I think to me one of iwtvs biggest issues is that they went into the show operating on the fundamental assumption that their entire audience already cares about Lestat (which, obviously, many people do but that doesn't excuse lazy writing) and thus have largely failed to ACTUALLY provide any substantial reason for their audience to care about him beyond being like "well he's lestat, of course everyone loves lestat, what are you doing here if you don't love lestat??" And it's like idk man that's not enough for me! I need you to actually make me care! I need something more compelling than "his mom was mean" that offers a real throughline to his flaws established back in the first season!
I think he's actually the weakest written character BECAUSE of rolins blatant favoritism toward him because thus far he's largely relying on Sam's charisma, a pre-existing book fanbase, and fandom bias toward hot white men rather than actually writing him well
Honestly this doesn't need much added to it; it's a whole thesis statement. You're absolutely, perfectly right.
The producers/writers/creative team is acting like Lestat is so iconic everyone already knows (and likes!) him. They don't have to bother explaining certain things, or making their characterization make sense across seasons.
They've been hugging that copy of TVL and treating it the way other big franchise adaptations treat their source material. But the thing they don't seem to understand is that The Vampire Chronicles are VERY different than say, like. Lord of the Rings. Or Game of Thrones. Or Marvel.
In the audience makeup.
In terms of what this particular bookish audience wants.
In terms of how iconic and well-known and well-liked the source material even actually is. Including (and even especially) Lestat as a character.
Lestat isn't like Spiderman. Half the fandom barely knew who Lestat was before they started watching the show, which has so far given us
complicatedly shitty husband Lestat in s1
a mirage of a guy who wasn't really there so isn't actually the real character in most of s2
brief moments of the guy again being maybe shitty or not, for the moment left ambiguous, in one single episode
plus one nice reunion scene that addresses none of the rest of anything directly at the end the first 2 seasons.
And that's all just stuff the show-only audience would have to work with, in terms of buying into this guy at this point.
That's not even getting into it being much more complicated when you think of the book readers. Many of whom, unlike more traditional genre fantasy, don't tend to put Anne Rice and her writing on an uncritique-able pedestal.
The other half of the fandom that came from the movies/books already has a complicated and at times unpleasant relationship to the character and his centrality. Because Anne Rice also infamously did a bad job justifying her shift from Louis to Lestat as protagonist in the books. When it comes to greenlighting a TVC adaptation, anyone who actually spent any time in the fandom would know when they went to adapt this whole thing: Anne Rice's approach to character writing and POV shifts is definitely a bug, not a feature. (I genuinely believe part of what has been going wrong with the show overall is that amc seems to have bought the rights to TVC thinking it was going to be some sort of franchise cash cow. When uhhh. I absolutely hate to say it, but. Queer stuff usually doesn't work like that. Because it's not mainstream enough in its viewerbase. And that's not to mention that they just seem to have a very odd understanding on a fundamental level of like. Who even really likes the TVC material. What kind of fan those people even are.)
Many book fans were excited and hopeful to see the show writers try to make sense of the nonsensical, unexplained twist that came from that shift in who the real main character was. And why they were so suddenly expected to care. Anne Rice infamously sort of flubbed this with her own audience. A lot of her own readers were very ready to see it get handled better. Not to see it get LESS justified. Not to see more of the same.
So yeah. The idea of treating Lestat like he's so iconic he needs no explanation or re-introduction? That being expected to like him requires no justification? Especially with something as jarring as a POV shift?
Wild. This is a particularly risky fandom to take that tactic with.
But! I guess we'll see how it goes in the rest of the season!
