#tvl speculation

A few caveats:

I’ve said before I think that it’d be a very poor narrative structure to next season be like “lol tricked you, here’s what really happened!” It’d MAYBE work if it was being called out more during this season. It’d MAYBE work if these seasons aren’t 2 years apart. But as is, I think it would be incredibly hard to pull off.

I also think that, even if that had been the plan, Rolin Jones is so committed to his belief that this is the greatest season yet, and he seems just egotistical enough to be like “how dare the fans criticize and dislike this season? There’s no need to recontextualize anything!!” or perhaps feel like it would look like fanservice/pandering if he went through with any original plans to do so. I could definitely see him changing his mind and doubling down on everything, frankly.

I also don’t want to contribute too much to fandom tendencies to desperately try to find some explanation for Bad Writing. You’ll note below that many of the things that I’m willing to accept as true are about characters I don’t care about (Lestat, Gabriella, the band), while many of the things I can’t accept are about characters I do care about (Louis, Armand, Daniel, Claudia). That may say more about me than anything actually in the show or planned by the writers for the future.

That said.

I’ve noted before that they seem to have grown increasingly resistant to the idea of unreliable narrators, etc. However, they also can’t get around it by nature of the show. So, I was trying to go through and decide, as teased above, what is true?

I think that anything in flashbacks (Nicki, early days with Gabriella, the second version of his turning by Magnus, the stuff with Marius and Akasha) is true or at least as true as Lestat believes them to be, or experienced them, with the recognition that all memories are going to be affected by time, emotion, perspective, and later experience. The minimal amount of challenge from Daniel or others means it’s harder to determine where exactly Lestat’s biases are, but that doesn’t mean these moments weren’t authentic enough to be considered reliable enough.

I also think that most of the things that happened with the band and Gabriella in the present day is true-ish, with the recognition that they purposely skipped some things that may be important to see later and of course that it’s also being heavily affected by drug use and a clear emotional/nervous breakdown.

So, here’s where I get to the What if what is true is “inverted”? bit? In seasons 1 & 2, it was strongly implied that while much of Louis’s memories may have been real to him, they were also very badly affected by the things mentioned above (time, emotion, etc.) as well as, in some but NOT ALL parts, by Armand’s manipulation either through the literal mind gift or through gaslighting. But what we, the audience, could feel pretty confident about was that everything that happened separate from Louis – Daniel and “Rashid” talking just the two of them, Daniel meeting Raglan, etc. – actually happened as we saw.

Here we cannot feel at all confident about that. I am, possibly like many people, guilty of forgetting the bit early on that clarifies what Lestat is narrating in the Failures about what others were up to is at least partly, if not completely, made up by him. I wish I could find the post easily now, but someone else did a very good breakdown of weird things about the Failures with the speculation that they were added later because they didn’t quite fit. I do agree that parts of them don’t fit and don’t make sense. But that could have been very much intentional.

For this, I want to focus specifically on the beheading and subsequent torturing of Louis and Fraudia, who he supposedly recruited in a years-long revenge plot. I know I’m an Armand apologist. Trying to keep that in check, I still think it doesn’t make any sense for the character or the narrative. Some people very convincingly argued that Louis was in on the beheadings and they were part of the plan to stop the concert or Great Conversion or whatever. Some people very convincingly argue that the absence of Armand in much of the present day and in flashbacks is done on purpose because something was being hidden from us (and not because, as I sort-of believe, the writers are petulant about the fandom loving him so much).

I might not have the exact quote here, but let me highlight the bit in the narration where Lestat says something to the effect of “Louis did not tell me what happened to him that night [of the beheadings] until later.”

But Lestat doesn’t say when later. It could be much later. What is shown to us in this episode may be what he made up to fill in the blanks in the meantime, or what Raglan or Gabriella or someone made him think what happened or something. I don’t know. I haven’t worked this all out in my mind yet.

So anyway, to sum up, I think:

Seasons 1 & 2: Louis’s memories and present-day storyline are not entirely “factually accurate” either because of memory issues or deliberate manipulation; everything that happens with other characters in the present day outside of that is real.