LESTAT CATCHES US UP ON THINGS

coming out of the swamps and i'm doing JUST FINE

Since the season 1 finale of AMC’s Interview With the Vampire aired tonight, I’ll let out my screams all at once:

You guys. Forgive my elder goth glee, but there are Lestat memes now?

A fact that is not terribly surprising. As I’ve mentioned before, the new show is one of the best adaptations I think I’ve ever seen, flat out. Jacob Anderson, Sam Reid, and Bailey Bass are the first family of vampires, now and forever, and I can’t stop screaming about it.

Another fact - I opened up this space with the intention of doing more , well, long-form (shit)posting about things I love that aren’t comics - novels, fashion, costumes, television (prestige and reality, I’m no snob.) I don’t use Twitter, and part of that is because I’m an advocate for making the kind of content you enjoy and we all hate Twitter and Tweeters and Tweets.

My favorite blog for years was the now-retired The Toast. The Toast was a repository for what I like to call ‘brainy shitposting,’ you know, really dumb jokes that you probably won’t get unless you’ve read a book or two in your life. Meme elitism, perhaps. Allow me this sin.

I still follow one of my favorite writers from The Toast, Danny Lavery, here on Substack where he continues to be distressingly smart and hilarious with every post. He’s always been one of those brilliant writers where I wish I woulda thought of it first. Danny’s ability to make me cry laughing about literary characters I haven’t thought about since high school is a gift, and I recommend spending some time with his archives.

So, back to Anne Rice.

One of the great gifts of being an Anne Rice fan while she was alive was her utter embodiment of her characters. She always swore that they lived within her, and fans of her newsletters and blogs were often treated to surprise commentary from Anne’s own characters - most commonly, her protagonist, Lestat de Lioncourt - vampire Prince, immortal anti-hero, occasional dinner guest of the Devil, and fully insane Leo. Once she even wrote in detail about Louis and Lestat’s wedding in a Facebook post rather than you know, put it in the book she was writing.

Maybe that’s why Lestat memes are so fucking hilarious - Anne would take them seriously. Perhaps too seriously, if you were one of us who wrote “VC Specs” during the years where she was notoriously litigious toward fanfic writers (guilty…) But in the wake of the new AMC TV show, which is - incredible - I’m delighted to see fan culture for my first and favorite fandom be so…well…out and proud. So without further ado, with apologies to the brilliant Anne Rice and the genius Danny Lavery:

LESTAT CATCHES US UP ON THINGS HE HAS DECIDED HE LIKED SINCE ANNE RICE DIED.

• Those weird ‘Choices!’ visual novel-esque phone games where you drown your butler, shave your courtly rival's head, or let your ugliest wife freeze outside during the winter.

• Has always liked bidets ("they're French and they tickle your arsehole") but likes that now Americans can and do buy and install them in their homes

• Megan thee Stallion

• "Bimbos! Bimbos, Louis!”

• The Drag Race franchise, especially the UK ones - he hates the English like a proper Frenchman but those rosbifs are filthy! Like the old commedia del’arte!

• #fashiontok

• Orville Peck

• “There are two wolves inside you” (Have I told you the story of the time I killed eight? oui monsieur you have)

• The concept of a Target run, reads the ‘I hope you had fun on your Target run’ sign out loud as he leaves each time, but in iambic pentameter

• Ryan Murphy programming, the more tasteless the better

• Savage X Fenty ambassadors (wants to be one)

• Raya

• Kendrick

• Wine moms, wine mom culture, feeding on wine moms

• A24 movies

SOME THINGS LESTAT DOES NOT LIKE

• Christian Girl Autumn

• Dasha Nekrasova, Twitter Tradwives, and Brooklyn Catholics

• Target-style minimalist eco-friendly packaging where you can’t see what’s inside the bottle

• Targets that close at 10PM

• Machine Gun Kelly (but it's a little bit like when dogs bark at a mirror)

  

• Twitter

• Reddit (“these social medias, Louis, they are for ugly people”)

• True crime fans (too scared to get caught by amateur sleuths tbh)

• Fast fashion/SHEIN “Garbage. Poo. I would not let Mojo shit on these rags.”

• Self-checkout lines (interferes with his Atlantean programming)

• Q-Anon (“a better conspiracy I could have improvised on a Parisian stage. And a greater beauty I am than their kings, too!”)

• Ride-share services, dating apps, basically anything with a physical record of where someone was before/during the time he maybe killed and ate them.

• Wish (keeps getting scammed, or “feeling scammed,” which he regards with equal importance.)

• Being corrected about how ‘A24’ is not a type of movie

  Anne Rice, I’m sorry, I’m sorry I’ll never be you. But goddamn if I won’t take your gleeful goth weirdness with me everywhere I go.

Stay weird, talk soon, sleep in all day, party all night, never get old, never die, it’s fun to be a vampire —

-TH 11.14.22 02.26