Couch Potato

…and, possibly, a spinning POV from the perspective of the severed head as it hurtles down the lane.

textually engaging with the fact that armand is a lyncher and the violence he does to louis is often directly pulled from the violence done to black people under enslavement and segregation would mean the nonblack writers would have to textually engage with blackness as a central theme and question their own impulses like why the show disproportionately and voyeuristically depicts the brutalization of black bodies- textually engaging with the fact that gabriella has been raping her own son for over 200 years would mean the misogynistic writers would have to engage with the subject of sexual abuse and assault beyond "louis the pimp" and question their own impulses like why so many of gabriella's scenes with lestat are played for taboo titillation or "comic relief". it's a lot easier to sidestep all of that and go "oh these relationships were fucked up and doomed bc there's no real love there".

that’s why he asks louis if he thinks levi truly loves grace. then he brings up louis getting married and asks him about his dealings with lestat. and when louis tells him he’s done with lestat. paul visibly relaxes, he’s assured that both his brother and sister are safe and in good hands. they’ll be fine without him, especially because paul knows the burdens he places on them. so he thinks that this would be in their best interest, that it’ll be okay.

he reminds louis one more time to stay away from lestat and calls him the devil.

the last thing he says to his brother is “i love you, louis” before walking off that roof

now paul isn’t appearing to his brother who he loved more than anyone in the world. instead he’s appearing to the white french man whom he thought was the devil and could not stand. not only does he appear to this man but he THANKS HIM. “for loving his brother the way he needed to be loved”

idk how you could watch the first season and then watch this fucking 60 car pile up and not wonder what fumes the writers were vigorously huffing.

I just saw the teaser for Season 4 of The Queen of the Damned, and I'm literally torn apart by contradictions. On one hand, I'm absolutely thrilled, because Akasha is one of my all-time favorite complex and morally ambiguous characters in The Vampire Chronicles. And Sheila Atim in this role is simply divine. She had only about five minutes of screen time, but she nailed it. It was that rare moment when I actually leaned toward the screen and said, "Wow."

But there's a huge BUT. Because of that underwhelming mess they made with the Vampire Lestat show, I feel like I just can't trust the showrunners with an adaptation of The Queen of the Damned. Akasha is way too layered and multifaceted. You can't force her into some cookie-cutter trope.

If they portray her as just some evil feminist out to destroy all men, I'll shoot myself in the head, rise from my grave, track down those showrunners, and destroy them myself. Because Akasha is not a feminist. Period. That's a fact.

In the book, it was written so brilliantly that, as a feminist, I sometimes found myself falling for her sweet-talking sermons. Like under a spell, I'd catch myself thinking, "Yes, girl, you're right—destroy them." But that's exactly the charm and genius of Anne Rice—leading us into delusion. Akasha actually hates women just as much as she hates men.

All she wants is worship. Let's not forget her past: she was an Egyptian queen, and in Egyptian mythology, rulers were considered literal gods. When Amel entered her, she fully believed in her own divinity. And in the 20th (or already 21st in the show ) century, she just found convenient rhetoric and beautiful sermons to lead people. But she wasn't leading them to a bright future—she was leading them to a world where she's the only god and everyone else is a slave.

She never cared about anyone but herself. She hated sisters Maaret and Mekare for not acknowledging her as a goddess, and she forced Khayman (who was a unwilling concubine just waiting for death) to rape them, then brutally disposed of them. She never turned women into vampires, not even her own daughters, because she saw them as competition. She placed herself above everyone, including Lestat. And yes, she was racist—being from ancient Egypt, she looked down on other nations and committed genocide.

At the same time, she's not just a cardboard villain. She's a very intelligent woman who ruled almost in place of her husband, she was a true queen, and most importantly, she had a childlike charm. Believing in the religion of ancient Egypt, she truly believed in her own divinity, and she didn't just want to rule the world alone. She genuinely believed that she had the right to do so because she was, in a literal sense, a god. It was described so beautifully. After reading these books, I literally ran to the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities to admire this culture.

She's so complex, so layered, so insane—a true embodiment of the Gothic novel. I love her so much for that madness. And Sheila was breathtaking in that role—in just five minutes, I saw everything I described above!

But God... after what they did to Lestat, I'm genuinely terrified to watch this. If they don't change the writing team, this season could be a total disaster.

thinking about how when in an abusive home the child sometimes places some of their anger away from the abusive parent and places it on the other parent (not to say louis was perfect parent but he is NOT the abuser in the NOLA home)

sometimes the ‘worse’ parent almost stops being seen as a real person with agency and is just a villain, a monster.

but the other parent? the one who isn’t fundamentally a ‘bad person’ how could they just sit back and let it happen? why do they keep making their home with this person? and violence enacted by the abusive parent leads to anger towards the other parent, who is not perceived as a victim but as a passive enabler

and when the child gets older they have to reckon with the fact that the parent ‘that let it happen’ was in fact a victim and that it was never as simple as ‘letting it happen’

claudia, i feel, really wrestles with how she perceives louis in this paradigm and ultimately sees him as a victim, but that he is complicit in his victimisation by being passive and weak and her love for him is always conditioned by this

claudia directing her rage about this at louis would make perfect sense. it’s something that’s reitrerated throughout the series. she resents lestat for the abuse and she resents louis for his responses to lestat’s abuse

let her scream about that, let it be messy and complicated

but instead it chooses to have her absolve lestat of some of the worst of his abuse and say he was her favourite and that she shares his blood so they’re closer??

and to use her rage at louis’ perceived passiveness to call him a slave? for the writers to decide that claudia should conflate his passiveness with being a slave?

but that character is then portrayed through the narrative of someone he hurt and who is a petty little bitch and cannot let that go [or anything really] and Lestat sees him as a vampire and a nightmare and someone who hurt him and stood up against him and for all of his charisma Anne Rice called him her brat prince for a reason, he is a spoiled whiny mama's boy and he holds grudges

so you can't turn the lens on to lestat's racism as it pertains to seeking out lovers of colour because lestat is completely blind to it

lestat is telling the story with his side forefront and even if he isn't lying he is not aware of all the facts, he is an unreliable narrator [all first person narratives are to an extent unreliable - or should be because the character often doesn't know something until later, or not at all, or was told it by someone else and doesn't remember it the same, or that person lied]

Lestat's racism is a point to discuss but how can you pull it into pieces to look at it properly when HE doesn't see the problem, when HE obfuscates and focusses on other details, and yeah from a fan standpoint we can see patterns that he can't, but he's telling the story.

Lestat doesn't think he's a bad person, he doesn't think he's a whiny prick with more charisma than sense, one of the reasons he attracts people is that he seems to utterly at peace with himself but he's a roiling mass of depression, self loathing and grudges

with unreliable narration the narrator cannot see where it's wrong, its up to the audience to do that, and the big easy mark here is Lestat feels wronged by Armand so the way he shows him is as a villain to be mocked and sneered at

but Assad''s performance is one of a million tiny hurts and a banked fire that is delicious. He is a monster but he thinks he was made one [not the vampire bit the rest of it] his desire for control in his own life becomes control of others and it is glorious to see

(nine inch nails hurt)

note: i started drawing this before s3 so obviously no s3 events are included (and honestly idgaf)

I didn't see a dentist again until this week because I've been transient/homeless the whole time & freelance writing is continuously degrading to pay functionally less than minimum wage with huge gaps without work because of algorithmic, AI corporate bullshit. It's BAD.

If you can help, my venmo is MirandaBrave. Here is my ko-fi (but it takes a fee). If we're mutuals, I'll give you my PayPal email. My friends helped me get my current low income apartment & thought I'd survive the year, but these costs mean I won't without help. I'm happy to beta or edit fic, be a sage of smut if you struggle with that in your writing, or any other thing you can think of if you give $50+.

Below is proof of my cost estimate for the work I need this month (about $5k), but I have to have laser treatments at least every three months essentially forever, but especially this first year of treatment, or I will lose most of my bottom teeth where the retainer was cemented. They're also concerned that the infection has caused damage to my health in other ways. I have no signs of oral cancer, but I do have several signs that it hit my bloodstream and was damaging my immune system and potentially my heart.