my daughter was my sister was my throw pillow

Wake up DanLou nation

Interview with the Vampire (2022)

SEASON 1 - EPISODE 2: "AFTER THE PHANTOMS OF YOUR FORMER SELF"

The drop

Louis with full body burns multiple times

Claudia’s rape

Legs slashed during the trial

And now this

Like I get it’s a gothic horror. But none of these were even in the book

Nothing remotely on the same level of brutality is every done to any white characters

And most importantly it is never approached with the same level of empathy or gravity the white characters’ pain and trauma are treated with

Like it doesn’t even register to these people the things they are showing carry more weight than the average shocking sensationalist vampire tv show fair.

Because to these writers and a lot of the audience it seems black pain is not really like. Worth consideration or empathy.

And the writing really was on the wall from the beginning this has always been a throughline

but I kept giving them the benefit of the doubt because I thought they were making an honest attempt to say anything meaningful about abuse, racism, how these societal power dynamics color the interpersonal.

The early episode leak. The conspiracy theories about a secret, true finale that will fix everything. The sudden genre pivot to Saw-like horror. The protagonist’s suppressed memory of a murdered childhood friend. The kiss that wasn’t.

i mean, at this point these are basically ocs, including lestat. arguably he's even more mischaracterised than he already was. in the novels, the emotional structure of the relationship is completely different. what produces lestat's fixation on gabrielle is her radical emotional detachment, combined, i would argue, with strong textual AND subtextual suggestions of abuse from a third party--the marquis. despite everything, she is still the one person he experiences as loving him, and the text repeatedly implies that she is trapped within the same system that is damaging him. when lestat says he loses her behind many doors, the image evokes both emotional withdrawal and material confinement. lestat himself is imprisoned and beaten by his father. gabrielle is confined by an aristocratic marriage whose primary function is dynastic reproduction. anne rice never states it outright, but the novel is haunted by the possibility that lestat and his brothers are the products of marital rape. what makes lestat identify so strongly with gabrielle is that he recognises in her another victim of the same structure that has shaped his own life. the forms of violence are different, but the novel persistently places them in relation to one another. they come to see themselves almost as extensions of one another because each recognises in the other the marks of a shared captivity.

the show seems to be gesturing towards some version of this dynamic but fails to articulate it. gabrielle pursuing lestat sexually, or appearing to demand sex was simply not part of their relationship in the books. anne rice's treatment of incest is far stranger and more complex than that. in a recognisably female gothic mode, the locus of injury is displaced away from the mother-son relationship itself and located instead in the patriarchal structures that organise both their lives. more specifically, the aristocratic structures that reduce gabrielle to a wife and mother and lestat to an heir and son. neither functions primarily as the other's victimiser.

which is why i think what you're describing is much closer to the logic of the "viaticum for the marquise" scene. the traditional viaticum prepares someone for death; lestat's intervention interrupts that process. by making gabrielle a vampire, he is not simply saving her life but severing her from the identities that have defined and imprisoned her. the marquise and the wife die. in an important sense, the mother dies as well. the scene is incestuous in the same way much of anne rice's vampire symbolism is incestuous. blood functions as the closest equivalent to sexual consummation in the chronicles, and the novel is perfectly aware of the implications. but the point is not that a hidden sexual desire is finally being fulfilled. the point is that the social identities which made them mother and son are themselves being dismantled. lestat is quite literally snatching gabrielle away from the patriarchal bonds that made her a mother in the first place.

that is what makes the relationship so difficult and so unusual. once those bonds have been broken, it is largely lestat who attempts to establish a connection with gabrielle outside the terms that previously governed their lives, and for perhaps the first time she does not entirely withdraw from him. but she has never been permitted to inhabit motherhood except through violence. her children are inseparable from the conditions under which they were conceived. what lestat seeks from her is a form of recognition and intimacy that neither of them has been able to access before. gabrielle is willing to grant it, yet the only available language for that intimacy remains the language of mother and son. what follows is not the fulfilment of a hidden desire but the collapse of a kinship structure that never functioned properly in the first place.

the discomfort of those scenes comes from that contradiction. they are no longer mother and son in any ordinary sense, yet they cannot entirely cease to be mother and son either. anne rice leaves them suspended there. reducing the relationship to gabrielle aggressively pursuing lestat sexually flattens something far more complex and interesting. it replaces a story about damaged kinship + coercive motherhood, and the aftermath of a shared captivity with a far more familiar narrative that the novels were never especially interested in telling.

I stand by my conviction that this is a show that will break your heart if you are a person of colour, because it is a show fundamentally made by white people. My distrust of white people writing PoC comes from a very informed study of media made in the past three decades, and the mistakes that I have seen in the past are being repeated here. Not all the same ones, and not necessarily in the same magnitude as other shows, but beyond the gradation of mistakes, there is a fundamental quality to media made by people of colour, where race informs everything. When white people address race, it is only in certain specifics. Everything that is not specifically labelled as 'race-related' gets treated as neutral (which is to say, it gets treated with a white-default view.)

And that's what this show has been doing and is continuing to do. You can see the specific places where they concientously address race relations, and then you can see all the places where their eye slides off of what the characters are embodying.

And I've done this dance before of book vs movie, and treating the film as fanfic of the book. It's a valid way to approach an adaptation, and I can see a lot of people enjoying bringing the book knowledge to guesses about the show's interpretations and motivations of characters.

But when you change a character's race, you fundamentally change a character. And trying to impose a connection between a white book character and a Black or Brown TV character becomes an exercise in minimising identity. I am not interested in how to squish the impulses and emotions that a South Asian Armand is performing into the box defined by a white Armand.

And what white showmakers repeatedly do is pander to a white gaze--this colourblind casting idea where it doesn't matter what race the actor is because we're here for the character.

I don't watch shows like that. I am here BECAUSE Louis is Black. I am here BECAUSE Claudia is Black. I am here BECAUSE Armand is Brown. Yes, of course they are beloved to me because they are not white. Yes of course, I dislike Lestat more because he is white. This is obvious, this is what any person who has faced racism will bring to a racially diverse piece of media.

If they had genuinely wanted to make a show about problematic mutually abusive vampires where race was not a factor defining their relationships, then they should have made Lestat also not white. (And that would have been easily achievable - they could have taken inspiration from Joseph Bologne.)

I don't have time to write the essay pointing out all the small detailed ways that the show has failed on race, because I just want to express my frustration at the large one. The one where the people in charge are talking about a different version of the characters than the ones I saw on the screen, because of the fundamental incompatibility in how they view race as a factor in shaping a person, and how I do.

I'd like to be able to speculate on things with other fans, to get into Armand especially, to talk about Louis's future and past, but I can't. Because the truth of the characters as I see them isn't what the powers that be define as the truth, and so that makes me a liar.

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