It's like what Jacob said about Louis trying to scrub the scars off Lestat, how he won't think about Claudia's life before them or let her talk about what Bruce did to her - he tries to write that pain in them away while wallowing in his own.
Do you think Louis does this out of selfishness or out of love? Like he doesn’t want to think about the people he loves in pain and struggling. Maybe it’s a little bit of both? Maybe he thinks because he can’t do anything about it or make it better/easier for them, he’d rather not think of it all. Like there’s almost a sense of helplessness that Louis hates feeling? (Does that tie in a little with his masculinity?) I think he felt that way a lot about Paul too… helpless to the pain and confusion and loneliness Paul felt?
I think it's definitely both selfish and deeply loving, anon, or at least, for Louis it's a true expression of love. I wrote a bit about it in the hiatus which I'm not going to be able to find now, haha, but I think for Louis, his capacity to care for, provide for, and protect his family is not just tangled up in his feelings of masculinity, as you said, and selfhood, but are really deeply connected to how he feels and shows love.
I think we really see that in 1.01 with Paul, not just in how Louis ignores the fact that Paul's mental health is deteriorating, but in his relationship to support outside of the family. Louis and Florence took Paul out of the institution that his father put him in, and Louis shuts down Levi's suggestion via Grace that a different doctor, a different healthcare provider, could be better (in a very important beat in terms of Louis' feelings of masculinity, given Louis and Levi's vying positions as head of the family), and yet he accepts the support and caregiving of the church.
There is, I think, an incredibly understandable distrust of a system that had already failed Paul in Louis' rejection of medical help (and a system that was undoubtedly racist), but Louis also chooses a church that's under his financial influence. The show's clear that Louis pays them off, and the nature of the confessional keeps this private and within his control. It's care Louis is ultimately still providing, that he pays for, and one that by its nature is private and protective because of how the Catholic church operates, particularly in this period of time, and all of that in itself is love and care as Louis best knows how to give it. They live in a world, in a society, that is unimaginably dangerous for them, but if he can at least control the world around Paul, Paul is safe. It's when he was out of reach in (what was most likely) the Mississippi State Insane Hospital that he was in danger, that Louis couldn't love him enough to protect him.
That is drastically undermined, of course, by Paul's suicide, but the part of that that's interesting is that Louis' behaviour might look like it changes as a result of that, but it doesn't at all. If anything, he kind of doubles down. He does put distance between himself and Grace, after all, who he doubtlessly still loves, but it's an artificial distance. He keeps her in a house he pays for (to a fault), he keeps providing for her, he protects her from the monster he now sees in himself, while denying her a voice and prioritising his own pain (Louis' grief over Paul always takes precedent over hers, even though it was her wedding day he died on). It's his deep human love both warped and amplified by his new monstrosity in vampirism - care that both overwhelms and feigns distance, which is, of course, realised most intensely with Claudia, both in New Orleans and then with the Coven with Paris, but it's always there with Lestat too.
This desire to scrub away the traumas of those he loves I think is kind of tied to why Louis likes to be in control of a space and actually why he's a capitalist too. Like yes, he's ambitious out of a sense of personal power and growth, but I think he's also a deeply protective and caring person who views money as a means not just to social elevation for social elevation's sake (although, again, I do think that's very much a part of it too), but because if he controls an environment, he can protect those he loves within that environment in the way that he could only try with Paul and Grace and his mother.
To acknowledge the pain in others when it comes to circumstances Louis' never had any control over - Claudia's aunt, Bruce, Gabi, Magnus, the wolves - is, I think, really deeply felt by him as a sort of personal failure as somebody who loves them so much, even though it's not something he could ever have done anything about. It's what that arc with Bruce was to me this season - like, yes, that's about him and his pride and sense of self, but it was, still motivated by his love for Claudia, it just didn't matter anymore, and he still exploited her to do it. It was another example of his failure to protect, rather than his ability to.
I actually love how that gave way to the plot with Regina too, because it allowed these arcs around how Louis feels he expresses love to both be interrogated but also eventually stripped back again to something pure. His engagement with Regina embodies the ways that Louis' ways of loving has been perverted by his vampiric monstrosity over time - he's paying her to play his daughter, yes, but he also wants to set her up in an apartment, provide for her, control the world she exists in and keep her safe in a way that traps, just as it did Grace, just as it did Claudia. It's containment with an artificial distance all over again, and - importantly! And more to your point, haha - he does the same thing this season with Lestat.
This seeds organically and lovingly - Louis is helping Lestat get back on his feet after the reunion, but it is pointedly through a house too. When their relationship fractures due to the book, Louis does the same things he did to Grace, that he offers Regina - artificial distance undermined by constant attempts to still provide for, to care for felt in the invitation to the launch of Dracula's Daughter, in financially entangling them again, in opening a restaurant blocks from his house, of following him on social media. An effort to control and influence the space around him to stay as close as he can, but it doesn't work, and when it doesn't, Louis turns inwards, he withdraws, and he punishes. He distances himself from Grace after Paul's death, won't talk to Claudia about Bruce, turns away from her when Armand chokes her in Paris, and here, from Lestat, he blocks his number after he's shot.
He internalises their hurt as a personal failing and he explains it away as selfishness ("I'm a selfish bastard, anyone who spends five minutes with me, they know that."), and in part it is, but it's also I think because he can't scrub it away like he can try the things that happened before he knew them. He feels this love so deeply, devotes so much time and energy to keeping them at arms length while wallpapering their lives with how much he wants to take care of them, that when he can't, the house sort of collapses in on him.
One of the things that I love about this late-season development for Louis though (and I think one of the things that really builds to that last beat with Paul and Lestat), is that this pattern of behaviour that has compounded and warped over a century for Louis is cracked open by his and Lestat's reconnection. It's Louis finally grappling with the fact that the arms length approach to love, the desire to scrub it clean, not only doesn't work, but it hurts both him and those he cares about. He feels it - acknowledges it - in the car in 3.05, he feels it - acknowledges it - again in 3.06 when they talk about the reunion with Daniel, but it's cracked open to him on the street after the reality of Gabi's abuse breaks the dam.
Even artificial distance is what's kept Louis in the dark, what hasn't let him see the real harm that's happening to the person he loves, and it's in the contact, the connection, the simple act of sitting and listening in the way he could never let himself do with Claudia that his love sheds its monstrosity and becomes something human again. It's why it dovetails well, in my opinion, to the seance, why, as I said after the episode aired, his and Lestat's acceptance of her fury, of their daughter as a whole person, was the purest act of love we've seen on this show. There's no swaddling of her in the moment, no denial of anything other than what and who she is, but they also both just finally listen to her. To how she feels, to her pain instead of their own, and I think Lestat does see all of that in a way that makes him sit with the reality that for Louis, this is what love looks like. Time and care and touch and closeness, when he can't or won't touch, which sometimes might look like a restaurant three blocks from his house, haha.
And there's payoff there in the finale with both Armand and Regina, I think. I have my issues with that sequence overall, but I do think that Louis' acknowledgement of this root wound in Armand as both something genuine, but also as a manipulation to save both himself and Regina is a reflection of that growth in his arc. It's added to, I think, by Louis having this degree of separation from Regina now, yet I still read his focus on saving her as being about his love for Claudia. He makes the choices in the moment that he couldn't with his daughter after all- he chooses Regina, and he uses the little capacity he has to control this environment (something he didn't have in Paris) through his still-lingering influence (memories of former intimacies) over Armand to protect someone directly, instead of at a distance.
Sorry, this went off on a huge tangent, haha, but yeah, I think his desire to scrub away the past wounds on those he loves is selfish and deeply loving, but I also think his arc this season has maybe built him to a place he can not only acknowledge those wounds a little better, but act on them in ways that might make a difference.
