Hero fail: Lestat
Sorry this is late.
Heroes that fail:
Lestat de Lioncourt
Lestat is a character who periodically turns up in Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles. In Interview with the vampire we saw him through the eyes of someone who was bitter and resentful and this rendered him an antagonist. After that we started to see his lighter side. The rebel who questioned authority and stood up to oppression. The man who was fiercely protective of those he loved and forgiving of those who have wronged him. The vampire that refuses to kill the innocent.
This is all well and good but let's count the ways he failed.
In The Vampire Lestat novel the character Armand cruelly chops the hands off of Lestat's musician friend and locks him in a room with his violin he cannot touch. This eventually drives Nicolas to suicide. Lestat doesn't believe in revenge, fine. But he tries to justify what Armand did to his friend by saying Armand was probably just trying to restrain Nicolas. Umm... Yeah, that would only make sense if not for the fact a page earlier Elani told us that Nicolas could be held with ROPE! It's easier to hack someone's hands off and torment them than bind them with rope?! Since when!? This was a poor justification so the character wouldn't have to return to Paris. Either on the part of the character or Anne Rice, herself, it's hard to tell.
Lestat's next big fail is in Memnoch The Devil when he's talking with Roger (the ghost of one of his victims) and it comes to a part about Roger's childhood where an old captain had wanted to touch him, sexually. Lestat chastises Roger for not allowing it. Umm... Anne... No! Just No! When the Hell did Lestat start to think like this?! He was a CHILD!
And Lestat's biggest fail as a hero: The ENTIRE novel Blood Canticle.
She makes him an action hero. He even blows up a helicopter with his mind. That sounds cool, right? Well, the language is dumbed down tot he point of insulting. The word vampire is now blood hunter. Telepathy is now mind gift and pyrokenesis is now Fire Gift.
Lestat spends the first two chapters (I kid you not) telling us, as a whole, that if we did not like Memnoch The Devil we must be stupid and don't get it and how it's a masterpiece.
He then shares a fantasy about wanting to be a saint and meet The Pope. Our hero goes on to chastise Mona, the female vampire, for being 'too slutty' with how she dresses. Since when did this matter to the eighties rock star!?
He also has Suddenly developed amnesia because he doesn't like computers and does not know how to send E-mail. Never mind that he's been using computer word processors since 1984, sent electronic documents (that's E-mail) in Tale of the body thief, and hacked into police data bases in that very same book. He also uses a laptop in the San Francisco version of the Lestat musical and commercials for the musical. But he doesn't know what E-mail is now? Oh, yes, and his left eye was ripped out in the novel Memnoch The Devil but by Blackwood farm and Blood Canticle it's suddenly his right eye.
Lestat also hunts and kills his own kind now. That's right. The vampire who wept for the vampire Baby Jenks who murdered her parents and did drugs is now killing other vampires who plead for their lives and out right say they just want to be like him. Umm... Anne... Since when? That was Armand, NOT Lestat! But as of the novel Merrick apparently it's now Lestat. She's turned all of her characters into one vague figure with an interchangeable head.
Despite his judgemental tirades and former taste for murderer blood Lestat somehow falls in love with Rowan Mayfair, a witch who murdered her own daughter for being different. Sadly enough WHILE the daughter was saving her life. Yeah, but this is Lestat's love interest?
Our 'hero' goes with Mona and Quinn to find her lost Taltos (alien-like) child. They find the island the Taltos have been living on has been taken over by drug pirates. They defeat / slaughter the drug pirates and it looks as if one of the Taltos had been working with them but instead of asking what her explanation is they sedate her and hand her over to Rowan Mayfair to be her 'life specimen' to live in captivity for the rest of her existence as a lab rat. Umm... Nice...
Turns out the Taltos was playing both sides and really still on the side of her fellow Taltos but they all happily stay in the 'care' of Rowan Mayfair, who famously hates all things non-human. Nothing can POSSIBLY go wrong!
The final part of the novel is Lestat and Quinn singing a country song by Quinn's dead, homophobic, slutty mother and Lestat mentioning a love of the Dixie Chix.
I miss Lestat, the brat prince, the one who questioned things and had a sense of right and wrong, the one who refused to be defeated. Sure had a few dim moments in the earlier books but at least he was... still Lestat...
The creature in Blood Canticle, in my opinion, is WORSE than the dark description of Lestat from Interview with the vampire. I HATED him in this book. Lestat in Blood Canticle is no hero, he's not even Lestat in the end. He's something unrecognizable.