Is it hot in here or is it just Lestat?
by Cory
Hi everyone! Cory from the r/InterviewVampire sub, writing another guest blog post for the Lorehounds! I want to say thanks again to the team for giving me the opportunity to share my knowledge of the show and books, and to share some theories!
Before we dive in, I’d like to establish something of a timeline regarding the Great Conversion, along with the knowledge we’ve gained from the latest episode. From there, we’ll look at how this sets all the divergent paths in motion to a finale that’s sure to be hot!
December 19th,1802- Marius “accidentally” forgets Enkil in the sun during the day when he had already moved Akasha into place, causing him to die. This causes a Great Burning, leading to a mass reduction in the vampiric race's population.
Sometimes after this, the Queen instructs Marius to bring Lestat to her as her new Keeper. He does so. Before Marius departs, he mentions that it took Akasha 22 years to speak to him. Akasha immediately responds to Lestat directly, saying it was “23 years.” This sets the stage for demonstrating that Akasha’s relationship with Lestat will be different from her relationship with Marius.
Lestat manages about a month before beginning to lose his mind. During this time, Akasha shows signs of slowly awakening. At the end of his time with her, the Queen takes of his blood, and he takes of hers. This causes him to fly in the air for several days and for her to begin fully awakening, leading to her monologue as Marius attempts to put her back to sleep.
In the 2020s, word of a “Great Conversion” begins. In 2023, Raglan James tells Daniel Malloy that in the span of a month, they went from tracking 900 vampires to 1600.
In November of 2025, the vampire Jasper is captured by the Talamasca. He is forced to begin making more vampires specifically for the “Great Conversion.”
In 2025, Lestat hears of and reads the book Interview with the Vampire. Shortly thereafter, he forms his band, Satan’s Night Out, which is later renamed the Vampire Lestat. They begin their tour. Gabriella, Lestat’s mother, comes to him. She mentions people being “candidates for the Great Conversion.”
It is stated that Lestat’s music is accelerating the Great Conversion exponentially.
At some nebulous point in the future, Lestat records “the failures” as a sort of explanation for why everything happened. We also know that he is either talking to Amel or to himself when he says, “I, Amel, digress.”
We know that his shooting took place sometime in the fall of 2025, with the “posthumous” recording of his album shortly thereafter. This should coincide with the time Jasper is captured by the Talamasca.
Now, with all this in mind, let’s start putting the pieces together.
The Great Burning occurs whenever the vampiric population reaches a tipping point, and the source of the vampiric race, Amel, causes it. He does this because his ethereal body can only extend so far, and he loses much of his consciousness and will the farther it extends. A Great Burning causes a sort of whiplash effect, a significant amount of his consciousness returning in rapid succession because of the vast majority of the vampiric population dying instantly.
It’s my belief then that Marius’ neglect of Enkil in the sun was not an accident because of Marius’ drunkenness, but rather a deliberate action done by Amel to cause the Great Burning of 1802. No doubt the Talamasca, who Watches and is Always There, would have known about this occurrence. After all, vampires randomly bursting into flames in the dead of night would have been widely reported. If the Talamasca ascertained what happened and why, and specifically how the Burning seemed to coincide with the Queen of all Vampires suddenly nearly coming back to full consciousness shortly thereafter because of Lestat’s singing, they could easily recognize the cause-and-effect relationship between the two.
So, when Lestat decides to begin singing again in 2025, he inadvertently begins awakening the Queen a second time. The Talamasca, either warned of this by Marius or their own informants, recognizes what is happening. They then set their plan in motion- Begin artificially accelerating the Great Conversion. The more vampires, the less conscious Amel (and therefore Akasha) is. Their strategy is, however, driven to the point of overdoing it by the actions of someone else who also wants to accelerate the Great Conversion: Gabriella de Lioncourt.
In Gabriella’s case, she wants to push the Great Conversion timeline forward so Lestat can take the throne as leader of the vampiric race, with her as the Queen Mother. She believes that because she can control Lestat, she can be the real ruler behind the throne, giving her the power and freedom she never had as a human, through the thing she always did: manipulating her son.
She achieves this by reinserting herself into his life as he starts his tour, then slowly removing or eliminating any other authoritative people and humans Lestat is connected to. Finally, she has Armand remove the one human in the band who would never have agreed to become a vampire, and then makes her final play, pushing the other bandmates to become vampires.
This will lead up to the “fateful concert” where all parties will converge. At the end, Akasha will reveal herself, leading to a second Great Burning.