what I fucking love is how tvl was written in the 80s and lestat is constantly sayinf shit like “as the kids say 🤪 that’s so rad!!” or whatever, and to me, reader of the vampire lestat in this modern age, that does NOT register the way anne rice intended it.
like it is supposed to feel jarring and insane. it is supposed to feel like lestat has been violently submerged in modern young people trends and culture and is now repeating all the new words he learned like a beautiful fresh baby. but because the book is from 1985, all I think is oh interesting huh I didn’t know that slang term even originated in the 80s how vintage how retro how lestat wow he’s so embarrassing aw aw so cute.
but amc in all their incredible genius decided that honoring anne rice’s original vision of writing an extremely modern and weird book that fully embodied the era it was written in was more important then bringing back the 80s nostalgia thing that streaming services love and it’s incredible to me. now I get to listen to lestat say shit like “labubu FOMO cosplay reddit discord Gen Z more like gen SNOOZE 🤪🤪🤪 safe space pronouns donald trump labubu tiktok dance 🕺🏻” and suddenly I understand what it felt like to be a young anne rice reader in 1985. God…. I understand.
A lot of 'eloquent writers' are not going to agree with me when I say this but; write however the fuck you want. Especially if it's for fun online, no one here is grading your shit. Yes it's a little different when it comes to original works you want to get published but fanfic? Nah no rules apply. Write in those run on sentences, fuck grammer, don't capitalize, word vomit your ideas into a google doc, fill those paragraphs up with words that barely make sense, just have fun with it. If it's nonsense it's nonsense but if it made you happy to write then that doesn't really matter does it?
Also, I fail to do this myself sometimes, but give yourself a break when it comes to writing. Your writing does not need to read like anyone else's, it's your writing. Everyone has their own 'voice' in writing and just because yours is different than someone else's doesn't make it any less.
I would LOVE to read your analysis of louis as byronic hero as apposed to his reading as gothic heroine. lots of the latter and zero of the former in the fandom.
Sure! Mmm, okay, so –
What are we talking about when we talk about Gothic Heroes?
When we talk about gothic heroes, we’re really talking about three pretty different character archetypes. All three are vital to the genre, but some are more popular in certain subgenres i.e. your Prometheus Hero may be more common in gothic horror, whereas your Byronic Hero might be more likely to be found in gothic romance. That’s not to say they’re exclusive to those subgenres at all, and there is an argument that these archetypes themselves are gendered (in many ways, I think people confuse Anne being an author of the female gothic with Louis being a gothic heroine, but I’ll get into that later), but this is also not necessarily something that’s exclusive.
Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself, haha, so the three gothic hero archetypes are:
Milton’s Satan who is the classic gothic hero-villain. You can probably guess from the name, but he was originated in John Milton’s 1667 poem, Paradise Lost. He is God’s favourite angel, but God is forced to cast him out of heaven when he rebels against him. As an archetype, he’s a man pretty much defined by his pride, vanity and self-love, usually fucks his way through whatever book or poem he’s in, has a perverted, incestuous family, and a desire to corrupt other people. He’s also defined as being “too weak to choose what is moral and right, and instead chooses what is pleasurable only to him” and his greatest character flaw, in spite of all The Horrors, is that he’s usually easily misguided or led astray. (I would argue that Lestat fits into this archetype pretty neatly, but that’s a whole other post.)
Prometheus who was established as a gothic archetype by Mary Shelley with Frankenstein in 1818. Your Prometheus Hero is basically represented by the quest for knowledge and the overreach of that quest to bring on unintended consequences. He’s tied, of course, to the Prometheus of Greek myth, so you can get elements of that in this character design too in that he can be devious or a trickster, but the most important part of him is that he is split between his extreme intelligence and his sense of rebellion, and that his sense of rebellion and boundary pushing overtakes his intelligence and basically leads to All The Gothic Horrors.
And the Byronic Hero, who as the name implies, was both created by and inspired by the romantic poet, Lord Byron in his semi-autobiographical poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage which was published between 1812-1818. The archetype is kind of an idealized version of himself, and as historian and critic Lord Macaulay wrote, the character is “a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection.” Adding to that, he’s often called ‘the gloomy egoist’ as a protagonist type, hates society, is often self-destructive and lives either exiled or in a self-exile, and is a stalwart of gothic literature, but especially gothic romance. Interestingly too, in his most iconic depictions he’s often a) darkly featured and/or not white (Heathcliff being the most obvious example of this given Emily Bronte clearly writes him as either Black or South Asian), and b) is often used to explore queer identity, with Byron himself having been bisexual.
Okay, but what about the Gothic Heroine?
Gothic heroines are less delineated and have had more of an evolution over time, which makes sense, given women have consistently been the main audience of gothic literature and have frequently been the most influential writers of the genre too. The gothic genre sort of ‘officially’ started with Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto and Isabella is largely regarded as the first gothic heroine and the foundation of the archetype, and the book opens even with one of the key defining traits – an innocent, chaste woman without the protection of a family being pursued and persecuted by a man on the rampage.
The gothic heroine was, for years, defined by her lack of agency. She was innocent, chaste, beautiful, curious, plagued by tragedy and often, ultimately, tragic. Isabella survives in The Castle of Otranto, but she’s one of the lucky ones – Cathy dies in Wuthering Heights, Sybil dies in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Justine and Elizabeth both die in Frankenstein, Mina survives in Dracula, but Lucy doesn’t. There’s an argument frequently posited that the gothic genre was, and is, about dead women and the men who mourn them, and Interview with the Vampire certainly lends itself to that pretty neatly.
Of course, the genre has evolved, and in particular by the late 1800s, there was a notable shift in how the Gothic Heroine was depicted. The house became a place of imprisonment where they were further constrained and disempowered, she was infantilized and pathologized and diagnosed as hysterical, and as Avril Horner puts it in her excellent paper, Women, Power and Conflict: the Gothic heroine and ‘Chocolate-box Gothic’, gothic literature of this era “explores “the constraints enforced [by] a patriarchal society that is becoming increasingly nervous about the demands of the ‘New Woman’.”
This was an era where marriage was increasingly understood in feminist circles to be a civil death where women were further subjugated and became the property of their husbands. This was explored through gothic literature as the domestic space evolved into a symbol of patriarchal control in the Female Gothic.
Female Gothic vs Male Gothic
Because here’s the thing – the female gothic and the male gothic are generally understood to be two different subgenres of gothic literature.
While there are plenty of arguments as to what this entails, the basics is that the male gothic is written by men, and usually features graphic horror, rape and the masculine domination of women and often utilises the invasion of women’s spaces as a symbol of further penetrating their bodies, while the female gothic is written by women, and usually features graphic terror, as opposed to horror, while delving more specifically into gender politics. More than that though, its heroines are usually victimized, virginial and powerless while being pursued by villainous men.
The Female Gothic as a genre is also specifically interested in the passage from girlhood to female maturity, and does view the house as a place of entrapment, but she is usually suddenly “threatened with imprisonment in a castle or a great house under the control of a powerful male figure who gave her no chance to escape.”
That’s not Louis’ arc, that’s Claudia’s arc twice over, first with the house at Rue Royale, then with the Paris Coven, and Lestat and Armand aren’t the only powerful male figures who imprison her.
Claudia as the Gothic Heroine
Claudia in many ways is the absolute embodiment of the classic gothic heroine. Even the moment of their meeting is a product of Louis’ Byronic heroism – his act of implacable revenge against the Alderman Fenwick which prompts the rioting that almost kills her. She’s a victim of Louis’ monstrousness before they’ve even met, and while he saves her, he arguably does something worse in trapping her in the house with both himself and Lestat, holding her in an ever-virginal, ever-chaste eternal girlhood, playing into Lestat’s Milton-Satan by enhancing the perversion of family and ultimately infantilizing her out of his own desire for familial closeness.
Claudia has no family protection before Louis and Lestat – a staple of the gothic heroine – she is completely dependent on them in her actual girlhood, and again in adulthood, never developing the strength to be able to turn a companion, to say nothing about the sly lines here and there that further diminish and pathologise her (Lestat calling her histrionic, Louis making her out to be a burden, etc.). This is all further compounded again with the Coven, and when the tragedy of her life ultimately leads to the tragedy of her death.
Louis as the Byronic Hero
Not to start with a quote, but here’s one from The Literary Icon of the Byronic Hero and its Reincarnation in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights:
“Generally speaking, the Byronic hero exhibits several particular characteristics. He does not possess heroic virtues in the usual, traditional sense. He is a well-educated, intelligent and sophisticated young man, sometimes a nobleman by birth, who at the same time manifests signs of rebellion against all fundamental values and moral codes of the society. Despite his obvious charm and attractiveness, the Byronic hero often shows a great deal of disrespect for any figure of authority. He was considered "the supreme embodiment [...] standing not only against a dehumanized system of labor but also against traditionally repressive religious, social, and familial institutions" (Moglen, 1976: 28).
The Byronic hero is usually a social outcast, a wanderer, or is in exile of some kind, one imposed upon him by some external forces or self-imposed. He also shows an obvious tendency to be arrogant, cunning, cynical, and unrepentant for his faults. He often indulges himself in self destructive activities that bring him to the point of nihilism resulting in his rebellion against life itself. He is hypersensitive, melancholic, introspective, emotionally conflicted, but at the same time mysterious, charismatic, seductive and sexually attractive.”
Louis as he exists in the show to me is pretty much all of those things, and I think to argue that he’s a gothic heroine not only diminishes Claudia’s arc, but robs Louis of his agency within his own story. Louis chooses Lestat, over and over again, he’s not imprisoned by the monster in the domestic sphere, he is one of the monsters who’s controlling the household, including making decisions of when they bring a child into it and when Lestat gets to live in it – he wanted to be turned, he wanted to live with Lestat in Rue Royale, and while there are certainly arguments to be made about their power dynamic within the household in the NOLA era, importantly Louis actually gained social power through his marriage to Lestat, particularly through The Azaelia, he didn’t lose it in the way that’s vital to the story of the gothic heroine.
Daniel Hart even said it in a recent twitter thread about Long Face, but there is an element of Lestat and Louis’ relationship that is transactional, and to me, for that to exist, they both have to have a degree of control over their circumstances and choices in order to negotiate those transactions. Claudia is the one who can’t, she’s the one who’s treated effectively as property, and she’s the one who lacks control over her circumstances.
While you could perhaps argue the constraints of the apartment in Dubai lend more to the gothic heroine archetype, I’d argue it as furthering the Byronic trope again by being representative both of Louis’ self-destruction and self-imposed exile. As Jacob has said a few times, Louis does seem to have known to a degree that Armand was involved in Claudia’s death on some level, and it’s that guilt and misery that has him allowing Armand his degree of control. The fact that Louis was able to leave Armand as easily and as definitively as he was I think demonstrates that distinction too – after all, to compare that ending to Claudia’s multiple attempts to leave the confines of the patriarchal house, both in Rue Royale and Paris, which were punished at every turn – first by her rape, then by Lestat dragging her back off the train, and then by the Coven orchestrating her murder.
Louis gets to leave because Louis can leave, he has both the social and narrative power to, and the fact that he does is, to me, completely at odds with the gothic heroine. Louis can, and does advocate for himself, Louis is proud, moody, cynical. Defiance is a key part of his character, just as his exile from NOLA society due to his race, and his chosen rejection of vampire society in Paris, is. He’s intelligent and sophisticated, travels the world, and has misery in his heart, guilt that eats him up, and self-destructive tendencies. That’s a Byronic Hero, baby!
a talking point i often see when defending the consumption of dark content is that it’s a coping mechanism for those with trauma which is very valid and true but i also want to make this abundantly clear: you can like dark content for no reason. you can enjoy fucked up shit in fiction because it’s enjoyable and entertaining. trauma is not required as a ticket for entry. enjoy your dark content bc it’s fun and sexy and don’t let anyone take that away from you
super simple low-effort ao3 summary methods that are 1000% better and 1000% less annoying than just saying you suck at summaries:
copypaste the first few lines of the fic. u already wrote ‘em. let ‘em be their own damn hook
if ur feeling fancy & don’t mind showing ur hand a bit, copypaste the first few lines of the fic that u feel are esp. Important or Interesting - the ones where u first start getting into the real meat of things
state the main tropes! theyre probably already in ur tags - just say them again - maybe as a full sentence if ur feelin fancy. or with a joke if ur feelin Extra fancy
ask a question. pose a hypothetical. eg what happens if u take [character] and put them in [situation]?
make an equation. [character] + [thing] = [outcome]
just write like a one-sentence summary of what the fuck is going down. just one (1) sentence. doesnt matter if it doesn’t cover every important aspect. or if it sounds bland. any summary sentence is gonna be miles better than “idk i suck at summaries”
just…explain the fic like u would to a friend? it doesnt have to be a polished back of the book blurb. it can just be “[pairing] coffee shop au, but like, still with murder, and also i made everyone trans. enjoy”
just stick a meme in there
honestly who cares
just put literally anything but a self deprecating comment in there & ur golden
figure out what the word means from context clues while reading -> use the word in a sentence while writing -> realise you're not actually certain what the word means -> panic about your sentence not making sense even though it hasn't been pinged as grammatically incorrect -> look up the definition of the word because You Must Know -> it means exactly what you thought it meant -> oh, good! :) -> immediately forget the definition -> repeat forever
i could fix her... (female character who is so clearly a lesbian but the writers or the network wouldn't allow it so she's trapped in heterosexuality) babygirl i could treat you so well...
blakekathryn
baratheonpilled
areudirty
tangentwithtanner
stormborns
