#it's mommy issues! it's daddy issues! it's complicated vampire family dynamic issues!

[theatrevampire]

Interview with the Vampire (2022-) // The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon // The Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur // The Kintsugi Kid (Ten Years) by Fall Out Boy // A Better Son/Daughter by Rilo Kiley // Sylvia Plath // The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice // Interview with the Vampire (1976) by Anne Rice // Smother by Daughter

[eclipsecrowned]

oh no. 'stat meta wrt his arc/dynamics in the core original trilogy. aka the only reason he's a secret menu option bc these thoughts are what keeps me obsessed with the beastie.

i think on some level, like many children of broken homes, he is kind of drawn to a stable home/family framework. even if it's with a community rather than family or him as patriarch rather than a child, but he only wants it as a reflection of himself. to spite his predecessors. he doesn't want it selflessly or for good reasons to settle down. i think that's honestly as far as he could go.

i think he's someone with delusions towards settling down, but it never works. look at paris. look at cl*udia.

thinking also like. it's my theory anne understood trauma too well and embodies it in her work almost accidentally.

le.stat as the warm, spoiling, doting patriarch, who loves his children as a reflection of himself, who was the son of a tyrant who had nothing to give any of his sons due to their wretched poverty, who still never let his youngest pursue his own ways because that meant losing control of le.stat, and how le.stat in framework of father/patriarch so rebels against how he was raised.

pretty dresses, and endless dolls, and grand parties, piano lessons, letting cl*udia feel out her own hunting style. it all reads once tvl is in the mix that le.stat was overcompensating.

in the same way, l0uis is a moralizing fuddy duddy, but he also steers both his husband and child right. he teaches cl*udia to be better, and only sparks for his darling le.stat. gabrielle was the cold intellectual who never truly connected with her children, who had this passionately hateful dynamic with her husband, her jailer, her abuser. who never taught her son to read because she lacked the temperament and patience to endure his mistakes.

it also shows why l0ustat fell apart and why ak*sha and lestat as a dynamic was better for him. if he's just dragging out his own dual mommy/daddy issues with l0uis then there's no growth and no catharsis.

i also think l0uis was him desperately trying be human, for whatever reason but i have theories, where ak*sha doesn't shame or hate or mock what he is. he's a complicated creature. that's what draws her in. and he so wants to be wanted by something, or someone, special.

i'm not saying everything about him is 'wah daddy issues, wah mommy issues' bc he's still a grown man who should have a handle on his shit. but i do think it's interesting he almost parallels/rewrites his own history when given the opportunity to be a parent himself. idk if anne meant it as such but A LOT of pre qotd le.stat is just cyclical.

there is a child who was not loved (le.stat) and someday there will be a child who is loved (cl*udia) and both of them are damned whether there is love or not. and there is a beautiful man with haunting eyes (nicolas) and there is a beautiful man with haunting eyes (l0uis) and he's going to ruin them both by his love, by his craving. and there is a devil (arm*nd) and there is a devil (arm*nd) and there is a devil (arm*nd) and no matter the era or the situation there are talons at throats and a swift flight form the roof and hatred like neither has ever known.

and there is music (the theater) and there is music (the vampire lestat) and there is lestat in the grips of it all with the attention that drives him.