also this is a secondary concern compared to the pervasive and gleeful antiblackness on the show, but lestat's line in s3ep7 that feeds into transfem readings feels like another example of this season going for "tell, don't show" and expecting fanon and fannish interpretation to carry the weight of what they aren't depicting onscreen. the s1ep7 marie antoinette drag scene is one of my fave in the whole show- and i mentioned before s3 aired that after rolin cited rocky horror and hedwig and the angry inch as s3 influences back in 2024, the lack of rockstat drag onstage felt like a glaring omission and was possibly tied to amc's corporate queerphobia given the obvious double standards in how they depict m/m and f/f v m/f intimacy. if the show wanted to make the idea of lestat being genderqueer or some form of transfeminine firmly canon, we could've seen a whole arc play out in s3 especially with gabriella coming back into lestat's life. imagine if drag was a consistent part of rockstat's look and stage performance, and esp around gabriella he insisted it was all for show, meaningless, he was just clowning, and as her control over lestat's music career and lestat himself increased we saw her steering him toward more conventionally cismasc presentation...and then we got hit with the quiet honesty of the line where lestat admits he does wish he was a woman sometimes as a resolution to a season-wide narrative that's primed for further exploration in s4. (this would also be in the hypothetically well-written s3 where lestat faces what he did to louis and claudia more firmly too, instead of 6-7 eps of wheel-spinning and darvo, and safe to say he would not be saying this to the apparition of louis' brother come to comfort him while louis is being tortured). they could've pulled on late 18th century ideas of gender that would've been formative to lestat (male performers performed fem roles then too- show him playing a woman when he was human and having a euphoric experience, show him interested as a child in the markers of femininity and womanhood that gabriella possesses and she rejects etc) being gnc/genderqueer/nonbinary/transfem/gnc (whatever your interpretation of lestat is) in 18th century france and then the early 20th century new orleans and then north america in 2025 are extremely different- your lead is an immortal vampire who's lived through all those eras, explore that.
but instead of doing any of that, instead of engaging with lestat's gender in any kind of arc, the show adds a throwaway line (in a season of throwaway lines) that can be interpreted depending on viewer bias as 1) lestat genuinely expressing some yearning for womanhood and being trans canonically or 2) still-cis lestat just saying he wishes he and louis had a heterosexual relationship to begin with bc it would've made their lives easier- like even though their relationship would've still been illegal if they were a m/f couple, they at least would've had paul and maybe the rest of the de pointe du lacs' acceptance- and plenty of casual viewers are gonna walk away with the 2nd impression. (and speaking of the de pointe du lacs, louis mentioning he was molested is another one of the throwaway lines with paradigm-shifting impact that the show doesn't care to explore in any depth- why bother developing things onscreen when fans will do the work for them and praise the writers as genius for hinting at depth instead of portraying depth onscreen??)
so many choices this season feel like the writers checking off boxes to confirm fan theories bc they seem cynically aware that a lot of people are watching the show less out of care for good storytelling but more to "win" whatever stan or ship war they're personally invested in. they're lines and moments meant to be screenshotted and shared on socmed for the fandom to talk about, pithy quips that can fit into 1-2 screenshots in subtitles and reposted with more pithy quips. the show doesn't care to explore lestat's gender in any deeper form but it does want fans losing their minds over some form of trans lestat being confirmed (with plausible deniability bc amc is the queerphobia network now)- the show doesn't care to explore devil's minion in any deeper form or show how armand and daniel started plotting together but it does want fans losing their minds over past devil's minion being confirmed, etc.
and this is only if you try looking at the arc (and lack thereof) of lestat's relationship to gender in isolation- when you put it back in the wider context of this episode and this season's antiblackness and the nonblack writers' choice to have paul's spirit (even if he isn't meant to be "real" or at least not represent paul's real thoughts) praise and comfort lestat while louis gets graphically tortured by his lynching director in the same episode. (and the white showrunner has already admitted he felt more for armand than louis in that scene and claimed the "apology" louis was coerced into via torture to be some kinda real moment of understanding, rather than louis doing what we saw him do in s2 and try to appease armand when he's helpless and armand holds his life in his hands.) like with the merrick scene in s3ep6, it doesn't matter what in-universe rationale for these choices are, it doesn't matter whether any of this gets revisited or recontextualized with "oh ghost claudia was lying just to hurt louis' "oh paul's spirit wasn't even real" "oh we were totally tryna critique armand's violent antiblackness" bc the problem here comes down to the nonblack writers' decisions and the choices they made in the real world when crafting this story. this show has had a persistent problem since s1 of depicting the onscreen brutalization of black bodies with far more vividness than it does nonblack bodies, and if a nonblack main character is doing the brutalization (lestat, armand) you aren't supposed to hold it against them or expect these choices to have longterm narrative consequences- the camera lingers on claudia and charlie's charred and "melting" faces as they burn but when daciana, nicki, magnus, bruce, antoinette or madeleine are burning, the camera's far quicker to cut away. and this is a deliberate choice- they weren't just pointing the camera at people spontaneously combusting, they had to allocate an effects budget and invest time and energy into showing black bodies burning with graphic detail. they had both delainey and roxane in the vfx makeup chair for their characters' murder scene, but only claudia's death was shown vividly while madeleine burning was a few brief seconds of ash scattering away.
and i simply can't enjoy any form of this "jangling keys in front of the fandom to validate popular interpretations/ships/theories" writing bc it's such a cynical bid from writers who want and expect their viewers to be satisfied with crumbs that we build elaborate headcanons around instead of expecting any form of depthful storytelling or care from them, especially when it comes to their black characters. fans being content with the show just going down a checklist to validate or debunk specific theories and fans not demanding anything more of the writers than perfunctory expository dialogue is exactly what this writing team is counting on.
also theo is right bc if your only reaction to people criticizing the nonblack writers' choices is to be like "neener neener femstat canon" (black folks critiquing the antiblackness and sharing their reactions to the show depicting this level of gratuitous racialized violence toward black bodies have already received comments along those lines) when that has nothing to do with the antiblackness being discussed here, that's ghoulish. like read the room
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