final thoughts on the end of ep 5
I don't have any desire to continue talking about this, so I'm going to hit my main responses to discourse I've been seeing and also points that have come up in my asks
I absolutely do not accept that what occurred on episode 5 was in character for Lestat, HOWEVER, Lestat is absolutely an abusive partner and father in IWTV. He's cruel and controlling, he makes empty threats to Louis to get his way, he's insensitive and volatile and his temper gets the better of him constantly. He is very, very bad. In TotBT, he sexually assaults a mortal woman and turns a human friend into a vampire against his will, the vampire equivalent of rape. Lestat is an objectively evil character. No one rational is disputing that. We are disputing this specific scenario/character choice.
I'm including an excerpt of the one physical fight that's actually described in IWTV, the worst one Louis says they had (other is only described with an extremely brief mention of "we grappled")
There are two other instances of Lestat being physical with Louis. I'll leave those here (he is never physically violent with Claudia, nor does he ever threaten her, both according to Louis).
This is all awful and it's domestic violence! Lestat IS an abusive partner and he absolutely deserves what he gets in this book. And yet, it is still not the same as physically assaulting his Claudia, smashing Louis through furniture and wall after wall as the house falls down around them, sitting on Louis and beating him with all his strength while Claudia screams, leaving Louis so injured he can't move, slitting his throat, reaching in, dragging him down the hall by the trachea, draining him of blood in a vampire sexual assault, flying up as high as an airplane, and dropping Louis onto the concrete.
I don't want to hear any pedantic, bad faith takes about how there's no difference here. The power imbalance alone changes things drastically. A fight scene is not the same as a torture scene. If you think these two examples are equivalent, you're being intentionally obtuse for the sake of argument or have no reading comprehension.
Would Louis actually have been willing to kill Lestat in that fight? Maybe, considering his perception of Lestat at that time. Clearly Lestat was not willing to kill or injure Louis. What matters most though is that they were FIGHTING. It was mutual and the power dynamic was FAR more balanced. Louis was holding his own, and when Lestat’s superior strength allowed him to gain control, he ended the fight. Period.
On that note, I keep seeing the end of ep 5 being called "a fight scene". It was not a fight scene. It was extended, one-sided torture. A fight scene is what happens in the first excerpt.
I am not opposed to there being physical violence in their relationship. Louis and Lestat have physical fights is canon and, as an anon pointed out, it would've been an excellent choice to have Louis and Lestat come to blows, Lestat injure Louis by accident and then stop, and have the narrative move forward with Claudia’s plotting revenge. This isn't about not wanting any violence in the relationship. No one who is a fan of the book has any issue with that. We have an issue with THIS.
While the subtext is VERY present, Louis and Lestat are not depicted in an explicit romantic relationship in the first book. Getting in a physical fight with someone you're attracted to is not the same as making an effort to torture your husband/long term partner to death. What occurred was not pure fantasy violence either, but a brutally realistic depiction of extreme domestic violence, just ratcheted up to 10 with vampire powers. There's a reason so many viewers found it extremely triggering. It was detailed and specific to the trauma experienced by abuse survivors to the point of being shockingly excessive
Even in a Gothic TV show, there was NO reason for a fan to expect what happened in ep 5. The showrunners repeated multiple times that this was "more of a Gothic romance than Gothic horror", that they were toning down/changing upsetting elements from the book to make it more palatable to a modern audience, that they wanted to be racially sensitive by creating a more equal dynamic for Louis and Lestat, and that Lestat was meant to be an amalgamation of his full canon character. Instead, they showed something exponentially worse than ever occurred between Loustat at any point in time and did so with maximum shock value. So no, "what did you expect?" is not a valid argument.
Lestat does terrible, violent things to other characters in the books, like David. This doesn't change the fact that a consistent, omnipresent tenet for Lestat’s character is not harming Louis and Claudia (yes, that's a bit hypocritical with those two smacks, but Lestat has never once injured Louis or Claudia). Louis and Claudia are sacred, always the exception. It's part of what makes so many people love Loustat.
This is from TotBT, the book where Lestat is his most violent and cruel. It's also the angriest he has ever been at Louis in canon, and this is his response. After this, he lets Louis kiss his cheek and then walks away. Even after Claudia stabs him and Louis helps her dump his body in the swamp, he doesn't make any aggressive or threatening advances on them upon his return. In TVL, he says he isn't/wasn't angry, that he deserved it and would've done the same in their position.
I've seen a lot of people say that this might be a lie/an exaggeration/a false memory. I don't care if it is because the showrunners still crossed a massive line in using extreme domestic violence and rape for shock value. It was traumaporn and depicting it like that after the stated goals of the show were so different violated many viewers' trust. Even if they hadn't made those claims, it would still be in very bad taste to say the least. And no content warning even after ep 1 had one for suicide tells you how seriously the creators took these issues.
I've seen the "lol I can excuse murder but I draw the line at domestic violence" posts and all I can say is: in this case, yes??? They're fairytale monsters killing NPCs for food. There are no vampires in the world. No one is being murdered by having their blood sucked. You know what IS real? Domestic violence situations very similar to the ones portrayed, just without the flying. THAT'S what impacts our perception of a character. When the fantasy monster becomes a little too real.
In conclusion, extreme violence is not OOC for Lestat. THIS extreme violence very much was.
