Currently being Tarred and Feathered in the Town

I want Marius to pop out with all the boys he kept despite leaving Armand to feel responsible for his death and to rot for 2 centuries in an abusive cult. I want them all to look just like Lestat—white, blonde hair, blue eyes. Then, I want a Loumand tag team taking out the Aryan Vampire Nation. I care more about this than whatever comes of the Great Conversion. No one's gonna beat me for it.

Finally, after both being emboldened by a fruitful murder and torture spree, I need Loumand to clock Daniel on all the sly racial comments before he gets the full power package from Armand. Put more fear into him. Keep it there. Same with Lestat, since both obviously need to live on.

It's in everything from NCIS and SVU to TikTok skits and AI racebait. Every ten scrolls is either some irony-poisoned joke about Black suffering or a third-hand recount of real-life violence. Both digital blackface and black suffering are among the backbones of social media and fiction.

It's not hard to find a crime or courthouse show about Black suffering or domestic violence against black women. It's not difficult to find memes mocking victims of police brutality, and although one might not agree with those memes, the simple act of seeing floods of that sort of content poisons the viewers' reaction to it later down the line. First, it's a flinch, and next it's 'not surprising, oh well'.

Seeing a Black person being unjustly abused, punished, unsympathetically dropped by their own community, or literally lynched is not an uncommon event to witness. It's a common trope in media, and it's also a common event in reality. It's something that people rarely share prolonged sympathy and understanding for.

They click, scroll, move on, and take their black box off of their social media a day later. Supposed allies on Twitter will plainly go "I'm so tired of seeing stuff like this, I have to stop watching things like this UGH!" while joking about how disturbing and off-putting it is, with little emotion shown towards the actual victim presented.

The recent season of IWTV (TVL) has been really disturbing in how much it feels like the show, and its audience has succumbed to this disease as well. Louis' suffering is considered trivial, unimportant, or funny to some. His victimization is now considered "old news" by the writers and an "inconvenience" by its own audience. You see thousands of hours of media showing a Black person getting beaten by their partner or receiving an unfair punishment, and suddenly "Louis is being dramatic". Because YOU have seen it all before, because YOU are tired of seeing it, and YOU are no longer shocked by it. And it's nearly impossible to not connect it to how people have been treating both real and fictional Black victims in media for centuries.

This constant wave of our own suffering on the news, being played up for laughs in memes, or being scrolled past in shock, has created a deep lack of empathy and desensitization towards us. It's become a welcome pattern; it's become a boring fatigue.

Suddenly, after this season has started, people have begun making DV jokes about beating Louis or joke edits showing Lestat beating him... something that was earlier frowned upon. This has gone from one-offs that quickly get deleted to constant jokes about it. It's almost as if... the audience has become tired of pretending to care... (see where I'm going with this? It's a pattern.)

It's as if, despite intentionally writing an immensely deep, nuanced trauma onto this character, they decided after only two seasons of him that they were tired of it. And it's hard to say, but it feels as if they got tired of hearing about their own character's suffering and decided to move on. And it's hard to not believe that race plays a part in it when the show has gotten rid of all of its Black writers while this season consistently makes racialized jokes at his expense.

“OKAY GAH FINE IWTV IS ABOUT DV! Anyways, here is 40 pages of analysis on dear god anything else” like I hope both sides of your pillow is warm if you post up on actual analysis of character dynamics with some “everyone is an immoral monster!”. Like idk fam, I think you are missing the point. In fact I would say the show actively tries to contradict that Louis’ view of vampiric nature as inherently a doomed codependent existence is one that is forced upon him rather than what he has to accept. The culmination of the finales was explicitly about him realizing that he shouldn't take this life for himself. Like its explicitly about Louis realizing that “it ends here”.

Like “she can dream” is such a powerful moment because after seeing his vampirism in the light of an inherently violent, soulless, hateful existence he is trying to see more.

To try and tie Louis back down into “all vampires are domestic abusers and that's just how it is so lets ignore it” is kinda like… almost contradictory to the point. But its also just disrespectful to everyone arcs in this narrative. Louis is desperately trying to break that mold and that cycle and find ANYTHING ELSE. When other worse vampires show up (Ses: Marius) the narrative goal isn't to turn Louis’ emotions into a funhouse mirror. Its to add nuance to why the characters might feel as if that inner darkness and violence is inescapable even though we as the audience know it is. We as outside observers know that the characters have full autonomy even when the characters lament that they feel as if they do not. That is the inherent horror of it all. They don't HAVE to do these things to each other at all, and yet they still DO.