LDPDL WEEK 2026

#ldpdlweek2026 day 2/day 3 entry focusing on louis’ race and his romance with lestat; a companion piece to my loumand edit.

tw for antiblack racism, intimate partner violence (IPV), and familial abuse. While this edit merely highlights existing canon, I wanted to give a warning ahead of time - please take care of yourself ❤️ - I don't own the contents of this edit.

Video - "Interview with the Vampire" and "The Vampire Lestat" by Anne Rice & AMC

@ldpdlweek2026

@ldpdlweek2026 #ldpdlweek2026 • day 4 + day 8 | angst ; s3 speculations + louis & victimhood

day three - romance | parallels (yes, i think loustat is a kind of couple who dance in their pajamas before bed)

@ldpdlweek2026

in a pre-colonial fantasy world, louis thrives as a griot; invoking ancient history and stories through song and storytelling

"The Louis Triptych (Burnt, Broken, Buried)"

"Louis’ long hair over four centuries"

"or is it the sleep of an infant?"

LDPDL Day 6d (Mental Illness & Angst / Childhood)

Day Six centers Louis’ mental illness—for example: his crippling Depression— and Angst. In addition, day six is also an opportunity to expand on his childhood!@ldpdlweek2026

For ldpdlweek2026, I'm compiling AMC's book references (S1 | S2 | AMC Auction) to break them down thematically, and explore the parallels in the books AMC used to contextualize Louis' dynamics with the people in his life. Here, I decided to do something different, and look at a film instead of all the literature I've been covering.

1942: Now, Voyager (Bette Davis)

A woman’s traumatized life of child abuse, repression, eating disorders & low self esteem, mental illness & depression. Rehabilitation, a whirlwind romance that briefly helps her confidence, only for her abusive mother to shatter it again. She finally finds strength/calling & kinship with her former lover’s mentally ill daughter, whom she helps raise.

Armand mentions watching Now, Voyager in 2x2.

The title's from the Walt Whitman poem "The Untold Want":

[x] The film's exploration of a woman's journey toward independence resonated with audiences, particularly during the World War II era, offering a message of empowerment and self-discovery.

[x] "Now, Voyager" is a classic American romantic drama film released in 1942, which explores themes of personal transformation and love. The story follows Charlotte Vale, a repressed woman living under the thumb of her domineering mother, who undergoes a significant transformation after receiving psychiatric treatment. With the help of her psychiatrist, Charlotte embarks on a journey to regain her self-confidence, leading her to a life-altering cruise where she meets the married architect Jerry Durrance. Despite their deep connection, they acknowledge the impossibility of their love due to their circumstances.

This a wonderful movie, about a severely browbeaten, repressed & verbally abused aging woman who lives under her wretched mother's tyranny. She's terrible; so resentful, judgemental, derisive & hateful of everything her daughter does that she strips Charlotte of all confidence. And she allows the rest of her family to join in on the harassment, further isolating her daughter from everyone, until Charlotte has a full nervous breakdown (severe anxiety attacks).

Charlotte is only able to realize her self worth and realize her own autonomy after being committed to a mental asylum run by the psychiatrist Dr. Jaquith.

[x] Charlotte's sister-in-law fears Charlotte is having a nervous breakdown and introduces her to Dr. Jaquith, a famous psychiatrist. Over her mother’s strong objections, Charlotte goes to his facility and then, after developing coping skills, losing weight, and having a makeover, Charlotte embarks on a cruise ship voyage to South America.

Once she's (re)gained her equilibrium (finding her own sense of style & fashion, talking elegantly, smoking, etc), Dr. Jaq recommends that Charlotte go on a nice voyage around the world to find something in life she truly enjoys (he also wanted her to get far away from her evil AF mother). On the cruise ship, Charlotte meets the love of her life, Jerry.

Since Daniel Molloy has zero genuine care for Louis, I'm seeing Lestat as 2 sides of Jaq & Jerry: the platonic mentor/father-figure (Dr. Jaq), and the quirky romantic lover (Jerry). (NGL I think Dan's obvs supposed to be Dr. Jaq, I just hate Daniel and am in no mood to be gracious to him today. 🤷‍♂️)

Jerry, unfortunately, is married with kids (😱), and is only on a business trip on the same cruise; while her itinerary still has more stops on her voyage. But he's fascinated with the mysterious Charlotte, who is walking around under an alias, trying to be a more confident person, but still repressing so much even as he sees her spark shining through.

[x] The iconic scene where Jerry lights two cigarettes has become a memorable moment in cinematic history.

Although NV is ofc a romantic love story oo la la, what IMMEDIATELY struck me is that it's also a story about family--esp. FOUND FAMILY. Is blood thicker than water? 🤔 Esp. wrt Charlotte/Louis' relationships with Mrs. Vale/Florence, and Tina/Claudia.

After Jerry goes back to his sickly wife and Charlotte's mother dies, Charlotte has another nervous breakdown, and runs back to Dr. Jaquith's mental asylum; desperate for his help regaining her sense of direction & purpose. Instead, there she meets his new patient, Tina--Jerry's runaway daughter, who is also suffering from anxiety, deep depression (sobbing fits), and nervous breakdowns.

Tina's mother deeply resented her, only married to Jerry since he'd knocked her up. So when Jerry was away on long business trips, she took it all out on Tina. Almost manically depressed, Tina was staying at Dr. Jaquith's asylum only cuz Charlotte had told Jerry that that's where she got help for her own mental break. Jerry told her about Tina, so she recognized his daughter and quickly took her under her wing when no one else would/could. They became codependent and basically adopted each other.

Unlike Claudia's fate, Now, Voyager has a beautiful--if kinda ambiguous???-- HEA, as Charlotte & Tina become the family they always wanted; and she & Jerry pretty much subtly agree to just wait out his wife's death OML. 😅 Regardless, Tina will stay with Charlotte, even if Jerry can't ever leave his wife (they're not even Catholic I though?! 😭).

In a lot of ways, NV reminds me of The Heiress/Washington Square, but with a much more romantic ending, where the love interest isn't a vile golddigger, he's just cheating on his wife. 💀 Catherine stays a spinster, but she finds purpose in charity work & opening a school. On NV, Charlotte adopts Tina & is ostensibly a spinster (so long as Jerry's still married, although they're agreeing to still see each other when he visits Tina 🍆).

The biggest difference is that when the evil abusive parent dies, Catherine is disinherited, Charlotte keeps her full inheritance; and Louis is the moneymaker Florence was living off of, not the other way around. Louis' struggle for independence from under his mother's oppression was more spiritual/moral than financial, since he's a gay vampire pimp who refuses to live "respectably" like regular straight men.

Still, Louis, Charlotte, and Catherine all refuse to marry unless they can do marry for love (and ofc Louis can't marry at all since homosexuality's illegal, even though he's all but married to Lestat). That disobedience drives a serious wedge in their relationship with their parents. All 3 of the MCs are getting too long in the tooth to get married & have kids of their own, and their parents accuse them of failing the entire family; further contributing to their sense of worthlessness. And so the bond they create with their adopted children/found families are all the more precious, after living life for so long feeling like disappointments.

TL;DR: Rolin Jones is a sicko

Although Armand watching Now, Voyager has nothing to do with Louis, the movie in and of itself being mentioned at all on THIS in particular is SICK, and 100% deliberate. Armand of all people is talking about watching a film with so many parallels to LOUIS' relationship with his daughter CLAUDIA--the girl Armand KILLED and then lied about. 💀

But clearly, those similarities weren't on Armand's mind at all when he bragged to Daniel about it (if he even watched the film, and didn't just use the cinema as a typical hookup spot where NV just so happened to be playing).

LDPDL Books 6c (Mental Illness & Angst / Childhood)

Day Six centers Louis’ mental illness—for example: his crippling Depression— and Angst. In addition, day six is also an opportunity to expand on his childhood!@ldpdlweek2026

For ldpdlweek2026, I'm compiling AMC's book references (S1 | S2 | AMC Auction) to break them down thematically, and explore the parallels in the books AMC used to contextualize Louis' dynamics with the people in his life. Here, I'll focus on depression & mental illness.

1938: La Nausée  - Jean-Paul Sartre 

A deeply depressed and socially isolated man reckons with existential crises.

[x] Nausea (La Nausée) is a philosophical novel by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, published in 1938. It is Sartre's first novel. The novel...comprises the thoughts and subjective experiences—in a personal diary format—of Antoine Roquentin, a melancholic and socially isolated intellectual who is residing in Bouville ostensibly for the purpose of completing a biography on a historical figure. Roquentin's growing alienation and disillusionment coincide with an increasingly intense experience of revulsion, which he calls "the Nausea", in which the people and things around him seem to lose all their familiar and recognizable qualities. Sartre's original title for the novel before publication was Melancholia.

[x] The protagonist of the novel, Antoine is a former adventurer who has been living alone in Bouville for three years. He has no friends and is out of touch with family, and often resigns himself to eavesdropping on other people's conversations and examining their actions from a distance.

[x] During the winter of 1932 a "sweetish sickness," which he calls "the nausea", increasingly impinges on almost everything he does or enjoys. He tries to find solace in the presence of others, but exhibits signs of boredom and lack of interest when interacting with them. Because of his aloofness to the world and the people around him, he starts to doubt his own existence.

[x] Contemplate the essence of ‘existentialism’ with Roquentin, and compare its complexion with our dear Meursault of Camus’ The Stranger; who similarly took a life in world of no meanings. Yet, different from the prospect of absurdism, Roquentin had thought about death — enabling the idea of suicide to his option (though, later he rejected the concept by logically contending that death would be too meaningless to be viewed as a part of life’s randomness). Overall, Nausea is a must-read once you’re all prepared for a train bound for an utter lack of happiness.

"He is my melancholy!"

[x] Melancholia or melancholy (Ancient Greek: μελαγχολία, from μέλαινα χολή, mélaina cholḗ, 'black bile') is a concept found throughout ancient, medieval, and premodern medicine in Europe that describes a condition characterized by markedly depressed mood...and sometimes hallucinations and delusions. Besides a pathological condition, melancholy could also refer to a mood or temperament and at times it was even used as a description of the human condition in general. Melancholy...was regarded as one of the 4 temperaments matching the 4 humours.

I'm already in a bad mood, I need to have some fun with this. So Imma bring in Nosferatu's topic of Ellen Hutter's melancholy/melancholia, too.

I watched an amazing video essay by Book & Hearth on mental illness in Nosferatu that broke it all down:

European naturalists & pseudoscience were responsible for spreading all kinds misogynist & racist bullcrap--so OF COURSE Louis gets the brunt of BOTH as a Black gay man. And OF COURSE he's internalizing what he reads, because who else is he going to talk to about his worsening depression in the 1930s, when mental illness (and homosexuality) got you a swift jaunt to the asylum? Furious AF Claudia telling him to go Romania with her to look for Dracula? Goofy AF LESTAT?!

To be fair, on the one hand, Lestat told Louis not to pseudoscience nonsense by quacks. ✋😔🤚

But on the other hand Lestat's the one BUYING Louis the stupid books in the first place, OMFG. 🤦‍♂️🤣

BUT to be more fair, Lestat knew that those were precisely the kinds of "cutting edge" & "modern" books nerds like Louis would like anyway:

BUT Lestat's excuses mean EFF ALL when he was the one not only ENABLING Louis' depressive spirals by FEEDING him the bullcrap that "fogs your mind;" but he was doing even worse by CONTRIBUTING to Louis' depression and increasing feelings of isolation & inadequacy/worthlessness when he got caught STILL cheating with Antoinette! 💀So this was a royal mess, basically, or as I like to call it:

LDPDL Books 6b (Mental Illness & Angst / Childhood)

Day Six centers Louis’ mental illness—for example: his crippling Depression— and Angst. In addition, day six is also an opportunity to expand on his childhood!@ldpdlweek2026

For ldpdlweek2026, I'm compiling AMC's book references (S1 | S2 | AMC Auction) to break them down thematically, and explore the parallels in the books AMC used to contextualize Louis' dynamics with the people in his life. Here I'll focus on the angst of childhood development & toxic masculinity.

1903: La Mortelle impuissance: roman du dilettantisme ("Mortal/Deadly Impotence: A Novel of Dilettantism") - Maffeo Charles Poinsot, Georges Normandy

A guidebook for young men coming of age in French society.

Deadly Impotence is another book from AMC's S1 - S2 auction, so who knows what the in-universe context is. 🤷‍♂️But it's GOTTA be one of the DPDL boys' books, that Louis and/or Paul read at some point.

Many titles of fin-de-siècle novels of formation highlight the period’s concern with youth as an age of transition and uncertainty.... Others are explicit in their characterization of the dangers that threaten French youth – La Mortelle Impu- issance (A deadly impotence, 1903) – at what they represent as a time of “crisis”.... Prefaces and dedications make clear that these novels are not only about, but also geared towards, young readers – that they engage in a double endeavour, to both represent and instruct the young man at this critical age. Karl Morgenstern, who first coined the term Bildungsroman, defined the genre precisely in terms of this double nature in a lecture delivered in 1819: “We may call a novel a Bildungsroman first and foremost on account of its content, because it portrays the development of the hero in its beginning and progress to a certain stage of completion...."

Proulx, François. Victims of the Book: Reading and Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle France. University of Toronto Press, 2019.

Granted, due to the late date, it's probably Paul's, since Louis would've been 26 when it was published & Paul likely still in his teens (and probably incarcerated in the mental asylum until their FATHER died--depending on WHEN Papa DPDL sent him there).

So maybe this was just a book Louis read in Dubai or something, while thinking about his childhood and Paul's? 🤔

Regardless, what's interesting's how this guidebook's for (white) boys, telling them how to grow up into (white) society's decent men...juxtaposed with the book on Etiquette (1922) that Bruce gave to Claudia, for (white) girls in (white) society. 👀

Especially since a book warning against the Deadly Impotence in men was published in 1903, the same exact year Claudia was born. 👀💀

And ofc vampirism is a metaphor for procreation, etc etc.

Anyways, back to the book--or rather, books about Deadly Impotence:

Representations of young male readers in these novels are linked to contemporary pronouncements about physiological degeneration, economic and reproductive impotence, and precarious masculinity in France’s rising generations at the turn of a new century.... [This] is linked to non-reproductive sexual acts (often masturbation or same-sex dalliances).... Through these devices, fin-de-siècle novels [examined various threats] to the “normal” development of young men’s productive and reproductive potential. According to their rhetoric, nothing less than the future of France was at stake.

Proulx, François. Victims of the Book: Reading and Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle France. University of Toronto Press, 2019.

Victims of the Book explain how various 19th century suicidal male protagonists in fiction who spent their time depressed with only books for company were seen as the "archetype of [an] exhausted generation;" NERDS more busy reading books and doing nothing but thinking/talking without actually having the gumption to get out there and DO anything--be A MAN and take action! 💪😤🍆 So not literally about sexual impotence, but that's included in all of it, too.

“You suffer from the disease that afflicts the current generation … we have dilettantes and wonderfully corrupted men … but we have no men of will; that is a trait that tends to disappear among intellectuals. Sensitive types, analysts, subtle thinkers … it is a brilliant degeneration, but a de- generation nonetheless … As for you, my son, what you lack is energy.” The opposition between impotent dilettantism and wilful energy, as we have seen, is a mainstay of discourses on the perceived crisis of contemporary youth.... Many novels of formation inculpate reading as the root cause of this imagined shift between active (re)productivity and passive impotence.

Proulx, François. Victims of the Book: Reading and Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle France. University of Toronto Press, 2019.

Or worse, you had try-hards overcompensating to "prove" their masculinity.

Characters are marked by a ghostly masculinity, manifested in either melancholy and impotence, or cynical and violent overcompensation.

Proulx, François. Victims of the Book: Reading and Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle France. University of Toronto Press, 2019.

Again, as I've repeated myself ad nauseum in this effing fandom, Louis was never AT LIBERTY to be the person he wanted to be--the man society told him he should be was always at way with the contradictory "latencies" he agonized over. Lestat's wedding vows about vampirism offered Louis FREEDOM; the power to "live honestly" and finally "be all the beautiful things you are without apology, for all eternity."

But in the end, Lestat was just as pisspoor a teacher/guide as anyone.

TL;DR: Morals/Ethics/Rules Don't Apply to Vamps?! 🤨

LDPDL Books 6a (Mental Illness & Angst / Childhood)

Day Six centers Louis’ mental illness—for example: his crippling Depression— and Angst. In addition, day six is also an opportunity to expand on his childhood!@ldpdlweek2026

For ldpdlweek2026, I'm compiling AMC's book references (S1 | S2 | AMC Auction) to break them down thematically, and explore the parallels in the books AMC used to contextualize Louis' dynamics with the people in his life.

c. 1321: Divine Comedy: Canto XIII - Dante Alighieri ("Wood of the Self-Murdered")

Suicide, self-hatred, eternal damnation and suffering.

1) The 7th Circle of Hell = Violence

[x] The Seventh Circle, divided into three rings, houses the Violent.... Ring 2: [Violence] Against Self: The 2nd round of the 7th circle is the Wood of the Suicides, in which the souls of the people who attempted or died by suicide are transformed into gnarled, thorny trees and then fed upon by Harpies, hideous clawed birds with the faces of women; the trees are only permitted to speak when broken and bleeding.

1) The Woods & Soul-Trees

2) The Harpies