Dreams did not make us kings. Dragons did.

Louis’ initial interview was influenced by his visceral grief for Claudia, his dissatisfaction with Armand, and his need for emotional catharsis surrounding both Claudia’s death and his relationship with Lestat. Louis’ second account was colored by the desire to rectify his first, although he still paints Lestat in a less than flattering light on numerous occasions; it was colored by his doubt about his own experience, his search for objectivity via Daniel; and most of all, it was colored by Louis’ crippling shame. Shame does not a reliable narrator make.

In The Vampire Lestat, Lestat’s perspective is shaped by many things - his narcissism, his own shame, his chemically altered mental state - but its core is his betrayal. The Vampire Lestat is Lestat’s retort to Daniel’s book and Louis’ interview, a pained narrative eruption following the nonconsensual excavation of his deepest pain.

It provides a new lens. It corroborates some of Louis’ memories and illuminates discrepancies/ nuance in others. It is not any more accurate than Louis’ narrative.

And that’s the thing: save for a few present day collective confirmations, we will never, ever know what happened in the past. We can try our best to determine it in the same way that Daniel does, picking at loose threads and analyzing omitted details. We can conduct our own reviews and come to our own conclusions. We can lay the different accounts over one another like screens, trying to make a complete picture. But at the end of the day, there are so many details that the show won’t confirm or deny.

It’s the nature of memoir, and it’s the nature of memory. There will be moments of clarity, moments where we forget, moments where memory doesn’t. There will be mystery, resolution, and eternal contradiction. There will be spaces forever blank. But the characters continue exploring, for maximum accuracy, for reparation, for catharsis, for other reasons entirely.

 I had everything. Opportunities for eternity. And I could belong to the night.

The Legend of Zelda

TV Appreciation Week '24 Day 5 : favourite season of a tv show | THE KILLING SEASON 3