Ace of 💜s

my brother in christ you cannot be more wrong and I'm so tired. also if you ask a random stranger this in real life, a random stranger who's mature enough to understand the difference between fiction and reality, they will look at you like you speak gibberish.

proship stance = anti harassing real people over goddamned fiction. your kink is not my kink and that's okay. don't like don't read. there are some prompts that trigger the fuck out of me. I don't read it. I don't even like it. but I will defend its rights to exist because

1.) it is fiction

2.) no one in real life is harmed

3.) it cannot harm you unless you go searching for it, knowing it will upset or trigger you

4.) a lot of victims and survivors cope and heal through fiction, a safe and controlled environment

5.) censorship is a fascist tool. once you allow one thing to be censored because someone somewhere doesn't want it to exist, anything and everything can and will be censored.

i do find it interesting that that is what prompts him for a second to verbally be like “wait a second she was a bad mother” before (crushingly) going to back to “but i am no longer a toddler and can do things to make you interested in me now.”

anyways i just want to hug baby and current lestat. i would love to hear about your stick game.

What struck me the most about that is the fact it was a look at Lestat's spirit.

We saw it with the ice cream scoop —

This is what BabyStat would've been like with his sticks. Finding the joy in simple things and engaging with it in delighted whimsy.

And instead of having love for her inherently good and gentle child, she just leaves him.

It leaves an impression on Lestat. He's "too much" and it's "his" fault that she leaves. It's a devastating blow of damage to his development and his psyche, and it does go a very long way in explaining why he operates the way he does. It also reframes a lot of his more....let's say unhinged moments with Louis, such as "I heard your hearts dancing!" because that was never about the relationships with Jonah or Antoinette. That was always about Louis' seeming rejection of Lestat for himself "What can I say? I'm a lot. I'm not perfect." and it spiraled back to these horrors like Gabriella abandoning him at a river as a baby just because he annoyed her with his wonder over sticks.

He's been told his entire life that he's just this colossal mistake and that he's unworthy of unconditional love without any expectations on his part.

It breaks my heart and even with all that damage, he still maintains that tender spirit, and we see it demonstrated all throughout S3, such as when he buys candy to give out on Halloween. I mean, that's him. That's Lestat and no matter how much he's used and abused, his spirit cannot ever be broken, and that's why he's such a beautiful character and such an inspiration. He represents strength and hope and love and resilience. The "failure" makes him better, and I just love how the season is truly bringing that to the forefront, because it's directly from Lestat's arc in the book canon.

That's the epitome of Lestat right there. ^^ That's BabyStat with his sticks and BabyFledglingStat with his ice cream scoop. 🥹♥️

(very long post!) this is actually the second part to my first meta where i address Louis and Lestat's own parental trauma and how this impacts their respective approaches to Claudia. this post is the continuation of that so please read that one first, it covers their parenting styles and abusive tendencies. this was actually inspired by a lot of what Sam Reid spoke about in the BTS/ After Dark about how important it is to give a child the space to hate you as a parent so they can learn about hate, and how Gabriella never gives that Lestat, and it made me think a lot about Louis and Claudia as well, especially after the seance scene.

I think that it what happened to Louis was real & that he said it in that moment, because he wanted to put a mirror to what Gabriella is actually doing to Lestat. I could also imagine that Louis' own experience fueled his initial reaction by seeing Gabistat.

What do you think? Do you think Louis' line is ambiguous enough that it could go either way?

Hmmm.

It didn't read as metaphorical or ambiguous to me. It was framed as if it was something that Louis and Lestat had already previously discussed as a testament to their relationship. Lestat's tone read to me as Lestat being hurt at the thought of someone doing to Louis what Gabriella is doing to him, and he quickly wanted to convey to Louis that they didn't need to rehash it.

When you look at the comment within the full context of the conversation, it's telling to me, because Lestat points out that he knows Florence called Louis the devil and blamed Louis for Paul's death. Lestat knows Louis' most shameful trauma, which sheds light on the fact they did communicate their deepest feelings back in the day. They were trusted best friends first and foremost, and that was on full display the entire episode. So I think Louis was trying to tell Lestat that the "dollar" from the cousin didn't justify sexual abuse, because Lestat was trying to frame Gabriella "helping him" to picture the larger life outside of Auvergne as if he owed her this access to his body. It read to me as Louis saying he relates, but it's not okay no matter what the other person gives you. I just don't see something as profound as that being metaphorical.

I do wish someone would ask Jacob about this scene. I watched After Dark hoping for a good discussion on the entire Gabriella reveal, but I should've known better. The interviewer has been abysmal all season. 😑 In fact, I'm not seeing many good discussions about it, because so many simply don't seem to understand grooming and incest, which brings me to your other point about Louis' reaction.

Louis' initial response to this was horrific, yes. He said some very grotesque things to Lestat. However, it was a very real reaction. Look no further than some of the fandom reaction, because they think Lestat being an adult means it's not abuse and that he's a willing, consenting participant. No. That's not how it works at all, and the scene at the bar heavily implied this relationship crossed the lines into sexual abuse long before Lestat was turned. Combine that with the fact Gabriella traumatizing him at the witches' place is why he has the stutter, and it's a chilling picture of what his life was actually like with her. Lestat hides this for a reason. Lestat was sick at the thought of Louis knowing about this for a reason. It comes with a stigma, and Lestat is aware of this.

With Louis, he wasn't aware of what >we< know about it at that point. He didn't know the backstory. All he saw was Lestat seemingly having consensual sex with his mother. It's hard for people to comprehend that the very dynamic of a parent-child relationship means the child cannot consent. No matter how old they are. And really, Louis took offense to the fact Lestat had "lied" about it. That is what really pissed off Louis. He spent decades with Armand being deceived and having his brain scrambled and now he's back with Lestat, they're trying to be open and honest with each other again instead of the petty games, and here's this big reveal that spirals back centuries that was under Louis' nose the entire time, yet Lestat never told him the full truth of it. We just saw in the previous scene that Louis is frustrated, because he wants to know all of Lestat. He wants to know his backstory, but Lestat explained that he just wanted to live a new life with Louis and for Louis. It's a romantic enough gesture, yes, but the truth behind that is the shame and the trauma. That's when Lestat looks away in shame and self-loathing and simply responds with "Because, Louis. I'm a monster."

There is way more laden into that statement than just the shame about his blood. Victims of incest and sexual abuse often hate themselves and blame themselves for the abuse they suffer. Their abusers often gaslight them and brainwash them into believing that they (the abuser) are the only one who will ever "love" them. That is exactly what Gabriella has done to Lestat. She was doing it in the previous scene after the rehearsal when she said Louis "likes his phone." The leading implication there is that >she< appreciates Lestat in a way that Louis does not. It's manipulation, gaslighting, isolation, and emotional abuse. She's trying to drive a wedge between Lestat and Louis by asserting herself as the "better" companion by taking shots at Lestat's self-esteem in relation to Louis' perception of him. It's an insidious pattern, because Lestat believes that Louis will find him disgusting and will abandon him if he knows about the abuse. It's what Gabriella has made Lestat believe.

It's not until Lestat has the full-blown panic attack that it finally clicks with Louis that this is something way more sinister than just "Lestat fucks his mother" and when he realizes, he's immediately apologizing and trying to comfort Lestat. That's one of the horrors of the relationship. Lestat, the victim, is victim-blamed for the simple fact one has to understand the layered and complex psychological mechanics of incestuous sexual abuse and people don't understand.

But Louis is trying to understand, because he loves Lestat, and he knows he messed up by judging something that he didn't know, but as soon as he got it thanks to Lestat's gut-wrenching reaction? He showed sympathy and understanding and basically told Lestat in the bar scene that he would carry that burden with Lestat. "A hill to climb."

2.4k Words - Explicit - Daniel/Armand

A couple asks ago you talked about Memnoch the Devil and Armand’s failed suicide attempt. I’m so fascinated with Armand’s relationships with ever character (surprisingly not just Daniel lol) and more specifically with lestat. Could you go into it that event at all and how Lestat talks Armand off that ledge?

And now with how the shows changed things do you think the reasoning that would draw Armand to the fire would be different now? And of course I’m a creature of habit forgive me! How do you think that would that look now that Daniel is wayyy more in the picture or “kinda might be” in the picture.

(Obviously we’re in the middle of the new episodes chaos, so please no rush answering💕)

Hey! How are you? 👋🏾 💕

So, okay about Armand's failed suicide attempt from Memnoch the Devil:

So, Armand's attempt didn't fail because Lestat, or anyone else, talked Armand out of doing it. It failed because after 500 years, Armand was too old for the sun to have the power to kill him anymore.

Armand just didn't know that at the time when he attempted to do it, to stand in the sun and let it burn him to death:

[...]

[...]

---

So yeah, after Armand did this, everyone, including Lestat, including all of us book readers at the time when the book first came out, thought Armand was dead. Dead and gone.

And because of things Anne Rice was saying before the book came out, we thought it might even be the final book in the Vampire Chronicles at that.

And that her killing Armand off was one of the final things we'd ever see done in the series as a whole.

It really was the "Armand Lives" campaign by fans that helped bring him back when Anne continued to write more books for the series, starting with Pandora and The Vampire Armand, which came out within 8 months of each other:

So yeah, in the books, Lestat didn't talk Armand out of doing it. Davind was the only other one there with them at the time, and David didn't either.

And it wasn't because they didn't want Armand to do it, but it was because the sun was coming up, and there was zero time for them to do so. Because in the books, once the sun rises, a vampire completely slips into unconsciousness wherever they are at the time. It is something they can't help or stop.

So if Lestat and David had stayed with him any longer, they too would have been caught out in the sun when they were rendered unconscious as they burned.

This, in fact, is what happened to Lestat when he went out into the Gobi Desert to try to commit suicide in the book before this one, Tale of the Body Thief. He flew up high as the sun was beginning to rise, and then, as the sun started to burn him, he fell to Earth, unconscious and burned under the sun of the desert all day.

The only reason it didn't kill him was because of the amount of blood he'd drunk from Akasha before then, during the events of Queen of the Damned, which basically left the sunlight unable to kill him, only just tanning his skin.

Anyway, Armand, at over 500, was too old to have the sun kill him, which he didn't know. So he was just severely burned by what he did and survived it.

And that is when he first meets Sybelle and Benji, btw, in the aftermath of his failed attempt, which we learn in The Vampire Armand.

---

Now, as to how I think the show might do it? Well, I actually already wrote a whole meta about that already, here:

And I also wrote one about how it could maybe relate to Armand's missing eye, which we saw in EP301 here: