Les linguinis sont cuits

As the dust settles and i can bear to think about this season, it is quite telling that despite the heavily racialized violence enacted towards louis (and the treatment of every single black character on screen), racism as a concept is quite literally never brought up in the narrative. Even the scene where daniel tells louis tv execs weren’t interested in a black man’s voice ("no, we want the white guy") meant nothing: what we originally thought was the foundation for broader racial commentary within the season and a way to question audience reception bias and sidelining of black voices (in line with the scene of the trial and its examination of white-centric fan reception) was just a throwaway line in an unending list of throwaway lines, and feels almost cynical in hindsight. Yeah! We sure know you wanted the white guy; it has been made abundantly clear.

Are you disappointed by how TVL treated Louis this season?

Louis Love Fest

You can't escape, you can't win as a Black person. Real life is miserable, fiction is miserable. The fandom that claims to be an escape for gay and trans people is virulently anti-Black. And when you say, "wow, this is miserable, is there any justice, is there anything we can enjoy, can we participate in the world?", everyone and their klan grandmother screams NO and gets mad at YOU for ruining their fun.

I keep trying to distract myself around the house but i just can’t stop crying. The sheer cruelty and gleeful cynism surrounding louis’ treatment is incomprehensible in its magnitude and overtness. it feels impossible to reconcile the compassionate treatment of louis and claudia’s abuse of the previous seasons with the horrifically mean-spirited antiblack and anti-victim writing we’ve had to endure for weeks. As it all settles, there is no way to view any of this other than through the lens of these writers vehemently hating louis and the people who dared regard him with love and empathy by pandering to the most racist confines of this online space.

with few exceptions we have only seen black characters graphically get brutalized. they had closeups of louis’s body and face after lestat tried to murder him showing the extent of what was done, we saw just how burned and disfigured he was after her suicide attempt, claudia’s death is one of the most graphic i’ve seen on any tv show, we got closeups of their ankles slashed and shots of louis being kicked in the head and claudia being shoved into a box of live rats by the coven members. the majority of louis’s scenes in episode 7 were of his decapitated head on a pike, forced to look at his body as it flailed, begging to die, forced to apologize in something so close to a saw trap that it was bordering on copyright infringement while being painted as cruel and deserving of the abuse and then branded by armand.