darthcannizard - Tumblr blog

[darthcannizard]

“how did you get into writing” girl nobody gets into writing. writing shows up one day at your door and gets into you

[darthcannizard]

christmas louis for y’all

[darthcannizard]

Xena warrior princess! For my amazing discord server mod Courtney - we did a little secret santa gift exchange within the mod team ✨

[darthcannizard]

I've created a discord lads, come have fun and interact with scraggly beard and the mun.

Rules:

No fighting or insults.

This is a safe space for everyone including the lgbtq+.

If rping, I don't expect novella, but please no single liners. As a writer, I love creativity and certainly expanding the universe in detail.

Be kind to one another.

You don't have to understand historical accuracy (I'm certainly still learning).

Hoist the colours and set sail to our horizons!

[darthcannizard]

sometimes i think about gay people who lived centuries ago who thought they were all alone who imagined a world where they could live openly as themselves who met in secret spoke in code defied everything and everyone just to exist and i’m like..i gotta sit down. whew i gotta sit down

[darthcannizard]

WWI real photo postcard depicting a French and a British soldier getting very cordial indeed

[darthcannizard]

Then let me introduce you to this here, which is my obsession since a few weeks. Agnar and Marcus live rent free in my heart and in my daydreams.

I think a gay romance novel between a roman legionary and a germanic barbarian would fix me.

I would honestly write it myself, but I have the writing skills of a 4 grader on Wattpad.

[darthcannizard]

Silver-plated Roman cavalry helmet found in Nijmegen, dating 2nd half of the 1st c. AD. The helmet itself is made of iron.

[darthcannizard]

The best preserved 'Lorica Segmentata', Roman Plate Armour in the world to date, Corbridge Roman Site Museum, Hadrian's Wall, Northumberland

[darthcannizard]

The Warren Cup. Roman, c.10 AD

[darthcannizard]

Count von Krolock is in my opinion one of the best movie and monster dads of all time. I mean, it's a movie from the 60s and he calls his son a sensitive boy, he openly shows affection towards him and tries to find a forever companion for Herbert. I don't see an ounce of any negativity in the scenes with the Count and Herbert. Oh. And Alfred/Herbert is a wonderful pairing. Coughcough but also, all the long dark nights the Count wants to use for talking to the professor coughagain

[darthcannizard]

devils~

You can't scare me 'cause I'm the devil too

[darthcannizard]

I bet octopuses think bones are horrific. I bet all their cosmic horror stories involve rigid-limbs and hinged joints.

[darthcannizard]

I Had a Great Idea

for a Humans are Weird story.

So human babies REALLY need to be touched. Its totally critical for development. Small babies can literally die if you don’t cuddle them enough.

But imagine that the aliens are more like reptiles, in that they just sort of hatch and their parents feed them or stay around (and presumably, like, educate them, since they’re intelligent aliens), but don’t carry them around or cuddle in the same way.

So one of them gets stuck with a human baby that they’re responsible for and of course, they go ask a xenobiologist or someone ‘what do you do for a human baby, they’re all weird and squishy’.

And the scientist says: well, you have to stroke them. Like actually pick them up and stroke their skin.

Why, says the alien, what could that possibly accomplish. Does it make their skin tougher. Will they grow proper scales.

No, no, that’s just what human skin is like, you just… you have stroke them or they won’t grow right. They get a stroking-deficiency and can die.

[darthcannizard]

1, 2, 4 and a real BOOMMM moment in 3 that will let us breathless and yearning for season 3.

things i want to see in season 2

daniel getting fucked nasty in every inch of that apartment

armand's fangs, armand covered in blood, etc.

daniel meeting lestat in the finale. i would love a 1994 film ending style first meeting but i'll settle for anything. as long as it's funny. and bitchy.

claudia is a lesbian

[darthcannizard]

I really think the "God" whom Armand serves is indeed Lestat himself. A Lestat after Memnoch the Devil - redeemed, full of empathy, powerful.

[darthcannizard]

I remember reading Memnoch and thinking: this is the last book. The is the last we'll ever read about Lestat. I remember being devastated, my heart crushed for days. My heart was weeping for him and still I thought: he is such a strong being and even if he seems absolutely destroyed by what happened he will never give up and succumb. Lestat reappears in Merrick, but I think the next book after Memnoch where he directly addresses us as readers is Blood Canticle from 2003 and that is an 8 year absence. Looking back in time the impact of waiting for so long to hear him speak to us again doesn't seem so big, but it was for me bc I already was a fan and reader back then when Body Thief and Memnoch were published. And it was a long waiting to read the words again: here is the Vampire Lestat.

Okay, now… that was one heartbreaking and messed up ending if ever I saw one.  I knew this story was going to end sadly, but damn, and knowing that, at least at the time, Anne Rice had meant for “Memnoch the Devil” to be the last book in the series, it makes the ending hit that much harder. 

First, I mean, I know Armand isn’t dead, since there’s more books after this and he’s in them, but shit, it still hurt like hell the way he just… lets himself burn up in the sun.  Making it worse is that I have to assume that’s what Anne Rice really intended his end to be at the time, and knowing how it was connected to Lestat himself being, apparently, duped by Memnoch into doing his will, into creating a “miracle” which only reignited the fury of Christianity in the world, ugh, it’s just awful.  I still don’t know if Memnoch truly was the Devil, or if what Lestat saw was truly Heaven and Hell, and I guess that’s sort of the point.  Lestat himself never knew, and couldn’t know one way or another, but it still ended up promoting and spreading the very kind of fanaticism and hysteria and blind faith in religion that he’s always opposed, and leading to yet more destruction for those he loves and cares for.  When he calls himself “Memnoch’s servant; Memnoch’s prince”, it’s just rough man, seeing how over and over and over again, Lestat has this horrible belief of his own, destructive nature reinforced for him.  Memnoch using his own defiance against him, tricking him into refusing to be his right hand man and prince, knowing he would refuse, and then just seeing the aftermath, seeing Lestat go pretty much literally insane from it, oof, just my heart really was in tatters reading this. 

That whole final sequence, with Lestat and David in New York, watching this kind of religious hysteria unfold, Lestat succumbing to his own sort of madness in seeing all this, his confusion and fear, not knowing what’s real and what isn’t, his memory faltering and deceiving him, his increasingly reckless and desperate attempts to stop what’s happening, and then Louis and David and Maharet, imprisoning Lestat because he was so unstable and devastated and lost.  Man, I just don’t have the words.  I thought particularly the moments, few as they were, between Lestat and Louis, were the most moving, with Louis coming to him while he was imprisoned in that chapel room, promising him there would be years ahead of good things, promising to read Roger’s books with him, etc… That was such a punch to the gut, that kind of sad sweetness from Louis, in seeing Lestat brought so low, and trying in the only way he could to give him some kind of comfort. 

Like this part

“We can read them perhaps… you and I… together.”

“Yes… all his twelve books,” he said.  He talked softly of many miraculous little images, of tiny humans, and beasts and flowers, and the lion lying down with the lamb.

I closed my eyes.  I was grateful.  I was content.  He knew I didn’t want to talk anymore.”

And really, just these last lines of the story here got me man.  They stabbed me right in the heart:

“And I saw myself.

I want you to see me now.  I want you to look at me, as I present myself, and as I swear to this tale, as I swear on every word of it, from my heart.

I am the Vampire Lestat.  This is what I saw. This is what I heard.  This is what I know!  This is all I know.

Believe in me, in my words, in what I have said and what has been written down.

I am here, still, the hero of my own dreams, and let me please keep my place in yours.

I am the Vampire Lestat.

Let me pass now from fiction into legend.”

And then how he signs it at the end:

Adieu, mon amour

Goodbye, my love…

That shit hurt.  This really did feel horribly final in its presentation.  I’m hugely glad Anne decided not to end it here, to continue on, because seeing it end for Lestat like this, seeing his story end in such a devastating fashion, with seemingly every, awful thing he’s ever believed about himself confirmed, with him literally serving the Devil against his will, his own nature leading to it, to the loss of so much, would have been truly unbearable. 

Lestat isn’t a bad person, but things keep happening to him which seem to affirm for him over and over again that he is.  He tries to do the right thing, and things go terribly anyway.  He tries to do good, and people end up getting hurt.  It’s just painful to watch happen to him over and over, because you know his heart is in the right place.  He’s trying.  He tries here, by refusing Memnoch and God both, refusing to be part of whatever game they’re playing, refusing to be a party to the torture of human souls, no matter that it supposedly can lead to their salvation.  That refusal from Lestat comes from a genuinely good place, I think. It comes from a desire not to hurt others.

Overall, I felt this book was, in the end, a strong entry in the series.  It had a few points of criticism from me, but in general, I feel like the ending left a great enough emotional impact for it to have well been worth reading.  

I’m curious and eager to see where things go from here.  Lestat says in these last chapters that he won’t take another human life, and refuses when Maharet offers to feed him blood, and I wonder about that, if that’s something that actually happens or not.  He seems fundamentally altered by the end of this book, in a big way.  And I know Lestat’s greatest dream was always to find a way to live amongst and still be a part of humanity, despite his vampiric nature.  So yeah, I’m powerfully curious to keep going.  I just felt so awful for him by the end of this.  I wasn’t prepared for it, honestly, despite knowing that the book ended with him in a bad place mentally.  I guess it’s just the finality of it, the sense of finality, that hit so hard.  It might’ve killed me if I knew Lestat’s story really ended here, in this way.