math, she is a fickle mistress.

It feels like they pulled the wool over our eyes. But the thing I don't get is WHY. This mindful exploration of trauma that let your actors shine and trusted the audience to untangle things with and against Louis... it WORKED. Why is every facet of trauma and violence now a joke, a shock jock punchline? And whyyyyy is the music so bad and so limited?

This just... not to be obnoxiously parasocial, but I feel so bad for the cast. Particularly Sam Reid who has been so thoughtful and loving when he's spoken about Lestat, who worried about the added violence and rode it out anyway, who has understood Lestat's complex feelings for Louis, Claudia, Armand, and even spoken a bit about Gabrielle before this season, and just... he gets it. I really didn't believe I'd ever truly see Lestat on screen. In IWTV, I did. Even under the at times too many layers of obfuscation they added, Lestat was RIGHT THERE. I keep seeing people say that this season is what it is because they're desperate for people to like Lestat, and maybe that's true, but that feels so weird to me. Because this is... an offensive caricature of Lestat that feels designed to hurt Lestat tbh. Lestat has a love for humanity and a reverence for art and culture tied right to that. And it's gone. The "haha I'm evil" is the cope, the "and what could they know, they're not vampires" is the cope, that's where he hides in those pages. But he hides less & less over time from his feelings about Louis and Claudia. And even in the first pages of TVL, you feel him more than this.

⌖ we might not flow through each other's veins,

A little thing like being in a (presumably) healthy relationship didn’t magically undo Niall’s need for dick & twinks & muscle daddies & self destruction. Just like becoming a successful writer didn’t stop him from party favours & bathhouses & self destruction.

So every few nights, once his finance has gone to bed, Niall sexts the picless profile of a guy who claims he’s muscular and 6’2” and he lets himself get carried away by the fantasy because even now after everything that he’s done to him and how scared he is of him, he still yearns for Ruben.

Meanwhile across town in a rundown tenement by the railroad line not too far from where Niall’s bedsit used to be, the bedsit HE paid for, Ruben sits in a sparsely furnished room, holding a refurbished iPhone engaging Niall in sexual conversations he knows will captivate him. He wasn’t hard to find, Niall, he was actually surprisingly easy. While it was just torso pic, Ruben immediately recognised the scar from his gut surgery.

And so now he’s here, sexting Niall over Grindr, knowing exactly what buttons to push to draw him further and further in. Collecting information bit by bit to figure out exactly what he can take from Niall after all he’s done.