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ah you have acne why don’t you borrow my tube of dermatologist recommended number one skincare product la roach pussy

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harry dubois if he was a young witch trying to solve the disappearance of her neighbors cat in a small village in the alps

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more cleaning: the little prince request I did last may ♥

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Armand, Haussmann, and Paris:

The thing about Paris that's not really discussed in the VC books themselves is the Haussmann project.

In 1853 Napoleon III commissioned Haussman to completely renovate Paris. The plan was to tear down all of the old structures and rebuild the city; reorganizing the streets and reshaping them to accommodate more green spaces, and replacing smaller buildings with taller apartment blocks in more uniform style.

The Paris Armand knew when he arrived as the coven master and which he came to know as the theater leader would have looked something like this:

Dark, winding streets leading off wide boulevards and short, leaning buildings.

The Haussman project would see all of these places systematically torn down, occupants removed to other areas of the city while new buildings were put in their place. In some areas workers were destroying and rebuilding things 24 hours a day.

At this time Armand would have been living at the theater on the boulevard du Temple, Paris's street of theaters:

This dagguerotype shows the boulevard in 1838. This painting, in 1862, looks much the same:

But by 1863 all but one theater on the street had been destroyed, and that was only because that theater was on the opposite side of the street shown in the painting. How and why it wasn't pulled down, I don't know- no information on it seems to exist, just like no explanation for the very small handful of other old structures that were left untouched.

That theater, the Théâtre Déjazet, still exists today. But it was established in 1770 by Comte de Artois, so while it could have been Anne's inspiration for Armand's theater it's not the 'rickety wooden rat trap' that seats 300 that Lestat describes in TVL.

Anyways, knowing all of this, I think it makes even more sense why Armand so quickly grabbed onto Louis and was ready to run away with him at any cost.

Armand, who'd been kidnapped from the monks, who'd had his palazzo torn out from under him, who'd established something of an existence under Les Innocents and was then ripped out of that world when the cemetery was destroyed. Who was watching the city he'd finally come to know get systematically torn apart. Everything that was familiar to him was being taken again.

So why not let Louis burn the theater? He arrived in Paris in 1870, just as Haussman was dismissed. But the work of destroying and rebuilding Paris was set to carry on. Chances were the Theatre de Vampires would be next, and if that were the case there's no way the crypts beneath the place would remain safe and undiscovered.

And if he'd stayed where would they go during the renovation? What would they do? What would the point be in continuing trying to run a coven he was bored of and a life he didn't care for in a new location?

Armand was going to have to begin again somewhere- better that be with Louis, out in the world, than roaming a now unfamiliar Paris. And even though he didn't burn the theater himself, allowing/instigating Louis to do it still gave him more control than letting a stranger come in at some unpredictable moment to demolish things all over again.

(And what of Lestat, what does he feel about these changes? He never could have shown Louis the Paris he knew and loved, which existed when Louis was still mortal- that Paris was largely gone)

Chances were Anne might not have known most of this at the time she wrote interview or even TVL. But I think it still makes a lot of sense and brings up a point about Armand and immortality that I don't see brought up much- that not only do vampires lose every mortal they've ever known, but with time they also see the destruction of every place they've ever known or loved.

(ps: I'm not an expert on this topic or anything, so if anyone does know why some buildings were unchanged or has any interesting historical info to add by all means please, reblog and add it on!)

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Kidnapped and experimented on by aliens but I was in the control group so nothing happened

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I love the bits in the ‘94 movie where Lestat is like “i have a tragic backstory btw. If you even care” and Louis is like “I don’t. Goodbye”

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One of the most interesting parts of the Rice vampire books is that the characters are realistically irrational, and, yeah, unfortunately at least some of that is going to be sacrificed for the sake of an adaptation given that it's so antithetical to what audiences are trained to receive. But I love it. Characters care about things they'd actually care about, which is not what they should care about. Characters have the take-aways they would have, not that they "should" have. People strain to fit character arcs into familiar tropes but... they don't really fit into tropes. "What kin of relationship do Lestat and Armand have?" The one that is described in the books. It can't be distilled to a familiar category or tag, any more than you should be able to distill your relationship with a sibling or your spouse that way. "Who is the love of Lestat's life?" This isn't a question that makes sense with this text. "The love of his life" is you presenting an idea that is incompatible with what the story is and how it is told. The questions are stuff like, "What were the selfish aspects and what were the benign aspects of Lestat wanting to see Gretchen again, and is her fate a consummation of her faith or an indictment of it?" or "Does Louis end the story having come to appreciate immortality or in such absolute despair that it's indistinguishable from inner peace? Why is his affection indistinguishable from and/or characterized by capitulation?"

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The Righteous Gemstones ✞ 1.06 Now the Sons of Eli Were Worthless Men

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A New "Evil Island" Has Been Discovered in the Galapagos - And Yep, The Finches There Evolved to Kick Babies

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YOU AINT ROCKIN W THE KLINGONS? 🗣️

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Lwaxana Troi | Fashion Icon

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Edi Patterson as Judy Gemstone in THE RIGHTEOUS GEMSTONES

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totally normal girl