radioactive airport skeleton

rolin truly said this and believed it to be true, and that should be enough for everyone to know what kind of person he is:

they had claudia refer to her life as not only bleak, but specifically bleak and black. a character who was never ashamed of her blackness. they had her say that she hates louis more than her rapist, abuser, and the people that orchestrated her lynching and burned her lover alive. they completely destroyed her character and killed two birds with one stone, butchering who claudia always was/how she saw louis and lestat, and throwing in more insults and hate at louis while mostly ignoring lestat.

and making it so that claudia is suffering endlessly, even in death, felt like another purposeful story choice. not to make claudia's character even more heartbreaking, either. it was pointless no matter how you look at it. this just felt like yet another way to torture a black character, and a black character that has been repeatedly exploited all season for everyone else's feelings. furthermore, summoning claudia had no effect on louis and lestat at all, as they were immediately over it by the next scene.

none of the heavy storybeats can have any emotional impact because both us and the characters are never given time to absorb them. they're just checking boxes with these heavy moments and moving onto the next scene. and all of this is, again, so we can absolve lestat of his wrongdoings and ensure no blame falls on him. his trauma is the only important thing in the show and the only thing worth discussing/unpacking. it's just antiblack, misogynistic writing again and again every week and rehashing it feels pointless but i can't help myself.

aside from the blatant racism and misogynoir, i also get the impression that these writers are just trying to get their quoteable, hashtag-able, gif-worthy scenes each episode. who needs a cohesive plot when you can have lestat say "serving cunt has its consequences" or give the viewers an iconic shot of their favorite ship that feels entirely unearned—one of my examples of this being the fact that devils minion feels like they just put together a bunch of shots that they thought people would love, without actually telling a story with these two characters. everything we learn of their history and relationship is given to us through exposition. and because assad is such a fantastic actor, he's making these scraps into something interesting.

the showrunners are no longer pretending to be subtle with their sloppy writing, poor pacing, and hatred towards louis and claudia. they're just writing the racism right into the script and think that, because a black character says it, they're free from all criticism. and a majority of their nonblack fans are jumping to defend them by saying that claudia's rage is justified and if you claim otherwise (even if you're not saying that) then you can't accept black characters being cruel and/or evil. which isn't true at all.

claudia's rage is entirely justified, her berating the two people that were supposed to love her and put her first but instead used both her life and death for their own gain is not the issue here. she could've been as cruel as she wanted—but having her say a slew of horribly racist things to louis and direct most of her ire towards him as opposed to lestat or the both of them equally was nothing more than these antiblack writers once again degrading louis for their own enjoyment because they hate his character and know they can get away with dragging him through the mud. especially if they hide behind another black character.

even the decapitation at the end felt like a quick moment of shock to the viewer that turned comical immediately after. the abysmal pacing of this show makes it so that loustat being beheaded has no actual weight because we know they're fine and we're given no opportunity to sit with this moment. there are no stakes and there was no real buildup to it. nor to armand and daniel coming up with this plan and suddenly working together the way they are. in fact after the dust settled, id say the scene was borderline cartoonishly evil.

you cut your hair. you slow down. you mellow.

she calls you, and it’s the best day you’ve had in weeks. you race again. your fellow racer tells you to stop chasing the past, stop racing someone you’ll never catch up to, and you dismiss it, because—

she’s your rival. she’s your rival. she fundamentally changed who you are. she arrived and shattered your world and rebuilt it in her image.

and then she left.

you chase her shadow around the track. you smile, the happiest you’re able to be, chasing that shadow.

you will never reach it.

I remember watching an analysis on how well the first seasons incorporated blackness into the narrative. It wasn't just a race-swap; louis' blackness became the key motivation behind his character, his suppressed rage and need to be seen made his turning so much more powerful than the standard 'don't you want to live forever?' shtick. You take that identity away from him and you'd have to rewrite the entire script. I would even go as far as to say it made iwtv better.

I know the show doesn't have the space to focus on Armand's identity to that extent, so i'm not too bothered, but.

rentboy, nicki's slur, bottom twink, ragdoll for hire, etc, etc. If you're going to mention all this anyways, can there be a little more to it?

I know this is not South-Asian exclusive. At this point of the show you could make armand white and you could argue it would largely stay the same* save for some insults switched around and, dare i say, have him be portrayed as more desirable like in the books. I almost wish this wasn't the case, I wish it was a race-adaption instead of a race-swap, because there's so much potential.

Everything about armands' story feels riddled with orientalist and colonialist themes. There's the historical association of south asian men as less masculine and feminized compared to their white counterparts, the simultaneous desire (exotic, youthful, novel) and ridicule (gremlin, monkey, dirty). Characters constantly humiliating and talking down to him, backhanded compliments because admitting that he could be desirable feels shameful so they have to take it out on the object instead. Marius' painting where his brown identity was stripped but the art was kept, because it sold better this way (scandinavian scarves, clean girl aesthetics, yoga). His complex view of his master as a rescuer, his relationship to religion, languages, names, ownership, identity, all colonialist themes.

And why not get geo-political with it? there's a wealth of detail that his background provides. Why not talk about Dehli's huge child trafficking problem that continues to this day? Or how his parents selling him could have been influenced by India's caste system? What was it like spending 400 years in a country with anti-Romani sentiment? How did Santiago, who existed during the period where India was under British rule, feel about having to answer to a brown man? Did it influence their dynamic at all? What about living in Dubai, a country built on slave labour?

So much potential. Obviously this can't all be fleshed out but the script definitely had room for a little self-awareness between the many, many, cases where we see armand grapple with these themes.

And A big part of The Steps (disclaimer: can be reinterpreted and used atheistically but were invented from a religious perspective) is giving yourself over to God and making peace with the idea that you don’t have power over your life, God does, and God will purify your soul and forgive your sins when you follow this Addiction Rulebook yada yada.

It’s a trauma thing and it’s an Armand-ism, the way that he is perpetually unable to just Exist and Figure it out As He Goes. He NEEDS this structure that can tell him what to do and how to live and keep him stuck together with glue so that he doesn’t fall apart. But it’s also very very autistic, this inability to navigate nuanced, deeply social, deeply human conflicts and situations outside of a routine, or a structure, or a This is How You Do This Step by Step pamphlet.

And god, Armand is so heartbreaking in this episode you just feel for him so much 😭. He’s fumbling around stuttering like a child and of course it’s not working. Of course the formulaic neat-little-bow 12 steps approach is not vast enough to amend the kind of shit Armand’s done and the history he has with these people. But the heartbreaking part is he really genuinely is being sincere. He really is trying to be good, he’s just so so unable to connect with people in the fundamental common ways that social interaction is built on.

His apology notes are written like ChatGPT or some weird overly formal archaic textbook summary of his history, and he reads his own words from the “deepest regions of his soul” sounding like a phone operator unconfidently rehearsing the side effects of a bowel softener. He’s staring at the page with his hand shaking without a whiff of earnestness on his flat placid face, and I can’t blame lestat or Daniel at all for laughing in his face and calling bullshit. But I understand him I really do and god it’s sad.

I feel like such a big part of the disconnect with that part of the fandom that theorizes every single thing Armand does and says, regardless of logic or characterization or plot, is some sort of deeply contrived elaborate evil lie or scheme is because they fail to understand that Armand is just very legitimately awkward 💀. Like yes he is dangerous, yes he is powerful, yes he is very old, but this does not somehow contradict the idea that he is genuinely just awkward and not that clever and not great at communicating like a person.

My coven is Claudia.

Referencing Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss