Murf's Personals

IWTVL S3 Ep3 Musings - "Dirt in the Sandwich" 🤔

@likecopperlikesalt I've been having a think (I'm tryna draft up a different yet related post about Artist vs Audience), and I fear something important/disastrous happens midway thru this tour/documentary that has nothing to do with Akasha or the covens at all.

And I think, as usual, it's all Daniel Molloy's fault. 🤦‍♂️

Lestat's Failures say "the first thing one thinks about when my name comes up" is NOT the Akashapocalypse, or Claudia accusing him of threatening her with rape on the train, or even DanLou's book making him look like a mayonnaise B-movie cartoon monster. No.

He says THE FIRST thing people judge him for nowadays is for the INCEST with his MOTHER. 🫣

He's saying it like the "common gossip" got him CANCELLED; over & above anything else he was up to???

And I think DANIEL leaked it. 👀🍿

And I think he did it ON PURPOSE. 👀👀

As payback for Lestat's stunt with the Mind Gift during the interview, stopping Daniel from getting The Scoop he wanted--just like how Daniel went behind Louis' back and published the book after Louis burned his laptop. (Istfg I hate this man so much!)

And now I'm thinking about all the overly hypersexual in-your-face narration Lestat's been giving, where everything related to his time with her is a metaphor for sex:

Fondling my thoughts...Oedipipihany....

Freudian Storms, Boat = Penis, Ocean = Mother's Vajayjay....

Kiss, grope, aftercare.

Licking the underside...rounding the shaft....

He's literally rubbing it in our face at the start of every episode. But he's also tryna act like he's above it all, like he's owning the fact that he has sex with his mom, like he's NOT ashamed ("It's different for vampires~!"), when he so very clearly IS.

So yeah.

Cuz now I'm wondering if the songs and the documentary and the Failures were 3 different endeavors meant for 3 different audiences. But now that he's ostensibly "dead" and auctioning his stuff off, this "privileged individual" is the one he's tryna convince the most that...he's NOT some degenerate? 🤔 Or that he doesn't CARE if someone thinks he's a degenerate? 🤔

Conspiracy Theory:

And I'm wondering: If Daniel sold Lestat's story to the tabloids, was it just to destroy Lestat's reputation and play the devil's fiddle as the city burned; OR did he make out like a bandit and get filthy rich?

Is maybe DANIEL the secret buyer who'll win the auction?! 👀

I know people were clowning the Out reviewer for confusing Raglan for Daniel at the Auction, but heck, tinfoil hat time: maybe they're on to something?! 🤔🤷‍♂️

Is Lestat hoping that whoever wins the auction will clear his name, and give him a better story? And will it be Daniel after all, regaining his lost humanity by finally doing a PROPER book on Lestat? 👀

I EFFING CALLED IT.

Devil's Minion deserve each other--BOTH of these butch queens are savage AF! 😭🤣

IWTVL S3 Ep2 Musings - Break a Leg! 🦵🦴

Just posting this cuz the BTS pics just answered my question:

But yeah, all this broken leg/missing foot imagery is really.... 🤢🤮 It's very pointed, and relentless, and I'm just keeping tabs, cuz good grief.

The true most ordinary object is beautiful, horrible sounding, very smelly, intangible, and delicious.

i think the second one works well for our hypothetical object. so we can use that.

therefore, the Default Object is:

beautiful

makes a horrendous sound

smells absolutely awful

is very fragile

tastes delicious

Frame by frame breakdown, as usual! LFG, Rolin Cut!

Is...Marius shaking Lestat like a sack of potatoes?! 🤣😂 Cuz I think I called this back during NYCC25.

My only question is if it's Marius or Magnus singing in that eyeball clip.

[EDIT] Now that I'm out of IMAGE UPLOADING JAIL, I can finish my frikkin thoughts! 🙄

All I wanted to say about Lestat's dirt nap is how I LOVE the roots they put on him--he looks HORRIFYING--like a Revenant. 😍

I'd love to see more vampires caught fresh out of the grave looking like that, cuz it makes sense! OF COURSE you're gonna be covered in weeds and bugs and have a mole-rat nibbling on your junk and worms falling out of your arse! 🤢 (Vampires are disgusting, I could never, Werewolf Supremacy Gang! 💪🐺)

Even during the Trail Lestat said that roots covered him as he slept:

The jury's still out for how long Lestat was asleep though. That scene with Marius had better be in 1908, Lestat, ISTG!

Cuz if it's true he was underground for the whole 100 years, that means everything he told Louis & Claudia was A EFFING LIE.

I already laid into Lestat's lyin arse in Pt1, but ANOTHER THING! ☝️😤

Like I've said 100x, I'm fine with Lestat being asleep for 100yrs and Marius waking him up in 1908 or wtvr.

But I slept on it, and I'm awake now my dang self with more questions:

How TF did Marius dig Lestat out of the dirt and wake Lestat up....IN PARIS?! 🤨

Lestat told the coven he was asleep RIGHT UNDER THEIR NOSES the whole time in Paris--which I BEEN said made no sense.

Which means that unless Lestat was asleep at multiple times in multiple places, Marius MUST have been IN PARIS to dig him up. 🤔

You know....

Paris. 💀

The same city MARIUS' OWN FLEDGLING ARMAND RULED OVER AND HAD SPIES CRAWLING EVERYWHERE????

So if even weak AF LOUIS "could sense Armand's ancient power" right away, how in the HELL would 🚨MARIUS 🚨 be able to travel ANYWHERE in Paris to dig up ANY vamps without Armand's spidey senses gaydar instantly tingling that My Vampire Daddy's Home?! 🤨

You know.... MARIUS. 👀💀

The same Vampire Daddy Armand thought had been DEAD for centuries?

You mean to tell me Armand wouldn't bat an eyelash with his Alpha's pheromones wafting all the way across the Seine?!!!

TL;DR: Lestat, stop playing with me, ISTG 🔫😤

I need answers RIGHT NOW:

WHERE did Lestat go to sleep? Paris or nah?

WHERE did Marius dig Lestat out of his dirt nap & wake him up? Cairo or nah?

WHERE was Marius stashing TWMBK?

With #3, it's perfectly fine for Marius to keep TWMBK in one country then fly to another one to wake Lestat up. That's not the problem here--he did that in the books, too (Lestat was asleep in CAIRO, and Marius was hiding TWMBK in Greece). I just wanna know how far Marius had to travel with Lestat to take him to his hideaway, cuz I'm nosey. 😅

So, Inverse just answered my question, AND spoiled something that hadn't even been on my mind, but thanks I guess? 🤦‍♂️😂

Not only does this mean that Marius was letting TWMBK "hibernate in a Paris catacomb," but I guess this also means that Lestat really was asleep in Paris, not Cairo. Which...?

I got QUESTIONS, AMC. Cuz how in the HELL?

Literally, the Children of Satan are in the same dang city. HOW were they not sensing Lestat!? And NGL, I'm looking at Armand hella crazy right now, cuz was he in on this?! Did he already KNOW? Was he protecting Lestat's resting place Memnoch the Devil style, like when Lestat was in his coma?

Fun trivia: The ice cream scooper was invented around the 1870s by a Black man (but the type in the AFD music video is more modern), so that tracks for Lestat waking in 1908.

As for TWMBK, Imma PRAY that Marius moved to Paris AFTER 1949--AFTER Louis killed the coven and Loumand LEFT Europe to go to Egypt or wherever.

Cuz if not, and he was in Paris the whole dang time pre-1949, that more than anything is gonna PMO the most; so AMC better have such a good explanation for this istg. (ARMAND, I'm still looking at you sideways! Don't let me find you were in on the secret about Akasha too, I will ROTFLMFAO cuz that would actually be an amazing twist NGL--it would certainly explain how he can walk in the effing sunlight--and jfc were all The Groan theories onto something?!)

Regardless, what makes me mad isn't that "they're doing the books"--cuz none of this is anywhere NEAR the books--but rather that AMC's once again gonna IGNORE LORE LOGIC that THEY THEMSELVES already established.

Vampires can sense, hear & even smell each other across great distances.

The Paris coven is particularly vicious & dangerous.

Marius already got burned by the CoS once before.

Armand didn't know who Akasha was.

So AT LEAST one of these is a lie, and ARMAND's the one who told half of them.

Cuz WHY is Marius in Armand's city--in FRANCE at all--and WITH the Parents? TdV MUST be already dead by the time we see Akasha in Paris, there's just no way. 😭🙏 It MUST be after 1949?! 🙏

👀🤔 I mean, there's MANY reasons to fear Marius, so...?

I am SO excited to see wtf this even means.

Cuz in the books, Lestat is Marius' biggest glazer bar none, all the way to the end of the franchise. Which ofc could be its own form of grooming/abuse too, (Marius hems & haws with his death threats in TVL warning Lestat to not be a snitch about TWMBK, but he's also a gigantic hypocrite so who GAF what he says 🙄). I been said that my biggest beef with Marius is his patriarchal AF Father Knows Best My Way or the Highway callous AF treatment of Armand leaving him with Santino. So AMC could totally lean into that with his dynamic with Lestat, and make him more of a tyrant to have Marius' death threats be LEGIT, esp. if he DOESN'T trust Lestat to not run off blabbing. Esp. since AMC seems like they've hated Marius this whole time; so I wouldn't be surprised if he's a huge a-hole to Lestat too--to strip away the rose-colored glasses Anne Rice/Lestat wrote Marius with.

OR, they could play it straight and let The Brat Prince give rules the middle finger--esp. since he already mentioned them in front of Louis TWICE (1x7 & 2x8). Who knows. 🤷‍♂️

But my theory's that Armand's GOTTA have something to do with all this, (which makes me look at Rolin & Assad SUPER SUS).

Ok, so whoever wrote the Inverse review was GRAVELY mistaken.

IDK how they assumed the shrine was in Paris, when it was clearly in Greece???

Now granted, I'm still not sure about where Lestat was asleep/awoken--there was a lot of talk about Spain, but I couldn't tell if that was just where Gabrielle ditched Lestat, or if that's where he actually buried himself, too. 🤷‍♂️

I've been thinking about the vampire population in Europe for a while, and WHY it was that Louis & Claudia had such a hard time finding any sentient vampires until they got to Paris.

It's SO interesting that AMC added Daciana, an old AF vampire who's obvs mentally traumatized, but still highly sentient & verbose & articulate; and one who knew other sentient vampires long ago, too.

We get the impression that the locals are going around killing vampires, or preventing them from being made just cuz they're shooting up coffins & wearing garlic. But we know that that's not how AR lore works--making vampires involves copious blood exchanges--not even S01E01 really showed it in full, cuz vamps need to swap blood back & forth quite a few times for the best results--like Marius did with Armand.

Which is why Claudia's revenants failed; she doesn't have enough.

We see Daciana feeding the soldier blood, and she's obvs bitten him, too, but it's clearly not enough--Lestat said you have to "half-kill" the victim and not drink dead blood--so I wonder if it's cuz the injured soldiers Daciana picks are just too close to dying already?

Who knows. We can assume Daciana's not the Maker of the other revenants Lou & Claudia encountered across Europe. Which begs the question: who is? And why're they making such shoddy vamps? Are ALL these Makers THAT weak?

Then it dawned on me when I remembered Marius again:

Are these northern & eastern European vampires the "Old Gods" from the Queen's Blood? Like--from the GREAT BURNING? 👀

Cuz it would make sense that the reason all the vampires Louis met suck (literally) in the Old World is cuz their Makers just CAN'T make better vampires--they're still too injured! 👀

Like, TVL implied that Teskhamen (Marius' Maker) might've FAILED b4, or that he'd seen other candidates NOT become proper vamps strong enough to make it back to Egypt. HE'd been too weak to make any; he was scared he didn't have it in him to do it properly.

Teskhamen said that the "Old Gods" all over Europe had burned up. It hadn't been a decade after the Great Burning that he turned Marius, and was still a charred black husk. (Centuries later, when he makes Hesketh, he's STILL injured. So I wonder: are the vampire Makers out there creating revenants injured & weak, too?....)

Teskhamen waited til Mael found Marius, "the mortal Who Knows, and is Learned and Can Learn," and made Marius a vamp cuz he was smart & educated; not only increasing his odds of sneaking TWMBK out of Egypt, but also likely lowering the possibility that he'd turn out a mad, dumb revenant.

Cuz aesthetics are everything with AR vamps--even as crispety crackety crunchety as Teskhamen was, he STILL had to go on bragging about how beautiful he'd once been, like, bruh? 🙄

Ok, so I was kinda right about Daciana--she definitely got burned! The only difference is that AMC pushed the timeline down significantly. 😬

Marius got drunk on ginger ale (LOL) after transporting TWMBK "from one crypt to another," and passed TF out like lightweight--your Italian ancestors should be ASHAMED.

I'm still very confused as to what exactly happened though.

Marius said he "hadn't finished the job," cuz Enkil was left out in the sun.

But surely that's not where the giant HOLE in his head came from. 🤨

Akasha has burn marks all over her--so did Enkil burning do that to her...? That makes no sense--SHE has to be in the sun for all of them to burn.

So was Marius passed TF out drunk OUTSIDE with TWMBK; then he woke up in the morning on fire, grabbed Akasha & booked it; leaving Enkil to burn in the sun cuz he could only take one? 👀

So did Akasha just drain Enkil cuz he was all charred and she was burned and took his blood to heal herself and killed him off? 🤔

[EDIT] @crazykuroneko brought up an excellent point about Lioncest in Denmark though:

How the heck can Marius be burning with TWMBK in the daylight in Greece; but Lioncest is burning under the moonlight in Denmark? 🤔

Sunrise in Denmark on 12/19/1802 was at 8:46 AM (sheesh!). (I picked Alborg because it seemed far away from the rest of the cities, and is close-ish to where a lot of Bog Bodies had been found.)

Meanwhile, sunrise in Athens, Greece on 12/19/1802 was at 7:10am.

So IDFK--clearly AMC picked Denmark cuz it's farther north and in the winter there's longer nights and shorter days which make it easier for vamps to roam around blahblah. But it's still only 1 hour's difference b/t Denmark & Greece, so it's not as if it was at some CRAZY midnight hour where Lioncest was. 🤨

So my only assumption is that Marius moving TWMBK "from crypt to crypt" wasn't actually in Greece yet--maybe he was much farther East? Maybe he was the one in Cairo all along? 👀 But that doesn't make sense either, since the whole point of his job was to get the Parents OUT of Egypt. 🤔

UGH, AMC, why TF didn't y'all just stick to the effing book!? 😭😩 Especially if y'all weren't even gonna bother explaining anything clearly!

TL;DR: Look how they massacred my boy!

I DEEPLY hate the changes they've made to Marius & Enkil, omfg. 🤦‍♂️

I'm so bummed that Enkil's already dead when we meet him; that's so annoyingly lazy. Like, I'm actually furious. His presence was part of why Akasha was so misandrist in the first place, cuz she (like Gabrielle), didn't want to be chained down to her husband anymore, some man breathing down her neck every time any vampire tried to get close to her! And clearly AMC is aware of this, cuz of how brazenly Lestat talks to Enkil's corpse.

Akasha liked how different Lestat was from Marius & Enkil--cuz Lestat was someone SHE could control, not the other way around. 😬

And as for Marius, they've pretty much merged him with The Elder, but made him far more bumbling & clumsy in ways I just CAN'T reconcile with book!Marius' darn near PARANOIA about the Parents.

But I guess that's the point, cuz none of AMC's characters are book accurate anyway, so.... 🙄🤷‍♂️

Like, yeah, it makes sense that Marius is kinda...touched, cuz he's been alone for so long. Esp. since AMC!Akasha hasn't REALLY been asleep the whole time--she talks telepathically with both of them, she moves around, and Marius said that feeding her blood "overwhelms" her, and it takes "years" to calm her back down.

But it's wild how they made Lestat the new Keeper; I'm so frikkin floored I don't even have words for it.

AMC, whatchumean COMEDIC? 🤨 (0/10 👎)

IDKWTF drugs y'all were on, but I wasn't laughing at all; I was ready to HURL CHUNKS. 🤢

I wanted sapphic Claudeleine kisses, BUT AT WHAT COST?! 🫣😭😩

Same, this is THE BAD PLACE, let's GTFOH. ❌🙅🛑❌🤮🤮🤮

The Boat Scene (1/10 👎)

I CANNOT.

The ONE (1) cool part is that LOUIS ALSO HAS THE TIME GIFT NOW.

The wording here was CRAZY foreshadowing too, cuz REGINA (the Queen) was turned to STONE (asleep) but couldn't be HELD (kept) too long.... AMC y'all ain't slick! 👀

💔 The Call / Loustat Car Scene 💔 (8/10 👍)

Is Lestat clairvoyant?! He (or rather, The Muses) knew Louis was calling him for help before the phone even started ringing! 👀

SOULMATE AU FTW; Brutal Love can't come fast enough omg~! 🥰

But crazy is how any time Louis' with another man, he's automatically a "whore"--but LESTAT can shag anyone he wants and he's just embracing Vampire Pride~! and being a Rockstar~! huh? 😒 That PMO; the double standards are WILD.

Likewise--

As much as I LOVE seeing Loustat talking and being vulnerable with each other again, I'm sorry I gotta channel Satan herself, but I couldn't care less about Lestat getting shot; I laughed when it happened. 🙄🤷‍♂️

This 265yo drama queen acting like he was at death's door or something, BFFR. 😭🤦‍♂️ In 1x3 Louis got shot at point blank range only 6yrs into the Blood and didn't even flinch and it was one of the most BAMF scenes in the whole series--so PLEASE spare me, Mr. I HAve thE BLoOd oF AKaShA iN ME; Mr. Imma Yeet Myself Into The Sun so I can record a lame AF diss track about Armand--he's SO UNSERIOUS. 🤣 If you just wanted to hear from Louis after your band ditched you and your mother ditched you, JUST SAY SO. 🙄

And there Louis goes, as always, internalizing the absolute worst things about himself. No duh Louis wasn't focused on Lestat getting shot; he was kinda going thru A FREAKING MENTAL ILLNESS CRISIS WITH REGINA AT THE TIME, HELLO?!

Esp., since Louis had ghosted TF out of Lestat for who knows how long already--so if he was suddenly calling out of the blue, YEAH it's serious.

Wtvr; I'm just glad Lestat will always come running when his BLOOD CHILD who is HIS RESPONSIBILITY asks for HIS MAKER'S help. 😤 At least Lestat's a better father-husband than EFFING ARMAND OML. 💀

Lestat Meets Regina 👀 (10/10 👍)

GOD I love this part--Lestat was SHOOK the whole time; I can't imagine wtf was going thru his head, cuz yeah, Louis ain't crazy at all; THIS CHICK REALLY LOOKS LIKE CLAUDIA OML. 💀

A HEART MURMUR!? 😱 When?! Before or after she was turned?! It must've been when she was still human--but did it carry into her vampiric afterlife too? The streets are still undecided as to whether Daniel has Parkinson's still or not; so who knows how else AMC will eff up the lore next this season--this episode PMO something fierce.

THE PAIN. 😔🤌

Regina clocked his arse though--she read that book; she knows what's up with Loustat. Hurting Louis was par for the course in that house; Mr. Pot Meets Kettle.

GET HER ARSE, LESTAT. 👏😤

Man I love this whole segment; Lestat saw right thru her.

I am SO glad Lestat was just like: Nope, hang it up, flatscreen; you're tripping, Louis. Like, if you're gonna gaslight Louis, at least do it in a way that actually HELPS him, jfc. 👏 Louis, cut the umbilical already! 😭😩

AMEN. 💯 Regina is just as bad as Armand, enabling Louis' worst habits and watching him deteriorate further & further into madness; not a care in the world for his well-being aside from how SHE could get something out of it. Which--MAKE YOUR MONEY, like I said. 🤑 But take the funds Louis already gave you and BOUNCE. 😤👉

ALL Y'ALL finna PMO--Louis' not calling just cuz "he wants something," he's calling cuz a girl who looks like LESTAT'S DAUGHTER is driving him crazy! HELLO?!

All the #Lesdaughter bullcrap in this fandom, but all of a sudden it's unreasonable for Louis to call Lestat and tell him to double-check what's going on with Regina?!

Frame by frame breakdown, as usual! LFG, Rolin Cut! (8hrs after Tumblr hit me with the image limit! So I went to bed, slept on all of this, and now I'm awake and ready to gogogo! 😁)

This is possibly THEE coolest frame I've seen on the whole show. 👌 (Murf's Cinematography Awards: 1x1 - Lestat Freezing Time at the Poker Table; 1x7 - Louis Slitting Lestat's Throat; 2x2 TdV's Projections; 2x6 Armand & Madeleine On a Sofa)

I can't wait to see this scene; whatever's going on looks FUN & creative.

My guesstimate's that either:

Lestat's hallucinating/dreaming as he talks to the "ghosts" of his past, and Daniel interrupts him / wakes him up

Someone's using the Spell Gift / Mind Gift against him to MAKE him face the ghosts he's been avoiding (Memory is a Monster)

This is a music video (highly unlikely)

I'm only taking #1 & #2 seriously, because #3 literally makes no sense--half the people at that table are dead. 💀

The fancy AF dining room's reminding me of Lestat's Chateau renovations in the PL Trilogy. That was his biggest hope/dream, to reunite all of the vampires under his father's roof--not the gross impoverished neglected & outdated medieval castle that had fallen to wreck & ruin when he was a human, but the lavish Rococo Disney Castle confectionary Lestat always wanted it to be, as befitting his family's rank as Marquis.

Cuz it's not really about the fancy castle. In Gothic Horror, the Haunted/Abandoned House is a symbol reflecting the character(s) and their progression, degression, or stagnation (x x). The Chateau's a symbol reflecting how badly Lestat wanted to REPAIR HIS RUINED FAMILY--human AND vampire.

So these vamps all eating together at the dinner table aren't some random get-together. Lestat's been stuck in a loop at his father's dinner table in the Great Hall all his life, only now he's taken his father's place--his seat at the head of the table as Patriarch de Lioncourt--repeating the TOXIC CYCLES OF ABUSE & FAILURE over & over with each fledgling, just in different but not unrelated ways.

My DEEP suspicion's that they're not even REAL. Lestat's clearly tripping, since that's the same purple shirt in his other hallucination:

But they're real TO HIM, because this is his FAMILY--these are his LOST CHILDREN. (Like Benji said, ALL vampires are a lost & parentless tribe/family.) But these are all GHOSTS, just manifestations of Lesat's guilty conscience.

☝️ And these are the OBVIOUS 3 dead giveaways. ☝️

Let's get ths heifer out the way first: That's Antoinette in the same Mardi Gras tuxedo she died in.

(My question is who TF the chick is behind her--is that Baby Jenks????? *squints* She's wearing modern clothes, so this is a vampire he turned more recently. 👀)

She's got a typewriter in one hand and a (phallic, cuz ofc) sausage in her mouth. So she's sucking his meat as usual, and writing/COPYING everything he says on the typewriter--cuz just like I said 1000yrs ago in my Brides of Dracula!Lestat post: she's his PARROT, his BIRD. That's not love, that's ownership.

But regardless of how much he used & abused her, I KNOW Lestat had to be in real physical pain when Claudia killed her--that's his daughter, just like Claudia's death must've physically pained Lestat and effed him up even more on that Trial stage (which is why he's mumbling & bumbling in the 2x8 Tower Scene). It's grief.

Next up, the most important of them all: NOLA!Louis in his iconic red suits (back when he had the most confidence, "There's the spark!" that Lestat's overbearing oppressive behavior snuffed out).

Nicki sitting next to Louis (is he shirtless at the table? *squints*):

I can't WAIT to see this convo--this is spiiiiicy~! 👀Cuz in my Brides of Dracula!Lestat post, Nicki's darkness/depression ("you drag me into your gloom") was half the reason Lestat DIDN'T want to turn Nicki.

Lestat knew that Nicki had already been traumatized by vampires--he'd been kidnapped & tortured by Armand & the Children of Darkness, AND book!Lestat had scared TF out of Nicki when he vamped-out at Renaud's and caused a mass panic and got SHOT, lol.

Nicki already had two of the WORST first impressions of vampirism. Lestat had a feeling something bad might happen, but he also hoped that vampirism might help Nicki the way it helped Gabrielle (& also helped himself duh LBH).

So for AMC!Nicki to be hollering about hoping Lestat would've taken the initiative to turn him much sooner is interesting. Lestat's guilty conscience telling him that he should've turned Nicki ASAP is just wrongheaded AF. There was NO POINT IN TIME when Nicki would've ever been a good candidate for vampirism, and certainly not after Armand got his grubby fingers on him.

Nicki was throwing red flags ever since Auvergne, even during Nickistat's "Golden Moments" when they'd get drunk as skunks & dream of running away to Paris.

Ofc the problem is that we only ever see Nicki from Lestat's POV--Anne Rice never gave Nicki his own voice. The way book!Lestat imagines Nicki even in TVL is still HIS version of Nicki. And unless AMC gives us an object 3rd party flashback of Nickistat, we'll never see anything but Armands's version of a cucked jealous AF Nicki, or Lestat's version of a possessive ("MINE!" in blood on the mirror) and needy Nicki whom Lestat felt like he didn't love well enough and abandoned--which.... 👀 🫖🍵☕

Like yeah, the whole point is that Lestat DIDN'T love any of his fledglings well enough. 🤷‍♂️ He let each one of them down in significant ways. And half of them are dead, and the other half are estranged.

Sure, it's not fair to "flatten" Lestat down to just his wrongdoings. BUT it's also not fair to IGNORE the FACT that he was a father who did wrong by each of his kids. 😤 The same way we're primed & ready to cuss Lestat's parents out is the same way we should hold Lestat to the same standards. A deadbeat dad is a deadbeat dad, human or vampire. 💀 (Go ask Alucard, LOL!)

Cuz you know who's NOT at that effing dinner table? Who DIDN'T get a seat at the table? Who's NOT being given a chance to sit with her siblings--her FAMILY--and give Lestat a piece of her mind? So she has to FORCE her way into Lestat's psyche and give him Hell from the ether?

vampire!ToughCookie?! 😱

2 Empty Chairs: Claudia & Felix? 🤔

1) vampire!Tough Cookie?! 😱

OK. So I am confusion, on multiple levels.

First, we have Tough Cookie:

Oh yeah, that's a effing vampire right there--WTF HAPPENED?! 😭

Cuz she still looks human in all of the other scenes--only in oned does she look pale & sickly.

So then who's this chick that gets hurt?!

There's too many brunettes on this effing show. Cuz I'm assuming this is TC in the back blowing smoke in Alex's face?

The girl in Lestat's arms doesn't really look like her, but maybe that's just cuz of the weird angle?

Regardless, thanks to @hauntedbauhaus' eagle eyes, we have DEFINITE suspicion that Tough Cookie's days are numbered; Lestat's turning her into a vampire at some point, oml. 💀 And then she dies anyway--OOF! 💀

2) 2 Empty Chairs: Claudia & Felix? 🤔

Ok, so we have 2 empty chairs, on either side of the table closest to Lestat:

Which is interesting in and of itself--all the other ghosts are sitting faaaaar removed from him; while the 2 seats closest to him are empty.

I reckon the seat next to Louis is Claudia's. And the seat next to Antoinette is Felix's.

So the 2 halves of the table are thus divided: Claudia, Louis & Nicki to the left; and Felix, Antoinette & Tough Cookie to the right. With Lestat & Gabrielle at the head & foot of the table--the OG Mom & Dad.

Hrm.... 🧐 She still looks human here... 🧐 None of the ghoulish discoloration around the eyes & lips.

And I can't see her hands to check for vamp claws/nails. 🧐🧐🧐

@hauntedbauhaus Hallucination!Magnus is spilling TEA!

"Very odd company at The Long Table...."

Because Armand's was telling the truth: it's "repulsive" to make vampires--it's just Makers creating more & more dead things to keep them company at The Long Table (Hell, Purgatory) that eats souls.

Makers know that each of their fledglings "eat your soul" as a reflection of who you are--what you want most, or what you're most afraid of and running away from the longest. They're all The Vampire Loneliness, that you KNOW you can't truly fulfill, cuz you're dead in side too. (It's RARE to have Blood Spouses who CAN beat the odds; "not enduring [eternity], living!")

A HAND

A FINGER

A DRUMMER 👀👀👀

A PIMP

YOU

MOMMY

CLAUDIA

TL:DR: I have so many questions!!!!

Cuz this literally makes no sense. Is TC *ALREADY* a vampire?! Why would Magnus list her? Why else is she apparently at the table?

Like, why does she always looked just as shocked & surprised by vamp shenanigans as everyone else? Or is she just *that* young of a fledgling that the novelty of everything's surprising her still?

IDK, why do I feel like we're being tricked/misled somehow?

Unless Alex & Salamander are gonna take the 2 empty seats, TCs the only one at the table. 👀

Granted, I also suspect that Alex & Salamander are gonna get turned by Sam & Gabriella, one each, since there's 3 vamps & 3 humans--I doubt they'd ALL get turned by Lestat.

So maybe these are not ALL estranged & dead vamps; they're just his bloodline. So maybe the 2 empty seats are Claudia & Magnus? 🤔🤷‍♂️

But yup, they were teasing TF outta TC becoming a vamp,

(Ouch. 😅) The wedding themes this season are ALL OVER the joint.

TC's Drums took me back to my Loustat feels!

AMC totally did that on purpose. 😭❤️

Which BEGS the question:

We already know that bb!Lestat could see spirits (which is book canon); but up until now I've assumed that the "ghosts" of his past were just hallucinations. Now I'm not so sure. Cuz Hallucination!Magnus already told us that "The Drummer" was one of Lestat's fledglings AHEAD OF TIME. But now we also have Hallucination!bb!Lestat foretelling that Louis was about to call his phone in distress AHEAD OF TIME.