munecabrava

[munecabrava]

@persuna Someone (Rolin I think?) has also said that they are leaving "memory is a monster" behind as a theme. I don't think this means that Lestat will become a reliable narrator (they don’t exist!) but it might mean that they do away with Louis questioning and revisiting scenes, digging through his memories searching for the truth, and transition to Lestat purposefully denying or downplaying things in his interview while we get to see what he remembers

x I was actually looking for that Rolin quote yesterday and couldn't immediately find it so if anyone knows in what interview he said they were leaving 'memory is a monster' behind, let me know!

The only thing I found so far is the interview I posted yesterday, where he says

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.

But he's not really talking specifically about S3 there, more so about the show as it goes on in general, and I think that yes, the show will evolve to be less about memory and backstory and different versions of events, and more about the present day plot going forward. S3 will start that evolution and have a lot more scenes set in present day, but it will still have stuff about (Lestat's) pov and his memory, I think.

(That's not to say I don't agree with what you're saying - I do also think Lestat remembers things fine, he just doesn't want to talk about them.)

[munecabrava]

I went back to reread this interview with Rolin today for reasons, but there's a part in it that I want to highlight, since I recently talked about why I didn't believe the reunion didn't happen, and I don't think that scene is Daniel's pov here

But I - and clearly, also the people who maintain that theory - forgot this interview because Rolin says right there:

Lestat, the first time you’re seeing him is in New Orleans. That’s an objective camera that’s happening for the first time.

It's an objective camera! Word of god right there, can we let that theory go now?

[munecabrava]

Love your analysis on unreliable narrators!

I was wondering how you think Lestat will be as an unreliable narrator in his season, apart from the train and stuff, like in the flashbacks to his childhood? Will he misreport more than Louis do you think?

I mean, this is the big question right?

In terms of the stuff I talked about in my post about unreliable narration, we actually have a very important piece of information already thanks to this interview Sam did, where he says

I don't think that Lestat has the same intention to tell his story as Louis has. [...] If he's unreliable, he's intentionally being unreliable as opposed to being potentially hoodwinked by a series of events

So between the two important facets of unreliability, intent and way of representing the narration, we already know that the intent is different, at least. Louis never intended to be unreliable or lie, and when Lestat is unreliable, it will be intentional.

The question I have is actually about how the show will handle showing that. I think that while there might be some misreporting (which Louis hardly did), it still won't be as much as people might be thinking. In the first two seasons, we only have a few scenes where we see one version, and then another (Jonah, Lestat's death, etc) - to great effect. But you can't do that too much, so I don't think it works to have Lestat tell a story that we see onscreen, and then Daniel go 'no that cannot be true' and then we see it again in a totally different way.

So I think there will a lot of underreporting - Lestat completely, deliberately skipping over a part of a story. "and then Magnus came and took me from my bed and turned me into a vampire. Anyway , the next day..." , after which Daniel digs into it and he's forced to talk about it.

Additionally, I think/hope they might play around with the contrast between voice-over narration and what we see onscreen. This can still be pretty subtle - yes you could have him say 'it was snowing' as you see a beautiful spring day. But you could also have him say, 'my childhood was lovely' as you see him being ignored by his mother or pushed by his brothers, for example. This is where it being a tv show rather than a novel can really be fun, you know? Goodfellas is a good example of a onscreen unreliable narrator who intends to depict something that isn't reality: the narrator wants to present his story as heroic, but we see onscreen how violent and disturbing it really was, without him misreporting all the time. I'd love something like that for S3!

Overall, I do think the intent of the narrative itself is to give us an accurate depiction of his backstory, especially given how traumatic it is. Not a lot of rooms for gags, tbh. With Louis' story, the overall takeaway is intended to be that we, at the end, know his story as he experienced it, and I do think with Lestat it will be the same.

[munecabrava]

I was worried about the trial. Hopefully it's one of those episodes that you can watch a couple of times and see there's a few different layers to it. There's a performance layer, there's a memory layer, and then there's bits where whoever's remembering it, you're like, well, why was he wobbling? Why couldn't he stand up straight? He is injured, but is the injury physical or is it psychological? I think it's more interesting, and Rolin probably thinks it's more interesting too, that all of the major injury is psychological because when they're so powerful, does it really take you 20 years to recover from a slit throat? So, it is more psychological damage, but [I was] always wanting to make sure there is a level that he is weak.

-Sam Reid. [x]

[munecabrava]

I saw you say you're working on a few fics, can you say what they are? I really like your writing! And are you posting a new chapter first or will the other fic be first?

Oh that's so nice thank you!

And yeah, the SDCC teaser really made me go a little insane and I have... a lot of ideas rn, haha

But I'm forcing myself to work on the next chapter of I'll light the fire before starting on anything long. So I posted the scars oneshot and who knows, if something like that catches hold in my brain other oneshots may follow, but in terms of longer fic it's gonna be one at a time.

Butt I have started a doc to gather ideas for two AUs; one is a vampire bar owner Louis/human musician Lestat thing that I've been thinking about a lot but idk - would be very fun but very challenging to write, which is why I really wanna try?

and the other is an alternate timeline thing where Lestat goes to Dubai pre-interview to talk to Louis when Armand is out, which idk. That one is very clear in my head but we'll see if I'm still interested by the time I get to it.

I still have 4 chapters of ILTF to write so. That will take a few months, probably, and who knows where my brain will take me by then

[munecabrava]

i love what jacob said, that louis is also quite a headfuck and a lot to take on even for someone like lestat, because a lot of times people act like he's this level-headed normal guy who got saddled with a basket case husband he has to manage when really it's crazy4crazy in the loustat household. and i love that ❤️

[munecabrava]

🧛 "How is Daniel dealing with life as a vampire when we catch up with him?" via Entertainment Weekly

[munecabrava]

Give this man his flowers 🙌🏾

[munecabrava]

'Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire' Cast Talk Influences For Rockstar Lestat | SDCC 2025

INTERVIEWER: Jacob, for you, how does the perspective shift affect the way you play Louis?

[munecabrava]

Christopher Heyerdahl in the Vampire Media

Are You Afraid of the Dark (1993)

Blade: Trinity (2004)

Twilight (2009-2012)

True Blood (2012)

Van Helsing (2016-2021)

Bonus:

[munecabrava]

A Not-Really-Brief Explainer on What "Unreliable Narrator" Means

Hello, Interview With the Vampire/The Vampire Lestat fandom. It has come to my attention that some of us are a little foggy on what an unreliable narrator is, what they do, what they intend, and what the rest of us are trying to say when we talk about them.

I've noticed recently this is leading to some of you feeling hurt, upset, worried, stressed, or preemptively disappointed about the next season. I want to allay some of these concerns by helping us to all get on the same page real quick.

EDIT: Literally as I was rereading the draft of this and about two minutes away from posting it, a friend of mine DMed me a link to a really great essay that @munecabrava posted yesterday which is ALSO about unreliable narrators in IWTV. (Fistbump, great minds think alike!) You should read that one as well as this one, and at the end of this essay, I will tell you WHY you should read both. I thought briefly about not posting this because her essay is already so good and makes the important points and clarifications necessary for the ongoing conversation in fandom, but... Look, I spent three hours writing this, ok? I don't want to just dump it in the trash 😂

ANYWAY. Essay below the cut:

First of all, when we say "unreliable narrator" we are NOT saying "liar" -- that is only one of many different ways that narrators can be unreliable.

Every first-person narrator (that is, an "I" narrator, as in "I went to the store") is unreliable. Period. This includes you, and it includes me, and it includes every single person who has ever lived. This is unavoidable. The opposite of "unreliability" is "objectivity," and there is no such thing as strict objectivity when it comes to a human being -- that is why there are so many structures in place in the sciences in order to help reduce bias, and why it is nearly impossible to ever fully eliminate bias.

This is such a crucial point to wrap your head around, so repeat after me: Every first-person narrator is unreliable. Every human being that has ever lived is an unreliable narrator. Let me show you an example.

Suppose you're at the bank. A bank robber comes in, and there is a kerfuffle. Everyone is safe, but the bank robber escapes with a bag of cash before the police get there. They ask everyone there to provide a description of the robber. You say he was wearing a turquoise shirt and a black hat, but you don't know if he had sunglasses or facial hair because you only saw him from the back. Another person says he was wearing a dark blue shirt. Another person says he was bald with a dark grey hat and his shirt had an elephant on it but can't remember the color. Another person can't remember his clothes at all, but they say he had a bandage on his hand, and he had a white goatee--or maybe it was a KN-95 mask? They're not sure, they only got a quick glimpse of his face from the side.

All of this is unreliable narration, because even when we're trying to tell the truth, we don't all perceive colors the same way (blue shirt? dark blue? turquoise? Elephant or no elephant?), and we all focus on different details while not noticing others (bandage on his hand, hat versus hair, mask vs goatee). There are also elements of bias present in what we've been trained to expect (for example, everyone reported that the bank robber was a man, possibly because the majority of bank robberies we see in movies and in news headlines are men; what if it turned out that it was just someone with a masc haircut and masc clothes?) as well as in our technical skill in some types of assessment (one person says the robber was 5'5, another says he was 6', another says "idk, normal height?", another says "really tall").

Especially in moments when your brain isn't at its best (such as in moments of danger, trauma, illness, physical/mental exhaustion, emotional distress, dehydration,or simple just-woke-up-and-haven't-had-coffee-yet), it is impossible for us to notice and remember every detail. So that's already one layer of unreliability: The simple sensory perception and interpretation of facts.

There is also another layer of unreliability, which is how we express those facts to a listener after the fact. Sometimes this impulse happens overtly (such as intentionally framing the bank robbery in a comedic way or otherwise downplaying the events when you tell a loved one so they don't freak out). Sometimes it happens really subtly and subconsciously (such as the word choice involved in describing the bank robber's shirt was "turquoise" instead of "sky blue", or glossing over the part where you were scared because you need your crush to think you're brave and cool).

For the vast majority of people, the expression of facts also gets distorted to some degree because they are filtered through a strongly emotional lens. For example: Your partner asks if you have time to unload the dishwasher sometime today; you privately gnash your teeth and end up telling your therapist that your partner is nagging you all the time, just like your mother, why do you always surround yourself with people who nag you constantly--

You're not lying here; you're expressing a very real and valid emotional truth, which is that you have a history of getting your toes stepped on in this way, and today your toes got stepped on again, and that was upsetting.

But you are also being an unreliable narrator -- does your partner nag you constantly, or did this just hit a sore spot and set you off? Was this situation actually identical the way it used to be with your mother, or were there differences? One absolute and incontrovertible difference is that in those formative experiences with your mother, you were a child, but in this current situation with your partner, you're an adult. "It's just like with my mother" is unreliable narration because now you have agency -- but the feelings are still real; your genuine emotional experience is one part of the whole truth.

Saying that you're being an unreliable narrator in this situation is absolutely not saying that you're lying, it's simply saying that there are pieces missing and that we have not yet arrived at the Objective Factual Truth. For example, if we ask your partner what happened, they're going to be an unreliable narrator because their experiences are filtered through THEIR emotions and THEIR mindset -- in this case, their unreliable narration might be, "On my way out the door to work, I was mentally planning what my One Daily Chore was going to be when I got home, so I asked my partner what their schedule was like, since sometimes they're busy. They thought about it for a second while I was putting my shoes on, then said they'd do the dishwasher, so I'll plan to take the trash out. :)" Upon being confronted with your version of events, their response might be genuine surprise and apology that this interaction came across as nagging -- such a possibility sincerely did not occur to them, and they didn't even see your upset face because they were busy tying their sneakers.

If we think about this too hard and allow ourselves to get existentially despairing about it, we start crying about things like, "But if everyone is an unreliable narrator, then how do we figure out what the truth is??? Does truth even exist? Is anything real? Oh god, what if nothing is real!?!"

Shhhh. It's okay. Truth does exist, and we can figure it out. We do that by triangulating the approximate truth through multiple viewpoints. You know this already! Imagine the last time some Drama happened in your friend group: Amy is talking shit about Beth, but Cathy claims that Derek was the one really at fault because of what he said to Esi, and so on and so forth -- the only way to untangle the bullshit and figure out what actually happened at that horrible sleepover you missed is to ask everyone for their side of the story.

And that's basically what IWTV/TVL s3 is going to be doing. I guarantee you it is not going to be about "proving Claudia lied", nor "throwing Louis under the bus", nor 100% condemning Armand for the full blame of absolutely everything that has ever happened, nor saying "We should believe Lestat more than everyone else, because he's telling more of the truth. :)" He's not. He is 100% not. He is not telling more of the truth. This is not the vibe. This is not what unreliable narrators are about. At best, he is providing a different angle on the shared truths that he has in common with the others. It's about gathering more data, not erasing or discarding past data.

Imagine that all of these characters are standing in a circle around a table, and there is a big pile of Stuff on it. Each of these godawful vampires, beautiful princesses with a disorder, poor little meowmeows et al describes everything that they can see -- some of them describe similar objects if they're standing nearby each other and have nearly the same perspective on the pile, but there are always going to be something they can't see because it's on the other side. That's unreliable narration. Even if everyone is telling the exact honest truth according to their perspective, they've only got part of the story.

In order to find the full, real truth of all the items that are on the table (or all the details of what happened during a Situation), you need everyone's cooperation in order to get a full description (and you need them to stop yelling at each other for two seconds and throwing around accusations about how that thing got on the table in the first place and whether perhaps SOMEONE could shed light on where their favorite hat disappeared to, by the way, HMM???). Once you herd these cats into some semblance of organized narrative threads, then you collect all the bits and pieces, verify the facts by comparing them against each other, and piece the truth together like a jigsaw puzzle.

When unreliable narrators are emphasized in fiction, the narrative is constructed with the expectation that you will be participating -- that you will want to participate and that you will enjoy participating and that the reason you're here is for the purposes of participation. It's like showing up to a murder mystery dinner or a D&D session or, indeed, a jigsaw puzzle session at your friend's house: Your host is implicitly expecting that when you accept the invitation, it's because you're interested in being part of the day's enrichment activity. You're not just being handed the jigsaw puzzle or the murder mystery already solved, because that wouldn't be much fun and it'd defeat the purpose of the puzzle, wouldn't it? You're not walking into D&D to find the boss battle already finished and all the sidequests completed. The fun part is doing the thing and figuring it out. You're MEANT to be figuring it out.

It's not about whether someone inherently Is A Liar or not. It's about doing the detective work to figure out when they told the truth, and how, and why, and what they missed, and what they saw that no one else did, and if maybe they did intentionally fib at some point, and who they fibbed to (someone else? or just themself?), and what their reasons and motivations were for fibbing, and why fibbing worked better than honesty in their pursuit of getting what they want, and what the nature of their fibbing says about them as a complex wonderful fascinating person with depth and nuance and a soul.

Basically, you're supposed to be Daniel Molloy about it. And you have to be Daniel Molloy about it, because the actual Daniel Molloy is also an unreliable narrator who might not hand you the whole truth wrapped up in gift wrap with a bow -- and even if he claimed to be doing so, are you really going to trust him without thinking for yourself and doing a careful rummage? He might have gotten something wrong. He might have forgotten something by accident or by vampire amnesia, or he might have left something out on purpose because it didn't fit the narrative he chose, or he might have gotten distracted by Armand standing across the room looking gorgeous and totally did not listen to the words that were being said to him. He too is an unreliable narrator, and you're SUPPOSED to check his work and call him out when he fucks up.

That's the game. That's the game. Unreliable narrators are an personal engraved invitation for you to engage in an enrichment activity. No one else at this gaming table CARES about solemnly cracking out the labelmaker and putting a neat little label on The Supreme Liar Of All Liars Who Is The Most Bad Because They Lied Most; that's not the point! That's not the game! (And even if it was the game, locating the Supreme Liar would be something delightful and exciting and a FUN PRIZE, not a furious and damning moral judgment. In this house, we love a Supreme Liar. That's ur local poor little meow meow.)

In conclusion: Everyone is an unreliable narrator. Unreliable narration is not the same thing as lying. The whole point of unreliable narrators is to rotate them in your mind and chew on them, and they'd rotate in a really boring way if they told the whole perfect objective truth all the time -- it'd be like chewing on plain boiled chicken instead of adding spices and flavors and texture. Fiction is an enrichment activity, and puzzles are fun.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk, I hoped this helped people.

EDIT: Okay, so, as mentioned at the beginning, @munecabrava wrote an excellent Unreliable Narrators and IWTV essay yesterday. Your homework assignment is to read her essay and compare/contrast with this one as if both she and I are unreliable narrators (because we are, on account of both being human, even though we're both genuinely and sincerely attempting to explain the same concept in good faith). This is practice for you in the kinds of questions you can ask about two different, parallel accounts: What truths match up? What does my essay emphasize or leave out? What does her essay emphasize or leave out? What hints are there in her essay about having a background as a scholar? What hints are there in mine about having a background as an author? And so forth.

Now get out there and play some games with the text. I love you.

[munecabrava]

the emphasis on LOVESSS-ZAH really did it for me

[munecabrava]

ragged-t1ger Thank you for the perspective. One of the reasons many think the reunion scene in s2:ep8 might not have happened is because it is the only scene in the entire series not told directly to Daniel or from Daniel’s POV, making the entire scene unprecedented. It is less about Louis’s unreliability, than the possibility we are still seeing Daniel’s POV, one he wrote, but couldn’t have had because he wasn’t there. However, reading your essay the probability that it is the only scene not from Daniel’s POV because it is the only scene that reliably happened the way we are seeing it, is a richer prospect. I love how this show is made so beautifully, it engenders these types of discussions. Thanks, again.

I think the main reason people think the reunion might not have happened is because it's contested in the books. But the book narration just functions differently from the show so I really think it was real!

Of course I might be wrong - I might be wrong about everything! But I think this is yet again a case of people seeing a story that involves an unreliable narrator and thinking that means they cannot believe a single thing they see.

But this show is so beautifully specific about narration that I do trust it to follow the rules, basically. And I think the rules will change in S3, btw, but I don't think that will work retroactively.

But this isn't even about narration - it's about the storytelling contract between creators and viewers, which agrees that the show will indicate to you when it's showing you something subjective and when it isn't. If in S3 we're told that the parts of S1+2 that were presented as objective reality were actually also subjective, it would feel to the audience as a betrayal, because it's the emotional climax of the entire season. There would have had to have been signs that it wasn't real for it to work. (This is what was it raining, Louis? does very early in S1 btw).

There is no indication that what we see outside of flashbacks is being narrated by Daniel. We're not seeing what he eventually wrote in the book. It isn't entirely from his POV. It's just an omniscient view, basically. We do see other scenes that aren't told to him. We see Armand and Louis in their bedroom together. We see them discuss what paintings to buy. And then what is the epilogue, when the book has been published? Is that the only 'real' part of the show? I don't think it works.

We have a very clear delineation of when the show becomes a subjective narrative. Louis starts talking, we hear his voice over, we see Daniel react to it. There is nothing to indicate that Dubai or the reunion is narrated by Daniel.

And also - if we go beyond just analyzing the text and actually look at authorial intent, people involved in the show have talked about the reunion as being real -specifically Sam saying it's the only time we see the real Lestat - and I just don't think they'd keep up that lie like that.

[munecabrava]

Oh wow I am a little overwhelmed by how much that post about unreliable narration took off - does this mean my degree is useful in my life after uni after all?!

Anyway, there is interesting stuff being said in the tags of the reblogs too and I would love to talk more about narration and this show in general, really, so if anyone has something specific they wanna get into feel free to jump in my ask box 'cause it feels like I'm not the only one with Thoughts about all this

[munecabrava]

The possible Talamasca interference is an cool aspect of the story and I'm very interested how it impacts how the book is received in S3.

However, that is about the in-universe narration of the book 'Interview with the Vampire' written by Daniel Molloy. What we see onscreen is not what is in the book, it's the story Louis told to Daniel. So it's a whole other thing to consider how Daniel changed it to make it into a book, how possibly editors/... changed it again, and how the Talamasca may have made their own edits. In terms of narrative theory, if that novel was actually the text we were analyzing - that would be fascinating, and there are books where the writer plays with the interaction between writer and editor or between different narrative voices to great effect. But this is a television show, so it functions differently, and you can't really show the difference between original text and edit in a clean way - traditionally, tv and film tend to plays around with different narrators, not editors and the like.

So on the one hand there might be scenes where Louis/Lestat/Daniel talk about hey, the book says this or that but that's not true because Louis never said that. But when and if we see Lestat challenge the narrative through the narrative, ie when we see flashbacks, when we see his pov of scenes from S1 and 2, that will be in response to what was onscreen.

Technically, him writing 'didn't happen' in the book might be a response to either one of those scenarios, but specifically wrt the train scene I do think it's about the story Louis/Claudia told, not anything the Talamasca did.

On IWTV, unreliable narration, and that train scene

Okay, I never want to be the person who's like 'I have a degree in literature so I am better at watching television than you' but I literally wrote my thesis on unreliable narration, so I want to talk about it for once.

A lot of people seem to have too narrow an idea of what unreliable narration is, to the extent that even the people involved in making the show are hesitant to call the characters, specifically Louis, an unreliable narrator. Because people see that term and read it as 'this character is blatantly lying all the time'. But that is not what unreliable narration is! And it's precisely because this show is so good at playing with actual unreliable narration in a way that is rare, especially on television, that I fell in love with it.

The thing about unreliable narration is that it happens on a spectrum, both in terms of the intentionality of the narrator and in terms of the way in which the narration is presenting information.

Which is why I always thought they might revisit the train scene, and why I think some people who are upset at the idea are not engaging properly with the way the narration in this show functions.

A great paper on unreliable narration is 'Lessons of Weymouth' (by James Phelan and Mary Patricia Martin) - it does a great job at going into all the aspects of unreliability (it defines six different kinds), and it's interesting to think of it in relation to this show. 'Weymouth' refers to a chapter in the novel The Remains of the Day in which the narrator reveals that throughout the story he has been telling, he obfuscated the fact that he was in love with one of the people in the story. Everything he told us was true, in a literal sense, but the meaning of the story changes entirely when we find out that there was a whole aspect of his experience that he left out. It's actually quite similar to how Louis/Lestat is presented in the novel of IWTV, where Louis (our narrator) only talks about Lestat in a negative, hateful way, until near the end of the book when suddenly we get a paragraph where he says

I allowed myself to forget how totally I had fallen in love with Lestat's iridescent eyes, that I'd sold my soul for a many-colored and luminescent thing, thinking that a highly reflective surface conveyed the power to walk on water.

Which is when we realize that he has left some of his true feelings out of the narration so far.

The show doesn't quite use unreliable narration in the same way, which is smart, because television functions differently from a novel. They actually lampshade this change by making the '73 interview the one from the novel, where Louis is much more dishonest about Lestat from what we hear (he played without one iota of feeling). In 2022, Louis' narration still focuses on Lestat's wrongdoings and glosses over his love for him. But while he refuses to focus on it, now it bleeds into his narration - 'Lestat was my coal fire', 'the earth always felt liquid', etc etc. And because it's television and they are working with a voice-over, they can play around with the contrast between what we hear and what we see. We hear Louis say 'I was being hunted' on top of images of him and Lestat going on dates to the opera and falling in love.

His unreliability is more subtle because of these changes. Like I said, there is a spectrum of unreliable narration, both in terms of how aware the narrator is that he is unreliable (or lying) and in terms of what type of unreliability is used. Example: A narrator describes a room where a murder happened. We later find out that the murderer entered the room through a window that was left open. If the narrator describes the scene without saying the windows are open, he is unreliable. But there are a variety of reasons for why he might not have mentioned it! The narrator can be aware of the omission because he wants to hide this vital information (because he is or wants to help the murderer), but he can also skip it because he is not aware that the detail is important. That's intent. Secondly, in describing the scene, he can say the window was closed (misreporting) or he can not mention the window at all (underreporting). (and so on - there are a lot of different nuances here).

So a narrator who both knowingly lies and does it by describing things that did not happen can exist, but is only a very small fraction of all unreliable narrators.

In IWTV, Louis mostly either unintentionally misreports (it was Armand who saved him, it wasn't raining) or intentionally underreports (not burning Lestat, not talking about their happy times together). Even in the parts where he is the most wrong in what he tells us, he still isn't all the way to 'blatant liar' on the spectrum. Claudia's turning is the biggest 'lie', but by the time of the trial, he clearly has made himself believe the version he told her and doesn't realize it's wrong until he tells Daniel about Lestat's version. That's the arc of these two seasons! Louis is using this second interview to confront the lies he told to himself.

He also, to an extent, underevaluates or even misevaluates in his narration. Which means he doesn't always consider other people's perspective or isn't aware of certain circumstances that might change the meaning of an event. That is what I think The Vampire Lestat will play with. This already happens for people who have read TVL and beyond: we know that Lestat has been abandoned over and over before meeting Louis, so we understand why he reacts so extremely to the thought of Louis leaving him. But Louis doesn't realize that context, so Lestat is villanous in his narration to an extent that Lestat himself would feel is unfair or even false.

What is so important in this show (to me) is that there is not a single scene in it that is revealed to not have happened at all. That would be a cheap way of using unreliable narration, and they're not cheap. It's why I think it's ridiculous that some people say the reunion in 2x08 might not have happened - in the books that's possible, in the show I don't think it is. There are only scenes that have been underreported. Everything with Jonah in the woods happened, but it was raining. Louis slit Lestat's throat, burned a body, and left with Claudia, but in-between, actually, he screamed over his corpse and attacked his daughter. Armand and Lestat were both sitting in the room when 'banishment' happened, but Louis didn't see who was whispering. Claudia was dragged to the house, and Louis begged Lestat to turn her until he gave in. It just...lasted longer, and was more horrifying.

And so the train scene. I have thought for a long time that it would be a scene we revisit from Lestat's pov, and it surprises me that some people are so against the idea. But they seem to think revisiting it means it will be revealed that it did not happen, something that, again, has no precedent in the show. Instead, I have always thought it was underevaluated, if anything, and possibly unintentionally misrepresented. Lestat is at his most cartoonishly evil in it, which is much more in line with his character in the first book than with how the show generally portrays him. The only other time we see him that evil, at least to Louis or Claudia, is in 1x05 in the lead up to the fight - and we already got the more nuanced version of that! It's another scene that was underreported (they literally go to another room which we don't see) and underevaluated (Lestat's trauma influencing his behavior as well as Akasha's blood possibly making him more volatile).

So my guess would be that when we see the train again (or hear about it), he will be much more desperate and scared, which he overcompensates with the theatricality that scared Claudia. And that we will see what came before: him finding Louis close to selfharm, panicking in part because it triggers a memory of Nicki, and going to get Claudia back so Louis doesn't die. And that takes nothing away from Claudia or Louis' narrative! It just enriches the story and shows that there is no objective truth, and narration is almost always somewhere on the sliding scale of unreliability.

(and just so it's clear - having more context and backstory and a fuller sense of the narrative from all sides does not excuse his actions and doesn't mean his abuse is okay etc etc but the morality-in-the-gothic-vampire-show discussion is another post)

[munecabrava]

sam has a crush