Salami Slopes!!

LEMUEL MAY HAVE SEEN TIMBUKTU IN IT'S GLORY AND WATCHED CHURCHES BE BUILT IN WHAT IS NOW ETHIOPIA.

He might well have watched Alexander be welcomed in Egypt and thought him a foolish boy.

Aughhhh.

The POTENTIAL.

i follow a ton of fan artists and none of them have been making art based on the events of tvl. it's either iwtv era stuff or AU art. many have just moved on completely to other shows. i also noticed a lot of people decided to start reading the books and they're now retroactively disappointed at what was left out.

the writers didn't need a big budget to do this season justice. they should've stuck to filming in europe and kept the one concert scene to the final ep. they didn't need to be on the road and visiting different cities. it didn't add anything whatsoever to the story.

rolin got snippy and blamed the budget because "you find somewhere that looks like europe and north america" but 1) many productions have achieved this. europe is a frequent stand in for north america and 2) you didn't really need to. europe has hotels and concert venues. it also has many, many old and grandiose churches. it has forests and huge country homes with acres of land, largely unchanged with time and it doesn't always cost that much to film in these places. there are period-accurate costumes for hire. you didn't need to have scenes of a tour bus on big wide north american roads or to film in canadian cities as stand ins for US ones. all we needed was daniel interviewing lestat interspersed with flashbacks. they had the fucking formula perfected. it was right there. then they could've shown the band rehearsing in any studio and built it all up to the concert

they could have given us a satisfying adaptation with the budget they had and the reason they didn't is because they didn't want to

they had a vision of rockstar lestat touring and fucking and doing drugs and recording music and that's what they prioritised over any actual story

what was the point of the failures? what was the point of lestat consenting to a interview with daniel he didn't want to give?

rolin repeatedly said the audience didn't just want two guys talking in a room again, that we didn't know what we wanted, that this season was going to be fast paced rock n roll. he made exactly what he wanted to make

1. Louis's undeveloped boyfriend Lemuel, his very little screentime, and the lack of character development and relationship building

2. The production team's decision to cut Nickistat scenes and put less importance on Nicki's role in Lestat's life as his first love

3. The celebration of Lestat's masculinity and hypersexuality vs the degrading of Armand for being effeminate and hypersexual

4. The fixation on Lestat's relationship with the oversexualized Gabriella, featuring several graphic sex scenes, completely overshadowing his relationship with Louis, which lacked any queer intimacy beyond drinking blood in beer

5. A cisgender male vampire purposefully misgendering a non-binary vampire and referring to them using the wrong pronouns

6. The focus on the non-binary vampire using the urinal in the male restroom, with the male vampires commenting on their "strong pelvic floor muscles" in a clearly degrading manner

7. The few moments of male intimacy being used for comedic relief with no plot significance (examples: Daniel showering in the background in Lestat's tour bus, and Lestat undressing while Armand tries to read his apology letter)

8. Gabriella being present almost any time Lestat is alone with another male vampire, overshadowing queer intimacy with incest

9. Gabriella being present when Lestat sings "Brutal Love" to Louis, again overshadowing a touching moment of male intimacy with incest

10. The producers preventing Sam Reid from singing "Brutal Love" to Louis on his knees on stage in the final cut, as he did in the rehearsal

11. The removal of Gabriella's trans/genderfluid gender identity from the novels, instead oversexualizing her and presenting her as a high femme dominatrix

12. The timing of the beheading of Louis and Lestat, which happens the first time they are alone together all season and are on the verge of reconciling/negotiating an intimate relationship, which is then cut short for "dark humor"

13. Paul telling Lestat "I still wish you were a woman," in reference to his homosexual relationship with Louis, pushing Catholic and heteronormative values

14. The introduction of Baby Jenks as a throwaway character, only used for elevator sex and to establish a heterosexual relationship with Claudia's rapist

15. Lestat belittling Armand's sexual trauma in the song "Big Boss", humiliating him on stage in front of a crowd of people, as well as Lestat's dismissal of Louis's sexual trauma

16. The addition of a line that makes Louis a victim of CSA, insinuating that to be queer, one must have a history of childhood sexual assault (which applies to Lestat, Louis, Armand, and Claudia)

17. Lestat's costume design, and how he was portrayed as a traditional male rockstar despite having a fluid gender identity, in contrast to his costume design in The Vampire Lestat: One Night Only concert in NYC, where he dressed in ways that celebrated both his masculine and feminine sides

18. The focus on bisexual men with female groupies, lacking male inclusion, except in short instances with the male characters rarely having any lines or plot significance

19. Louis's role as a pimp in paying Regina to be Claudia and another woman to be Madeleine, and the fetishization of wlw relationships as they're paid to make out in front of him

So Claudia hates Louis so much that she doesn't want him honoring her memory, but she has nothing to say about Lestat, who played an active role in her death, honoring her with a song? She doesn't call him out, challenge him, or even acknowledge it. Not even to mock him. Man.....

Being a Black viewer of TVL and socially aware is something. I don't know what that something is, but it's definitely something.

Edited to add that it's being brought to my attention that she did acknowledge the song in passing with "a song in the radio". My mistake for missing it, I only watched this scene once because it hit a nerve for me, so I am trusting the people in the comments on that detail.