louis and claudia and the theory of the dark fantastic
last summer i read ebony elizabeth thomas' excellent the dark fantastic: race and the imagination from harry potter to the hunger games about the portrayal of black girls and women in sff media and i wanted to bring her theory of the "dark fantastic"- an analysis of cyclical narrative patterns developed from how "dark other" characters are framed in media- to louis and claudia on interview with the vampire. like thomas writes in the screencap above, it's extremely rare for black characters to not only be protagonists in vampire media but to be the central subject who desires the vampire, the central object of the vampire's desire, and ultimately the central vampire themselves. louis is both the subject who desires the vampire and the object of the vampire's desire in s1ep1, when lestat pursues and seduces him- and louis and claudia share the role of the "central vampire" as leads of the first two seasons after lestat turns them in s1ep1 and s1ep4 respectively. (also note that thomas is a black scholar and centers black characters, esp black women, in her media analysis and i'm applying her theory to black leads here, but her theory could be applied to any racialized or othered person in media.)
louis and claudia are extremely unique in the vampire genre bc they're black protagonists in a historically-white, historically-xenophobic-and-antiblack genre who face mainly nonblack antagonists (and many of those antagonists are textually antiblack, targeting and tormenting louis and claudia for their blackness) and bc they're sympathetic, humanized vampires who fully embody the carnal eroticism that's always been integral to vampires' appeal as supernatural creatures. but all of louis and claudia's complexity, interiority and uniqueness don't exempt them from "the dark other" role that's imposed on racialized characters in fantasy media, and their arcs in iwtv are a perfect fit for the steps of the dark fantastic cycle- spectacle, hesitation, violence, and haunting- in thomas' literary framework. let's get into each step under the cut.
spectacle- the display of the visual or existential difference of the dark other, marveling at what can be seen or unseen
hesitation- the dark other interrupting the "waking dream" of the fantastic, disrupting the idealized fantasy world with their presence- causing unwelcome feelings of fear, desire or longing
violence- the existential dilemma of the dark other and the feelings they cause being stamped out with violence- destroying the dark other to restore the status quo
haunting- the dark other haunting the narrative despite their material destruction
and steps 1-4 endlessly repeat in this cycle- the haunting turns into a spectacle when the presence of the dark other becomes a threat again- unless the 5th and final step, emancipation, subverts and ends the cycle. thomas notes that not only is emancipation of the dark other rarely depicted, it's often rejected by audiences who can't accept liberated black characters. often even the potential, not reality, of a liberated black character is enough to prompt audience backlash.
louis and claudia's arcs both feature spectacle- we're introduced to louis performing a carefully controlled facade of hardness to maintain his social standing and safety- "you couldn't look weak on liberty, you never knew who was watching" in a scene where his performative violence attracts the attention of the european vampire- "the big man of liberty st" "truly...an exceptional negro", hypervisible as a black creole man, singled out as an "exception" by wealthy white property owners as the only black man at their regular poker game. louis' hypervisibility multiplies once he starts living more openly as a gay black man in an interracial relationship, disrupting the norms of a society where both miscegenation and queerness, "crimes against nature" are illegal- rumors of him "out cattin' with some white man" get back to his sister grace, indicating that louis is always surveilled offscreen.
and while claudia isn't a public figure in nola like louis was, she's still treated as a spectacle, from the racist white girls who target her when they see her walking on the street ("darkie playing dress up in the dark") to her objectification as the "doll-like sister" in what tom calls their "fag, pederast trio" on rue royale. this continues in eastern europe- a nazi guard expresses amusement and surprise at the "black ukrainians", they draw hostile gazes when emilia brings them to other romanian villagers (claudia's even called a "crow" by one of the children) and once they arrive in paris, they're surveilled and stalked for months by the paris coven who are unsettled by their freedom and lack of adherence to strict vampire power structures. ("who was the master?? neither, it seemed")
in the 2nd step, hesitation, we see how louis and claudia disrupt the regulated world of the paris coven and how the paris coven lashes out against them for it, initially more at louis than claudia bc even though claudia tries to initially assimilate and play by their rules- so they perform a fake welcoming civility towards her, intended to deceive and lure her into the cult until she's formally bound by their laws- louis rejects them from the start. and claudia, despite her (misguided, even though it's not her fault) faith in her new companions, is still a disruptive force to them, as the sole black woman in the coven and the only black person who wants to perform onstage, decentering the nonblack stars. claudia's temporarily compliance with the coven's rules means they intially direct their hatred towards louis, seeing him as an aberration and a threat to their way of life- francis says "he will be the ruin of us"- who needs to be destroyed.
and this is a point where i'd like to add some more nuance to thomas' framework bc the division of racialization in iwtv s1-s2 that's at the forefront of the story isn't "all bipoc v white" but "black v nonblack", demonstrating how nonblack poc will also choose complicity with white supremacy and violently enact antiblackness to gain and maintain social status. armand is south asian, tuan and quang pham are southeast asian and planche is black- but in louis and claudia's story, there's no material difference between them as agents of antiblack violence and the white characters who are also agents of antiblack violence- it makes no difference to the black victim if the person lynching them is white or poc, and anyone can be antiblack regardless of personal identity- louis and claudia are a specific kind of "dark other" as black protagonists.
when the coven's desire to violently subjugate, punish and destroy louis and claudia reaches a boiling point, that brings us to the 3rd step, violence- and while there's a strong argument that the baby lulu play also covers the 1st step, spectacle, the fact that it's a show drawing on minstrel tropes with the unspoken goal of torturing and humiliating claudia for the state of her body is what makes it an act of textual violence. once claudia escapes the coven with her chosen companion, ending the baby lulu play, the coven starts plotting to lynch her and louis. the lynching is the climax of the dramatic arc of the first 2 seasons and the greatest act of antiblack violence inflicted on the black protagonists, where they're tortured, maimed, humiliated and darvo'd onstage, until claudia's executed onstage by burning her alive in the sun- and louis would've been executed right next to her if the lynching had gone "according to plan".
bc louis and claudia are sympathetic characters and claudia's murder is framed as a tragedy, not a righteous victory, iwtv subverts the idea of light (white) being a cleansing or purifying force for good- it's a destructive tool weaponized by lynchers here.
and with that we arrive at the 4th step, haunting- while iwtv s3/tvl promises a possibly literal haunting if claudia's ghost returns, she's already haunting the narrative in s1-s2- claudia promises to come back and murder the lynch mob, yeah- "if there's an afterlife, i'm gonna come back and fucking kill all of you. and if there isn't an afterlife, i'm still gonna find a way"- but the entire interview in a way is louis being haunted by claudia as he lives a confined half-life punishing himself (and lestat and armand) for her murder. the louis who was vivacious, social, engaged with life and art and the world around him that we saw in his early days in nola and early days in paris is gone, and the interview slowly reveals the fact that he's still subjugated under his lyncher's power while claudia's memory hangs over him.
"darkness must be destroyed, or there is no story"- there would be no story, no interview, if claudia wasn't dead, and louis' narration at the start of s2ep8 indicates that he sees his entire life as an inevitable road to claudia's death bc of his weakness and susceptibility to lestat, his failure to kill him that brought lestat back across the atlantic to murder louis and their daughter.
claudia never gets to escape the dark fantastic cycle- since there's no resurrection for her coming, by the time we "meet" her in her flashbacks she's already become trapped in this loop and entered another cycle with spectacle, her diaries read by at least 3 others she didn't consent to seeing them and presented to daniel for his book. but louis' story temporarily flirts with emancipation- at the end of the interview, he finds out the truth about his daughter's murder, sets daniel's laptop on fire as a tacit way of revoking consent for the book's publication, and returns to nola liberated from the last of his abusers. the return of his natural accent indicates he's starting to come back to himself, exiting the shell of the still, emotionally repressed, almost robotic demeanor he had in dubai.
but when louis goes on that true crime tour, we realize louis and claudia are still being treated as the mysterious, hated figures of rue royale they were in the 1930s/40 and stereotyped as a nameless hustler running a voodoo cult and "his child bride". and any hope of louis' arc ending with true emancipation, at least at this point of the story, is extinguished with the time skip forward several years, after daniel's published the book. louis has been thrust back into the 1st step of the cycle, and this time he and claudia have been turned into a global spectacle- and vampires around the world are already calling for his head for disrupting for wrecking havoc on their order, foreshadowing the hesitation step.
"it is this dilemma that ultimately repositions the dark other as the spectacle that creates hesitation and elicits violence anew...spawning sequels..." sequels?? and if we look at iwtv's sequel/its 3rd season, we can see how louis has been misrepresented and othered by daniel turning him into a spectacle- "i didn't like myself in it. passive. selfish. a liar. and not the lying to myself kind, a fucking liar"- and he's on track to replay the dark fantastic cycle, the target of violence by both human readers, knowing how antiblack and anti-survivor general audiences can be, and by the direct retaliation of vampires around the world.
i wrote this back when i had more faith in the show to yk. give a fuck about the black characters so it's a lot kinder about the framing of the show than i would be now but i think it shows how strong thomas' analysis is and how tvl plays into the same racist othering tropes she's criticizing in her work that the dark fantastic framework still fits louis and claudia's arcs to a tee. louis, claudia and now regina as black characters, as "dark others" dehumanized by an antiblack writers room, go through every step of this cycle and are primed to be put through it again bc s3ep7 ends with louis and regina being made a spectacle with the lynching livestream. rolin thinks he wrote something bold and creative and radical that the plebs who loved s1-s2 just don't understand, we just don't get his genius man, when a book analyzing mainly the racist failures of children's media clocked him and every racist narrative move he'd make. anyway imma revise this analysis at some point to take tvl's whitelash into account but in the meantime i 100% rec reading the dark fantastic by ebony elizabeth thomas
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iwtv has a very clear motif of 'come to me' but in s1e5 claudia says to louis 'come with me', which is the only time in the series a vampire has ever called to another vampire like that
So the IWTV IP was always going to devolve into white supremacy because that's what Rolin Jones meant when he said he can't wait to adapt TVL. They took two years to meticulously craft the butchering of black characters both literally and figuratively on our screens. Your local white showrunner in an all white writer's room, writing the scenes where the black vampire gets his head cut off, and then branded by the brown vampire, all the while your white, blonde haired, blue eyed vampire who was given the gift for vampirism to preserve his Aryan features gets to be just a tortured soul- the narrative also works overtime to retcon all of the abuse he inflicted. The KKK members of this fandom must be so happy, peering from under there white hoods lol. The innocence and fragility of whiteness has been preserved and the value of white tears has been reaffirmed. Gothic horror not in so much that questions the established patterns of power structures in society, but in the way a TV series will eat its own tail to preserve and cater to white supremacy. Bravo! I hope you all cough blood.
You can make a movie with where the only white character is a man named Ray Cism whose one line of his 16 seconds of screen time is āI seriously hate women and minorities.ā and youāll find fifty bajillion reader x Ray Cism fanfics and renaissance style drawings of him with a halo of golden light
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This season has truly been a massive waste of my time and truly built to nowhere. Just so many baffling choices that were made in all of my theories truly feel like , wow , I put more thought on this than you did. It just feels like a giant joke and if the backlash is the point. I'm just trying to make sense of it all. I truly thought this season was building up to the moment where it stopped. It's like, you know what, I've been acting crazy. This midlife crisis of mine isn't doing well, I have agency, and then he gets kidnapped by akasha so his journey gets put on hold, and that the failures were just him reflecting on how he failed from a future weird perspective. Plus the mention of Amel, and him maybe being bodysnatched made me think that would be used as an excuse for how he's been acting. After 303 and 304 I was just like , you know , would be funny if gabrielle was a replimoid and the real one ,would show up in the finale because you just might as well bring in clones let's really jump the shark.
Also after 304, i came to the conclusion that the season was meant to be binged and dropped all at once.Because it feels like a midway point building to qotd rather than tvl. How im am I supposed to be excited knowing I waited 2yrs after the season two finale for this , I was so hyped for this season and all the possibilities just to be giving the DARVO season with Louis suffering more than any character. The opening showing that he survives and lost a leg.So it's like he's gonna be, okay, but no one we're still going to see him be tortured and humbled on the way. How am I supposed to be excited for anything?Because this season , despite the buildup , still didn't really set up much like Yeah there's going to be destruction but I just don't care. I truly thought that this finale was gonna be a blood bath like the band is taken out at the concert, because I don't care about the band and found myself actively cheering for them to get off my screen. But instead we got torture porn for louis with him being essentially lynched again to a public and lestat unharmed. Like what, i can't believe i'm saying I don't want a season four but I also don't want it to end like this like they cant be serious. I don't even care what the actors are going to say.But also I do want to know what the writer thought are reactions were going to be , I guess we'll see soon. Sending positive vibes and waiting for more of your analysis of this shithole season.Because it's giving me a sense of peace , knowing that i'm not alone in this fandom. šš¾
@theuniverseisaholigram We are living in THE WORST timeline
Ironically, this season made me love Louis even MORE, cuz he's just been getting bashed & bashed & bashed for NO REASON whatsoever other than blatant hatred. The antis stay swearing he's not a victim and "this isn't The Abuse Show" and Louis' just an evil pimp--how TF is Louis NOT as a victim of abuse & assault!? š¤Ø For the 3rd time/season in a row, there's been uneven revelry in subjecting Louis to ghastly levels of physical (& even mental/psychological) brutalization & torture, without giving his abusers equal treatment, AND then blaming Louis for his own abuse at their hands. š”
šÆšÆšÆ
AMC has no scruples, so I'm curious IF they'll even acknowledge/respond at all. Like, THEE worst backlash they ever got by far was after Ep5 Fight & The Drop. But that mostly came from book purists & Lestans who hated seeing their blorbo as the "big bad white abuser" breaking all of Louis' bones. Many of them just up & left the fandom entirely after 1x5, while the rest have been hate-watching the series ever since, waiting with all kinds of headahh theories tryna "prove" that Louis was lying & the Drop never happened he never abused them Claudia's a liar blahblah wtvr let them fap to SamStat gifs easier.
MY main problem with S1 was that we never got to see Pyromaniac du Lac as he set Lestat on FIRE and dumped his arse in the swamp to get eaten alive by alligators. š¤š„š
āļø This bit from Rolin & Sam was foreshadowing 3x7 like CRAZY.
And I ESPECIALLY hated that racist AF Trial, where Louis & Claudia got kidnapped, beaten, tortured, hamstrung, Mind Fogged until their eyes & noises hemorrhaged, and lynched on stage; meanwhile Lestat got to stand before them as glorious as ever, no wounds or injuries whatsoever, no indication that Armand & the coven had tortured him to force him to participate in the Trial--on top of the fact that (thanks to GabriellA, we now know) he was already perfectly recovered from LouClaudia's ONE (1) unified victory against him, showing ZERO indication that their "murder night" had any lasting physical effect on him at all--so wtf is everyone all up in arms for?!
But Armand's Judas arse was exposed, and here's where things get wicked, cuz Armand's arguably THEE most popular character in the whole show. His stans were ALREADY calling Louis an evil abusive pimp for shoving Armand into the drywall and leaving Daniel oh-so-alone with Armand (I thought y'all bimbos WANTED vampire husbands DM!? š¤Ø Why are y'all so MAD at Louis for not being Daniel's frikkin babysitter?! He's a vampire now, you're welcome! š¤·āāļø ). Lo & behold, Armand DID turn Daniel out of spite--but jfc we didn't know how deep the rabbithole went! š¬
So DM are the opps who leaved a revenge porn video of Lioncest to humiliate Lestat in 3x6, and are now engaging in a livestreamed torture porn snuff film to humiliate Louis in 3x7. That's the big finale of the season that was supposed to be adapting TVL, a book nowhere near as effed up as anything AMC wrote. But the ONE (1) thing AMC got right is that Lestat is the Gary Stu who must be protected at all costs. š¦ø We never even SEE Lestat's blonde-haired blue-eyed head literally rotting in that bowling bag, or his decapitated body struggling against being poked & prodded at knifepoint. Lestat's just laying there peacefully, totally unmolested by Armand, the guy he's had a centuries-long blood feud with; meanwhile Daniel just YAPS at a bag and doesn't even bother using Lestat's head as a bowling ball! š¤¦āāļø
But Louis can't even DIE IN PEACE without his abuser of 77yrs (his daughter's MURDERER) accusing Louis of being a p.o.s. who deserved to get lynched & deserved to be lied to and brutalized, cuz his grief was just such an inconvenience to the Dumb & Dumber sex pests buzzing around him who literally threw themselves in Louis' path cuz he wouldn't give them a crumb of his attention while he was busy dealing with CRIPPLING DEPRESSION & MENTAL ILLNESS over Claudia being MURDERED.
Once again: Louis has to fight for his life to be taken seriously but is still stripped of all dignity & respect; meanwhile Lestat de Passive gets to just languish as the Gary Stu doing EFF ALL in his own season until RAGLAN JAMES of all people shows up in full force for the damsel in distress, I kid you not--Captain-Save-A-Vamp to the rescue. š¦øš¤¦āāļø
With PAUL of all people THANKING Lestat for loving Louis "the way he needed to be loved" as if the Drop was NEEDED or even wanted by Louis at all OMFG (but guys, God is a woman, and Lestat wants to be a woman, woo~~!).
Craziest of all, the Finale didn't FIX anything wrong with this season whatsoever to do TVL justice--you know, THE BOOK allegedly being adapted this season?! š¤¦āāļø
TL;DR: WTF
š«ā¤ļø
You're so right, what's been my ONE relief is that darn near EVERY side of the fandom has people coming speaking against this bullcrap. So it's NOT just Them/Those People/That Subset/Louistans/Loumanders/Bipocs/SJWs and all the other microaggressive insults the Lestans & Antis keep using.
PLENTY of people who were giddy AF seeing Claudia cuss Louis out just last week are in agreement that 3x7 took things too dang far, and that Hannah Moscovitch & Rolin Jones were FULLY out of line with what they said in the 3x7 After Dark about Louis deserving to be tortured by Armand and owing his abuser an apology because actually Louis was the one who abused Armand by not loving him as much as he loved Lestat & Claudia (the daughter Armand killed & the ex-husband Armand lied on BTW)--WHAAAAAAT?! š¤¦āāļø
The writers have CLEARLY lost their effing minds with this DARVO bullcrap.
So yeah, I'm glad the brainrot hasn't reached too critical a state that the fandom still isn't seeing the writing on the wall, now that it's been said from the horse's mouths that this season--Hell, the whole series--was all about making Louis "Humble Himself" through an endless array of humiliation rituals so that that HE is made to apologize to his abusers for their mistreatment of him that is his fault for not being the Stepford Wife they wanted him to be, jfc. š¤¦āāļø
I've seen a bunch of "fandom etiquette" posts on my dash today and I'm going to say something that is maybe going to be unpopular but;
The absolutely pervasive mentality that unwanted criticism or critique shouldn't be given and should be ignored is why fans of color don't stay in fan spaces.
And I am not going to mince words here:
A lot of you are racist. A lot of your fan works are racist.
That might have been difficult to hear. And if it was, you should probably reflect on why that was.
"Fandom etiquette" has created a space where fans of color either bite our tongues and eventually leave or say something, get dogged on, and then eventually leave.
So much of "fandom etiquette" seems to be about insulating creatives from Feeling Bad and hostility to any kind of negative feedback is a pretty big contributor to why bigotry festers in these spaces.
iām sick of ppl trying to equivocate that claudia couldāve been that hateful and mad at louis without the racism. no she wouldnāt be. the entire thing is out of character for the iwtv canon, stop trying to give an inch when none of it even matters anymore. even in the books itās clear that itās not fully claudia and louis was shittier to her there. or accepting that he was a pimp after all even if thatās not ~all he was. no he wasnāt. we have long since traced back to the exact real life brothel owner the s1 writers transferred 1:1 to louis. missing and honoring the black writers who made iwtv also means respecting the story THEY wrote, and we donāt have to concede some bullshit about louis having been selfish or cruel or equally at fault for claudiaās abuse. itās still victim blaming to say the seance was right that louis didnāt change bc heās taking the abuser back. itās victim blaming to equivocate that he and armand equally couldnāt consent to the bdsm and that louis was a bad dom even if he still didnāt need to apologize to armand. that antiblack torture scene has nothing to do w louisā relationship with armand, it has no basis in canon at all, they just wanted the nbpoc to torture louis bc of the optics bc why the fuck would fareed even be there lol? donāt internalize this white supremacist revisionist bullshit, this show used to mean a lot to jacob for a reason, he and delainey came back for a reason, and we know they were lied to. louis was never selfish or a pimp or cruelly culpable for withholding to the powerful men who hated and battered him, thatās not softening his agency for perfect victimhood. claudia came back to see him because she loved him and loved him until her very last breath. we know what we saw
the thought i keep coming back to with the finale, and this season in general, is a sense ofā¦ infestation, i guess is the best way to describe it. because for the first two seasons, iwtv was a work thatā even with all its gothic/horror themesā seemed deeply compassionate at its core, and it remained devoted to beauty and love in a way that felt like a reprieve from (even a small rebellion against) the rising fascism of the culture surrounding it. and now it feels like the hatefulness it was pushing back against has infested it somehow, like a swarm of fuckin termites, which has not only ruined this season but also calls into question the structural soundness of what came before it. like, how did we even get here? was this sort of mean-spirited derision always just lying in wait? idk. i donāt want to make a bad season of tv deeper than it is, but it does feel like witnessing another loss in the cultural battle when a careful, compassionate work that ostensibly cared about the marginalised experiences it depicted becomes just another conduit for hatred toward vulnerable groups. what a fucking bummer, man
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the other problem with lestat's hateful backlash to louis in tvl and the lack of any kind of proper contrition arc for what he's done to louis and claudia is that even if the show does have him regretting what he's done and apologizing to louis again in s4 or later, after s3 it's just gonna feel like another phase in the cycle of abuse- "lestat the vulnerable becomes lestat the irritable becomes lestat the controlling". lestat was seemingly contrite in s2ep7 when he apologized to louis for dropping him, lestat was seemingly torn up in s2ep8 when he expressed heartbreak at louis hurting himself, but all of those moments are rendered meaningless (or at least only reflecting a kind of fleeting self-pity more than any real change or confrontation with his actions) since we've seen in tvl that lestat is perfectly willing to embark on a planned, multi-month darvo tour where he insults louis repeatedly and makes fun of his suicide attempt in his lyrics (bye any ounce of sincerity in the reunion scene) and bitterly nitpicks minutiae like his hair length while refusing to accept what he's done to his family...and then he and louis are on good terms again without any substantial change or growth on lestat's part. and no "he didn't really mean it, he was just lashing out bc he felt hurt and thought louis didn't love him" doesn't rationalize a multi-month darvo tour when "he felt slighted and was acting emotionally" is the crux of so many abusers' behavior. even if lestat was acting impulsively, that's not an excuse, but writing music, organizing a tour and performing those songs where he mocks his own abuse victim for speaking out requires a kind of planning and intent that makes it clear he wasn't being impulsive. it's a calculated move when you're doing it for that long and that consistently. if there had been some real emotional payoff in s3ep7 i could've said the execution was off but i could respect their commitment to exploring the psychology of an abuser in denial, but there's no payoff- it's clear they thought lestat's behavior on tour was just lestat being bitter and zany and cunty and didn't intend or expect the audience to see any weight behind it.
and with these same anti-survivor writers at the helm, even if they did attempt to show lestat apologizing to louis in s4 or beyond, the audience will have no reason to believe or trust that this apology is more sincere or reflects a more permanent change than the apology in s1ep6 or s2ep7 or his tears for claudia in s2ep8 given all of that fell by the wayside as soon as lestat felt "wronged". (and no, he wasn't wronged by louis when it came to the book, as louis isn't responsible for something that was published against his consent and it's not wrong for abuse survivors to talk about their experiences in a biography. the idea that the book is something louis had to apologize for or that the book justifies lestat mocking his own victims publicly, for months- they can't "oh lestat is a creature of impulse" their way outta that one- in itself exposes a kind of anti-survivor thinking, and we have no reason to believe this team of writers, with their unserious attempts at "comic relief" about incestuous abuse, complete disregard for louis and claudia as victims and voyeuristic, gratuitous framing of racialized black suffering think otherwise.)
claudia (back when there were some black writers with input on her writing and back when she could express herself in her own voice- not the way they depicted her in s3 as a mouthpiece for ooc antiblackness filtered exclusively though her white father's pov and written by nonblack writers) was 100% right and remains validated 80 years after her murder. the unintentional message of s3 is that louis and lestat haven't changed and lestat will always be a mercurial abuser who swings between hurting louis and performative self-serving apologies that lead to no real change, and louis will always take him back despite his cruelty. except even in s1-s2 when lestat was fully a narrative antagonist i believed he loved louis, that we were seeing the nuanced portrait of how love and abuse can exist within the same relationships and love doesn't "cancel out" abuse, but now lestat's love feels like an informed attribute that they have to bring a hallucination of paul onscreen to tell us about since it sure as hell isn't demonstrated in lestat's behavior for the vast majority of s3- the way lestat acts in the front half of the season, followed by complete lack of contrition for either what he did in nola/paris or what he did on tour, makes their reunion feel unearned, rushed and insincere. and beyond the antiblackness and anti-survivor rhetoric, the writers have just gotten lazy- loustat is scripted this season as if the writers thought could take for granted that the entire audience is already invested in them, that everyone already wants them back together, and they don't need to put in the work to get viewers onboard with their relationship and get people invested again. and to be fair, this isn't a problem unique to loustat this season- all romantic relationships in tvl get the "tell, not show" treatment and all their important development beats take place offscreen, which makes me think the s1-s2 writers they fired were pulling the weight of most of the romance writing (just like the black writers they fired were clearly pulling the weight of louis and claudia being framed with any compassion whatsoever).
the only thing remotely compelling thing left about loustat's romance is sam and jacob's chemistry, and it's telling that all moments of genuine intimacy and desire between them this season were unscripted and added by the actors (the comforting hug on the sidewalk, louis savoring lestat's blood in the beer etc). the problem isn't that loustat is a bad or "toxic" romance, the problem is that loustat is a badly-written and unearned romance. and as of the end of tvl the actors are its only saving grace.
Watched TVL after dark (so you donāt have to) here are some points
the host said this was the best season of television she has watched, Rolin thanks her but the actors are like not reacting to itā¦ except for Delainey whoās face KILLED ME (it seems to me sheās throwing a glance at Jacob)
-I wanna say that all the actors looked so uncomfortable the entire episode. No one wanted to be there or discuss it. All questions the actors got was deflected by them to praise someone elseās good work (ex. Jacob praising Assads and Delaineys acting when asked about the torture scene)
- Rolin says basically that maybe it felt nothing happened but thatās only because Lestat has such a strong āarmorā and doesnāt want to look inside himself and that they need another season to actually explore him as a character
-the head chopped happened bc they wanted to explore how Lestat would react to being near deathā¦ and it was the thing that made him realize Gabi was abusive.
- Sam Reid loved the Paul scene because all Lestat wants to hear is that Louis loved him? Unclear to me maybe itās bc Iām not a native English speaker
-Rolin and the writers made the conscious decision to remove Claudia from the long table (ā¦)
- maybe Iām projecting but Delainey seems sad and off and doesnāt want to be there and like she disagrees with all the writing choices for Claudiaā¦ :( my goat.
-Hannah said Rolin hated writing about identity and wrote about it all this season. Itās a lot about creative failure and Rolin didnāt like it. (That shows)
-Assad was asked about the torture scene and said that Armand felt seen by Louis and it reminded him why he fell in love with Louis in the first place :( he didnāt seem to like talking about it
-Hannah said that Armand was violent bc he knew that heād been used in all sorts of ways by Louis and āhe wanted what he wantedā ?!?!?!?? š¤Øš¤Øš”š¤Ø Assad and Jacob both looked displeased by the answer
Again wtf?!?!??!? Armand tried to lynch Louis and killed his daughter and lied about it for 77 years ?!()?(???!?!!!!!?,?? I love Armand but Jesus wtf is this DARVO
-Jacob didnāt want to talk about the torture scene at allā¦
This pissed me all the way off Rolin interjects and says that he found it EXTRAORDINARY that after 2 seasons of Louis ānavel grazingā and only being involved in his own stuffā¦ that Louis can admit āwhat did I do that caused this guy to chop of my head?ā
WTF IS THIS VICTIM BLAMING ?!?
Delainey and Jacob both look down to the ground uncomfortably
Jacob then says (sarcastically imo) āThatās Louis way of saying the fault is mineā
They get into the āpimpā and āsex slaveā aspect. Assad and Jacob tries to save it by saying thereās layers to abuse and this was just one aspect of Loumands dynamic and there are intersections.
- The host asked where Rolin would like to take the story
His answer is āum thereās a lot of things people wanted to see that didnāt get included this season (them telling and not showing the whole season) that QOTD will have another framing device and point of views structure.
He also said that they risked failure this season (hm sure did) and heās excited to continue bc they only told half of Lestatās story.
This is my subjective reading from my own watch of this episode keep that in mind.
This is some deep level of psychosis happening, where these people can open these mouths and act like Louis EVER abused Armand. And these preposterously vile words are leaving Rolin, Hannah, Assad, AND Jacob's mouths.
Which is why I'm not looking for explanations from NONE of these people; when what was CLEARLY needed were BLACK writers (AND Desi/South Asian writers) to tap them on the shoulder and say: Hey, what Y'ALL think is such a great idea cuz oo-la-la it's all so complex and stimulating or wtvr is actually coming across as EFFING OFFENSIVE. Your intentions vs executions are at a severe disconnect! And now you're pissing on our heads telling us it's raining as y'all try to VALIDATE this effed up story arc, WTF is wrong with y'all at AMC?! (And once again, like I keep saying: Delainey's the only one smart enough to keep her mouth SHUT.)
AMC, your "good intentions" may be to allow Louis to finally realize that he's been too withholding with his love, and that it comes across as cold/selfish/etc--but y'all are so far up your own arses about abuse/power imbalances that you've OVERSHOT the mark, and completely missed that Louis was NEVER the one with REAL power in Loumand's relationship! So now AMC's on the Road to Hell with abuse apologia & victim-blaming, to act like Louis & Lestat getting their heads cut off and livestreamed was all Louis fault for not loving Armand enough and "abusing" him?!
ARMAND had an entire coven threatening to KILL Claudia & Louis in 2x3--Armand was in the sewers ready to set Louis on FIRE, while Louis patiently stood there and ACCEPTED that he was going to DIE.
ARMAND stopped HIMSELF and let Louis go. Louis didn't fight or argue or plead his case or manipulate or control Armand AT ALL.
Loumand then trauma-bonded over the ways LESTAT had broken them BOTH, and how hung-up on Lestat they BOTH were, but Armand especially: "What is time to a vampire?"
But rather than AMC acknowledging that Armand's got centuries of baggage FROM LESTAT that PREDATE Louis even being effing BORN, they're dumping all of LESTAT'S (heck--not even Lestat: MARIUS') involvement in Armand's trauma on LOUIS' shoulders--
--cuz GOD FORBID Lestat should have to face REAL criticism from REAL people actually STILL ALIVE in his REAL life, and not just a bunch of HALLUCINATIONS in his head, as he's coddled & hidden away in a bowling bag not having to FACE the REAL consequences of HIS effed up crimes--
Louis invited Armand to his flat to have transactional sex (I'm not even done watching the After Dark as I'm typing this--did they even BOTHER mentioning Louis' cousin?!) and broker a deal that Armand would "keep the secret" about Bruce/Lestat so CLAUDIA wouldn't be killed for breaking the Great Laws she's literally JUST sworn herself to!
The Maitre roleplay was UNDER-NEGOTIATED Dom/Sub Kink that NEITHER Louis nor Armand were fit to consent to or participate in, because yes, they BOTH had too many effed up traumas & presumptions about what "power/control" meant due to their FORMER lives as a pimp & sex slave.
Even before the Maitre roleplay, ARMAND was the one nagging Louis in 2x4 to keep hanging around the coven when Louis explicitly said he didn't want to be there anymore, cuz he hated TdV, and only agreed to MAKE ARMAND HAPPY. He wasn't even there to watch Claudia perform; he was there to pay Armand back just for keeping HER alive--even though Louis & Santiago hated each other and Santiago wanted Louis DEAD ASAP. And Louis repeatedly TOLD Armand that it was JUST SEX, that they were NOT companions!
The same way Louis told him in The Tower Scene that he was only with Armand as a way to get back at Lestat--and Armand even admitted that he was "dumbfounded" that LESTAT didn't bother to stop them and reveal Armand's hand in LYING to Louis about "Banishment".
Lesmand BOTH played Louis for a fool! How TF was Louis ABUSING anyone, when he was the one who didn't even know what was going on over his head!?
Armand KNEW he was the rebound, and that he stayed with Louis cuz otherwise he'd have nothing!
Why is everyone acting like Armand got tricked into this dynamic, instead of him willingly entering a loveless marriage Louis OPENLY ADMITTED was built on spite against Lestat for THE TRIAL--spite that only existed because of the SEISMIC LIE ARMAND told Louis about Lestat!? š¤£š¤¦āāļø
AMC is out of their effing minds acting like Louis is showing "GROWTH" by taking ALL of the blame for Armand's nonsense, when that's literally just victim blaming & abuse apologia--especially when they effing said it themselves that Louis was doing it UNDER DURESS as he was being TORTURED and was already HALF DEAD from ARMAND decapitating him and DEMANDING an apology!
Just because Louis can acknowledge that his role in Loumand's failmarriage was toxic & unhealthy & selfish does NOT mean that it was inherently "ABUSE" -- it's like they've completely lost their plot in their over-zealousness to over-correct because they literally said it themselves: Louis got off TOO EASY in 2x8.
AMC, aside from blatantly sadistic antiblack racism, why does Louis' "growth" have to come at the cost of him being tortured & lynched into a confession by his daughter's killer and his own abuser that everything wrong with said 500yo abuser is HIS fault?
And explain how that is NOT victim-blaming abuse apologia. QUICKLY! š”
Krista Tippett, āKrista Tippett Wants You to See All the Hope Thatās Being Hiddenā, interviewed by David Marchese for The New York Times [transcript in ALT]
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem āintimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.ā Crucially, he added that this is ānot a matter of laziness on the part of the studentsā but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Educationās 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of āmeet your students where they areā for so long that she has begun to feel ālike a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.ā
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessmentās own language, they likely ācannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.ā And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austinās McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participantās smartphone ā whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision ā measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japanās Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they ākept losing trackā of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled āYour Brain on ChatGPT.ā They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays ā one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing ā and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and āconsistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.ā Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term ācognitive debtā for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brainās engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the studentās mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not āfree students up for higher-order work.ā It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their Kā12 schooling. Whatever the standardsā original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling āevidenceā from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on āfinding the main ideaā in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as āsevere or very severe.ā
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that āthinking is becoming a luxury good.ā The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a ādeep workā lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a sourceās claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into āthis is goodā and āmaybe add more detailsā the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
Iām afraid I donāt have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? Kā12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that āstudents will adapt.ā They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish studentsā sentences before theyāve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
ā Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Canāt Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
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crossposting this here- life got in the way for both @reticentvampyr and me so we had to delay our plans for this but it'd still be a cool idea to do a louis and claudia/jacob and delainey appreciation week to fundraise for a charity supporting black dv survivors. channel this energy into some material good yk
