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this is very insightful because it made me realize that lestat probably does not even understand that he is owed any sort of sexual privacy whatsoever what with him being groomed by his parent and preyed upon by magnus armand etc. and while I think he is resigned to giving up his own body as public domain consciously having anyone watch him and louis would be extremely difficult. magnus secretly intruding into the privacy of his and n’s home comes to mind, what was supposed to be a safe space with lestat’s long term partner being a snow globe with lestat as a decorative fixture to gaze at in such a vulnerable position, without his knowledge. I think that kind of voyerism is forever terrifying. by that kind I mean not even spying, but there’s public sex with people lestat doesn’t care about, using his body and nothing more, and then there’s sex with THE person he loves, a special kind of experience where lestat’s not just flesh and louis is someone sacred and safe, and someone separation from whom is unbearable, not to mention the idea of being forcibly ripped away. idk. it IS harder to gouge Louis’ current position because despite the circumstances of it all he did become more publicly comfortable in his sexuality over the course of the decades that came after lestat. and I think his security in the relationship at least at first might manifest as laying a sort of “claim”, though I’m not sure that’s the right word. in their nola era their relationship was an open secret, but it was not an actual acknowledgment of their union the same way a heterosexual relationship between people of the same race and opposite gender could be. now louis, when he is ready, and lestat has grown enough, can call lestat his husband and expect other people to respect the boundaries of their marriage, and that might be enough, but I think louis “I wanted him dead , I would him all to myself” would enjoy other people SEEING that lestat is his. anyways this got away from me

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it is a curious thing to me. that once upon a time lestat “destroyed” armand’s coven by refusing to live the way they were ordered to, and then a century after there comes louis once again refusing to join the coven armand has rebuilt. and armand is blaming louis for disrupting the peace by showing too much “independence”, famously the reason lestat and gabrielle were hunted. but a facsimile of choice for louis. sure you can roam the streets and mingle with humans and have a ""hobby"", until we find a reason to suffocate you. lestat, leaving. louis, locked together with armand for seventy plus years after the failed attempt to destroy him.

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my prediction for ep 3x05 of iwtv is that unless they invent some new horror lestat is going to initially distort his retelling of the abuse he suffered from his family and/or magnus storyline, leaning into the willful unreliability that was mentioned, until something cracks and leads to a true reckoning in ep 5

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delainey and roxane are so amazingly good in the scene where claudia reveals her nature to m. always in awe of claudia’s gentle expression

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lestat live reaction / lion tries lettuce

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and. the scene from the books where lestat and gabrielle are being accused of living in sin by the coven is not at all comparable to the horror of the lynching for many reasons, but I did reread it recently after watching the Armand’s armandstat fanfiction piece again, and I also find it interesting how armand is pointedly doing nothing during it, just standing there while “the boy” throws out accusations, watching how everything is going to resolve. he’s never the openly active participant of those group ambushes, despite being the master behind them. he lets other vampires “take the lead” in both “the trial” and this scene. really very convenient for playing the unwilling, I HAD to do it part, and really a sort of pattern.

it is a curious thing to me. that once upon a time lestat “destroyed” armand’s coven by refusing to live the way they were ordered to, and then a century after there comes louis once again refusing to join the coven armand has rebuilt. and armand is blaming louis for disrupting the peace by showing too much “independence”, famously the reason lestat and gabrielle were hunted. but a facsimile of choice for louis. sure you can roam the streets and mingle with humans and have a ""hobby"", until we find a reason to suffocate you. lestat, leaving. louis, locked together with armand for seventy plus years after the failed attempt to destroy him.

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it is a curious thing to me. that once upon a time lestat “destroyed” armand’s coven by refusing to live the way they were ordered to, and then a century after there comes louis once again refusing to join the coven armand has rebuilt. and armand is blaming louis for disrupting the peace by showing too much “independence”, famously the reason lestat and gabrielle were hunted. but a facsimile of choice for louis. sure you can roam the streets and mingle with humans and have a ""hobby"", until we find a reason to suffocate you. lestat, leaving. louis, locked together with armand for seventy plus years after the failed attempt to destroy him.

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I was supposed to be luring him in but the opposite was happening, from armand & I, a vampire!, was being hunted, from the trial. well!

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only now realized that lestat wanting to refuse claudia the change in family dynamics she came up with - I’m your sister or that’s the door / it’s not as easy as coming up with a new family configuration (paraphrasing) - is probably going to parallel gabrielle immediately shedding the mother title once she is turned, quite literally coming up with a new family configuration. and then again, to loop it up: lestat appeals to being claudia’s maker, not her father or uncle, on why they can’t be equal, and that same logic is applied on why he and gabrielle “should” be - he is “no longer” her child because he made her.

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I’m waxing poetics about loustat but every iwtv rewatch actually makes me hate lestat more so this time i was like they should’ve killed him for real 🫤

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louis confesses that he wore vampirism like a curse and didn’t see it for the gift it was supposed to be but tbh I firmly believe that lestat didn’t view it as a gift either before he met louis himself. what other good did vampirism do him. in his mind it just drove away the people he loved (who would’ve been lost to him anyways even if he stayed mortal, but gabrielle wouldn’t have left him by choice, at least, and nicki could’ve locked them in hatred for a much longer time) and made him an outsider. but then it gave him a chance to meet louis. and so it was a gift.

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out-of-timeness is such a good aspect of loustat. they were actually never supposed to meet because lestat would’ve been dead by the time louis was born. no chance their paths would cross. meant for different times and different people and never for each other and YET. lestat found him quite literally through time.

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i really enjoyed your louis + motherhood meta, it was fantastic. do you have any thoughts expanding on that irt louis turning madeleine, asking armand to and being turned down, his breakdown after?

Omg thank you 🥺💖

Yesss I do have thoughts! So in terms of my Louis-Motherhood read, I feel like part of Louis's trauma over turning Madeleine is because of turning being a masculinizing act, and the burden of Louis's identity being compromised by the permanent masculine role of fatherhood.

(Idk if maker=father is a common take in this fandom or not so stick with me for a minute lol)

The term "Maker" may seem gender neutral on the surface (enough so that people will jokingly refer to Lestat "birthing" Claudia in a maternal sense/being a mother figure) but the show's treatment of Makerdom is more akin to a paternal 'siring'.

'Maker' has a religious connotation, referring to the ultimate Father, God, and Lestat explicitly takes on a position of Godhood over Louis as his maker.

Lestat is the principal maker we are acquainted with in the show, and they make sure to call him Daddy 100 times (🤦🏽‍♀️)

Armand uses 'sired' and 'begat' for makers (ie male-gendered procreation terms vs something more maternal like 'birthed' or even just 'created')

Also something I don't see discussed much is how paternal Lestat's claiming of Claudia during the trial is. The idea of publicly claiming a child is a father thing and not a mother thing, like a monarch recognizing a bastard child or stuff like paternity court/Maury because mater semper certa est and pater semper incertus est ("The mother is always certain" and "The father is always uncertain").

And then taking into account that it seemed like the coven was ready to lead the audience to believe Louis was Claudia's maker and lay the violation of the Second Great Law purely on Louis to further condemn him (because they emphasize how wrong it is to turn a child and that Louis was warned not to, and seem thrown when Lestat chooses to claim Claudia as his; then they pull the law off the screen all fast bc clearly they are not going to punish Lestat for that crime). So Lestat is literally publicly taking on the title of father in Louis's stead.

And then if you want to get kinda gross about it, turning requires a 'donation of life-giving fluid'....lol and we know vampires cannot give birth but they can get boners and presumably ejaculate 🤦🏽‍♀️ (per the show biology). So in that sense, a vampire making another can only really be a 'fathering'.

It may be tempting to dismiss this as incidental bc male makers are being discussed (and female makers ie Daciana/Celeste are less prominent) but the show is deliberately choosing to frame the role of 'maker' as father and masculine when they could be more neutral about the phrasing. And Louis's reaction to makerdom is presented within the context of this framing choice.

I wrote a long thing about Louis/Armand and the negotiation of masculine roles in another post but basically my read on that is Louis was obligated to take on a masculine/dominant role for Armand, when really Louis wanted/expected Armand to be serving that role for him.

If we see turning/makerdom as implicitly masculine, then Louis asking Armand to turn Madeleine is another attempt to get Armand to serve that role Louis originally wanted from him. Armand's refusal to do so is cementing the onesidedness of their power dynamic: Louis has to continue to perform dominance/masculinity (maitre when its hot or convenient) while Armand doesn't have to obey him or give anything up in return. Just like his negotiation with Armand on the bench, Louis has no choice but to perform masculinity (to his emotional detriment) in order to ensure Claudia's safety/well-being, giving her an immortal companion to survive outside of the coven with. Louis was basically asking Armand to be the dad that stepped up and Armand stepped down instead lol.

Unlike putting on a masc/mask for Liberty Street or for Armand, which could at least be discarded in private, the maker bond is permanent and inescapable. It's the equivalent of Louis fusing the mask to his face. It's intolerable for him. He tries to bodily reject the fatherhood, throwing up blood and cutting his wrists, wanting to have given the gift without being physically defined as 'giver'/maker/father. But he has 'fathered' now and cannot take it back.

(I can't tell if it's the same painting or not, but the painting behind Louis when he's reeling from the turning looks similar to his 'vampire capitalist' painting, ie the one he showed Armand when he was most recently performing masculine dominance for him/the coven.)

Louis even refers to the turning as a 'job', connecting back to his hardened businessman persona. Turning as we've seen it is such a deeply intimate, emotional act, but for Louis it's a job, clinical, detached, transactional, something to buckle down and get over with.

With all of Louis's intense desire for children and family we see in s1, I wondered why Louis never seemed to consider having children as a human. He says he met with Lily in order to publicly conceal his gay-ness, but wouldn't an easier/more secure solution be to just marry a woman and have kids, esp considering how badly he wanted children and mourned not having them when he became a vampire? As a man in his thirties, I imagine he was at the age where not being married with kids would only seem more and more suspicious.

But then I realized, Louis wanted children, but he never wanted to be a father. He already begrudged so much of his masculine social role, and again, that suit can be removed in private. Being a father cannot. After struggling beneath the burden of 'man of the house' for his family, the last thing Louis wanted was to lock himself into that role even deeper. One day his mother would die, and Grace would marry, and Louis was committed to being Paul's keeper, but as a brother that masculine burden wouldn't be the same pressure as 'man of the house provider etc'. As long as Louis didn't become a father or marry a woman, he could preserve the possibility of one day setting down that particular burden.

But being a vampiric maker is literally eternal fatherdom! So it is a massive sacrifice of Louis's personal identity and leaves him despondent and dissociated from himself. :(

It just impresses upon me even more Louis's alignment with motherhood. Fatherhood is a thing that is foisted upon him, that he hates, feels as unnatural and disconcerting. But when he looks at his mother-child picture he's so at peace.

In conclusion: Louis Is Mommy 🥰

Sorry that got pretty rambly but thank you for the ask!! 🩷

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male colleague messaging me after shift asking about my plans and jokingly (?) saying that he’s going to change his schedule so we work together……….. what if I jumped 😃

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First look at Louis de Pointe du Lac in Interview With the Vampire Season 3

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I was looking at marius actor going I recognize him from somewhere other than twilight……….someone on twt pointed out that he played ALASTAIR ON SPN THIS IS GOUNG TO ACTUUALLY BE INSANE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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louis in her bridal outfit