lee felix enjoyer and shane hollander understander

i saw a kitty kat 🐱✨

There’s the fact that after hearing that Armand was trafficked and prostituted as a child, he decides to bring back his pimp persona. No negotiations. No checking Armand would find it helpful. He just does it.

There’s him sleeping with and then murdering 128 young queer men in San Francisco. The timing of it makes this so much worse to me, considering the AIDs crisis was just on the horizon. It’s not like Louis knew that, but the larger context makes it scarier for us as viewers. Plus the fact that Louis was luring them there under false pretences (he knew he was going to murder them) which makes the consent dubious.

There’s also the fight in San Francisco with Armand. He did not even hesitate to use Armand’s history of violent sexual abuse against him. The fight has been memed and it’s not not funny but there’s something so upsetting about the way he got in Armand’s face and put hands on him. In that scene, Armand hadn’t done anything to him (yet) and Louis was horrific. The drugs certainly made it worse and both of them were clearly deeply unhappy and everything boiled over It’s one of the best scenes of the show. Louis’s capacity for cruelty is one of his best traits imo. He’s truly cutting when he wants to be.

There’s also the fact that he’s arguably the largest contributor to Claudia’s loneliness. Neglect is abuse and no one knows how to emotionally neglect someone better than Louis (maybe Gabrielle Idk.) Louis and Claudia should’ve been thick as thieves, both being black vampires living in the early 20th century with a white maker. They had an understanding of each other Lestat could never have, a shared experience he’d never be able to relate to. And they were close-ish, but Louis still withheld so much from her. He wasn’t the only reason she suffered, but he played a much bigger role than he gets credit for.

There’s also weaponising Daniel’s Parkinson’s against him. A lot of people think Daniel deserved it because he was trying to see the removed pages from Claudia’s diary (I don’t think he was wrong for that but that’s another post) but I don’t think it really matters. It demonstrates a willingness to use someone’s illness or disability against them that I think is very present in Louis. Again, in comes his cruelty.

And I don’t hate Louis for any of this. I think he would be pretty boring if you removed all these things. Most writers wouldn’t dare assign these traits to their characters, especially their protagonist. All these characters are hurt each other all the time. That’s practically the tagline of the show.