#iwtv character study

[itwasanangryinch]

L'odeur de la mort

He remembered the smell of death.

Not the antiseptic, clinical smell of a modern death. A body sterilized and removed of fluids. Removed of its humanity and everything that had made a person alive.

Not even the less-modern, but honest smell of a natural death. The sweetened, heady fragrance of putrefaction taking over a body as it took over the air.

As it hung in the humidified climate.

Clinging to anything it touched.

Digging into soft fabrics the longer the body was kept for viewing.

No, Louis remembered the smell of death from his youth. Before they moved into the final de Pointe du Lac family home half an hour from the Quarter, when they buried his grandfather and his father took the mantel as head of the family.

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At first, the de Pointe du Lacs decked out in their best existing black finery as an urgent correspondence was sent to a favored tailor and its twin to their favored dressmaker. The children's current clothes all fit smaller versions of them; the whole family many seasons out of style. Grace would have been… six…? to Louis' nine. It hadn't even been a quarter century since they parted, but recent proceedings made it harder than usual to focus on the particulars.

New clothes in the latest style were delivered before the death notice hit the papers. Favored servants also received updated, but less stylish additions to their wardrobes. Regardless of what went on in their personal lives, when the house was in mourning, the whole household was in mourning.

Unfavored servants though. It was unfavored servants who created the Creole smell of death.

Despite the custom for open casket viewings in an ill-suited climate, it wasn't the smell of a less-than-fresh corpse that created the smell of death in New Orleans. Instead it was the smell of the fresh dye that in the city permeated the air for blocks and for miles from the not-quite-plantation house at the edge of town. It was gag inducing and its permanence ensured their servants would be clad only in black until they could afford to replace the clothes.

Officially, they would only have to wear black as long as the lady of the house dictated, but in practice? In practice, they were worn for years after, re-dyed with each death. Re-colored with each loss. The dye as much a literal reflection of mourning as it was metaphor rubbing from the fabric and into their skin. A literal marking of the family loss imprinting semi-indelible on everything it brushed upon.

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It was that smell more than anything that Louis found himself missing those first nights at sea. The crisp, salt air seemed an affront to the unnatural death that they had witnessed in New Orleans. That they had caused in New Orleans. That they had fled in New Orleans.

His mourning clothes weren't to be black. Dingy greys, muted browns, muddy greens, earthy purples. All colors he and Claudia cloaked themselves in to hide amongst the mortals on the warfront. But not black.

Lestat had died, but in his stead there was to be no full page, black-ringed notice in the evening paper. No open house allowing loved ones and spectators one last glimpse at the carefully prepared body of the illusive, flamboyant former investor of the French Quarter. No black wreath adorning their front door marking their house as having an untraditionally sombre Lent.

All their carefully packed and coordinated accoutrements had been abandoned almost as soon as they debarked. Traded in to play-act as wartorn locals. As much a lie as the photograph of Grace they used to pretend to be a family looking for their missing member. But they knew where their missing family member lie.

Lestat was dead. What did petty trinkets matter?

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A respected family like the de Pointe du Lacs had their mausoleum well established. Long since built in anticipation of generations not only yet interred, but yet birthed. An anticipation of generations of death reunited for family members yet to come.

The last interment Louis had witnessed had been that of his father. The singular death that catapulted him from second, but capable son to patriarch and provider. His mother's man in society, his sister's caretaker until Letty proved himself worthy — if he ever proved himself worthy. Paul's alleged savior, bringing him home from hospital and back to the parish church where his delusions were indulged and not beaten. Where his standing as a stalwart local noble carried an air of deference as opposed to being seen as just another crazy negro.

Florence's mourning period for her husband was longer than it had been for the previous patriarch. She had liked her father-in-law well enough, a curt respect and show of deference to where their young family had tithed from. But where Grandfather du Lac had found himself with a lack of a wife to prolong his life much beyond what it took for the Second Line to play their last, Florence had a place in society to maintain. She loved her late husband, of course, but her mourning was as much performance and societal duty as it was grief. She counted down the days till she could reintroduce a small splash of color to her wardrobe.

And yet, when the time came to enter half mourning, she found herself reluctant to add any colors to her wardrobe. And Louis wondered if it were as much about the loss of a husband as it was finding him to be a lack of a worthy replacement.

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Claudia found Louis' rituals to be tedious. It had been hard enough to convince him to kill Lestat. To keep Louis engaged with the plan once he had given himself over to illusion and allowed himself to love Lestat without reservation. Able to tell himself that this was the illusion and not the distance he had kept between them for so many years beforehand.

She almost killed Louis herself when he suggested a final update to her much ignored doll collection. What did she care of the human custom for black dressed widow dolls? What use would she have had for a mourning trinket meant to signal the death of a loved one? Lestat wasn't her loved one so much as her captor.

"You're supposed to be a child," Louis chided as they bedded down in a makeshift shelter.

"A teenager, not a fuckin' baby," she reminded him, her sleep already soured before she made the nightly commitment to coffin.

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Before they left Rue Royal for the final time, Louis went around the house and covered the remaining mirrors. "Closin' up the house," he deflected.

"Makin' sure he won't get trapped," came the surly reply. "He was a goddamned bastard. At least if he's trapped, we know where he is."

But Lestat doesn't deserve that, Louis thought to himself. Numb in his blood soaked clothes as he draped cloth over each mirror in the residence.

The horror that had been Lestat. The husband that had been Lestat.

What was death without the trappings of mourning? Without the rituals of loss? Without the overt signals to the neighborhood that a beloved family member had shuffled off this mortal plan and to the next?

What was life without Lestat?

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Final notes: All of the cultural mourning information is based on the historical information and research of the Hermann-Grima + Gallier Historic Houses in New Orleans. Their Fall tour of the Gallier House is based on Creole practices circa 1860-1865 complete with historic ads for some of the items mentioned like the widow dolls.

While this information would be 50-80 years out of date for the show's timeline, Florence was definitely old school in the way she comported herself and Louis "clings to his Creole heritage" so it wouldn't be out of step for the characters to have an old fashioned way of doing things, especially as it would gain them respect in an increasingly hostile society.

Gallier House, of course, being notable to the narrative as the exterior model and address of 1132 Rue Royal and the basis for the interior layout as well.

[helianthus21]

I love that both armand and marius are painters but while marius' paintings are kinda mid, about armand they say he has god-given skills like literally everything marius can do armand can do better

[erebus0dora]

so i clicked through IWTV to find a very specific reference yesterday (i needed the blinking mechanics, it differs from person to person, and YES I KNOW I SOUND WEIRD, but that's still research for ART) and i noticed an interesting detail about Daniel as portrayed by Eric Bogosian. you're unlucky enough for me to write about that.

his Daniel is always moving. almost any given second.

it's not just blinking, it's always, um..... the full body flow. head. shoulders. arms and hands. everything is in motion, slightly changing angles, alive, breathing. almost restless.

when he is still, he is unblinking. focused like a laser beam. still, collected, unwavering. asking the difficult questions. almost like Armand is when he goes in defensive mode.

(when that old man becomes still and unblinking, RUN)

it's like two or three moments in total when he's still AND blinking. and those are always him being soft and vulnerable. that's subtle, but that's... incredibly vivid storytelling. he doesn't even need to say anything, the movements speak for him.

anyway, i think i can get too close to breaking down again if i read more of the newsfeed, so i suppose imma just make more art instead

[arcanasland]

The Vampire is Bored | Louis du Lac

“picking LINT off the SOFA???'" Emmy award immediately.

[kindaorangey]

hold on wait. wait. regime change between when show!armand leaves delhi, and when he's turned into a vampire. god. i'm thinking about his speech to madeleine, his "what will you do when there is nothing left of your era?". if he tried to visit the village he came from during his time with marius, he will likely have witnessed exactly that. within his mortal life. armand believes he is uniquely suited to endure immortal life, to adapt and survive no matter what. he might have seen the fall of the lodi dynasty while he was in his 20s; maybe that's why. but god. how devastating. his village might even have been destroyed in the fall of the lodi dynasty. what do you do if you are taken from your home and when you finally have the freedom and strength to return to it, it is unrecognisable to you. fuck.

[hummingbee-o0o]

Fic rec Friday!

Go read this absolute gem! It has Devil's Minion era shenanigans, character study and beyond-gorgeous parallels between what Daniel and Armand are each going through!

👉 Here you go

[shineforthee]

Thinking a lot about Armand as a complex character, and Armand as someone capable of great harm to others. And then about how this knowledge is sometimes translated into how he is expected to be characterized in fandom or fanon, for lack of a better term.

Thinking also about tenderness, softness, gentleness. And how it can be easy to take a character who is violent or cruel or immoral and say that they should be written as hardened, as not yearning for any kind of softness.

As if there is not a violent sort of tenderness. As if there is not brutal love, unyielding love, a devotion strong enough that it is capable of harm.

In TVA there's this passage, while Armand is sick, where he envisions being in a glass city and is addressed by a priest. There's plenty to unpack there but we get the sense this is some threshold between life and death. And he is told this:

"Your love for others and their love for you, [and] the increase of love in life itself around you, is what matters."

I can't stop thinking about that. About how that creates a thesis, a guiding principle of sorts, for a character who goes on to do terrible horrible things. It reads like a part of a hero's journey. It reads like a beautiful, wonderful thing. He does abhorrent things for that love, because it's what matters, right? All that matters, maybe.

When we remove the layers from a character - when we decide that because they are vicious they have no desire for tenderness - we flatten the things that can make them so genuinely fascinating.

I don't have a whole lot of interest in writing or reading an Armand that is cruel for the sake of being cruel, mustache twirling torturer, boiled down to a list of what awful things he can do for shock value. It's far more interesting to me to see what that darker devotion looks like. What it looks like to believe, for 500 years, that love is all that matters and that you will never truly get enough of it. I want to feel as though it almost makes sense, what he's doing. Not by pardoning him and blaming others, but by getting a sense of just what it would take for a character who is genuinely capable of love and tenderness to weaponize that.

[the-quiet-youve-been-longing-for]

Thinking about Daniel and his ex wives. The way he briefly talked about it, it sounds like it was a slow drifting away from each other, with some degree of regret on his part (the way he cried when Louis taunted him, the fact that Louis "low blows" du Lac went for "if she thinks of you now?", which means that's his fear. That they have forgotten him)

He cared for them, for Alice especially, she's the one that pops up in his mind more than once, he wanted to surprise her with the ring, he liked her in the purple dress, small human feelings now embittered by age and pain. He most likely threw himself into his work when the pangs of addictions reared their ugly head, into the lifeline Louis gave him because there are stories that need to be told, and he is a bright young reporter with a point of view. It overshadowed his relationships until it was too late to salvage anything.

And at a certain point, addiction came back in the shape of the thrills journalism would give him. Go away on foreign lands to interview dangerous people. Get threatened, hurt, risk his life in uncovering uncomfortable truths. Because above all, he hates the lie, in all shapes.

"She always dyed it back to brown. I liked it when she left it alone."

[slavictear]

y'all need to watch this masterpiece

[moondustinfj]

MBTI AND ENNEAGRAM ANALYSIS OF INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE CHARACTERS

Part 1

Louis de Pointe du Lac

Mbti

Introverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiving

Infps are highly idealistic, sensitive and driven by their values

Especially because their leading function Fi (introverted feeling) allows them to be in tune with their emotions. Very much so that they are driven by their inner compass. They have a clear sense of right and wrong and it's not likely or easy for them to change their mind about something, especially moral issues

Armand: I would have made this woman a vampire. But I thought it best you have a hand in it. Otherwise you would not give Claudia up. You must know you wanted it

Louis: I loathe what I did!

Armand: Then loathe me, not yourself

Louis: No, you don't understand. You nearly destroyed the thing you value in me when this happened. I resisted you with all my power even when I didn't know it was your force which was working on me. Something nearly died in me! Passion nearly died in me! I was all but destroyed when Madeline was created!

Armand: But that thing is no longer dead, that passion, that humanity, whatever you wish to name it. If it were not alive there wouldn't be tears in your eyes right now. There wouldn't be rage in your voice

Infps are very emphatatic and sensitive. They want to make the world a better place and they try hard to help others

"But why, with this passion and this sense of justice, do you wish to call yourself the child of Satan!" - Armand

Louis: I'm incapable of your detachment. I know what it is, and I do not possess it and I doubt that I ever will. I accept this

Armand: I understand. I saw you in the theatre, your suffering, your sympathy with that girl. I saw your sympathy for Dennis when I offered him to you; you die when you kill

They are introspective and they desire to find their meaning in life

"It's a terrible feeling, not knowing, not understanding, not being in control of your own destiny" - Louis

"I would have to know from what... from what it comes. Whether it came from other vampires...or elsewhere" - Louis

They focus on the big picture and are very intuitive

"No need to tell him what to observe, or what to remember. He always knew such things. Years ago, when I'd done the dark magic on him, I hadn't had to tell him anything; he had savored the smallest aspects of it all on his own. Then later he said I'd failed to guide him. Didn't he know how unnecessary that had always been?" -Lestat

With their strive for authenticity and their sensitivity, they look for ways to express themselves through art and stories

Enneagram

Basic fear: that they have no meaning or significance

Basic desire: to have their own identity and purpose, their meaning

Type fours are sensitive, self aware and reserved. They are also prone to be moody and self conscious. They can suffer from self pity and melancholy

Type fours see themselves as fundamentally different from other people. More than any other type, they are acutely aware of their weaknesses and defiances. They see themselves as uniquely disadvantaged or flawed

And because they see themselves as so different, they feel like nobody can see their true selves and therefore no one can love them for who they really are

"For the first time in my life, I was seen"

They might romanticize pain and bittersweet feelings

"I think to be this happy is to be miserable, to feel this much satisfaction is to burn"

Type fours often feel like there is something missing in them that others possess. This thing can't be properly identified but they feel like there is a hole in them that can not be filled

"If I ever thought we have souls, mine is gone forever"

So they feel like with this thing missing, everyone but them can fully understand who they are and their meaning

Type fours struggle to let go of their feelings from the past. They nurse their old wounds and hold onto their feelings about people who hurt them

4w5 (four wing five): The Bohemian

This subtype is combined with type five. So they're more reserved than the usual type four. But they're also more observant and speculative

"Louis, the watcher, the patient one, was there on account of love pure and simple"

Overall, infps and type fours are generally sensitive, creative, melancholic, empathatic, understanding, authentic, emotionally expressive and introspective people

"Louis, whose green eyes are soulful, the very mirror of patient misery, soft voiced, very human, weak; having lived only two hundred years, unable to read minds, or to levitate, or to spellbind others except inadvertently, which can be hilarious, an immortal with whom mortals fall in love" -Armand

" And it occured to me. If Louis does end his life, if he does bring his supernatural journey to conclusion, how will I ever answer for it to Lestat or Armand? It was the love of Louis which had at times crippled Lestat, and enslaved Armand" - David

"The first thing I'd ever noticed about him-well, after his green eyes that is- was his black hair. No, all that's a lie. It was his expression; the passion and the innocence and the delicacy of conscience. I just loved it!" - Lestat

"If I knew a mortal of that sensitivity, that pain, that focus, I would make him a vampire in an instant. But such can rarely be done. No, I've had to wait and watch for you. And now I'll fight for you. Do you see how ruthless I am in love?" - Armand

"Louis, my handsome Louis, in his dark wool and old fashioned high-collared linen, gazing down on us with a look of thinly veiled amusement, but with a secret in his hypnotic green eyes" - Lestat

[yearnerspermit]

Ngl I could write a dissertation on Louis and his relationship to performance/theater. Like that through-line is the core of his story and basically the entire show and there’s so many different facets to it

[pickingbelovedoffthesofa]

The whataboutism in this fandom is actually crazy. The internet is big. Not every opinion can fit in one post. Some of y’all just want to get mad at something. “Oh you chose to talk about this one specific detail and the context surrounding it?!?! It must mean you’re too stupid to understand the actual important parts of the plot going on around it.”

Uh… Go touch grass.

[septembermonologues]

i appreciate the "i need to study louis like a bug" people but i simply do not need to be one. we're just two girls with melancholy guilt and grief built into our bones. book!louis dragging his coffin into the mausoleum paul was buried in to sleep in every night and show!louis being put under decades long suicide watch and turning a whole room into a tomb is a level of freak (depression fueled masochism) i can match. he's like a brother in manic depression to me <3

[mostardently]

Interview with the vampire for me is on the level of breaking bad, succession, Hannibal right now for how far it has made me go insane with its writing and acting and cinematography and foreshadowing and parallels and production and costume EVERYTHING. and I love it more cos I went in with zero expectations I'm not fond of vampire shit gives me an ick but these actors and their insane acting made it look so hot I've been bewitched.

I love when a show stays with you or you keep discovering more about it, after you finish it. I love when it's complex, that it doesn't literally feed you the answers but makes you wonder, makes you tear the layers of the story or character, makes you their lover,hater and understander, makes you form your own opinions, makes your body shiver, makes you lose your breathe, is vague in an artistic way, makes you want to gnaw on your bones, makes you want to scream cos you can't process to understand how many efforts and thought process went through even one line/dialogue by everyone -actors ,writers, directors.

I love consuming media pls give me more of this shit!!!!!!!!

[nightcolorz]

cw: problematic gender stuff

Love how all the men in tvc have the most backwards complexes about their gender and masculinity that make my head spin. I think this is a product of whatever complex Anne Rice had going on about gender in her life but it pays off at least for my own enjoyment, lol. Keep in mind that these characters have very outdated, problematic, stereotypical, etc ideas about gender bcus old vampires are old. Lestat thinks he’s the pinnacle of masculinity and the ultimate manly man who’s 6’0 with a massive dick but literally no one in his life sees him that way. He’s generally perceived as foppish and a pretty boy and if he found this out he’d have an explosive identity crisis/meltdown that’d be everyone’s problem. (is this a plot line in blood canticle? Potentially, but I haven’t read it lmao). Lestat is also desperate to not be seen as a victim and victim hood and femininity are equated in his mind (old). Louis portrays himself (and wishes to be perceived) as a principled Catholic man but internally sees himself as subservient, weak and shameful, and “feminine minded” (see: https://www.tumblr.com/armandaniels/717587975606779904/louis-de-pointe-du-lac-the-first-man-to-be?source=share). Neither of these self assessments are accurate or healthy. He also believes that his perceived feminine way of being is inherently wrong bcus he is a Man but also it is True and Unchangeable so he is therefore incurably flawed. Internalized misogyny but ur a cis man and it’s also hand in hand with ur internalized homophobia basically. Just a lot of internalizations going on here overall. Armand’s a whole new beast. Armand’s ideas about his gender are so complicated I don’t know if I can accurately summarize them in a few sentences. It’s more tied to how he’s perceived and treated as someone who looks youthful, and feminine/androgynous bcus of his eternal age and how that perception plays into his own self image as a man, contrasted with Louis and Lestat where it mostly stems from problematic old fashioned gender norms and expectations clashing with their lives as queer vampires. That coupled with his life of being objectified and dehumanized, not even mentioning his relationship with religion and sex and how that applies to gender, and it’s just a lot. And the thing about all this is that I don’t know if any kind of modern gender language/tools/self reflection that I (and probably u let’s be real here) are familiar with as queer ppl would be helpful or even apply to them were they to use or explore them. This is bcus they’re all so disconnected from humanity and gender roles as ppl from centuries ago living lifetime after lifetime where gender roles and ideas of gender are consistently changing that I don’t think our new fancy gender terms would even compute in their brains. In conclusion I wish I could hook these freaks up with a vampire friendly therapist who could sort their shit out, but for better or for worse they are fake and beyond help either way.