"I Want To Be Your Maker."

i know that's not the popular opinion right now and i understand and respect that, but i think apart from the insane racist creative choices they have made this season they have also done some incredibly beautiful and fun work.

those two things can co-exist, you just need to be critical of the things you enjoy.

(however i do understand every single person that's incapable of finding anything positive in this season. especially the POC fans that were so incredibly hurt by it. i understand anyone that is stepping out of the fandom or refuses to engage with anything s3 related.)

i have had issues with parts of this season from the start but i prefer to keep any criticism locked down and discussed in small spaces with people i know are capable of interesting and nuanced conversation instead of broadcasting my immediate thoughts onto my tumblr blog with almost 1k followers. which i think is very fair personally.

i liked this season but i do not think it was necessarily a good season if that makes sense.

litteraly so much of this seasons failures seem to boil down to "this plot point is interesting, let's explore that" and then they execute it in the most horrible fucking tonedeaf way for some reason. this entire season had SO MUCH potential. i see the idea in most of their choices, they just managed to royally fuck up, usually due to a lack of black writers.

which is what makes it all the more frustrating to me because i want to be able to just hate it and move on. but i do genuinely love a lot of what we had this season. i have found myself repeating "there was so much potential" over the past 24h. they needed black writers on their team. we know these people are capable of writing beautiful, nuanced, well thought out stories about black characters. what the fuck happened.

again and again and again the managed to incorporate blatant racism into this season and it's sickening. how this script passed through so many hands and not a single person raised concern is baffling to me and i pray that they learn from their mistakes. this is also your reminder to reach out to AMC and put in a complaint. its important that you send valid and thought out criticism and not just hate though.

i do think that after seeing the audiences reaction to this mess of a season we can hope for better from s4. not just because i think they genuinely do care for the fans of this show, but also simply because they care about money and cannot afford another fuck up like this.

i also have criticism aside from the racism. it also seemed like they had no idea what the fuck they were trying to do with this season. it was a mess. they simultaneously gave us So Much and yet Nothing at all which is an insane accomplished i feel like i have to applaude. how did they even manage that?

i think the narration style did nothing good. the whole failures thing did not work for me i would have preferred if we just stayed in the present and watched things fold out instead of having an unreliable narrator recap to us. did not enjoy that too much.

i have many more things to say but idk how to put my thoughts into words very well. this post could have been much more thought out but this is what you'll get for now.

trick or treat! xoxo, the molloys 🎃🗡️

even shows that we absolutely love are not immune to fucking things up or at the very least making writing choices that we wish looked different. you don’t have to agree with every critique you see, but you also don’t have to make people feel like they’re idiots for having those critiques or for wanting to start a dialogue about them.

i personally find myself standing in an in between place of feeling like there were some really beautiful moments in the season and things i genuinely loved, but also acknowledging the shortcomings in pacing and glaring racism. i can’t separate those two things. to me it’s just part of engaging with media. i’m not interested in looking at some idealized version of what we were given. i’d rather have honest conversations about what we thought worked and what we thought went really wrong. because that’s what it means to be an active participant in the media you choose to consume.

for those who want to bury their heads in the sand, i can’t stop you. but don’t expect everyone else to do the same. the bare minimum you can do is not to be someone who takes pleasure in stifling and shutting down fellow fans of the show who (for various extremely valid reasons) didn’t have the grand old time that you had. i’m really disappointed in the attitude i’ve seen from people who i thought cared more about this fandom beyond just caring for those who share their exact view or who would never say a bad word about the show.

Ok. So I really didn’t like the finale. It honestly made me re-evaluate even the things I did like earlier in the season, which is a difficult thing to process. Having the cognitive dissonance around having loved the first two season, having devoted so much thought to the characters, and having defended the season up until the reframing of the finale episode is really difficult. There are still things I enjoyed and maybe I’ll come back to them. But for now I need to process my feelings, and I do best in writing. So here are my thoughts.

To me, Armand has never actually been a schemer. He’s a manipulator, but he moves out of fear. When he chose the coven in Paris, it was to ensure his own survival. (And also to eliminate the reflection of himself that he saw in Claudia, perhaps. More on that in a bit).  When he erased Louis’s memory, it was to preserve his companionship. These are all game-time decisions made to preserve himself. And sure, maybe he took some pleasure in the aesthetic art of the trial. That doesn’t change the fact that he was and always is grasping for security.

Because of that, I find the idea that he would use facial recognition software, track Regina down, blackmail and cajole her into following Louis around the world in order to bait him into… what? Reliving the misery he spent seven decades trying to erase out of Louis’s head? Pretty out of character. I can see Armand wanting revenge. I cannot see him carrying out a three year detailed multi-step scheme to get it. I also don’t understand logistically what this was supposed to accomplish—Regina didn’t actually lure Louis back to Armand, because Regina was in NYC and the butcher shop is in Montreal.

I also feel like that whole thing being designed by Armand really lowers the emotional impact of the weird emotional incest between Louis and Regina. It cheapens a thing that felt really emotionally complex to me. It was actually just a part of an evil plan. A puzzle box all along.

Speaking of Regina. It is wild to me that the episode critiqued Louis as a pimp so much without pointing out that Armand was basically doing the same thing with Regina- paying her to pursue a client. @bluedalahorse I talked a lot about how the scene would have been way more impactful if Regina hadn’t been an Armand plant, but had accidentally stumbled into the scene in the butcher shop while searching for Louis to get him to give her the money he owed her. That could have created a moment where Armand was suddenly confronted with her resemblance to Claudia as well. Armand could have reckoned with why he did what he did to Claudia. He could have acknowledged some of the parallels between himself and Claudia, and that would segued into the way that Louis genuinely understands his pain and creates that moment of empathy between them. Armand letting Regina go because he realizes some of the mistakes he made with Claudia would have been an actual moment of growth for his character.

I did like that moment. Assad’s acting in that moment especially was wonderful. But the fact that it had to literally be tortured out of Louis did make it feel cheap to me. I did not like that two South Asian men were portrayed to be conducting non-consensual medical experiments on two Black people, one of whom resembles Claudia who was a disabled Black woman. There are too many examples of very real medical experiments unethically conducted on Black people for me to be comfortable about that. There are too many instances in fiction of Muslim coded characters being maniacal villains for me to be comfortable with that. And the fact that they made such a big deal about it being in a Jewish deli?? Why??? That was so weird and uncalled for.

I think people are going to justify Armand’s apology/revenge tour as him reverting back to his Children of Darkness days, but I actually find it kind of hard to square with that. Armand’s actions are rooted in a search for survival, but also, always in self-denial. That’s what being a part of the cult taught him: pleasure and beauty is barred to him. He must carry out Satan’s wishes. So he’s violent, and he’s cruel, but those things are based in self-flagellation more than they are based in animus against the outside world. There’s a world where in this season we saw Armand sink deeper and deeper into self-harm as no one accepted his apology, where he denied himself food and happiness, and only arrived at these horrible acts at the end of that journey. I could even see a world where they put his end-of-Memnoch suicide attempt in this season. Maybe we still will see some of that if we rewind and see some of Armand’s point of view of the events. But that does not square with Armand birthing this horrible plot from the moment he was thrown into the wall in Dubai, and meditating on it for three years.

It also doesn’t really square with Armand turning Daniel three weeks after Dubai in my mind. If Armand was already occupied developing this evil plan—why stop to turn Daniel along the way? Maybe he really was turned out of spite, and to spite Louis specifically and not Daniel. I will hold out hope until we see otherwise that that is not the case, and that there was tenderness in the act. In general, I don’t really see how Armand being so hung up on revenge against Louis squares with him realizing that his love for Daniel was so present in Dubai. Maybe this is me woobifying devil’s minion too much, but the thing that is so special about them to me both in the text of the book and meta narrative of Anne’s writing is that loving Daniel is Armand’s redemption. The devil’s minion chapter prevented Armand from ever becoming the revenge-seeking person we’re seeing here. So what does it mean for Armand to be doing this with Daniel by his side? How can their love ever have that tenderness and that redemptive quality to it?

I can think of some answers and places the show might go. I can see that Daniel was initially able to surprise a true moment of emotional vulnerability out of Armand, and that Armand then clamped down by revealing the stalking and nothing more about a past relationship (and I do still believe that there is more; the lack of information in this season just feels like there’s more to come). Daniel is won over by the promise of vampiric power and revenge against Lestat and also a sexual attraction to Armand he can’t control. He goes along with the plan and gets swept up in the sex they’re having. But maybe he’s also there to get answers. Maybe he’s not so in the fog that he isn’t also investigating Armand still. He loves him but he can’t trust him. And that would honestly square more with what I know of Daniel. Daniel is mean and vicious but not without a point. It doesn’t seem in character to me for him to be chopping heads for the sake of chopping heads. (But he’s the minion! I hear you say. Well yes. But the whole point of devil’s minion is actually Armand granting Daniel’s every wish. Not Daniel being a henchman for revenge plots). But if there’s a story at the other end of it, then I believe he’d be there at Armand’s side. And maybe it’s in that reveal that they will find real honesty with each other, and that’s when that true and redemptive love can start. But will the show do this? I have no idea.

(I also can’t imagine that Daniel would have co-signed Armand torturing Louis like that. Louis and Daniel are made at each other, but they still have a profound connection, and Daniel starts the season out hoping for Louis’s approval. I wonder if Armand lied to him about what he planned to do with Louis’s head, and why he needed to separate Lestat and Louis.)

I also really hated the cracks that Daniel made about autism. That felt especially wild considering how autistic coded Armand is. I also wonder if Alex refusing to talk is a nod to book Daniel going mad after being around Armand, and if so I doubly dislike the comments. I’ve always loved Daniel as a disabled fan, and to have the one-two punch of him being magically cured and then to have him say those things felt really bad.

Everything in Lestat’s mind palace was pretty fine I think. I liked him having to confront all of his failed loves and his kills. I liked it culminating in Lestat refusing to perform for Gabriella. That’s the answer to the dramatic question of the season—will Lestat shake off Gabriella’s control, and be able to reconcile with his past? And the answer is yes. But it feels so overshadowed by the B plot (btw I’m so sorry y’all for this post, I was wrong, Armand was not the C plot protagonist but simply the extremely villainous B plot antagonist, once again) that it didn’t really have the punch I feel like it should have. Why were we spending so much time in a horror movie when we should have been building up to this moment of emotional catharsis? Why were we bogged down by puzzle box reveals when we should have been letting Lestat’s emotions soar? The engine of this show has always been relationships, especially the romance between Lestat and Louis, and I felt like this episode barely touched on it.

The other thing that this finale left completely unaddressed was the trial. Since there was no “Armand was keeping Lestat hostage” reveal, I have to assume that Lestat really was there of his own free will to get revenge. I don’t think we’re going to dip back into the past of Paris again, or at least I hope not, because at this point I cannot survive another “Armand is secretly evil” reveal. In another better finale, Armand would be torturing Lestat’s dismembered head, not Louis’s. We could have focused more in on the Lesmand relationship, and about how desperate Armand always was for Lestat’s love that he never got. We connect that back to a flashback in the 18th century with Lestat being cruelly dismissive of a desperate Armand, and then to the trial as well, with Armand keeping Lestat in Magnus’s tower. Then it’s up to Lestat to extend understanding to Armand, and it becomes about him recognizing the ways in which he and Armand are similar and have both fallen into the role of abusers to people they claim to love. It becomes more about Lestat reckoning with his failures (the theme of the series!), rather than a Black man being mutilated and then convinced to apologize to his abuser.  But since none of this actually happened, it’s very weird that Lestat’s dream sequence doesn’t touch on his role at the trial at all. Paul tells Lestat that he “loved Louis the way he should be loved” or whatever, but no one’s addressing that he went to Paris to seek revenge (after dropping Louis from the sky). (I also did not enjoy another Black character arriving simply to sanctify Lestat. In another episode with less going wrong I would be 100% caught up on that. But as it is it barely enters my list of most egregious sins).

I honestly wish that they had completely cut Armand out of the present day in this season and let him just be in flashbacks. Save devil’s minion and his emotional arc for season 4 if this was the alternative. I think a season 4 that actually does some Armand pov and develops devil’s minion could go a long way to putting the Armand we just saw in context. But at this point I don’t really trust the writers to necessarily deliver on that. And there’s no way for me to erase the image of him torturing two Black characters in a moment that feels deeply out of character from my mind.

I haven’t even really written in depth about my feelings about the séance scene yet, but I also felt really frustrated by that and the way it throws so much of the first two seasons into question. I feel like the writers really felt excused from having to think seriously about questions of race (and disability and queerness, to a lesser degree) now that they have “proven” themselves in the first two seasons and now that the show has changed title. Things that I think really needed an adaptational deft hand like the séance were ported over unchanged from the books, uncomfortable implications about abuse victims intact, while other things that I did not think needed to be reinvented or made up whole cloth, like Armand’s revenge tour, where given their own spin by the writers. It really felt like the things they picked to bring over were highlighting the worst elements of Anne’s writing rather than the best. I really, desperately hope that can change moving forward.

I also have no idea how much we’re supposed to trust Lestat’s recounting of events. Does Daniel really know the word yaoi? Or is that something Lestat is putting into his mouth? Did Claudia really say she hated Louis more than Lestat, her primary abuser? Or is that Lestat’s spin on the séance? Does it matter, if the show runners are implying that Lestat is inherently more trustworthy than Louis?

from the moment the first episode of the vampire lestat dropped, it was evident that this show was going to be nothing more than a shoddy, poorly paced mess that cared more about humiliating louis—alongside its other black and brown characters—than telling any sort of cohesive or lovingly crafted story. the amc team set out to undo the two previous seasons of impactful writing, and punish those of us who resonated with interview with the vampire and the characters it presented to us viewers.

rolin, hannah & co. rewrote some of their powerhouse characters (louis, claudia and assad) around uplifting a white man and excusing him of the things that he's done, but even in that they failed. because this season did not make lestat more likeable; it barely fleshed out any of his past, but made it a point to show us him kissing his mother every episode, and even that was oftentimes played for no more than shock value or laughs. there was no character development on lestat's part, even when other characters' writing was sacrificed to exonerate him.

there is genuinely no winning with this fandom or show as a black viewer. when the first season came out everyone went on and on about Book Accuracy™ and how the changes made were an affront to the legacy of anne rice's story. and as a result it was review-bombed by racists for how unabashedly black it was. then season two came out and everyone took the opportunity to say that louis was lying about what happened and that he was on an equal playing field regarding lestat and armand. and critics couldn't be bothered to praise jacob, delainey and assad for their incredible performances, instead turning the spotlight on sam, despite lestat being one of the more minor characters until ep 7. and things only got worse once iwtv ended

First of all, your “companion” has vampire autism, Daniel, so watch your mouth. You should know better.

Second of all, Daniel’s dialogue had been so strange. It’s like they gave him one big offensive thing to say per episode. This doesn’t feel like Daniel just being an asshole anymore.

One big offensive thing per episode, and it always comes out of nowhere. It’s too big and too frequent to demonstrate the casual biases he realistically has. Season 1 and 2 did it more naturally. It was a comment here and there, not every episode. That’s a believable character. Daniel is intelligent and has travelled the world but he’s also still a crass man of a certain age so he’s gonna be saying shit.

It’s offensive, of course, but does anyone else just find it weird too? I want to say it’s Lestat trying to portray Daniel considering how cartoony every side character was this season and that it makes sense for him to make Daniel look bad, but I don’t know if I can say that confidently anymore. By the time it got to the autism comment, I was just rolling my eyes at the writing. You don’t need to do it that often. I barely want to use it to analyse Daniel as a character anymore because I just don’t think he was himself this season. No one was.

armand rootling around nicki's flat like a giant bug

lestat beating the shit outta armand then taking him home

"we can't leave each other in hatred"

gabrielle haircut/subsequent freak out

lestat accidentally waking up akasha and enkil and then frantically apologising to marius like a little kid