i also thought the "asylum where they raised me" line was a little silly but then literally one billion people on earth had an opinion about it, so you know what-- i take it back. i would not last an hour. she got my ass

A reminder in the year of our lord 2024 that Tumblr has an option to report posts for “election integrity”…. since there’s already a ton of propaganda on here featuring false or misleading info by people who openly say they want Biden/Democrats to lose or Trump to win, maybe consider doing that next time you see some of it on your dash.

(Especially important to do with people who are downplaying the human rights violations of the Russian and Chinese governments, demonizing Ukrainians or Uighurs or Hong Kong democracy activists, or currently, delegitimizing the security concerns around TikTok as “Sinophobia” or something. Be extremely skeptical *especially* of anyone whose issue with Biden is that he’s not pro Russia or pro China enough. Just unfollowed someone for reblogging this crap and blocked and reported the OP.)

shout out to my very first little meow meow the vampire armand

fuck it I'm getting a house cleaner

Any setting where the elves have weaker booze than the dwarves isn't committing to the bit

...Do I need to say it?

{Quotes:Nitya prakash/Richard siken ,crush}

Do you remember in which part Seth's killings are described? 👀

It's in the first half of Prince Lestat, I'll try to find it specifically.

Can I please have a cappuccino but with oat milk and a big pump of sugarfree chocolate syrup and... Lol I remember your stupid ass from 2,300 years ago. We were living in seleucis on the tigris river during the same span of summers... do you rememver a red ibis bird with beautiful plumes? Yeah U were a sort of dull brown goat that didn't train and dint make milk or kids. Yeah? No? Eventually the Zoroastrian homesteaders who owned you started feeding you contaminated barley to try and kill you lol. Maybe you remember the ergotism? Anyway. also I want one of these 🫵stupid little breads in the case

"how can you like this objectively bad thing!" because i have bad taste. move on.

I literally think they're lying about it.

Armand's first kill is a mess

Marius admits in Blood & Gold that when he's upset he makes a mess (did this in Rome)

Marius' kill in Rio that is described was DEFINITELY a mess

Pandora is ripping out hearts; she's making a mess

Azim (remember him!) is making a mess.

Holy shit that's got nothing on Seth; SETH is making a MESS. Holy SHIT.

Khayman is also making a mess. It's mentioned ancients tend to make a mess (although it's about Seth). If you're getting into the marrow, you've made a mess. I think that's sort of definitionally mess behavior.

Maharet is stealing eyeballs somewhere along the line :T

oh like sybelle gives a shit!

This is an unpopular opinion, but I never liked that vampires from The Vampire Chronicles don't make a mess while feeding. 🧍🏻‍♀️

im curious what's the first meme you remember seeing? mine was numa numa

Something people don't tend to point out with Marius thematically is he's always trying to write down histories only for them to be destroyed; he's one of the few characters who is largely okay with the immortality aspect, but yet he's denied any victory with respect to his vision of what he can accomplish with it.

I really enjoy Blood and Gold and this is pretty spot-on, and I do understand why it doesn't have much QotD-onward stuff even though it's frustrating as a reader. It's a book of context but he doesn't want to talk about current events because, uh. He can't cope with them very well.

And I do love Thorne as wellllll

So I realized that I never shared my Blood & Gold re-read thoughts due to shadow-ban issues on the old blog, thoughts under the cut! It's long!

It was interesting to read this immediately after TVA, it really highlighted Anne's talent for developing distinct voices for her characters as the two books are so different in structure and voice. Where TVA is fevered and rambling with tonnes of evocative metaphor this is logically ordered and somewhat detached. This has none of Lestat's conspiratorial chumminess interspersed with catastrophic existential crises, none of Louis' melancholy poeticism, we're just getting straight facts from Mr Marius . So Marius' voice is a bit drier than a lot of the other narrators in the chronicles but that does feel correct and it gives the book a bit of a cosier and more chill vibe than most of the other entries. It's like story time with Marius. 

It's interesting that this one isn't framed as a book being written for publication but as a quiet and private conversation between a lonely guy and a stranger who showed up on his door step happy to listen to him. I think that makes sense for Marius, he doesn't seem like he would publish his life story, he's too private and he would probably have been more tactful land less honest about certain things if it was for publication - less interesting for us!

You do still have to read a lot of his inner journey between the lines nonetheless. He's not really telling you how he was doing day to day after he abandoned Pandora entirely (following an argument about how to deal with the emerging cult of satan worshippers) then spent centuries in Rome pretending he wasn't dying for Avicus' (and Mael's?) company while letting partying mortals have run of his house as he painted the walls subconsciously with dozens of Pandora faces... but you can imagine, he's probably not feeling great!

It was fascinating to get more detail on how he was recruited to be keeper of the parents and to see his tense arms-length relationship with Mael play out over the years. Eudoxia is a great addition to the story as brief as her time in it is and getting his version of Armand's story is very welcome (and of course interesting to contrast with Armand's telling). Getting more Bianca was also welcome, she's such a big presence in TVA, I liked getting Marius' perspective there. 

I've got some of the same kind of complaints I had with TVA about what was left out. I guess that structuring a life story that spans millenia is no easy task and it's inevitable that some stuff is gonna get left out. Anne probably didn't want to rehash the same events form different perspectives over and over again but I really was disappointed that the narrative doesn't touch on his thoughts on his reunion with Armand in QotD, the brief Night Island coven times, how Daniel came to be in his care (???), his reaction to Armand's suicide attempt (!?), how was it that he and Santino ended up being the team on clean up duty together for that anyway (???), his reaction to learning that Armand was in fact alive(!) and his subsequent turning of Benji and Sybelle.

Marius:

And Pandora of course, I hadn't read her book at the time of reading this so I was disappointed about how little detail we get on the centuries they spent together. You can imagine his motivations for leaving a lot of this stuff out, it seems that some things are still too painful to talk about and he is also telling a specific story to a specific audience here (to influence a particular outcome, perhaps? *squints suspiciously at Marius*) so it makes sense for him to brush over or leave some things out entirely but it's not always the most satisfying result for a reader that's already invested in these characters and their stories.

The framing device with Thorne is great, I can't emphasize enough how immediately I fell in love with this guy, this stoic but sensitive viking titan of a vampire. I found the final chapter to be the most exciting really, I guess because where most of the story is Marius explaining from his perspective why he's alone (apart from Daniel who doesn't count because he's too obsessed with his model cities, sorry Daniel!), it's all a foregone conclusion where we're heading and we know what happens to most of the major characters but once we get back to Thorne's contemporary POV hey, anything can happen! And thanks to Thorne, stuff does happen! He's kind of the MVP of this book. We also get a teeny bit of Daniel in the framing chapters at the start of the book and hey, it's nice to see him alive and still sassy, if a little worse for wear.

Overall I find it a pretty enjoyable vampire chronicle. I do love the lore of Anne's vampire universe, how rich it is both with historical details and with her own world building and Marius is, of course, very key to it as guardian of the parents for millennia, so I do want to know everything about him and I'm glad this book was written to give us more of his story. His chronicle of his very lonely life, caused in no small part by his own stubbornness and terror of losing control is sad and often frustrating but I did find all of it a compelling read. He's a very strange guy and it really is fascinating to get more of his perspective, even if he doesn't quite have the zazz of a Lestat or the poetry of a Louis.