eagna-eilis

- in The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice

Even for people who haven't read the books, are they missing all the other things the show is about???

Such as... cycles of trauma, the question of how people who exist outside of or on the fringes of human society relate to one another, all the moral knottiness of having to take life to sustain your own, the quandry of bringing somebody else into that existence to stem loneliness only for one or both of you to feel that you have condemned them, the deeply interesting experience of how immortality forces the vampire to exist in contexts vastly different from their context of origin and with wildly different social values, how to keep up with those changes, how characters from these wildly different contexts relate to each other (how an 18th century European aristocrat can or cannot relate to an 20th century Black Southern girl, to give one of a bazillion examples), the edifying nature of art and music, the question of enduring when the only way to make your life end is to do it intentionally, how narrativisation and renarrativisation of our lives' events can impact our identities, the goddamn history of vampires, ALL OF IT.

And that's not even bringing in all the other interesting things from the books, or the ways these manifest in the books. (I'm on a PL trilogy reread rn to keep me going until Sunday and so thinking about Anne's mythology and philosophy a lot).

If the viewer isn't paying heed to all the other aspects of the show, they are missing out on so much. It IS about relationships, but in a more general and interesting way than just 'who put what bits where' or 'when will pretty men smooch'. Immortality and the parasitic nature of how it is sustained complicates EVERYTHING in these characters' lives.

It's not a Mills and Boon with fangs. (No shade on romance novels, I myself go through them like NOLA Louis goes through rats). It's complex. Someone yesterday asked you why you want a queer show to not have payoff for its central romance quickly. I want to ask them why they don't want a queer show to be about all sorts of things beyond sexual dynamics. It strikes me that many viewers are so yaoi poisoned that they are treating these complex characters like fetish objects to be smushed together at will for their own gratification, with no care or love for the wider mythos or thematic questions.

Let it be complicated. Let it be art, ffs.

Sorry for the rant, I am just quite annoyed by how much nagging BS you're getting. It feels so shitty for us old guard VC fans that we are getting this wonderful adaptation that we wish to enjoy in community with one another only for it to be overtaken by flat interpretation, shipping wars, and toxic fandom discourse.

Thank you for all you do. One week to go!! 💚

One week to go!! *hugs*

And yeah, it's... well.

I kind of blame the way the first seasons were framed within the show. Louis' tale had such a focus on the "jealousy" aspects in a concentrated effort to not address the vampiric aspects that a lot of all this *waves hand* flies over people's heads. Hence all the human AUs on Ao3, too.

But that is very much what the VC are about, yes.