memengwaa

iwtv continues to be so smart in its portrayal of memories and trauma, the way lestat’s memories of his family are so obnoxiously loud, everyone’s screaming all the time for no reason and everyone’s acting like caricatures, like an actual assault on the senses, as if lestat’s mind is filled with unbearable noise every time he thinks about them. lestat’s memories coming at him all fragmented and loud and violent, attacking him and beating him into submission as he desperately tries to escape them is such an interesting contrast to how louis would carefully weave a thread of his past pretending the glaring holes in it weren’t there

and also it's always about claudia. the story remains about two fathers haunted by the memory of their daughter. lestat's music becomes raw and vulnerable and pure when he is haunted by claudia, when he allows himself to think about her again. the entire album is being rerecorded because of claudia. akasha will awake because of the pain of lestat losing his daughter. the story is claudia.

No because actually I’m not okay about the song ‘Stained Glass Eyes’ and what it shows us about Lestat. Because Claudia was his daughter, not his sister, not a mere inconvenience he was saddled with, yes he turned her to appease a devastated Louis so he wouldn’t go mad like Nicki, but Claudia was his fledgling. A child of his blood. He taught her to drive, to hunt solo, to play piano and chess, he took her to the movies and span her around the living room with Louis in Rue Royale. He bought her clothes, gifted her Gabrielle’s necklace on her birthday, was concerned about the hemline of her skirt (because he was her MOTHER and that was his BABY), and they had private little jokes together. She was the best of his vampiric self. Then at the trial, after every betrayal and nasty word between them, he didn’t have the strength to save both her and Louis. He picked Louis over her, but he stayed rooted to the spot as Claudia turned to ash, and… he stared right into her eyes until the very end. Her red eyes, red like the blood that restored her to life, the blood that he and Claudia used to playfully call ‘kill juice’ when she was still new to vampirism, the blood that spilled from his own throat during the Mardi Gras ball. Claudia looked at him, ‘like a child looking to her father’, and like Nicki before her, Lestat was helpless to what Armand was doing, another person he loved held to the fire and accepting their miserable fate, burnt to ash with their only remnants being the memory of their agonised eyes forever seared within Lestat’s mind. He failed his daughter, and he will never forget that.