all of this, all of this. it’s august 2026, it’s over, and i’m still trying to remind myself there will be no exploration of the s2 trial. we will not be seeing lestat and armand in 1700s paris. we will not be seeing lestat and armand in the 1940s. there will be no depiction of daniel’s turning. we’re not getting meaningful post-s2 devil’s minion. we’re not going to give auvergne the weight it was due, we’re basically almost entirely vaporizing nicki from the plot, we’re not running away together to paris, lestat’s not working his way up through the ranks at the theater, we’re not really getting into magnus and lestat (beyond the show’s five seconds of an implied fully clothed rape; in the book they actually had conversation that mattered), we’re skipping lestat’s post-turning existential crisis (just this morning i was staring at the ceiling and trying to figure out how the show’s decision to have him return to live with nicki after his turning actually worked), we’re not revisiting nicki’s kidnapping in lestat’s POV, we’re whizzing past gabrielle’s turning, we’re not doing gabrielle’s shedding of her female-presenting life, we will not see lestat wandering the continent looking for marius, we won’t have marius’s sinister luxurious island, we won’t see the weird mutual besotment of lestat and marius.
some souls posit we’ll see some of these things in s4. i mean, maybe you are right. they couldn’t even revisit the trial as heavily implied would happen in s3, but maybe you are right. i have lived on this earth too long to extend my trust like that to them again after everything.
i also conjecture they really, really, desperately wanted to tell a story almost entirely about a rockstar vampire. that a period drama was perhaps less interesting to them than rock n roll hedonism. if an invented rockstar narrative was their priority, yet they couldn’t even divide the season up between the past and present evenly, cutting forward and back equally in good faith, then basically they were uninterested in adapting the novel The Vampire Lestat. so maybe call it something else.
—and i hate to even put this conjecture apologia out into the world, literal blood and stomach acid are running down my lips as i type this—
—is that amc didn’t actually have the money to adapt TVL (the whole-ass property they themselves bought, don’t even get me started omfg), so the writers problem-solved by turning a novel about a guy wanting to tell his story instead be a show about a guy who didn’t want to tell his story [because they couldn’t afford to depict it] but see it’s okay bc it sneaks up on him Through His Art, very traumatic, so we’ll still get a few tiny flashbacks, see—
the only two things this solution would solve are the money issue and being so bricked up to do a show about a vampire rockstar. which is cool if you’re cool with that, and sucks if you’re me and wanted to see this cast in an adaptation at least vaguely resembling The Vampire Lestat. (yes—change the novel up, sure: I need So Much Louis. I need Daniel. sure, more rockstar. but…also maybe throw in that novel i love, yeah?)
i’d love to know if it really was a money issue/TPTB issue and i need to direct my ire for the rest of my life at AMC Networks, or if this was always the direction of the creator(s) from the word go, and instead i devote my remaining days to grieving storyteller choices. or both. a little bit of both.
2087
tangentwithtanner
origamiaround
yousharknotpass
amandla
