no thoughts head empty

For the first part, I think of fics about characters like Black Widow from Marvel, where maybe she had gotten pregnant while in the Red Room and lost the child, and/or she had been forcibly sterilized by the Red Room, but either way, she "no longer can be a mother" even though m/m couples will be shown as becoming parents in all sorts of ways that don't involve having a uterus. Alternatively, a woman will present her dark past as precluding her from ever raising a child--while a comparable past does no such thing to male characters. Alternatively, female characters will talk about motherhood as a detriment, something that would get in the way of their lifestyle. They're girlbossing too much to want to be a mother, and they're not interested in something that would "soften" them in the way that motherhood ostensibly would.

They may take care of a child, but ultimately they don't keep that child, because they're just not mother material.

For male characters, we will often see them becoming parents by surprise--they stumble on a baby, their mission/adventure/quest suddenly involves a kid they need to protect, their sibling or friend will die and they will have to take care of their child, and suddenly they're a parent out of nowhere. Rather than losing the ability to be a parent, they gain it, often without expecting to. This is almost universally shown as a positive for the male character--maybe it's tricky at first, but they connect with the kid, feel feelings they didn't expect to feel, and ultimately thrive at fathering, usually with a male character or two by their side.

Sometimes a female character chips in on that parenting, but it will often be more as the aunt-type relationship, one who can hang with the kid for a bit and then give them back to their true parent.

WHY is the fucking AIR out here TOUCHING ME

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 somewhat worry about fans who are going to be unable to understand that everything Lestat says may not be the truth (maybe it wasn't raining, who knows?). But also for the fans who are unwilling to believe that Lestat may not be lying about everything either. And that's fully the point right? To understand that once a moment has passed the most truthful telling of events is what lives in our memories. And so for all the scenes that we get retold to us by lestat I'm excited to put both the pieces together to get a better look at what might have happened. (Now this isn't to say the Lestat will never be straight up lying I think he totally will) but its just a more interesting show if we allow the odyssey of recollection to inform us on the characters along with the plot. I think that 'this is what Louis remembers vs this is what Lestat remembers' is such an interesting way to get into the interiority of these characters.