#lestat also says ‘she kept them together’ centuries after their actual shared experience in rue royale. so like

[blueiight]

To me the show did not give us enough of a Lestat + Claudia connection beyond their brief ep4 hunting trip to suggest any sort of unique relationship beyond what they mean to Louis. Lestat even says this explicitly when he was beating up Louis (it was never you @ claudia) and dragging her home from the train. Lestat also tries to kill her in the finale saying she's the only who ruined his relationship with Louis which is not the case in the books where he very much still believes Claudia kept them together.

I think sometimes we take too much literally from the books when the show has changed the relationship dynamic dramatically. Louis is the one who wanted to save Claudia in the show and they have a clearly defined non-romantic relationship unlike the books. Those are big enough changes that I don't feel comfortable using the book as a hard blueprint for anything.

well i have long posts saying why i dont necessarily feel the same about lestat& claudia in the show somewhere but ion feel like digging them up..when he says “it was never about you” its ironic . the whole beatdown started bc lestat was under the impression that louis was going to leave him with claudia. lestat attempts to strangle claudia, louis pushes lestat off her, and the whole 1-2 go down. in tvl lestat says “two times, i had my wings clipped” and we can parallel that to claudia in the show: being raped by bruce, and lestat following her on the train to drag her back home. the patterns never break theyre just reiterated. lestat and claudia have similar dispositions when they are turned , deciding to be the best at monstrosity that they can be, where louis struggles with that (which i read as ironic af cuz in both book+show he has an exploitative enterprise as a mortal). once again, in book iwtv lestat is also cruel to claudia, mocking her physical immaturity in a similar strain to the show, and saying how hes feening to murk claudia so bad on some i brought u in the world ill take u out type shit. if you’d just let me lock her up her screams would be heard from here to paris.. a starving vampire is bad, a starving child is unbearable (so whats a starved child vampire looking like? we are meant to read lestat between the lines there). of course, a visual medium wont be 1:1 to the books, and also a good adaptation would necessitate a different display of similar thematic beats in the source material.