Castle-temp, red wine

the funniest part is that if they actually adapted the vampire lestat they wouldn't have to make up excuses to absolve lestat (absolve is not a good term here, but ultimately is what they wanted to do). the brilliance of the book is that after you read it, you're able to understand the character and why he acted like he did in the previous book. years later, they were not only adapting the series again, but they had also planted some seeds in the first two seasons to achieve the same goal anne had. now louis is a black man and by all means, i know it's not the same as being a white woman, but imagine: lestat sees how vampirism freed gabrielle, how she is no longer tied by society rules, how she has overcome them; lestat, with 0 knowledge of race issues, would think that the same could happen with louis and that's why he can't understand how louis still suffers after being turned. nicholas being present as his own person, with desires, struggles, and dreams that exist beyond his disorder, you would be able understand why lestat was so impatient in his arguments with louis. but also you would get why he was willing to do everything to soften his moods because he knew someone once upon a time who went down a really dark path caused by the existential crisis vampirism brought. nicki as his fledgling and paramour and gabrielle as his fledgling daughter having telepathic conversations and hunting together like in the books is a fine parallel to louis and claudia's relationship and would show the audience how lonely it is to be a maker this time by the eyes and narration of the maker himself. claudia seeking knowledge only to find vicious vampires very much summarizes lestat's whole journey through tvl and i can believe no one in the writers room thought about that. instead we got a character that finds marius without wanting to, a guy that got in the theater because his boyfriend helped him find a job (we spent more time with the théâtre des vampires in season 2 than revisiting his creation in season 3), a man that does nothing and was manipulated to kill the wolves (magnus chose him because of his braveness and now he was just his biggest fan…). there's probably more, anne wrote this book with iwtv knowlage and masterfully made these parallels in a subtle way so we could understand lestat without denying what happened in the previous book. maybe this is it, the writers room didn't want a new perspective for these events, they actually wanted to dismiss them. they wanted to absolve their perpetrator.

also we should absolutely question the show's choice to remove gabrielle, magnus and marius' overt antiblackness from the tvl book when the writers got armand out here acting like he's auditioning for kkk grand wizard. clearly the show isn't shying away from depicting antiblack violence considering the treatment of black characters in the past two episodes, so the refusal to depict gabriella, marius and magnus as the white supremacists they were in the source material, is a blatant tell- the writers are protective of their white characters, even the antagonists, and don't want them to seem "too" evil (which tracks for white and nonblack liberals acting like being called racist is worse than being racist.) and this clearly isn't a concern they have when it comes to the characters of color- armand has for 2 seasons now enacted forms of explicit violence inflicted on enslaved black people- louis and claudia's cut ankle tendons, the entire public humiliation of the trial, claudia's burning, louis' head on a spike, coercing him into a performance of self-debasement and contrition and branding his body- and claudia calls her black father a slave in a bioessentialist, derogatory context and expresses a level of internalized antiblackness she was never even hinted at feeling when she was alive. in both scenes, the narrative is much harsher on louis than on lestat and the nonblack writers go into extreme detail in their antiblack dialogue and racialized, borderline pornographic depiction of louis' torture. but gabriella is portrayed shallowly complimenting louis' beauty when realistically she would be calling him slurs when talking about him to lestat, magnus' "master race" aspirations and fixation on white supremacist beauty standards for how he chose his victim pool and "heir" aren't addressed, and marius' racial politics ("rotten boy", the whitewashed portrait of armand- we know he's racist, the show just hasn't acknowledged it and intentionally excluded the parts of tvl where he expresses that racism when talking to lestat) remain an elephant in the room. and ofc the way the writers are tryna be like "see lestat isn't racist, black people love him" in-universe through characters like merrick and paul (lol. lmao even) and tryna overwrite or dance around every textual example of lestat's antiblackness is so transparent in its clumsiness.

the difference between louis' unreliable narration and lestats is that with louis we had a framing device that was anchored in reality and daniel was constantly asking clarifying questions or finding holes in the story and we got to see louis in present day go through journey of examining how he remembers his past and what hes choosing to ignore or gloss over. the show never made you forget that this was a story being told from a limited and bias perspective. but in tvl, we lose that framing device. we are technically listening to lestats recount of the events of tvl on the "failures" recording but there is absolutely nothing besides the occasional bit of narration and daniels "youre listening to the failures" twice an episode to remind us. we have not revisited the auction. they promotional material and interviews really gave the impression that this was gonna utilize the format of a documentary/concert film much more heavily than it did. it drops that approach right away and settles on only the occasional reminder that everything were seeing is technically from lestats pov. but we also see things that happen way out perspective of lestat. how does lestat know about the conversations between armand and daniel? how does lestat know that louis and regina went on a pedal boat at night? how does lestat know about the conversation that larry had with that fan? in iwtv, we were deliberately tied to louis' perspective and whenever the story reached beyond that it because we had things like claudias diaries or armand chiming in or daniels recording from that night in '73. and those perspectives raised questions about how they lined up with louis' story and who was telling the real truth. but in tvl everything that is technically lestats retelling is just framed as the objective, present day reality. nothing in the show is asking me to question if what im seeing is the full truth or something tainted by lestats feelings. the closest we get is that interview where he talks about nicky BUT even then that is an interview told WITHIN lestats retelling of events. i feel like they had such an obvious yet clever route to go with adapting tvl and completely tossed it out the window.