I'm a bit obsessive and kinda dark and existential
Disclaimer: There is no wrong way to consume fiction. And I would not wish my obsessive brain on anyone. I get some people read to escape reality, to self-soothe, for symbolic wish fulfillment, for emotional release without analysis, and who wouldn't, given our political climate?
Personally, I don't. And I'm painfully aware that I'm in a small group of people. And I'm beginning to feel like I might be overburdening my friends by trying to discuss things that might be uncomfortable. This is me embracing the void that is the internet to reach out to other obsessive peeps who might not be offended or stressed out by dark subject matter. I look to fiction to understand reality. I experience books, especially Anne Rice's books, as moral arguments or ethical laboratories. There are times when I had to nope out of some of her books for the fact that she kept applying the same solution to the problem of consent. She had her hammer, and her hammer was to dress harm up love, beauty and culture. She never came up with an alternate solution that didn't leave the burden of forgiveness squarely on the victim's shoulders.
As someone who grew up in a strict Catholic household (I'm fiercely not Catholic, fuck baptism, and holy communion), I understand that Abrahamic religions stress forgiveness and obedience over sovereignty and consequence. Because, let's be honest, it allows priestly predators to escape accountability. For me, true beauty is justice/Karma/accountability. I'm strictly criticizing the dead horse Anne kept kicking.
When I read Interview with the Vampire at 12 or 13 (I remember it was around 6th grade), it changed me. It gave me a way to exist in a world where boundaries are frequently trespassed. Sometimes, the best solution is not to respond at all, even though at the time Claudia's rage and my rage were one. Louis has always been my North Star. A perfectly imperfect moral standard to measure myself against because he's the only character that treats predation as cataclysmic to the soul. He never dressed entitlement as romance, or domination as passion. Louis showed me that you can still suffer and choose not to become what hurt you.
I've written first-person Lestat fanfic because yes, he is chaotic fun. However, I have found that Lestat's worst behavior is often preceded by helplessness, quickly followed by overcorrection through domination. I still see the wound under the glitter. That is why I haven't kicked him to the curb. Because he cares, and there is always the sense, as much as he insults Louis that he wants to be someone Louis can love in the way Lestat wants to be loved.
I think this might be the year, I revisit Anne's newer books. I feel for as complex as IWTV is, and a tendency to breadcrumb clues as to her character's interior life, that I might find she was trying to do the same with her Prince Lestat, Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis, and Blood Communion. I am not excited to read Merrick or Blood Canticle, but I feel that I must review them if I'm going to confirm a theory.
Especially the theory involving why Louis and Lestat never got around to becoming a couple on page. Why she was unable to get Louis to "forgive" Lestat everything. I think she was trying to come up with a solution by exploring Armand and Marius. I think Anne, through Armand and Mona, was trying to argue that trauma is mitigated by agency: if the world feels entitled to consume the beauty, purity, and youth of her characters, then perhaps it's for the best that minors get to choose. I believe she used fiction to argue a philosophical point about consent with herself. Or she was simply trying to give her characters a happy ending because she found it cruel not to. In fiction, it's all well and good. But in reality, not so much. I think that the older she got the less she wanted to sit in discomfort and who can blame her? Her creative signature is aesthetic yearning filtered through existential weight and haunted by loss. She kept coming back to the question: what is right conduct when desire is monstrous?
I tend to obsess over the same things in her books. I just wish she'd done more to remove the burden of forgiveness from the victim's shoulders. Just one book or one instance where it wasn't the victim's task to forgive, integrate, be grateful and understand the context. She just kept using the same hammer of violation to frame the stories as rescue leading to education and then devotion.
Louis has consistently been the only character who would push back. Aestheticized predation is still predation. True intimacy has no hierarchy and desire doesn't equal entitlement. She couldn't ethically make him behave how she wanted so she curated him.
There were times in Blood Communion where I believed that perhaps she was writing Louis out of character. Like when Louis questioned why Lestat would be against housing prisoners in the cells below the Chateau to provide victims for the younger vampires. I think Louis may have been trying to gauge Lestat's true feelings. If Lestat still held the same discomfort if Louis wasn't there to behave like his conscience. Also, I can't help but notice that Louis may be rewriting his own trauma by giving it a different ending. In IWTV, Paul died with Louis laughing at his mission: to turn the tide of the French Revolution like a modern Joan of Arc. And present-day Lestat is trying to domesticate vampires by creating a Royal Court (same mission). I can tell you it won't work with predators, but I can't unsee this. At the end of Prince Lestat, Anne had Louis reread his own memoir, that is a clue. And the whole brother/lover thing Anne kept circling around in her journals.
I have this suspicion that Louis' mortal life, the one he denied was interesting, is the reason he keeps Lestat at an arm's distance. Anne gave us clues as to Louis' wound in IwtV. None of the scenes were just for erotic flair. Louis being a planter is the system that wounded him. It is a brutal system where he felt the need to infantilize the slaves to exist. I believe Louis when he said the plantation is the reason he became a vampire. The culture around it. I have a whole headcanon that may need a different post. It's a vicious system full of predators where only the most predatory benefits. Rose's misquote of DH Lawrence about Louis' face being the flower of the body; is a tell. A flower is the most visible part of an organism, the least durable, the part most likely to be cut, displayed, traded, admired, and not meant to survive. Flowers exist to be seen. Roots exist to endure.
