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You know it's a Gothic Horror show, and you're supposed to feel uncomfortable, right? I do. But do you? Do you, Rolin, and Hannah understand that? Because from where I stand, only the Black characters seem to be trapped in a horror story. The others appear to be in a completely different genre.
The issue isn't that viewers like myself don't want to feel uncomfortable. The issue is that, in this Gothic Horror show, Black characters disproportionately bear the brunt of the violence.
Take this season finale as an example.
At the end of Episode 6, two characters are beheaded. Yet in Episode 7, we are shown the severed head and mutilated body of the black character in explicit details, while the white character's mutilated body is shown only briefly and out of focus, and his severed head is hidden from us.
Louis's arc is presented as a parallel to Lestat's. Both characters are placed in situations where they must confront people they have wronged, or at least people the narrative insists they have wronged, as well as their pasts, relationships, and mistakes. (Personally, I don't believe Louis owes Armand anything, but the narrative clearly wants the audience to think otherwise.đđđ)
Yet the way these parallel journeys are depicted are drastically different.
Lestat's reckoning unfolds in beautiful rooms, elegant spaces, and dreamlike settings. He sits comfortably while listening to the grievances of the people in his life. He argues back. He reflects. He moves through beautiful environments, from grand rooms to forests and back again. Even when he is forced to confront painful memories, the experience is framed as introspection. The focus remains on his emotional and psychological journey.
Meanwhile, Louis is placed in what looks like a torture room straight out of a Saw movie. His severed head sits on a table, hooked up to a machine. His body is positioned across from him, forcing him to stare at it. His suffering is not just physical; it is public and humiliating. His torture is broadcast for others to watch and study. His pain becomes both spectacle and data. He is joined by Regina, another Black character, whose torture is used as leverage against him.
The man torturing Louis demands an apology, not for any genuine wrongdoing, but because Louis failed to love him the way he believed he deserved to be loved, and failed to show enough empathy for his trauma. This is the same man who murdered Louis's daughter in a lynching and attempted to murder Louis in that same lynching, and who, only minutes earlier, boasted that he took aesthetic pleasure in making Louis's death visually exhilarating as part of that lynching.
And so the torture continues. Louis is pushed to the brink of death. Regina is slicing her wrist. Eventually, Louis gives in. He apologizes. He accepts responsibility not only for hurting his torturer's feelings but for the torture itself. He tells his torturer that his coldness and denial drove him (the torturer) to these actions (the torture). The torturer receives the apology he wants, ends the torture, heals and frees Regina, and leaves, but not before carving the letter "A" onto Louis's mutilated body.
Meanwhile, Lestat is still moving through beautiful settings, confronting his past, and listening to others condemn him for the failures of his life. His story reaches its climax in the final act, when he is surrounded by the people in his life and the people he has wronged, some of whom are cheering him on. Rather than being subjected to physical degradation, he is given space for self-reflection. The focus remains on his memories, his relationships, his mistakes, the horrors he has committed, and his regrets. He eventually acknowledges some of his mistakes and even apologizes to one of his victims. Instead of fleeing from his past, he chooses to face it. His reckoning culminates in understanding, and the arc ultimately ends with imagery that evokes transcendence, as though he is ascending to heaven.
Both Louis and Lestat are given parallel narrative arcs centered on confronting their pasts, their relationships, and the harm they have caused. Yet the show presents those reckonings through vastly different visual and narrative lenses. Lestat's journey is psychological, reflective, and aesthetically beautiful. Louis's journey is a sustained ordeal of physical and psychological torture, humiliation, and degradation. One character is invited to examine himself; the other is turned into a spectacle of suffering. While Lestat is afforded reflection, Louis is afforded degradation.
And I'm supposed to look at that contrast and just shrug and say, "Well, that's Gothic horror for you"? Really? Take the blinders off. Look at what is being asked of Louis and compare it to what is being asked of Lestat. One is granted introspection, reflection, and, ultimately, transcendence. The other is subjected to torture, humiliation, and spectacle. The genre does not erase that disparity. If anything, it makes it more obvious.
My issue is not the horror. My issue is who is repeatedly asked to embody that horror, whose pain is treated as spectacle, and whose pain is afforded dignity, nuance, and care.
washing dishes is evil because you go "oh fuck there's so many dishes this is gonna take foreverrr" and then you enter the dish abyss and emerge with your abdomen somehow covered in water and your hands all wrinky and then you look at the clock and what felt like half an hour was actually 10 minutes
the writers tried so fucking hard to make us hate louis this season but all it did was reaffirm my love for himâlouis dpdl is the vampire ever and nothing will ever change that. not antiblack writing, not character assassination, not smear campaigns, nothing. jacob has made him into a such a loveable, multifaceted, imperfectly perfect, iconic character that is so easy for so many people to resonate and empathize with, and that can't be taken away no matter how much they try. it's impossible to decenter louis. there would be no story without him.
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sure, let's have a black woman be basically a caricature, call her black father a nappy-headed slave, claim she never cared for him even though the past two seasons make it very clear that's not true, say she hates him more than her rapist and the people who murdered her, claim she intentionally and maliciously lied about being threatened with rape, say she prefers her white father (who horrifically abused her for 30 years btw) over him, and then have said fathers not show a single intense emotion over it afterwards. you know, since we can have characters just do ANYTHING now.
iâm sick of ppl trying to equivocate that claudia couldâve been that hateful and mad at louis without the racism. no she wouldnât be. the entire thing is out of character for the iwtv canon, stop trying to give an inch when none of it even matters anymore. even in the books itâs clear that itâs not fully claudia and louis was shittier to her there. or accepting that he was a pimp after all even if thatâs not ~all he was. no he wasnât. we have long since traced back to the exact real life brothel owner the s1 writers transferred 1:1 to louis. missing and honoring the black writers who made iwtv also means respecting the story THEY wrote, and we donât have to concede some bullshit about louis having been selfish or cruel or equally at fault for claudiaâs abuse. itâs still victim blaming to say the seance was right that louis didnât change bc heâs taking the abuser back. itâs victim blaming to equivocate that he and armand equally couldnât consent to the bdsm and that louis was a bad dom even if he still didnât need to apologize to armand. that antiblack torture scene has nothing to do w louisâ relationship with armand, it has no basis in canon at all, they just wanted the nbpoc to torture louis bc of the optics bc why the fuck would fareed even be there lol? donât internalize this white supremacist revisionist bullshit, this show used to mean a lot to jacob for a reason, he and delainey came back for a reason, and we know they were lied to. louis was never selfish or a pimp or cruelly culpable for withholding to the powerful men who hated and battered him, thatâs not softening his agency for perfect victimhood. claudia came back to see him because she loved him and loved him until her very last breath. we know what we saw
(tags via @greedydemands) this is another important point bc while folks have rightly pointed out the palpable sense of resentment and contempt the nonblack writers room seems to have for louis and claudia, it's important to think about how this show did have some black writers working on it during s1-s2 and it was an intentional choice to remove all black talent from the writers room and how white creatives often have a chip on their shoulder about their work being popular with a marginalized audience they didn't intend or feeling like their own work and ideas are being outshined by the work of black collaborators. iwtv s1-s2 was loved by black viewers and was praised largely as a black show, with louis and claudia (despite their unpopularity among nonblack viewers and in predominantly nonblack fandom) being celebrated as iconic figures in the small but beloved pantheon of black vampires in pop culture in less than 4 years. omar benson miller and jack o'connell (who knows jacob) cited and recommended iwtv on the sinners press tour and as the original post points out, iwtv s1 was clearly a visual and conceptual reference for ryan coogler when he was making sinners. (and sinners was both a box office and awards success despite the antiblackness of the industry so anyone justifying amc's efforts to distance tvl from iwtv as a purely business/financial decision is being seriously bad faith.) reddit and tumblr, and we know rolin lurks on both, might have been shoulder-deep in antiblack abuse apologia to excuse fan favorite nonblack characters, but iwtv was entering pop culture as a black show, as centering and valuing blackness. and we see now more clearly than ever that none of those aspects of the show- not the compassion and nuance for louis and claudia, not the immersive and lyrical dialogue and narration, not the thoughtful engagement with themes of race, racialized violence and domestic abuse- came from hannah or rolin. they wanted to make a "everyone is evil and nothing matters" vampiric-violence-excuses-all ironic shlockfest where any gesture toward sincerity gets undercut by a self-aware quip and where compassion is only reserved for nonblack people. and the seeds of that are there in the earlier seasons, like hannah always writing episodes that are extremely, disproportionately detailed about the brutalization of black bodies, but there was just enough care, thought and interest in the black leads to make the show seem like it was critiquing the nature of this kind of violence instead of punitively reveling in it. and that part came from the black writers (and likely also some of the nonblack women who worked on s1-s2 but were fired before s3, bc while the show has always been misogynistic, it wasn't cartoonishly misogynistic where every single woman is reduced to a one-note stereotype) and the nonblack writers and producers likely deeply resented them for it.
think of how black fans are often framed as dour killjoys who hate fun and are trying to ruin the essence of fandom itself for centering black characters and talking about antiblackness in shared online spaces, even if we do it in a kind, gentle and conciliatory way. how black fans' analysis of media will be hated or ignored but embraced if a white fan makes the same points, including in discussions of racism. how black creatives often have their work copied or emulated by nonblack creatives who'll villainize the original creator even as they play in their sandbox. the iwtv subreddit is a great example of that where nonblack fans regularly screenshot, copy and repost analysis or even just silly memes made by black fans while the racist mods consistently ban or remove the posts of any black person who wants to talk about antiblackness there or share opinions deemed too sympathetic toward the show's black leads. fandom, even allegedly liberal fandom, is like this bc it's a microcosm of how society treats blackness and black people- there's no reason to think a cable tv writers room also populated by nonblack liberals would function any differently. people talk about the obvious antiblack spite behind a lot of choices this season and expressing concern for what the bts working conditions have been like for the black leads, and we should keep talking about that, but it's also important to consider how the antiblack backlash is likely also directed toward the black writers who used to work there and the white creatives wanting not only to overwrite their work but make a pop cultural impact that's completely disconnected from blackness, to make the show "their own" instead of sharing creative air with blackness. and in doing so ironically they've made sure this season will have a longterm legacy (like sleepy hollow, like the vampire diaries, like the star wars sequel trilogy- all were critically and fannishly beloved at first and now they're synonymous with racism and creative cowardice in pop culture) that's still all about blackness, remembered for embodying the mid-2020s whitelash in usamerican culture and for not adapting the book it was supposed to adapt in their quest to do a whitecentric rewrite of everything good or depthful or compelling about s1-s2.
Any TVL cast member being interviewed: yeah so when I first read the script I wanted to murder Rolin with my bare hands :) haha yeah he butchered my character so badly that I threw my laptop across the room :) aha and then I yelled at him for two hours which only resulted in minor tweaks to the script :) yeah I was so shocked and confused :) and he comes up with scenes that donât make any sense in-universe. :) and I worry for the future of this tv show :) but itâs alright as long as you think about how [5 min in depth analysis of details that the cast member has come up themselves to justify the season despite these justifications not being evident in the actual show at all] aha :)
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i feel like the offhanded bigoted remarks were much easier to stomach in iwtv s1 and s2 when we had an intentionally made product which provided commentary and framed them in the proper light. not to mention that most of the previous seasons were period pieces, with the derogatory language used to tell us something about the environment weâre inhabiting.
now, almost all of the bigoted remarks are happening in the present day with no framing to indicate how the audience is supposed to feel about them. they are primarily played for comedy rather than drama and the audience is encouraged to laugh at the marginalized (especially racialized and ESPECIALLY Black) characters.
in hindsight iâm glad they changed the fucking name. you cannot describe a Black character as âlouisiana fried chickenâ and then act like itâs at all comparable to the artistic merit and thoughtful social commentary of the first two seasons
itâs crazy how much people are using the âunreliable narratorâ excuse to justify bad writing and pacing. there was no need to do so in the first and second season because everything flowed perfectly, the characterisation made perfect sense, every little scene had weight and narrative consequences. no devilâs minion isnât incredibly rushed because lestat doesnât care about them. itâs bad writing. no, louis didnât completely ignore claudiaâs terrible state in the afterlife and simply went on to flirt with lestat because lestat is an unreliable narrator. itâs bad writing. no the flashbacks arenât two minutes and very cheaply made because lestat doesnât want to focus on them. itâs bad writing. open your eyes!!!
I see people arguing that the slave remarks in Episode 6 of The Vampire Lestat were a callback to the slave remarks in Episode 6 of Season 1 of Interview with the Vampire. If that's true, then it is the perfect example of why black writers were needed in the room. And I mean black writers specifically, not just "people of color." The contrast between how the two episodes handled the subject shows that.
Before I get into that comparison, I want to make something clear. I didn't like the introduction of a slave-master narrative into the unholy family dynamic. The racial implications made me uncomfortable. However, discomfort and offense are not the same thing. While I found it unsettling, I did not find it racist or anti-Black, and that's the key distinction.
In Episode 6 of Season 1, there are two instances where Claudia uses the word "slave". The first time, she is referring to both herself and Louis. She is essentially saying that they are under Lestat's control, trapped in Rue Royale, prisoners of Lestat, his slaves. In that context, "slave" is being used to describe their lack of freedom and autonomy. The second time, she refers not only to herself and Louis, but also to Lestat. She draws a parallel between their situation and Lestat's situation with Magnus. Just as Claudia and Louis are trapped under Lestat's control, Lestat was once under Magnus's control. He was Magnus's slave, and he ultimately killed him rather than continue living that way (we know that's not what happened but that's what Claudia believed). In both instances, the word "slave" is tied to a circumstance, not an identity. It is being used to describe a power dynamic: control, imprisonment, coercion, and domination. You could replace the word "slave" with "prisoner" and the point would remain intact. More importantly, the narrative makes a deliberate effort not to tie slavery to Louis and Claudia's race. Applying the same language to Lestat is what makes that distinction clear. The point is not, "Louis and Claudia are slaves because they are black." The point is, "Louis and Claudia are slaves because they are trapped under Lestat's control," just as Lestat was trapped under Magnus's. Now, viewers can absolutely be uncomfortable with the racial implications of using that metaphor in the first place. I certainly was. But I don't think anyone can honestly argue that the use of the word slave in this scenario was racist.
The writers managed to create discomfort, arguably one of their goals without resorting to anti-Black rhetoric. That's exactly the kind of nuance the black creatives involved in season 1 brought to the story.
Now compare that to Episode 6 of The Vampire Lestat. Claudia calls Louis a slave and then goes further, suggesting that slavery is part of who he is. She implies it is in his DNA as demonstrated by her saying that "slave" is etched into his ribs. Add the "nappy-headed" remark on top of it, and the conversation is no longer about a power dynamic. It becomes an attack on Louis's identity as a black person.
That is the fundamental difference. In Season 1, slavery was used as a metaphor for control. In The Vampire Lestat, slavery is framed as something intrinsic to Louis himself. The word is no longer describing his circumstances; it is describing who he supposedly is. The narrative shifts from "you are being treated like a slave" to "being a slave is part of your nature."
Those are not remotely the same thing. You cannot write a scene in which a Black character tells another Black character that slavery is essentially woven into his DNA, pair it with a racialized insult like "nappy-headed," and then act surprised when viewers, particularly black viewers find it offensive. So if those remarks were intended to be a callback to Season 1 Episode 6, then the callback was an utter failure.
What made the Season 1 dialogue worked was that it treated slavery as a condition imposed on people. What makes the Vampire Lestat dialogue offensive is that it treats slavery as something inherent to Louis. One is about oppression; the other flirts with the idea that oppression is an innate trait. That is not a minor difference. It is the entire issue. And if you genuinely cannot see the difference between using slavery as a metaphor for imprisonment and using slavery as a marker of a black character's identity, then I really don't know what to tell you.
The contrast between the two episodes is precisely why having black writers in the room matter. Season 1 showed that you can explore themes of domination, control, and power between black and white characters, while navigating the racial implications with nuance. The Vampire Lestat Episode 6 shows what happens when that nuance is absent.
the paul scene really really solidified the fact that rolin has fundamentally misunderstood what is interesting about loustat. absolving lestat of any wrongdoing and going as far as having FUCKING LOUISâ DEAD BROTHER come in and THANK lestat for âloving louis the way that he needed to be lovedâ. loustat, and i say this as a firm loustat girlie, is NOT HEALTHY. lestat did not SAVE louis with his love. louis was not saved by his love. they are both CURSED with loving each other.
louis was coerced, manipulated, intentionally isolated by lestat. lestat killed lily, the only person who he confided to, accelerated louis into severing contact with his family (whom he did love), and LOATHED paul from the one instance where he met him, because it was clear he did not approve of them. paulâs death and his stance on lestat was the eerie foreshadowing for how lestat would go on to treat louis throughout season one. i.e., enraged that in spite of all his UNWANTED efforts to receive louisâ unconditional affection, there was deep resentment from louis for stripping of something that he valued as much as his humanity.
and louis was not resentful because it is his nature. he was not cold to him because âit is his fatherâs wayâ like paul said. he was cold to him because louis is embittered by the fact that the majority of his suffering would have never happened if he had never met lestat. just as the majority of his greatest euphoria would have never happened if heâd met lestat: claudia entering their life, becoming bold enough to truly define who he is, experiencing a love that he was constantly told was wrong and unholy. but none of that changes the fact that lestat TRAPPED himâlouis is constantly battling between these two opposing facts regarding the love of his life, and he learned to utilize resentment and coldness to make lestat feel the same constant turmoil and insecurity that lestat made HIM feel.
louis and lestat do not love each other BECAUSE of what theyâve been through. they love each other IN SPITE of what theyâve been through. theyâve made each otherâs lives a living hell, but the love is STILL there and it always has. thatâs what makes them interesting. theyâve lost everything for loving each other. yes, as the episode pointed out, lestat was insulted, betrayed, had his throat slit by louis. but what they failed to mention is that louis suffered for loving lestat as well. claudia detests louis in large part because they still love each other. louis lost everyone in his human life. louis is constantly facing threats from LESTATâS past, his mother, theatre des vampires, whoever else. theyâve damned each other: lestat damns louis, louis damns lestat, and the cycle always continues because they cannot fucking resist each other. it is the love and the hatred, euphoria and abject misery, profound connectedness and the most acute loneliness. they are EVERYTHING to one another. rolinâs incessant need on victimizing lestat is butchering one of the best gothic romances of all time.
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I keep trying to distract myself around the house but i just canât stop crying. The sheer cruelty and gleeful cynism surrounding louisâ treatment is incomprehensible in its magnitude and overtness. it feels impossible to reconcile the compassionate treatment of louis and claudiaâs abuse of the previous seasons with the horrifically mean-spirited antiblack and anti-victim writing weâve had to endure for weeks. As it all settles, there is no way to view any of this other than through the lens of these writers vehemently hating louis and the people who dared regard him with love and empathy by pandering to the most racist confines of this online space.
My heart aches for jacob and the exploitation of his time, talent, and care for louis. My heart aches for the black writers who have to see their work desecrated for cheap twitter jokes and embarrassing failed attempts at virality. My heart aches for the black fans who love louis and earnestly wanted to see his story treated with the same level of care and respect afforded to his abusers and then having to sit through that violence.
Now more than ever, hannah moscovitchâ words saying that "louis would never not be believable as a victim" sound hollow and deliberately cruel and I can only hope this writing team will in time feel a fraction of the humiliation they inflicted on their audience for the crime of loving louis. Iâm just absolutely gutted.
I havenât watched the finale yet and quite frankly Iâm scared to. I started watching this show *purely because* I was so excited to see a black man as the lead in a show about vampires⌠and to see how theyâve treated him this season makes me want to literally vomit.
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