become gnarly → gnarlissimo!

lrb i didn’t want to say this in op’s tags because it’s wildly uncouth but unfortunately i do believe that armand would vivisect daniel while fucking him :/ and it would get them both off to get to see the guts armand is currently rearranging :/

sam reid is so good at distilling the entire ASPCA in the arms of the angel commercial down into a single facial expression

another part of the season structure that i’m really enjoying is how each episode zeroes in on lestat’s relationship with a different character — ep1 is his own artifice, ep2 gabi, ep3 nicki — but there’s this throughline of lestat’s (sexual) trauma and history of being violated that carries between the episodes. and it’s not going down the line and saying “this person hurt lestat in this way,” because the only episode thus far that focuses on his relationship with one of his abusers is ep2, but it’s this compounding conversation about how that trauma shaped this relationship as it happened and how the mark that relationship left on lestat is in turn filtered back through the lens of said trauma. really really chewy stuff.

the first three episodes really are a slow frog boil of sexual trauma. episode 1 is the lightest but it’s also the introduction to lestat’s hypersexuality, he’s throwing glitter in your face and running away to distract you from thinking too hard about he was just roofied beyond the point of consent or his big speech about how he’s totally not using sex to self harm, and then it ends on that really haunting scene with gabriella. episode 2 is lestat still trying to keep it light but starting to crack as he desperately tries and fails to convince the audience and himself that his relationship with gabriella isn’t abusive. and then episode 3……the cracks are visible from the start and by the end of the episode it all comes down. i’m really loving it.