When You Cannot Face Your Monster, You Have Failed as a Creator
I've always thought Lestat willingly participated in the lynching of Louis and Claudia. It's a minority position, but it's the only framing that made sense based on how they wrote him from 1x05 to the S1 finale of Interview with the Vampire.
(I rather believed that was the point. That there were no lengths Lestat wasn't willing to go. If he couldn't control and smother Claudia and Louis with his idea of "love" or "companionship", then he would destroy them. That is a natural progression for a possessive and controlling character. But worry not, I've been disabused of that notion.)
But the problem is, they didn't want to confront that. Didn't want to ask the kind of questions necessary of a writer after creating such a violent character and characters who might've loved him, or still love him, but fear him and the power he holds over them. Didn't want the audience to ask questions of themselves, what they would do to justify or push against who Lestat was in the text.
(Did their preference for Loustat mean more than the violence visited upon one half of that relationship and their daughter?)
They knew that and intentionally avoided confronting it in the text (in favor of Armand and the Theater Coven taking the brunt of the guilt). They preferred that people assume innocence or coercion for Lestat. And that allowance created fictions of bruises, blood coercion, mind control, and a secret rescue plan. The intentional non-address is reinforced by The Vampire Lestat, which spent most of its time whitewashing his actions and blaming his victims, his sires, and mother, for what he did.
A lynch mob is just another crime for a character who beats his partner half to death, then plots to murder his daughter and replace her with his racist white mistress.
Can I believe that he 'regretted it' and 'defended claudia' (as he was rehersing her murder)? Sure, that's not impossible and that works for a character like Lestat. But the writers didn't want Lestat to textually regret this specific moment of violence toward Claudia and Louis.
The only thing the writers were concerned about were optics. They knew, just like The Drop, The Trial would be held over his head (rightly) more than it is now.
This is what has always bothered me about how season two ended. They had two of Louis's lovers take part in his and his daughter's lynching, their murder, and instead of confronting that. Instead of putting that "regret" Lestat apparently experienced to good use, they made their reunion about Louis apologizing to him for not seeing vampirism as a gift, for giving Lestat a hard way to go.
They focused on Lestat asking Louis if he tried to commit suicide in the 70s, a suicide that wouldn't have happened if Lestat hadn't participated in Claudia's murder. But that bit of context seemingly doesn't matter anymore. Claudia's death is treated like an unavoidable event Lestat has no responsibility for, but he does. He absolutely fucking does!
But the only thing the writers were worried about was getting Loustat back together. Just as in the present, when those two episodes came out in 2024, audiences still that shout down the above concerns could have cared less about how violently the two lead Black characters were treated in the previous episode. Only that they got to play with dolls and smash Black Ken against White Ken.
All of that violence, dehumanization, all of it swept under the rug so Daniel Malloy can declare, "Armand didn't save you, Lestat did!" As if saving Louis, letting Claudia die, and doing nothing for seventy-seven years except wallowing in self-pity, is amends.
And I remember thinking, watching the seventh episode, that if they don't land this, didn't offer narrative catharsis, justice, then a Black audience will have watched things their parents and grandparents still remember with absolute clarity, that are still happening, and it would've been for nothing (narratively and thematically speaking).
And two years down the road, I guess it truly meant nothing. No accounability, or atonement from Lestat. Just protection of white comfortability.
So, considering they're still actively framing Louis as the greatest sinner and wolf crier for how he handled being battered and nearly murdered several times over, and Claudia has been turned into a angry stooge for her white daddy, this is the only "honest" thing they've said in their racist and petty post-series press tour.
Watching Lestat fans lose their minds over this non 'revelation', it seems, will have to be catharsis enough. And I am enjoying it.
