Little Drink as edging and MURDER as orgasming is the most mindbendingly hot and truthful parallel to ever be drawn. Just. Cannot get past it
Yes, YES!!!
Like I know I’m Marius Brained and everything but even when I’m reading TVA and in Armand’s POV I am always like, god this must have been killing Marius. 🥵
The Devil’s Minion era (once they warm up to each other) and Venice Era are really the only times in canon we get to see a prolonged courtship between a vampire and human, yeah? But the books constantly tell us about how killing & drinking is the ultimate form of intimacy. (Notice me being very very mature and not devolving into an Asexual VC dissertation LMAO pin that for later). I’m not counting Lestat & David as a prolonged courtship because David was Not Interested and they weren’t sharing blood before Lestat finally turned him, and still David’s turning is explicitly described as rape and written to be erotic. But the overlap of Venice & Devil’s Minion is too obvious to ignore and we see the way the human/vampire relationship finds ways to translate their interspecies erotic desires by sharing sex acts (for the human) and blood (for the vampire).
STILL!
The Little Drink isn’t all they need! Like they’re not just taking a little sip and fucking off for the night — Thorne describes it as being a bee going from flower to flower! Drinking from many many people! And the books tell us that it’s not ONLY the blood itself — it’s the murdering that’s the truly intimate and most special act!!!!!
So anyway just.
Taking little sips for years and years ! The blue balls, my god. And finally getting to take him all the way!!!!!!! God. 🥵💦
Especially like reading B&G and knowing that Armand was like, Marius’s 3rd choice rebound during that time period LMAO. He wanted Botticelli and had to leave Florence to not kill him! He wanted Bianca and had to remove himself from her social circle to not kill her!!!
This is my favorite Marius quote in VC, when he’s feeling like he’s going to murder Bianca —
For a moment, I thought my powerful self-control would be lost. I would embrace her, whether or not she would have it, and take her rapidly by force from the very middle of her warm and safe rooms to the cold and fatal domain of my soul.
He finds Armand because he’s trying to like ethically source a fledgling (great job buddy that’s the worst anyone has ever done it) by choosing someone who’s on borrowed time, anyway! Blank slate that he can groom for vampirism!!!!!!
I was just talking to @apoptoses today about how the concept of “this sounded cool until I actually tried it” comes up a bunch in VC — we were talking about Daniel romanticizing murder until he actually had to do it LOL — but same for Marius thinking he can just mold a trafficked boy to be a good vampire. So it’s not just like, Marius having a relationship with him and taking little sips as a fucking aperitif for The Act but like, he almost immediately changes his mind and doesn’t want to do it !!! He’s willing to deny himself !!!
Gosh where’s that other thing he says in TVA…
“I’m coarsened by human blood. It's always the fact. Only in starvation do I find an ethereal purity.”
"Ah, and you turn me from penance at every juncture," I said, "towards the senses, towards pleasure."
Just, oof. Especially for Marius who, from what we can tell, is a little more into humans than most of the cast? Like he’s someone that craves social connection and wants to be around them all the time. Even when he was alive and he was traveling to meet and study people in taverns. So I think there’s just a lot wrapped up in this !
I shared this a couple weeks ago but I wanna share it again because I think it will make everyone understand VC better and we’ll all write better fanfics for it LMAO it’s based on Hellraiser but it's the topic of eroticism in religious penance !!!!! Very excellent.
But the eroticism of suffering! Of denial! Inside the universe of Written By Crazy Catholic Lady VC we also have to talk about how eroticism is the kill & the blood and how abstinence is akin to starvation - how it’s something actually painful.
Anyway I’m gonna leave it here I think because I’ll talk all day but I was poking through TVA and B&G for some quotes about this and I’m just !!!!!!
Marius on Armand:
I had never experienced such pure intimacy with a mortal, except with those I meant to kill. It gave me chills to have my arms around this boy, to press my lips to his cheeks and chin, his forehead, his tender closed eyes.
Yes, the blood thirst rose, but I knew so well how to control it. I filled my nostrils with the smell of his youthful flesh.
"He is irresistible, but what am I to do?
Armand on Marius:
"Amadeo," he said, his lips on my throat as they'd come a thousand times, only this time there came a sting, sharp, swift and gone. A thread stitched into my heart was jerked all of a sudden. I had become the thing between my legs, and was nothing but that. His mouth nestled against me, and again that thread snapped and again.
I saw him staring, beastlike, from his chair, as if some ravener had come into him and banished all his civilized faculties and left him thus, hungry, with glazed eyes and reddening mouth, the glittering blood finding its myriad little paths over the silky margin of his lips.
He rose, a drugged thing, and came towards me with a rhythm of movements that was alien and struck the coldest terror in my heart.
His fingers flashed, closed, beckoned.
I ran to him. He lifted me in both hands, clutching my arms ever so gently, and tucked his face against my neck. From the soles of my feet up my back through my arms and my neck and scalp, I felt it.
"Master, Master, Master, I love you."
"Yes, well, that's not so unusual," he whispered. He didn't stop his kissing. He lapped at the blood. I writhed under the weight of his hand on my backside. "But the question is, Amadeo, why do I love you? Why? Why did I have to go into that stinking brothel and look upon you? I am strong by nature ... whatever my nature ..."
He greedily kissed a large bruise on my thigh. I could feel his sucking at it, and then the tongue lapping it, eating the blood, and then his blood coming down into it.
And this from TVA when he finally does it:
He bent his lips. A sense of dreadful awesome finality swept over me.
"You will die now to be with me in life eternal," he whispered in my ear. "Never for a moment must you really fear. I will hold your heart safe in my hands."
His teeth cut into me, deeply, cruelly with the precision of twin daggers, and I heard my heart thud in my ears. My very bowels contracted, and my stomach was knotted in pain. Yet a savage pleasure swept through all my veins, a pleasure which coursed towards the wounds in my neck. I could feel my blood rush towards my Master, towards his thirst and my inevitable death. Even my hands were transfixed with vibrant sensation. Indeed, I seemed suddenly to be but a puppet map of circuitry, all of it aglow, as with a low, obvious and deliberate sound, my Master drank my life's blood. The sound of his heart, slow, steady, a deep reverberating pounding, filled my ears.
The pain in my intestines was alchemized to a soft sheer rapture; my body lost all weight, all knowledge of itself in space. The throb of his heart was within me. My hands felt the long satin locks of his hair, but I did not hold to them. I floated, supported only by the insistent heartbeat and thrilling current of all my swiftly flowing blood.
"I die now," I whispered. This ecstasy could not endure.
(What’s also funny is that the turning from Marius’s POV is so much about Armand’s religious ecstasy and revelations - thanks Catholic Lady but also that’s whole eroticism-mysticism thing again. Also the way that Marius treats it like a wedding so. Jsdkgla.)
I’m going to be so fucking honest with you, I was gonna pull a bunch of quotes and I think there were some more I was gonna look up but I got a little too squirmy reading these ones 🥵🥵🥵🥵 dhjkadslg I THINK I’VE MADE MY POINT.
