busted lestat doll commissioned by anne rice

Daddy Lou — Louis was the main one who wanted Claudia. He wanted the nuclear family dynamic and wanted someone to love that would depend on & need him in ways that Lestat did not. Lestat wanted to be loved, but a child would need to be actively provided for. Louis was trying to recreate the relationship he had with the family he just lost where he was the provider and caretaker because this is the only way Louis can comprehend “family”: as people who wholly rely on him, to the point of causing him pain & suffering, rather than just love him with no other expectations.

This is one of the reasons why he struggled to interpret his relationship with Lestat as familial because Lestat did not depend on Louis financially, legally, professionally, etc., for nothing else other than affection. (This isn’t to say their relationship was entirely healthy of course, and Lestat did pressure Louis in other ways.)

At the time, Louis was not used to affection being the main thing needed from him. This expectation changes later, for the worse, but that’s a whole other conversation (read Infinitely Weary’s tags on that post if interested in that convo.)

So anyway Louis, former head of his family, becomes Daddy Lou. Almost as an attempt to step back into the shoes of his father as at least there was familiarity in that role. Being a leader/authority figure in his family, while not at all what he wanted nor was fulfilling, was familiar and his life by that point had become painfully unfamiliar.

Becoming a parent gives him guidance. There’s a simple, organized structure that Louis can adhere to. Louis’ had occasional trysts before Lestat, but Lestat is his first boyfriend husband. He has no idea how a full fledged romantic relationship is “supposed” to go. How you deal with conflicts, misunderstandings, etc. especially when you have the large identity gaps between the two of them that you do (interracial, age, religion, etc.)

But being a father? A parent? He can do that. And after how horrible his life turns out in 1x03, it makes sense he’d be desperate to fall into something recognizable. To have someone to love that would always need him.

(And I do think Louis always placed great value on being needed by Claudia. In 1x06 before the train, he tells her she doesn’t need him because it’s what she needs to hear, but he was also going to kill himself immediately. He could not yet live with that actually being true. And later in 1973, he hallucinates Claudia calling for him, needing him, and runs to kill himself to get to her. Louis needs to be needed by her. Her knight in vengeful black.)

There’s a lot of other factors that play into Louis’ desire for a daughter and for Claudia, such as his yearning for someone to connect with after starting to feel completely alone & misunderstood. Plus I do think Louis identifies more with motherhood than with fatherhood, but this is just some of the aspects for why he eagerly becomes Daddy Lou at the start of their lives.

Uncle Les — Lestat, on the other hand, did not initially want Claudia. She was this random girl Louis brought into their house in a bout of mania. From what we’ve seen so far, Lestat at least prefers to have a connection with the person he’s turning before he does so.

Turning is an intimate experience on the body and mind, and he did not feel comfortable sharing himself with this stranger neither of them have ever said two words to. Blood drinking is one sided whereas turning is an exchange, and Lestat would be exposing himself with someone he doesn’t know. With a literal child. While he wouldn’t cut himself, I can see him feeling as disgusted as Louis was post-Madeleine. (Hmmm the Louis-Claudia and Claudia-Madeleine pipeline strikes again)

On top of this, he saw only tragedy and pain in Claudia’s future and hesitated damning her to such a fate. All three of them know that there was a possibility for her to still have lived had they just taken her to a hospital. But this wasn’t about Claudia for either of Loustat. Lestat’s love for Louis took precedence over concern for her and so he turns her. He does whatever it takes, even at a cost to others and partly to himself, to keep Louis with him.

But Lestat seems to always have this wariness in the back of his mind. That Claudia won’t make it. That she’ll either die or be killed or generally be miserable for eternity. That her life will be nothing but tragedy upon tragedy upon tragedy. Then when you factor in the Nicki of it all, Lestat viewing Claudia as someone else that should’ve never became a vampire that had been turned anyway, he spends majority of their relationship expecting the day when she’ll be gone forever.

And so I think Lestat agrees, if not suggests himself, that he be referred to as uncle, or at least not as father, as a way to distance himself from what he sees as heartbreak waiting to happen. While both Loustat were dishonest with Claudia from the very beginning, Lestat was more obvious with how much of himself he tried to keep hidden from her. For their entire relationship, he’s trying to keep her at arms length so he doesn’t feel it when she “inevitably” dies.

I mean, Lestat is someone who easily loves and loves hard. So for Claudia to feel a lack from him screams Lestat deliberately trying to suppress those feelings. He doesn’t succeed all the time, and there were moments in the early years between the two of them that were loving and carefree. But Lestat seemed to always have these fears about her in the back of his mind.

Like, over the course of NOLA, Louis repeatedly tries to reel Lestat into their shared role as parents, but Lestat typically put up resistance. Louis urges him to show concern post-Charlie when Claudia is behaving recklessly, and when Lestat pulls the “You wanted her, you fix her”, Louis reminds that they’re parenting together. Even as Dreamstat, Louis has the hallucination endearingly refer to Claudia as “the wilderness that is our daughter.”

Whereas in S1, the times Lestat referred to her as their child was to belittle or insult her, like when they’re discussing the terms of his return post-drop (“said child, interfering in the romantic lives of her parents”) and when he and Claudia are playing the piano together during Christmas (“sister, daughter, infant death”). Louis was usually the one who viewed both of them as Claudia’s fathers, whereas Lestat didn’t want to view himself that way, and in the rare times he did, it was in the negative. And Claudia soon follows his example the more distant their relationship grows. The further Lestat pushes them apart.

And this is one of the reasons why it’s so crushing for him when he watches Claudia burn alive. Because it’s him finally realizing that he had been her actual father this entire time, rather than only her vampiric maker. It’s the first time he sees Claudia as his genuine daughter rather than as a Louis add-on, a tragedy on legs, or as simply another fledgling.

While we still don’t know the full background of Lestat’s participation in the trial, how much of it was consensual vs non-consensual, his involvement likely made him realize that Claudia’s death hadn’t been inevitable. Unlike most of his loves, Claudia hadn’t been suicidal, she had found happiness, and intended to live a long life fully embracing vampirism. She remained strong and proud and loving to the very end.

Claudia’s death on that stage was preventable and I think this realization is one of the many things that messes Lestat up so severely. To realize she was not, and never had been, actually doomed. Claudia’s murder was the result of deliberate choices made by several people, and it’s going to haunt him forever that he was one of them.

Was there anything Lestat could’ve done to save her? To save both of them and not have to choose? It’s too late to know. Claudia was undeniably the biggest victim of the trial, but I do think it was very horrible for all three of them, and this aspect being part of Lestat’s own trauma from it.

But to circle back to their very beginnings in NOLA, as the years moved forward, both of their relationships with Claudia changed. Louis got demoted to brother while Lestat grew to monster, largely due to the drop, but from a snowball effect of lots of tiny events beforehand too.