It’s come to my attention a lot of people (even many trans girls) don’t know you don’t need to have sex with a trans girl like it’s straight sex with a cis man and a cis woman and that’s alarming to me
You know you can kiss her toes and suck her tits and huff her pits right? You can tug her hair and bite her neck and edge her and rub her taint? And stimulate every part of her body? That you can make her suck on your fingers and grope her and make her whimper.
You can hold her and whisper in her ear and watch her melt in your arms. You can beg for her to spit in your mouth and piss yourself when she punches you. You can worship every inch of her body and cover it in kisses. Why are you having straight porn style sex what is going on
The Relics of Saint Lestat, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Blood Canticle
As a more recent hardcore fan of The Vampire Chronicles, I find myself in the somewhat bizarre position of actually liking a lot of people's most hated book in the series, Blood Canticle. It's not my favorite- in my personal ranking of books in the series it's like, eleventh out of eighteen. I do like it though, and I think there's a lot interesting in it that gets overlooked by the consensus hatred of it. It's hard for me to articulate why I like it a lot, why I find it to be such a rich text, but on its behalf, I figure I'd better try.
All of the books in The Vampire Chronicles narrated by Lestat have some level of metatextual fourth wall breaking. They're being narrated by a self described "guy with things to say to you," and are explicitly written with the intention of attempting to communicate an authentic experience to an audience. The audience is, from The Vampire Lestat on, always a factor for Lestat: the audience is the rest of vampire kind he hopes to rile, it's the human fans of the band, it's the readers, it's vampires looking for a guide. Lestat wants to be recognized as himself, he wants to become something authentic in that act of recognition. He wants to be onstage, and on that stage, to become something real. He wants the place he can encompass for the audience to give him form.
However, Lestat has this very basic problem: he isn't real. He is a fictional character written by the author Anne Rice. He only exists in the pages of books, in the mind of the reader, in the impact that the book series has on its fans. What people don't talk about enough is: he knows this. Lestat, sometimes, knows he is a fictional character. From the end of Memnoch:
"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."
That is the last thing Lestat says directly to the reader before Blood Canticle, and the entire crux of the novel. Blood Canticle isn't a story about a vampire who wants to be a Saint. Blood Canticle is a book about a fictional character who wants to become legend, and isn't really sure how to figure out how to be. All Lestat de Lioncourt, fictional vampire, can ever be is Lestat de Lioncourt, fictional vampire, who wants to be good but likes drinking people's blood, who kind of thinks God exists but isn't sure whether or not that's a good thing, and who wants to see himself in what he means to other people.
The saint Lestat spends most of the novel talking about is Juan Diego, who vitally, it says in the book itself, probably didn't exist. Juan Diego wasn't a real person, but he became a real saint because his mythos was more important than his reality. That's what Lestat wants to be, the embodiment of something more than what he actually is, because then he will exist in the minds of his perceived audience beyond the pages of the books, into legend. To do that, in this book, Lestat is trying to cash the check he wrote you way back at the beginning: he's going to find a way to be good, actually, for real this time.
He's just also, as usual, not that good at it.
Lestat wants to be a saint so he can declare to the world that the gays are going to heaven, but unfortunately, he's an evil vampire, so he can't. He wants to be a great mentor figure, but he can't, because Mona gets on his nerves and doesn't listen when he tells her what to wear. He wants to be an example to vampire kind of how they can be good, but he can't, because everyone's read all these books where he confesses to murdering children, and that makes everyone else think they can murder children. He wants to save the Taltos, but he can't save the Taltos, because sometimes when you try to do a good thing, people still die for stupid, petty reasons. This book is about trying, and what it means to fail.
Part of the metatextual nature of the book is also that it's a cheeky self-deprecating commentary on The Vampire Chronicles as a whole. You think Lestat spends too much time mooning over tables? Fine! He's going to try really hard not to and fail ridiculously! You think the books have these long, sprawling sections of dense philosophical nonsense? What if a character just shoved all that into a blog instead! She wouldn't even be good at writing it, Lestat would tell her it was bad! You think Lestat lacks self-awareness and is the author's most special boy? You don't even KNOW the levels of lacking self-awareness Lestat can reach! You think the books aren't action-packed enough? What would be action-packed enough? LESTAT JUST BLEW UP A HELICOPTER WITH HIS MIND! ARE YOU HAPPY!? HE ISN'T!!
This also plays into the book's role as the (originally intended) final book in the series. Lestat is looking for a way to goodness, a redemption, but also specifically because that would be a resolution to his story. If Lestat can be good, he can redeem himself for Louis, for Claudia, for every person he's killed, for every question he ever asked and then never gave the reader an answer for. An ending is, in some way, certainty: those were the questions, here were my answers, turn on the houselights, the show is over. Lestat can never end his story that way, because he will never have the answers.
From The Vampire Lestat:
"I realized aloud in the midst of saying it that even when we die we probably don't find out the answer as to why we were ever alive. Even the avowed atheist probably thinks that in death he'll get some answer. I mean God will be there, or there won't be anything at all."
Finally, we get to Rowan Mayfair, and the part of this that's going to be the most difficult thing to explain.
Rowan, in many ways, is like an ending. Her story is one of looking for answers and finding them: who am I, why have these things happened to me, what was this all for? Her answers didn't resolve anything: she is a person with the means to heal the sick who still can't save her own family, these things happened to her because of hundreds of years of decisions made by people with their own selfish ends, and what was it all for? The possible return of a species that could destroy humanity, if it wanted to, and no knowledge of where they even are. Rowan has no resolution, just a messy rest of a mortal life trying to do the best she can for the people who rely on her. She's a human, not an immortal, and her attempt at redemption will always be more urgent and more real than Lestat's. There's a possibility, somehow, that the good she does might somehow outweigh her pain, and because of that, she can never stop striving for it, even while she fails.
What do you do when you fail, fail to redeem yourself, fail to be the example you wanted to be? When you fail to be good, when you fail to do right by other people, when you fail at finding the answers you were looking for, but are still here? When people rely on you, when you mean something to people, when you can't be a Saint and you can't rescue Mona's daughter, when you can't keep writing these damn books for the people who they matter to anymore, because the part of you that doesn't believe you'll get the answers has been a fictional vampire for too long, and now needs to belong to something else? What do you do, when you're an author who needs to let go?
Blood Canticle is a book about failure. It's a book about failing to stop being yourself even when you'd like to, it's a book about failing to find satisfaction in knowing the answers, it's a book about letting the people who you mattered to down. When you fail, when you can't be good, when you can't ever, even if you had thousands of years, make up for the things you've done- you keep going. You keep trying, you keep failing. You hand the questions you had back to the people who expected you to answer them, and you move on.
"Be gone from me, oh mortals who are pure of heart. Be gone from my thoughts, oh souls that dream great dreams. Be gone from me, all hymns of glory. I am the magnet for the damned. At least for a little while. And then my heart cries out, my heart will not be still, my heart will not give up, my heart will not give in—
—the blood that teaches life will not teach lies, and love becomes again my reprimand, my goad, my song."
This isn't my full read on what Blood Canticle is about, which goes much deeper into some of the prevailing themes of the entire series, and I don't know if Anne Rice, reading this, would have agreed with me. I barely even mentioned how this is a sequel to Blackwood Farm. I don't know if I missed something obvious she intended, or if that one page where she gets Rowan's hair color wrong was a purposeful fourth-wall-breaking metatextual hint, or if the copyeditor just missed a mistake. Blood Canticle is always going to be, on some levels, the book that's the farthest from my never-Catholic, atheistic self. Blood Canticle is always, now, going to be a weird artifact of an attempt to end a series that got retconned. Blood Canticle is always going to be the insane manic fever dream that it is.
Against the odds, it was able to mean something to me anyway. If you've only heard bad things about it, I wanted you to know that there's someone who likes it, actually likes it, and why. I wanted you to know that it's weird on purpose, and bitchy on purpose, and it not resolving anything was on purpose, at least, as far as I can tell. If you read it and asked yourself, "what the FUCK WAS THAT?!" I hope hearing what it is to someone else was interesting.
It also doesn't hurt that I find it really, really funny. Blood Canticle Lestat is a legend, a true legend, and he's wandering through legend covered in morally imperative dust, and he can't stop noticing tables!
F/F/F threesome where two trans girls frot inside a third, post op trans girl. it's awkward as hell at first but once everyone gets into it the sex carries on for hours and hours
the girl in the middle is this thing. please please please? won't a couple of girls that want to frot come and use this thing as their medium? pin it between you both and don't let it go? make use of its holes until we're all fucked out?
I just wanna say the original is like a thousand times funnier than all the edgy sex joke versions. Some of us are just autistic about reptile phylogeny, bitch.
girl who absolutely desperately wants to be a mechsplo pilot but she's into it in a way that's actually too horny for all the handlers around so she's denied initiation every time
izzy806
jacobvanloon
ellievsbear
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kianamaiart
