remade

Jenny Diplacidi, Gothic Incest: Gender, Sexuality and Transgression. • tvl

And when a young beggar woman with a little child approached, [...] I looked into her eyes until I saw them glaze over. [...] I kissed her, feeding on her heat as I pushed the dirty cloth away from her throat, and I bent for the drink so skillfully that the sleepy child never saw it. Then I opened with careful trembling fingers the child's ragged shirt. This was mine, too, this little neck.

There weren't any words for the rapture. Before I'd had all the ecstasy that rape could give. But these victims had been taken in the perfect semblance of love. The very blood seemed warmer with their innocence, richer with their goodness.

lestat, tvl

[...] the losing of her behind a thousand closed doors, and cruel answers, and the terror of her and her complexity and her indifference and her indefinable strength. [...] So these moments had bound me to my mother. These moments had given us a love for each other unnoticed and probably unequaled in the lives of those around us.

lestat, tvl

[...]You see, they represented the greatest loss to Lestat, because they stood on the threshold of the maximum possibility of life. Of course, Lestat didn't understand this himself.

louis, iwtv

'My son, my son'; and then he said something I could not hear about innocence and innocence destroyed.

the marquis from louis' pov, iwtv

the dead hindquarters and the struggling forelegs, the huge innocent eyes rolling up into her head as the rattling cry came out of her. She was like an insect half mashed into a floor, but she was no insect. She was my struggling, suffering mare.

like, the two items given pride of place in that space were claudia's dress and the portrait of paul. it was a space memorialising the family louis loved and lost. in some ways it might've functioned as a reminder of the ways he felt he failed them – an attempt at atonement (god knows louis is harder on himself about claudia than lestat/armand ever were). my favourite thing about that s2 scene was that the space focused on the people who were family to him, rather than defining him by his romantic relationships. he was finally on his own after many painful years with lestat and armand, and it felt like he was reconnecting with the people in his life that perhaps mattered the most. i didn't see it as selfish or self-indulgent at all. i don't remember anyone reading the scene that way when the episode aired.

My heart aches for jacob and the exploitation of his time, talent, and care for louis. My heart aches for the black writers who have to see their work desecrated for cheap twitter jokes and embarrassing failed attempts at virality. My heart aches for the black fans who love louis and earnestly wanted to see his story treated with the same level of care and respect afforded to his abusers and then having to sit through that violence.