Re: @firelight-fading​‘s post: “How many of you actually feel that Louis’ visiting Lestat at the end of IWTV and the conversation that followed actually happened? Lestat insists that it didn’t, but both him and Louis are unreliable narrators…”

Hey, look, you are free to believe in whichever unreliable narrator you want! Clearly we don’t all agree on this. I still don’t know what I believe, but I lean towards it happening, that they met, just maybe not as Louis described it.

Anon says: If the scene didn’t take place at all how did Louis get such an accurate description of Lestat’s condition?… 

^Louis had seen a pretty battered Lestat around 1865, and then he thought Lestat was destroyed in the TdV fire, so he’s probably guessing that his maker looks like toast now, if he’s in fact still alive. 

Lestat acknowledges in TVL that Armand came around to pester him in NOLA, which, yes, is presumably after Armand and Louis went their separate ways. But Armand could have visited Lestat before that separation, or gotten the information from another vampire who had seen Lestat in NOLA. They’re probably not the only vampires in New York during the time that they’re there. 

Anon says: even if he had visited once before why would he give Louis the full disclosure? In IWTV, Armand tells Louis that Lestat is in NOLA:

“Then, finally, Armand urged me in another way. He told me something he’d concealed from me since the time we were in Paris. 

“Lestat had not died in the Theatre des Vampires. I had believed him to be dead, and when I asked Armand about those vampires, he told me they all had perished. But he told me now that this wasn’t so. Lestat had left the theater the night I had run away from Armand and sought out the cemetery in Montmartre. Two vampires who had been made with Lestat by the same master had assisted him in booking passage to New Orleans.

^So how Armand knew this, we don’t know, but I assume he read it from Lestat’s thoughts when he visited Lestat in NOLA prior to Armand’s separation with Louis, or from another vampire who had seen Lestat passing through NY.

Armand wants Louis to see Lestat for himself bc he wants Louis to “come back to life.”

” `You care about nothing …’ [Armand] was saying. And then he sat up slowly and turned to me so again I could see that dark fire in his eyes. `I thought you would at least care about that. I thought you would feel the old passion, the old anger if you were to see him again. I thought something would quicken and come alive in you if you saw him . . . if you returned to this place.’

^Sorry Armand, fail on that 😛

Whether Louis actually met with Lestat the way he described it in IWTV is up for debate, but Louis might have gotten such an accurate description of Lestat’s condition verbally from Armand. Perhaps, as you say, Louis might have exaggerated the patheticness of the conversation to get a reaction from Lestat, as he was trying to provoke Lestat into coming out of wherever he was hiding.

Or maybe Louis just wanted to tell his story to another soul, like confession, and get some feeling of absolution from the act of telling, maybe it felt good to invent this portion for no good reason. I don’t personally think that’s very IC for Louis but… who knows?

Can we just look at this for a minute….

Two vampires who had been made with Lestat by the same master had assisted him in booking passage to New Orleans.

^This used to really irritate me, these two vampire siblings of Lestat who never appeared again in canon, I have to assume Armand invented them for whatever reason (make Louis jealous that he didn’t help Lestat himself?) or that Daniel’s publisher added them in for whatever reason *shrugs*