#iwtv asks

Also I have already seen people not liking her being white, which is actually I agree with, especially since she 99% will parallel Claudia in Lestat's mind

!! Thank you for sharing, anon, and I don't think she's getting aged up actually, no. She looks really young in the face to me, and I hope this doesn't sound weird, but given Baby Jenks is 14 and has very recently been pregnant when she's turned / was literally dying in the process of becoming Not Pregnant when she becomes a vampire, I think that her potentially being more mature in certain parts of her body works for the role.

In terms of her being white , I feel the need to clarify that she is in the book and - I hope people don't read this the wrong way either, but I actually kind of think she should be in the show too? If they keep Baby Jenks to her tiny little arc in QOTD (and this is about to be potentially very spoilery, so just a heads up!), raceswapping her could have a lot of pretty ugly connotations. I don't know if you or the people who are unhappy about her being white have read the books, but Baby Jenks is a 14 year old, pregnant drug addict when she's turned. The leader of the Fang Gang, Killer - now likely confirmed to be Bruce, Claudia's rapist - has a penchant for 14-year-old girls in the books (hence the speculation that they've been the same character all along), and he finds Baby Jenks dying in the streets from a back alley abortion and he takes her and he turns her.

Her being Black in that context has a pretty insidious racial stereotype attached already, given the criminalisation of Black girls both broadly and specifically, but it also racialises Killer/Bruce's crime. He's a pedophile, there's no doubt about that in either the book or the show I don't think, but to make him a predator specifically to young Black girls would open a door narratively that I don't think the show's prepared to step through, given it's not the story it's trying to tell.

On top of that, Baby Jenks never meets Lestat or Louis in the books. Lestat's moved by the story of her (and I'm going to circle back to that in a second), but Akasha burns her alive while Baby Jenks is on her way to Lestat's concert. Lestat's inability to reconcile that senseless brutality - because it is senseless, Akasha has no reason to burn this girl alive, and she does so from a distance - is a part of what anchors Lestat to himself during that arc, and to have another Black girl's body senselessly burnt to remind a white man of his humanity I think has really ugly connoatations.

And look, with that comes the reality too that the root of Claudia and Baby Jenks' similarities comes through their burning, but also through the fact that they are the two characters who kill their parents. It's really, really important that Lestat can never do that. He can never kill the mother and father who neglected, abused and assaulted him, no matter how much he wanted to, and I love that about him, just as I love the fact that both Claudia and Baby Jenks can, and do.

To have both of those characters be young Black girls (and again, they're both young white girls in the books), I think has potentially a pretty racist subtext too. You're positioning the three characters who fantasise about parricide as connected, and yet the white man can't do it, while - if Baby Jenks was to also be Black - the two Black girls would be the ones 'monstrous' enough to do it. It would feel really loaded to me as a viewer, and I don't know, maybe others would find that an easier pill to swallow, but I think tying both that power and that specific sort of crime to girlhood itself rather than Black girlhood changes the conversation than if it was only Black girls capable of murdering their parent.

I actually re-read the Baby Jenks chapter of QOTD last night too, and I was thinking a lot about how the show's done quite a bit already to bring their version of Claudia more into line with her, and the parallels are loud and they're there, but in a lot of ways, Baby Jenks as she exists is a midway point between Claudia and Lestat's experiences. She's the point in the Venn diagram where their history meets. She had loveless loving parents who exploited and abused her, and she was a child thrown to the wolves, and - in the show's context - she was likely raped by her maker, and she killed her mother, even as she loved her, and she was burned alive for the act of being born at all.

Baby Jenks isn't just a parallel to the show's version of Claudia, I think in a lot of ways she's a meeting point for that versiion of Claudia and Lestat. She's both their experiences, and neither of theirs, she's her own person, and she never gets to be, because she's killed at the first taste of freedom just as Claudia was at the trial, just as Lestat was by Magnus.

Respectfully, Anon, you're missing my point.

I'm not trying to negate what the show has alluded to re: Daniel's backstory and relationship with his family, what I'm saying is that, with so little to go on wrt Daniel's backstory and given that it is still totally plausible (to the point of being quite common, if you can believe it) for one to have a great deal of love for a parent with a history of substance abuse, neglect, or one you've decided to go no-contact with, the accepted Daniel's Kids Hate Him fanon feels flat and lacks appropriate nuance (and imagination!!! which is more annoying to me, personally) for the fandom of The Complicated Relationships Show.

I know children (even grandchildren) of addicts whose parents still managed to create good memories with them even as they battled addiction. Are these relationships dysfunctional? Yeah. Were these good parents? Jury's out. But imperfect or even bad parenting doesn't mean it was all bad, all the time.

On the subject of Daniel's estrangement from his daughters, the fandom bases this on one throwaway line Daniel says during a highly charged rant at Louis, who has been baiting him off and on for days. What does Daniel say right before "My daughters don't even talk to me?" Some snarky remark about legacies being for execs and assholes in loafers (paraphrasing). I got news for you, peeps, two-time Pulizer winners who teach Masterclass seminars and who go through the trouble of publishing an autobiography/memoir care very much about their legacy, despite what they might say in the heat of the moment.

BUT, even if one wants to interpret this one throwaway line literally and run with the notion that both of Daniel's daughters have gone no-contact with him, the show's canon still leaves the "when's" and "why's" of this estrangement wide open.

Who's to say this has always been the case? What if it's recent?

Terminal illness affects families in different ways; what if one daughter couldn't deal with the news and is coping by ignoring him, and the other cut contact bc she doesn't agree with Daniel's decision to continue living independently instead of moving in with her or into an assisted living facility? What if the news of Daniel's diagnosis caused his kids to start smothering him as though he was already in hospice until one day he snapped, said some messed up things, and demanded they give him space, so they're giving it to him (albeit not the way he wanted it).

What if it has nothing to do with the Parkinson's? What if one kid is a semi-homeless addict globetrotting around the world just like Daniel did back in the day (if we assume DM chase happend) and is just so caught up in doing her own thing she doesn't even think to call anyone in the family, much less Daniel? What if the other kid has a partner who doesn't like Daniel and Alice (if she's real) and since marrying this asshole has distanced herself from her family?

What if--as I said in my original post--they're simply really fucking busy being grown and having their own lives and don't have time to reply to Daniel's 90 million daily texts, and "My daughters won't even talk to me" is just Daniel being a surly, dramatic old man who's had it with the depressed vampire he's ranting at, and also wants his girls to be faster texters?

Or, Daniel was a druggie fuckup who was too strung out to ever meaningfully bond with his daughters who, now grown, actively despise him. <- Sure. The popular theory works, too, obviously but there's no reason this has to be THE go-to fanon explanation since

For the show/movie/fandom asks.

You cannot ask me that. How can I choose, honestly?

I don't know if it is my uncontested favorite, but season two episode five, simply for Assad Zaman's beautiful delivery of Armand's lines to Daniel.

Okay, anon, I'm so sorry. I went to answer this, had a ridiculously lengthy and detailed answer, and as I went to hit 'post now' tumblr deleted it all and said 'our servers aren't cool enough to handle your post right now!' and I was so nauseous, I spent so much time. I'm afraid this won't be as good, but I remember most of what I said, so I'll try to rehash it all best I can.

So, first of all, welcome to iwtv/tvc! it's always been chaos here. second of all, let's spend some time discussing the Armand-Louis-Lestat relationship, particularly in context of the first book and of the show, in turn!

Armand-Louis-Lestat has always been incredibly interesting and the show is, obviously ("the love of my life!") setting us up for continued interesting vibes. Here's what I will tell you about Armand and Louis in Interview (the book). As the show is setting up as well, Louis meets Armand in Paris following the "death" of Lestat. Up until Armand, Louis had been in an incredibly depressive episode (moreso than normal) because of Lestat's death. Meeting Armand fills Louis with this infatuation, and Armand, like all vampires, immediately falls deeply in love with Louis and his beauty and his remaining humanity. It's a beautiful couple of weeks/months, and I have no doubt that the show is going to capitalize on that and show us many many many cute, loving, sexy, and tender moments of Louis and Armand's relationship. What I will also tell you, without trying to spoil too much of the book, is that the period of happy and loving in Louis and Armand's relationship is very limited and, by the end of the book, Louis is so numb, so distant, so cold to Armand.

Now! I feel like I need to clarify that, in later books, Louis and Armand always reconnect, but I very much have always viewed it as a true friendship/companionship. I think, in a lot of ways, they both saw each other at their worst and have a trust that will always let them find solace in the other, even if it's just platonic.

With all that in mind, I actually have two passages from Interview (the book) that I'm going to type out and that I think are exceptionally important to Louis and Lestat's relationship, especially in comparison to Louis' relationship with anyone else.

In my version of Interview, the first passage is on page 123. It takes place immediately following Louis and Claudia "killing" Lestat:

"Claudia had wrapped Lestat's body in a sheet before I would even touch it, and then, to my horror, she had sprinkled it over with the long-stemmed chrysanthemums. So it had a sweet, funereal smell as I lifted it last of all from the carriage. It was almost weightless, as limp as something made of knots and cords, as I put it over my shoulder and moved down into the dark water, the water rising and filling my boots, my feet seeking some path in the ooze beneath, away from where I'd lain the two boys. I went deeper and deeper in with Lestat's remains, though why, I did not know. And finally, when I could barely see the pale space of the road and the sky which was coming dangerously close to dawn, I let his body slip down out of my arms into the water. I stood there shaken, looking at the amorphous form of the white sheet beneath the slimy surface. The numbness which had protected me since the carriage left the Rue Royale threatened to lift and leave me flayed suddenly, staring, thinking: This is Lestat. This is all of transformation and mystery, dead, gone into eternal darkness. I felt a pull suddenly, as if some force were urging me to go down with him, to descend into the dark water and never come back. It was so distinct and so strong that it made the articulation of voices seem only a murmur by comparison. It spoke without language, saying, "You know what you must do. Come down into the darkness. Let it all go away.""

The second passage is just a few paragraphs later, on page 124:

"...'He deserved to die!' she [Claudia] said to me.

"'Then we deserve to die. The same way. Every night of our lives,' I said back to her. 'Go away from me.' It was as if my words were my thoughts, my mind alone only formless confusion. 'I'll care for you because you can't care for yourself. But I don't want you near me. Sleep in that box you bought for yourself. Don't come near me.'

"'I told you I was going to do it. I told you...' she said...'Louis, I told you!' she said, her lips quivering. 'I did it for us. So we could be free.' I couldn't stand the sight of her."

The reason I think these passages are really important, especially in context of the show, is because this is Louis when he wasn't telling us everything. According to the show, Interview (the book) has already happened, at least up to a point. Louis has told Daniel this story before, but is doing so now with more truth, more nuance, more history. He kept out a lot, namely the depth of his relationship with Lestat, out of hatred or disdain or repression or something, towards himself, towards Lestat, towards life, etc. And yet these passages highlight something so so incredibly important, which is how much Louis loved/loves Lestat.

Lestat's death haunts Louis. In Europe, he talks about his grief in the narration, and it appears that in Claudia's diaries in the show, she discusses his grief too, namely that he is worse than ever following the death of Lestat.

Have you ever heard of how the opposite of love isn't hate, but apathy? I've heard it a lot in my life, never understood it until I got older, and I think Louis and Lestat, and Louis and Armand, are perfect examples of that.

Lestat drives Louis crazy. He lights fires in him, both good and bad, and, no doubt, damages Louis' blood pressure (if vampires have blood pressure to worry about, I guess), but he makes Louis feel, he makes him be alive. He drives Louis so crazy that Louis interviews TWICE about his relationship with the man.

Louis and Armand, while sweet in its own way, and will, undoubtedly, have its sweet moments, is going to fizzle out. And I think the show will very much do that on purpose to show us how any relationship Louis has (and Lestat has) pales in comparison to what he has with Lestat.

I've talked about it in a couple of asks before, about how I think the show is going to take a slightly different direction than the books re: polyamory and re: Loustat as a whole, and my general consensus is that Louis and Lestat are endgame in the books, but it's going to be so much more apparent, and will happen so much quicker, in the show. The show has so much content to work with re: storylines that there is no need to play relationship will-they-won't-they with Louis and Lestat. They can stabilize them (to a point -- any relationship with Lestat is always going to be slightly unstable) and have the actual plot (Akasha, Memnoch, Amel, etc.) be the main problems to work through versus relationship drama 24/7.

not sure if this makes sense — but what i’m trying to say is, there’s a lot of things going on in both lestat and louis’ psychology that impacts how they approach sex in s1. i do tend to read lestat as the more dominant and louis as more submissive in their sexual relationship back then, but i think s3 might actually see this be subverted as it seems like lestat’s hypersexuality is going to be deconstructed? i view his dominance in s1 as somewhat of a facade stemming from a need to ‘please’ sexually, to give rather than receive, as so much of his self-worth is caught up in his looks, body, sexual prowess/skills. irl, there’s more of a pressure on tops/doms/men (in m/f relationships) to ‘perform’ and prove their sexual competence, and so it would make sense to me that lestat would gravitate towards this role because in his mind, if he can’t guide louis to his pleasure and sexual fulfilment, why would he love him? tldr; lestat domming is a coping mechanism and s3 will debunk strict dom top lestat lol.

and to be clear, these aren’t my views on sexual dynamics (i don’t think tops/doms are active/the desirers and bottoms/subs are passive/the desired etc.), but i do think traditionally a lot of people held perspectives similar to this, and it wouldn’t shock me if lestat felt this way back in the early 1900s. i still see people in the fandom echo these kinds of sentiments — only the top’s desire matters, only the bottom’s pleasure matters, and it all gets funnelled into this interpretation of loustat that focuses primarily on lestat’s love and lust for louis vs louis’ almost indifference to him, while emphasising louis’ sexual satisfaction as the primary objective of their lovemaking (with lestat’s as a byproduct essentially)

I’d say that it definitely plays a role.

It’s kind of interesting to consider it when you frame it that way, because in a lot of ways this sort of polarity of Lestat’s hypersexuality and Louis’ s1 sexual passivity (which is obviously rolled back massively in s2) is, in my opinion, rooted in Louis’ broader denial of his own role in their relationship. He paints a picture of himself as more sexually innocent than he is which the show takes deliberate steps to undermine from the very first scenes – he says he can resist men in the same shot we see him actively cruising, he talks about only wanting to talk to Miss Lily in the same episode he goes down on her during a threesome, he’s vague about his sexual history only for Jonah to show up – and I think a part of the issue in this fandom is that people do take these things at face value. I can’t tell you the amount of posts I’ve read that imply Louis was a virgin with Lestat or that he was pretending to go down on Miss Lily, which are both things I find at best a reach.  

Louis fucks, and he fucked long before Lestat or Armand or cruising in Paris or 128 dead boys in San Francisco. His obfuscation of his sexuality in s1 I do think is tied up to genuine and complex feelings of shame that he’s still trying to unpack at that point in the interview, but also it really is him attempting to position himself to Daniel as someone ultimately corrupted by Lestat. The artifice of that wears away throughout the two seasons in a way that even Louis finds confronting – his shock at Lestat feeling hunted by him too is a good example of that – but I think you’re right in that their sexuality together and apart as Louis depicted it in those early episodes plays into notions of seducer and the seduced, which plays into notions of the sinful and the virtuous, which, in heteronormative terms, plays into old romance novel tropes of the rake and the debutante.

The show knows that, and I think Louis subconsciously does too in how he chooses to tell the story to Daniel, because again, for the first half of the interview, he’s trying to eschew responsibility for all of it. He wants to be seen as passive because then everything that happened isn’t his fault, and his grappling and eventual acceptance that he was an active – and responsible – participant in his own life (even though there was still so much out of his hands) is literally his arc in these first two seasons, and the way he finds peace.

But jumping back to sex, I actually think their first time post-turning is a really important one in terms of not just looking at how Louis depicts their relationship, but the fundamental schism in the fandom, because like - -

When you said “It’s because there is nothing else that can be tangibly pointed to” on Louis’s gender in your last ask, I suppose what I want to ask is what would be tangible grounds to say Louis is femme or feminine in canon i.e. what would be the canon depiction that you would find convincing enough to say that Louis is feminine? I have read posts that stated if Louis dressed and presented in a more feminine fashion, then more people would accept him as feminine, but since he does not and Lestat does, Lestat is feminine. But I think that has the potential for troubling gender essentialist connotations as well e.g. if clothes make the gender, then is a woman that does not perform femininity with fashion less of a woman?

I suppose this is a debate feminists have been having for ages and we will find no easy answers. But I have been troubled at times by some of what people say “against” a feminine interpretation of Louis and in support of a feminine interpretation of Lestat, that Lestat is The Woman and The Mother in the relationship because Lestat is flamboyant and wears feminine fashion. I know many people do the converse for Louis and say he is The Woman and The Mother in the relationship and they appeal to academic ideas of social gender to support that argument, but I remain unconvinced by those as well e.g. if social roles decide gender, such as being a victim of domestic violence means a person is feminine, does that not contribute to de-gendering a victim of domestic violence that may identify as a man?

I know this is discourse is a minefield and you have gotten very bad messages about this in the past so I do not begrudge you if you don’t answer, but I am sending this in good faith. I feel as though there is one box that says Lipstick Makes The Woman for supporters of Lestat as The Woman, and there is another box that says Oppression Makes The Woman for supporters of Louis as The Woman. I don’t think there are tangible grounds to say either of them are.

(x)

Of course you can ask, anon, and I agree that the stress on clothing, make-up and outward presentation can lead to some pretty gender essentialist talking points too, although I don’t think it should be ignored / is irrelevant either. The DV as a metaphor for gendered oppression argument is kind of similar in that regard given it's a very complex thing to ascribe to characters, particularly male ones, but also shouldn’t be ignored, particularly when you take into account the fact that the books do generally fall into the female gothic which was built on the back of things women felt dread about.

In that sense, it is tricky, because so much about gender in conversations like this is, in my opinion, about personal identity, and the ways that that is reflected or shared or felt varies in such a huge way that there isn’t really any one way to talk about it. I think that’s probably why the discourse runs so hot in this fandom, as you said.

For the record though, I don’t view either Lestat or Louis as The Woman, nor really even The Mother. Claudia has two fathers, and yes, I think you can make the case for both Lestat and Louis trying to fulfil a maternal role for her and both of them not being very good at it (which isn’t to say that that’s because they’re men, more just because they’re not very good parents). That said, I do think there is a sense of the maker as the birthing parent which can sometimes [although not always!] influence a dynamic. I think it does with Lestat and Claudia, and I actually think it does with Louis and Madeleine, albeit in a really different way. That’s not really here nor there though for this post, so - -

Yes, haha.

More to your point, what it comes down to for me right now is honestly textual expression.

I think that Louis’ emasculation by white society in his mortal life is not only explicitly detailed in the show, but pretty pivotal to this version of his character, and the complexity around his relationship with gender – because I do think he has complex feelings about it – which stems from the fact that he is a Black, gay man in the early 1900s, which is an identity he claims in the actual text of the show.

That might seem silly to say about the queer vampire show, but he’s literally the only character so far who has stated his sexuality textually, and he’s done it with identifiers about his race and gender, so I do think that’s incredibly important. It’s even brought up in the trial – Santiago talks about Louis' race and his desires in the context of reminding us of his character, and while obviously Santiago is not an authority on Louis, of course he's not, you’d think that if there was a chance to address Louis’ relationship to gender there both Santiago/Armand and the show would have.

My reading of Louis’ character is that his sexuality and the systemic racial abuse he experienced compounded his feelings of gendered inadequacies, which is why both Grace and Claudia were able to weaponize it against him. It’s why him calling himself ‘the housewife’ when he was in a depressive episode wasn’t him claiming an identity, but rather him fixing on the worst perception of himself – the very thing he never wanted to be. The fact that it was initially tossed at him in the same breath that Claudia called herself a mistake after Lestat had called her that I think makes it abundantly clear. They are all trying to hurt each other, and they’re all good at it, because they know each other well enough to know what will land, not because it's what it speaks to a truth in them, but because it speaks to something they desperately don't want to be.

With Lestat, it is genuinely harder to know how the show is going to approach his relationship to his gender going forwards, because I truly don’t know how much they’re committing to, but at the same time, it has already been explicit that Lestat’s not doing drag in a vacuum. If he was, then yeah, I wouldn’t read all that much into it – Lestat’s from a particularly flamboyant era of history, and he’s ever a performer – but again, he hasn’t been. Pissabataille actually did a great gifset of it here, but as much as the fandom can shrug it off or put it down to Lestat’s flamboyance, he has used feminine pronouns or identifiers on multiple occasions now. We can discuss the weight and interpretation of those moments, yes, but they are textual in the same way that Louis self-identifying as a gay man is, and that all the arguments around influences and Shelter and which character’s actually being pointed to in Louis reading Madame Bovary is not.

This isn't even getting into Carol saying his Mardi Gras costume needed to be equally masculine and feminine, because again - - this is just text, and it does lend, in my opinion, greater weight and nuance to his relationship with drag and make-up. It's all present, textually, no matter how you or I or anyone else chooses to interpret said text, and I’m always kind of left wondering how different the discourse around these things would be if it was Louis who’d called himself aunt, mother wolf, she and not Lestat.

Which really comes to my point, I guess. I think I’d need Louis to express it on a textual level, in dialogue or in meaningful gesture, something that centred his relationship to his gender in any way that positioned him as anything other than a cis gay man, because the show has demonstrated that it will do that, and that that is a part of the language of the show. I’m not saying Louis needs to use feminine pronouns like Lestat did, but I think these reaches to influences or gendered oppression, as you said, really are reaches to a potential subtext that eschews the - - well. Text.