Tonight, I confide with pen and paper because I know which direction my hatred will take me. And I fear for those who have aroused my wrath. By those I mean, of course, my evil parents, my splendid fathers, those who have led me from a long forgotten mortality into this questionable state of timeless 'bliss.'
To do away with Louis would be foolish, as he is without question the more malleable of the pair. Louis will do as I wish, even unto the very destruction of Lestat, which I plan in every detail.
Whereas Lestat would never cooperate with my designs upon Louis. So there my loyalty lies, under the guise of love even in my own heart.
What mysteries we are, human, vampire, monster, mortal, that we can love and hate simultaneously, and that emotions of all sorts might not parade for what they are not.
I look at Louis and I despise him totally for the making of me,
But then I love Lestat every bit as well.
Perhaps in the court of my heart, I hold Louis far more accountable for my present state than ever I could blame my impulsive and simple Lestat.
The fact is, one must die for this or the pain in me will never be scaled off, and immortality is but a monstrous measurement of what I shall suffer till the world revolves to its ultimate end.
One must die so that the other will become ever more dependent upon me, ever more completely my slave.
I would travel the world afterwards; I would have my way;
I cannot endure either one of them unless that one becomes my servant in thought, word, and deed.
Such a fate is simply unthinkable with Lestat's ungovernable and irascible character.
Such a fate seems made for my melancholy Louis, though the destroying of Lestat will open new passages for Louis into the labyrinthian Hell in which I already wander with every new thought that comes in my mind.
When I shall strike and how, I know not, only that it gives me supreme delight to watch Lestat in his unguarded gaiety, knowing that I shall humiliate him utterly in destroying him,
and in so doing bring down the lofty useless conscience of my Louis, so that his soul, if not his body, is the same size at last as my own.
IWTV S3 Musings - ghost!Claudia's Diary in Merrick
IDK where all the haughty crowing is coming from on the Lestan side of the fandom, as if S3 pulling from Merrick is supposed to be some big revelation for Louis about how much Claudia hated him--as if he wasn't already WELL aware of that 2 seasons in a row. The antis have been saying for years how S3's gonna drop the bombshell and show Claudia's nastiest feelings towards Louis & how awful she was, uwu Lestat's not that bad & Lesdaughter this Lesdaughter that & Louis' gonna get a reality check & the Louis/Claudia stans are gonna get a rude awakening when AMC does Merrick, etc blahblahblah. 🙄😒
Meanwhile ignoring the fact that unlike book!Louis, who'd NEVER read Claudia's diaries when he did his interview with Daniel, we ALREADY have Claudia's diaries on the show. AMC!Louis MEMORIZED all of them (way BEFORE they removed the pages during the 2022 interview, so Daniel wouldn't know the private details about Bruce/Killer, the pages Loumand removed that had Armand's name on them; and whatever pages Armand removed behind Louis' back to protect himself from Daniel). There's nothing to imply that LOUIS was NOT already well aware of every negative thought Claudia had about him. Esp. cuz she cussed him up & down Eastern Europe--they already had it out, and Louis KNEW he deserved her anger & resentment for all the ways he'd failed her--he takes accountability for it in BOTH seasons. SanFran & Dubai are AMC!Louis' Merrick; where he faces the reality of what his dynamic & relationship to Claudia was really like, and how it hurt her, and what it cost him. It's like Jacob said at NYCC25: Hanging up her dress isn't gonna change that she's dead partially cuz of the mistakes he made.
S3 is LESTAT'S turn to face his failures towards Claudia. He read her diaries pre-Charlie, but beyond what she told him to his face (1x6, 2x7), LESTAT is the one who needs to face how he failed his daughter; and hear her worst thoughts & feelings--whether it's a figment of his imagination/guilty conscience, or Lestat being given access to Claudia's diaries. And Les NEEDS to read her diaries, to see her words for himself & face those harsh realities, same as Lou.
Hannah Moscovitch said S3 is pulling from QotD, TVA, and Merrick. What I think is interesting is that Hannah didn't mention ToTBT, despite how AMC has OBVIOUSLY pulled from TotBT just from putting Raglan James into the mix. Lestat's at his lowest point there; actively being haunted by ghost!Claudia, the manifestation of his overwhelming self-loathing, guilt, loneliness, and bone-deep sense of "shame" (x x) & "failure"--which is precisely what Sam Reid said Lestat feels most in S3. So for Hannah to NOT mention TotBT but mention Merrick is SO interesting; esp since Claudia was haunting LOUIS in Merrick, NOT Lestat.
So now I can't help but wonder if the Merrick of it all is actually being misinterpreted by the side of the fandom that's still waiting for Louis & Claudia to be revealed as huge liars who did LESTAT dirty. At the end of the day the books are emphasizing how CLAUDIA was the one done dirty by BOTH of her parents--not the other way around. CLAUDIA is the victim here. Claudia being a pissed off ghost is NOT the gotcha the Lestans are so determined for it to be. Her anger & rage & resentment are VALID, cuz she was their child & she ended up dead when they BOTH failed her. Louis already got raked across the coals; now it's Lestat's turn. And seeing how Claudia was murdered in 1949, 2025/2026 is high effing time that Lestat FINALLY starts taking accountability for it--and no, torturing/killing Bruce/Killer 77 years after the fact is nowhere NEAR enough to do right by his Blood Child. 😤 But better late than never, I guess. 🙄😒
