The Unexpectedness

so in the book, and i can't believe i'm being this much of a book purist, but IN THE BOOK lestat publishes his life story and starts a band named after himself so he can release songs full of vampire lore because he wants to take the attention away from louis after iwtv is published and all the vampires are pissed because louis broke the great laws by telling a human all about the existance of vampires and not only letting that human live but having it recorded and published which is Not Allowed. yeah lestat is kinda pissed that louis made him the villain in his book and wants to clear some things up, but he also wants to take the heat off louis by breaking those same great laws in an even bigger and flashier way because he still loves louis and wants to protect him. the great conversion (i don't remember if it's even called that in the book but whatever) happens at lestat's big concert, which is his band's first concert EVER btw, because all the vampires want to kill him for telling everybody all of vampirekind's buisness in his songs

my question is WHY WOULD THEY CHANGE THAT? all that extra work and budget and screentime they used up making these songs and these big musical numbers, and most of the songs don't even advance the plot. he's not even singing about being a vampire that much, even the songs that are good (the one about how you can't escape the loneliness, the one about claudia) aren't explicitly about him being a vampire. having all the vampires converge on his one big concert (that we don't even get to see i guess) because they all became his fans after he made one song where he said "make more" is not nearly as interesting a premise as them converging because he's pissed them off and they all want him dead. that would be a better use of "the failures" because him singing specifically about akasha and vampire origins wakes her up and makes her go and save him from the other vampires by murdering everyone and fucking up the world, thus making lestat's original motivation for the band and the songs a Failure

It feels like they pulled the wool over our eyes. But the thing I don't get is WHY. This mindful exploration of trauma that let your actors shine and trusted the audience to untangle things with and against Louis... it WORKED. Why is every facet of trauma and violence now a joke, a shock jock punchline? And whyyyyy is the music so bad and so limited?

This just... not to be obnoxiously parasocial, but I feel so bad for the cast. Particularly Sam Reid who has been so thoughtful and loving when he's spoken about Lestat, who worried about the added violence and rode it out anyway, who has understood Lestat's complex feelings for Louis, Claudia, Armand, and even spoken a bit about Gabrielle before this season, and just... he gets it. I really didn't believe I'd ever truly see Lestat on screen. In IWTV, I did. Even under the at times too many layers of obfuscation they added, Lestat was RIGHT THERE. I keep seeing people say that this season is what it is because they're desperate for people to like Lestat, and maybe that's true, but that feels so weird to me. Because this is... an offensive caricature of Lestat that feels designed to hurt Lestat tbh. Lestat has a love for humanity and a reverence for art and culture tied right to that. And it's gone. The "haha I'm evil" is the cope, the "and what could they know, they're not vampires" is the cope, that's where he hides in those pages. But he hides less & less over time from his feelings about Louis and Claudia. And even in the first pages of TVL, you feel him more than this.

The very Anne Rice in spirit, sensual, melancholic, and florid dialogue was dropped in favor of Stan Twitter short hand written for Gen X, shoved into Lestat's mouth. Lestat's love and reverence for art and counter culture born of it is exchanged for a band that is awful, that doesn't like Lestat and who Lestat doesn't like, and the show wastes our time with one dimensional band drama surely designed for to follow while still on your phone. The music is background noise instead of storytelling. Being queer is being hypersexual, covered in glitter, and a sign of unhappiness.

And the show relies on deliberately inflammatory and/or lazy writing, having POC in its cast that it doesn't protect, and the combination of those things translating into online bickering that doesn't have the time to actually analyze the show. And when it does, there's a large contigent of "but it can't be [x], the show has [y] people on it," or "let people enjoy things" or parrots parroting talking points spoon fed to us BY Rolin Jones and AMC in "press" that is entirely controlled, pre-approved, in house, OR paid for at outside publications desperate for the right kind of clickbait and exclusives handed to them by AMC.

Interview with the Vampire was born in the haze of COVID (when we were still acknowledging it - it's still here), when there was still some dignity and expression left in art. It was AMC saying, we have the rights, let's use them. It wasn't competing with anything, it wasn't supposed to be for people on their phones or people brainrotted by AI content and an even more inflammatory online anti-social social landscape.

And that era is dead.

But it wasn't inevitable. AMC chose this. AMC saw the love we had for this show, the grassroots fan base and fan arts that grew from it, and it decided to spit on it. It decided fandom couldn't be trusted to govern itself and is trying desperately to replace us with its sanctioned After Dark illusion of conversation and courting the kinds of people gross enough to be addicted to AI first social media. Rolin Jones is the showrunning equivalent of a streamer dropping slurs so he can get more comments and then pretend to be unfairly maligned by those comments.

I guess I just want you to know that this IS a betrayal and you get to feel hurt. I want you to know that real writers and critics still exist and we're fans, too. We're just silenced right now. I want you to know that the work those actors did and the love you had for it mattered. It was beyond good enough. But unfortunately we live in hell, and no one had the integrity to stand by us, or by Anne Rice's work.

Maybe this sounds overdramatic or maudlin, but my whole life has been about this. Storytelling. And so much of that love for gothic storytelling, most of it tbh, was born in Anne Rice's books, was fostered and nurtured and sometimes challenged by Lestat, Louis, Armand, and Claudia. It matters as long as we say it matters. So please write your fix it fics (fwiw, Anne came around a lot via FB posts in the end, & I think she'd be delighted with the love we have for her babies), air your grievances, name your hurt, and share the ache of this loss in the fandom space YOU made. YOU made this.

and in the same vein, something just as romantic is that daniel doesn’t even remember those years with armand, but they still haunt him relentlessly. they fuck up his life, bring him to his knees. he feels armand’s absence until he dies without even knowing what it is. daniel is so proud and so cruel and bitter and yet he is weak to armand, too, without even being aware of it.

The thing you say you don’t like they did like that, is it the drop itself? I mean (sorry, eng is not my first language), the fact that they used the drop as a way to explain or exemplify something?

I have thought before that they will do something with the drop because they showed us a revisit of the fight with new scenes in the recap, and Lestat has this moment in ep1 that I can’t get out of my head (when he’s so mad because the band is playing something wrong) and he starts shaking and his voice changes, I’ve been trying to talk to people about this and they don’t care, I don’t understand, they think it’s just to express how angry he is. But that’s not his voice, how do you even explain that, and he literally looks as though he’s trying to “suppress” this voice and regain control, and then he storms into the band’s flat. So that made me think it’s Amel, that he somehow already has Amel in him. If he has it in him, the question is since when, because it could be since NOLA and that would add layers to the drop.

Sorry for the very long ask, I ended up rambling too much.

To you later part of the ask: that... could be :) We'll see that, eventually. More re that will come in next episode :)

But no, it was not the drop itself, though that also seemed OOC at that point.

But I... like... immediately after that scene I was like... "that is not Lestat", in the driveway and outside I mean. He felt off, immediately. People, of course, did not take that kindly, and, in retrospect: how could they.

But for ME... it clicked into place almost immediately, namely with the next episode, when Lestat says, in 1x06: "I don't know what possessed me that night."

And I was like: "Ohhhhhhh."

*click*

SHIT.

The fandom took that as expected, of course.

And for me... like, I knew where this was going, for YEARS. I talked about it, I tried to point things out, I got called things for it.

I get the resistance to it. I talked about that, too.

But none of that changed anything about it, and then when Sam talked about it in Autumn's interview, it was the final confirmation for me.

When I say I don't "like" it I do not mean that they were not "clever" with the lore to spin it like that. No, they were.

But they also thought it ... IDK... "fine enough" to show a white character abuse his black partner and child with severe domestic violence IN THE YEAR 2022, to let that fester for AT LEAST one hiatus... and they knew they would eventually walk it back, to an extent at least.

And I did not like THAT, from the very beginning.

I do not like that the show set it up like that. Did not, still do not.

No matter the clues, no matter their playing around with the lore, they thought THAT was a good idea.

WTF, seriously.

But, as said before, it is what it is now.

It has been what it is for years now.

I have... more or less forced, made my peace with it.

Next expisode will... establish some things wrt all that *waves hand*

It will cause another meltdown when people realize.

But... there's no way around that.

It's been set up by the show for years.

(The screenshot is awful but the footage in the video below is clearer.)

They’re just so clearly not the same. All three are exaggerated stage makeup but the sharp outline of the blue eyeshadow makes Baby Lu. The pigtails still give Claudia and the pants are still the trial pants, but this is a direct reference to Armand portraying Lestat as a Harlequin instead of Lelio and Sam and the costume designers wanting to call back to that.

There’s also the fact that Lestat is kinda proving Armand right with the performance considering this is definitely the most outlandish Lestat has been on stage since Black Licorice. Clown-esque.

Plus there’s Lestat calling Armand a theatre kid while acting so much like a theatre kid. The costuming and makeup is so theatrical.

And I also think that’s better? To paint yourself like your dead daughter you abused to rub it in your ex’s face would be… a choice. This is the far more sympathetic option, even if it’s more self-centred. Much more Lestat.

I’d still like to see Sam in cunty blue eye shadow though.

“Sam and I had talked about having something that is reminiscent of his 18th century performance days. He was wrongly presented as a Harlequin but a lot of that clowning and that performance style of the 18th century what was we kind of wanted to pull at the strings of.”

— Lex Wood, lead costume designer (full interview here. It’s really good.)

Oh, noes, Daniel called Louis a racist thing? Daniel, who was totally not an arse to anyone of any race? Daniel, who Louis drained and nearly killed? Daniel called Armand a bottom twink sociopath? Armand, the guy who murdered and abandoned him?

Oh, noes, Lestat misgendered someone of the Fang Gang? The people that planted a drugged human to roofie him and were planning to gang rape him and decapitate him? How evil of him! Also, how evil to make a silly diss track at Armand, the same guy murdered his daughter? Awful, terrible.

Marius' dynamic with Lestat and Armand.

We’re now more than halfway through the season, and I understand that most of the big reveals/re-contextualization came in the last two episodes of the previous seasons (louis and lestat both saving each other’s lives, claudia’s turning, armand directing the play) but we also had multiple moments per episode where louis was challenged, by both daniel’s questions/comments and claudia’s diary. We have had very few moments that make lestat challenge his own opinions or have him self-reflect.

Sam reid is doing a fantastic job with the material he’s been given but the writing has not done much to paint lestat any differently than the first two seasons. It’s giving us context for his continuation of the cycle of abuse, but he’s not confronting the fact that he did continue it.

Source: @amcannerice on Instagram