#bc i was thinking abt clones and robots and how the vampire is kinda. both and fails at being both

[obeetlebeetle]

genuinely I think the thing that separates contemporary vampires from their 19c progenitors is like. the turning, the before and after. we can see this in iwtv s1, where Lestat is The European Vampire and he arrives in Louis' story as this great confused symbol that is, importantly, only ever a vampire and thus only ever symbolic. like ruthven and carm and drac, his role is the vampire, and all his personhood is folded into our understanding of The Vampire. Louis and Claudia, by contrast, start out human. they are turned; we witness the violence and we know that something in them was annihilated by the turning. we have them before and after all of those signifiers are attached.

but something that has been on my mind in s2 is that those signifiers are both broadly applicable AND unique to Lestat. like. a lot of what he's doing in s1 is originally read as The Vampire, but now that we have access to other european vampires, we can see and are explicitly told that Lestat's role was different than theirs, that he negotiated a new way to read The Vampire as symbol -- and we can infer (or otherwise know) that many of the signifiers he packed into The Vampire predate his vampirism and are direct responses to both his life as human and his own turning. Lestat can't be The Vampire, so he joins Louis and Claudia in their role, and the three of them are set in opposition to Armand -- who is constantly telling us about the Laws of his kind and the Rules of his coven and who tries extremely hard to maintain his status as The Vampire. still, we can't be fooled by that anymore. we know that there was an Armand who was turned, and we refuse to view him as the symbol that we had so easily applied to Lestat before s2. Which is interesting to me bc I feel like Louis and Claudia taking on Lestat's concept of The Vampire is not unlike children learning how to be people by modeling their parents, and their encounters with Armand and the coven respectively feel like when you step out from that framework and learn that no one anywhere knows how to be a person. It gives us a lot of immediate and useful shorthand with which to understand Armand's control over the coven and why it means so much to him, why he wants to be The Vampire and why he needs to redefine himself whenever that symbol gets complicated. and that's not even getting into the religion -> theater -> storytelling progression of his obsessions!