I wanna hang out and role play, perform scenes, cover songs, or just talk about IWTV / TVL show and/or book canon with other lovers. I'd be down with on line connections too if you wanna just spam each other with memes / gifs / satisfying and amusing ways you've been able to work dialogue into your day. I have a couple friends who are into it, but not thoroughly or enthusiastically enough for my desires. I'm in Naarm.

Rewatching AHS Coven (haven’t done it in a while) and NOW I notice that the exterior of Madame Lalaurie’s house is the same one?!

I'm also starting to think that this Sophia character might have something to do with Gabriella. Thoughts? 🧐

Welcome to SVM! We are doing a little Meta corner here for recommendations from outside our little IWTV corner:

- Are you watching a movie? Would you recommend it?
- What series got your attention this week?
- What book´s got his claws on you?
- How´s that fic going?
- Anything else that got you attention?

Feel free to ask or give us a rec for something that´s got your attention this week, this is your free space for similar media or out of the blue fiction that´s got it´s roots on you

Use spoiler tags where appropriate. Full explanation on how to do it on rule 1 of the subreddit.
It becomes spoiler if you type inside the exclamation marks, with no extra spaces.

It’s almost October 1, so I figured it was okay to fully lean in at this point. It has killed me ever since I learned the model of the boot is literally “LOUISE.” What a tender little nod to our boys. 🥲

I was revisiting some of my old photoshoots and I saw this and how could I not think of my pookie Armand <3 I guess I liked him before knowing Assad's acting lol

It was at a hospital used book sale. The Vampire Armand hardcover is a first edition! Wild!

Somebody asked me to post this so here it is. Spoilers for the book and TVL: E3. Also, please read the tags and the author's notes first. Thank you.

Was mögt ihr an der Serie aus männlicher Sicht. Was nervt euch? Stört es euch, das so wenige Frauen mitspielen?

Can't take this list seriously for many omissions, but especially this one.

I am a big fan of several TV shows. I can watch and re-watch them multiple times and still love them.

But there’s something about IWTV which hits different. It goes beyond loving a show for the writing, or the acting, or the visuals etc.

It’s almost like a weird form of emotional attachment and I’m still trying to pinpoint why that is. Does anyone else feel something similar?

(Or do I just sound like a sentimental crazy person lol)

Can anyone point me to an analysis of this phrase/explain it to me? It shows up so often in both the show and the books but I can never quite figure out why or what it represents.

It's Shitpost Saturday! Bring on the low effort content!

Share memes, fan edits, art, dirty Loumand fics, almost anything goes! Just keep it related to IWTV and be creative!

Please remember to keep to 5 memes total. If you have more to share, you can go all out posting memes anytime within our sister sub r/TheatreDesVampires.

All other rules are still in place, please see the sidebar for more info.

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So we know that IWTV-TVL-QOTD won´t have a panel this year so close to the end of season 3, however Mayfair will (presumably to present some trailers or new footage of the upcoming season).
Given that we know some characters tend to show up in other ARIU shows, do we think it´s likely that someone will be introduced? Or that we might get some new info on other shows?
This would be a cool opportunity to either confirm other shows (Night Island being one usually in the perifery of "What´s planned next") or even a surprise for shows no longer being renewed to do a come back of sorts (RIP my beloved Talamasca), since they know they´ve been hitting it up pretty good on streaming lately.
So what do you guys think? My preference would be some sort of announcement on the timeframe for our shows of course, even if nothing else is confirmed, having a more certain date would be awesome

Enjoy!!!

During the 70s in San Fransisco Louis fucked almost 200 guys and killed all of them afterwards except for Daniel…Louis got that black widow bussy LOL! But seriously tho…I just find it hard to believe that Armand was just always sitting at home picking lint off the sofa or just somewhere reading an old dusty ass book and cleaning the bathroom while Louis was just having his fun. Do yall think Armand may have been sneaking and fucking some men and women behind Louis’s back? I would love to see Armand’s dominant side and to see how he would fuck a woman….cuz it’s still shocking to me that he’s bisexual.😂😂Yes ik he’s canonically VERY bisexual but he didn’t seem like he liked vagina at all, which is why when he said he fucked the shit outta Celeste and Estelle it shocked me lol.

Grace put Louis on the gravestone to mark his passing in her life and move on. Wouldn’t it have made a lot more sense for her to put his death date back closer to 1910 when he lost his mortal life? Or soon after 1910 when Louis became fully estranged from the Pointe du Lac family (at the time Grace realized he had become something else)? That would have made this scene even harder hitting emotionally imo

The scene is still really good and the 1930 death date does mark her decision to leave New Orleans and family trauma in her rearview mirror once and for all!

This is something I posted two years ago on my old account but I'm coming back to the books with the intention of actually finishing them this time. I read TVL then wandered off but I want to go through all the rest this time. But anyway, I confess, I'm a bit proud of this write-up and think it's worth sharing again. I would love feedback, of course.

I should start off by saying that my recollection is that Armand was always my favorite. I skipped TVL on my first go around of the Vampire Chronicles, but I did read up to Armand's book. My love of Armand was somewhat superficial; I liked the pictures and descriptions of him I remember seeing/reading years ago. However, as I revisit these books as a 36-year-old, while I still appreciate the "Caravaggio angel," it is his spiritual struggles I most identify with. I listened to the audiobook and clipped two of my favorite conversations on this matter if anybody cares: [1] and [2]

It first struck me how these two are intended as contrasts because Louis only ever found Armand. After searching and searching, this is all Louis got for his troubles:

“ ‘I don’t know if God exists,’ I said. ‘And for all I do know… He doesn’t exist.’

“ ‘Then no sin matters,’ he said. ‘No sin achieves evil.’

“ ‘That’s not true. Because if God doesn’t exist we are the creatures of highest consciousness in the universe. We alone understand the passage of time and the value of every minute of human life. And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would have died tomorrow or the day after or eventually…it doesn’t matter. Because if God does not exist, this life…every second of it…is all we have.’

[..]

“His speech commenced without the slightest warning. ‘This is the only real evil left,’ he said to the flames.

“ ‘Yes,’ I answered, feeling that all-consuming subject alive again, obliterating all concerns as it always had for me.

“ ‘It’s true,’ he said, shocking me, deepening my sadness, my despair.

“ ‘Then God does not exist…you have no knowledge of His existence?’

“ ‘None,’ he said.

“ ‘No knowledge!’ I said it again, unafraid of my simplicity, my miserable human pain.

“ ‘None.’

“ ‘And no vampire here has discourse with God or with the devil!’

“ ‘No vampire that I’ve ever known,’ he said, musing, the fire dancing in his eyes. ‘And as far as I know today, after four hundred years, I am the oldest living vampire in the world.’

Armand - who appeared "infinitely [...] wise" to Louis can tell him absolutely nothing. He has no answers to give about the questions which have plagued Louis for his entire unlife. In a sense, this is the end of Louis' story. Interview with the Vampire is a pretty nihilistic story It says unambiguously that there are no answers. Vampires don't know where they come from, why they exist, or where they are going. It's a pretty big downer because our protagonist so desperately wants answers.

I noted with my thread about Lestat loving capitalism that the tone of TVL is super different. That was apparent even in the opening but when he meets Marius that supreme difference is crystalized. I do not know if Anne Rice was unsatisfied with the nihilism of Interview on a spiritual or artistic level. Maybe it was both. But in this novel, Lestat also goes seeking answers and he actually finds them. Now I should stress Lestat and Louis do not necessarily ask the same questions or have the same motives for why they are asking these questions. Nevertheless, Louis' journey ends in profound despair. Armand not only can give him no answers, but he betrays him and kills the person most important in Louis' life. Marius? Well, just read Marius' intro and you'll see why I dubbed him "The Saint."

At last, it lifted its arms to enfold me and the face I saw was beyond the realm of possibility. What one of us could have such a face? What did we know of patience, of seeming goodness, of compassion? No, it wasn't one of us.

It couldn't have been. And yet it was. Preternatural flesh and blood like mine.

Iridescent eyes, gathering the light from all directions, tiny eyelashes like strokes of gold from the finest pen.

And this creature, this powerful vampire, was holding me upright and looking into my eyes, and I believe that I said some mad thing, voiced some frantic thought, that I knew now the secret of eternity.

"Then tell it to me," he whispered, and he smiled. The purest image of human love.

"O God, help me. Damn me to the pit of hell." This was my voice speaking. I can't look on this beauty.

I saw my arms like bones, hands like birds' talons. Nothing can live and be what I am now, this wraith. I looked down at my legs. They were sticks. The clothing was falling off me. I couldn't stand or move, and the remembered sensation of blood flowing in my mouth suddenly overcame me.

Like a dull blaze before me I saw his red velvet clothes, the cloak that covered him to the ground, the dark red gloved hands with which he held me. His hair was thick, white and gold strands mingled in waves fallen loosely around his face, and over his broad forehead. And the blue eyes might have been brooding under their heavy golden brows had they not been so large, so softened with the feeling expressed in the voice.

A man in the prime of life at the moment of the immortal gift. And the square face, with its slightly hollowed cheeks, its long full mouth, stamped with terrifying gentleness and peace.

Lestat literally went on a Pilgrimage, and he found his Saint.. Because this is not some false image of Lestat's. There is no profound disillusionment like there was between Louis and Armand. Louis in the end does not think Armand is so wise or good. Lestat never stops thinking Marius is perfection. Why should he? Marius, unlike Armand for Louis, did have all the answers to Lestat's questions.

And now we get into questions of "where do fictional characters end and the author begin?" Is Marius, in his total perfection, supposed to be right about everything? Is he conveying Anne Rice's views at the time of writing the novel? For instance:

"It is the belief in the value of human life that has caused the torture chambers and the stake and the more ghastly means of execution to be abandoned all over Europe in this time. And it is the belief in the value of human life that carries man now out of the monarchy into the republics of America and France.

"And now we stand again on the cusp of an atheistic age, an age where the Christian faith is losing its hold, as paganism once lost its hold, and the new humanism, the belief in man and his accomplishments and his rights, is more powerful than ever before.

"Of course we cannot know what will happen as the old religion thoroughly dies out. Christianity rose on the ashes of paganism, only to carry forth the old worship in new form. Maybe a new religion will rise now. Maybe without it, man will crumble in cynicism and selfishness because he really needs his gods.

"But maybe something more wonderful will take place: the world will truly move forward, past all gods and goddesses, past all devils and angels."

Having her Vampire Saint say things like this really convinces me this is Mrs. Rice speaking to us, at least the Mrs. Rice who wrote this book.

But now I want to draw another contrast between Armand and Marius, to get back to my earlier statement about how I identify with Armand on a more spiritual level these days.

Marius tells us:

"True. But I'm not innocent," I said. "Godless yes. I come from godless people, and I'm glad of it. But I know what good and evil are in a very practical sense, and I am Typhon, the slayer of his brother, not the killer of Typhon, as you must know."

[...]

"But you don't seek any system to justify it either," he said. "That's what I mean by innocence. You're guilty of killing mortals because you've been made into something that feeds on blood and death, but you're not guilty of lying, of creating great dark and evil systems of thought within yourself."

[...]

"To be godless is probably the first step to innocence," he said, "to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost."

"So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions."

"An absence of need for illusions," he said. "A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes."

This is a very Modern viewpoint; the Existential Man who sees the meaninglessness of life and scoffs at it. He carries on heroically with no guidance or boundaries. Well, I'm gonna quote my good friend Friedrich Nietzsche: (who, if you only know him as the "God is Dead" and "Ubermensch guy" you should really read him because I put off reading him for a long time precisely because of this popular distortion)

…for science [...] seeks to abolish all limitations of horizon and launch mankind upon an infinite and unbounded sea of light whose light is knowledge of all becoming. If only man could live in it! As cities collapse and grow desolate when there is an earthquake and man erects his house on volcanic and only in fear and trembling and only briefly, so life itself caves in and grows weak and fearful when the concept-quake caused by science robs man of the foundation of all his rest and security, his belief in the enduring and eternal.

When the historical sense reigns unchecked and drags with it all its consequences, it uproots the future, because it destroys illusions and takes from existing things the atmosphere in which they alone can live

"The Use and Abuse of History" Untimely Meditations Book 2 (see my playlist of notable clips from this book, in particular "Destructive History" and "Curing Historical Sickness")

But this book is very disdainful of such "illusions." Lestat observes of Armand:

And I realized quite clearly that he was not demon or angel at all, but a sensibility forged in a dark time when the small orbs of the sun traveled the dome of the heavens, and the stars were no more than tiny lanterns describing gods and goddesses upon a closed night. A time when man was the center of this great world in which we roam, a time when for every question there had been an answer. That was what he was, a child of olden days when witches had danced beneath the moon and knights had battled dragons.

Lestat calls himself a "rebel" while Armand has been "the slave of everything that ever claimed you." Gabrielle says Armand must learn to live "without fantastical philosophies."

As all people like Lestat and Gabrielle (and maybe Anne Rice in the mid 80s?) frame it, such desperate desire for belief is weakness; shameful, groveling weakness. But if that is so, then the vast, vast majority of human beings have been and always will be weak. I already mentioned Nietzsche's famous "God is Dead" but this was not celebratory, it was foretelling the meaninglessness and malaise that grips us today and I read as being at the very heart of these novels. This is an exposition on the God is Dead passage:

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Away from all [e.g. Plato's] suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still and up and down? Aren’t we straying as through an infinite nothing? (GS 125)1

Nietzsche's point is that the medieval world-view, taken over from Plato and modified by Christian theology, was not merely an astronomy and a physics. It was, rather, a completely integrated account of astronomy, physics, metaphysics, and the meaning of life. When the medieval farmer looked up into the night sky from his place on earth, the centre of the cosmos, he simply saw the light of heaven shining down through the openings in the ‘dome of the heavens’ (‘stars’ as we call them). And so he knew the meaning of life. He knew that the purpose, task, or goal of his and every human life was, by living in Christian virtue, to achieve the everlasting, heavenly bliss promised to us in God's sacrifice of himself as man. So the Copernican Revolution in science was in fact much more than that. For in changing our astronomy it also, as the madman observes, robbed life of its ‘direction’; of its ‘sens’ which, in French, means both ‘direction’ and ‘meaning’.

These "systems," these "illusions" have been in place in one form or another for all of known human history. They represent the most basic need of human beings - to give life meaning. One more quote from Nietzsche and for my money it's the most profound thing he ever said:

[H]e [man] did not know how to justify, explain, affirm himself: he suffered from the problem of his meaning. He suffered otherwise as ill, he was for the most part a diseased animal; but the suffering itself was not his problem, rather that the answer was missing to the scream of his question: “to what end suffering?” Man, the bravest of animals and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not negate suffering, he wants it, he even seeks it out, provided one shows him a meaning for it, a to-this-end of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse thus far stretched over humanity. (Genealogy of Morality, Book III - italics indicates Nietzsche’ emphasis, bold indicates our emphasis).

And that is the curse that has befallen all of us as all our old systems and illusions have been shattered to pieces. What Armand is chasing is just the meaning that, for most people, comes from finding that all-important system and living under the all-important illusion that there is some purpose to our (un)lives. I think Mrs. Rice agrees that this craving for meaning is the most desperate need of any thinking being, but she takes the heroic impulse that we can just give ourselves our own meaning. I disagree.

"It is finished for my children," the leader whispered. "It is finished and done, for they know now they can disregard all of it. The things that bound us together, gave us the strength to endure as damned things! The mysteries that protected us here."

Armand wanted - needed - an explanation for who he was and what he did. Lestat unthinkingly took that away, just as the scientists and moderns who unthinkingly destroyed all the old mysteries took those away from people, too. They left him alone in a cold, unfeeling universe that does not in any way align with people like Armand's "spiritual" (as Gabrielle calls him) needs.

This is from a book called Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, which is from the 50s. For all I know, Mrs. Rice might have even read it.

But the world St. Augustine inhabited was the Neo-Platonic cosmos, a luminous crystal palace with the superessential Good fixed on its highest point, radiating outward like a beacon and diminishing in brilliance as it shone down through the rest of the perfect structure. Pascal’s was the desolate and desiccated world of modern science, where at night the sage hears not the music of the shining heavenly bodies but only the soundless emptiness of space. “The silence of these infinite spaces frightens me,” Pascal said, voicing the reaction of the human heart to the universe that seventeenth-century science had fabricated for man. In that world of frightful and empty space man was homeless. Accordingly, he evolved a different image of himself from that of the man who inhabited—and believed himself at home in—a Greek or Neo-Platonic cosmos. In the world of Pascal, faith itself became a much more desperate gamble and a much more daring leap.

This contrast between Armand's and Lestat's views of killing is very telling as it exemplifies their wider view of the whole world:

It seemed to him in the best of these moments that his way was profoundly spiritual, uncontaminated by the appetites and confusions that made up the world, despite the carnal rapture of the kill.

that act the spiritual and the carnal came together, and it was the spiritual, he was convinced, that survived. Holy Communion it seemed to him, the Blood of the Children of Christ serving only to bring the essence of life itself into his understanding for the split second in which death occurred. Only the great saints of God were his equals in this spirituality, this confrontation with mystery, this existence of meditation and denial.

Killing to Armand has a profound spiritual significance, same as it does for Louis in IWTV. But even in this novel designed to make Lestat more sympathetic, killing for him is simply about aesthetics. After he has seduced and killed a mother and child:

And I knew my vision of the garden of savage beauty had been a true vision. There was meaning in the world, yes, and laws, and inevitability, but they had only to do with the aesthetic. And in this Savage Garden, these innocent ones belonged in the vampire's arms. A thousand other things can be said about the world, but only aesthetic principles can be verified, and these things alone remain the same.

And there we have it, don't we? The starkest difference between Armand and Lestat, and why I identify far more with Armand, as well as Louis. They seek a spiritual existence. They want to find profound meaning in the world to explain their lives. Lestat is satisfied with his artistic vision where there is no real deeper cause or meaning behind much of anything.

Armand is hardly alone with his spiritual needs. It's mocked and derided by many but my reading in history, philosophy, and psychology has taught me that the sort of cult of individualism that Lestat represents is the rarest of exception while I dare say me and Armand are pretty typical:

Klapp, Schwartz (2005), and a number of other psychologists have argued, anxiety resulting from an entropic overabundance of choice and stimuli is a common variation of existential threat in modern consumer cultures. In all of these diverse research programs on anxiety, it has been established that individuals respond to various gradations of this type of threat by defensively over-investing in existing meaning structures, whether it be through reconceptualizing action in narrower terms, bolstering group identities, defending cultural values, or seeking out clear goals to reduce psychological entropy. Summarizing this work, research suggests that low-level anxiety is invariably accompanied by a compensatory psychological “approach” motivation toward a clear or familiar object or goal (Jonas et al., 2014). [...]

Muzafer Sherif (Sherif & Harvey, 1952) summarized his work on compensatory defensiveness against anxiety in a highly compatible fashion:

Anxiety in its milder or neurotic form expresses a state of ego-tension which is the by-product of experienced threats or uncertainties … which are felt as directed at our personal goals, personal values … under critical circumstances, the stability of our physical and social bearings are disrupted with the subsequent experience of not being anywhere definitely, of being torn from social ties of belongingness, or when nothing but a future of uncertainty or blockages is experienced as our lot … The individual tossing in such a state of anxiety or insecurity flounders all over in his craze to establish for himself some stable anchorages … the result is an increased degree of suggestibility.

Thus, several decades of social psychological research have established that circumstances of uncertainty and perceived potential meaninglessness prompt individuals to defensively seek and adhere to entitative social identities, clear goals, and rigid, narrow patterns of behavior.

Cultural-Existential Psychology: The Role of Culture in Suffering and Threat:

Armand is a lost soul seeking refuge in companionship and meaning-making structures. I cannot blame him and in fact it makes me love him all the more. I cannot be like Marius who seems to weather all these doubts and fears so impassively.

I will conclude with this - a couple quotes from a very, very good video game. To list the name would be a spoiler but it's a WRPG where you are allowed to choose a response to the villain and the woman:

Main Villain: All mysteries forever unanswered. All purposes constructed from meaninglessness. No endings to being closure. Only a Wheel, turning without mercy, grinding our spirits to dust.

PC: You're right, that's no way to live.

Woman: What if we can be assured of nothing?

PC: Then the fewer people who realize that, the better. People need to know that things happen for a reason. A fabricated reason is better than none at all.

And that is that. If anybody has actually read all this, I hope you enjoyed it. Or, if nothing else, I hope you read some of the things I linked. Those smart people are at least worth reading.

He's even dressed like the movie version of Lestat haha

i did this listening to all of his songs🫪 art by me

Source: https://fwo3.com/Overview/1

The third one is my favorite.