#don’t know if I answered your question lmaooo I basically yapped for a while about things that randomly came to my mind

[in-kyblogs]

need to know more about italian lestat and why is this so overshadowed by his french side 😤

Have you heard about the fact that Lestat is nonbinary on his mother side? We could say the Italian thing is the same kind of situation really lmao

His mother, Gabrielle De Lioncourt, was born in Naples and grew up there. It was common for Italian nobles to marry in France for political alliances reasons, the most famous is the Medici family from ‘400 Firenze: Caterina De’ Medici was a french queen in 1547 (fun fact: the Medici family seal has similarities to the royal French seals with the arald of a lily I think for some alliance thing in the ‘500 but I can’t exactly remember). But I digress. This is to say that, as direct neighbours, Italy and France have a lot of history and a lot of beef, mostly due to wine and cheese if you can believe it. And football. Oh, especially football.

Gabrielle isn’t really an affectionate mother, she has a complex and fascinating relationship to her role as a woman and a wife and a traumatic experience, I’d say, with giving birth to seven sons (can’t wait for her character in the show, especially since Hannah, who wrote a play on these themes called What a young wife ought to know, which I wholeheartedly recommend, said she is really excited to be writing for her!). This results in her and Lestat having a really weird relationship, cold and distant but at the same time extremely visceral due to the both of them being kind of prisoners in their own life. Gabrielle never teaches Lestat Italian, nor is particularly forthcoming about her old life or her cultural roots. When Lestat runs to Paris, Gabrielle tells him to find someone who can write Italian for him, so he can send her letters that his father can’t read. She also never bothered to teach him the alphabet, even less a second language, and she used to read Italian books that Lestat couldn’t understand. So, very mixed feelings about this on Lestat’s part I’d say. He is, I think, really resentful of this side of his mother that he isn’t allowed to know, but at the same time really fascinated by it: his first attempt at escaping is with an Italian troupe of commedia dell’arte actors, a type of play that involves a lot of improv. Basically you have a series of “maschere” (characters) that have a definite set of characteristics but no written lines (we call it canovaccio I have no idea how to translate this concept though). Each character is tied to a specific part of Italy, for example Pulcinella is the neapolitan one, Arlecchino (Harlequin) is from Bergamo (near Milan). Lestat plays Lelio in the book, a character from the italian play that is the maschera of the lover. (He is also the protagonist of a play by Goldoni where he is also a liar (title of the play Il Bugiardo), totally unrelated to iwtv but it always makes me laugh).

I basically wrote all this stuff to say that Lestat knows basically nothing about his italian heritage and that explains why it is so overshadowed by his french side, but I will say that both italian and french people are extremely extra, in wildly different ways and also they will fight each others over nothing (they stole the Gioconda btw), so this accounts for why Lestat is like that ™️. Particular about food? Italian heritage. Snobbish about music? French heritage. Extremely petty? Eh, to be fair, both. Will hold a grudge forever? I will tell you, during fifa and uefa football games we still yell at the French team about that time during the 2006 World Cup final when one of their players went and hit one of the Italian team players with a headbutt (Italy won btw💁🏻‍♀️). So yeah. Lestat never stood a chance really