the curves of your lips rewrite history

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE 3.07: The Failures TVLTwT/IWTVTwT Version.

did Armand partake in the ruthless murder of Claudia? absolutely.

did Louis enable the fucked up power dynamics of pimp/sex slave between him and Armand? absolutely.

was Lestat a victim? absolutely.

did he also perpetuate the same cycles of abuse he himself was a victim of? absolutely.

do i wish the season had a different pacing and had more scenes from the TVL book? absolutely.

do i think the season works as a part 1 of 2 of a very long arc? absolutely (and i had soooo much fun watching it).

i have said this a billion times already but i do believe complexity and nuance are the key words here.

But like Pinkerton, guys like him still exist. He's the guy who wants to date Asian girls before settling down with a white wife. Literally, that's not even a joke. Or in the modern day he might be the 19 year old frat boy who thinks it's okay to flirt or worse with girls barely in high school, and groom and manipulate them into believing that he actually cares about them. Those kinds of guys still exist.

Or Scarpia with his hiding behind religion and wanting to break women.

ɪɴᴛᴇʀᴠɪᴇᴡ ᴡɪᴛʜ ᴛʜᴇ ᴠᴀᴍᴘɪʀᴇ 𝚂𝟹 ᴀᴋᴀ ᴛʜᴇ ᴠᴀᴍᴘɪʀᴇ ʟᴇꜱᴛᴀᴛ (𝟸𝟶𝟸𝟼) ᴍɪʀʀᴏʀɪɴɢ ᴠᴇʟᴠᴇᴛ ɢᴏʟᴅᴍɪɴᴇ (𝚄𝙺-𝚄𝚂𝙰, 𝟷𝟿𝟿𝟾) ʙʏ ᴛᴏᴅᴅ ʜᴀʏɴᴇꜱ

bonus: bespectacled Real!Rashid / ChristianBale!Arthur

Both amused and irritated, Byron retaliated in a letter to his publisher thus:

"Blessings on his experience! ... did he never spill a dish of tea over his testicles in handing the cup to his charmer, to the great shame of his nankeen breeches? - did he never swim in the sea at Noonday, with the Sun in his eyes and on his head? ... did he never draw his foot out of a tub of too hot water, damning his eyes, & his valet's? Did he never inject for a Gonorrhea? - or make water through an ulcerated Urethra? - was he ever in a Turkish bath - that marble paradise of sherbet and sodomy?"

Detail from The Funeral of Shelley,  Louis Édouard Fournier, 1889.

Byron did go swimming, but this was not an uncaring act. He is often characterised as indifferent to Percy’s death due to recounting the funeral dispassionately in a letter to Hobhouse, but this was his characteristic mode when he wished to distance himself from something he had found distressing. Additionally, Hobhouse hated Shelley and would not have had much sympathy for him going out in bad weather against the advice of seasoned italian sailors. Byron’s later reflections were much more harrowing, and his actions spoke volumes.

In actual fact, he had poured a lot of resources into both finding the bodies, paying Italian authorities for the treatment of their remains, and helping and funding Trelawney planning the funerals. He had also helped him to source frankincense and other aromatics to stifle the smell of burning flesh, and he was very upset by how Shelley and the others no longer resembled their living selves at all. He acted the stoic after the fact, but at the time of the cremations, he stripped off his clothes and waded into the water to escape the visuals and the literal smell of his friend burning. Leigh Hunt and Edward Trelawney fought over claiming Shelley’s heart (or a lump of organ meat that refused to burn), and Byron literally had to embarrass Hunt into giving it to Mary later.

This “swim” actually turned into a four hour fete of physical endurance that made him seriously ill. Byron was suffering from intense sunburn and also heat stroke after the exertion in the summer sun, something that took such a toll on him that he remarked several times in letters to friends that he had never physically recovered from it. Through today’s lens we can conjecture that this could even have been the start of the delicate state of health that caused him to succumb to the illness that killed him some months later in Greece.

Immediately after Percy’s death, Byron funded Mary Shelley and her child both staying in Pisa with the Hunts and, when she decided to return to England, shipping hers and Percy’s things home with her. Some weeks later he also sent her the money to travel home in comfort, but Leigh Hunt stole this money and lied to her that Byron had never sent it (by this time he was on his way to Greece), casting a pall over their very close friendship.