Ace of 💜s

my brother in christ you cannot be more wrong and I'm so tired. also if you ask a random stranger this in real life, a random stranger who's mature enough to understand the difference between fiction and reality, they will look at you like you speak gibberish.

proship stance = anti harassing real people over goddamned fiction. your kink is not my kink and that's okay. don't like don't read. there are some prompts that trigger the fuck out of me. I don't read it. I don't even like it. but I will defend its rights to exist because

1.) it is fiction

2.) no one in real life is harmed

3.) it cannot harm you unless you go searching for it, knowing it will upset or trigger you

4.) a lot of victims and survivors cope and heal through fiction, a safe and controlled environment

5.) censorship is a fascist tool. once you allow one thing to be censored because someone somewhere doesn't want it to exist, anything and everything can and will be censored.

Yes.

Claudia asks Lestat during the seance if he's back with Louis and Louis, mistakenly believing she's addressing him, says that he's sorry, which is him inadvertently confirming that he considers them back together. The bench scene further confirms this with Louis telling Lestat that he's thinking about the future, and he wants that future to include Lestat.

Delainey said on After Dark that the root of Claudia's beef with Louis is jealousy, because Louis has Lestat. She doesn't have that. She's jealous of Louis, because Louis has Lestat that loves him unconditionally and will go to the ends of the earth for him, and that was the big driving force behind her tirade against Lestat during the seance. It basically amounted to her saying Lestat was pathetic for loving the likes of Louis and for, essentially, being Louis' bitch. Hence why she killed Lestat over Louis.

All of this was set up in S1 when Claudia asked "Who's my Lestat? Who's my Louis?"

Claudia is now in a version of hell, separated from Madeleine, while Louis gets to go on living his life with Lestat and experiencing Lestat's love.

They could not have casted a better Akasha. Her monologue STRUCK MEEEE. HOLYYY SHITTTT my mind is genuinely blown. My favorite episode so far.

Right?? RIGHT??? Akasha is a FORCE and I fucking love it. The way she just commands the screen and her VOICE. I am not lying when I say I could listen to her forever and a day, seriously.

And yes, Marius. It took me... a while to warm to this interpretation, but he is so close to "Blood and Gold" here, imho, the slightly eccentric, manipulative hermit, and I love the eccentricity, because that keeps it "real", does it not? What does being alone for so long do to someone?

And I love that.

I also loved that Akasha sent Marius to get Lestat, based on the FUCKING SAME CRITERIA MAGNUS HAD, and also told him to do away with Gabrielle, because Akasha is a jealous queen, she did not want other vampiresses next to her, and her wanting Gabrielle gone is soooo in character.

I love all of it. Sheila (and yes, Christopher) did slay it.

Hey 👋🏾

Okay, so to start, I am very much not trying to be an apologist here -- because I do not apologize for the horrible things I think all these characters have done -- but I, personally, did not see it as rape that Daniel did here with that college student.

I did see it as an abuse of power, given that the person in question -- the person appeared to me to be a student of his. And his leaving that person the way he did was callous and an asshole move, for sure, showing that he very much was just using that student for sex and nothing else.

But first off, Armand calling the student a "boy" did not -- and still does not -- register to me that that college student was underage. Because both Armand and Louis have both called Daniel a "boy" back during Seasons 1 and 2. And Daniel was 69 years old at the time.

I think calling humans "boys" and "girls" is just something some vampires do. Because in the eyes of creatures who are hundreds of years old, someone who is only 69 years old, on top of just being human, would register as a child to them.

So no, in this case, I think we are looking at someone who was of college age, meaning between the ages of 18 and 22, at the very least.

And you know what? There is also nothing wrong with two people having aggressive sex if they are both into it. And we just don't know if that student was into it or not.

Though yes, given the way Armand described it? He probably was not. Even if he consented to the sex itself, which, in my reading of it, he did -- which would match with what happened with Daniel and the girl with the paper bag.

Remember, Daniel told that girl under what conditions he'd have sex with her, and she consented to it before they did so. She clearly hated the whole experience, but did consent to it.

And I think the same might have been going on with the college student as well. He gave consent, but he hated the whole experience, even with having given that consent.

That seems to be becoming a pattern when it comes to Daniel and the two sexual encounters we've heard about with him so far.

At least when it comes to sexual encounters outside of him giving himself over in exchange for drugs, at least, as we saw him try to do with Louis in EP205.

(And for the record, even before I read that passage in the Hate and Ashbury book the show did for Daniel, I'd been getting a "he was too young to be there" vibe about Daniel and his getting into the whole counterculture scene in the 1960s. The famous "Summer of Love" in San Francisco took place in 1967, when Daniel was 14 years old and living not too far away from it.)

And this, sadly, could also be one of those cases of a college student having sex with a teacher/professor to improve their grades. Basically, trading sex for that, or some other things that Daniel, as the teacher/lecturer, held the power over what the student likely needed or wanted, and very likely might have been trading sex for.

And that, to me, is the real issue in all of this -- that the person in question was a student, and Daniel was around 38/39 years old at the time, and (likely) their teacher. Which, as I said, makes for a huge power imbalance.

And oh look, there goes the student-teach dynamic that is prevalent all over the whole Marius-Armand-Daniel dynamic again!

I know that there are people out there who, at the moment, because of what happened in EP305, think that past-DM didn't happen.

I am not one of those people. At all. (And no, I do not feel in any way that I am coping with that either.)

I very much think it happened, this all, once again, points to the show, again, showing more than anything how Daniel's life of being entwined with vampires from the age of 20 affected his overall life, even after the point when his memories had been altered and blocked regarding his love affair with Armand.

And I think that "splinter of coldness" that Armand detected in Daniel back when he was 20 years old, had become a gulf in size by the time he was 38/39. And his being entwined with vampires -- including being the human lover/companion of one of the most vampiric of vampires to walk the Earth in Armand -- that splinter had become a gulf.

And even if you are someone who is set on believing their past relationship didn't happen? That doesn't erase the fact that Daniel's mind was messed with by Louis to be hyper-focused on his job and reporting/interviewing, over everything else.

Because, as Daniel said in EP205, no matter how fucked up the rest of his life was, he always managed to hold down a job.

So yeah, while I didn't read or see the encounter as rape, and the student not being underage, I very much did see it under the umbrella of advantage being taken of the student by Daniel because of the huge power difference that was going on.

And the student, while I think giving consent to the encounter, likely did not enjoy it. Same as what happened with the girl and the paper bag.

And that, clearly, by 1990, the "splinter of coldness" in Daniel that Armand had detected in Daniel at the age of 20 was not only still there, but likely exponentially grown.

But I never expected Daniel, the person who -- likely did in the past and will again at some point -- looked upon Armand as a giant insect that had devoured a million human lives, and declared he loved that thing, to be a good person.

I think Daniel is the perfect companion for Armand, and what they did have, and will have again, works within their little two-person sphere; it will work perfectly, in my opinion.

But lord help anyone, especially any human, who gets caught up with either of them who are outside of that sphere.

Because with the way this show has done things and turned them up to 11 (as we are already seeing wrt Lestat's band members, who, in the books, never knew he was a real vampire and all survived their entanglement with him -- never either dying or becoming vampires), I think what we heard here wrt what Daniel did was probably one of the more tame things that happend... or will have happened.

Daniel is not what I've heard many show-fanfics have portrayed him as, i.e., some kind of therapist to these vampires. Because Daniel is just as fucked up and flawed as they are.

And those vampires he encountered back in 1973 likely had much to do with Daniel never even having a chance to self-correct how he was already starting to become at that point when he did first encounter them, as the sexual encounter with the girl and the paper bag showed.

Instead, Daniel Molloy became a perfect companion for a vampire.

However, when it comes to being a human? Well, I am not going to ever be surprised to learn that he mostly sucked.

Armand's Guide to Stopping Lestat's Stupid Great Conversion (with Daniel Molloy)

Step 1. Ask Very Nicely (Failed)

Step 2. Break Up the Band (Failed)

Step 3. Bring in the Boyfriend (Failed)

Step 4. Deploy Public Shaming (Failed)

Hello! 👋🏾

So yeah, I have been asked this before, but given the new information we have about Armand and Daniel wrt Season 3, I can update my answer.

So, I think Daniel will regain his memories sometime in Season 4. After whatever happens to him at the end of Season 3.

Which, yes, at the moment, I do think will be the death of his biological body. (And yes, there is still the possibility that such a death wouldn't happen until Season 4, but just go with me here.)

I've always felt that whichever season the show revealed the full, past relationship between Armand and Daniel, would be the season when Daniel would get his full memories back.

Because the original Devil's Minion chapter in the books is told in flashback. And it is fully told from Daniel's point of view.

And with the way I see this show going with Armand, and how Season 3 might end with General Audiences (many of whom are the ones mainly doing YouTube reactions to the show) thinking he was lying the whole time about loving Daniel? Because that is what many of them think about it all right now?

Showing Daniel's POV of everything that happened between him and Armand in the past will make it very clear to everyone watching that no, not only was Armand not lying about how much he loves Daniel, but that Daniel deeply reciprocated that love as well.

So yeah, how Daniel finally gets his memories back, I do think will come with his death at the moment, most likely. And I can see his memory regaining being a gradual process, taking some time as it happens. And which, as he does so, we viewers seeing exactly what Daniel is remembering about his and Armand's past relationship together over that time.

Hopefully, culminating in us seeing exactly how and why they ended up split up (which I still very much believe was Marius' doing).