#louis asks

[spidermansballs]

bmw is crazy because "two roads diverged in a wood, and i choose the one that leads back to your house"

pack it up shawn

GAY, like omg hello?? theyre so qpr its fucking insane

[prettystylinson]

i’ve been seeing so much about things zara has said and done, and i truly love louis and his music but it is really hard for me to get excited about things as a women of color and seeing the things she’s said/done online. even if louis isn’t dating her and it is truly pr it does suck to see him be associated with someone like this, it’s just getting harder and harder to keep believing

i completely understand where you’re coming from. i’m not a person of color or part of a minority myself, but i can see how upsetting and disheartening it must be to watch him tied to someone with her history. it’s exhausting, and it feels unfair. but this is exactly where we have to remind ourselves that louis is not responsible for what zara says or does, nor does he have any real control over it. if we don’t separate him from the stunt, the narrative management wants just keeps winning—because then he gets judged by her actions instead of his own. it doesn’t make the situation easier, but remembering that distinction is one of the only ways to keep perspective.

and just to be clear, i’m not saying you’re doing this at all, but i think sometimes the fandom as a whole falls into this trap of reducing louis down to zara’s mistakes, like he’s somehow defined by her actions. that’s not fair to him. he’s his own person, with his own values, career, and choices, and none of that should be overshadowed by someone else’s behavior. it’s frustrating to see him constantly tied to it, but that’s why separating him from the stunt is so important—otherwise his identity and artistry just get buried under her controversies. 🫶🏻

[awesomefringey]

harry loves being called a daddy lmao

😆 Just because Harry goes to the gym four hours a day and seems bulkier recently, doesn’t mean you can start rumors like these about your boy, Louis…

(I’ll be waiting for the revenge ask sent in by anon Harry)

[hlupdate]

hello, i have a question regarding the pre sale for louis' new european tickets. do you know if everyone who signed up via the link in louis' story will get a code for pre sale access or just a few people? cause i signed up but i haven't received an email yet

Hey! According to the website, “Pre-Sale access will be sent out ahead of 9am BST / 10am CEST on Wednesday 19th October.” So it sounds like the same day the codes will be sent out? However people have already received it if they’ve previously bought from his store.

[writsgrimmyblog]

what happened with nick Louis and Eleanor?

I hate this topic because Nick still gets shit for it, but because I’ve seen people talk about recently it in a way which completely misrepresents the facts, I’m going to set out what happened here.

In October 2013 Louis posted his #papsaretwats tweet about not being able to leave the hotel room, when 1D were touring. The Breakfast team mentioned the tweet on the show, with Nick saying “I love a complainy popstar. It’s my favourite thing” and then saying Louis should wear a mask. A Finchy mask. Finchy was a former producer on Breakfast. Nick seems reluctant to talk about the tweet when it gets raised initially, he says it’s a bit “sweary” but they do go on to have a brief moment of banter about it.

Louis then tweeted @grimmers < @chrisdjmoyles. For those that don’t know, Chris did Breakfast for years and Grimmy took over from him.

Chris tweeted to say how delightful and handsome Louis is. 

After the tweet from Louis, Nick tweeted ‘ooooh Stacey got out the wrong side of bed this morning’ with the nail painting emjoi. Meanwhile, Zayn waded in supporting Louis (saying something like he doesn’t know why people have to ‘get brave’) and Eleanor responded to the Eleanor update account with ‘me neither’ when they tweeted that they’ve never liked Grimmy. During this time, Harry tweeted ‘Shania Twain is so good’ because he’s a ridiculous human and I love him.

On Nick’s show a few months after (February 2014) there was a feature ‘who’s more annoying than…’ on Showquizness. Nick’s producer said Louis. Nick never mentioned his name and listed a bunch of different people. That didn’t stop people getting up in Nick’s mentions to the extent he had to ask ‘hey 1D fans!!!!! i never mentioned the word “Louis” on my show today so enough with the charming homophobic death threats yeh?’

As far as I know, Nick has never had any interaction with Eleanor or mentioned her name on social media, the radio or anywhere else. The only other thing I can think of is the picture of Nick and Miquita looking bored and holding hands, which gets used as ‘evidence’ that he was throwing shade at Eleanor. I don’t pay much attention to that as it tends to be used to drive forward conspiracy theories. The tweets above are the main public record of the ‘feud’ that gets brought up when people talk about Nick and Louis hating one another. It’s worth reiterating, Nick has mentioned Louis plenty of times on Breakfast before and since, they have been friendly at events they have attended together and Louis has said on multiple occasions he’s let knee-jerk reactions get the better of him on social media - something he’s even said during an interview with Nick. Of course, because it’s far less exciting to believe they might actually get on fine and just aren’t particularly friendly, those instances rarely get pointed out and there’s a tendency to focus on late 2013/early 2014 stuff and to paint Nick as the villain of the piece.

People have said this over and over, but I’m going to say it again. Nick is an out, gay man who has been on the receiving end of a torrent of abuse over the years, for his friendship with Harry and this supposed hate of Louis. There’s still plenty of ‘Nick can choke’ and ‘Nick doesn’t deserve to be within 10 feet of Louis’ stuff out there which I stumbled across before the latest Breakfast interview. I don’t like talking about it because I find it as infuriating as the ‘Nick uses Harry for fame’ narrative or the incredibly toxic ‘predatory older gay man’ stereotype, but I wanted to set the facts out just once. I love Louis AND Nick so I’ve got no interest in pitting them against one another based on events four years ago. What I do think the tweets make pretty clear though, is that both are eminently capable of defending themselves so I’m sure if anyone is still worrying about Louis getting bullied by big, bad Nick, they can hopefully chill.

[pynkhues]

Something i think is really interesting is that we've seen "rage baiting" work on Louis, but not actually Lestat.

The first interaction they have, Lestat pisses Louis off, insults and offends him, and left him wanting to murder and be Lestat.

Obviously Antoinette singing the song was a return to this tactic, pull the same thread of outrage, and here comes Louis across the river after years of gifts and begging did not move him.

Louis talks bad in the interview in 1973, not because inducing rage has worked to draw out Lestat, but because it's worked on him.

And based on what we know, it seems like he's still playing with that tactic, which I think could be very interesting.

The times Louis has said or done things to *intentionally* anger/hurt Lestat ("Here's your death" or "You're always gonna be alone") we don't see Lestat blow up or chase after him. The opposite actually.

We'll have a Lestat who's just read their love story as a hunting, their lives together as a prison, and himself as the monster throughout Louis' story. And a Louis that still thinks poking the bear will get him out of his cave.

It's super interesting, anon, especially because I do think they're motivated very differently in that Lestat baits to try and pull Louis closer, whereas Louis has, generally speaking, done it to push Lestat away or to hurt him when he himself is feeling low. Louis even acknowledges this himself! Twice!

When Louis' tried to get Lestat to do what he wants in their Rue Royale era, he generally went for the charm offensive, but that's clearly not going to work this season if Lestat's gone no-contact with him, which it does seem like he has. Him taking a page out of Lestat's book as a result and trying to force his hand is a really fun switch-up of their dynamic, but you're right that it doesn't usually work with Lestat, who typically goes inwards when Louis' trying to provoke him. Even in that scene from 1.05 with them bickering it ends with Lestat leaving.

There are exceptions though, of course, like the '73 interview which who knows if that would've worked (I tend to suspect not), and Louis hooking up with Jonah, which was less bait, I think, so much as calling Lestat's bluff, haha, and it didn't so much pull Lestat back to him as it did cause him to have a meltdown, which looks like it's more likely to be echoed in the mediation scene to me. Otherwise though, I think it will feel different this season, because Louis doesn't seem like he's necessarily baiting him so much beyond that to me, rather it looks like he might be finding ways to force Lestat to be around him, which is also a very fun shift in their dynamic! I honestly can't wait to see how it all plays out.

[pynkhues]

I understand if you don’t want to answer this because the temperature is so high about this discourse, but may I ask something about the gender discourse in good faith? I am not trying to bait you or belittle you, I would just like to try to understand your perspective and share some of my own.

When you said “It’s because there is nothing else that can be tangibly pointed to” on Louis’s gender in your last ask, I suppose what I want to ask is what would be tangible grounds to say Louis is femme or feminine in canon i.e. what would be the canon depiction that you would find convincing enough to say that Louis is feminine? I have read posts that stated if Louis dressed and presented in a more feminine fashion, then more people would accept him as feminine, but since he does not and Lestat does, Lestat is feminine. But I think that has the potential for troubling gender essentialist connotations as well e.g. if clothes make the gender, then is a woman that does not perform femininity with fashion less of a woman?

I suppose this is a debate feminists have been having for ages and we will find no easy answers. But I have been troubled at times by some of what people say “against” a feminine interpretation of Louis and in support of a feminine interpretation of Lestat, that Lestat is The Woman and The Mother in the relationship because Lestat is flamboyant and wears feminine fashion. I know many people do the converse for Louis and say he is The Woman and The Mother in the relationship and they appeal to academic ideas of social gender to support that argument, but I remain unconvinced by those as well e.g. if social roles decide gender, such as being a victim of domestic violence means a person is feminine, does that not contribute to de-gendering a victim of domestic violence that may identify as a man?

I know this is discourse is a minefield and you have gotten very bad messages about this in the past so I do not begrudge you if you don’t answer, but I am sending this in good faith. I feel as though there is one box that says Lipstick Makes The Woman for supporters of Lestat as The Woman, and there is another box that says Oppression Makes The Woman for supporters of Louis as The Woman. I don’t think there are tangible grounds to say either of them are.

(x)

Of course you can ask, anon, and I agree that the stress on clothing, make-up and outward presentation can lead to some pretty gender essentialist talking points too, although I don’t think it should be ignored / is irrelevant either. The DV as a metaphor for gendered oppression argument is kind of similar in that regard given it's a very complex thing to ascribe to characters, particularly male ones, but also shouldn’t be ignored, particularly when you take into account the fact that the books do generally fall into the female gothic which was built on the back of things women felt dread about.

In that sense, it is tricky, because so much about gender in conversations like this is, in my opinion, about personal identity, and the ways that that is reflected or shared or felt varies in such a huge way that there isn’t really any one way to talk about it. I think that’s probably why the discourse runs so hot in this fandom, as you said.

For the record though, I don’t view either Lestat or Louis as The Woman, nor really even The Mother. Claudia has two fathers, and yes, I think you can make the case for both Lestat and Louis trying to fulfil a maternal role for her and both of them not being very good at it (which isn’t to say that that’s because they’re men, more just because they’re not very good parents). That said, I do think there is a sense of the maker as the birthing parent which can sometimes [although not always!] influence a dynamic. I think it does with Lestat and Claudia, and I actually think it does with Louis and Madeleine, albeit in a really different way. That’s not really here nor there though for this post, so - -

Yes, haha.

More to your point, what it comes down to for me right now is honestly textual expression.

I think that Louis’ emasculation by white society in his mortal life is not only explicitly detailed in the show, but pretty pivotal to this version of his character, and the complexity around his relationship with gender – because I do think he has complex feelings about it – which stems from the fact that he is a Black, gay man in the early 1900s, which is an identity he claims in the actual text of the show.

That might seem silly to say about the queer vampire show, but he’s literally the only character so far who has stated his sexuality textually, and he’s done it with identifiers about his race and gender, so I do think that’s incredibly important. It’s even brought up in the trial – Santiago talks about Louis' race and his desires in the context of reminding us of his character, and while obviously Santiago is not an authority on Louis, of course he's not, you’d think that if there was a chance to address Louis’ relationship to gender there both Santiago/Armand and the show would have.

My reading of Louis’ character is that his sexuality and the systemic racial abuse he experienced compounded his feelings of gendered inadequacies, which is why both Grace and Claudia were able to weaponize it against him. It’s why him calling himself ‘the housewife’ when he was in a depressive episode wasn’t him claiming an identity, but rather him fixing on the worst perception of himself – the very thing he never wanted to be. The fact that it was initially tossed at him in the same breath that Claudia called herself a mistake after Lestat had called her that I think makes it abundantly clear. They are all trying to hurt each other, and they’re all good at it, because they know each other well enough to know what will land, not because it's what it speaks to a truth in them, but because it speaks to something they desperately don't want to be.

With Lestat, it is genuinely harder to know how the show is going to approach his relationship to his gender going forwards, because I truly don’t know how much they’re committing to, but at the same time, it has already been explicit that Lestat’s not doing drag in a vacuum. If he was, then yeah, I wouldn’t read all that much into it – Lestat’s from a particularly flamboyant era of history, and he’s ever a performer – but again, he hasn’t been. Pissabataille actually did a great gifset of it here, but as much as the fandom can shrug it off or put it down to Lestat’s flamboyance, he has used feminine pronouns or identifiers on multiple occasions now. We can discuss the weight and interpretation of those moments, yes, but they are textual in the same way that Louis self-identifying as a gay man is, and that all the arguments around influences and Shelter and which character’s actually being pointed to in Louis reading Madame Bovary is not.

This isn't even getting into Carol saying his Mardi Gras costume needed to be equally masculine and feminine, because again - - this is just text, and it does lend, in my opinion, greater weight and nuance to his relationship with drag and make-up. It's all present, textually, no matter how you or I or anyone else chooses to interpret said text, and I’m always kind of left wondering how different the discourse around these things would be if it was Louis who’d called himself aunt, mother wolf, she and not Lestat.

Which really comes to my point, I guess. I think I’d need Louis to express it on a textual level, in dialogue or in meaningful gesture, something that centred his relationship to his gender in any way that positioned him as anything other than a cis gay man, because the show has demonstrated that it will do that, and that that is a part of the language of the show. I’m not saying Louis needs to use feminine pronouns like Lestat did, but I think these reaches to influences or gendered oppression, as you said, really are reaches to a potential subtext that eschews the - - well. Text.

I’ve said it on here a few times recently, but I actually don’t think Interview is a particularly complicated show. It’s excellent, don’t get me wrong, and layered and compelling and so emotionally rich, but I feel like it wears its heart on its sleeve. I feel like it keeps telling everyone what it is, and who these characters are, and people become convinced there’s something beneath the paint, so they scratch at it until they tear the canvas, y’know? Louis is textually a Black, gay man. Lestat is textually white, French and non-discriminating, which is probably going to be – in my reading – the show’s approach to his relationship with gender too.

[pynkhues]

Idk if uve discussed this before, im new haha but I really enjoy your readings of the show and I’m curious, would u call louis a femme? Idk i think it’s a widely accepted canon in the fandom and i constantly see it spread all over twitter with no argument whatsoever and im over here like i.. i dont see it?? Idk!

Hey! Welcome, anon! And thank you for your kind words! You’re very sweet!

I think I’ve probably discussed it in fragments before, but not outright said it, but no, I wouldn’t call Louis a femme. It’s certainly a largely accepted fanon in a vocal part of the fandom, particularly on Twitter and ao3, and yeah - - I mean. I’m really glad people are having fun with it! I do also sometimes feel they’re watching a different show to me though, because it’s honestly not something I see at all. I don’t know if their arguments are necessarily organized in the one place (although I could be very wrong in terms of that!) but I might use this as an opportunity to collate my thoughts and the previous posts I’ve made addressing the arguments around this particular topic. SO! Okay! Let’s break it down and dive in:

Louis is femme because he’s a Gothic Heroine

I just don’t agree with this argument, I’m sorry. I’m not going to get into the weeds of this one, just because I feel like I’ve done so already, but I don’t personally read Louis as a gothic heroine at all. In fact, I see him as a very archetypical Byronic Hero, which I talked about in this post, and in others in my Byronic Hero tag.

Louis is femme because he is a Battered Housewife / relying on a Sugar Daddy

This point often gets tied up into the gothic heroine one, and it’s one that always kind of surprises me a little bit. Even putting aside the fact that it’s an ugly, misogynistic trope in general, Louis’ relationship to being a quote-unquote ‘housewife’ is one that – to me – is symbolic of his feelings of emasculation in the Rue Royale household not as a result of Lestat alone, but as a result of the white power structures in New Orleans that would disempower and disenfranchise him. He doesn’t like it, it doesn’t make him ‘femme’, in fact, my interpretation is the opposite – it emasculates him as a Black Man, and he feels that in every part of his life to the point that both his daughter and sister weaponize it against him, and I personally think it’s a factor in his periodic impotence in his marriage. Respectively, Claudia calls him the housewife, and Grace calls Lestat his white daddy – these aren’t compliments, these are callous insults from both of them designed to bruise his pride and force him into action. The fact that neither of them work to move him the way they want doesn’t mean Louis identifies with them, rather it means he’s – at the time – committed to Lestat for better and worse, but their words compound in a way that fuels his resentment of Lestat as both an adulterous husband and a symbol of everything wrong with his life.

Further to that – and I say it in the Byronic Hero/Gothic Heroine post that I link to above  – but a vital part of power dynamic tropes in gothic literature is that women lose power through marriage, they don’t gain it, and Louis does, in fact, gain it. Lestat’s a ticket to social advancement for Louis because as much as Louis (rightfully! It’s extremely racist!) hates being forced into a servitude role publicly at the theatre or in lease agreements, it’s Lestat’s whiteness that allows Louis into more conversations politically, and eventually allows him to buy the Fair Play Saloon and turn it into The Azaelia. It’s a limited power, of course, as a result of his race and the era, but the show actually explicitly lays out certain things for us like the fact that Louis pays Lestat back in full, and pointedly, that Louis never felt that he had to pay Lestat back at all:

The last line of which is Louis greeting Lestat not as a sugar baby or a housewife walking out to his sugar daddy or husband, but as a business man to his husband.

In fact, the interesting exchange of power in that sequence actually leans to the reverse as Lestat ends up playing host to a new client while Louis lords over an empire.

(You can't see it exactly in these subtitles, but it's Louis who says 'you about five years late', and Lestat honeytrapping with taking the man away).

It's a dynamic that repeats with the musician who tries to leave that Lestat coerces into staying - Louis' king of the castle, and Lestat, the show implies, I feel, plays the placating partner smooting over the edges.

But isn’t Lestat a symbol of patriarchal power in the Rue Royale Household?

I’ve had a couple of asks about this and have a long reply in my drafts that I’ll try and post this weekend, but yes and no? I think in Rue Royale, Lestat’s definitely a symbol of patriarchal power to Claudia, and I think Louis sometimes feels him that way too, but I don’t think it’s actually true for Louis in the way that it is for Claudia. Gender isn’t what divides Louis and Lestat, it’s race, and every time Louis has the chance to exert patriarchal power against anyone outside that house or inside it, he uses it – from coercing Lestat into Claudia's rebirth to physically assaulting Claudia over Lestat’s murder, to even trying to influence her diet and guilting her into staying, to throwing Lestat out of his own house and then fucking him in his lover’s bed (which, obviously, are after Lestat's singular act of violence), to being literally a pimp, strongarming his sister and his mother, to giving less than 0 fucks about Lily’s murder and the attempted anal-rape of Bricktop - - just.

Yeah. There are two patriarchs in the Rue Royale household, and both their names begin with L.

Eldest daughter syndrome

Sometimes men are also eldest siblings who feel the burden of responsibility?

Even beyond that though, I think Louis’ response to Grace is particularly paternalistic, a pattern he’d repeat with Claudia, which I talk about here. I do think Louis has a lot of responsibility and weight on his shoulders as an eldest child, absolutely, and I actually think there’s a lot to talk about in terms of his complex position as brother-father to Paul and Grace in s1 (and I empathise with him intensely in this regard as someone who’s been a sibling’s guardian), but like. That’s not a feminine trait, nor is it one that makes him an eldest daughter. I’m not one, and he’s not one either. Sibling dynamics aren’t cut and paste.

But Louis buys and reads Madame Bovary and obviously relates to Emma

I mean, he doesn’t buy it – the show literally, explicitly makes the point of telling us that it’s Lestat’s copy of the book that he’s reading, which honestly makes sense to me. I talked about it here (where I include the caps of it being Lestat's book too), but Emma as a character cheats because she finds monogamy boring, provincial life even more so and dislikes her daughter, while married to a successful man in a regional town. Louis’ not the Emma in that equation, Lestat is, given he's fucking Antoinette – allegedly because he wants variety – escaped the Auvergne in Paris, and can’t cope with parenthood and/or Claudia.

Interestingly too, Louis’ focus in that scene is on the 'denseness' of the prose and 'the absence of metaphor' not the content, as he ignores Lestat having a meltdown directly opposite him. My interpretation of that scene is that the writing is pointing out exactly how disconnected they are from each other, and that Louis can read a story that parallels a lot of Lestat’s experience, and fail to relate it to, or empathise with Lestat at all, even as Lestat indulges Louis’ depression and hoarding, which ! I love Louis, but Lestat does in that sequence (not that that justifies anything that Lestat does, of course).  

Isn’t Louis compared to Juliet and Mélisande?

Mmm, yes and no? Armand does put him in the Juliet role, which Louis riffs with Dreamstat about, but I tend to interpret that more to be about the involvement of the balcony than I do about their roles as Romeo and Juliet – because, y’know. Not everything’s actually about gender, particularly with same sex couples of that era who had limited reference points generally, and certainly limited mainstream ones.  

And Melisande - - not at all, actually? I do have to say that I’m a little bit baffled by this particular argument given we have the lyrics to Come to Me and Lestat puts himself in the feminine role of Mélisande (and I actually do think you can mount the argument that he's done that because he’s intending for Antoinette to sing it, which I thought for a long time before hearing Long Face tbh, and now I actually do think it’s deliberately playing into Louis’ sense of masculinity), and he does cast Louis in the masculine role of Pelléas. The chorus literally goes:

Ruin each other Like star-crossed lovers Your Pelléas, my Mélisande Oh, come to me Come to me

So, yeah. Again, that argument just doesn't quite land for me.

Wasn’t he jealous of Grace’s pregnancy though?

Was he? That wasn’t my interpretation, but I’d actually genuinely be interested to hear a case for it, because I feel that’s kind of tasty on a narrative level, haha. My interpretation of that entire sequence though kind of feeds back into that eldest sibling thing again where he a) resented Grace building something of her own before he could, and b) was terrified of the idea that her having her own family would mean that she’d pull way from him which she, of course, did.

I tend to see Louis’ desire to have Claudia as a fairly impulsive one, and I actually see (in the show’verse) his desire to have Lestat be the one to turn her as a part of him further interlocking him and Lestat together, particularly after he's effectively just broken up with Lestat. It's messy! But yeah, I mean, I think 2.07 laid out pretty cleanly that Louis' choice to turn Claudia was inherently a selfish one, and I personally don't see it as one borne out of jealousy so much as needing an anchor. 

Anne bases Louis on herself

She also bases Lestat on herself and/or everything she wants to be, and also washes her hands of Louis as a character for books at a time, and like - - I’m sorry, this is not the tone I usually take, but like - - lowkey, who cares? Everyone in this fandom loves death of the author until Anne says one thing they can use to justify their headcanons, and I just don’t really get it. Why are you trying to interpret a vampire novel as a memoir? Obviously it’s not factual? Anne’s not a man, she’s not drinking blood, she’s not romantically entangled with her dead daughter, like I do understand that it can feel noodly sometimes with authors and characters, but as someone who works with a lot of writers, I can promise you they’re dipping in and out of characters like crazy, haha.

It doesn’t mean a character’s them, and it certainly doesn’t mean you’re interacting with Anne when you're interacting with Louis, which I suspect a lot of people don’t want anyway? I don't know, personally I view this one as a bit of a non-starter.

Louis’ pretty though

Yeah, he is! He’s your Helen of Troy! He’s beautiful! He’d look amazing in tights and heels! That doesn’t mean he’s canonically femme though.