but why did Lestat have to forgive his abuser? why only Lestat? (you don’t have to answer this, but it always sat wrong with me that Louis made him forgive him in the books before he killed him. I don’t know Lestat owed him forgiveness if he didn’t want to give it. no child owes an abusive parent that.)
i agree on the Louis thing, but i also fundamentally don’t think these points are even remotely the same thing 😭 like there is a huge difference between “deciding not to forgive ur childhood abusers” and “going out of ur way to enact brutal revenge on ur childhood abusers” 💀
i don’t have a problem with the choice to have Lestat kill his family because i think he needs to forgive them for what they’ve done to him. he absolutely does not. no child owes an abusive parent forgiveness if they don’t want to give it. my problem is mostly that it contradicts a lot of the really compelling character traits Lestat has in the books, and flattens him in a way i’m not sure i enjoy.
i can’t stand entirely by how i feel about that yet, because i have no idea where they’re going to take this, and they could absolutely do something with it that’s really cool and brilliant. but right now, i just feel like giving Lestat a revenge story flattens a dynamic with his family that, in the books, feels very real and complicated. he hates his family for abusing him, but at the same time he cares for them genuinely and wants the best for them. and that contradiction is the interesting part to me.
it’s a genuinely nuanced conversation about how complicated this can be. it is very common and very normal for people to love their abusers, especially when their abusers are their family. and i’m not saying it is somehow wrong for people not to feel that way, of course it’s not. some people hate their abusers forever. some people feel nothing. some people want revenge. some people just want to be left alone. i don’t care at all about seeing these characters be “good” victims, or morally clean victims, or victims who process abuse in a way that is easy for an audience to approve of.
more so, i think it potentially takes away from something interesting in the books. Lestat’s relationship with his family in the books is compelling to me because it’s ugly and unresolved and contradictory. he knows they hurt him, he resents them, he wants to escape them. and yet there is still this horrible emotional attachment there, this leftover love he can’t just surgically remove from himself because they were cruel to him. that feels very true to how family abuse can work.
so to me, turning that into a revenge arc risks making the whole thing simpler in a way that feels less emotionally interesting. it sort of basks in brutality for no real reason other than a flagellative desire to bask in “cathartic” violence, and to me, that has the opposite effect. In a weird way it almost makes it more clean cut? Less lestat. Meh.
again, maybe they’ll do something with it. maybe the point will be that revenge doesn’t fix anything, or that Lestat is trying to cut out a part of himself and failing, or that this brutality is supposed to feel hollow. if that’s where they’re going, then i could be very into it. but as of right now, meh.