#and i believe both him and armand genuinely love louis because if they didn't then what's even the point

[shamixlour]

I am really curious to know and like don't get me wrong, I'm not being sarcastic or judgmental, I really want to know why as this gets me quite baffled and dumbfounded and what I mean by this is people who are surprised or don't understand why Louis stays with Armand after Paris or even SF.

Like, sure, in a way I understand where you are coming from... like how can Louis stay after what Armand did to him and Claudia in Paris? How can he continue to be with him after SF even though their relationship has been nothing but decades of boredom? Why is he still with him, years later in Dubai? Why didn't Louis leave him after everything? Imho, regardless of the mind controlling and all that memory erasure that did happen between them, it is a rather simple answer.

Where do you want Louis to go?????? Like genuinely. What do you want him to do?????? Who do you want to meet??? Is there anyone else for him now???? Is there someone????? Same for Armand, really. They are both almost forced to hold along because who would want to be with any of them? Who would want to be with Louis? Who would want to be with Armand? They both think no one would, and so they hold onto each other, they've seen the worst of e/o anyways and so they stay with each other because that is the only thing they can do and there might have been love at some point, affection but when we see them in Dubai, only an empty shell remains or rather they are both a lap of resentment and unuttered feelings.

Louis's got all eternity spread out in front of him. He is immortal and he is all alone, or at least he believes so. Claudia is dead. He probably thinks Lestat doesn't want anything to do with him anymore or maybe they can't be together for some other reasons, the point is Louis is alone and has nowhere else to go other than stay by Armand's side. He has nowhere to go.

He's like a bird stuck in a really pretty cage.

Louis is all alone, and his hands are tied, and his heart aches, and he is half a world away from where he belongs, from where he really wants to be. Again, it is not complicated, it is that simple and tragic (for both of them btw) and so i don't get why it is such a big deal for a lot of people although I'm always open for conversations and speculations and all of that but for this particular thing, idk I feel like it is quite crystal clear. It is made crystal clear, it is painted very outwardly and it is utterly sad and purposefully expressed in subtle ways but it is here.

Daniel and the interview shine a big fucking spotlight on it, on the entire situation, on all the flaws and pain and bitterness of Loumand's relationship throughout the years but also the mere condition of being a vampire and coming in terms with it and all the struggles that comes with it.

Daniel and the interview also will be, imho, what will help Louis break free from this cage, from this golden prison and finally be himself, accept who he is deep down. It will free Armand too because they deserve better and it is definitely not each other.

But yeah, that is why they stay with each other all these years, because what else could they have done??? Who would have want their company? Would Louis even indulge himself in accepting said company? *crickets* yeah exaclty.

Anyways, this was way too long, so if you read all of this, heart on you! Also, in no way i'm trying to belittle people's interrogations and emotions, it was mostly just some brain splash of things i wanted to express but also because Louis is not to blame for staying...like there are plenty explanations as to why he stays just like there are some explanations as to why Armand does what he does for this relationship to keep going forward. Besides, i'm always curious to read how people view them ect so feel free to hop on the discussion!

[casyawn]

so the thing is.. the thing is. lestat is manipulative yes but crucially, CRUCIALLY he's not good at it. in ep 1 he had a plan for seducing louis but the moment it stopped going his way he got impatient threw a tantrum and basically strongarmed louis into becoming his companion which only really worked because louis is also crazy. but the thing is the thing IS that that's exactly what's scary about lestat, that he's a selfish irrational violent man with no impulse control and he's also often kind of stupid. and the fact that he DOES love louis extremely sincerely and passionately only ADDS to the horror of it because there's a level of volatility and unpredictability that simply wouldn't be present if he was a cold savvy master manipulator. there's simply nothing he wouldn't do to keep him and he is insane!!!!

and this is also what makes season 2 interesting because armand actually IS a master manipulator and that's scary in the completely opposite way, in a subtle way where you don't even get that you've been manipulated until it's too late or potentially ever. and he too is insane and capable of doing anything to get and keep what he wants. lestat was incapable of keeping louis with him without resorting to violence but armand doesn't even need to and better for him yet he's convinced louis that it's all his choice and that he has real agency in the relationship and that is also scary!!!! they are both really scary that's the thing

[knifeeater]

hii love @dictee i wanted to reply but this got so long & didn't want to add it to an already massive post, hope this is ok!

i 100% agree on the coercive element which is fully a textual layer and the reason why their relationship is only 'equal' in appearance but not materially. louis i think needs to believe in this kind of equal footing to stay sane and armand plays into it to keep him. power imbalance is an intrinsic part of their relationship same as it was in lestat's and louis' relationship, which brings it back to the meta-textual level of domination and submission.

as for the boredness we see that in dubai for sure - 'the vampire is bored'. they have been in the same circulation for 70 years now. as for paris era, and this is in the end of course a matter of interpretation and i hope i'm catching ur meaning here, for me personally ghost lestat and his slights against the romantic nature of armand's 'courtship' mostly represent the holdbacks of someone not wanting to give himself fully into a romantic relationship with someone so obviously dangerous, with that many very familiar red flags and as we've said just now representing a coercive situation that seems very close to louis' turning and subsequent housewife imprisonment. lestat's voice to me personally reads almost like self-sabotage that accompanies an (if extremely founded) fear of committment. he represents louis' old life, his fears, his relational trauma, his self-hate and to a certain extent his hold onto a smidge of humanity (lestat being the last person alive who has known him as human).

armand is of course not wholly the suave lover from the book, he fumbles and uses basic stereotypes of love because it's not something he ever learned and louis does get tired of that (light his fucking cigarette!). while not at all dismissing the play louis is making here (he did learn, after all, the hard way a woman's tricks on how to appease a violent man) i do still believe there is a genuine need in louis to make this relationship work as well as a genuine love for and attraction to armand. as in his relationship with lestat love and resentment go hand in hand. i don't believe it to be only calculated manipulation because why else is he doing this now when he could have just done it directly after the threat was made to claudia's and his life. and this is why, as i've tried to explicate in the og post, it's not coincidental that this version of lestat fades at the point he does.

it's both, to me. it an ensuring safety for claudia and himself, a learned survival tactic. but i think it is uncharitable to say that there is no desire or love from louis towards armand. claudia did not say 'two blood fat cocks clapping together' for nothing. the love is what makes it a tragedy.

[momthesearemydinnerguests]

Re: My last reblog

IDK if reblogs were turned off or I've been blocked, so I'm responding here. I hope this doesn't come across as argumentative because i don't mean it to be. I'm just bad at tone. but I promise I genuinely want to have a discussion because i adore this fandom with all my heart.

@virginiaisforvampires Oh, don't get me wrong!! I am in no way trying to justify Armand in this scene. i 1000% agree that his "seduction" of Lestat in that scene is an act of incredible violence and cruelty. Armand DID try to rape Lestat, and Lestat absolutely should have wrecked his shit. I apologize if my wording made it seem like i was team Armand in this instance, because I absolutely am not. Lestat is 100% the victim in this instance. I'm a CSA survivor myself and I am deeply sorry if my wording implied that I was blaming Lestat. But I bring it up because 1) the obvious mirror in the show, and 2) it demonstrates how ridiculously powerful Lestat is even as a fledgling only a couple weeks/months old.

I also want to be clear that I am not saying the ep 5 scene happened in the books. It didn't. Like hands down. I don't even think that lestat is physically abusive in the books. I know it came across that way in my original response, and I apologize. i was in a rush and not separating my points out the best. I agree to an extent that In the Interview!book, Lestat and Louis do get into physical altercations and both parties are at fault. Hell, I'll even concede that in the physical altercations we see in the book, Louis is usually the aggressor (for example, when Louis almost kills Claudia, it is Louis who pins Lestat against the wall and rails at him). However, there is an inherent power imbalance in the Loustat relationship. Of course, i also FULLY believe that Lestat would do his best to hold back because he loves Louis with 100% of his being and wouldn't want to hurt him. But that doesn't mean that the imbalance isn't there. If Lestat's capable of doing that much damage to Armand - a vampire 200 years older than him who was also created by an ancient one - it's difficult to picture Louis and Lestat being evenly matched in a physical fight.

I also want to point out that reactive abuse is a very real thing... When Louis lashes out in the book, it's not without reason. And Lestat himself admits this, multiple times, throughout the books. When I say Lestat is abusive, I'm not talking about the physical violence. I'm talking about the way he targets people Louis cares about (Frenier, for example) - even if he has valid reasons (Frenier's plot to betray his family and leave his sister's with nothing), Louis is never made aware of these reasons and Lestat makes no attempts to explain. i'm talking about the fact that Lestat frequently projects his own trauma around being turned, and mocks Louis for his struggles with vampirism as a way of punishing himself. I'm talking about how he does to Claudia the exact thing he hated magnus for - turning her without her consent, condemning her to a life he didn't even want, without regard for what that transformation would mean for her. He denies them access to information, and even though he has good reasons for it (fear of marius's retribution, fear of the destruction of the vampire race, etc.), he's far from kind in the way he does so. In my experience, most abusers aren't sitting in their chair rubbing their hands together Bond villain style thinking of ways they can hurt you. Often they genuinely think that they are trying to make you stronger or to protect you from the world. it doesn't make their abuse any less real, it just makes it harder to see if for what it is.

As to @nalyra-dreaming's point about proving my own objection... I'm not objecting? My whole point there was that Armand is absolutely twisting the narrative. It's a thing he does all the time in the books. He will do anything to not feel alone, and that frequently involves tampering with memory and perception. The fact that the ep5 DV scene so closely mirrors his fights with Lestat in TVL is intentional. I absolutely believe that it could reasonably (and probably will) turn out that Armand is twisting the narrative and passing his own memories off as Louis's. While I personally don't like it for the reasons I stated , it fits with the narrative. But if it is a deception on Armand's part, the deception is effective precisely because Lestat is capable of such violence, even if it was never directed at Louis personally. After all, he's witnessed the violence lestat has directed at people less powerful than him (the priest in ep1, the tenor, their victims on murder night). I grew up in an abusive household, and even if it was never directed at me personally, I spent a lot of time waiting for the moment when the other shoe drops and it is directed at you. And Louis himself isn't immune to fits of excessive violence! If he himself struggles so hard to contain his rage, it makes sense he would fear Lestat doing the same. And if Lestat is capable of that level of violence, that means that it is also possible that it's not a deception. Rejecting the scene outright to me feels like turning a blind eye on that aspect.

Long story short, I agree that the DV scene in ep5 probably didn't go down the way Louis has presented in season 1, as much as I hope otherwise. I don't think that the story we've been presented so far is the WHOLE truth, but I don't see any reject it as a flat out lie. Even the books (at least the first five) I don't recall Lestat saying that Louis is a liar, but that Louis omits details and context, and/or misunderstands the situation. I do take issue with the idea that idea that Lestat isn't capable of that level of violence (not saying that's what y'all are doing, but I've seen a lot of that on my dash lately), and I do take issue with the statement that Lestat isn't abusive. The whole story is about a cycle of abuse (Marius+Santino to Armand, -> Armand+Magnus+Gabrielle to Lestat -> Lestat to Louis+Claudia) compounded by existing trauma, and the ways in which the characters struggle to break the cycle. And that's why it is so rewarding when they do succeed.

I personally don't want the scene retconned. I don't think it's necessary, and it would rub me the wrong way because of my own history with abuse and not being believed, or being told that I somehow deserved it. I don't think it takes away from Lestat's inherent goodness to have him fall so low in a moment of weakness. I don't think it changes the story either way. I'll also understand if they do, though, because it does fit with Armand's character. I don't understand the animosity I'm seeing between people who want it retconned and people who don't, because either way, it's all just speculation until season 2 actually aires. Both paths are capable of staying true to the characters and the story of the Vampire Chronicles.

[chicalepidopterareblogs]

My theory for what is going on in S1 of IWTV (and what could happen in the next seasons)

So I was re-reading the last few pages of IWTV to grab inspiration for a drawing and I realised I have forgotten something very important: that it was actually Armand who wanted to get Louis (who was already done with Armand and with life in general) back to NOLA, so that Louis could feel "alive" again (and maybe don't abandon him) by remembering all the passion and rage he felt once back then. Now, I think this situation mirrors perfectly the one we have going on in Dubai in the present day. If so, it would make sense for Armand to make Louis revisit the interview and manipulate his memories so his resentment and anger against Lestat would grow stronger (re: episode 5) not just for the sake of jealousy but like in a messed up way Armand thinks is helping Louis out of his apathy that is slowly dragging him to his own destruction ("the vampire is bored"). This is actually something so in character for Armand to do. Let's not forget that this is the same vampire that cut Nicolas' hands off just because, acording to Lestat, he thought he was helping him recovering his sanity. Nevertheless, Louis feels guilty for whatever he did or happened to Lestat (he's convinced that he's dead, probably) ("am I the man you came to kill? I did a terrible thing once, it wouldn't surprise me"), and no amount of dreadful memories would make Louis hate Lestat, he just doesn't allow himself to ("are we the sum of our worst moments?")

That being said, I do think Louis is accomplice, at least in some extent. I believe that Louis, with his natural passivity (aggravated by his emotional state), just let Armand do whatever he wanted (I like to think there's some sort of agreement too anyways). But at the end of the day Louis is just determined to do what he wants, that is, put an end to his existence ("you're chronicling a suicide", "what do you think will happen when you publish this book?" etc.)

However, Louis didn't expect Daniel's questions to be able to tear down the carefully curated narrative he had built to both, keep Armand satisfied and achieve his own purpose: to die as someone who wasn't hated by his daughter for having failed her, basically. After all, he remembered Danny as a rather mediocre journalist. Funny enough, the moments when Louis reaches the state of rage Armand could probably be trying to induce by disturbing his memories, are actually because of Daniel and it is then when Armand has to intervene to soothe him so he won't hurt Daniel. Armand is juggling between keeping Louis by his side and also keeping Daniel safe from Louis's anger.

The thing is, this whole situation is 100% compatible with Devil's Minion: once Armand knew of Louis's intentions, he could have easily asked Louis to repeat the interview so he could finally turn Daniel ("this time I won't save your life") and take him as a companion once Louis was gone (don't get me wrong, I believe Armand wants Daniel genuinely but I think it's just the perfect excuse to set it all up). They could also have an agreement for when it was the right moment for Armand to stop being Rashid ("please, stop Rashid"). I love the little game the writers layed out for us with the dialogue in Dubai, when we can't be sure who Rashid is actually talking to (if Daniel or Louis) or the sentences that lead to equivocal interpretations ("please, stop Rashid" again, or " are you awake? "I can be".) I believe most of this season's inconsistencies hide in those little exchanges. Their conversation could still be ambiguous in S2 though but in another sort of way, maybe taking advantage of Danny's growing confusion having to face his own memories.

With this, we would have the penthouse sort of fixed up. We would still have the basement left and whatever it's going on with Lestat. If things go more or less like I wrote, it's not hard to imagine that Lestat will appear just in time to save Louis at some point in S2 and from then on, he will proceed to tell his story to Louis in S3. If Louis gets injured, they could make them have Their Own Conversation while Louis is healing an Lestat is taking care of him. As for the basement, I do believe The Groan are Those Who Must Be Kept and that Louis and Armand are the ones in charge of keeping an eye on them now. Danny could take Louis' place in S3 so he and Armand could have their own plot doing this task, maybe Marius could join them too somehow or even introducing the Talamasca. I also believe (it's more a really really strong hope tho🤞) that we won't have to wait till S3 to see actual glimpses of Lestat's past. If the writers are generous and smart enugh they could make Claudia and Louis bump into Gabrielle while in Europe. And there will be plenty of opportunities for them to know more about Nicolas in the theatre: from finding his written plays, a portrait of him or even reading a member of the coven's mind for actual vivid pictures. This would make an hypothetical conversation between Louis and Lestat way more rich and interesting.