i think there's a lack of clarity on whether the writers want lestat's narration to have some wry self-awareness in hindsight or if they want his narration to represent lestat's mindset in the scenes we see onscreen, and at times i feel like they lazily drift between the two depending on what they want to depict. if his narration is meant to represent how lestat feels when he made the recordings, it doesn't bode well for his character development and limits the possibility of him coming to certain realizations by the end of s3. lestat insults louis' perception of events and calls him "insane" (yeah he adds a note about removing that comment in the final version of the recordings, but he didn't do that) but that doesn't make sense if he's come to respect louis' truth more over the course of the season. he says he's gonna talk about his relationship with gabriella "how it felt then" at the end of s3ep1 but in s3ep2 he rationalizes the incest in the present tense, especially when delivering the "*sigh* fuck it. it's different for vampires. that's it" line as if he still believes it (and again, it doesn't bode well wrt the incest being framed as a serious form of abuse or lestat coming to any kind of realization about gabriella's behavior with him if that's how he still thinks of it after the events of qotd)
in s1-s2 there was a clear separation between louis' unreliable, often distorted narration (and no i'm not calling louis a liar, i'm talking about scenes like "i don't consider myself abused. i'm not a victim" or him describing parts of the paris era as idyllic when we could see he was deeply stressed and unhappy in the flashbacks) and how the writers themselves were framing the story- but with s3 and lestat's narration being both undisputed by another character's voice and covering the entire story, the lines are blurred. i don't think the writers are firm enough in what they want lestat's narration to be- what he's supposed to think and feel when he's making the recordings v what he thought and felt in the flashbacks he's describing, how he's changed over time- for this storytelling device to work. i honestly think they should've kept the rockstat modern day plot grounded in "objective" 3rd person pov like the dubai scenes in s1-s2 and only had lestat's narration featured over the flashbacks. i feel like the writers are using it as a crutch to tell not show several key aspects of lestat's character, handwave their pacing issues and skim over the parts of the source material they didn't care about adapting, and the story is a lot weaker for it.
snowghoul
pixelskylines
dailybridgerton
tangentwithtanner
