I love seeing everyone use their incredible skills to participate in vc / iwtv fandom! There are so many talented artists, writers, humorists, and metasmiths on Tumblr.
As someone new to the platform, I’d like to add my own very particular set of skills to the conversation.
That’s why I’m here to tell you why Armand is like a Fluorine atom…
Ok, so fluorine is a tiny little atom, and it’s one electron away from being pretty stable. It really fucking wants an electron. It will bond with pretty much anything else to get that electron. It will pull atoms off of other molecules, tearing them apart, to get at that fucking electron. In hydrofluoric acid, it will penetrate your skin to react with the calcium in your bones (this kills you). In short, it’s reactive as hell. When it reacts, there’s often fire involved.
But once it makes a bond, the bond tends to be extremely stable. Fluorine is just lacking something, and it will use whatever means necessary to get what it needs to be stable. That’s Armand to me.
Stay tuned for why Marius is Radon, Lestat is Oxygen (obviously!), and Louis is probably Aluminum but it would be funnier if he were Lithium.
Yes, @deaddovehasbeeneaten! I agree 100% that man is a noble gas with a half-life of 3 days. Radioactive as hell yet oddly stable. Also it reacts with Fluorine to form a solid but it separates back out at high temperatures. Like if you lit it on fire, you could kidnap the Fluorine. For example.
I can’t decide what Daniel would be! I will think on it and develop a theory.
Louis as lithium would be funny because:
Lithium lights on fire just from the moisture in the air. It’s natural state is basically on fire, and you have to actively fight to keep it from exploding
I was chatting recently about a specific, niche question that is unanswered in The Vampire Chronicles: When and how did Daniel actually end up living with Marius? A lot of fan work has different answers, and I realized that, based on my read on Marius, I don’t think he specifically took in Daniel because Daniel is Armand’s fledgling. I was trying to figure out how to phrase why I felt so sure about that, why Marius would never be guilty or feel accountable for that particular thing, and I realized-
It might be time for me to try to be concrete about my actual read on Marius.
A quick disclaimer here: I think Marius is an interesting character, and also I don’t like him very much. At the end of this it will become clear why that is, and why I often find him annoying, but I want to get out of the way upfront that I don’t have an issue with anyone who does really like this character.
“I have lived lies.”
This is a phrase Marius says before he starts telling the story of his life in Blood and Gold, and a phrase he keeps coming back to. Marius, to some degree, and with some self awareness, operates from a state of self-delusion. There is something Marius cannot accept, and to deal with that, he has to live his life through layers of lies he tells to himself about who he is. What, then, can Marius not accept?
Well, that’s simple: it’s the same thing that all of the characters in The Vampire Chronicles struggle to find a way to live with: Marius cannot accept that human existence, and the inherent suffering it contains, is meaningless. Within the framework of The Vampire Chronicles, the main ways people struggle or find a way to cope with meaninglessness is through religion, either, like Armand at times, believing that the suffering in life is required because of the religious framework, or like Louis, deciding that suffering has no meaning because nothing has meaning because God has forsaken us. Marius is not just an atheist, he’s one of the only characters in the series who never is anything other than an atheist, so the way he copes with meaninglessness must be something else.
The first part of this is what Pandora says in her book, that he has “made for himself a religion out of reason.” If there is no meaning to life or to suffering, there can still be a universal truth, and even though it’s not the same thing, it can serve a similar purpose. Discovering universal truths, knowing what is definitive and can be known, is why Marius is a historian: he is looking for a grand narrative that will reveal those things to him. This is also the basis of his argument to Akasha, that he has observed the arc of history and, because of it, he believes that one day humanity will overcome superstition, accept reason, and this will end suffering. People used to fight religious wars in Europe, now they don’t, one day no one will, and we will have world peace and no one will have to suffer, and we will no longer feel the pain of meaninglessness because it won’t matter anymore, and we’ll all know the universal truths of the world through science and progress.
Nice lie, you think? It would make life a lot better if it were true.
Marius admits that himself at the end of The Vampire Armand, but it’s not the only lie he tries to live by to deal with a lack of meaning in the world. The other, he can occasionally see in bits and pieces, but has the issue of never being able to fully step back and see the bigger picture of.
Marius’s self-delusions mostly come back to the fact that he thinks he can deal with life being meaningless if he can have meaning and serve a purpose to someone else. Altruistic, right? I mean, ideally it would be.
Marius’s biggest actual flaw, the thing that causes him to hurt people, mess up his relationships, to be kind of a dick sometimes, is that he thinks his role, his purpose, the thing he can do to be meaningful to other people and therefore make up for greater meaninglessness, is something he gets to have a say in. Because absolute truth exists. Which means, rationally, there is a most correct way to serve a purpose in other people’s lives. Which means, rationally, Marius, being a historian who has observed the arc of history, being someone who wants to find meaning in serving a purpose, being someone who isn’t superstitious, and only wants the best for everyone, and really isn’t doing anything purely for himself, thinks he knows what you need better than you do.
There’s this concept I heard in some pop psychology one time that I’ve been able to find useful, which I remember being called over-identification, and which may also be called toxic empathy. Basically, it’s the idea that when you put yourself into another person’s shoes too much, you can tend to be blind to the ways that that person is not the same as you are. You tend to assume that what they want is exactly the same as what you would want in their situation, that their limits are the same limits you have, and that the reasons they may act differently from how you would act are still based in the same fundamental thought processes and motives you yourself could have. It’s toxic not because it’s an attempt at empathy, but because it doesn’t leave room for you to empathize with the idea that the other person might just be different from you. They may take actions you would never take for reasons that make perfect sense to them. They may have experienced things that inform how they act that you never experienced.
They may, for example, have joined the Children of Satan for reasons you don’t actually understand because Armand is a different person with a different history and different brain than you, Marius.
Most of us can be blind to the ways we fail. We justify our failures because we know exactly how we reached them, and that we had good intentions. We want to think we did the most reasonable thing we could have done, and someone else getting hurt wasn’t our fault. If we over identify with them, we might even figure out that it was really their fault, and we aren’t accountable at all. We’re all rational Romans who know God isn’t real, and if you want to go off and take the easy way out by trying to take Akasha from me, or not listening when I tell you the Satanists shouldn’t be wiped out, or pretend you believe in Jesus or whatever, my hands are clean of the consequences. You brought them on yourself, really. I was just a rational guy trying his best. One of these days those Satanists are going to remember that God isn’t real anyway.
This is, to step back a second, one of the most realistic and well-written flaws given to any character Anne Rice ever wrote. It’s almost painfully realistic. It makes perfect sense, and at the same time makes no sense at all, because it’s not how the world works, but doesn’t it feel like it would be nice if it did? If you never misunderstood someone, if you never had to accept that you just didn’t see something the same way someone else did, if we all could just admit we want the same things and work together to achieve them? Nice lie, isn’t it?
Marius has to believe a greater truth exists, and he has to believe that, within that greater truth, he has a role in other people’s lives that it is his purpose to fulfill. Marius thinks that the thing that gives his life meaning is setting aside his own needs and wants and serving a greater altruistic purpose, and things like irrationality, anger, weakness, and the selfish part of love only get in the way of that. Marius thinks that, if he can just set aside his flaws, his failures, his emotions, he can find meaning in purpose. And he has to believe that’s possible, because what other choice does he have?
“I live lies because I cannot endure the weakness of anger, and I cannot admit the irrationality of love.”
I want to bring us back to the end of The Vampire Armand, where Marius admits that the greater truth about the progress of humanity away from suffering is a lie he’s been deluding himself with, and which he can no longer believe. Marius has become self-aware of this flaw in himself, but still thinks that purpose can make up for his lack of meaning. Those Who Must Be Kept aren’t there to be his purpose anymore, but they were never enough of a purpose for him to begin with. He’s tried to find another purpose for himself a few times over the years, to fill that emptiness. Once, he saved a kid from a brothel, and it was good, altruistic thing to do, and he put him on the path to appreciating humanity and the greater truths of progress, and that kid had a lot of religious trauma and needed a lot of saving, so that was a purpose that felt a lot like meaning something-
And then that kid threw all of that out the fucking window, probably because he failed overcome his own emotions and had to live lies instead, but they’re worse lies, not like the lies Marius lives by, because Marius acts with good intentions and is rational. Armand is living under irrational lies and won’t admit his own desires to himself, and I, Marius, who am very self-aware and not projecting my own flaws onto anyone else at all, will just make the kids into vampires because Armand is deluding himself that he’s not going to anyway.
Armand really has the exact opposite issue that Marius does, and it's the exact reason their relationship worked in the first place: he doesn’t think he knows what the path to greater truth is, and sees himself as different and alien because of it, because he feels like he should. His arc in The Vampire Armand is about seeing how much humanity is like he is and how much he is like humanity. Sybelle and Benji are, to Armand, the first time he understands that people can be different and loved, in the way he is different can be loved. Sybelle just wants to play her piano, and if that’s the only thing she ever wants, that’s her truth because to be human is to each have our own flawed, personal, incomplete truths. Armand doesn’t need to have someone lead him on the path of the greater truth anymore, because he’s learned that the actual greater truth is that no one knows what the greater truth is.
So Marius turning Sybelle and Benji to help Armand in a rational way to overcome his limitations caused by his own emotions is Marius’s altruistic purpose. The problem is, he’s not able to come from a place of serving Armand’s personal flawed version of the truth. The problem is, he wants to help Armand- who, even when he tries, he can’t help but see as a broken version of himself.
To me, this is both the root of a lot of fans of Marius’s compassion for him, and a lot of my frustrations when I see people misunderstand his character. Marius is ultimately a case study in how you can try to act with perfectly good intentions, and how the fact that you are a flawed person who can never be perfect or know everything can still lead you to hurting other people. Marius is selfish, yes, but he’s tried so hard not to be that he can barely be aware of when he’s being selfish. He tries so hard to be rational that he’s totally irrational about it. He loves and wants the best for other people so much that he doesn’t understand that he’s limited himself in his actual ability to help them. He just wants someone to need him in a way that he can help them so that anything feels like it means anything, and he won't let himself admit when his own emotions get in the way.
I think, to conclude this, I have to admit who the person I am writing this is: when I read the book Pandora, I remember setting it down and thinking, “wow, I didn’t know Anne Rice wrote me into her books.” Universal truth seems nice, but it’s not real, and it’s a bad way to look at other people if you assume it is. There is no arc of history you can predict, no scientific discovery that will end all suffering, no perfect future, just a lot of people trying their best to make sense of the pain in the rational, irrational, emotional, angry, loving way that makes the most sense to them. It’s frustrating: a rational universal truth from which everything makes sense doesn’t exist, and the idea that it does exist is a kind of self-delusion. Reason is a kind of lie people tell themselves so their pain has meaning, so their mistakes were correct, and their shortcomings are universal, that they can give themselves a real purpose.
“Reason is only a created thing, imposed with faith upon the world, and the stars promise nothing to no one.”
Insane. Does it work well? No. But who cares when it looks like that? She hasn't toasted a piece of bread in years but she will sit prominently on your counter nonetheless.
Louis:
Fun to look at but confusing to operate. Needs 3 different adapters to function. If you can figure it out it makes perfect toast every time. This toaster heats up immediately and takes hours to cool down.
Armand:
Petite and adorable but looks can be deceiving. Keeps toast in a cage while it cooks. Passed down from your great aunt. This toaster is a fire hazard and should be handled with caution.
Claudia:
Equal parts cute and effective. Tries to look complicated but really just wants to toast bread, and a lot of it. Can cook at two different temperatures simultaneously. The devil works hard, but this toaster works harder.
Daniel:
Still looks and works great despite being an antique. Only has two settings: burnt and more burnt. A strong exterior that can take a beating. This toaster is fine being a single slice machine, two slices are overrated.
Santiago:
A bastard creation with a cursed aura. Makes everyone uncomfortable and yet nobody can look away. Only looks like this to upstage the microwave. This toaster lives to make you uneasy.
Last one for the night (it's 5:30am help). I love doing these so please submit requests for characters/objects you'd like my take on!
Started the gremlin family canvas. Just sketches without bg for soul healing purposes. I wonder if I'm going to be serious with at least one, they are too fun being silly (I'll try, I want something tender as well)
Underappreciated detail of the Devil's Minion vampire voyeurism tidbit is that all these random people come home with them because they want to fuck Armand and none of them ever get to do so. His "power to seduce was almost beyond his control". World's shittiest vampire power, truly, especially in a world where all vampires have ED. Making Daniel fuck these people is a hilarious move and "if Armand could possibly arrange it" implies a real delight in being able to pull it off. Imagine hitting on someone ethereally beautiful at the club and his eyes light up but he then immediately starts trying to sell you on the virtues of fucking his boyfriend, a normal human man who looks vaguely irritated by the entire situation. Incredible.
Just recently I've been downright crazy about how "I love you" were the last words of human David Talbot, something he could tell on his deathbed, and on his deathbed only (and to his murderer, mind that!). But now I've realized that the first words of the vampire David, after everything Lestat had done to him, were "you're hurt".
I don't know which of you know the tale about mother's heart and which of you don't. But if you know it... "they are the same picture".
I mean, what a moment to worry whether Lestat is hurt, right? Even Lestat himself, in a rare flash of self-consciousness, understands the absurdity. But the first thing David cares about is whether Lestat is in pain, whether he gave too much blood and went too far. Then came the time when David got angry (and rightfully so), when all due words were said (well maybe saying some of these words to a guy with a degradation kink wasn't the best long-term strategy but still), but the very first thing David cared about is whether Lestat was hurt.
No. Hear me out. There is nothing nice or pure or wholesome about this. Love is, and always was, the villian of the story. Love is a force that can change you beyond recognition - "to be loved is to be changed", isn't it? Love is a beast that can rip your heart out of your chest, but that's not the real horror. And the only thing you'll be able to say is "are you hurt, my dear?" And that's the real horror.
But still, love was there. Love was there, unfortunately.
