#and that abuse victims aren't always completely powerless in the dynamic yet that doesn't cancel out the abuse they experience

[naivety]

i really, truly, honestly hate to get Serious about the fictional fun and freaky moral ambiguity show but it is driving me crazyyyy to see people write full essays on why loustat are a mutually harmful dynamic and not an abusive one as if that isn't Exactly how real life abuse gets downplayed and misconstrued and misinterpreted until it is taken so unseriously that the abuse gets perpetuated. like you are. exactly doing The Thing. this is how it happens, because it makes sense, and people see that someone has been dishonest, or nasty, or mean, or toxic, or Insert The Illusion Of Mutual Harm Here, and it is compelling! that's how real life abuse apologia happens! people aren't just stupid or cruel, they try to think it through and still drop the ball because intimate relationships of any kind are minefields of subjective experience that cast very reasonable doubt. just because it's reasonable and half of the truth doesn't mean it isn't still harmful and something you maybe have to and actually should check yourself on. it's a tangled yarn of half truths you have to sift through with no way to verify anything because it's all based on he-said she-said information, who are ALSO working with subjective experiences of half truths that they could not escape even if they tried.

every time louis shows himself to be an unreliable narrator it is a narrative device made to cast doubt on his recollection of everything he tells daniel, instances of abuse or otherwise. yes, this is true, you are correct! this is also true for literally every single person on earth! and it is also exactly how real life people are gaslit! because they Do remember things wrong and they Are subject to their own blind spots and willful ignorance, and abusers see this and know this, and they use it to cast doubt on truths AND half truths! and abusers are also subject to this just as well, and they often have very human reasons for exploiting this fact, they aren't supervillians cackling to themselves around corners. it is a Human trait to subjectively interpret information, and it can be knowingly and even unknowingly exploited for personal gain, because we all have a device in our brains that is looking out for our own self interest, whether it's an obvious material one, or a more nebulous idea of the self; it's there, and it will gladly work with us to enact itself or work behind the scenes in our willfully ignorant blind spots to protect what it thinks is being threatened. real abuse is abusive because of the presence of an imbalance of power that cannot be willed away, even if the person with greater power wanted to. the harm they deal someone who Lacks that power can never be reciprocated in the same caliber, even if they wanted to. that's why abuse is abuse and not just harm. that's why it's called a power imbalance. it cannot be avoided or undone or erased. just because you want to pretend you don't have an advantage over someone you love doesn't mean that you Don't have that advantage. this is like basic revoking white privilege virtue signaling stuff.

the fact of the matter is that every instance in which louis harms lestat, lestat can actually physically leave, or outright physically stop louis from enacting the harm. this is just a fact. knowing what we do about lestat and vampires as a whole, it would cause him emotional harm, he would be alone, the single most horrible thing he can possibly imagine and has already experienced in all it's all epic highs and lows, etc, etc, this is also true, but it is still an escape he can make even theoretically, while louis has absolutely no material safety net to leave lestat literally ever. he was a black man turned fledgling vampire in the early 1900s in the midst of a suicidal episode, with hardly any knowledge of how he can orient himself in this new vampiric world because lestat has purposefully withheld the information due to his own fears (of louis leaving and of his own traumatic experiences in it probably), he has no family, a precarious source of income that lestat often props up with his whiteness, no community he can maintain even outside of his human family because he knows no other vampires and is physically incapable of creating and maintaining new human relationships, and even when he does finally leave, it doesn't end well for him Because of all the aforementioned reasons! it feels silly to pretend these factors are not at play in their dynamic whatsoever, let alone that they interact with and impact in big and small ways every interaction they have in season one. it is Not an equal playing field, even if lestat himself were to wish it was! that is how abuse can even happen. these are inescapable truths of the world they live in. both can harm each other and both do, yet only one is fully capable of denying the other with a semblance of material safety, while the other is absolutely not. real love can be there, but that does not mean it changes anything, or saves anyone, etc, that is often exactly why these dynamics are such a mindfuck to fully extract yourself from.

this is what an instance of power imbalance looks like guys like. that's what it is. you are walking headfirst into the point, beloved. this isn't a #cancellestat post, i am simply begging you to at least enjoy lestat in a way that doesn't include blatant abuse apologia. there are incredibly interesting discussions we could be engaging with about the source material here. you can enjoy lestat for what he is, and i honestly wish you would instead of fearing some cop in your head might cancel you if you admit a fictional character has been abusive and that you still enjoy them. but refusing to engage with the epic highs and lows of core aspects of his place in the narrative and their implications seems counterproductive and also incredibly boring lol

very weird to frame your abuse apologia as being aware that the writers intended to illustrate a mutually harmful dynamic and not an abusive one. when the writers in question also wrote the line 'once you put it out there, they [the audience] decide what it is' because nothing you ever create has any innate definition. when the writers in question decided to racebend major characters and then showcase them being harmed by white or nonblack characters in a repeatedly racialized pattern when they Did Not Have To Do That and then genuinely or disingenuously decide to dialogue about their directly or indirectly illustrated racialized dynamic of intimate partner violence within and outside the narrative. like to be quite honest it does not matter what they intended because this is what they made and this is how it Looks to a notably large amount of people. who just happen to be interpreting it wrong? according to what metric? the very metric they say Doesn't Work in their own fictional creation? ok