not happy about the adaptational choice of having Lestat and Gabrielle kill his father and brothers. it seems to do a massive disservice to a really interesting part of Lestat’s character in the books, which is that Book Lestat uses his Magnus acquired fortune to send money to his brothers and their families. he buys gifts for his nieces and nephews and sends them for their birthdays. when he learns that the brothers who beat and tormented him as a child are killed in the revolution, he cries and mourns them. and even as he hates his father, who abused him horribly, he still takes care of him in his old age. he houses him during his last days. he’s miserable about it, but he does it.
Lestat has the capacity for this massive amount of compassion and feeling for the people who have wronged him the most. he sees the souls of the evil doers he drains and kills, and he learns to love them in their final moments. in the same way that he grieves for Magnus, feels for him even after Magnus has done nothing but torture him, he loves his family. or at least he feels for them. he can hate them and pity them and still feel bound to them, which is part of what makes him so interesting and frustrating and sad.
and I don’t find him and Gabrielle killing them cathartic either. it’s so much effort and grotesque cruelty wasted on people that they have only ever wanted to be away from. Gabrielle, maybe I could see her wanting to do this, but even then, in the book she is literally the one who diverts Lestat from his messed up fantasy of going from room to room and slaughtering his father and brothers. she gives him the means of escaping Auvergne and going with Nicki to Paris because she doesn’t want to see him take on the burden of the madness of their family. he doesn’t need to become a cabbage! 😭
I don’t see killing them as cathartic. it’s kind of pathetic and sad, to bother going all the way back to Auvergne to torment these miserable people who are ultimately going to suffer and die in the French Revolution anyway 😭 and maybe that is potentially the point? I could see them exploring the weird tragedy of this decision, because there is something so grotesque about Lestat taking revenge on his blind, dying father, who is so old and ill that he can’t even fully understand why this is happening to him, and leaving the aftermath of that for his innocent nieces and nephews to come home to.
it’s disturbing in a similar way to Lestat taunting and berating his father on his death bed. it’s justified, considering what his father has done to Lestat, but it’s also so so sad. like the opposite of cathartic. this elderly, demented, blind man tormented in his last moments by the son he abused and beat all his life, pleading for forgiveness and denied the resolution that honestly neither of them fully deserve. it’s ugly and tragic and unresolved, not some triumphant revenge fantasy.
so I’m going to try and hold my judgement, again, until I see where this goes, because I do think there is a version of this where the horror and sadness of it is the point. but it does send an unhappy chill down my spine, and I had to address it lol.
