Fallen Rocket

Jacob Anderson on the Ep5 Fight (Pt2: Vulture)

I have an entire post I'm drafting up, but I've decided to save it for after the 3x7 finale, just in case AMC pulls a heinous retcon about the Ep5 Fight out of its arse. Suffice it to say that this is gonna be my manifesto from here on out. I hear you loud and clear, Jacob (x x). 💯

TL;DR: Again: Louis doesn't get violent enough IMO 🔥

Which is precisely why him going after Bruce in S3 is hollow AF, cuz the time to have stood up for Claudia came & went long before The Trial, and long before the Ep5 Fight; or even him finally speaking against Lestat the night Claudia ran away from home in 1923. The very first time Lestat put his hands on Claudia, Louis should've snatched Lestat baldheaded. But ofc it never would've mattered, since Louis was never physically on Lestat's level anyway. But it would've mattered to Claudia, if she thought she really was Louis' #1 priority without them having to kill Lestat first. 🤦‍♂️ Because IWTV is a cautionary tale about failure, and as always, ABUSE.

louis had nothing to do with their traumas and he's the one who needs to be understanding? rolin and hannah, just say that he's the only character who can. just say it out loud already, at the very fucking least instead of saying how louis needed to be humbled or whatever. you have no other character who could feel empathy for the other and you keep torturing him on screen like it's funny. but you keep relying on him to carry this show and all the emotional weight.

Daniel (Alice and Steve)

GIF from @derekstilinski (shakes fist at the GIF search function)

I still have a handful of Joel Fry’s past roles to talk about, but this is a new project, which makes me happy! Be warned, this show isn’t for the faint of heart—the premise is troubling, and there’s a strong secondhand-discomfort factor at various points—but it features yet another really stellar supporting performance from Joel. 

Alice and Steve have known each other for 30 years. While they dated way back when, much of that time has been spent as best friends. When divorced Steve confesses to married-with-kids Alice, “I wish I was in love and…and had a baby!”, she encourages him to look for a younger woman (since most women in their 50s can’t have babies.) Unfortunately for everyone involved, Steve does find a younger woman: Alice’s 26-year-old daughter Izzy, who’s just moved back home after a tough breakup. A drunken hookup turns into a real relationship, and Alice is incensed, ready to burn down all their lives to put a stop to it.

I’m not gonna lie, things get rough. The show takes pains to downplay some of the creepiness inherent in Steve and Izzy getting together, but it obviously can’t be avoided (nor should it.) What’s more, although Alice’s misgivings about the relationship are super valid, she goes about expressing them in the most toxic, scorched-earth way possible. She’s out to punish Steve, and in doing so, she has such tunnel vision that she’s hurting everyone around her, herself included. She interferes with Steve’s career, she humiliates Izzy in front of her friends, she loudly talks about her sexual history with Steve in front of her husband, and just generally, she doesn’t consider anyone’s feelings but her own. Steve is in the most compromised position here, getting together with a woman half his age who he’s known all her life, but Alice’s self-centered viciousness backfires on her to the point where it makes Steve seem more sympathetic by comparison.

While I wouldn’t call it an enjoyable show precisely, it’s a compelling one, full of messy people who are bringing out the worst in each other. It can be too quick to go for predictably lazy “twists” at times, and I think it tries to cover too much within six half-hour episodes—by the time we get to the finale, there just isn’t enough time to deal with it all. Still, it’s fascinating to watch Alice implode and see her scramble to hold her life together even as she’s blowing everything up.

A few fun casting notes here. Steve is played by Jemaine Clement (opposite Nicola Walker’s devastatingly raw performance as Alice)—adding to the list of famous Kiwis Joel Fry has worked with! Also, Daniel’s minor subplot features a coworker played by Lydia Wilson, who starred in Requiem with Joel. The two have a very different dynamic on this show, which is neat!

But okay, let’s talk about Joel Fry’s performance! Daniel is Alice’s husband and Izzy’s stepdad, a sweet guy caught in the middle of a shit storm. In addition to his job as a music teacher, Daniel handles most of the cooking at home and keeps the household running smoothly. He’s not any happier about the Steve/Izzy situation than Alice is, but unlike her, his primary concern is for Izzy rather than himself, and he desperately tries to rein in Alice’s cruelest impulses for the sake of their daughter.

I’m not claiming Daniel isn’t flawed. He can be avoidant, and he sometimes gets petty/passive-aggressive when he feels like it’s the only card he can play, but he’s the one trying his best to keep the peace. While other characters view him as too weak or passive, he’s actually not a pushover. Daniel’s patience isn’t inexhaustible—when he’s able to choose his moment, he’s forthright about what he thinks/feels and doesn’t meekly accept the way Alice lashes out at him in response.

Season 1

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

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.

I have been enduring intense conversations with myself in the 3yrs since our companionship ended. And as part of that journey, I wish to say something from the deepest regions of my soul. 2 grievous lies, gross betrayals. The 1st is a well-trod pit of hot coals I blistered my feet on for 77yrs. I chose my coven over you; lured you into a production of a play in which your death would act as the grotesque climax. The coven was twisting my arm, but I took aesthetic pleasure in making your death visually exhilarating. All of which was made worse by our heady lovemaking throughout this period of betrayal. But the 2nd: I shamefully took credit when Lestat saved your life. That lie bound you to me, and it lay like a corpse in the boiler room of our companionship. Many times, I told myself the lie did not matter, because what we had built, a love that served as a bunker against time, was weightier and more consequential than the lie, but it wasn't true. The lie did matter, because the corpse was there, calling forth the facts. And as for the many boys you drugged, drained, and lay with, I feigned resentment, when in fact, I welcomed your straying; because your guilt in the aftermath bound you to me all the more tightly, and allowed me my hours of observation with Daniel. I told you I loved you, but did I? Hrm? Did I?! Or was it a clinging to the underside of anyone who would help me survive? And when I look back on who I've deceived and how I've deceived, how easy it was to lead a cult for 400 years; to burn in ritual any who broke the archaic laws we lived by, I-- I think I might be a room without walls, floors, a ceiling. An infinite nothing. Also, yes. I put the Fred Steins in your photo collection. And that is my full and heartfelt "Armends." Now, it's your turn!

I have been enduring intense conversations with myself in the 3yrs since our companionship ended. And as part of that journey, I wish to say something from the deepest regions of my soul.

2 grievous lies, gross betrayals.

So Armand was lying to DanLou in 2x6. Rolin said there were "2 really extraordinary lies," but that those were compounded by more & more lies.

The 1st is a well-trod pit of hot coals I blistered my feet on for 77yrs. I chose my coven over you; lured you into a production of a play in which your death would act as the grotesque climax.

Still the "production of a play"--so what Lestat (eff him too btw) said to Armand went in one ear and out the other. 🙄😒

What's WILD is that S3 has still REFUSED to confirm or deny wtf Lestat was doing at that Trial--and not even Armand's taken this as an opportunity to either admit that (following BOOK canon) he DID have Lestat tortured & forced to participate (just like he did with Louis here); or even better/worse: to rub it in Louis' face that Lestat was never forced at all, and that he wanted to get revenge on Louis for Murder Night & being a withholding/cold/selfish/depressed husband, too--all his abuse & suffering is his fault, etc etc.

So which one is it, AMC? 🤨 Cuz now it looks like a missed opportunity that y'all didn't plan for AT ALL, and had no intention of revisiting.

And now AMC's written themselves into a corner, cuz if Lestat was tortured, then Armand will AGAIN be exposed as the gotcha! for THE 4th TIME IN A ROW; and contradict everything they said about Armand NOT being a duplicitous AF evil AF mustache-twirling villain. And if Lestat was NOT tortured, then ghost!Claudia was right that he was there on purpose to watch her die.

The coven was twisting my arm, but....

"I could not prevent it"--sure, Jan. 🙄😒

I took aesthetic pleasure in making your death visually exhilarating.

Which instantly INVALIDATES any drivel from the writers, cast, stans, etc that Louis "abused" Armand, and that Armand in any way "deserves" an apology from Louis--WTF is going on with folks actually tryna gaslight people into thinking ANY of this was okay?!

All of which was made worse by our heady lovemaking throughout this period of betrayal, but....

So Armand's admitted to being Louis' rapist too, since he was acknowledges he was still regularly having sex/"heady lovemaking" with Louis under false pretenses (violating Louis' trust/consent is rape) all while planning Louis' death as the "climax" of the Trial.

The 2nd: I shamefully took credit when Lestat saved your life.

We been knew, but go on.

That lie bound you to me, and it lay like a corpse in the boiler room of our companionship. Many times, I told myself the lie did not matter, because what we had built, a love that served as a bunker against time, was weightier and more consequential than the lie, but it wasn't true. The lie did matter, because the corpse was there, calling forth the facts.

"The corpse" is the seismic lie about "Banishment," but "the thing lay still," and Jacob Anderson BEEN said Armand gave Louis the ick the whole time cuz Louis KNEW something wasn't right with that dude--which is why he tagged-teamed Daniel to call forth the facts.

And as for the many boys you drugged, drained, and lay with, I feigned resentment, when in fact, I welcomed your straying; because your guilt in the aftermath bound you to me all the more tightly.

Literally Claudia's reheated nachos from Merrick, but wtvr AMC. 🙄

And every time Louis felt guilty killing those men, he would look for more drugs to get high and forget/dull the pain; causing an ouroboros loop while Armand just sat there pretending he GAF when really he was enjoying Louis' suffering & spiraling out of his mind the whole time, jfc.

and allowed me my hours of observation with Daniel.

WOAH WOAH BACK TF UP. I'm confused here. Cuz if DM was happening while Louis was the Zodiac Killer, that meant Louis did NOT stop spiraling AFTER Armand mindwiped him in 1973; he was still doing it the whole time into the 2020s? Then what was the point of mindwiping him if he'd still be getting high, killing, hallucinating Claudia's voice, feedback loop, etc etc? What is Armand talking about? Why say "hours" and not "YEARS/DECADES"? This makes no sense.

I told you I loved you, but did I? Hrm? Did I?! Or was it a clinging to the underside of anyone who would help me survive?

I mean DUH, you're a vampire--they're ALL parasitic evil barnacles glomming onto driftwood like leeches sucking the lifeblood of the corpses they feed on. Which is why TRUE COMPANIONS--Blood Spouses--are so important & rare.

And when I look back on who I've deceived and how I've deceived, how easy it was to lead a cult for 400 years; to burn in ritual any who broke the archaic laws we lived by, I-- I think I might be a room without walls, floors, a ceiling. An infinite nothing.

Yeah, sounds about right. FAILURE! Your whole life wasted.

And how was that 400yrs of wasted life from the MIDDLE AGES down to 1949 (Louis only met you in 1945 btw) LOUIS' fault again??????? 🤨

Also, yes. I put the Fred Steins in your photo collection, just to f**k with your head.

THIS P.O.S.!

REAL RASHID, I'm so sorry I ever doubted you! 😭😩🙏🙇‍♂️ (I still don't trust your arse cuz you work for RAGLAN JAMES 💀 but I'll take back everything I said about you messing with the Steins at least.)

And that is my full and heartfelt "Armends." Now, it's your turn!

Eat an entire bag of Lestat's bloody vomit and choke on it, Armand.

TL;DR: ROTTEN BOY!

YES, Assad acted his gorgeous behind off, Gremlin Mode in full effect, blahblahblah.

But that's only me being able to process that almost 48 hours later, cuz in the moment I was just screaming at my screen in a rage seeing Louis' EFFING DECAPITATED BODY desperately reaching for his DISEMBODIED HEAD.

How TF is Armand seriously expecting anyone to accept this bullcrap apology in the first place, when he's literally just rubbing everything in Louis' face and gloating about all the ways he used & abused Louis' trust and violated & brutalized his body for public spectacle, and backstabbed him a zillion times?! (While also admitting how he effed over Lestat and "enjoyed ruining for the sake of ruining"!)

Louis was ALWAYS honest with Armand about where he thought they stood, as someone he genuinely felt love for and cared about, but who initially was NOT his companion and whom he was NOT with for the sake of their own relationship, but only for Claudia's sake vs the coven ("the Secret" 1946 - 1949), and then to spite Lestat ("here is your death, Lestat" 1949 - 1973), and then to save Daniel's life in 1973 ("I need this one to live. As a testament to our companionship. Of its endurance. This boy to live out the night.") Louis ALWAYS put someone else above Armand during their failmarriage, but at least he always TOLD Armand so, and why they were together, so Armand would have NO DELUSIONS about how Louis felt.

But this effing idiot clearly never got the message! 🤦‍♂️

"I think you know you've wrong me."

BISH, how?! 😡💢

AMC HATES Louis, and these are all the specific ways in which they've proved it.

And what's even worse is how Armand's laying out all the reasons he hates Louis and expects Louis "to repent" and "owes" him an apology; meanwhile simultaneously LIVESTREAMING Louis' 2nd lynching to yet another bunch of sickos in Europe, while Dr Fareed sits as moderator transcribing everything & to see how long their little Tuskegee experiment can last as Armand tortures him.

And what utterly SICKENS me is how hard in the paint AMC is going to BACK UP everything Armand's saying, that Louis will "grow" by admitting to how he wronged Armand and apologized to his effing abuser doing all this to him--I can't.

I thought it was uhhhhhh bad 🙂‍↕️ but less from a character perspective and more as a writing choice. It's a slightly odd decision for Louis, but I can find a way to rationalize it as being in-character for him...the way that the writers have chosen to utilize this diary entry narratively is what infuriates me. I wanted so badly to hold out hope (and I'm always saying this, but i would LOVE nothing more than for the rest of the season to drastically reorient my feelings on this!!), but I think the way they chose to go about this plotline is incredibly revealing of how little regard they've ever had for Claudia's suffering (or Louis's for that matter).

(this gets kinda rambly but here's some stuff about Louis's relationship to the diaries)

Claudia's diaries are introduced by Louis into the interview to provide an 'alternative perspective' on the story of his life. I think there are two big reasons for this:

Louis doesn't trust himself to understand/tell his story on his own. Louis is doing the interview to find 'truth and reconciliation', some greater understanding about his experiences, but he isn't sitting down and writing a memoir the way Daniel did, or recording a series of monologues like Lestat did with his "Failures". Unlike Daniel/Lestat, who are the sole arbiters of how their story is told, Louis's chronicle of his own life is a dialogue comprised of multiple voices and perspectives. Louis does not see himself as the ultimate authority over his own story. He routinely second-guesses himself, admits to his own misrememberings throughout the interview, and frequently cedes the power to others to define his narrative: he invites Daniel to assist him (a bright young reporter who has already undergone his own 'odyssey'), in s2 Armand joins the interview, in 207 Louis is deferring to "Lestat's version" of events, and obvs most notably includes Claudia's perspective in the form of her diaries. Louis is willing to consider others' perspectives even when they conflict with his, bc his interview is not about ego, but understanding - and he sees Claudia as particularly integral to that understanding bc he values Claudia's perspective above his own. Claudia was his light, a spark in the dark - when Louis feels muddled, he looks to her for clarity.

Claudia is very intelligent and perceptive, but she's also a person, who is not omnipotent or infallible, and who, like Louis, has been inundated with trauma her entire life (and trauma is the root of Louis's memory issues/faulty recall and part of why he doesn't trust his own mind). There isn't any real reason for him to view Claudia's account as indisputable or unbiased, but he does - he trusts her more than he trusts himself. It's why it shakes Louis to his core to realize something in Claudia's diary wasn't true (that one single awful thing he believed in, Claudia's inability to dream, wasn't real, and the reality was less painful) because he had this almost biblical reverence for her words.

Claudia throughout the show has been used as a kind of illuminating light/deliverer of hard truths for Louis (and I expect that to continue with ghost Claudia if we ever get to see her.......................................amc its been four episodes come onnnnnnnn), so it makes sense for Louis to see her diaries as essential for making sense of his story (which is also so much about her and his grief over her loss).

2. Louis's identity is so entwined with Claudia that he cannot tell his story without her. Louis was dependent upon Claudia to define him, and he couldn't really conceive of himself outside of her. I had hoped that his 'I own the night' era would entail some level of growth in that respect, but it seems like this may still be true as of s3. Naturally, Louis feels the need to cling to Claudia/her diaries as a reference point for his own sense of self.

Louis's story begins when he meets Lestat (Claudia's maker) and his story ends with Claudia's death. The 80-odd years after don't really matter, except for one time in San Francisco when he thought he heard Claudia's voice calling him into the sun. Louis ceases to exist when Claudia dies, and becomes an embodiment of the Rage and Madness her death sparked in him; after he's gotten his 'revenge' his Rage and Madness fade and he's left with nothing.

Stuff like this helped me contextualize Louis reading Claudia's diary pages. Maybe Louis reading the pages and recounting them with Daniel was the closest he felt to Claudia since her death. Maybe for a moment when Louis was reading her words in front of the man they were written about, he felt some semblance of the Rage and Madness he experienced on her behalf. Maybe he tapped into something that made him feel her presence. Even if Louis didn't get any real satisfaction from more revenge, maybe in the act there was a twisted kind of closeness he felt with her, even if it was fleeting.

What spoils that for me is the way her pages were presented.

Because s3 isn't about Louis anymore. It's Lestat's story. And as I mentioned, Lestat's story is very pointedly not a chorus of perspectives the way Louis's is. It's literally just Lestat sitting somewhere monologuing.

(its one of many writing choices that baffles me; they took something so multi-faceted, with built-in nuance and complexity by virtue of its contrasting voices, and flattened it into one voice...its like working backwards...the show should evolve and become MORE complex as it goes on, not the other way around?? When they started off with something so dynamic, Lestat's telling just feels overly simplistic and stunted by comparison...just let it be first-person limited if ur so insistent on a more singular perspective....since they wanna go for a disorienting tone anyway, just slip into and out of the flashbacks/non-Lestat scenes as needed, without beating us over the head with the narration...what is this framing deviceeeeee. but i digress...)

Everything we are seeing past the auction scene is presented as the story Lestat tells on his "Failures" recordings; it's Lestat's voice narrating the events we see play out to some undisclosed listener* who acquired his records.

This framing device means that everything we see this season is something Lestat is choosing to tell us about, either explicitly or implicitly (bc there is some occasional discrepancy between how Lestat verbally presents events and how we watch them play out, notably with regard to Gabrielle, but i think u can understand this as reading between the lines of what he's saying in his recordings, rather than the viewer having some omniscient access to events; bc the narration is very set on having you understand that this is LESTAT describing events, even when it doesn't make sense)

So, in the context of the show, it is Lestat who is choosing to share the graphic details of Claudia's assault with his audience. Lestat, who abused Claudia, whom Claudia sought to kill to free herself and Louis, who learned about the assault secondhand by listening to her rapist 'think of her often', because Claudia never felt comfortable sharing that information with Lestat. Lestat is now sharing those details Claudia never wanted him to be privy to, spelling them out in gory detail for the highest bidder at an auction.

And in the context of the episode, Lestat is sharing this information in lieu of describing the details of his own sexual assault. Bc the show is flipping rapidly between Lestat remembering his own assault and the scene where Louis reads Claudia's diary pages, there is no album break between the two scenes (the guy going "Album 25 Side B" or whatever to signify different scenes are being recounted on separate records), which means Lestat is conflating them in his retelling, using Claudia's story to support his own. Lestat will get on stage and sing a cutesy song about Magnus and make flippant remarks in front of Daniel, but he's not sharing those gory details about his own experience. He co-opts Claudia's words instead. Because Lestat has the ultimate authority over his own story, bc he is the season's sole narrator, HE gets to decide what details to share and what to gloss over - unlike Claudia, whom he strips of that agency.

I don't even know what's intentional in this show anymore, but there is a throughline of Lestat being active in/flippant about violating Claudia's privacy from s1; and Claudia being upset about her diaries being shared without her consent.

And it feels like a deliberate contrast that Lestat is the one to share these diary entries with the world when Louis was so hell-bent on keeping them out of the public record, ripping them out and hiding them from Daniel. I won't say Louis is without fault here, bc he does share Claudia's diaries in the first place (albeit in an interview he attempts to delete), but I think its speaks to Louis/Lestat's different attitudes towards Claudia that Louis understood how hard it was for her to share that event and sought to omit it to avoid exploiting her, and Lestat does the complete opposite.

(also this is random but idk if I've ever seen anyone point out books as a yonic symbol - the imagery of Claudia's diaries being cut and ripped apart, her boundaries transgressed, Lestat reaching into this pink box to take her privacy from her, and the entry he reads is explicitly about sex....her sa entries being torn and bloodstained...it's like very on the nose but also all these men violating her over and over for eternity.........where is Akasha actually. and then her willingness to share her diary with Madeleine is an intimacy she chose...remember when the show did interesting things. I guess in that lens Louis burning the pages is like putting them to rest, deciding not to let her be violated/exploited anymore? but then the content makes it into the show....idk. idk!!!!!!!!)

(tw sa more graphically sorry but //////// its a kind of minor thing but I think it's worth noting, when we see the flashes of Lestat's actual assault...he and Magnus are both fully clothed. Like all the sexual violence is implied with the visuals, how its cut and Magnus pressing him down and whatnot, but it isn't terribly explicit in terms of whats on screen. I'm not saying it isn't effective as is, but the most explicit thing about that sequence is the words from Claudia's diary - her story is literally doing the heavy lifting for Lestat's. I almost wonder if they couldn't be super graphic onscreen so they felt they needed that entry to be read aloud to pack more of an emotional punch? Idk its wholly unneeded imo and pretty shit in terms of respectful sa portrayals but I'm trying to parse the logic)

In the After Dark for this episode, Jacob Anderson expressed hesitation about the storyline for fear of it falling into classic exploitative rape-revenge tropes, and sadly his fears were valid - what we got is a textbook example of a story making a woman's assault about a man - two men, in this instance. Claudia's body is reduced to a vehicle for Lestat's pain and Louis's grief. Rolin commented in the same After Dark that Lestat's assault storyline was what they had in mind when they wrote Claudia's assault into the show in s1; her pain was always going to be in service of Lestat's.

The show violated Claudia in 105 to benefit Lestat's storyline later, and in presenting her diary's gruesome details for the audience's consumption against her wishes, Lestat and the show are violating her a second time.

They could have done both storylines without this. The show has already employed this idea of "some things are too precious to be shared in the dialogue" with us not hearing Lestat's full proposal in the church in 101, us not hearing what Claudia and Madeleine say to each other in 207, and Loustat's infamous unheard words in 208. The audience gets that like. rape is bad; its not like the words themselves were needed for comprehension. We could have had Lestat reliving his memories without narration alongside the Bruce scene and had a fade out on Louis's dialogue, or Lestat could have just described it himself, or the Magnus hallucination could have given his warped description of things (or, what i thought we would get, they could have intercut Lestat's assault with the Magnus song/a performance of the song to hammer home that stark dissonance between Lestat's lyrics and the event itself). Like these are creative professionals they could have done this in a million ways and they selected the bluntest possible instrument and it was artless and it was cheap and it was exploitative and it was fucking unnecessary.

(also we literally already had Claudia speaking about her assault on her own terms, in her own voice in 203, in a scene where she is sharing that info freely with Louis bc she wanted him to know. Lestat using words she never wanted to say to him to illustrate his own pain is just something fucking else - and the writers choosing to tortuously squeeze further detail out of Claudia's assault for a THIRD scene in three seasons is.......i don't have words)

The thing that snags my brain a bit is that Louis burns the pages at the end of the scene. I could totally buy Louis, with his connection to Claudia's diary, and the way he clearly struggled with processing Claudia's assault, wanting to give voice to her pain one last time before incinerating the perpetrator and the account itself.

But we have to remember that this is Lestat's narration within the framing device. So how does Lestat know line for line what is on those pages? Either Louis recounts the whole thing to Lestat in excruciating detail (which I doubt, though I would believe he remembers it all word for word), or this isn't actually a word-perfect recounting of her pages, and it is Lestat using what he gleaned from Bruce's thoughts about Claudia's assault to surmise what the diary entry said (since Lestat was open about making up some details of the scenes he wasn't in - "Did it happen in a bar with a view? I say it did" - any of the scenes without him could be read as pure conjecture if u wanted to) - OR what I think would be most interesting (but also very poorly telegraphed), if the details are not details of Claudia's assault at all, but Lestat's own explicit experience of his sa but presented in the shape of Claudia's diary entry...it would still piss me off but it would at least be some semblance of Lestat choosing to be vulnerable in his story within the safety of a facade, instead of Lestat just outright refusing to narrate any of his own assault and only exploiting Claudia's. Atp I don't rly think the show gives enough of a fuck to be that layered but idk u can interpret it a lot of different ways...

On a slightly different note, another thing that bothered me about equating Lestat's/Claudia's assaults is that it frames Louis as this outsider to the experience of sexual violence; these two ppl have a commonality that Louis is placed outside of, unable to relate (Rolin explicitly said as much in the After Dark). This is wild to me bc BOTH s1-2 detail Louis's abusive relationships where extremely dubious sex is happening......I know the show dgaf about Louis anymore lol but like...how consensual is the sex after Lestat has broken all the bones in his body bc "a thousand nights of sulking and the first sight of her you are gonna up and leave me" and the sulking in question was not having sex with Lestat. And Louis is dissociating during the sex with Lestat. And Claudia is projecting Bruce into Louis's mind and saying "They're not all like him, or him" talking about Bruce, and Lestat as Louis's Bruce. And calling their maker "Bruce" during s2. it felt like they were drawing a pretty straightforward parallel there to make a statement about sexual dynamics in abusive relationships but that was an oopsie i guess....and then Loumand's "you can have sex with me if you don't kill me" and the bargaining for Claudia's safety as pillow talk afterwards. There are really overt coercive elements there...and coerced consent is not consent which means it was like.... dubcon at best and nonconsensual at worst...

Idk it just displays a real disinterest in Louis as a character and everything they've put him through to do this kind of revisionist history around his experiences. It's actually wild how 1-to-1 the Anne Rice/Rolin Jones trajectory has been, despite s1-2 seeming to be interested in correcting so many of her wrongs wrt racism and abuse, from creating something poignant with Louis only to perform the most merciless character assassination of him to boost up Lestat...it's starting to feel like s1-2 were sincerely good on accident and all the stuff we thought was nuance was incidental. bc what!! I just feel like that scene could have been an opportunity to have Louis reflect on his own experiences alongside Claudia's (bc Claudia had already drawn that parallel for him in s1) which would be a more nuanced twist on the boring played-out "Father gets revenge for daughter's rape" thing but no, they just did the trope beat for beat and smothered it in Lestat. It makes BOTH Louis's and Claudia's pain ancillary to Lestat's. boooooooooooo

Truncated text of tweet from MrPitBull, Mar 11, 2026:

She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.

Yale University, 1969.

Margaret Rossiter was a graduate student studying the history of science. She was one of very few women in her program.

Every Friday afternoon, students and faculty gathered for beers and informal conversation. One week, Margaret asked a simple question: "Were there ever any women scientists?"

The faculty answered firmly: No.

Someone mentioned Marie Curie. The group dismissed it—her husband Pierre really deserved the credit.

Margaret didn't argue. But she also didn't believe them.

So she started looking.

She found a reference book called "American Men of Science"—essentially a Who's Who of scientific achievement. Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont.

There were names. There were credentials. There were careers.

The professors had been wrong.

But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing.

Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams.

But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased.

It wasn't random. It was systematic.

Women who designed experiments watched male colleagues publish results without giving them credit. Women whose discoveries were assigned to supervisors. Women listed in acknowledgments instead of as authors. Women passed over for awards that went to male collaborators who contributed far less.

Margaret realized she was witnessing a pattern that stretched across centuries.

Women had always been present in science. The record had simply pushed them aside.

She needed a name for what she was documenting.

In the early 1990s, she found it in the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage—a 19th-century suffragist who had written about this exact phenomenon in 1870.

In 1993, Margaret published a paper formally naming it: The Matilda Effect.

The term captured something that had been hidden in plain sight for generations. Once you knew the term, you saw it everywhere.

Her dissertation became a lifelong mission.

For more than 30 years, Margaret researched and wrote her landmark three-volume series: Women Scientists in America. She examined letters, institutional policies, individual careers. She gathered undeniable evidence that women in science had been consistently under-credited and structurally excluded.

Her work faced resistance. Many dismissed women's history as political rather than academic. Others insisted she was exaggerating.

Margaret didn't argue emotionally. She presented data. Documented cases. Patterns repeated across decades and institutions.

Eventually, the evidence became undeniable.

Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased:

Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick.

Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the Nobel Prize.

Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomes—received little credit.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed.

And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.

Margaret changed the narrative. Science was no longer just the story of solitary male geniuses. It became a story of collaboration that included women who had been written out.

The pacing, the lazy storylines and writing, the inattention to backstory and newly introduced characters. All of it makes sense when you understand that telling Lestat’s story was never the main goal of this season. At all.

But they were right about it being EXACTLY what some of y'all wanted.

The thing is, with Our Flag Means Death, you can tell the love was there. Even if you disliked the Our Flag Means Death Season 2 finale or the season as a whole, you can tell everyone working on the show (including the showrunner) actually cared about the romance, the story itself, the characters, and even the fanbase to an extent. It wasn't perfect but there was love. All those BTS videos of the cast and crew having fun, the fondness with which everyone who worked on the show still talks about their experience to this day. Regardless of your opinions on Season 2, you can't deny everyone involved enjoyed their time on set and there was an effort, there was love, put into the final product.

With The Vampire Lestat TV series? You can't convince me there was love.

I'm not just talking about the ghoulishly disgusting antiblackness in the finale that made me sick to my stomach, I'm talking about showrunner Rolin Jones interrupting and smugly contradicting Jacob Anderson during the post-episode interview, I'm talking about the actors (especially the brown and Black actors) visibly uncomfortable and deflecting questions during the same post-episode interview, I'm talking about their decision to fire all the Black writers after Interview with the Vampire Season 2 so there are no Black writers working on TVL, I'm talking about Rolin Jones lying to Jacob Anderson about to what extent Louis was going to be brutalized this season, I'm talking about Rolin Jones saying he wanted his actors to "hate acting" by the time they finished filming the season.

And I don't think it's a coincidence that during a global rise of violent antiblackness and transphobia, The Vampire Lestat TV show, a show where the Black characters are consistently brutalized more than the white characters, a show where graphic heterosexual PIV sex happens on screen while queer intimacy and queer sex happen mostly off screen, a show that features a joke about pronouns in the first fucking episode, a show where racist and misogynistic language are thrown around for shock value, a show where the only times we see women kissing on screen are highly sexualized and for shock value, a show where a deliberate choice was made to turn a woman who is (in the books this show is based on) a GNC/potentially transmasc character into a Confident Girl Boss with a push-up bra who spends most of her screen time having intercourse with men and being cartoonishly evil, is being hyped up as some kind of juggernaut of "queer representation". And the horrifically racist fandom is telling people to stop criticizing the show because it's queer and they're afraid our complaining will get it cancelled which (according to them anyway) would be a massive blow to queer representation, which is. Not fucking true.