I know I said I'm trying to save my thoughts on this stuff until the end of the season but my thoughts keep circling back to Daniel's racist comment in episode 4 so I guess I just need to purge my thoughts.
Because on one side are people saying "well Daniel has always been like this, it's not surprising" and on the other people are saying "this racism from the writing team is completely new" and I think that both of these statements are true and can coexist.
Daniel has always been like this, very specifically towards Louis and Armand, because throughout season 1 and 2 despite being the old white guy in the room, in that Dubai penthouse he held significantly less power. Louis and then Armand were active threats to him, because they are vampires, and to me Daniel's microaggressions and jabs were his way of trying to regain some kind of feeling of power whilst being in danger. And we see him doing that again in 3x4 when he is ranting to Armand, throwing out jabs about his sexuality and his submissiveness as a way of claiming back a little bit of power, because Armand is a threat to him.
That's why his comment calling Louis "Louisiana fried chicken" stands out to me so much, because it doesn't fit with what Daniel is doing, what Daniel has always been doing. Louis isn't there. Louis isn't a threat to him right now, nor was he a threat to him in that moment in San Francisco he's referencing. Punching down at Louis does nothing, gains him nothing, and you can't even call it some extension of a microaggression towards Armand because what he said was specifically anti-black. That to me is where the changes in the writer's room become apparent, because the white writers have taken what was originally something that told a bigger story about Daniel as a character and reduced it down to "old white man is racist, and that's funny" and I think it highlights not only the obvious lack of Black creatives this season, but also how much the white writers fundamentally didn't understand what their Black cowriters were even contributing in the first place.
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