the flashback with the witches when Lestat was nine - the reveal being that his mother forced him to watch his friends burn to give him motivation to leave home - I don't know if I got the punch the writers intended?
curious now if there's more to it and the girls saw his mother being inappropriate with him? didn't he start stuttering when he was nine?
loved how Lestat started to stand up to Sofia from ep6 onwards.
It's a really dense scene, but I actually think the little girls dying aren't intended to be the punch, it's the first woman, Marguerite, who's burned for being raped by her father:
It's implied there that the mother murdered the father for it, but also turned her daughter forwards, blaming her for the violence of the father. I think in that sense, the girls are a means to underscore Marguerite's death and elevate the message Gabi intends (and we can definitely debate why she intends it, because I think her intentionality is deliberately oblique) - his age won't save him, and to speak is to burn, to be punished. The monks say confession will save these women, and it's actually Augustin who says that they have confessed, yet nobody will let them free of the pyre. Their fate is sealed, they have been tried in the court of public and divine opinion, and it's not crimes that see them killed, but the violence they too briefly were able to survive.
This moment is formative because it becomes the foundation of Lestat's understanding of his own abuse - the monks say Margueritte seduced her father and Gabi effectively affirms it. Anything that happens later is on him, he ceased his prayers, he put a spell on his mother, on Magnus ('if I had seen 19 straight performances of my Lelio, I would have abandoned all decorum too'), on Armand, on Larry, on all those who touch him without his consent, and to speak about it is to be punished. The thing about this season is that that's only been punctuated for Lestat - he tells Louis about Magnus and it ends up in the book, 3.03 ties the Magnus and Nicki chapters together and in doing so connects both beats to Daniel's subsequent witch hunt, culminating in the revenge porn, and, of course, the revenge porn itself - - all of these are about exposure and the ways victims are punished for speaking and surviving.
In that sense, the witches place scene and Lestat's emphasis on the girls while the writing itself actually leads with, and focuses on Margueritte is about how Gabi has groomed him into not just silence, but self-blame and the romanticisation of abuse (the father favouring his enchantress daughter means it was her fault, just like Magnus being a fan of Lestat's enchanting performance means what he did to him was his), but I think it's also about him still not entirely understanding it or Gabi at all. He's just able to start grappling with the idea that the little voice in him that tells him it's wrong might be one he can start listening to.
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