i wish vampires were real

Oh please talk about this further…

I would love to

while IWTV the series is very very similar, thematically, to IWTV the novel, one of the largest changes is they type of story that is being told. as a novel, IWTV was a way that AR coped with the death and loss of her child. she's stated in her autobiography and biography that in IWTV, she was Louis, her husband Stan was Lestat, and her daughter Michele was Claudia. this was, primarily, how she dealt with these factors: that her husband became domineering and controlling in the face of an uncontrollable situation (Michele's sickness and eventual death), that she became passive in the face of that same situation, and that Michele grew up far far too fast, was a little adult in a child's body by the end. in turn, IWTV the novel is written as a letter of grief, and the interview portion of the novel is meant to pose as a warning. we see some of this in the 1973 interview in the show, but it's heavier in the novel. in the show, Louis barely gets through the story when talking to Daniel before Daniel interjects with the "Give it [vampirism] to me!" while in the book Louis gets through the entire story before Daniel finally goes, "Is that it!? That can't be it! Make me a vampire!" but one thing is very consistent which is Louis' anger at Daniel's request. he's so upset that that is what Daniel takes from the interview. this was to be a warning! not an encouragement.

the show doesn't work in this same manner though, especially (obviously) the 2022!interview. from the first scene of Louis and Daniel together in the living area of the penthouse, we learn this isn't the same. Daniel asks what has changed, and Louis says, "the world...me...and I, too, find the tapes lacking...truth and reconciliation." this interview, the show, is not a letter of grief, it is not a warning: it is an adventure, a search for truth.

the hero's journey has a general format that it follows. because the hero's journey has existed since the very beginning of storytelling, there are a lot of deviations, but the general format is as follows: - the hero has some kind of call to an adventure or journey - the needed aid - the first threshold where the hero goes into the unknown - the willingness to change - the trials of transformation - atonement - apotheosis - the achievement - refusal - the final fight and rescue - the crossing back on the threshold - freedom to live this is exactly what Louis goes through in IWTV. - he has a call to adventure (the need to uncover the truth and the interview itself is the journey) - the needed aid (Daniel), the first threshold (the beginning of retelling the interview with more nuance) - the willingness to change (the first time Louis is confronted with questions ("Was it raining, Louis?" and the realization on Louis' face that he doesn't know things as well as he maybe thought he did)) - the trials of transformation (the interview continuing and more things coming to light) - atonement (the s1 finale and what it reveals about Armand and about Louis' memories) - apotheosis (the truth is revealed in the season 2 finale) - refusal (Louis doesn't believe it at first (this is very very very brief in the show)) - the final fight and rescue (the final confrontation with Armand, the shaking of hands with Daniel) - the crossing back on the threshold (going back to New Orleans and Lestat and them talking about Claudia) - freedom to live ("I own the night")

These were a lot harder, since there's no in-universe context for where these books were--they could've been in NOLA (1132, the DPDL estate), or Armand's office at TdV, or Loumand's Dubai penthouse, or wherever. So I had to just guess for most of these. 🤷‍♂️

RENAISSANCE - 18th CENTURY

1533-1592: Essais Montaigne (Claudia & Louis)

1793-1875: Le Négrier ("The Slaver") - Edouard Corbière (x x x) (The Unholy Family)

19th CENTURY

1812 - 1827: Robinson Suisse - Johann David Wyss (The Unholy Family)

1827: Vie de Napoleon - Walter Scott

1847: Le Cousin Pons - Honoré de Balzac (Louis & Claudia vs TdV) (x)

1852: Les robinsons de terre ferme - Mayne Reid (Louis & Claudia…?)

1862-1941: Lettres de femmes -Marcel Prévost (Claudeleine)

1864: La San-Felice, Tome 03 - Alexandre Dumas (Claudia vs TdV)

1866/1903: Dělníci moře - Victor Hugo (Czech translation Toilers of the Sea) (Lestat) (x)

1869: Romain Kalbris, the Adventures of a Runaway by Land and Sea - Hector Malot (Lestat / TVL) (x x x)

1871: Après la pluie, le beau temps - Countess of Ségur (Claudia) (x)

1872: A Satchel Guide to Europe - William James Rolfe, William Day Crockett (Claudia)

1875: Bible (A.J. Holman & Co.) (I reckon this belonged to either Father Matthias or the DPDLs, since it's ab American Bible company making these--unless Lestat bought it for Louis as one of his poost-Ep5 Fight mea culpas.)

1877: L'Olonnais - Gustave Aimard (Lestat)

1882 - 1886: Le Tour du Monde (Claudia)

1894: Le Lys Rouge - Anatole France (Loustat vs Loumand)

1896: Revue Spirite - Allan Kardec (x) (I wonder if this was one of Louis' books, and if he'd been contemplating contacting ghost!Claudia for a while.... 👀)

1899: The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, Vol. IV - William Dwight Whitney, Benjamin Eli Smith

20th CENTURY

1900: Théatre de J. Racine - Ernest Flammarion (TdV)

1903: La Mortelle impuissance: roman du dilettantisme ("Mortal Impotence: A Novel of Dilettantism") - Maffeo Charles Poinsot, Georges Normandy (x) (Louis’ coming of age & gay crisis)

1905: Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustre - Claude Auge (illustrated French encyclopedia)

1914: Au bord du gouffre - Victor Margueritte (WWI & Jonah...?)

1920: Les Guides Bleus Suisse - Marcel Monmarche (Claudia...?)

1923: Le Compagnon - Victor Margueritte (Claudia)

1927: La Retraite Ardente - Marcel Prévost (Claudeleine...?)

1928: Le Nouvel anacharsis - Abel Hermant (Louis & Paul...?)

1929: La France & ses colonies au XIXe siècle - Ernest Lalanne (NOLA)

1934: Die Herden Gottes - Hans Tolten (1x7, The Unholy Family’s “plan” to migrate to Argentina) (x)

1940s: Sélection du livre - La vie quotidienne à l'Elysée au temps de Charles de Gaulle, La pionnière, Le négociateur, L'enfant et l'anniverssaire oublié ("Book Selection — Daily Life at the Élysée Palace in the Time of Charles de Gaulle, The Pioneer, The Negotiator, The Child and the Forgotten Birthday") - Rudolph Frank Claude Dulong, Jeanne Williams, Frederick Forsyth (2x2 Louis; 2x6 Madeleine)

1942: L'Étranger - Albert Camus (2x2 Daniel vs Louis)

1947: Les Bonnes -Jean Genet (1x7 Claudia’s Murder Plot)

Books from the auction that I skipped and did not put on the list:

what mattered the most in that scene (and their subsequent argument) is that it revealed hidden dynamic in dubai apartment. and i think once you fully realize all the implications of that scene, you'll also realize that there's no point at all to defend armand with technicality of "who did this".

season 1 depicted louis as someone who had full power in the apartment, since armand was pretending to be a member of the staff, someone who served louis. after it's revealed to be a disguise, armand and louis give another, more subtle performance instead: that they're equals, that they're romantic partners who do everything together. there are some suspicious details you can notice in their interactions etc, but they're almost always downplayed, made to be seen as some sorta compromise ("could i see the pages we removed?" - "we made an agreement").

and the thing is, this is the first moment when we see something very clear in their dynamic, something bigger than all the hints we got before it. the scene still doesn't say it explicitly, but it's a great opening for what's gonna be revealed in s2e5. so it's still subtle but it's also not subtle enough to be ignored anymore.

the show does some interesting things there, and i greatly enjoy thinking about them. let's look at some of them closely.

it's downplayed a thousand percent, both in surety and degree. he was born right after the civil war and riiiiight before the forceful of reconstruction. there are so many very blatant conclusions we can draw from this that are horrifying at every single level. from the start he tells us that de pointe du lac is of the lac plantation--like many free black people from the 19thc and their descendants he got his last name from the ppl that enslaved them, and since that's from his father and he specifies that his daddy's father was the one who inherited the plantation, we can assume his grandfather was born enslaved--grandfather first to have plantation implies first to be free, then his daddy loses all the money (prob partly from the encroaching sweep of jim crow, the same reason louis lost all his businesses after less than 2 decades), and the only way his grandfather would've gotten the plantation was manumission and inheritance from his slaver father who raped his mother who had probably been his favorite victim. and then florence either had the same backdrop (not likely) or was also born enslaved (most likely) prior to abolition, and i say most likely bc she wouldve been born 1840s/1850s and by then the french hierarchy of white mixed black was long gone and across the south & especially the deep south, slavery had tightened up a lot and at a peak... so probably one of many lightskin black people whose mother was raped by a white slaver. that's the family and life he's born into! that's not even generational trauma, that's just trauma, no modifiers. chattel slavery is downplayed a lot in general, and i think something that even black ppl can downplay is the depths of rape required to have as many lighter skinned black ppl as we do in the americas. i mean it's the largest and worst sex trafficking operation in the history of the world. (that the symbol of jim crow is lynching, a usually masculine violence, instead of the much much MUCH more pervasive white male rape of black women, which unfortunately made claudia getting assaulted much more common than them getting lynched).

There's something about gaining rights in your living or your parents living memory only to lose them in your lifetime.

Because Louis is a specific type of creole and they're in New Orleans, Louis has a front seat to all of this Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction trauma.

Homer Plessy in Plessy v. Ferguson(1896), the plaintiff in the "separate but equal" case, went to St. Augustine, like the Du Lac family. Louis would've been about 12-18 from the time the Separate Car Act (1890) was passed to when the Supreme Court upheld the law. The very religious Paul would've been 9-15. Comité des Citoyens, the civil rights group that brought the lawsuit challenging the railroad car law, was full of wealthy Creoles and gens des couleurs, presumably like his father and mother.

If Reconstruction and its aftermath was actually taught in schools, you'd know for example:

Louis saying that Bruce burned on a bridge on Caddo Lake as part of his cover story for the coven about "Bruce" when he and Paul used to fish with their father... so loaded with possible trauma. Caddo Parish was notoriously violent.

Why might the filmmakers have chosen to include references to A Doll's House, Madame Bovary, Marriage In A Free Society by Edward Carpenter, and Pelléas et Mélisande? What themes, if any, do these references reinforce?

Claudia calls Louis "the housewife" and Louis later describes himself as "ignoring all other duties of the role Claudia had mocked me for... the unhappy housewife." What does this indicate about attitudes towards gender and sexuality in the society in which the characters live? What is the significance of the word "role" here in relation to Lestat's promise in the first episode to free Louis from "all these roles you conform to"?

When Claudia first introduces the idea of reconceptualizing her relationship to Louis and Lestat as a sister, what does Lestat's reaction suggest about his opinion? In the following episode, when Lestat calls Claudia "sister, daughter, infant death," what is his tone?

In the context of the story, what is a "maker"? What kind of status in the household does Lestat believe a maker should have?

Does becoming vampires allow the characters to escape the social structures of the world around them, or do they remain trapped? In what ways, if any, does sociocultural context in regards to gender, race, sexuality, and family influence the characters and their relationships?

8. Is Louis compared to cisgendered figures of Black masculinity in the Jim Crow era such as Paul Robeson, Richard Wright’s insert character ‘Bigger Thomas’, Jack Johnson, and social activists like Booker T. Washington & W.E.B. Dubois? If he is not, then why? [Hint: refer to your answers for Q#2 & #3]

9. What is the significance of the Storyville district in historical Black music culture, and why is AMC Louis now positioned here? What law was passed in November 1917 that is directly named in AMC’s Interview with the Vampire 1x03, and what is the significance of that with respect to Louis’s character arc and the introduction of Claudia here?

first of all, empathy isn't a good thing by itself, it's basically a thing where you feel strongly what other people feel. having emotional empathy isn't the same thing as being a good person, despite what many people on the internet would want you to believe. you just live with the awareness of other people's feelings, and what would actually determine if you're a good person or not is how you choose to act on it. people often confuse empathy with "compassion" and "sympathy".

emotional empathy is not something you control and i can believe wholeheartedly that louis is a very empathetic person. it's what makes him spiral over other people's pain, what makes him cry over iolanta, what amplify his catholic guilt, what makes him forgive his lovers over and over again. it's very likely something he developed in his childhood, as a result of growing up with moody, critical and demanding mother he had to please. notice how she's the first (the only?) family member whose mind he tried to read.