hello im nick

Old white left-leaning men LOVE to fuck with uptight twenty/thirty-somethings. (Actually, most old folks with progressive sensibilities will do this, but they tend to stick to their respective demographics. Old white men are unique in being equal-opportunity young-person-botherers.) I've seen some takes on Daniel's little jabs and snide remarks toward Armand (when he was playing Rashid) and Real Rashid as being dismissive with privileged overtones, but . . . idk man his dynamic with Real Rashid in particular* reminds me viscerally of how my first boss used to try and get a rise out of me. And by "get a rise out of" I don't mean bullying to laugh at my distress, I mean a 70-something-year-old man decided I was too polite for my own good and spent six months calling me every name that starts with the same letter as mine EXCEPT mine. And he only stopped when I plucked up the courage to tease him back. Sort of like how Daniel keeps calling Real Rashid ''Real Rashid'' until Rashid finally snaps. Ever notice how, despite totally steamrolling Rashid's valiant "It's just Rashid," Daniel finishes a moment later with a perfectly innocent "Thank you, Rashid"? Ever notice he looks a little proud when he says it? Ever notice he sticks to that, even while finding other ways to ruffle Rashid's feathers? Classic old man shit. (*This also puts a totally different spin on his interactions with Armand in s1. Armand looks barely a year out of undergrad yet he's completely unaffected by Daniel's grumpy professor routine. Which—sure, fine, Vampire's Butler must be a stressful job, but I'm betting Daniel's interviewed 22-year-old combat veterans who were easier to fluster than this neurotic little weirdo. Of course he got suspicious.)

With that said, Daniel does not try this with Louis, because he knows Louis is older than him. He doesn't nitpick and needle at Louis to provoke him, or as some kind of power trip. Rather, what he's doing is confronting Louis with the most bad-faith interpretations he can imagine a future reader taking from a comment. In his capacity as an interviewer, Daniel is less a Writer than a Bitchy Content Editor. Content editing, if you don't know, is a sort of formal beta read. It's where you point out continuity errors or spots where the characters' motives don't quite make sense, and you float potential ways those issues could be fixed. Daniel does the same thing with Louis' story, just bluntly and out loud and in real time. The ultimate goal of content edits (and also a lot of line edits tbh) is to idiot-proof the text as much as possible. "I know you mentioned the gun on the mantelpiece in Act I, but I promise you some readers will skim and miss that line, so we gotta mention the gun at least one more time before it's used, otherwise you'll get a thousand Goodreads comments complaining how the gun 'cAmE OUt oF nOWheRe!'." In that same vein, Daniel calls Louis on any comment or detail that he thinks readers will nitpick. He's not NICE about it; he's not what you'd call tactful; but he is a journalist and journalism is confrontational by nature. (Also, he must know most readers won't believe the book is nonfiction. Meaning a lot of folks will assume Known White Man Daniel Molloy invented a gay Black character, put him in a weird power dynamic with a white character, then had the words "Equals in the quiet dark" come out of his mouth. He knows DAMN well how that's gonna look on paper, and he knows that if he doesn't get Louis to examine that statement, TikTok will do it for them. Same goes for Louis' waxing poetic about the less overt racism in post-WWII Paris. I mean, IMAGINE. Imagine how that would've gone down, metatextually, with readers assuming that sentiment came FROM Daniel.) Interestingly, Daniel only attempts to pry delicately two times during the interview—which are also the only times he hints at his reasons for prying. The first is when he and Louis discuss the missing diary pages, which others have explored exhaustively. But what I find interesting is the second instance, right before the big reveal at the end of s2 when he asks his followup questions. Daniel's demeanor in that scene fascinates me: he's ostensibly out of "Interviewer" mode and for a second, we see his inner editor take over—shuffling papers, acting flustered, apologizing for his disorganized notes, etc. Of course, he's doing this to bury the lede because he doesn't want Armand steering what comes next. But I have edited enough memoirs to tell you firsthand: this is exactly how you manipulate someone into questioning their deepest assumptions. You act friendly and casual and not at all like you're opening a gigantic can of worms as you recap the relevant facts; you ask clarifying questions about each point; and then you gently point out the other ways all those facts you just established might be interpreted. You know, by a reader who doesn't know any better. "Huh? No no, of course I'M not saying your husband of 70+ years is lying! I'M only pointing out another conclusion someone might HYPOTHETICALLY reach, based on all those details you just verified! I'M just a journalist, it's my JOB to question everything, guess I just have trust issues haha!"

I don't know, maybe I'm too sensitive but seriously? Not a single mention of Lestat while torturing Bruce? But he asked about Armand slogan. I get that Louis chronically can't accept responsibility, but even without his part in it (telling Daniel details on Magnus), where the hell is any show of concern?

Lestat still manages to mention Louis every now and then. Louis has scenes with people who mention Lestat or even harmed Lestat and he doesn't say anything?

Genuinely, am I stupid? Is it supposed to be Lestat's pov so he's basically making up dialogue himself? If yes, I understand, Lestat believes Louis doesn't care about him, only Claudia. If it's not Lestat's pov I don't know what we're doing.

https://x.com/13thvault/status/2069429078038356216?t=N5_Iw-dCZVnrjG1rQrLuDw&s=19

I don't think you're being too sensitive or that you're stupid, anon, that wall in the Fang Gang lair is upsetting by design, and wanting Louis to have defended Lestat in the context of that is understandable. Personally, I think it makes sense that he didn't do so with words, just because it wouldn't achieve anything in the context of him massacring the coven, but I re-watched the sequence after learning the glory hole was scripted, and I had a bit of an oh! moment, because I actually think he did defend and protect Lestat in terms of the visual language of the sequence?

You can see here that Louis' looking over a corpse at the poster (and it's deliberately upside down on top of that, to make it a focal point), but his head's directly between us as the viewer and the glory hole that's been cut into the poster over Lestat's mouth, hiding the obscenity of it:

When Louis stands up to pull Bruce's spine out, he doesn't leave him on the floor and play judge, jury, executioner there, nor did he put him in one of the (multiple!) other chairs visible in shot. No, he picks him up and he puts him in the chair he was in, facing the glory hole, and when he rounds him, to sit opposite him, he positions himself in front of it again, an inversion of the first shot, but still, importantly, covering Lestat.

By positioning himself between us and the glory hole, then Bruce and the glory hole, by allowing us as viewers only a glimpse of it in the brief moments where Louis has reason to move, visually speaking, he is protecting Lestat, and not allowing anyone to see Lestat's degraded image.

In doing so, in the context of the scene, he once again shields his husband while exposing his daughter. He pulls out her diary pages with the inverted (and still defaced) poster visible over his shoulder, and while he quote-unquote 'avenges' his daughter the one he actually protects is Lestat.

good news: can procrastinate again

Like for Louis, Claudia is his daughter in that she is His Little Girl. As long as she is his daughter, she is a child to him. It's the idea of having a daughter, and not an actual, dynamic father-daughter relationship. And that's why as she ages, it has to change to "sister" for him to even try to treat her as a grown up.

And then on the other hand, for Lestat, it's literally. That's literally his daughter. She's his little girl daughter as a child, and he entertains her like she's a kid. In her later teens, that's his teenage daughter who needs to learn how to drive a car and what sex is. And then when she becomes an adult, she's his grown-ass daughter who he treats as a competent, if antagonistic, adult.

I think this explains why Lestat is not onboard with the sister switch - the relationship is ongoing and developing over time, it's nonsensical to him that you could just substitute one relationship concept for another because the relationship is tangible, it's there in the real world. It also explains why he refers to her as his daughter less than Louis does - Louis has to reaffirm the concept, but for Lestat it's not necessary.

Also I think that's why Claudia hated dealing with his bullshit less than Louis's bullshit, which really is what she meant by "I liked him more". Better to be treated as a grown daughter than a little girl sister. And part of why Lestat would be harder to manipulate - with louis, she could play into the conceptual His Little Girl, but there's no equivalent for Lestat, because what he sees when he looks at her is an adult woman he raised, not a child to be protected

And I wonder if that's part of why she's not at the long table. Not only that she said all she needed to say, but that that relationship is so grounded and real for lestat that there's no reason for his brain to give him dying revelations about it, and a projection of her wouldn't be believable for him because if anything, he sees the real her too well for either of them.

codependent 🐰🦊

"This is Amadeo. He was rescued from a brothel when he was 15, named... Named Arun then, I think. The abuse in the brothel was such that he cannot be sure that's what his parents named him. The parents that sent him to work on a merchant boat in Delhi when in actuality they had sold him into slavery to the ship's captain." - Armand, IWTV S2 E4

but nothing will ever excuse his actions, no amount of explanations and supposed justifications will ever wipe the record clean. and it KILLS HIM that this is the case. he so desperately wants to be excused, to blame it on something or someone else. i mean, that's why we find him at an NA/AA meeting, right?

he wrongly assumes this act will be enough to purify him. but it isn't. and daniel calls him out on it.

but then we get to louis... and louis says exactly what he wants to hear. that it wasn't his fault, that it was the worlds fault for being so cruel to him. that he is blameless. that it was is everyone else's fault for making things like this. making him react this way. making him do this.

and i think when louis says this it finally clicks for armand that hearing what he wants to doesn't have the effect he wished it would. it doesn't give him the absolution he desired. he's been trying for decades to manipulate louis into sympathising with him, but when he finally hears those words the illusion of the power he hoped they posessed dissolves.

i think it's uncomfortable, but often necessary to recognize when we're watching a show or a film or reading a book or playing a video game with different expectations or desires than the story ever promised to fulfill. simply, you can't draw blood from a stone, you know? and I think this idea, however simple, is often very easy to forget when you're in fandom because fanworks are innately transformative. in fandom, we draw blood from stones all the time. we re-imagine characters, relationships, universes in whichever way we deem fit so that we can experience wish fulfillment. but as the fourth wall between fandom and the creatives behind media becomes thinner and thinner, the boundary between what is the job of storytellers (to tell a story), what is the job of the audience (to receive the story or opt out), and what is the job of fandom (to connect with one another over shared imaginative and transformative reception of the story being told) is getting muddied to detrimental effect. coupled with the rise of hyper-individualism and the increasing commodification of fanworks into traditionally published forms, this is where we get a real wave of entitlement from fandom -- this sense that the storyteller owes something to us by virtue of our fannish devotion and that perceived failure to meet our desires is worthy of a host of outrage and abuses. i think this is where paratext comes in and why the notion of what is or isn't canon feels perhaps more debatable now than ever before. i think it's born from a blend of hyper-individualism effecting how we think and behave as audience members, the increasing sense of entitlement that is borne out of such individualist thinking, the vanishing of the fourth wall between fandom and the mainstream as well as the creators of media that fandom enjoys, and a growing inability to accept the story you're being told on its own terms (and go happily and exclusively to fandom to remedy the urge for something more). because, really, what paratext offers is a sense of legitimacy -- usually when it conveniently upholds what you privately wanted in the first place. if the show you love isn't giving you enough to substantiate your ship, you can get your fix through an actor's interviews, their exposure to fanfiction and fan art, and their perceived approval of the ship. their opinion, by virtue of their literal proximity to the show, legitimizes your own. if the movie you love doesn't do enough with a character you find interesting, a scrapped plan for what the character might've done or a deleted scene might do the same. etc etc.

Let's lay aside the fact that we don't actually know what Gabriella's motivation in bringing him at NINE to see WITCHES BURNED AT A STAKE including girls HIS OWN AGE who he USED TO PLAY WITH—he may well be correct since he does know who his mother is but that was his own hallucination speaking, not her. She may have had other motivations, given that we never actually hear her own response to the question. But let's treat it for now as if HalluciGabi speaks the truth.

To be clear, both of these instances are bad parenting moves. I am not advocating either approach. Both Charlie's death and the witch burning majorly fucked up Claudia and Lestat respectively and traumatized them.

But it's not the same thing. Claudia, ultimately, needed to learn from her actions. She's a vampire and can't afford to be reckless with her power. It can cause the deaths of those she loves and cares about if she's not careful—as with Charlie, as with Lestat's own history with Nicki. Should she have been treated with more kindness and gentleness in learning that lesson? Yes, but ultimately it was a needed lesson. Lestat badly did something that needed to be done, and the fact that Claudia deserved a better approach does not erase the fact that the lesson itself was necessary.

The witch burning is different. If we assume that HalluciGabi is correct, she...took her young son to see his friends violently painfully murdered just so he would leave home. At *nine*. If he had been 16, it would still have been fucked up, but there are plenty of stories of adolescents striking out on their own. A 16 year old Lestat could have stolen away to Paris with a theater troupe (or at least made the attempt). A nine year old is too fucking young. You're telling me you saw this wet-behind-the-ears boy and thought he was ready for the real world? On his own? Next you'll tell me that she abandoned him at 3 by the river so he'd leave home. My God. And of course the effect is that that memory chained him further to Auvergne and is a major reason why he stayed home until he was 30. She gave him the stutter, she encaged him further in what was ostensibly an attempt to toss him out of the nest.

Aside from the fact that both are terrible parenting moves in which a loved one is burnt to cinders in front of their eyes while they grasp onto their parent's arm, the two scenes have nothing in common. Claudia's incident was, ultimately, her fault. The blame doesn't solely rest on her, of course, but ultimately, it was a reaction to actions she took. Lestat, on the other hand, had no involvement in his friends being accused of witchcraft and taken to the stake (unless they revisit in season 4, but I highly doubt they will). The whole incident had nothing to do with him.

But it is very Lestat to see the scenes as being the same. Lestat is ultimately actually pretty decent at owning up to his own actions, given his apology for the drop in 2x07 and his speech to the band about wanting to save them from his blood in 3x05, etc. Is he perfect at it? No. And his perspective is always skewed because he *is* a monster as a vampire. But he's pretty decent at recognizing when he was in the wrong (after the fact). But he's terrible at recognizing when others have done wrong to him, especially the deeper that wrong gets. With petty slights, it's one thing, but his romanticization of Magnus (Your Biggest Fan) and Gabriella (see. Uh. Everything. And not just in season 3, a retrospective on 1x01 is also interesting here) is extreme. He recognizes that he did harm to Claudia, but even as he recognizes that Gabriella did harm to him, he minimizes and justifies it to himself, much like him pretending that Magnus was his "liberator" and "emancipator" and not his abuser/rapist/forced maker.

I do think that the goal of comparison between Charlie and the witches burning isn't to make the claim that those are the same thing, instead I think it is more so a showcase of the mental connection Lestat himself makes. As in, we are being shown that being taken to see the witches burning is the reason why Lestat in the future thought it was a reasonable expression of parenthood. Basically, rather than an overarching commentary, it is an internal connection the character has made. To contrast that, for example, the juxtaposition of Claudia's and Lestat's rapes is an overarching commentary - it is not a connection actively made by any of the chracters but rather the narrative itself. Lestat is the one making the connection with burning.

Also, while the exact motivation and thinking of Gabriella herself may be somewhat different from Lestat's interpretation of it, I very much disagree that Gabriella's choice to bring him to the witches burning was an insidious, targeted, self-aware act of manipulation of him. First of all, this interpretation makes her into a flat "mayonnaise villain", which is just not what she is. People are often forgetting that she was first and foremost a victim. She was a victim before being an abuser. While one does not erase the other, in fact it feeds into it, we should also examine her personal motivations through the lens of victimhood first and abuser second.

I do not believe that she has explained the details of the "witches'" sentences as some sort of sinister personal threat to babystat saying "this will happen to you if you talk", as I have seen some people suggest. She has not even engaged with him sexually until the wolfkiller scene, which is made pretty clear in the way Lestat recalls it in her bedroom later. What she IS doing at the witches burning, however, is group herself and Lestat as being the same thing the witches are. Again, she is a victim. A victim of misogyny and sexual abuse no less. What she is saying to her 9 year old there was more akin to "look at what they do to people like us". Which is awful AND is also grooming, just not the sexual kind yet. In this act she is making him dependent on her, because what a child like Lestat will learn from this situation is that the world is bad and scary and only your mother is not like everyone else. That is NOT her intention. She starts manipulating this unhealthy dynamic in the future, in a weird "making use of what's at hand" kind of way, but it was not her intention to establish it. 100% her fault, but not intention.

And I have always loved them too. Every single one of them. Armand, Lestat, Louis, Claudia - no favorites, all favorite. But this season... left me with so much fondness for them.

Armand broke my heart. I expected him to but he still broke my heart. 12 years old. He was 12 year old. Now over 500 and counting and yet still 12 years old. Do you understand how much hurt and confusion one must live in to have the last resort methods that he does? I always knew that part of his tragedy as a character is that everything he does is claw back crumbs of love, of feeling seen and understood, of comfort and control and then always failing. Every venture he takes to achieve his goals ends up working backwards and failing miserably, hurting himself even more. He cannot imagine an alternative way of receiving that. It is simply not the sort of thing his brain can conjure up. Like children that scream and act out when they are not being heard because they were never given the tools and the knowledge of how to be functional. In return those children get branded as brats and are further ostracized and unloved than they were in the first place. How would he know to try anything different? If he is tame he is the beigest pillow; if he opens up then Louis' subconscious mind conjures up Lestat laughing in his face (which he then recounts with a tangible sort of indifference). Louis is not at fault for the way Armand is, but Armand had no data to learn how exactly to be better.

And Louis? Oh my god, dude. The whole time he is defiant. He is on the verge of death and still defiant. His fondness for humans is challenged and he is still defiant. Even his empathy in the end felt somehow defiant?

And I am relieved that none of Louis' rough edges were sanded down. They highlight just how hard he is trying. How much desire he has to be better. It makes me tear up again thinking of it now. And, no, apologies are not inherently self-flagellation. This season is the least self-flagellation he has done. He is trying so, so hard to be better and I am so proud of him and so incredibly fond. He is so tentative when he is being kind to Lestat in the car, he is not used to doing that. We have never seen him be openly affectionate or verbally kind to anyone before: not Lestat, not Armand, not even Claudia. And we know how much he loved Claudia, his love for her was palpable, yet all they did was squabble and banter, and maybe hold her hand in the moments of quiet fondness. Even "you and me" moment is filled with 'harsh truths' and his grief over Lestat. He means the sentiment he expresses but is he affectionate in the way he does? Not really. He is the most himself he has ever been this season and I find it fascinating that coming into himself and accepting all aspects of his nature is what allows him to even consider kindness for others. Not performative like before. And it was performative because he used his kindness as a sort of proof that he wasn't all that bad, that he was worth something - kindness before was directly tied to his identity and self-worth. Now it's genuine and it's not perfect but so, so incredibly precious.

It is not satisfying because I want to see a black man grovel and be timid and "put in his place", it is satifying because I see myself in him. It is satisfying because I see so many people that have hurt me (and built me) in him. The fact that one can move forward. That the ingrained, carved into our bones performative masculinity welded into armour is not the end or the grand finale of ourselves, that it is not the cardinal sin that cannot be escaped - THAT is the relief.

Jacob's performance of his last defiant empathy for Armand is everything. Louis doesn't have to be emotional in his sympathy for Armand but he is. It is a stark difference too with his monologue in the pilot where, really, Louis is emotional because of his guilt. His focus wasn't specifically on the people his way of living has hurt. His focus then was on the guilt of being who he was. With Armand now he admits the guilt, the guilt he has always felt, but what breaks him is compassion. This is so fucking important.

The first kind can be seen in this notion that Lestat should grovel. That he should suffer, beg and and apologize to earn the empathy. When he does apologize and when he does suffer - it is never sufficient. In fact it is met with more vitriol than when he doesn't apologize because he "should have apologized more and harder, and to everyone at the same time" since he already started apologizing. When he does grovel it is never sufficient: he doesn't sacrifice enough, he doesn't feel guilty enough, etc. Though Lestat is in a unique position where he has to battle with very severely established preconceived notions of the past seasons in which he was the antagonist, he is not the exclusive recipient of this treatment.

A similar thing happens with Loustat's handling of the seance aftermath. Not only the reaction and vitriol of it towards them made me think that the people carrying it out have never experienced or witnessed the multitudes of grief in their life (truly don't know how else to explain it, they acted the most human in the wake of it), but it was also a strange erasure of Claudia's character happening AGAIN. It was bizarre to witness the fandom get so bitter over the fact that they did not grovel enough, not cried enough, didn't break enough. First, they were already broken. It has been nearly a century-long unclosing wound for both of them. We have seen them live through that grief deeply and harshly. At some point the tears dry up. Not only that, but Claudia is FED UP with it. "Burn the diaries, burn this dress. Stop saying my name." She doesn't want them to grovel, has had enough of it. So then why are we imposing our desire for them to engage in this performative suffering that she has not so subtly spit on already? This is Claudia erasure all over again. Why are we expecting them to make her car fuel for their self-pity AGAIN? If we are so mad over how they grieve her then the answer isn't closing our eyes on Claudia's truth and policing their sadness in a vacuum but actually considering what Claudia wanted. Them being miserable on her behalf has never done anything for her.

As for the second part of my initial thesis, I noticed that the other side of the coin is the preceived mistreatment (by the writers) of more compassionable characters. Truth of the matter is, nothing horrific that happens to the characters in the show is something they actually deserve. Claudia does not deserve to be damned by turning, Louis does not deserve to be dropped, Lestat does not deserve to be killed, end etc.. There is no philosophy in this narrative (or really any good narrative) that suggests measuring crimes against one another to determine the hierarchy of fuckedupness. I truly thought we were over this by season 3. Yes, actions bring consquences, often unexpected ones. But there is no karmic morality that so many expect to be hidden in plain sight for some reason. The show has NEVER presented its narrative as a race towards moral absolution. So then why do we expect it to do so now?

I think both of these attitudes reveal one and the same worldview that is imposed and stretched thin over the spikes of this show's themes to make them all fit the same agenda. The thing is, retribution has never been the answer. Just like in our current reality, not even fiction. Vengeance has always been a personal frivolity, not a preordained act of divine judgement we got used to believing. Punishment does not prevent crimes, it does not aid rehabilitation, it does not help the victims - it never did. The only thing it does is bring brief relief to the one enacting it, by only reinforcing their self-dentity. It is never Right, or necessary.