Claudia's death and Lestat and Louis' failures to love and protect her over choosing each other os the heart of The Vampire Chronicles, and Rolin is telling it that way with the "Phantom of the Opera" framing device, and Lestat's "The Failures" album which will be intended to be heard only by Louis as his apology to him and Claudia
Episode 3.1 begins with a framing device pulled directly from The Phantom of the Opera. The framing device is important because it is the men who outlived Christine bidding on objects in remembrance of her, and the ending of the framing device is one man at Christine’s grave with his winnings from the auction, only to find his rival has already been to the grave and left behind a rose. The Phantom bid against Christian and let him win because Christine chose Christian, but it had never stopped the Phantom from also loving her all this time, and this is an admission to Christine and Christian that they were right to haven chosen each other and an apology to Christine and Christian for the violence and emotional torment the Phantom subjected them to out of jealousy.
The auction establishes that:
-Lestat is considered to be dead
-Louis is alive but missing a leg
-Armand is alive but missing an eye and with facial disfigurement that is not entirely concealed by an eyepatch
-Louis and Armand are on if not good terms then at least fondly tolerant, as evidenced by Louis’ and Armand’s shared secretive little grin
-Raglan James is there
-Lestat considers himself only partially to blame for the “near destruction of the Y chromosome” [and later says "Armand did more damage than she (Akasha) ever did, establishing that Armand breaking the Great Laws to turn Daniel resulted not in a true vampire fledgling but the prototype for what would become the tissue originator of the adaptations Replimoids, creatures that have young Daniel's face, kill and drain humans but require powerful vampire blood to stay alive, and (like Daniel's preference for Grasshoppers but saying he prefers "savory most days") prefers O negative (universal donor) to AB positive (universal reciñient), inadvertently creating a severe bottle neck in the human population and mass starvation of vampires after the great conversion because as Gabi established there are only 9 active Rh null donors (people with O negative blood type who have never been exposed to/developed antibodies to Rh factor) and 45 people in the world with that blood type, and their blood is donated and usef to become a medication that saves hundreds of thousands of women and infant's lives a year due to Rh factor incompatability.]
Rh factor, or Rhesus factor, is a type of protein found on red blood cells. Complications can occur when a pregnant woman is Rh-negative and
-And, most importantly, if we as a member of the “auction”/audience want to hear the only copy of Lestat’s recording The Failures in Existence, we must be prepared to spend a lot of money. Rolin chose to frame the rest of the story of The Vampire Chronicles this way because he is baiting AMC to SPEND THE DAMN MONEY to greenlight seasons 4 and 5 and as a plea to us as the audience to support the show with our money to put pressure on AMC! The Phantom of the Opera framing device is important because even if seasons 4 and 5 aren’t greenlit, Rolin can end the first and only season of TVL and the whole The Vampire Chronicles on the epilogue/framing device that will tell us as the audience how everything shook out, and that “The Failures” is a spoken word album and apology that was only ever intended for Louis’ ears alone, and THAT is why we as the audience heard the details of Claudia’s journal in the telling, because Louis knew them and ONLY Louis knew them, and we were reliving the events with Louis as he remembered them.
The framing device ends with Louis going to visit Lestat’s “grave” empty-handed, only to find that Armand has left his winnings from the auction there for Louis, including Lestat’s still-sealed albums and the full magnum of blood there solely for Louis to find. Louis and the audience will understand that Armand has chosen to live without the eye in penance and apology for his role in killing Claudia, silently telling Louis he is “leaving the damage to remember the damage” he did, and as a memorial to Daniel, his missing other half, that Armand loved Lestat and both, but they were right for choosing each other over him.
Rolin James will be there, but will be revealed to either be Really Rashid in a glamor, Really Rashid having body-swapped into him, or being forced to act as a proxy/puppet for Really Rashid who steps out behind him, revealed to be the one actually in charge of whatever super secret “clean up all this supernatural vampire apocalypse bullshit” secret agency was behind the auction. Really Rashid tells Louis “capitalism” de Pointe du Lac to take a vacation and he has heard Auvergne is particularly nice this time of year. Rashid will give Louis a Night Island or Talamasca sweatshirt hoodie, which is suspicious because of how hot and humid it is in New Orleans where they are and Auvergne where Rashid recommended. If Raglan is there he will point this out, and Louis will tell him “shut up, Raglan” and deliberately pronounces it wrong with the em-PHAS-is on the wrong syllable. Rashid smiles coyly. Louis will put the sweatshirt on skeptically and Rashid will nod towards the hoodie pocket, where Louis finds his own initials embroidered in a call back to Dream!Stat in Paris with Louis, Really Rashid, and the audience understanding that Lestat is alive, waiting for Louis in Auverne where it all started if Louis wants to see him after he has finished listening to Lestat’s apology “the failures”, and Louis understands that Lestat keeps Louis’ initials not only over his heart but right over his dick. Louis shakes his head and rolls his eyes Ertha Kitt-style.
Lestat’s voice over (imitating Daniel's narration of his Practicum course that began the series) There are stories that deserve to be told, there are stories that are better when you don’t know the ending, and there are some stories–
[Armand in Daniel’s Brooklyn apartment, telling what he believes is a hallucination of Old Daniel “you’re not here” only for Daniel to reach out and physically touch his hand with all the fucking yearning and unresolved sexual tension of Mr. Darcy helping Elizabeth into the carriage in the 2005 Pride and Prejudice adaptation, and we get a gasp and a desperately aching “Beloved–?”]
--are no one’s fucking business but their own, and even Gremlins deserve their happy endings. As for myself? In the words of the great American poet Samuel Clemons–”
“Mark Twain, you pretentious fuck,” Louis grumbles fondly.
Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Louis, mon cher, I will not say come to me, only that I await you.
Louis travel montage to Auvergne like the montage to Dubai in season 1. Louis arrives to Lestat’s run down family estate. He’s swarmed by massif puppies and curious horses turn to him in the fields. There is a tiny, sad sign about “the vampire lestat museum” and Louis encounters Jarda!Lestat, a pathetic grifter trying to pry every penny out of his lookalikeness. Jarda!Lestat reveals himself to be Lestat playing Jarda playing Lestat by telling Louis “Perhaps Armand was telling the truth–I can play the part of a clown after all.” Lestat reveals he has been hiding here in his own birthplace disguised as Jarda because no one actually cares about his mortal past and it’s so patently ridiculous no one would ever believe it.
Lestat and Louis discuss Claudia, with Lestat revealing that Armand saved some of her and Madeleine’s mingled ashes from the Theatro and hid them, preserving her memory when Louis couldn’t, and they had been hidden in the magnolia tree all this time. Louis and Lestat discuss what to do with the ashes, where/whether to bury them, and Louis reveals Claudia and Madeleine had meant to travel the world together when Madeleine suggested they return to Paris to say good-bye to Louis. Louis apologizes, telling Lestat “you said I’d regret it every day for the rest of my life, and I do, I do” and Lestat takes his hand and says “I do, too” showing their relationship which was framed as a marriage in a church could only be restored by addressing their failures to each other and especially their shared failures as fathers/brother/uncle/Makers to Claudia. Louis and Lestst agree to release the ashes instead of burying them, so no one can exploit their grave or their story or disturb their rest. Lestat reveals the small urn to Louis, on which Armand had inscribed the immortal companions Madeleine and Claudia Eparvier, coven of 2. The final shot is of the ashes being released into the wind to travel together forever fulfilling Louis’ vision while turning Madeleine of Claudia dressed in yellow in the afternoon light.
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Okay now that we're seeing in real time the disproportionate level of promotion that this season is getting compared to the first 2 (we know why), can I speak my truth and say that they had absolutely no reason to include that much Dreamstat in s2 and the only reason they did it was because of their anxiety around having the show led entirely by non-white actors
Something that, I just frankly find absurd and one of the more easily digestible flaws of season 3, is that the reason Devil's Minion feels so empty is because there is nothing tying them to the narrative. There's no themes past "loneliness," and a sprinkle of "patriarchal traditions."
And it's just laughable, because they had the set-up there. Devil's Minion in QotD is about addiction. Daniel relapsing, and Armand in AA as an addict, could have developed the subtext and meat of the relationship. "Too little" or "too early" aren't the problems with the writing, there, the problem is the fact that there wasn't any substance. Where did Daniel's struggle go? Why is Armand doing anything?
They are untethered, which is why they don't have the sauce. For a season with explicit drug use in it, it is not only shameful, but a waste of a motif, to not include two characters who are deeply involved in those themes.
There are SO many bigger, more egregious writing flaws and shocking decisions made, but the lack of meaning there just shows how empty and meaningless the show is, even if you want to say "it's Lestat's POV." How you forget to write in addiction for the couple that is an addiction metaphor is beyond me.
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Genuinely feels like they keep bringing up Armand's childhood sexual abuse/slavery to directly contrast it with Lestat in a way that's like "look at our sweet boy lestat who goes through so much and yet is still loving and precious and independent unlike gross yucky gremlin Armand who has the same trauma but is EVIL and MEAN and DESPERATE and UNLOVABLE" :/ idk it really rubs we the wrong way tbh
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if they wanted the arun name drop/age reveal to really hit they should've actually maybe let armand tell lestat and gabrielle his backstory and explored his dynamic with marius but no let's just blame it all on louis because that totally makes sense
no but why would it be Louis of all people Armand is torturing?? Where is him throwing Lestat off that tower or trying to kill himself in 18th century Paris??? In fact where is lesmand???!!! and why must the writers only write gore for their black characters this season?? wtf
still perplexed by how terribly the show has fucked up the loumand dynamic, and clearly a LOT of show fans are too.
in the later book canon, armand and louis reunite and live together in the trinity gate compound in new york for a while. they have love for each other. they're in a good place with each other again, even after parting ways at the end of iwtv.
you can't tell me that any version of armand would brutalize louis. there's no way.
They CO-PARENT Benji Mahmoud together at Trinity Gate! Louis adopts Armand's adopted kid! The whole point of their time at Trinity Gate is how much they love and trust and have forgiven each other without ever saying those words on the page! Why are the all white screenwriters of TVL so determined to construe and label every sexual and romantic partnership between two queer men of color as abuse just to get one of them back with a white ex???
i feel like turning the torture scene in the finale into a louis fan vs armand fan thing is a very fandom-focused perspective to take that ultimately trivializes the very real racism of the writers and production behind it. like, the roles of both characters in that scene are obscenely racist. having louis, a black man, be brutalized and forced to take blame and apologize for abuse done to him is horrific. it’s also incredibly offensive to have a south asian, implied muslim, character be cartoonishly evil by spilling the blood of his victims (louis and regina) in a jewish butcher shop
don’t turn this into character vs character fandom war when there are layers to the racism, including pitting the main nonwhite characters against each other
I really cant get over the fact that Louis being brutally tortured by Armand is apparently functioning as the writers mechanism to make him confront his "sins" and atone for them.
But Armand is not some neutral vessel for Louis'accountability. This is one of the persons involved in Louis' lynching and Claudia's death. And yet the narrative put Louis back into his hands, lets him degrading his body (again) and uses that violence to push Louis toward apologizing to him. Like, it's crazy??
His brutalization is yet again a way the story humbles him, in a season, mind you, that repeatedly used other characters to do the same, from Claudia calling him a slave etc, Lestat taking every opportunity to belittle and trash him, and now Armand tortures Louis is literally pushed toward repentance.
And after 3 seasons of repeatedly making this Black character's body the receptacle of the show's most extreme graphic physical punishment, I cannot separate those choices from race.
Why, of all the ways Louis could have been made to confront the harm he has caused, did the writers decide he needed to be physically broken by one of his own lynchers first?Accountability is not my issue. Louis has done bad things, and if they really want to insist that Loumand was mutually abusive, okay, fine even if to me it feels like a moral retcon. My issue is that the story seems unable to let Louis grow without first making him suffer for it physically.
And I'm not saying Black characters can't be monsters or go through horrific things. I'm pointing out a pattern in who gets grace, interiority and explanations for their worst actions, and who gets treated like their mistakes mean they need to be dragged through the dirt and physically punished before they're allowed growth.
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truly fascinating that although chunks of TVL are enjoyable to watch, and Sam Reid continues to be excellent as Lestat, the show seems to be written by people who despise most of the non-Lestat characters
“You were sold by who you were sold by. Sold into what you were sold into. You and I didn’t talk about it much. Cause I didn’t want to think on my own sins. Or picture you at twelve. At twelve. You were twelve. Scared. Poor boy, Arun. You need a love that’ll cradle you. You should have that. I saw good in you. For a while.”
THESE are the words I want to hear be exchanged between louis and Armand!!! BUT!! The thing is these words SHOULD be shared between armand and louis BUT NOT RIGHT NOW. I find it incredibly beautiful that louis sees armand’s hurt and trauma and tells him that he understands why he is the way he is, and that their relationship was always doomed for his role as a pimp when he was alive.
But it should come from a louis who has genuinely forgiven armand and moved past their relationship. it should come from a louis who has had time away from armand, time to heal and reflect and ready to talk about it. and sorry but 3 years for a vampire is simply not enough.
He should have told Armand this when Armand was at a low point and needed to hear those words from someone he not only loved, but had been on the other side of what was done to him. An armand who was reliving his traume as a sex trafficked child, preferably after finding out that Marius is still alive, and being told by louis “hey what was done to you wasn’t right. What I did to those girl was wrong and I used them just as someone used you and it’s not your fault”
Not from a louis who is still freshly hurt by armand and needs his space and time to reflect. not from a louis who is getting the words tortured out of him because the r*cist writers thought it would be fun to torture their black main character one more time and make their south asian actor do it to him because apparently Armand is nothing but a cartoon villain now. oh yeah and let’s do it by stealing a plot point from A MUCH LATER BOOK and then change the entire context around it and do it to a different character entirely because I’m sure it’s a good idea to bring in all these other plot points in our already pretty tightly scheduled season.
