Vamprincess

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

✨ the vampire lestat tiny desk concert ✨

A Wip of a big ass oil painting I impulsively started a month ago but haven’t had time to work on 😔

It could have been SO interesting to have this revisited from lestats pov as one of the only 2 other people who survived that incident. Maybe we might have gotten an explanation even about why he saved louis but did not even try for claudia even though he was clearly devastated by her murder, or why he left louis to rot in a coffin even after seemingly going through great lengths to prevent his execution.

and now that i've seen everything, i wish they'd left him the fuck alone. or at least had him kill bruce, realize how hollow he felt after, and go off on his own journey of learning how to be in the world again with his grief and guilt, even if he fucked it up and it wasn't perfect. let us fill in the blanks if they didn't care enough to do so thoughtfully.

either way, they assassinated everyone else's characters including their protagonist, so the season still would've sucked, but at least we wouldn't have had to see the writers gleefully humbling and physically torturing One Specific Guy for the entire rest of the season.

they certainly answered the question of "how to return louis to lestat." the answer is debase him. have half of of the spoken lines about him reduce him to a pimp and a liar. physically torture him, make him crawl back with his tail between his legs. it's never a question that louis and lestat love each other, even when they hate each other most. but i would've loved to see them come back to each other organically. we saw the start of it in episode 6, but a lot of it was entirely left offscreen.

if the goal is to put all these monstrous characters on equal ground with each other, it's a superficial one at best, because you can't deny the disproportionate violence inflicted on louis vs other characters depicted onscreen. it shouldn't necessarily be one to one--"louis experiences this so armand experiences that so this thing must happen to lestat"--that's just lazy storytelling. but tying torture almost exclusively to one--Black--character throughout all three seasons is ignorant at best, virulently racist at worst.

Ma Cherie!

(Claudeleine healings for all of us...)