Wow, I have so many thoughts on this. There are spoilers there, but you might be interested in my post about Louis’s rings, and in the jewelry tag.

Not a stupid question. The short answer is No, the VC fandom is all pretty much in agreement that Louis was never married. Or that he had much of a romantic attachment to any woman in IWTV aside from Claudia and a certain sister of the owner of a neighboring plantation.

In terms of whether any other big or small discrepancies between the movie!IWTV and book!IWTV are considered canon? Ummm… I don’t know. That would be up to each person’s own headcanon, which I describe below.

I think alot of the film’s dialogue has been added to our collective canon, since, as you correctly put it, AR did write it! But I can’t think of any specific examples… most of that was revised dialogue from the book and we all tend to remember the movie quote over the book quote. It would be a huge project to try to pick them all out.

—> Now, we all have what we call “headcanons“ and that means, whatever you believe to be canon based on:

• your own reading of the books and watching the movie(s)
• reading fanfic on AO3 (or elsewhere)
• reading RPs here
• meta posts like this one
• Whatever you want!

It’s just that you might not find anyone to agree with your headcanon that Claudia and Louis have been hiding out in Amsterdam knitting blankets with Eric, or whatever ;]

In the movie version of IWTV, they (Anne Rice and Neil Jordan worked together) changed a few things from the book, maybe partly to keep it to a 2 hour runtime (I think it was uncommon to have movies over 2 hours in the early ’90s) and partly to open up the story to a wider audience. That’s my explanation for the casting of Antonio Banderas as Armand in my Defending Antonio tag. It’s more upsetting to more people for Louis to have lost a wife in childbirth than a religious zealot of a brother who wanted him to sell the plantation and donate all the money to the church!

PLUS: It actually makes Louis’ transformation into a vampire that much more jarring for his character; he’s married (presumably by the church), had created a new life (the baby), and lost those both at once. That would be devastating to anyone. He immediately turns to drinking and prostitutes, very against the church’s idea of appropriate Good Person behavior. But all that is within the context of being STRAIGHT.

Becoming a vampire not only meant Louis would have to break a big commandment regularly (that pesky Not Killing people one), but it also put him in a confusing relationship with Lestat, a dude, very against the Bible’s idea of appropriateness.

One of Neil Jordan’s previous films dealt with sexuality vs. religion (The Crying Game), so I’m sure he was keenly aware of and even enhanced this crisis of character that Louis would have to undergo, to accept himself as being at least bisexual. That, plus the need to kill people, would mean letting go of those religious principles and societal propriety, because he had to accept that he was no longer human and no longer capable of achieving Goodness. That he had lost his chance for Heaven if it exists.

Of course Lestat told him, “no creature under God are as we are, none so like him as ourselves.” meaning that the religious rules do not apply to vampires.