[This post right here, is the Lestat/Life OTP post, if anyone wants to catch up]

BRACE YOSELF FOR A WALL OF TEXT™©®

…like GDI YOU ASKED FOR IT.

^This is like the only time they hold hands in the movie ;A; not ghey enuf

I think I can say w/ 100% certainty that AR did not set out to write the Vampire Chronicles as we know it now. When her original short story of IWTV was published in 1973, she didn’t plan for a 2014 VC that diverged from canon, sinking several ships in its wake (including Lestat/Rowan). 

No, I don’t think the VC relies on Lestat’s romantic relationships specifically to keep the series interesting and keep ppl connecting with him. There are ships in canon other than whoever Lestat is throwing himself at! Armand/Daniel, for example. Marius/Pandora. Marius/Amadeo. 

Of course, I’m sure some readers need the romance in VC in order to stay interested/connected to it, and that’s fine, too, but I would ask them to consider looking deeper.

TL;DR: Lestat is all about love, yes, but not necessarily in pursuit of specific ships. He’s filling a void that was made in his childhood and no one seems to be enough to fill it other than simply the pursuit of it. AR does throw in a little fanservice now and then, but I think she writes for deeper reasons, and the romance aspect – or lack thereof – is part of her exploration.

Hit the jump for more. I also address your doggie headcanon 😉

AR wrote the first short story basically to ask why her daughter died of leukemia. She wanted to interview God, the Devil, and/or Death himself. She wanted to know: Was she and/or her husband being punished for being bad Christians, or was their daughter a bad Christian? When a parent loses a child they want to know why. So she made Louis, and he answered her, “There was no reason, that girl was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don’t serve Heaven or Hell, I was just hungry, I’m sorry, I feel like shit. Also, blame Lestat.” 

Then she had to interview Lestat and find out where the evil comes from. How evil can he be, when he was forced into vampiring, totally against his will?

Everything else that followed in the series stems from that central question. Why do bad things happen? Why do people do bad things? What if the person doing the bad thing did it accidentally? Or they feel terrible about it? What if they are trying to change and be better? Why do they want to be better?

Lestat strives to be good bc he wants love. He is making up for an enormous void, his formative years spent mostly unloved and untouched, a childhood in which the only love he got was from his animals, the teachers in the school he briefly went to, the theatre troupe he ran off with, and a teensy bit from his mother. When he expressed himself, he was often shot down, and with beatings.

He knows the equations he’s been taught: 

• Be Good —> Get Loved.  
  
• Give Love —> Get Loved.
  
• Be in Control —> Take Love.

So I think his huge heart is a hungry one, he can’t get enough, and he can’t seem to get enough from one person. I think he’s afraid of commitment. To commit to one person is to risk that person having too much control. 

Having lots of relationships, well, I do think AR was doing a little fanservice when she set him up with women. That was probably a response to so many POTP begging her to set him up with a woman for a change. 

But I on the other hand, I feel like alot of his dating record is unsurprising. Who can predict their future lovers? I think we can all learn from our past relationships, and that improves subsequent ones. Lestat does tend to repeat some mistakes and he does have issues with consent in relationships, but he at least is good at confessing these things and presumably working on them.

We all agree Lestat is a dog person!

He had a pack of them as a mortal, and yes, I think he’d love to own a bunch of fluffy dogs that make him happy! But dogs do not like vampires:

“I’d expected to hear from [the dog] before this time, for surely it would pick up my scent, know instinctively that I wasn’t human, and then begin to sound its natural alarm of growls and barks. Dogs had done that enough to me over the centuries, though they don’t always. Sometimes I can entrance them and  command them. But I feared the instinctive rejection and it always sent a pain through my heart.” – Lestat, Tale of the Body Thief.

That’s part of what made Mojo so special, that he seemed to override whatever natural dog instinct with love for Lestat ❤ 

Lestat also has expensive tastes in terms of furniture and fashion, and that’s incompatible with having a pack of dogs. People with even one dog have to dog-proof their home to some extent or risk sacrificing things to a curious doggie. 

And plus he’s a wanderlust, he likes to just up and leave for long periods, and he can’t leave a pack of dogs with Louis to babysit. Plus, he knows he can’t be there for all those puppies during the day when they need to be walked and run around, so I would imagine he would have to set them up to be taken care of on someone’s huge farm or wherever so he can play with them occasionally when he needs a good dose of animal therapy ❤