S. Kenyatta

Armand tucked away on a pier, lingering after boats leave the harbor

ko-fi • insta

Turning Louis at his most vulnerable. expecting Louis to be forever grateful for it.

cheating on him cause Louis didn't want to have sex with him

cheating on him cause Louis was depressed and that was actually very helpful to him

killing the only person Louis talked to

yelling at him that he shouldn't leave him

keeping information from Louis that would be essential to his survival if he ever left Lestat (using his gifts, the coven and the strict laws, the ancients...)

laughing at Louis when he asked him if he was enough (but of course we gotta validate Lestat's feelings)

Threatening their daughter

dragging Louis from the jaw and dropping him from the freaking sky and making it about how Louis couldn't tell him he loved him

his "apology" included gifts and how he doesn't like to be abandoned, so whose fault is it really

making an entire song about how awful Louis is that he dared to make Lestat a bad guy in the book

crossing the ocean to go punish Louis for killing/leaving him. and according to Rolin he actually went there to punish him, so wtf.

Calling him/openly seeing him as: insane person, ungrateful, cancerous jackall, a whore, pimp (derogatory), selfish

Being dismissive whenever Louis talks about race. saying and doing various racist things himself.

and whilst s1 and s2 were (mostly) framed as Lestat loving Louis but also hurting him, s3 is framed as Lestat claiming he loves Louis, whilst he seems like he doesn't even like him (you can't like a person and treat them like that, even in the evil vampire show lol) and all of these behaviours were normal, something that Louis not only deserved but Louis has to apologise for. frame it as Lestat's POV. Show it to us as how abusers see their victims. the audience keeps watching each episode expecting to finally finally see it as it is, but Rolin & Hannah said "actually only the people of colour in this show are to blame for everything wrong that ever happened, including the actions of white people". dead serious.

i follow a ton of fan artists and none of them have been making art based on the events of tvl. it's either iwtv era stuff or AU art. many have just moved on completely to other shows. i also noticed a lot of people decided to start reading the books and they're now retroactively disappointed at what was left out.

the writers didn't need a big budget to do this season justice. they should've stuck to filming in europe and kept the one concert scene to the final ep. they didn't need to be on the road and visiting different cities. it didn't add anything whatsoever to the story.

rolin got snippy and blamed the budget because "you find somewhere that looks like europe and north america" but 1) many productions have achieved this. europe is a frequent stand in for north america and 2) you didn't really need to. europe has hotels and concert venues. it also has many, many old and grandiose churches. it has forests and huge country homes with acres of land, largely unchanged with time and it doesn't always cost that much to film in these places. there are period-accurate costumes for hire. you didn't need to have scenes of a tour bus on big wide north american roads or to film in canadian cities as stand ins for US ones. all we needed was daniel interviewing lestat interspersed with flashbacks. they had the fucking formula perfected. it was right there. then they could've shown the band rehearsing in any studio and built it all up to the concert

they could have given us a satisfying adaptation with the budget they had and the reason they didn't is because they didn't want to

they had a vision of rockstar lestat touring and fucking and doing drugs and recording music and that's what they prioritised over any actual story

what was the point of the failures? what was the point of lestat consenting to a interview with daniel he didn't want to give?

rolin repeatedly said the audience didn't just want two guys talking in a room again, that we didn't know what we wanted, that this season was going to be fast paced rock n roll. he made exactly what he wanted to make

codependent 🐰🦊

Lace and glitter

So many people have been writing excellent posts about the issues with The Vampire Lestat, in particular regarding the show's anti-Black racism. I've been gathering some of these for my own reference and thought I would share. This list is by no means exhaustive. I tried not to have too much overlap on points among the posts, and have loosely organized them. Please add your own/others that you love! (As a reblog or comment)

The context/going into TVL

v4mpgrrl on anti-Black fandom meets the de-racialization of popular discussion around the show

lilacs-in-the-wind on the show’s choice to deliberately explore race and thereafter its attempts to ignore/avoid it

kriame on the show's changing racial dynamics across seasons (with particular attention to Armand)

coldeveryseason on white liberal insecurity and fandom response to critiques of TVL

General patterns/TVL choices

subcrypha (pre-finale but prophetic) on the white gaze and the taste for Black suffering

coldeveryseason on the decision to remove book Magnus/Marius/Gabrielle’s white supremacy from the narrative: 

tv-kiki on the specific brutalization of Black characters in IWTV/TVL

certifiedlurker on the S3 meta-trial and humiliation of Louis and Lestat's white goodness

crithir on problematic selective depiction of Armand’s violence

yaoiblackmold on TVL removing all blame from Lestat

Analyses of specific moments

crazykuroneko on inappropriate/reductive comparisons between Lestat and Claudia's assaults (3.3)

jeunesseoubliee on why the ‘slave’ language is so harmful vs. its use in s1 (3.6)

infinitelyweary on the seance scene, Louis’ grief, and issues with what Claudia does/doesn't mention (3.6)

claudialdpdl on the offensiveness of Claudia's words to Louis in the seance scene (3.6)

loyalhorror on the mistreatment of Claudia and sloppy writing (3.6)

certifiedlurker and crithir on why ‘it happened in the books’ isn’t a valid defense of Claudia’s seance speech (3.6)

tomato-frog43 on disproportionate violence against Black folks (3.7)

Things the creators have said

usaginoir on the 3.7 TVL After Dark finale (with specific quotes from Hannah in particular)

murfpersonalblog on victim blaming Louis

She saw how they were fracturing and she thought if she was honest that it would continue their trajectory and I can say that I blame her for that. Hen wasnt given the space to grieve and show her true feelings, because he was Athena’s husband, he died FOR Chimney, Eddie was gone and feels all kinds of ways about that, and Buck was basically his son.

Hell, people LOOOOVE to bring up how Eddie was talking about Buck measuring everyone’s level of grief, but it was Eddie being worried and expressing it to other people. Hen never got that, even when she asked Maddie the very specific questions about ‘her patient’ Maddie never followed up, neither did Chim. It was just momentary worry that quickly faded.

Hen comes back to work because ‘the boys are coming back, I want to be there too’ (I’m paraphrasing), she checks in on Athena’s investigation into the ‘missing’ baby, she talks to Eddie about how he is, she’s stuck between Athena’s beef with Chim and she turns the conversation that Athena tries to start about her being captain right back to her.

The only person really there for her is Karen and it’s no surprise that she doesn’t want to burden her more.

The only way to “save” the characterizations for QOTD would be for them to say TVL was a fever dream or an in-universe IWTV fanfic. To entirely decanonize it, which AMC will never do.