(mentions of episode five from the Interview With The Vampire show, so warning for mentions of domestic violence and general violence)

I recently noticed two parallels between the show and random moments in Anne Rice books. Mind you, I’m not thinking it’s intentional right now but it did make me go Uh.

The first one is not from the Chronicles actually but from the book The Witching Hour. It’s the only explicit mention of domestic gay violence in Rice books I can remember, happening between Julien Mayfair and one of his male lovers (who was a black man):

For context, Suzette was Julien’s wife.

Mind you, this paragraph is sort of a footnote - both because Victor doesn’t appear a lot, and because Julien is so fucked up (dude makes Marius look almost normal) that the narrative doesn’t linger on it, but it did caught my attention as an example of domestic gay violence that made me think of episode five on the spot as soon as I read this part.

The other one is from Prince Lestat and The Realms of Atlantis; I had forgot until recently that there’s a bit where Lestat grabs the character Kapetria and flies around with her without her permission, for her absolute horror.

The context for this is that Kapetria was forcing his hand in doing something that could potentially get Lestat permanently killed, and she was not being very nice about it. So the whole grabbing her and taking her places is a dick move to show off his power, but even then he’s aware of her fear and how terrified she is despite not being human.

And despite being a dick move to scare her, he also is not actually being cruel to her, despite how hostile things are between them and she being virtually a stranger to him, not someone he actively loves.

I don’t think these two scenes inspired the scenes we saw on show (unless the writers are playing random patchwork with Rice’s books and being real bad about it), but I always do like noticing little parallels that make me go Uh.

There’s many reasons for the mess that is Lestat and Louis’ relationship, the most glaring of them being their abismal lack of communication with each other of course, and the show also adds the fact that Lestat doesn’t seem able to understand that being a vampire does not free Louis from racism. Him being lived his entire life as a white man and inability to understand how being a black man in a racist society affects Louis is something that puts a big strain in their relationship.

But I think something else the show adds to their dynamic is that Lestat is much older than Louis here, when in the books he was only a little older - meaning that this Lestat has over a hundred years, probably spent a lot of these years in relative solitute, and he is much more… dlvorced from his humanity, per say.

I don’t think he understands why holding into his humanity means so much to Louis because it has been long since he was turned so everything Louis cares so deeply about - his human family, his job, his role in society likely looks like a blip in time for him - meaningless, things that are always changing. Not really important. A hobby as he says, because their immortality and the potencial of a thousand hundred nights together with Louis is what means the world to him.

Meanwhile, Louis hasn’t fully grasped what means for him being a vampire, being immortal, and he still clings so hard to his human life that he is hurt when Lestat just shrugs his problems off, because these thing are very important to him, so I don’t think at this point these two are capable o being in the same page.

Something that is moving me about this IWTV adaptation is that… if you only watched the movie or read only the first book it may elude you since Louis’ pov is so full of grief and bitterness, but the thing is, Louis loves Lestat. He desires him, is head over heels in love, as a matter of fact.

Often I see Louis being portrayed as long-suffering, resigned in his relationship with Lestat and while yes, they are toxic (lmao), they often fight and hurt each other and are quite terrible to each other, but their relationship is not only defined by misery.

Louis likes to be with Lestat, he enjoys his company, lights up when they are together and by memory I can remember at least two characters (Khayman and Amel) commenting how deeply Louis loves Lestat and how very obvious it is. And the fact the show is actually showing this to us from the beginning, that love was actually always there despite everything actually means so much to me