dumb

The issue isn't that viewers like myself don't want to feel uncomfortable. The issue is that, in this Gothic Horror show, Black characters disproportionately bear the brunt of the violence.

Take this season finale as an example.

At the end of Episode 6, two characters are beheaded. Yet in Episode 7, we are shown the severed head and mutilated body of the black character in explicit details, while the white character's mutilated body is shown only briefly and out of focus, and his severed head is hidden from us.

Louis's arc is presented as a parallel to Lestat's. Both characters are placed in situations where they must confront people they have wronged, or at least people the narrative insists they have wronged, as well as their pasts, relationships, and mistakes. (Personally, I don't believe Louis owes Armand anything, but the narrative clearly wants the audience to think otherwise.🙄🙄🙄)

Yet the way these parallel journeys are depicted are drastically different.

louis was coerced, manipulated, intentionally isolated by lestat. lestat killed lily, the only person who he confided to, accelerated louis into severing contact with his family (whom he did love), and LOATHED paul from the one instance where he met him, because it was clear he did not approve of them. paul’s death and his stance on lestat was the eerie foreshadowing for how lestat would go on to treat louis throughout season one. i.e., enraged that in spite of all his UNWANTED efforts to receive louis’ unconditional affection, there was deep resentment from louis for stripping of something that he valued as much as his humanity.

and louis was not resentful because it is his nature. he was not cold to him because “it is his father’s way” like paul said. he was cold to him because louis is embittered by the fact that the majority of his suffering would have never happened if he had never met lestat. just as the majority of his greatest euphoria would have never happened if he’d met lestat: claudia entering their life, becoming bold enough to truly define who he is, experiencing a love that he was constantly told was wrong and unholy. but none of that changes the fact that lestat TRAPPED him—louis is constantly battling between these two opposing facts regarding the love of his life, and he learned to utilize resentment and coldness to make lestat feel the same constant turmoil and insecurity that lestat made HIM feel.

anyways one of terminology we have coined to talk about music is "Knee Music" which is derived from the fact that album covers that show a person's knees tend to sound the same as each other. It's kind of a sleepy, grungy indie folk pop sound with youthful-sounding, vocals that affect a candid and vulnerable feeling.

or anyway we found multiple album covers with knees in quick succession, and they all sounded the same, hence "Knee Music"

For a while, his method was slightly different, instead choosing a random genre and listening to it until he found a song from that genre that he liked.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.