#one piece of fanon i always love is louis having a big nose though

[licncourt]

top 5 moments of louis characterization

or

top 5 pieces of vc fanon

Honestly, I'm at the point where I hardly know what's canon and what's fanon because AR lore is so wild, so I'm taking option one for my own sanity.

The lead-up to Paul's death! What we find out about mortal Loui really encapsulates the clash between the moral pillar Louis aspires to be (and believes himself to be in some cases, whether he'd admit it or not) and the reality of his selfishness. He's a spoiled brat who has the privilege to sit around and contemplate his adherence to Aristotelian Christian morals while his lifestyle is made possible by pure exploitation. It tells you everything you need to know about Louis and how his moral compass, how it's all theory and no practice. That carries over directly to vampirism in so many fascinating ways.

THE PRIEST SCENE. I think that's really the first time we see what Louis is capable of when he loses it entirely. Feeding on Claudia was a lapse in control, but the priest scene was a concentrated descent into madness, like a microcosm of his issues around desire and control and guilt. He goes from a quiet, pious young man to a bloodthirsty monster over the course of a few paragraphs. It's so chilling and so revealing, Louis as he wants to be and then Louis at his worst (which is also what he thinks he really is). Truly masterful and one of my favorite scenes from VC as a whole.

His stupid little Aesthetics monologue. Literally what the fuck is this Lewis. What a fuckhead.

"But why…you’ve said Lestat shouldn’t have made you start with people. Did you mean…do you mean for you it was an aesthetic choice, not a moral one?"

"Had you asked me then, I would have told you it was aesthetic, that I wished to understand death in stages. That the death of an animal yielded such pleasure and experience to me that I had only begun to understand it, and wished to save the experience of human death for my mature understanding. But it was moral. Because all aesthetic decisions are moral, really."

"I don’t understand,” said the boy. “I thought aesthetic decisions could be completely immoral. What about the cliché of the artist who leaves his wife and children so he can paint? Or Nero playing the harp while Rome burned?”

"Both were moral decisions. Both served a higher good, in the mind of the artist. The conflict lies between the morals of the artist and the morals of society, not between aesthetics and morality. But often this isn’t understood; and here comes the waste, the tragedy. An artist, stealing paints from a store, for example, imagines himself to have made an inevitable but immoral decision, and then he sees himself as fallen from grace; what follows is despair and petty irresponsibility, as if morality were a great glass world which can be utterly shattered by one act. But this was not my great concern then. I did not know these things then. I believed I killed animals for aesthetic reasons only, and I hedged against the great moral question of whether or not by my very nature I was damned."

4. The flower picking and stargazing and singing!! It's an adorable passage, but it also encapsulates what makes Louis so endearing. No matter what happens, he never loses his reverence for the wonder of being alive, the inherent optimism and love that keeps him going through everything and the unexpected whimsy that makes you so aware of why he winds hearts like he does. It's so little but so much. I talk a lot of shit about Louis, but God. He's a cutie pie. Baby.

5. The Prince Lestat epilogue, my beloved. It may be the bare minimum from Anne, but my little guy is HAPPY. He is forgiving himself and finding peace and it makes his arc feel worth it. I'm SO glad AR let him have this after so much suffering. It's so lovely and so needed.

+ Honorable mention to him standing in the rain and watching Romeo and Juliet (1996) through the storefront window. It serves functionally the same purpose as no. 4, but it is so.