Ariel The Daydreamer

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I am going to start with a brief list of things I enjoyed so it's not all negative:

Lestat continuously running into the sun to get the perfect shot for his music video. That was the moment that felt the most Lestat to me out of the whole show.

Louis' little fake Claudia, I was a huge fan of that and kept praying we were going to cut back to it every time the scene changed. It was heartbreaking and so true to Louis as a character. This is the big thing with AMC Louis (as well as his schizo Lestat visions) that I would have have loved to see in the books.

Just in general, I enjoy seeing Jacob Anderson. I will say, VERY little of the actual writing for him this season (outside the fake Claudia storyline) felt like Louis to me, but that wasn't his fault at all and I still liked when he was on screen.

Pretty much all of the Armand content was quite good! Assad Zaman is a great actor and I wish he hadn't been stuck in this torture nexus where I couldn't fully relax and enjoy his performance as Armand. Especially since I DID like the writing for him largely. Can we please get him better contacts though like ?

I hated 3.05 the least out of the season. Akasha was INCREDIBLY cool and I appreciated the period accurate hair on Marius. I still hated the episode but I wasn't pacing around the room with rage.

I technically hated this badly as it was applied to the season, but I do think that the surreal/dark comedy/reality show vibe could work really well with Lestat's storytelling. This was just NOT the time to do it though, Lestat barely even does it in the book TVL (coming back to that). I would have much preferred to see the inherent absurdism of Tale of the Body Thief or Blood Canticle in this style.

Okay, now the stuff I hated so much that sometimes I had to look away from the screen or walk around the room just listening and taking deep breaths:

1) Some of this was cartoonishly racist ?? Others, especially many black fans, have already articulated this better than I could, but it was actually shocking to watch. I've seen the argument that the racism was being used to remind the audience that all the characters are evil, but to that I would say that's already abundantly clear and didn't require violent, aggressively on the nose references to the torture experienced by enslaved people. Especially when the "reminding us they're bad" was really just reminding us that Armand, one of two primary non-white characters, is bad (and also his The Gremlin poster was crazy work). Tonally, it reminded me a lot of 1.05, the episode that originally put a bad taste in my mouth regarding the showrunners, not because it chose to depict domestic violence graphically, but because the callous response from the creators confirmed to me that the point was ultimately engagement-driven shock value. The examples that stood out to me in this season (and to most people I think) were the slavery head-on-a-stake punishment, the branding, and Claudia's seance monologue. They felt more like an intentional provocation of the audience than a meaningful look at the realities of racist violence. I think a big part of that was how little the main characters of color—Louis and Armand—were actually in the narrative. For Louis, most of his longest, most important scenes were JUST him being tortured in a racially-coded or explicity racial manner. He experienced a lot of racism in the first two seasons, but he was also a three dimensional, whole character who was a vital part of the narrative and more than his trauma. The racism itself felt grounded in reality as well, s1 giving an honest look at the systems of the Jim Crow south. It wasn't cherry-picked, sensationalized torture methods from across time seemingly chosen to be the most shocking. Armand's biggest scene was just being the perpetrator of that torture. There are many very valid criticisms about racism in the books that stemmed from AR's ignorance and I agree with them. That includes her casual depiction of slavery. However, I would argue that, as a direct comparison, the depiction of slavery in IWTV is at least very effective at communicating Louis' hypocritical, mundane cruelty and Lestat's desire to feel big at any cost, to subjugate the way he was subjugated. Nothing is sensationalized or used for shock value—it's barely even a footnote in Louis' self-centered narration—simply a constant, chilling reminder throughout the beginning of the book of who and what both of them are: selfish, entitled, self-victimizing parasites who care more about their comfort and pride than who they hurt preserving it.

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2) This interpretation of Gabrielle's character was so awful it made me emotional. Beyond being annoyed, it actually made me angry and sad when she was on screen, seeing the bastardization of what she was supposed to be and represent. This is when I was the most painfully aware that I was watching a straight man's interpretation of a character written by a woman with deep gender issues, seemingly a history of abuse, and a painful relationship with her mother. Gabrielle is an incredibly complicated, very explicitly butch or transmasc character whose story is one of liberation from her abuse at the hands of her husband and of her culture, now turned into a femme fatale, nymphomaniac boogeyman of incestuous abuse. It was kind of sickening to me. Gabrielle is a beautifully crafted character, and not one I think is really depicted in media often, and certainly not in the 80s. There was no reason to change her, her story was always ahead of its time, a perfect inclusion for a show originally built around minority characters and complex gender and sexual dynamics. Instead of exploring Gabrielle's original journey of finding herself separate from her trauma and redefining her relationship to motherhood and to the son she loves dearly but never wanted to have, she became half fetish fodder and half monster. Gabrielle isn't a manic, scheming, hypersexual, cruel caricature of a woman, she's a stoic, self-possessed entity. An unapologetically masculine woman (or perhaps not a woman at all) of few words who has held staunchly to her identity and sense of self through a lifetime of rape, abuse, child loss, and imprisonment. She dresses in men's clothes and cuts her hair off and lives a life of adventure and science, quietly and on her own terms, freed by her turning in a way no other character is. Her entire identity as a vampire is liberation and what that means for her and for the one she loves. In the show, the hurt, healing, and ambiguity between her and her son is lost, as is their desperate attempts to connect across untraversable gaps. Her narrative parallels to Louis and his relationship with Lestat, the repeating cycle that's so painful for Lestat, ends up erased too. The pain of a mother wound that passed from her through Lestat and into Claudia is gone, as is the combined hurt of three generations stuck in a body that doesn’t feel like their own, still tied together across decades and lifetimes. The show did away with that for this, and I can't even begin to imagine why.

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3) On that note, OFFENSIVELY bad representation of incestuous abuse. Not only was that never, ever the actual point of Lestat and Gabrielle's relationship, it diminishes both the real traumas they share and the reality of shame for actual incest survivors. I don't really have the space here to go over all my thoughts on the intention and circumstances of the (MUCH more limited) incestuous elements of Lestat and Gabrielle's relationship in the book, but I'll leave links here and here to where I talked about it more. But ultimately, I see the point as the effects of connection in isolation, a mother willing to receive the needs of her son in a way that is less painful than motherhood, and what could happen between two people whose relationship is reborn via the ultimate contradiction. Daniel nasnyys said this while we were watching and I think he’s making his own post, but it feels like the the show was angry that TVL depicted “bad” things with a neutral gaze, particularly incest, and decided to punish the book itself/Anne Rice/readers who felt seen and represented by the depiction in the book. It feels like the show is not just destroying the complexity of the book and the experience of incest survivors in favor of yet even more shock value and Twitter engagement, but also making sure the point is the shame of the victim. Not only that, but affirming it SHOULD be. Lestat is treated as a victim, but then punished for being one in "the wrong way". It felt like the show was saying yes, incestuous abuse is bad, but also if you as the victim experienced physical pleasure during incestuous abuse, you’re BAD. If you have complicated feelings towards your abuser, you’re BAD. If you have sexual feelings towards your abuser, you’re BAD. If you still love and wish you could have a relationship with your abuser, you’re SICK and need to be a better victim !! And if other people you love find out about these things, they’ll think you’re BAD and SICK too, at least unless you grovel and repent for being so sick and bad!! Nothing exists in the narrative except condemnation, and for the show, the issue can't be resolved until that condemnation is rightfully doled out to everyone, victim included. This type of righteous, moral condemnation doesn’t apply to racism though apparently, so I have to assume it only matters what the makers of the show find personally yucky.

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4) The choice to apply what was, in the book, a very brief foray into a brassy, comedic tone for the opening chapter across the whole season was a horrible choice that ruined any chance this all had to be good. Even Lestat didn’t approach his own story with that kind of later, stereotypical Lestat silliness, so there's no defense here imo. TVL is his most reverent and emotionally honest account of his past and the things that hurt him, by far the most we ever get in the series. In spite of the jokes book fans make, that’s the more important contrast to his portrayal in IWTV than the goofiness of the opening. AMC sacrificed the ultimate vulnerability Lestat shows us, that humanizes him against all odds, for somehow STILL more engagement bait. When I found out the season was framed around his rockstar era, I was immediately worried because that was the first sign of how badly the point had been missed. In a way, I think they kind of already ruined the gut punch of TVL (and the Loustat reunion) by pulling the Lestat sad backstory card during the IWTV seasons, but the actual approach to the most difficult subject matter he recounts—his rape and turning—is unforgivable to me. The most heinous example is the bizarre Magnus music video sequence ?? Out of the whole book, Lestat's turning is the most gut-wrenching, visceral moment we get, literally nauseating in exactly the right way. It's such a unflinching, honest depiction of sexual assault: the sudden unraveling of identity as the situation unfolds, the primal, animalistic fear, the inner war between fight and fawn, and the special sort of body horror afterwards, the feeling that you've been permanently changed into something worse. The show scene and references back to it being 80% jokes is cruel and twisted. Lestat doesn't inject even one moment of levity into his telling because there isn't one. It's a moment that ripped what was left of him apart and he feels he can never put it back together. For the basically one geniune moment depicting this event, the show decided to overlay Claudia's narration of her assault in some attempt to add the necessary seriousness back, but it's so incredibly hollow after the barrage jokes and the portrayal of Magnus as the fucking Sesame Street count. The character of Magnus is barely described in the book, only black hair and a white face and swirling cloaks, the embodiment of the horrors that lurk in the dark and the way that darkness can snuff someone's light in an instant, sometimes irreparably. Even the serious moment we saw was downplayed to a single drag across the floor, subduing, and bite. If they can depict the punishing racism they did, they can show the entirety of the horror Lestat experienced, from screaming and convulsing and begging for his life pinned under a monster to the violent expulsion of every bodily function onto himself in the aftermath to the piles of dead, rotting doppelgangers he vomited blood and licked it back up in front of. If you want horror, show me horror.

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5) The fact that SO much screen time was dedicated to something as trivial as rockstar Lestat touring with his band (something that never even happened in the book) is absurd considering it was at the expense of real, meaningful plot beats from the book. Even much more minor fan service than this isn't worth it if the fans actively hate it, so they screwed themselves over for nothing. The shortening of the wolf scene and the way they glossed over Lestat's relationship with Nicki stand out to me as the biggest failures, two of the most formative moments of his whole life given maybe five minutes of screen time each. In the case of Nicki, they've even changed very load bearing aspects of their situation and history together. Nicki being not just Lestat's first love but also from his human village, the one he dreamed of a better life with then finally escaped with matters. The loss of Nicki mirroring the loss of Lestat’s remaining innocence matters. Lestat turning Nicki, seeing the darkness in him, and having his entire worldview sent into upheaval because of it matters. The way those events inform every moment of his relationship with Louis in the Interview era matters. Him leaving Nicki with Armand at the Theater and the tragedy it leads to matters. How that destroys his sense of his own goodness and redeemability matters. The show made it a minor detour, a small look at something bad in a mundane checklist of bad things. The incredibly brief nature of the wolf scene has the same effect. It's presented as a bad thing that happened, a two minute glimpse into a rough tussle Lestat had in the forest. That's not what the wolves are though or what the mantle of Wolfkiller means to Lestat. Becoming the Wolfkiller was the moment Lestat was forced to trade his soul for the strength to endure. It was the first step towards the darkness he would descend into, why he was "chosen" so senselessly, and a rite of passage into what he would become. It was the moment his fate was sealed and his spirit broke into the pieces that becoming a vampire would form into a new, different, worse being. In book, the scene feels like it lasts a hundred years even though it's only a few pages. It's the first event of his human life that Lestat recounts to us, what he sees as The Beginning. His last moments fully "human" before he entered his pre-vampiric limbo, starving and 20 years old, trudging alone through the snow with the weight of the world on his shoulders, parts of him dying off and hardening and growing cruel with every step, every gunshot, every dying scream of his dogs, every splatter of his eviscerated horse's blood onto him. It's his first of several fundamental reckonings he experiences and the show used it as a brief lead in to a hand job from his crazy mother.

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- Bonus Louis Section - 6) Like I said in the little intro, mostly I was just bummed that he wasn't around ? If the show went through the trouble of writing a whole modern storyline that didn't previously exist, whyyy can my best friend Louis not be a prominent character. RJ following in the Anne Rice personal animosity footsteps of sidelining Louis for absolutely no good reason unless there's an opportunity to torture him somehow. As I mentioned in the things I DID like section, I think Jacob Anderson is a great actor, and hearing him talk about his inspirations for his portrayal of Louis makes me so happy, he really gets it. Unfortunately, I don't feel like the writing this season lived up to the JA's ability to offer that portrayal. There were several scenes that felt diametrically opposed to fundamental truths about who Louis is supposed to be, like how sexual the conference room argument got, the egging on of Lestat to reveal himself to the human women through the car window, and the very carefully planned, mentally present, calculated attack on Bruce that was almost Armand-like (vs the real Louis propensity for sudden, impulsive, animalistic outbursts, even at the expense of his own safety). It's like the show equivalent of late book canon sexy lamp Louis, where continuity and complexity cease to matter and Louis is whatever the writers say he is in order to prop up Lestat. If anything, I don't get the impression that RJ et al care enough about Louis at this point to keep him in-character. His purpose, besides getting tortured, is just to be an ex boyfriend situationship for Lestat to bounce songs and one-liners off of. The emotional impact of their relationship and history is just gone. The absolute worst part of an otherwise merely frustrating and mediocre Louis role though was the seance scene and his reaction to it. This is what felt by far the most out of character and unnecessarily so, especially since it's an almost direct recreation of a scene from the book Merrick, only with Lestat present this time. I talked about the book version of this scene recently and it's a soul-crushing depiction of Louis' absolute worst fears. In his whole life, he sees Claudia as his biggest failure, the child whose suffering he caused with his weakness, the daughter he could never give the good and happy life she deserved, his baby whose death he couldn't prevent because he wasn't mentally or physically strong enough to fight Armand. The thought of Louis, who in the books was literally tipped over the edge into attempting to burn himself alive by what Claudia said to him, responding with "what about the things you should thank me for" and walking off to banter with Lestat afterwards is incomprehensible. It shows just how little the writers cared about Louis' life and inner world, especially compared to Lestat. If they didn't want to do one of his most devastating and revealing scenes justice, they should have left it alone, not turned it into more racist ragebait and a side quest for Lestat.

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There is still somehow so much more that I could say but I'm exhausted from thinking about this show. I hope to never think about it again. I hope nothing like this is ever MADE again.

The upside is that for anyone who hasn’t read the books and was disappointed by this season, you have the opportunity to experience something really awesome!! PLEASE go read The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice. It is one of the best works of popular fiction out there in my humble opinion, and it avoids everything that went wrong telling Lestat’s story in the show. I was going to say read it even if you hate his character in the show, but actually ESPECIALLY if you hate his character in the show. Go have a great time meeting the original Lestat, it will be a completely different vibe in the best way.

And I said this in tags before but truly, if you’re worried about the books being bad/eventually stupid/offensive etc, I understand that concern deeply, but nothing you will read is worse than what you just watched I can promise that. Even if you don’t want to read Interview (but I really really really think you should), it’s 110% worth it. Hope is not lost, your summer can still improve at your local library.