cool

Thank you SO VERY MUCH for your time as a reader and as an artist!

This is remarkable. I am really just so moved by this!

s2: nicki calls armand the g-slur → armand separates the two of them and flings lestat into the wall. coven lynches claudia and nearly kills louis → he comes back sets the whole place on fire and relieves santiago of his head

s3: LFC, ragdoll, fuck cloud, drug mule, gucci grace jones, etc. → crickets (except for dr. fareed coming in when lestat read out mommy dearest's text and did all of that re: the proper indigenous name). we don't even have well written racism anymore

So sorry for the double message.  Thank you again if you are able. 

Dark-skinned women & transphobia.

Antoinette is hard for parts of the fandom to come to terms with bcuz fandoms are mostly made up of white women. It hits closer to home for those characters to exist and be shitty rather than other characters that are more removed from how ppl personally identify.

I come and go seeing comments in all directions about Antoinette and it's bcuz she's a white woman who was complicit in antiblackness bcuz she expected to benefit from it herself in the end. She didn't and it called attention to why she didn't and made ppl reflect on that and feel uncomfortable. It is meant to be a sad story but also reflective and critical of how white women often move in the world.

But also!! I just think the writers don't really care all that much about him outside of who he is to Lestat. I think this has always been true honestly (tho it was easier to ignore in S1 when it was about their relationship proper & this is why loumand was hard nerfed out of the gate) but it's the most glaring this season (for obvious reasons).

And I know I'm like the worst person to be taking the word of on this bc i just find Lestat to be the least compelling of the main characters, but I just feel like that whole "how can we take him to rock bottom to drive him back to Lestat" is what's actually causing the main weakness in Louis' subplot. Like the reason it ALLLL comes back to Lestat is bc they're just not interested in him on his own (obligatory *local woman shakes fist at cloud* at the reunion scene which really was the writing on the wall for the total death of any idea that Louis was his own character to these people)

Incidentally, Louis as a character really shines most in his relationships outside of Lestat - his family, Claudia, even fucking Daniel - because the writers aren't bending over backwards to make their ship endgame. It is kind of a late-stage Game of Thrones problem where characters who have developed in organic ways away from their book counterparts have to act like they're supposed to in the outline for the unfinished source material. So the I-Own-The-Night Louis at the end of season two should NOT actually be the Wither-Thou-Goest drip of the latter books, but bc the authors have an OTP, we get The Reunion Scene, and Louis all apologetic in the car, and none of it is satisfying in terms of theme OR character because they have to break the back of the characterisation of their protagonist in order to make them work.

Circling back to his arc this season: I don't think it's impossible to make it compelling. But the writers would have to commit: make Lemuel an actual character, invest in their relationship (Louis never being able to have an emotionally shallow relationship despite his difficulty showing vulnerability with his partners is an interesting trait!! Something we may want to explore!! Perhaps with a vampire who only wants a casual relationship!! Perhaps with a vampire who is totally unattached from the Lestat baggage that Mr Companion-Enough-For-Myself swore off some time ago!!), and develop Regina further - perhaps give her a fucking visible life outside of Louis and her off-screen cunt of a boss. She's well-travelled!! She's vulnerable without being easily pushed around by a guy who keeps throwing around thousand-dollar cheques!! The most interesting part of Regina this season has been the ways in which she's very similar to Claudia positionally, in that Louis is trying to assuage his guilt by making her reliant on him and making her responsible for his emotional security and puts her in danger by doing so!! It's a relationship that could grow in fascinating ways and while, yes, it is kind of unwatchable, and while the fake claudeleine fetish kiss was heinous, I think there is a universe where it could work.

Why, then, Art, do you think that the writers should not have gone there, I hear you ask.

Well, it all goes back to the fact that everything in this show HAS to lead back to Lestat. Every character only matters in relation to their relationship with Lestat, and all plot threads all interesting elements of everyone's previously established characterisation are secondary to this fact.

Spiritually book accurate one may say.

But the upshot of this is that no arc, not Louis, not Armand, not Daniel or Gabriella or Marius or fucking Sam-Why-Are-You-Still-Here-Barclay can exist without coming back to Lestat. And it's not in the way that the protagonist of the show will naturally have a connection to most arcs and subplots. But in a way that he's like a black hole - warping time and space and previous story and characterisation beats all to lead back to him and his rockstar bullshit.

The body of 18 year old Nolan Xavier Wells has unfortunately been found after he went missing from Horn Island, Mississippi. Wells went boating with a group of boys — the rest of the party being white — on July 4th, but he was the only one who didn’t return to shore.