#‘Vampires increase thru slavery.’

[blueiight]

I was reading your tags to dre's published ask. Do you think while writing about these blood sucking monsters, Anne deliberately made one of them a former slave master? I mean the way this man during his mortal times had benefited by preying on the black race and the reflection of it in his fate where he is now in literal terms an entity who survives by preying on people? Or is it like twilight ( movies) where Jasper's past as a confederate soldeir is just dropped as if it's the most casual thing to shrug away.

( something is up with vampire media and all of them being connected to slave trade my god. Either it is a social commentary or people really do not have any self awarenesses?

i dont know about twilight book or movie to make a meaningful comparison to louis’s book counterpart. i wish i knew. and tbh, its hard to prescribe authorial intent on a dead woman who wrote a sprawling epic of 20+ books for 50 years , especially with shifting perspectives , namely pivoting away from louis to lestat as her MC bc of what fantasy/POV was more interesting to her. but i think in the first book there was some intention there, i cant just say how much. lestat wants to hunt the runaway slaves along the freniere plantation, and louis discourages him from doing it not out of compassion for enslaved people (which would be condescending and abysmal writing for a slaveowning character), but for his proximity to the freniere’s as fellow planters. ive talked about it a lot how its really interesting in the first 2 books that the american planter is created both literally + vampirically by the european aristocrat.. and theyre both parasitic beings in relation to the enslaved people, eventually draining them+ burning the plantation down. iwtv early book louis is resentful of lestat in part bc he thought lestat wanted his plantation, but when he learns who lestat is + where he came from, the power and will he has. hes far more genial to him. its a very dark book, and i think the fact that these characters are so vicious + melancholic is intentional on the authors part. i dont know how much race based chattel slavery is meaningfully explored from the perspective of the slaveowner, but book louis thinking of people in his captivity as fixtures, as creepy ‘things’ more proximate to the supernatural bc of their ‘african nature’ (that had yet to be ‘trained’ out of them) is a very probable, chilling, and haunting perspective of a former slaveowner to take even a hundred and some years removed from it. or if we take it as book louis immersing himself in his perspective @ the time. either way. and its pathetic when fans try to flatten book louis into ‘he was a good slaveowner’ cuz at that point theyre just conflating the movie with the book. i kinda joke that book louis is the vampire it girl bc he was such a terrible mortal LOL. im still indeterminate on the exact mode or purpose, or how much it was just about the aesthetic of gothic horror (re: the earth’s a savage garden). especially bc later books fixate on very discrete modes and metaphors of servitude/subjugation ‘being a slave to the blood’ is a recurring motif running antiparallel with the motif of ‘purifying the african/asian/foreign’ (through ‘admixture’ with the ‘european’) (s/o poacher bro gabi + talamasca bro dave ig) and in later works, theres the cycle of slavery through marius & armand.. marius, whos mother was a slave, purchases armand. chattel slavery took inspo from the romans in the idea of maternal based slave caste inheritance.. idk. idk. ive had very long rambly convos w ppl on here in the past (& im still a bit embarrased abt it) on this, but i think the reasons why fans dont rly get into it is cuz most ppl got into these books at a young age + was just into the cool lore or the queer shit and were able to handwave things as just aesthetic/era/quirky anne things etc. idk.