#blind spots.

[gabriellelestat]

Hi,I feel like I'm being gaslighted into thinking that AR wrote Marius & Armand"s relationship in a positive light? That wasn't my impression at all. Am I mistaken? I ask you this because you seem to have good Armand takes.

Hm. I do consider the vampire chronicles a study in power, abuse and sexual violence, personally. the books often take advantage of elaborate metaphors and heightened violence to do this and the different perspectives sometimes distort the narrative to either reveal or obfuscate abuse so they’re not always straightforward which can sometimes complicate interpretations. the victims have incredibly complex and realistic reactions to the abuse they face.

so where I approach this from is - ‘they said a child had died in the attic’ -> opening line of all time to me. particularly in terms of how TVA is concerned with exploring csa + the narrative structure of armand’s history in the book being bracketed by chapters which involve him trusting his children into marius’s care only for marius to betray it and every single principle he stands for to turn them (in TVL he advises lestat to allow people to live full human lives before turning them while confessing that he failed armand by not giving him the same grace) in order to entrap armand by establishing a bond with benji & sybelle that can never be severed. this is specifically because armand rejects the invitation to resume a domestic relationship with him in the first chapter of TVA. this generally sets the tone for how their relationship plays out over the course of the book. ultimately it’s also narratively important that armand is unable to fully come to terms with the abuse marius inflicts on him and is able to express how betrayed and angry he feels only when the bodies at stake belong to people he cares for very deeply - he’s able to better articulate his feelings through secondary subjects who’re similarly abused, i.e. namely sybelle and benji (and lestat! he feels very deeply about gabrielle’s neglect of him).

that said I cannot emphasise enough that I feel it’s impossible to interact with renessaince venice without the historical context for how sexual relations were organised at the time- and homosexuality was practiced almost exclusively through pederasty. anne is extremely conscious of this - she rarely shies away from examining how power differentials play a role in generating conditions where abuse is fostered. it would be antithetical to the premise of the vampire chronicles to do so. I think people may often find it distasteful that she eroticises dynamics which feature abuse but it works for me because I find it to be brutally honest and prefer to see depictions of abuse that encompass their complexity - so although this post is about lolita I do always come back to it when I try to express why TVA being an erotic text doesn’t particularly bother me (and speaking of lolita. I do also like to make a point about the very intentional ways in which immortal humbert humbert marius chooses to identify armand - armand/dolores being ignored in favour of amadeo/lolita which is a sexual identity that marius specifically bestows).

I talk a bit more about TVA & armand’s complicated feelings about the abuse he experiences here although it was typed out very hastily and I think this conversation between marius and armand from an initial draft for TVA where armand makes very confronting statements is incredibly revealing about anne’s thought process while she was writing their relationship.

[sameair-weallarebreathing]

Face down in retrospective mud

Air pollution itself, I think, is one of it’s own blind spots. People tend not to think about it, especially in places like America, where it is not as bad, therefore not as visible. Many people know of the horrible smog in places such as India and China, and empathize with them. Some people may think that it is bad because it is visible, but don’t realize that if it is not on that level quite yet, it is almost invisible. Smog in America is not yet a problem for most people because they do not think about it, large in part because they cannot see it. However, you can see pollution in things like car exhaust on the highway, or the smoke coming out of the chimneys of industrial or manufacturing plants. But, since it’s not something that we feel we can change or is causing a visual issue at this moment, many people do not even think about it. They simply continue to burn fossil fuels out of cars, houses, building, everything, without giving it a second thought. Because we are in a country where it is not overcome with smog, but it very well may be soon.