Ewwwwww!!!! This ones all squishy!!!

the model of dysphoria borrows from the social authority of psychiatry which takes things that are normal human experiences and marks them as deviant. thus, for someone inclined to distrust her own experiences, the explanatory power of such a thing can serve to motivate action very well. this is why you are deviant/wrong (diagnosis), this is what you need to do to make it better (treatment). it is also true that transitioning will make your life better.

but also this kind of sucks, for a variety of reasons.

for one thing, i think people are a bit too inclined to place unearned scientific credit on pseudoscientific diagnosis (you know the first dsm was mostly just shit they made up but wrote professional sounding enough that people believed them? and that's the basis of each subsequent dsm?). i do not think 'having or not having dysphoria' is well defined and thus it does not meet my standards for "basis for organization"/"group to focus materialist analysis upon". diagnosis isn't real, except as a performance required to access medication.

sometimes a trans woman wins against a cis woman. sometimes a cis woman wins against another cis woman too. yet only one of them is allowed to win without facing consequences.

the writers are trying to be the arbiters of what's rape and what's just questionable ethics and that's not a decision they can make. that's a real world thing they have no control over. they only control what the characters do, and how they describe it. lestat, louis, armand and daniel have all sexually assaulted someone on this show, and retconning it now or making the consent dubious is reductive. the way they write sa now is reductive, while in seasons one and two it was exploratory. they were talking about sexual politics and how complicated sexual violence is, now they want to demarcate who is and isn't a rapist, because the rapists are evil villains. setting bruce on fire even though lestat and armand have a history of sexually assaulting louis throughout their relationships, even though lestat assaults akasha in episode five, is reducing sexual assault to the ultimate evil in a way that's weird and unhelpful to the conversation.

louis sexually assaulted 128 young men, because consent is revoked posthumously if you went into the encounter planning to kill them. that's an element of vampirism and predation we're not examining at this point. but for some reason lestat's assault of akasha is paralleled with louis holding regina's hand while she was frozen, even though she asked him to freeze her for fun. even if episodes six and seven somehow fix this, i think we need to focus on the fact that the writers made some choices this season that didn't land the way they wanted them to, and it hurt people. it being the bad people doing bad things show is also a reductionist way of looking at this, because there is supposed to be a narrative. this is a show that's focused on emotions, and so far they're doing a questionable job of honoring the audience's emotions. they should do better, take stock of themselves, and get more writers (especially Black writers, and hopefully somebody who's a survivor or has experience talking about sa recovery bc this is dire) in the writer's room so it doesn't happen again.

During the stop, Lorenzo had 3 coworkers with him in his truck who have all been taken into ICE custody.

His family described Lorenzo as a hardworking family man who didn’t deserve to be killed. All he wanted was to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people. His eldest son recognized his father by his cries and pleas when trying to identify who the victim was.

The Salgado Araujo family has set up a gofundme to help with funeral and legal costs, and to help keep their family supported since Lorenzo was the sole provider.

I guess in retrospect I can see the "cracks" that already showed in earlier seasons (the general misogyny, the way issues of race got seemingly sidelined in s2, the treatment of Loumand, the way vampire abilities were seemingly thrown in whenever they thought it would be cool rather than actually having a concrete plan for them, the retconning of what were blatantly writing mistakes and chalking them up to Louis' misrepresenting events etc.) but back then I chose to trust the writers, so even with changes that left me puzzled or that I overall disliked I still felt like I wanted to wait and see what they would do with them before casting judgement.

But now for TVL/s3 I find myself completely disillusioned. I no longer trust that the writers know what they're doing and I'm left wondering what their overall "goal" for this season was because surely they must know that it utterly fails as an adaptation of the book? Even a loose one that includes a lot of their own creations.

It really feels like they got too excited about the whole rockstar thing and forgot that they also had to include other events from the book? Why are there so, SO many songs this season? We got four songs each for the last two episodes. And I'm not even one of those people who hate the music, I like quite a few of the songs (yes, even Long Face, I don't have a very sophisticated taste in music) but this show is not a musical and the songs are not good enough replacements for actually emotionally impactful scenes. I'm watching this show for the dialogue (and the masterful acting), a lot of my favourite scenes are essentially just a couple of people sitting/standing around and talking to each other! The Loumand fight in 2x05 is my all-time favourite scene and the one I can still recite from memory even years later and that scene is literally just them standing in a kitchen yelling at each other.

I also hate how instead of getting a season where Daniel interviews Lestat we instead get ONE interview between them and the rest of it is Lestat recording his own story by himself for some nebulous reason. I hate how they're blaming Lestat's mental state for how chaotic and disjointed everything feels and the atrocious pacing. I think if we had actually got Daniel interviewing him we could have fixed a lot of it. Have Lestat start off in a more rambly manner and then have Daniel pick through his evasions and try to get to the point of it all. So many scenes might actually hit a little more if we as the audience actually got the time to process them instead of immediately going to the next plot point so the writers can check off another item on their list.

It's also insane how the season feels so fast-paced in the moment but whenever I look back on what actually happened so far it's like we've barely moved the plot along. And you might argue that the book also isn't really plot-driven but since we're barely getting any of the actual contents from it we might as well focus on whatever plot they're cooking up.

And I also remember way back when Rolin Jones said we couldn't focus on the past that much because the other characters (Armand, Louis, Daniel) also needed to have screentime this season? Then how come we barely get to see them at all? Not to mention that they had years to come up with good plots for them but instead we get served whatever BS we got that is only saved by Assad Zaman's, Jacob Anderson's and Delainey Hayles' brilliant acting.

So much time is wasted on Lestat's band! They barely matter in the book and I wouldn't mind if the show had expanded their roles (like they previously did with Louis' family, Santiago, Madeleine etc.) if it didn't feel like their screentime was so blatantly eating into time we could have spent with the actual main cast of the show. That and the budget that got wasted with all those unnecessary scenes featuring Lestat's present day shenanigans. Too many concerts with too many extras, too much hetslop, too much *pissing*, too many scenes that are just there to give us edgy rockstar shit. It's like the writers got too carried away giving us the rockstar fantasy and no one was there to reign them in and remind them that they had to actually adapt the book.

Coupled with the misogyny, racism & homophobia that's been rampant this season it just does not feel very satisfying. And to top it all off, the writing feels significantly worse this season. All the new characters feel like Hollywood stereotypes rather than real people and everyone must constantly deliver zany Marvel-tier quips. Every so often the ghost of the show I used to love makes itself apparent in some of the lines but it never lasts that long.