Hello i'm illiterate. What does the iwtv dante inferno i need protection from the wolves post mean. I'm dumb i'm so sorry and i. Desperately need to know

hey, please don't apologize! i was worried this would be kind of unclear because i skipped over a connection in the tags: i have a pet theory of louis walking daniel through the nine circles of hell and showing him his sins along the wayside, similar to the structure of dante's inferno, louis being the ghostly guide virgil aswell as the topological space himself (sometimes i factor in armand as virgil but let's keep it simple for this purpose). there is a reference to the forest of suicides in s1, so louis as an autobiographical narrator is certainly aware of dante and we know how he loves to weave in literary devices.

this is about guilt as foreshadowing, primarily concerning louis' culpability in claudia's death. in the first two images we see louis breaking a birds wings, hoping claudia will eat them, and shortly after lestat makes a hidden reference to armand cutting off his fledling and first love nicki's hands. in the same episode lestat calls claudia a baby bird. if we read iwtv as louis consciously including those references into his narration, we can interpret this as a connection to him prompting claudia's turning, the pain she expresses of never being able to grow up and experience 'flying from the nest' as it were but being kept in a perpetual subjugated daughter state. i believe louis' feelings of guilt express themselves here in a parallel of having a hand in her wings being clipped to having, through his passivity and active alienation towards claudia in paris, a second-hand in her eventual death.

so at the deepest center of dante's hell is a frozen lake, colcytus, which is reserved for the worst sinners, the traitors: caina for traitors of kin, antenora for traitors of city and state, ptolemea for betraying hospitality and judeca after judas iscariot for betraying your lord (lol yes ik this is a medieval text). At last in the frozen bottom of hell is the devil, 'dis', lucifer who betrayed god himself.

the quote from inferno is from the ptolemea section, in which a man forever gnawing anothers head laments him and his children being incarcerated in a tower where they starved, something he references as being hunted like wolves ('i was being hunted'). he now forever rips apart his cruel jailor with 'long fangs'. colcytus overlaps in my mind pretty well with the deepest layers of louis' very christian/catholic shame - the 'murder' of his brother and 'sister' claudia, the betrayal of his community, falling in love with a bad man who's a danger to his child (x2), betraying lestat with a judas kiss and at the end lucifer himself, the fallen angel - am i the devil, am i of the devil. in colcytus a lot of references to blindness and being veiled to the meaning of your own story appear which is very interesting to narrative agency and louis' self-justification too.

then ethel cain references dante in ptolemea - claudia is the daughter of cain, the man who pressed the same blade to his brothers sternum he would later kill his lover with, the one he's never quite sure didn't have a hand in paul's death. before her 'conception' louis makes a deal with the devil. lestat the aristocrat, the wolf hunter, louis accepts his love and his motives. him taking on the page of hearts from this trickster is a moral choice concerned, as every deal with the devil is, not just with love but also power, money and influence. it is a choice which leads to claudias birth into death, her parents union born out of the dark gift, birthing a child into sin, violence and pain. what's interesting in cains text is the interchangeability of the wolf and the hunter which is one of my favorite themes in literature, one i noted in tvl aswell - lestat's stylized (himself) as a werewolf figure, an outsider, hunted, wild and uncontainable. rice was influenced surely by angela carter's writing about this kind of otherness and masochistic attraction to violence which reveals an animality in yourself - louis' favorite movie isn't 'company of wolves' for nothing. to close out this meandering connection i thought it was interesting that this lyric ends with sublime, quick burning white light - the luminous fall of lucifer morningstar is certainly a theme in louis first season story arc.

thank you for coming back on this and giving me a chance to unhinge my jaw about it, always happy to talk. 🖤