#and lestat is so mean to claudia while being fully aware louis thinks of her as daughter?

[horngryeyes]

lestat is so mean like okay you can think those things but youre being so mean to someone thats one tenth of your age??

[pynkhues]

This might be a bit of speculation, but do you think that Lestat also found the 20th restrictive? I feel as though his relationship with Louis brought him into a social climate that he may have otherwise ignored or avoided. I wonder if it impacted his relationship with Claudia also.

Oooo, that's a really interesting question, anon. My inclination is yes, he would've? Especially given he's already run through a few chapters of history and been living apart from human society in a way that Louis doesn't really make the active choice to do until he decides to turn away from Morgan and Amelia at the Romanian shelter in 2.01.

Depending on how they decide to adapt this part of TVL though, Lestat does go to America to make a connection and live a human lifetime that he never got to as a mortal. That's what Marius wanted him to do, so I think there probably is - to an extent - a broad embrace of this society that Louis' a part of that goes with that. He's getting to share this new mortal lifetime with a man who he loves, and I think he probably figures that they'll live that and then move on from it and it'll be this thing that they both look back on with nostalgia at some point. In some ways, Lestat's arrived in 1910 New Orleans basically to play house, which I think fundamentally contributes to this disconnect between him and Louis, because Louis' not playing - this is still his life - and Lestat's all in, of course he's all in, but he's already left this equivalently formative part of his human reality behind him.

In that sense, I don't think Lestat is ever fully aware of the toll of the era on Louis or on Claudia, and while I think he probably feels some degree of restriction, he's also got far greater freedoms broadly by being white, wealthy, and able to pass as straight when he's with Antoinette. It's a very, very different type of freedom though from the one he had in Paris with Nicki, and the one he had while travelling with Gabrielle though, and I do think we see that he chafes with certain things. Like I think he does feel restricted that he and Louis can't be together publicly, for instance, because we see the catharsis of it for both of them when they kiss on the dance floor at the Mardi Gras Ball, and I actually think he struggles sometimes with them being so anchored to New Orleans, even though he's in love with that city. He tries to get them to travel a couple of times, after all, and Louis' refusal to do so as he's still so tethered there to his mortal life, I think probably did feel restrictive in its own way.

And yeah, with Claudia, I think the social climate there probably affected him a lot because it really compounds the othering within their family unit. Louis gets to be Daddy Lou, he and Claudia get to share a vampiric language in telepathy, but they also inherently share a human one too by both being Black. They experience the world differently still by nature of Claudia being a little girl and Louis being an adult man, and that results in very different levels of social power in the 1910s-through-1940 (hell, still does today), but they have more crossover than they don't.

If Louis' the father, if he's Daddy Lou, Lestat can't publicly be anything other than Uncle Les. Gay marriage was illegal, gosh, interracial marriage was illegal, and transracial adoption was extremely controversial, so in this sense, I think the social climate that they're in absolutely has a huge impact on that relationship. It's particularly interesting - and potentially even more poignant - when you consider again the fact that Lestat's technically the birthing parent given he turned her. Those social restrictions of the era means that only one of them was ever going to be able to live openly as her parent, and that was never going to be Lestat.