentioned Anne Rice having abuse apologia (pedophilia and incest) in her work and I was wondering if you could explain that a little more? I’m kind of afraid to google it

hi! i assume you’re referring to my post on the show’s treatment of incest as a theme?

in any case, i hope that i can clarify a little. i’m actually gonna turn to a couple academic sources, because i’m lazy and i don’t feel like writing too much.

but, before i even get into the books, some background on anne rice.

while i do believe rice's fictional work does reproduce a discourse of abuse apologia, particularly with regards to pedophilia, and that you can arrive to that conclusion simply from reading the text, without any extraneous knowledge about the author, ultimately my opinion of rice’s fiction is inseparable from my knowledge of her real-life beliefs, more specifically, her defense of child molester carleton cajdusek and of a bdsm erotica novel about thomas jefferson and sally hemings.

in august 1997 she left this message on her "fan voice mail" still transcribed and public on her official website as it was at the moment of her death, over 20 years later:

O.K. I just read a book I recommend. It's called THE DEADLY FEAST by Richard Rhodes. The book centers around a man named Carleton Gajdusek. Carleton Gajdusek is a Nobel Prize winner and he's in prison--apparently for fondling a 14 year old in a shower. I have not seen the court record and I'm not in any way qualified to judge what goes on. All I want to say is that I highly recommend that you get the book. That the contribution of Carleton Gajdusek to medicine and to science has been fantastic and that I personally am looking into the whole question of child molestation, children's rights, because it concerns me. I remember being a young adult, and I remember being real angry that I wasn't allowed to do things that other adults were doing. I was working full time and I was living in a rooming house and I didn't like being classified as a teenager, because somebody wanted to sell me something expensive. I know I sound angry--I am. I am angry. But we've got to revise our concept of teenagers in this country. If we want to stop the crime in this country we've just got to realize that 14 and 15 year old people are adults, they are not children. And leading them to believe that there is a fundamental difference between play killing and real killing.

in 2015, an author by the name of "Fionna Free Men" published on amazon an ebook called Thomas Jefferson's Mistress, a "Werewolf Fetish Vampire MILF Sex Slave" [sic] about sally hemings, which you can see on webarchive here. author jenny trout published a call to boycott this book, and anne rice in turn called for people to organize against this boycott. there are screenshots and more details here. the situation isn't as clear cut as anne rice going on record to say writing bdsm erotica of a real enslaved child's systematic rape and abuse by the grown man who owned her is perfectly okay, but that she of all people would use her platform to speak up in defense of this bullshit, in my opinion, speaks to how little her ideology had changed since 1997.

i’ve failed to find a full copy of Anne Rice and Sexual Politics: The Early Novels by James R. Keller (and i would be endlessly grateful to anyone who found it for me), but this extract articulates my position fairly well —that is, that you can’t separate the art from the author when the author so intentionally sought to make herself one with her art:

In Michael Riley's Conversations with Anne Rice, Rice asserts that she finds the pictures of naked children in Vogue "very erotic." She then goes on to describe the "sensuous enjoyment" that she experiences when showering her children with kisses and hugs, initially a rather bold admission from a mother and a mainstream writer. However, in her subsequent explanation, she very rapidly distances herself from any impropriety, so much so that she completely eviscerates the concept of the erotic, implying that she means nothing more unconventional than maternal affection, an interest in watching her son grow “big and strong". The backpedaling is very clear in the exchange. The author wants credit for the shocking suggestion, but she does not want to face the social stigma that would attend such an admission. (...) the author wants to raise eyebrows and to perpetuate an outrageous public persona, and yet at the same time, she does not want to be taken seriously. In her fiction and in her initial assertions about children, she appears to be endorsing pedophilic desire. (...) The author even offers a defense of such sexual desire in her biography Prism of the Night, where she suggests that some children are mature enough to negotiate a sexual relationship with an adult and that sometimes the child is even the aggressor. If Rice were to leave these ideas in the world of her fiction, there would be no issue. However, she clearly considers the idea a philosophical position about sexual repression in our society, and she even flirts with the concept in the public characterizations that she makes of her family. Yet as with other issues, the ideas are not ones that she is entirely capable of owning. (...) The argument that she is not obliged to be what she writes does not particularly apply because authors of erotica have often been defined by the stigma associated with their subject. Also, the effort to define her public image as an eccentric and a sexual dissident erases the dividing line between her fiction and her reality.

he goes on to put rice’s eroticization of pedophilia within the chronicles in context, breaking down the unmistakably homophobic rhetoric that permeates the entire series, in a couple of pages which i found to make a very solid argument: 

Here we must move away from our concentration on family politics to address those myths that are commonplace within right-wing, homophobic discourse. Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles perpetuate many of the most troublesome and hostile stereotypes, even those that have proven most effective in impeding the progress of homosexual demands for social equality. Perhaps the most destructive of all heterosexist delusions involves the association of gays and lesbians with pedophilic desire. (...) In such a volatile political environment, Rice's portrayal of same-sex desire between adults and adolescents, a passion that seems to lie at the heart of her vision of vampirism, should not escape interrogation.

george haggerty makes a similar argument, and you can read his essay here:

Rice makes it immediately clear, however, that this world of male-male desire cannot be satisfying. For all the homoerotics of these volumes, Rice seems unable to create a bond between two men that is more than the symptom of a corrupt and corrupting culture.

there’s still something to be said about how the vampires in the chronicles serve as both object of abjection and subjects of identification, which the next essay i’ll mention touches on but doesn’t explore in depth. in the vampire chronicles, vampires are meant to be at once repulsive and attractive to readers, functioning as sympathetic heroes while they behave as evil monsters. 

this anti-hero role allows rice the kind of plausible deniability that keller lays out: her vampires can be a homophobic caricature and a (poor) attempt at “gay representation” at once, because it’s up to the reader to decide whether to identify with the monster or reject this identification. this is a technique that vladimir nabokov executes very well in lolita, where we are compelled to identify with the pedophile narrator so that we can understand a predator’s mindset, and there are moments in the chronicles where i’d argue that rice pulls it off, but she overwhelmingly fails in her attempts to walk that line, and the overall result of the series is one that reads as straightforward abuse apologia. i’ll circle back to this later.

now, back to the specific topic of pedophilia and incest. 

while i wouldn’t say i agree with every strand of reasoning in this essay, and it’s definitely very 1990s sex wars feminism, i think “Abuse and Its Pleasures: Compensatory Fantasy in the Popular Fiction of Anne Rice,” by Annalee Newitz breaks down the issue very well in these choice passages:

…the heroes in Rice’s novels have in common one basic trait: they feel marginalized or abused, but learn to use their victimhood as a form of empowerment. Her characters often become powerful, wealthy, or famous by taking up the tools of their oppressors—and revaluing their victimization as something pleasurable and special. (...) By representing abuse within a contained, fictionalized setting, one might say that Rice generates a therapeutic “safe space” in which readers can experience and master their anxieties about abuse. And to a certain extent, I want to allow for this possibility in my analysis. But there is also something deeply troubling about the way Rice invites readers to deal with their anxieties. For ultimately she offers what I will call an “anti-therapeutic” resolution to abusive situations: her abused characters gain power by sustaining and even celebrating their trauma.

newitz says:

Louis and Claudia become inseparable, and Louis considers their relationship to be a union between “Father and Daughter. Lover and Lover” (Interview). Rice offers many descriptions of Claudia’s childish sensuality, heightening our sense that it is precisely her status as a child that makes her so sexually alluring to her “parent” Louis.

and later, writing in the sibling, parent-child, and cousin incest in the mayfair witches books, she adds:

By blurring the line between parent and child, Rice generates a fictional space in which children can be cast as perpetrators of child abuse.

this essay precedes the publication of the vampire armand by a couple years, but the rhetoric in that book, and the way armand is written from the vampire lestat onwards all fall squarely within the pro-pedophilia discourses that newitz and keller above describe. armand is “seductive” and “irresistible” precisely because of his “youth” and “innocence,” elements which become integral to his character as the chronicles go on. the first section of his solo novel is dedicated to lengthy erotic descriptions of his sexual encounters with marius, which are presented as pleasurable and desirable and, of course, distinctly different from the violent rapes and beatings that he’s been through. 

marius is his owner but a benevolent one and, like mona mayfair, armand is made out to be a sexually precocious child that seeks out and seduces his abuser, demanding for their sexual intimacy to grow and eventually asking to be made into a vampire.

while there are moments in the book that invite a reading of armand as a victim in denial, presenting the reader with a disfigured perspective of the abuse he endured to cope with his own trauma, once put in context with rice’s other work and her personal politics it’s impossible to interpret this novel as anything but propaganda: she was very aware of her platform and reach when she publicly stated that she believed children of fourteen should legally be considered adults when it came to sexual consent, and not two years later she wrote the vampire armand. the connection can’t be ignored.

another aspect of her work that i think could lend itself to a dual interpretation if read in isolation, but ultimately only serves as evidence of the deeply-held ideologies she’s reproducing in her books, is her sympathetic portrayal of abusers. again from newitz: 

While Lestat is a cold and manipulative character in Louis’ story, we discover in The Vampire Lestat that Lestat has himself been used and hurt. Like Lasher, Lestat tells a story about his painful intimate relationships which is intended to solicit readers’ sympathy and make his crimes against Louis and Claudia both understandable and forgivable. In these monster stories about child abuse, all of the characters ultimately appear to be victims in the end. Rice invites readers to feel deeply ambivalent about characters who are abusive: at any moment, we might discover that these abusers are victims too, and therefore we cannot hold them responsible for their cruelty to others. The safe space where Rice stages and masks sexualized child abuse is therefore a safe space for both perpetrators and victims. It is a space where the line between victim and perpetrator is impossible to draw, and therefore Rice makes it impossible to judge whether or not child abuse is in fact abusive at all.

(you can find the full book, Creating Safe Space: Violence and Women's Writing, ed. Tomoko Kuribayashi and Julie Tharp, on anna’s archive.)

yes, yes, depiction is not endorsement and so on and so forth. of course, abuse is one of the most prevalent themes in the gothic and there’s no doubt that making the monster a sympathetic object of desire is a staple of the genre. it’s up to us to triangulate the topics portrayed in her novels, the treatment these topics receive, and what we know of rice’s real-life beliefs to interpret her work. 

one of the aspects we can analyze when looking at treatment are narrative patterns and, while simplistic, punishment-reward goes a long way. in rice’s vampire chronicles, victims of rape and abuse must fit one of a very narrow selection of roles. keep in mind that the chronicles both make vampiric assault akin to and distinct from sexual assault, so the allegory gets muddy at times, but here’s how i would break it down: 

good survivor, gets rewarded: they are violated against their will and firmly refuse the assault, but they don’t overindulge in “whining” and dwelling on what’s happened to them, insteading choosing to embrace it and move on (e.g. lestat, david, marius) 

bad survivor, gets punished: either they “ask for it,” sometimes changing their mind at some point, which makes them “deserving” of the bad things that happen to them following (e.g. lewis, merrick, armand); or, particularly in the case of children, even if they did not “ask for” the initial violation (e.g. claudia, armand, merrick) they are later revealed to be, as i mentioned, cunning and seductive, and thus similarly “deserving” of their downfall 

revenge on the abuser, gets punished: following from the first division, “bad survivors” are shamed, punished or outright destroyed for taking revenge on their abusers or for wanting to overthrow the abusive institution (e.g. claudia, akasha)

forgiveness for the abuser, gets rewarded: on the other hand, “bad survivors” get a sort of narrative redemption, and “good survivors” cement their position in this role, by forgiving and loving their abusers, often recognizing the abuser had only good intentions all along (e.g. lewis with lestat, lestat with magnus, armand with marius)

these overarching discourses that run through the entire chronicles, coupled with the eroticized depiction of abuse and particularly child abuse, to me solidify the interpretation of the chronicles as uncritically reproducing abuse apologia and pedophilia apologia as the only viable one. trying to read the chronicles as a whole as a critical, self-aware narrative simply doesn't hold.

however, i think there might be more merit to an interpretation of rice's treatment of incest as critical. but the overwhelming fetishization and eroticization of the subject across her books, alongside with the portrayal of most of her victims of incestuous abuse as seductive and, if not “initiators,” then willful participants, ultimately leads me to conclude that, if she was trying to construct a purposeful problematization of incest, she failed.

(now we’re circling back around!)

just like she failed in her attempts to toe the line between a sympathetic villain who’s portraying their victim from a distorted perspective, and outright villainizing and narratively punishing said victims.

(not that i believe all victims should get happy endings or all abusers should get their narrative comeuppance, of course. actually, let me make a general disclaimer, since i’m releasing this answer into the wilderness: going back to nabokov, there are people who read lolita all the way through and still came away from it still identifying with humbert humbert, and i don’t think that’s a failure in the writing, but in the reading. not even the most skilled of writers are spared from being misinterpreted… and anne rice wasn’t among the most skilled of writers, though she did have a couple strokes of genius. art as a whole would be poorer if bad artists didn’t get to make and share stuff, just like it would be poorer without haters and critics. so anne rice got to write some ideologically indefensible bullshit, and we get to call her an abuse apologist on the internet! such are the wonders of free speech.)

anyway, i think that’s pretty much all i have to say on the topic, so, sorry for the wall of text, i hope this answered your question. and if it didn't, or if you just want to read a bit more, i definitely think newitz’ piece and the part of keller’s essay “Interrogating the Vampire: Heterotextuality and Queer Reading” that’s available for preview here are both worth it.

ps: and again, if anyone can find me that book, or that essay, in full, i’m very curious to know what conclusions the author reaches. 

[enigmaticdiary]

At the moment i am 60* or so pages into queen of the damned and I have yet to have any meaningful opinion of any kind on it. A lot of set up from characters i dont really care about.... Im at the beginning of Pandoras section and im interested to know more about her, but that's really all im feeling.

I laughed when marius got folded by akasha

[enigmaticdiary]

Putting this account to good use to say I looooooooooove louis de pointe du lac soooo muchhhhhhhh. None of you understand the insane feelings I harbor for this woman in my heart SIGH. I am forced (by no one) to witness terrible takes on her character everyday (overexaggeration) on twitter and it is disheartening and makes me want to throw cement blocks at peoples heads (Not An Exaggeration.) but then i have to remember that i am smarter than these people (objective fact) and i will love louis to make up for their lack of love. and i understand the show and i LOVE LOUIS

DO YOU FUCKING HEAR ME!

[enigmaticdiary]

and so i have been thinking thoughts...

elicited from the new trailer. copy and pasted from my discord cause i do all my thinkin there n_n;;

claudia + louis

when i think back to the book and the movie claudia was obviously an extremely important turning point in louis' life but it never felt like she was... the center of it you know? despite the fact that she was that glue that kept louis tethered to anything human in him.

but the book felt like he was just telling his story to be a. Sad pathetic man thing for the sake of it. cause he had no purpose to exist alone. to exist without claudia or lestat (or armand but their dynamic is. different and dicier) but after claudia is killed something about her presence and the years she spent with louis while alive felt... shrugged off in a way? and its likely because she didn't really have much of an identity outside of him and lestat which is understandable because she was significantly more vulnerable in the book than in the show, so she lacked that autonomy to have that choice to exist outside of them.

and when madeleine was brought into the picture for her to get that autonomy it was unfortunately already too late...

~~[mild separation of thoughts because i left to take a shower]~~

theres a few things i want to mention. just thoughts in my head. claudia dies fighting HARD for her autonomy as a person and a vampire. in comparison to louis who in all honesty has (DEBATABLY) lived without a shred of having his own autonomy. with lestat, lestats love (as claudia very smartly puts it) keeps him in a box. louis is financially dependent on him as a black man in the jim crow era once he loses the azalea, hes cut off from his family, he has NO ONE.

the brief time of just him and claudia is a good moment in time for both of them , trying to discover vampiric history together(tho in the show it looks like before they get to paris its gonna be absolute dogshit in comparison to the book), but in louis' case i feel like its guided by guilt and some form of obligation, because if he didnt go with claudia–who was already set to do this traveling alone before lestat dragged her back–where WOULD he have gone? stayed in new orleans with lestat in the dump just waiting to crawl out? i think he would sooner kill himself if he was left alone like that.

with armand…………… loumand is definitely better than loustat in extremely complex ways that i cant put into words right now but simultaneously even worse because of HOW armand preys on louis. there is absolutely love between them and i wont deny it but armand is so INSANELY dependent on the love of others to give meaning to his existence that he leverages louis' weaknesses and frailities to ensure that they will spend an eternity together. like he was plotting from the second he met louis and claudia. he kills claudia and madeleine, which then makes louis kill all the other vampires of the coven, so that there is no one left, NO ONE for louis to be able to turn to for solace.

i think that him remembering what actually happened to him up until the present is so important to him because he'll finally be able to realize that he hasnt been allowed to properly exist for himself the entire duration of him being a vampire. and maybe he can decide what he wants to do, for himself.

devil's minion... (in the present)

[these thoughts are referring to a tweet that wonders if armand is going to end up alone in the end. note: i am not versed in devil's minion lore. i'm getting there but as of this post i have not reached it]

saw this [the tweet] and audibly exclaimed GOOD

i love armand but the guy is genuinely evil and has wronged every single character hes come across including lestat which i find is hard to do

I know ppl are excited for armandaniel and devils minion but Im not..going to lie ive been REALLY skeptical of it and how it would be explored in the context of the show without severely wronging louis and doing him EXTREMELY dirty.

people are allowed to like it in the bubble of the books but theres a really big shift in dynamic for the show in the fact that ... armand has definitely done... Something to daniel and louis, of what i cant say. but with the way that things are going, an ending in which daniel sides with armand after finding out exactly what armand did to louis and claudia in paris does NOT sit well with me?

and i love loumand but I am so uneasy about the inevitable breakup in regards to whats gonna happen AFTER it. I feel like daniel now is wise enough to not chase after a guy who is diabolically selfish and broken and leave louis behind to live out the vampire fantasy dreams of his youth. and in the trailer too im getting. Loudaniel vibes in terms of reconciling their past with the previous interview. And Heres my theory for Devils minion BUT ITS LOUDANIEL INSTEAD OF ARMANDANIEL (1/689)

[enigmaticdiary]

Tonight i start reading queen of the damned

[enigmaticdiary]

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