So Louis’ emotional connection to Lestat, and the fact that it wasn’t really visible in IWTV.
The really short answer is that I believe in Louis’ love for Lestat so much that I can’t quite pinpoint the evidence for it! I think it’s from reading further books and seeing Louis from other ppls’ POV, who can describe his love better than he might be able to admit.
“Louis, the watcher, the patient one, was there on account of love pure and simple. The two had found each other only last night, and theirs had been an extraordinary reunion. Louis would go where Lestat led him. Louis would perish if Lestat perished.” – Khayman, Queen of the Damned.
TL;DR: You gonna have to read The Vampire Lestat to get that connection.
These are actually pretty appropriate here:
So, yes, I think you’re somewhat right when you say that in book!IWTV and movie!IWTV, it seems like the only feelings Louis has for Lestat are:
a “range from hatred
to disinterest,
to pity,
with no real love besides the initial wonder.”
Louis is baffled by a lot of the things Lestat does in IWTV, he disagrees with Lestat’s philosophy (which is unclear in IWTV in both versions), and until Claudia rebels against their maker, Louis stays with Lestat because YES, he is still fascinated with him, he doesn’t know of any other vampires, and he’s sure he can pull more of the mysteries of life out of Lestat about vampiring, and his place in the scheme of things (whether vampires work for God or Satan is a big question).
^At the end of IWTV, Louis does meet up with a very incapacitated Lestat. Lestat says in the next book that this scene never happened.
Whether they met like this or not, Louis clearly is “empty” at the end of IWTV, and he wants to find Lestat, but how’s he going to do that? Check the Yellow Pages? It would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
IWTV is like a Batsignal from Louis to Lestat to call him out of wherever he’s hiding. Some of the story is embellished (or maybe even invented) to paint Lestat as a bizarre antagonist. This is all to get him ANGRY ENOUGH to rise up out of hiding and FIND LOUIS. Whether to retaliate physically, and finally end Louis’ misery, or correct the record by putting out HIS side of the story, and everything he couldn’t tell Louis during IWTV.
Which is exactly what The Vampire Lestat is, and that’s why you need to read it ❤
I forgot to mention that there is some fanon that Louis had never been with a man romantically (or only with one) before Lestat, and being religious, that would have been a huge sin, too. As bad as killing? Idk, but high up there on the scale of being bad. So he may not want to admit to the gay feelings he has for Lestat, and has had, for the 70-some years they were together.
^I feel like, even though this is Claudia’s line, we’re watching Louis’ reaction bc he’s about to lose her, and he’s also thinking about how he’s lost Lestat ;A;
Louis does mention in IWTV missing Lestat when he and Claudia are free of him:
“I wanted to forget -him, and yet it seemed I thought of him always. It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow there was a disturbing comfort in that… I wanted him alive!”
Lestat also tells us in TVL to read between Louis’ lines in IWTV:
“And why should I bother to tell of the times [Louis] came to me in wretched anxiety, begging me never to leave him, of the times we walked together and talked together, acted Shakespeare together for Claudia’s amusement, or went arm in arm to hunt the riverfront taverns or to waltz with the dark-skinned beauties of the celebrated quadroon balls?
Read between the lines.
… he told the truth about the eerie contentment he and Claudia and I shared…”
Then there’s the part in Pandora where Pandora wants to consummate her “marriage” to Marius after he turns her. She puts his dick inside her and concedes it doesn’t do much sexually but it’s comforting in the way any part of his body near her is so like Agreed 100% with the above.
“He was right. The lower organs meant nothing. He fed on me. I fed on him. This was our marriage.” – Pandora [more of that scene here]
I think she wanted to see for herself that it didn’t work bc she argued with him about like EVERYTHING whether his dick works is just one topic among MANY.
“I looked down at the ground and saw flowers of complete perfection; flowers that were the flowers that our flowers of the world might become! I don’t know any other way to describe how well realized were the petals and the centers and the colors. The colors themselves were so distinct and so finely delineated that I was unsure suddenly that our spectrum was even involved.
I mean, I don’t think our spectrum of color was the limit! I think there was some other set of rules. Or it was merely an expansion, a gift of being able to see combinations of color which are not visible chemically on earth.
…‘Sapphirine!’ I cried out suddenly, trying to identify the greenish blue of the great leaves surrounding us and gently waving to and fro, and Memnoch smiled and nodded as if in approval, reaching again to stop me from touching Heaven, from trying to grab some of the magnificence I saw.” – Lestat de Lioncourt, Memnoch the Devil
The Colossi of Memnon, Thebes, Egypt, 1880s, photographed by Antonio Beato. (Getty Museum)
And I understood that in her own way Akasha was a monster. I was a monster as well. I had no intention of creating a devotion for her. She was a secret. And from the moment she came into my hands she and her consort were most truly
They have a bizarre kind of chemistry, don’t they?! If they weren’t both so obsessed with being alpha, they could really enjoy each other.
This is one of the only fanarts I’ve seen of them in any kind of shippiness, and even then, I think it’s the scene in TVL where Lestat is succumbing to Armand’s illusions.
“You know it was the damnedest luck!” I whispered suddenly. “I am an unwilling devil. I cry like some vagrant child. I want to go home.”
[Source unknown, even reverse-image searched. Tell me the source if you know it!]
Anyhow they have referred to eachother in canon as being brothers of a sort, so I tag them #murder brothers, if you want more Lestat/Armand action.
“How to describe what humans look like to us! … you can’t imagine what it’s like for us to look on living flesh. There are those billions of colors and tiny configurations of movement, yes, that make up a living creature on whom we concentrate.
But the radiance mingles totally with the carnal scent. Beautiful, that’s what any human being is to us, if we stop to consider it, even the old and the diseased, the downtrodden that one doesn’t really “see” in the street. They are all like that, like flowers ever in the process of opening, butterflies ever unfolding out of the cocoon.“
– The Vampire Lestat
I love this quote bc it means that just being alive makes us ALL beautiful.
I-want-my-IWTV 