ash (he/him)

the haunted man 🩸 homage to ryan mcginley's photo for bat for lashes' similarly titled album

he could say literally anything else but he brought up the lamest plot point where he had the least narrative agency. and i think it's indeed a writing problem: they wanted louis to say something unhinged and mean and get wacked for it by claudia, but they could only use what happened in this season.

like, walk with me (and you know how much i love louis) and imagine if louis said "you should be thanking me for following you around when no one else ever cared about you". imagine if he said "you should be thanking me for giving you 50 years of life". like, it'd infuriate me and it'd be perfectly in-character (like, welcome back, florence de pointe du lac) and i can imagine what claudia would have to say in response!

louis was sitting there at the trial watching lestat say the most disgusting shit about him and he still couldn’t stop loving him. and we agreed he was insane for that, and we wanted more. louis couldn't stop loving lestat and longing for him even when he thought lestat wanted to kill him. when he was angry at him. when he was scared of him. but in s3 i simply can't feel anything anymore.

i know more great loustat scenes are coming soon but i really just... i think i'll have troubles in believing the sincerity of it after these 4 episodes. one, two, five great scenes won't replace the ever-present yearning in s1&2 and the devastating nature of it.

we keep being told again and again that's intentional. and sure, it is! he's isolated and in a downward spiral and doesn't want to tell daniel about his fucked-up past! i believe you! but i don't need 5 episodes of this kind of stasis and eye-rolling meme references when we only have 7 to tell a story, or at least part of it.

we keep being beaten over the head with gabi in nearly every scene. any references to louis are about how angry lestat is about a book louis didn't even write and didn't consent to get published.

i understood the anger at the start. hell, i still understand it. it's characteristic of lestat. but we've wasted precious airtime on barely-there flashback scenes (and the ones that were there, prior to episode 3 or so, were very cheap-looking), superfluous footage of a band we somehow still barely get to know, and characters telling us exactly what's happened

--(i.e., armand telling daniel he watched over him for 52 years...could we have seen flashes of that, like, sprinkled anywhere in the season? saying "well it's lestat's season, we wouldn't see that" doesn't hold up. we got snippets of daniel's life in the first two seasons that were largely told from louis' POV.)--

and now, at the end of episode 5 when we learn lestat has apparently found his true/honest sound via allowing himself to grieve claudia again (a song i do love btw), we have two episodes left of the season. two episodes left to convince the audience that there's still something there in a relationship that was touted as core to the series. and it was, for the first two seasons. louis' love for lestat, as fucked up as it was, remained a through-line in the first two seasons even when he wasn't around. i've felt none of that from lestat this entire season, which is so out of character for him. and if i'm supposed to feel it next episode, based on interactions that happen offscreen....what am i even watching for, then?

you could say "well, it's because he was angry." but despite that anger louis should've been haunting his ass at every turn. lestat would've welcomed it. why did dream/muse louis only make an appearance in ep 5? why was "big bad wolf" only released now, not even teased prior to the latter half of the season, if it was written out of lestat's anger toward louis at the time the season opens?

i'm not asking for loustat to even get back together. i'm just asking for their interactions to feel earned. the end of season 2, that final scene...that felt earned.

Like, everyone "likes" her! But in that very "girl boss girl power" white feminism way where they erase everything about the source of the power out, in order to subsume it. And it's weird because to me, it showed that, just like how they did with Louis, they did not engage with how Claudia's Blackness was another important part of her story. Despite it being quite spoonfed in season 2, tbh.

Think about it. Claudia is 1) Black, 2) female, 3) queer, and 4) trapped in a child's body, forever. This is like, the torment nexus of Lacking Power and Autonomy In Society 😭 Going unheard, that resentment against the world for not taking her and her needs and her desires seriously, from inside the home and on. Of having to build a wall of strength and resilience to protect herself, of always Taking Care of Business because her goof ass brother certainly isn't gonna do it! Of having to grasp power her own way, because it will never be considered for her. Yet, somehow still a threat.

To me, AMCs Claudia is a very beautifully written example of a Black Woman that is Angry, who would be treated like an Angry Black Woman. So many of these fans HATE real world Claudia's! Because I've seen her rage and exhaustion, her fire to fight (Akasha's too), in so many of us. And yet we don't get the girl power, girl boss label- until it's time to Need us. Otherwise, you're just a Bully.

It's complicated because on the one hand I can absolutely see Lestat's version of Daniel being a kind of dialed up version of reality, making him extra rude, extra loud mouthed, and also tacking on him being loudly racist and homophobic too. But if that was the case I think they should have made that more overt in Lestat and Daniel's dynamic, even if it was just a throwaway line from Lestat implying that Daniel is probably a racist or something, just something to lay a trail of breadcrumbs to that. It's annoying because I don't want this show to have to hold my hand and explain it's intentions, but they've kind of dug their own grave with this one.

The problem I have is that the show has kind of lost any grace I might have been willing to give it by being so loud and insistent about this season being something entirely new and trying to separate it from the previous two seasons. If this was Interview With The Vampire Season 3, I might have been a lot more willing to let my trust in the writers from their racial storytelling and sensitivity carry forward into this season, but instead they've axed their Black creatives and hailed this as a separate project, something that can be watched without the first two seasons (I do not agree AT ALL that that is the case either), something that an audience who didn't enjoy the first two seasons can love. And I just have to question who exactly this new audience that they're trying to reach is, because unfortunately the more the season goes on the more it looks like they're trying to bring back a white audience who were alienated by a show which centered around a Black man and his racial identity.