#but I had a lot of feelings for lestat

[manichewitz]

i dont think yall understand how floored i was when i found out that the interview with the vampire books are actually incredibly erotically gay for real and not just light queercoding or fan's gay ships?? bc this changes everything. i had always assumed anne rice hated fanfic authors for making her male characters fuck, but no, she just wanted to be the only author making her male characters fuck

[faithandfairies]

Interview with the Vampire Season 2 Rant

It's so interesting how season 2 is like watching a train wreck happening in slow motion.

Let me start by saying that Claudia tells Louis that he's once again choosing another vampire over her. But I feel like Louis is trying to do the opposite of that. Or at least he really doesn't start out trying to choose Armand.

The entirety of season 2 involves Louis trying to help Claudia make her dreams come true by following her lead, doing what she wants to do. For once he's choosing her.

None of what they end up doing is anything he cares about. He's a homebody who likes to read a good book by the fire while knowing his loved ones are safe and near. I mean, he asks Claudia early on whether they can go home now, when they don't find what they were looking for after 5 years of searching, right before Paris.

He doesn't know what home will entail, whether it will just be going home to New Orleans with Lestat dead or if Lestat will be there waiting for him, murderous or loving, but he doesn't care. Both options will do.

Him seeing Lestat is him trying to desperately reconnect with something he cares about, even if it is within his own memories, especially when his attempts at connecting with Claudia fall flat.

Claudia initially wants to leave Paris when they first arrive there but Paris is the first time Louis feels at home because Paris is the closest he's been to Lestat in years. So Louis wants to give it a chance.

I think on some level Louis expected Lestat to follow them, to come looking for them, so Louis could say he tried to pick Claudia over Lestat and Lestat wouldn't let him. The way he tends to place blame anywhere else than with himself. Even him going to Roger and Albert is about inquiring whether Lestat is truly dead, sure, but is also a siren song meant for Lestat in case he's alive I think. That if Lestat is alive he will hear from Roger that Louis is in Paris and show up. But then none of that happens.

Season 2 also involves a lot of everyone lying to themselves. Even Louis' relationship with Armand is him trying and failing to fix the mistakes he made in his relationship with Lestat with Armand as a stand-in for Lestat.

Armand is very obviously dangerous from the start. Even while he's crushing a bit on Louis he does not make it a secret that he wants Louis and Claudia dead.

Initially Louis makes the right call, he wants to leave Paris the moment he realizes Armand is a danger to them. But it would mean uprooting Claudia, forcing her to start over from a point of misery again. So then he approaches Armand the way he did Lestat.

He tries to solve the problem of Armand being a danger to them by trying to love him, love him into safety. He tries to go one step further than he ever did with Lestat, he tries to say it, say "I love you" but it doesn't ring true even to his own ears.

He forgets that loving Lestat was always his truth, incapable of being a manipulation, impossible to replicate as a lie.

Even Armand tries to love Louis, because the only thing better than killing Louis would be for Louis to fall in love with him more than he ever was with Lestat. To the point that if given the choice Louis would choose Armand because he loves him more than he ever did Lestat.

But Armand is not Lestat. Which means a lot of things. It means Louis and Claudia will never truly be safe with Armand simply because Louis and Claudia are not his. Lestat considered Louis and Claudia his, his family, his to take care of, his to protect. Armand does not feel the same way. But Armand not being Lestat also means Louis will never love Armand. Which only underlines that they will never be safe with Armand. Because aside from running or killing the coven, actually loving Armand more than Lestat was the one way Louis might have gotten Armand to not kill them.

And Louis can't do that. He shows Armand this too when he can't commit to Armand in the one essential way he did do to Lestat. He can't accept Armand as his companion. Because in his mind Lestat never stopped being his companion and to accept Armand as such would mean to give the role Lestat filled to Armand. At this point Armand is an affair. He cannot be Louis' companion because even considered dead, in Louis' heart of hearts, that position belongs to Lestat.

And yet when it turns out he and Claudia are still in danger from Armand and the coven Louis tries to do that anyway. He tries to banish Lestat's memory. He tries to force companionship with Armand even though he doesn't feel it. And that scene is so interesting because it's Louis lying to himself in its entirety. It seeming to be initially about him breaking up with Armand but instead it's him trying to let go of the memory of Lestat.

But what it's really about is him trying to let go of his humanity and once again becoming the cold and calculated pimp he used to be before he met Lestat, that needed to do what he needed to do to protect his family. It's funny to realize that by loving him Lestat unknowingly unearthed some of Louis' humanity that had previously been hidden away. Because in choosing to love Lestat Louis became more human. Lestat chose Louis in part because of the hardened pimp façade he threw up in order to cope with the work he had to do to take care of his family. But in loving Louis Lestat laid bare all of who Louis really was and while he thought he knew what he was doing I don't think he truly knew until after he had turned Louis and saw the true effects of him taking a wrecking ball to all of Louis' walls at the same time.

When Louis realizes that once again his family is in danger he does what he did all those years ago. He dusts off the pimp persona. He's about to give the performance of his life trying to make Armand believe he's in love with him so Armand doesn't kill them, all while locking his heart away with the memory of Lestat for safekeeping so that he can actually give a convincing performance.

But here's the thing, Lestat was the actor. Louis was never good at lying about how he really felt. It's also why distracting Lestat before he killed him was so effective. It was as easy as breathing because Louis didn't have to act. The love he felt for Lestat was the absolute truth and anything less than that would have been a lie Lestat would have seen straight through. Lestat may not have realized Louis loved him but unbeknownst to him he did know how it felt to be loved by Louis.

Louis can't deceive Armand the same way precisely because he doesn't have those particular feelings for Armand and up to then he was trying to use Armand as a Lestat stand-in, a do-over in which he tells Armand what Lestat needed to hear, in the hopes this time the outcome will be different. Which almost worked because he had Dreamstat to bring those real feelings to the surface. But then Louis locks Dreamstat away thinking that's the answer and no longer even has a whisper of the feeling he previously had to back up his words and actions. And by then it's already too late anyway.

[monstersinthecosmos]

I use TVA/B&G to backwards engineer The Devil's Minion a lot, not only as a rare and detailed insight into how human/vampire relationships tend to go in this series, but also just how many things they had in common, all the parallels, all the ways you can ask if Armand was working through his Maker Issues, and of course the final excuse that their hand is forced because the human is dying. But I think often about how much Marius struggled with it, and although he caved in the end, he changed his mind sometimes, he knew he was a monster, and it's always going to be the struggle of whether you love someone enough to let them go or if you love them too much to let them go, do you curse them with darkness or do you keep them so that you aren't alone in your own darkness, etc.

But I've wondered a lot how that journey went for Armand, how often he maybe changed his mind, if he felt tempted but then reminded himself he's a monster and shouldn't, and I'm absolutely haunted by their final separation before the concert. Lestat's book comes out, Daniel is wandering, Armand can't find him (or is avoiding him?) and there's just so much here, and how much of their relationship was violated by reading Lestat's book independently before speaking to each other, how much Daniel would've learned without Armand's consent or before he was ready, and how much Armand's abandonment issues would've been ripped the fuck open by reading about Marius and what he had to say.

"Whatever will happen will happen, but choose your companions with care. Choose them because you like to look at them and you like the sound of their voices, and they have profound secrets in them that you wish to know. In other words, choose them because you love them. Otherwise you will not be able to bear their company for very long." "I understand, " I said. "Make them in love. " "Exactly, make them in love. And make certain they have had some lifetime before you make them; and never never make one as young as Armand. That is the worst crime I have ever committed against my own kind, the taking of the young boy child Armand. " "But you didn't know the Children of Darkness would come when they did, and separate him from you. " "No. But still, I should have waited. It was loneliness that drove me to it. And Armand's helplessness, that his mortal life was so completely in my hands. Remember, beware of that power, and the power you have over those who are dying. Loneliness in us, and that sense of power, can be as strong as the thirst for blood. If there were not an Enkil there might be no Akasha, and if there were not an Akasha, then there would be no Enkil. "

It's just wow like.

Sincere advice that he never got to receive? In the same sentence as hearing he's a mistake? Does he read this and think he should make Daniel out of love, and at the same time feel all the more monstrous, and want to resist?

The choice is taken from him anyway, and he's forced, just as his own turning was forced. And as @nightislandnoveltymug pointed out recently, he treats it like a funeral.

[winepresswrath]

what louis did to lestat and what louis did to armand are connected and that's important to the story but also. it is simply not the same. nothing louis did excuses armand's behaviour, that's not how anything works, but he did not "cross a line" or "poke at armand," he weaponized armand's history of abuse to belittle and demean him. nothing armand said to louis came close- the equivalent would have been "oooh, i'm such a stupid bitch that my husband can beat me half to death and i'll keep crawling back for more even when it endangers my daughter!" it's retraumatizing and deeply destabilizing to hear that shit from your partner. and in response armand should have been like "well this man sucks when he's high and he's high all the time, so i'm bouncing" but if he'd done that we wouldn't have a story, would we?

edit: i've come back to give armand credit for "claudia didn't love you like we did/do. ps. u used her to distract from your own hurt feelings" that shit does hit in a similar way. however "the ways someone hurt you have left you contemptible and weak. they scrawled 'dirty and annoying' all over your soul in red ink and it's never coming off" is just outstanding work. timeless

[pynkhues]

It is interesting with Antoinette. I could see it being that Lestat genuinely had affection for her, even if he would certainly have killed her had Louis personally asked him to -- or it could be that she was just familiar, and he wanted the closest thing to intimacy he could get, so someone who knew him was better than someone who didn't. And the whole possibility that she reminded him of Gabrielle in some ways...

(x)

Yeah, I totally agree, anon.

I actually unfortunately suspect that Antoinette isn't a character the show will really come back to, and I think I'm one of three people that cares about that, haha, but where I tend to land on her relationship with Lestat is the fact that neither Lestat nor Louis actually have any friends.

That's not to say that I think Lestat and Antoinette were just friends, I don't, they obviously fucked a lot (which like, also comes down to the fact that Lestat doesn't know how to have friends he doesn't fuck, haha), but I do think the reality is that Lestat and Louis have very different racial and cultural contexts, hobbies and areas of interest which aren't things they can easily share with each other, especially not in early-1900s America, and I think that's a bigger factor in their relationship breakdown than either will admit to.

It's why Louis' able to reconnect with Jonah so quickly - they might be leading different lives, but they have more overlapping factors than they don't, whereas he and Lestat have less than they do - and for Lestat as a white theatre kid, he needs to be around other performers. I think with Antoinette, she's obviously a talented vocalist and an ambitious artist, and I can see that genuinely just being company that Lestat wants to be close with. They probably talk shit about crap theatre they've seen and do vocal runs together and fuck, and honestly for a part of Lestat, that would lowkey be a dream relationship, haha. Do I think they have a deep emotional connection? No, but given even Louis' willing to admit she's talented, and his own complex relationship with not succeeding as an artist, I wonder how much that factors in to his portrayal of her and his insecurities around their relationship (to say nothing of the fact that she's both white and a woman).

This feels like it's going on a hundred tangents, haha, but my point is maybe they'd step out on each other less or descend into unforessen levels of chaos and destruction if they both had a few friends they could talk about their identities and niche interests with!!

[gouinisme]

i undertand that i use makeup as an art medium and a hobby so i shoudn't feel guilty for wanting to buy art supplies but also buying contour or an eyebrow pencil although i don't use those in my regular makeup feels like a fucking crime

[mech-bull]

One of the things I hope for is that IWTV does not buy into making Armand still, always, and forever ridiculously in love with Lestat like he (apparently, I have not read them) is in the books. I mean...I'm not even saying that as a DM shipper (which, ahem, I am). I would certainly be down for a more complex resentment, lingering feelings, eventually getting over it thing (and I am DEFINITELY down to see more flashbacks of them). I just don't care to watch a faithful adaptation of the "Literally everyone is obsessed with Anne's special-est boy" theme. There are so many more interesting things they can do with all of those characters and relationships than that.

[hekateinhell]

I know I talk about this line a lot (far too much) from Lestat on Armand in TVL as a twenty-one year old baby vampire before he leaves Paris:

I loved him. I knew it, as incomprehensible to me as he was.

And at least once a day I remember that Anne intended for Armand to be the villain in IWTV, TVL, and QotD, before she changed her perspective on him when writing him with Daniel.

But it adds another layer to the way I read Lestat and Armand's complicated dynamic in TVL.

Why emphasize so much that her protagonist has loved the villain, and that the villain has in turn desired him, for almost two hundred years?

When Anne started thinking through QotD, did she originally intend to have Lestat destroy him when the Akasha plot failed? (Armand was supposed to tie into the Akasha thing).

Was all of that to make it hurt for Lestat that much more if she had followed the traditional hero/villain arc?

I HAVE QUESTIONS.

[halflingkima]

wait wait wait wait wait

lestat knew they (claudia) were planning to kill him. Not just the night of the gala but the whole time (or almost). he planned their trip knowing that they wouldn’t take it. coffins that lock from the inside.

mets-moi dans mon cercueil. louis. louis!

[rainbowcarousels]

30. Tell us an idea for a longfic you want to write in the future.

I feel like I'm about to curse myself, but there was a discussion about what would happen if Nicki and Bianca had been the ones to find Armand after TVA as opposed to Benji and Sybelle and I haven't been able to get the idea out of my head.

I think they both deserved a chance to be featured since Bianca is around in PL and just about everyone BUT Nicki comes back from the dead, with Armand's contrasting relationships with them both fascinate me. Bianca is ruthless but emotional and I think it would have been a beautiful thing for her to help him as she nursed him when he was sick and dying and for him to realise there are people he loves still around and how he impacts them. She's also done with Marius' shit, so that would have been interesting to look at too.

I feel like it would have had a lot of meaning for Lestat, who is always the light and bright one to Nicki's darkness, awoke from his state to him playing to mirror what happened in TVL and that the echo of Daniel's condition to Nicki's could have been explored in a really interesting way. Looking at Louis and Antoine with the Mark 1 around? Absolutely fascinating. He's also just, and I can't really use another word for it because this is it, a bitch and I love that about him. He does not give even a little fuck what people think of him, he's not afraid to die (he's tried enough) so he's not afraid of the older generation in the slightest and just does whatever.

[island-in-the-shadows]

In my best Miranda Priestley impersonation: "Mean and Toxic Vampires? Groundbreaking."

Who would want them to be anything but messy? I ❤️ these mean and toxic vampire messes and their fucked up dodecahedron of affection. 🍿

“lestat and armand are too mean/toxic/immoral to be main characters of the show!” you Will Not survive season 3

[pynkhues]

Different anon here- I’m generally ok with mpreg existing. But the sheer volume of it in this fandom is pretty weird. Especially considering the source material… one of the great things about the unholy family (to me) is that it’s this family unit without the necessity for sexual reproduction. It’s so interesting because they all had lives outside of each other at some point so it’s part found family, part queer and yet biological parents. I think that’s one of the things I first loved about the 1994 movie and it’s a shame that aspect is overlooked

(x)

Yeah, I totally agree on all counts. Like I don't usually bat an eye at mpreg (whatever floats your boat! I'm very good at scrolling, haha) but there have literally been times I've opened ao3 and have counted five or six fics on the front page of updated works that are mpreg which feels really disproportionate to the amount of fic that actually gets posted in this fandom?

I - - mmm, kind of wonder a little if its tied to some of this gender essentialist stuff that's coming up more and more both in this fandom, and in social media generally? There feels like there's this real desire to shoehorn them into a quote-unquote 'traditional nuclear family dynamic' which really feels like it's the antithesis of the show. Like you said, the fact that they've all had lives outside of each other is, and the fact that as a family they are both one found and made is, I feel, pretty crucial not just to their interpersonal dynamics, but also to each individual character?

[live-laugh-obsess]

queen of the damned is really trying my patience

[wizardpink]

@iamanoccasionaldoodler

Okay so,

There seems to be this negative reaction to the finale from a lot of Devil's Minion fans and I don't understand it for a lot of reasons, but one of them is ... I don't get why people are upset that, when read at it's worst, Armand and Daniel are seemingly not on good terms after Daniel is turned. I keep seeing this belief that Armand "abandoned" him, which I think is fully pulled from y'alls collective ass, and a disappointment that Daniel would call Armand a "fucking asshole."

But the thing about Armand/Daniel everyone seems to be forgetting is that even in the source material, they first had to tear each other down to their bare bones before they could see each other well enough to love one another -- REALLY love one another. Because Armand is a russian nesting doll of lies, masks, and emotional walls, and with Daniel, idek if I can explain it properly, but I think its some combination of Armand needing to break him a bit to get him on his level of broken freakitude, and also Armand not being able to relate to the 20th Century Human period and needing to drill down into Daniel's core, straight down into the monkey brain that every homo sapien has shared for eons, before he can find something he understands.

If we were to ever get a proper Devil's Minion storyline on this show (and we will), they've laid the perfect groundwork by having Daniel EVISCERATE Armand right to his face, slicing his Gorgon's knot of lies and schemes in half and leaving it lay on that table. And Armand's face! HIS FACE! He can't believe it! Seventy-seven years with Louis who never could unravel all the strings, or simply didn't care to even bother. And THIS guy who seemingly hates him found Armand fascinating enough to try. AND succeed!

And why wouldn't he? Daniel may not have remembered until they were nearing the end of the interview, but Armand SHOWED Daniel what was beneath the mask years ago, the very first time they met. The jealous, insecure, desperate creature that was hiding under there, that IS Armand to Daniel.

I'm getting off track here, but what I'm trying to say is that as much as Armand turning Daniel in the books is SUCH a flawless scene, ultimately, if you believe in the infinite and eternal nature of their love story, it doesn't matter whether Armand turned Daniel before they fell for each other, afterward, during a break-up or at the climax of their most romantic streak. Like Lestat said, "We'll be together ten thousand nights, a hundred thousand. What we're doing is hard."

So maybe Armand turned Daniel shortly after Daniel stripped him bare in front of Louis, and Louis was so disgusted by what he saw, he threw him into a stone wall. Daniel could have run, too. For some reason, he didnt. Armand could have killed him in an instant, sitting at that table or after Louis left. He didn't. Armand made a conscious decision to tie himself to this man who just exposed him for ETERNITY. Because as horrific an experience as it was, as devastating and life-altering, he was seen.

"It is difficult to explain how his words disarmed me, how efficiently succinct and impenetrable his argument was. All my conceptions, even my guilt and my wish to die, seemed utterly unimportant, and I completely forgot myself and the barbaric scene that surrounded me. For the first time in my life, I was seen."

Louis said those words about Lestat as he described being made a vampire, when he kissed Lestat on the altar.

That feeling, of someone cutting to the core of you and telling you exactly what you are as no one else has ever been able to understand, made Louis accept the Dark Gift from Lestat.

And it made Armand give that Gift to Daniel.

[liaratisoni]

Not the best episode comparatively but still great and boy I AM HAVING A BALL ON THIS BITCH!!

Apparently people on my dash didn't like the episode!? Still super excited to watch tho! To see what I'll think.

[nalyra-dreaming]

Rolin Jones on IWTV s3 (going forward) and POVs:

"Everybody’s free to judge the rest of it. If all goes right, we’ll have six or seven more seasons to work on you coming around to that, or the redemption of that. [In season one,] the audience wants to kill Lestat along with Louis and Claudia. But we had to sit on it for a year and a half. So it’s okay for people to think that we made a supervillain out of Lestat and then to come around to a fuller portrait. In season three, [Lestat is] front and center, and Jacob takes a supporting role. And it’s not all about point of view. We got 80 to 85-percent of Lestat pretty solid. Retribution is easy, right? It’s being contrite. [There’s] the idea that forgiveness should be part of this cycle, too. That’s something I think we’re trying to sell." "So, what am I interested in? I’ll be less interested in point of view and memory as much. The challenge of the books is that there’s not a lot of forward story. I don’t think that you can probably mine the arcs of those for origin story after origin story after origin story. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take the same material and in very inventive, exciting ways move it forward."

And:

“The big difference moving forward is Lestat will be front and center telling the story, so it should feel like this show has been taken hostage by Lestat,” Jones says. “Aesthetically, it is going to feel different. It is not going to feel like two old guys in a room trying to figure out what brought them together. It is going to be over the shoulder of Lestat de Lioncourt, of whom you have probably seen about an 80%-accurate version of who he is — on fire and reckless. So it should be fun and dangerous.”