𝓒𝓵𝓪

Weeks of people telling others to “trust the process” and “everything’s deliberate” just to find out they took a song clearly about Lestat’s love and mourning for Nicki and slapped Gabrielle’s name on it for filler. No, don’t ask that they write a new song or just cut it. They just said fuck it, let’s make it about his sexual abuser!

genuinely fascinating to me how people look at Armand kidnapping and torturing Lestat's boyfriend before using that same boyfriend to "lure him into his orgy cult" and then torturing Lestat's daughter and killing her in front of him and conclude that the person being too mean in that situation is Lestat. ofc the time you were kidnapped and raped should be off limits, but if you then go on to kidnap and torture other people the people who love your victims may not be sympathetic to your own victimization. The ragdoll line is in and of itself an expression of frustration about the hypocrisy of Armand affecting passivity and powerlessness when he is, in fact, the big boss who gets to decide who lives and dies. this is something I think it is reasonable for Lestat specifically to be annoyed by, however subjectively powerless Armand feels. Louis makes essentially the same point in 2x05, but unlike Armand and Louis, who have an intimate and longstanding if deeply dysfunctional relationship, Armand and Lestat are literally just people who meet up once a century so Armand can set someone Lestat loves on fire. Armand used his position of authority, knowledge of vampirism, and Lestat's very sick boyfriend whose mental health was not at all helped by the kidnapping and torture to try to manipulate him into a relationship and when that didn't work he sulked about it for a century, used his vulnerable daughter to do the same thing to his husband, used his authority over her to publicly humiliate and demean her, and then killed her. Lestat wrote a cruel line in a song about all the horrible shit Armand has used his very real and literal power to do to him and the people he loves. he's done so many actual bad things, why are we pretending this is one of them?

I think Lestat and Nicki at the end of the episode—Lestat being silly to his ghost—is maybe my favorite part? There’s something so… sweet(?) about a widower’s love. Not the sadness of his death or the pain of witnessing his madness, but the just that, the innocent joy, what you mourn for. And he gets to stay. He’s not laid to rest, he's not let go of or forgotten. And Lestat imagines him cheering for him.