didn't have time to go through the #tvl critical but culture kitsch voices some of my thoughts
"Y'all got way too comfortable with the language. (...) And I know that there were some response because in season one Claudia alludes to the words like massa and slave, but the context of those two scenes are very different.
(...) Race clearly is in the driver's seat (in s1), and race began to take a backseat in season 2. (...) The fact that at the trial they chose to call it a stoning, versus a lynching. Again, a racialized term that I think would have been very appropriate for for that that point in time. But hey chose to to call it a stoning.
(...) You can't then come back around seasons later and you want to use that racialized language between two characters that are the same race. It doesn't work like that.
(...) It's inappropriate. (...) If the show had maintained a consistent pitch of a consciousness of race throughout the season. Doesn't have to be that every single episode is talking about race, but if that had if the racial subtext had remained present through season 2 into season 3, then when we get to this point, that wouldn't feel so odd.
(...) And the thing is, like I said, you take those three phrases out, the the core of what they're getting at, the core of of Claudia's rage and the core of her trying to hurt Louie still lands."
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You know it's a Gothic Horror show, and you're supposed to feel uncomfortable, right? I do. But do you? Do you, Rolin, and Hannah understand that? Because from where I stand, only the Black characters seem to be trapped in a horror story. The others appear to be in a completely different genre.
The issue isn't that viewers like myself don't want to feel uncomfortable. The issue is that, in this Gothic Horror show, Black characters disproportionately bear the brunt of the violence.
Take this season finale as an example.
At the end of Episode 6, two characters are beheaded. Yet in Episode 7, we are shown the severed head and mutilated body of the black character in explicit details, while the white character's mutilated body is shown only briefly and out of focus, and his severed head is hidden from us.
Louis's arc is presented as a parallel to Lestat's. Both characters are placed in situations where they must confront people they have wronged, or at least people the narrative insists they have wronged, as well as their pasts, relationships, and mistakes. (Personally, I don't believe Louis owes Armand anything, but the narrative clearly wants the audience to think otherwise.🙄🙄🙄)
Yet the way these parallel journeys are depicted are drastically different.
Lestat's reckoning unfolds in beautiful rooms, elegant spaces, and dreamlike settings. He sits comfortably while listening to the grievances of the people in his life. He argues back. He reflects. He moves through beautiful environments, from grand rooms to forests and back again. Even when he is forced to confront painful memories, the experience is framed as introspection. The focus remains on his emotional and psychological journey.
Meanwhile, Louis is placed in what looks like a torture room straight out of a Saw movie. His severed head sits on a table, hooked up to a machine. His body is positioned across from him, forcing him to stare at it. His suffering is not just physical; it is public and humiliating. His torture is broadcast for others to watch and study. His pain becomes both spectacle and data. He is joined by Regina, another Black character, whose torture is used as leverage against him.
The man torturing Louis demands an apology, not for any genuine wrongdoing, but because Louis failed to love him the way he believed he deserved to be loved, and failed to show enough empathy for his trauma. This is the same man who murdered Louis's daughter in a lynching and attempted to murder Louis in that same lynching, and who, only minutes earlier, boasted that he took aesthetic pleasure in making Louis's death visually exhilarating as part of that lynching.
And so the torture continues. Louis is pushed to the brink of death. Regina is slicing her wrist. Eventually, Louis gives in. He apologizes. He accepts responsibility not only for hurting his torturer's feelings but for the torture itself. He tells his torturer that his coldness and denial drove him (the torturer) to these actions (the torture). The torturer receives the apology he wants, ends the torture, heals and frees Regina, and leaves, but not before carving the letter "A" onto Louis's mutilated body.
Meanwhile, Lestat is still moving through beautiful settings, confronting his past, and listening to others condemn him for the failures of his life. His story reaches its climax in the final act, when he is surrounded by the people in his life and the people he has wronged, some of whom are cheering him on. Rather than being subjected to physical degradation, he is given space for self-reflection. The focus remains on his memories, his relationships, his mistakes, the horrors he has committed, and his regrets. He eventually acknowledges some of his mistakes and even apologizes to one of his victims. Instead of fleeing from his past, he chooses to face it. His reckoning culminates in understanding, and the arc ultimately ends with imagery that evokes transcendence, as though he is ascending to heaven.
Both Louis and Lestat are given parallel narrative arcs centered on confronting their pasts, their relationships, and the harm they have caused. Yet the show presents those reckonings through vastly different visual and narrative lenses. Lestat's journey is psychological, reflective, and aesthetically beautiful. Louis's journey is a sustained ordeal of physical and psychological torture, humiliation, and degradation. One character is invited to examine himself; the other is turned into a spectacle of suffering. While Lestat is afforded reflection, Louis is afforded degradation.
And I'm supposed to look at that contrast and just shrug and say, "Well, that's Gothic horror for you"? Really? Take the blinders off. Look at what is being asked of Louis and compare it to what is being asked of Lestat. One is granted introspection, reflection, and, ultimately, transcendence. The other is subjected to torture, humiliation, and spectacle. The genre does not erase that disparity. If anything, it makes it more obvious.
My issue is not the horror. My issue is who is repeatedly asked to embody that horror, whose pain is treated as spectacle, and whose pain is afforded dignity, nuance, and care.
Racism in narratives is such an important topic, I wish y'all didn't banalized it so much to make a bad point.
Lestat's journey in this season is a parallel to Louis in the previous 2 seasons, not on this one. Louis doesn't have a reckoning to be had, his happened last season, emotionally, when he revisited the trial and started agreeing with past Lestat. That's when he understands that he was at fault too.
The narrative is not forcing anyone to think that Armand is right and deserves an apology; you guys really need to understand that depiction is not condoning. Armand doing what he did is not justified nor is it a good thing; it IS an incredible violence done to Louis and Regina. this is not a big brain realization. How the fuck are you guys thinking that the narrative wants you to agree with Armand.
The idea that ONLY the black characters are suffering violence, be it physical or otherwise, is just... Stupid.
In season 1 we saw Lestat torture a lot of white characters. Most didn't even had names. Remember the opera singer? Was that not torture? Remember the train conductor? Was that not disrespectful?
Didn't Louis you're and butcher and crucify a white man?
Wasn't Lestat's attempted murder a torture too? Not just physical, but emotionally too? Being killed by the love of your life and your daughter?
Armand wrote and directed an entire play to torture Louis and Claudia and Madeline. They could've just killed them, but they wanted a show.
We have a cast that is mostly non white. I'm actually shocked that Eric is considered white, tho. Either way, in the main cast only Daniel and Lestat are white. The violence in this show is gonna happen to black characters too at some point, it would be really strange if it never did.
It's unfortunate, but that is the trade off of changing these characters to be black; Claudia will suffer some violence, Louis will suffer some violence, Armand will suffer some violence. And they will be violent too.
It makes it seem like you want black characters to be so protected that they never experience a bad thing ever, and I honestly don't think that is a humane treatment of a marginalized person.
Louis decapitated a lot of vampires in episode 2. Treated it like a joke. What separates those vampires from Louis? Why do they deserve it but Louis don't?
It is a bias. You are biased towards Louis and so it's wrong to harm him, to offend him. It's okay if he does it.
My bad, I guess I had to be very specific and explicitly state that I was talking about the protagonists of the show, the characters with actual narrative weight, the characters whose stories we're supposed to become invested in, not nameless victims who exist for a scene or two before being killed, or side characters who exist primarily as plot devices.
Why should I measure the treatment of the show's protagonists against disposable characters? Am I supposed to care about the treatment of the train conductor, the opera singer, or the Alderman in the same way I care about the treatment of Louis, Claudia, Lestat, etc?
And more importantly, what does that have to do with my argument? A Gothic horror story is not defined by side characters experiencing horror while the protagonists remain unaffected by it. The horror has to reach the protagonists. The protagonists are the ones whose suffering, trauma, fears, and reckonings carry the story's thematic and emotional weight.
As for your point about Armand, I guess you haven't watched the newest After Dark episode, because Rolin and Hannah actually argue that Armand is justified in what he does to Louis. Rolin specifically says that Louis should deeply reflect on what he did to make Armand want to do that to him. So, I guess based on those comments, one might argue that depicting is in fact condoning.
About your point on Lestat. Lestat's death in Season 1 is tragic and emotionally devastating. But the scene is treated with reverence. The focus is on the fracturing of the unholy family, the betrayal, and the heartbreak of both Louis and Lestat. Even though Lestat suffers physical violence, his death is not framed voyeuristically. The focus remains on the emotional and psychological devastation of the moment.
I'm not arguing that Lestat doesn't suffer. He absolutely does. My point is that the show often chooses to frame his suffering through emotional and psychological devastation; even his death scene reflects that. Meanwhile, Louis's suffering is made visible, graphic, and unavoidable in a way that emphasizes bodily violation and degradation. This ties back to the conclusion of my original post “My issue is who is repeatedly asked to embody that horror, whose pain is treated as spectacle, and whose pain is afforded dignity, nuance, and care.”
As for your point on Louis’s reckoning happening in Season 2, you really need to watch the newest episode of The Vampire Lestat: After Dark, because according to Rolin, Louis got off too easy in Season 2. So, his reckoning is apparently happening this season, in two parts: part 1 was the séance, and part 2 is the torture.
Finally, I think you're missing the central point of my issue. My issue is not that I want Black characters to be protected from harm, nor is it that I don't want bad things to happen to them. This is a Gothic Horror story. Of course, terrible things are going to happen to the characters.
My issue is that the show repeatedly reserves its most graphic, degrading, and physical violence for its Black characters. Even in the season finale, we're given explicit shots of Louis's severed head and mutilated body, while Lestat's mutilated body is only briefly shown and his severed head is concealed from the audience.
That's the disparity I'm talking about. It's about how that suffering is framed and depicted, which once again brings me back to “My issue is not the horror. My issue is who is repeatedly asked to embody that horror, whose pain is treated as spectacle, and whose pain is afforded dignity, nuance, and care.”
💬 13 🔁 214 ❤️ 675 · with few exceptions we have only seen black characters graphically get brutalized. they had closeups of louis’s body a
Needed to put these in a full screenshot because this nails it. It’s not at all the content; it’s the narrative framing. This is the fourth time in which Louis is physically maimed or tortured by his significant other (firsthand or by a mob) to the extent of black and blue, visceral on-screen gore. To add insult to injury, this is the third time that this abuse is framed as retaliatory for Louis' actions.
Most of which, if you may have forgotten, DID NOT come with a trigger warning beforehand until massive backlash.
All of which have now become retroactively justified as “provoked” by Louis emotional manipulation or protective treatment of Claudia. We reframed the drop in the Trial as an attack that Louis verbally and physically escalated by fighting back and verbally taunting Lestat after Lestat physically attacked Claudia. We framed the torture of Louis in Episode 5 of Season 2 as Louis' learning not to test Armand's patience. (Again, the framing of good vs bad or proportionate is irrelevant, I'm questioning the framing of there being a lesson to be learned at all). The cast and the characters physically attack Louis to teach him a lesson.
This finale now marks the fourth and third, respectively.
And again, it is not about framing these abusive actions as right or wrong when, generally, Louis senselessly seems to be flogged with physical violence in pursuit of a “greater lesson” constantly. No other character has to learn their lesson; they simply ARE, and they can BE. Their evils are often tightly wound into their identities and flaunted as a matter of pride. To others, evil is a character trait that makes them interesting; to Louis, it's something he has to crawl out of or die trying. Even when his evils are significantly less or more sympathetic than the larger cast. (Again, no issue with this being part of Louis' self-flagellation, but the writers and showrunners themselves seem to uncritically target him with this framing IN REALITY without making this clear)
It’s a pattern FROM THE WRITERS (not the characters) for Louis to be physically abused in the pursuit of altering his thinking or treatment of others. This appears uncritically in this text, which is shockingly absent in the source material of the books.
Louis’ pain is intrinsically linked in the narrative to “Learning a lesson”, “humbling”, and apologizing. While others in the narrative, despite their wrongdoings, do not have their victimization framed as such. Again, my issue isn't with the presence of the violence, but rather its framing as Karmic justice while other vampires of all shades of morality do not seem to be punished narratively by the other characters. Their victimhood is seen as extraneous to their morality.
Abuse towards Armand and Lestat in their pasts is framed as something that cannot be justified. Rightfully so. The narrative, in fact, spends several episodes setting this up for Gabriella’s incestuous abuse. That is not to say it's always handled kindly and with sensitivity; I have many issues with how they handled the gratuitous on-screen incest of Gabistat and the way characters seem to throw Armand's abuse in his face.
However, there's this addiction to treating Louis' abuse as a simple cause and effect in interviews that is incredibly anti-victim and makes the gratuitous violence faced by Louis read as carceral. The same way one would justify beating their own children. In fact, it's a common Jim Crow-era trope. The insistence in both fiction and reality that a Black person must be threatened or punished with physical violence like a slave or an animal to learn their lesson. It's the same reasoning used to justify overpolicing, the same reasoning used to justify families beating black children. The idea that physical violence can flip a switch in one's brain to somehow see reason.
It is particularly a Black man’s pain that is framed in this manner. That Louis could do something different to avoid being beaten, kidnapped, or threatened with murder. The double standards become very clear. And not a single character has afforded him the luxury or comfort that the physical violence inflicted on him isn't warranted. The closest we got was Lestat's retelling of the drop scene in the Trial, where he admits it was a disproportionate act of violence for which he takes grave responsibility. (Again, this season tries to undercut it with the Akasha plotline, and it brings the carousel of what I'm writing here back around.)
And again, the writers are telling you to your face that there is a lesson to be learned here. And I have to ask, why hasn't anyone else been beaten to learn a lesson? And why hasn't a single character LEARNED a lesson other than Louis and Claudia?
And again, I love Louis whump; it is not the content. It’s the narrative framing and retreading of physical abuse that staggeringly resembles racialized violence that the narrative fails to address (or intentionally acts oblivious to). For example, the lack of actual content this season about the Trial and Lestat's canonical level of involvement. It’s jarring how often it laughs at or skims over the previously central instances of domestic violence and betrayal this season. We are not expected to care about the trial, the drop, the death of Claudia, or the implications of Armand truly playing mind games with Louis since prior to the interview. Those things are glossed over because the narrative is trying to tell you that, from S3 onward, we should no longer see these events as important. Because Louis "learned his lesson". And I do not feel like the same people who wrote the first two seasons are here with us now. Either because they got anti-victim brain worms or because they have left the team along the line.
I simply cannot believe in good faith that the same people who said, and I quote, "But I want to be careful to say that Louis will never be not believable as a victim," would turn around and write this finale and walk into the After Dark with a smile on their faces and genuine light in their souls. Especially not when you turn around and pretend like this was about Louis "learning" a lesson.
And I hate the fact that the toxicity of the Maitre/Arun dynamic is now overshadowed by the narrative trying to retroactively use it to torture a Black character physically for the fifth time in fewer than 25 episodes. Never wanting to discuss your own partner's trauma in depth because you feel guilty about your own past wrongdoings is such an addictive substance. In fact, they both do this to each other constantly to endure in this relationship. Armand with Claudia's death and Louis with his past in pimping. They are forcing themselves to be together and yet alone for 77 years, unwilling to actually uncover their trauma until Daniel. They sit and stew in that resentment, while Armand has to suffer in silence about his own abuse, forced to be needled with it again and again by people he cares about when it's convenient. And yet the show had to sandwich that between a double standard of violence inflicted on him and Regina for the fifth time in the series.
Having the two of them actually grapple with that would’ve been so interesting if they hadn’t had to do the whole "he must break him to learn," thing. Louis is not an animal that needs to be trained, and I hate the fact that the show's finale and After Dark want to pretend like he is.
Imperfect victims do not need to learn a lesson from their abuse, and the idea that abuse can be karmic justice or a lesson for ANYTHING is already blowing my mind in many ways.
You know it's a Gothic Horror show, and you're supposed to feel uncomfortable, right? I do. But do you? Do you, Rolin, and Hannah understand that? Because from where I stand, only the Black characters seem to be trapped in a horror story. The others appear to be in a completely different genre.
The issue isn't that viewers like myself don't want to feel uncomfortable. The issue is that, in this Gothic Horror show, Black characters disproportionately bear the brunt of the violence.
Take this season finale as an example.
At the end of Episode 6, two characters are beheaded. Yet in Episode 7, we are shown the severed head and mutilated body of the black character in explicit details, while the white character's mutilated body is shown only briefly and out of focus, and his severed head is hidden from us.
Louis's arc is presented as a parallel to Lestat's. Both characters are placed in situations where they must confront people they have wronged, or at least people the narrative insists they have wronged, as well as their pasts, relationships, and mistakes. (Personally, I don't believe Louis owes Armand anything, but the narrative clearly wants the audience to think otherwise.🙄🙄🙄)
Yet the way these parallel journeys are depicted are drastically different.
Lestat's reckoning unfolds in beautiful rooms, elegant spaces, and dreamlike settings. He sits comfortably while listening to the grievances of the people in his life. He argues back. He reflects. He moves through beautiful environments, from grand rooms to forests and back again. Even when he is forced to confront painful memories, the experience is framed as introspection. The focus remains on his emotional and psychological journey.
Meanwhile, Louis is placed in what looks like a torture room straight out of a Saw movie. His severed head sits on a table, hooked up to a machine. His body is positioned across from him, forcing him to stare at it. His suffering is not just physical; it is public and humiliating. His torture is broadcast for others to watch and study. His pain becomes both spectacle and data. He is joined by Regina, another Black character, whose torture is used as leverage against him.
The man torturing Louis demands an apology, not for any genuine wrongdoing, but because Louis failed to love him the way he believed he deserved to be loved, and failed to show enough empathy for his trauma. This is the same man who murdered Louis's daughter in a lynching and attempted to murder Louis in that same lynching, and who, only minutes earlier, boasted that he took aesthetic pleasure in making Louis's death visually exhilarating as part of that lynching.
And so the torture continues. Louis is pushed to the brink of death. Regina is slicing her wrist. Eventually, Louis gives in. He apologizes. He accepts responsibility not only for hurting his torturer's feelings but for the torture itself. He tells his torturer that his coldness and denial drove him (the torturer) to these actions (the torture). The torturer receives the apology he wants, ends the torture, heals and frees Regina, and leaves, but not before carving the letter "A" onto Louis's mutilated body.
Meanwhile, Lestat is still moving through beautiful settings, confronting his past, and listening to others condemn him for the failures of his life. His story reaches its climax in the final act, when he is surrounded by the people in his life and the people he has wronged, some of whom are cheering him on. Rather than being subjected to physical degradation, he is given space for self-reflection. The focus remains on his memories, his relationships, his mistakes, the horrors he has committed, and his regrets. He eventually acknowledges some of his mistakes and even apologizes to one of his victims. Instead of fleeing from his past, he chooses to face it. His reckoning culminates in understanding, and the arc ultimately ends with imagery that evokes transcendence, as though he is ascending to heaven.
Both Louis and Lestat are given parallel narrative arcs centered on confronting their pasts, their relationships, and the harm they have caused. Yet the show presents those reckonings through vastly different visual and narrative lenses. Lestat's journey is psychological, reflective, and aesthetically beautiful. Louis's journey is a sustained ordeal of physical and psychological torture, humiliation, and degradation. One character is invited to examine himself; the other is turned into a spectacle of suffering. While Lestat is afforded reflection, Louis is afforded degradation.
And I'm supposed to look at that contrast and just shrug and say, "Well, that's Gothic horror for you"? Really? Take the blinders off. Look at what is being asked of Louis and compare it to what is being asked of Lestat. One is granted introspection, reflection, and, ultimately, transcendence. The other is subjected to torture, humiliation, and spectacle. The genre does not erase that disparity. If anything, it makes it more obvious.
My issue is not the horror. My issue is who is repeatedly asked to embody that horror, whose pain is treated as spectacle, and whose pain is afforded dignity, nuance, and care.
Remember when I pointed out that people generally are so desensitized towards abuse and unjust "provoked" violence towards Black people in media and reality that both the audience and the nonblack writers were going to start to handwave Louis' abuse away as unimportant, comedic, and not as severe as it was portrayed in the actual material? And everyone jumped me like I was crazy...
I want to add more analysis and critique from the perspective of how often people see the type of content that was shown in the first two seasons as normal social media slop. We see violence and sometimes domestic violence against black people so often on TikTok body cam footage and blacksploitation film that I genuinely believe that the way the show and its audience have panned out regarding racial themes is entirely affected by this larger phenomenon. Think: Precious memes, or footage of racist violence, footage of parents threatening to beat their black children, looping over and over as a TikTok audio trend. (All real examples btw, some happening dozens of times)
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.
I love IWTV, but if this pattern continues, I'm genuinely gonna lose my marbles because this constant timer on how long Black people are allowed to be seen as sympathetic in media is devestating. And I really expect better from the show whose primary themes in the first season WERE RACE TO BEGIN WITH.
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Stuff like this always makes me remember how sensationalized the “hide your kids, hide your wife” video was, also known as the “bedroom intruder meme” 🗿.
The guy was clearly one of the earliest memes of a black person expressing frustration publicly (it was a news report of the man explaining how he’d run off a predator trying to rape his sister by the way) but in a “funny way” (the way that nbs and whites find entertaining at least because they don’t see black trauma as something that should be given grace, and shown empathy right from the very start over their own intial enjoyment because that’s no fun), and something like this became a huge joke. Like, this meme was literally everywhere in the early 2000’s, and I think people forgot that his sister was almost raped 🧍🏾♀️…………………………..!
I will say about Antwon, specifically, that he at least embraced things, including a very bizarre stage performance of the bed intruder meme song on one of the awards shows. But MANY of these people do not agree to or appreciate what their moments become. I often think about Netta with her voice magnifier thing (I can't think of the word. It looks like a cup with a handle) and she's defending a girl and that meme was often used so much for really trivial fandom things. Netta is a Black activist, specifically a Black lives Matter activist and her speaking through a megaphone (I think that's the word!) doing work was used to such bullshit. (And she didn't appreciate it, but had to learn to live with it). That British woman who gives the eyeroll and walks off... ANOTHER Black activist caught in the midst of her labor frustration. (It is in the thumbnail)
I even go so far as to feel a way about how Kandi Burress "the lies" gifs used, considering that she was in the midst of learning that her friend had been saying that she was trying to sexually assault someone.
We were a part of this. Black people online did use gifs and memes to express ourselves in such masterful ways that everyone else tries (and often fail) at using them and they become something mainstream and misappropriated.
When we do it, it is often in the spirit of what we've done for most of my life, at least, where we actually laugh about our pain, and we use humor for really horrific things in our communities. One day, everybody decided that they were a part. So, any image of a Black person became the face of everybody's "humor" and representing everyone's "feelings," when the image is often not even expressing the feeling that the meme is.
This has caused me to backtrack on most memes. If I know there is a painful background, or an indignity that the person endured, it is hard for me to use them. And I AM a part of the culture, and communities that are Black and oppressed and traumatized. I know that Black people will continue to make memes and use reactions that might have a terrible origin. I want us to reconsider. And I want the nonblacks to straight up cut it the fuck out. Full stop.
I need at least one scene where a vampire of colour properly whacks the white supremacists & their beneficiaries (yes, including Lestat) within the vampire society. I know they're meant to be awful blah, blah, blah. But, I'm tired of them just getting away with it in-universe. Especially with the plot now in the 2020s. It was funny, but I now need a stronger image than Louis putting up a coloured only sign, then going back to Lestat's racist ass—a man who couldn't understand or tolerate the cultural connection he maintained with Claudia (when Louis bothered nurturing his connection with Claudia, that is).
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.
Too often, bits of this show have felt like white writers getting away with saying whatever because neither they nor their vessels will be held responsible.
Remember when I pointed out that people generally are so desensitized towards abuse and unjust "provoked" violence towards Black people in media and reality that both the audience and the nonblack writers were going to start to handwave Louis' abuse away as unimportant, comedic, and not as severe as it was portrayed in the actual material? And everyone jumped me like I was crazy...
I want to add more analysis and critique from the perspective of how often people see the type of content that was shown in the first two seasons as normal social media slop. We see violence and sometimes domestic violence against black people so often on TikTok body cam footage and blacksploitation film that I genuinely believe that the way the show and its audience have panned out regarding racial themes is entirely affected by this larger phenomenon. Think: Precious memes, or footage of racist violence, footage of parents threatening to beat their black children, looping over and over as a TikTok audio trend. (All real examples btw, some happening dozens of times)
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.
I love IWTV, but if this pattern continues, I'm genuinely gonna lose my marbles because this constant timer on how long Black people are allowed to be seen as sympathetic in media is devestating. And I really expect better from the show whose primary themes in the first season WERE RACE TO BEGIN WITH.
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I really love, and by that I mean virulently hate, the way that “both Lestat and Armand suck” are used in a way in so that nobody can talk about how and why they suck. It is all just an inane diversion tactic to keep actual analysis of abuse and trauma out of the show/book series about abuse and trauma. Its also just a diversion so that people can harp on and nitpick the black victims of theirs. Like its appeasement so that you don't have to actually look the themes of domestic violence in the eye rather than exploring it.
“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.
Anyways I have a 9am lecture. I have to actually sleep.
Bringing this analysis back for TVL because I think the "This is the Evil Vampire show" statement, while being true and iconic, is also being used to handwave away the literal THEMES OF THE SHOW. The show isn't trying to say that Lestat's "Fuck it, it's different for vampires!" is a legitimate opinion. You're supposed to raise your eyebrows at this, CONSTANTLY.
Remember when I pointed out that people generally are so desensitized towards abuse and unjust "provoked" violence towards Black people in media and reality that both the audience and the nonblack writers were going to start to handwave Louis' abuse away as unimportant, comedic, and not as severe as it was portrayed in the actual material? And everyone jumped me like I was crazy...
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there are many, many funny things about kingdom hearts, but for me the funniest part is in any scene where there’s supposed to be a big crowd but the devs didn’t want to model literally anyone so it’s just a huge empty room with only the absolutely necessary characters there
