Emeraldine

Armand considers telling Daniel:

The time he bit him (they had a certain understanding in the 80s) and Danny said, “You aren’t gonna buy a lady a drink first?” as Arun’s latched gum-deep into his neck. It surprised him; snorted blood through his nose.

Dabbing at his nostrils in shock. Daniel laughing at his expression. Arun saying, “Apologies, that’s… never happened before,” as wetness sloughs from his lips.

Danny’s hand on Arun’s hip, murmuring, “Sure, well, I am gonna see if I can make it happen again.”

But that’s not love, that’s not proof for an investigative journalist.

He considers telling Daniel: holding his hand in places where it wouldn’t be safe to do so; and wiping the minds of anyone who objected.

He considers telling Daniel: visiting him in Paris, tutting at the tourist attractions, playing footsie in cafés, kissing in hotel rooms where it felt like romance.

He considers telling Daniel: reading his articles, sometimes as he’s writing them; debating the journalist on Soviet politics to be a nuisance, until Molloy throws his pen at him.

Instead, Armand tells Daniel the times he’s seen him broken.

All the times Daniel’s sorrow has really been his own fault.

Times Daniel has indulged, or used his small authority to inflict pain, or relapsed, or huddled up in self-pity. I love that man. I love him too. I’d make his life easier, I’d want him, he couldn’t hurt me- he couldn’t destroy me like he’s destroyed his wives, as he’s destroyed his children, I can take it, I can take whatever you give me, Daniel. Please. Armand says, “Like Lestat and Sofia. I want to be your Maker.”

i'd be interested in paralleling Lestat's cavalier and unbothered attitude to being stopped by police (with his vampiric power over humans standing as a proxy for the protection of his whiteness) with Blade being (unsuccessfully) shot at by police for fighting a (white) vampire in the hospital (because the police are complicit and in service to hegemonic vampirism)

The power of old man yaoi cannot be contained

hello anon, thank you for this question :) it is one of my most liked posts so i was hoping someone would ask me about it lol

in the books, the wolfkiller scene constitutes lestat's first full inhabitation of the masculine role expected of him. the rifle, the horse, and the mastiffs, each given to him by gabrielle, function as the symbolic instruments through which he performs manhood: the horse embodies courage and nobility, the mastiffs represent aggression, and the rifle serves as an unmistakably phallic emblem of masculine violence. before lestat ever confronts the wolves, gabrielle has already furnished him with the means through which that confrontation becomes possible, so he may embody the very ideal of manliness that she herself longs to possess. the victory belongs to lestat, yet it also belongs to gabrielle, whose ambitions have been displaced onto her son.

though, from lestat's perspective, it is not a victory. in fact, the scene itself is written like a rape sequence, with sexually violent imagery such as fangs penetrating flesh, physical descriptions of "lunging" and "thrusting", and lestat's blood soaking into the snow. even after the wolves are dead, the narrative refuses the satisfaction of heroism. instead, it lingers upon the disemboweled mastiffs and his mare's "dark broken body against the whiteness of the snow. . . dead hindquarters and the struggling forelegs," until lestat is forced to end her suffering himself. by the time he returns home, he reflects: "i think i was not lestat. i was someone else altogether."

there are also eight wolves in total, while the lioncourt bloodline consists of seven children and the marquis. i have always found that parallel difficult to ignore, especially given gabrielle's history of being a child bride (and the implication that lestat was assaulted by his father when he was young). what appears to be an initiation into manhood is simultaneously an externalization of familial violence and patriarchal structures that oppress lestat and his mother. this is precisely why gabrielle's response matters so much. after the attack, she attempts to emphasize with lestat by comparing his slaughter of the wolves to the labor of bearing her children. lestat has not simply enacted the masculine ideal gabrielle once imagined for herself; he has also inhabited the vulnerable maternal body through which she herself suffered. lestat was forced into being a man, just as gabrielle was forced into being a woman.

when i say that the wolfkiller scene is about gabrielle "giving birth" to lestat, i mean that almost literally. the novel first presents the scene as lestat's symbolic birth into manhood, then immediately has gabrielle reinterpret that "birth" through her own experience of marital rape and childbirth.

Because gooooood lord, on a rewatch, IWTV s1 &2 definitely had the saving grace of a 'mortal, human character' actively questioning the story being told.

I have no doubt that helped suspension of disbelief for the tale that was being told. It actually really grounded the emotional, humanizing beats. And without that perspective (though Lestat's band does some of this now), it feels like the show in the TVL season is telling the audience that the 'omniscient narration' is fine to believe, because Lestat's perspective being 'posthumous' after a great catastrophe simply means everything that led to it, he had firsthand account of.

And don't get me wrong, while he definely has some of that experience/omniscience, it's clearly not all. We are left, as an audience who want to see more depth both to other characters and said story, floundering more than we would be otherwise. But since it isn't completely omniscient, the audience is also uncertain what to question or what to look for and why.

In general I've been amazed at the structure of this season, because we've got amazing sequences that we don't realize are related until two episodes later and suchlike, and that's soooo hard to pull off. There's foreshadowing, flashbacks and flashforwards, callbacks, situational irony and metaphors and themes that are happening all at once and also all out of order, bathos, pathos, onomonapeia, clear repeated pastiche and imagery, checkov's guns and red herrings, I mean for chrissakes Lestat in his own opening narration in ep 1 calls out in media res by starting in the middle.

The use of so many narrative (literary, poetic, or otherwise) methods makes it clear that the writers know what the fuck they're doing and did it this way to emphasize how Lestat's brain works. Like, no question, they're paying respect to the Lestat character and the epic that is the Vampire Chronicles.

But no wonder there's an audience that can't believe that-we have a supposedly omniscient narrator who's clearly unreliable (to an extent) and as beloved as these characters are, no wonder people want them from a perspective that feels more authentic to the characters we already understand.

Like, god you guys ....rewatch s1 and 2 if you've got the time. Lestat's perspective is WILD and that has never been more clear to me than rewatching the s1 finale and the s2 opener.

From that point actually....rewatch the TVL opener. The amount of narrative methods packed into literally every single second of ep1 is fucking crazy.

MARIUS IS A DEAD BLOND

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.

Is Hannibal in love with me?

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE 3.05: New York TVLTwT/IWTVTwT Version.

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE 3.04: The Devils Road TVLTwT/IWTVTwT Version.