the light side of the moon

the real reason why we weren't given much press after the ending of s2 is because amc was afraid that rolin would start saying left and right how "the coven had a point" and that he agreed with santiago but "not everyone has the same opinion, so it's okay"

sometimes being a fan of something means not wanting them to make any more of it

i like how people ask "why did armand apologize to lestat and daniel but not louis" as if armand is actually feeling remorse and not seeking any kind of structure in his life with these self-improvement steps. he's coping. he probably blames louis for ruining his life or something lol. he and lestat are twins, they both only acknowledge things they want to feel bad about. he probably saw aa advert online, something like "you're not alone" and "unity. service. recovery" and now this is his new routine

#secretgood8thepisode tag doesn't even make sense now, there's no way this team could make a good episode.

oh no, people are genuinely making secret 8th episode theories now because "i've been a monster, this is my reckoning" line wasn't in the show. stop sounding so convincing

i'll do you one worse- the tone sam uses to deliver that "i've been a monster, this is my reckoning" line in the official trailer is v similar to the tone he uses in s3ep6 when he's breaking down on the sidewalk and talks about his own fracturing. so what if the original context of that line isn't lestat reckoning with the horror of his actions toward louis and claudia but lestat talking about the revenge porn released of his mom sa'ing him as if it's consequences for his own behavior

I'm gonna become even more obnoxious about defending ldpdl now. He did nothing wrong. Louis de kind du lac. Louis de brave du lac. Louis de empathetic du lac.

the thought i keep coming back to with the finale, and this season in general, is a sense of… infestation, i guess is the best way to describe it. because for the first two seasons, iwtv was a work that— even with all its gothic/horror themes— seemed deeply compassionate at its core, and it remained devoted to beauty and love in a way that felt like a reprieve from (even a small rebellion against) the rising fascism of the culture surrounding it. and now it feels like the hatefulness it was pushing back against has infested it somehow, like a swarm of fuckin termites, which has not only ruined this season but also calls into question the structural soundness of what came before it. like, how did we even get here? was this sort of mean-spirited derision always just lying in wait? idk. i don’t want to make a bad season of tv deeper than it is, but it does feel like witnessing another loss in the cultural battle when a careful, compassionate work that ostensibly cared about the marginalised experiences it depicted becomes just another conduit for hatred toward vulnerable groups. what a fucking bummer, man

#secretgood8thepisode tag doesn't even make sense now, there's no way this team could make a good episode.

oh no, people are genuinely making secret 8th episode theories now because "i've been a monster, this is my reckoning" line wasn't in the show. stop sounding so convincing

crossposting this here- life got in the way for both @reticentvampyr and me so we had to delay our plans for this but it'd still be a cool idea to do a louis and claudia/jacob and delainey appreciation week to fundraise for a charity supporting black dv survivors. channel this energy into some material good yk

also we should absolutely question the show's choice to remove gabrielle, magnus and marius' overt antiblackness from the tvl book when the writers got armand out here acting like he's auditioning for kkk grand wizard. clearly the show isn't shying away from depicting antiblack violence considering the treatment of black characters in the past two episodes, so the refusal to depict gabriella, marius and magnus as the white supremacists they were in the source material, is a blatant tell- the writers are protective of their white characters, even the antagonists, and don't want them to seem "too" evil (which tracks for white and nonblack liberals acting like being called racist is worse than being racist.) and this clearly isn't a concern they have when it comes to the characters of color- armand has for 2 seasons now enacted forms of explicit violence inflicted on enslaved black people- louis and claudia's cut ankle tendons, the entire public humiliation of the trial, claudia's burning, louis' head on a spike, coercing him into a performance of self-debasement and contrition and branding his body- and claudia calls her black father a slave in a bioessentialist, derogatory context and expresses a level of internalized antiblackness she was never even hinted at feeling when she was alive. in both scenes, the narrative is much harsher on louis than on lestat and the nonblack writers go into extreme detail in their antiblack dialogue and racialized, borderline pornographic depiction of louis' torture. but gabriella is portrayed shallowly complimenting louis' beauty when realistically she would be calling him slurs when talking about him to lestat, magnus' "master race" aspirations and fixation on white supremacist beauty standards for how he chose his victim pool and "heir" aren't addressed, and marius' racial politics ("rotten boy", the whitewashed portrait of armand- we know he's racist, the show just hasn't acknowledged it and intentionally excluded the parts of tvl where he expresses that racism when talking to lestat) remain an elephant in the room. and ofc the way the writers are tryna be like "see lestat isn't racist, black people love him" in-universe through characters like merrick and paul (lol. lmao even) and tryna overwrite or dance around every textual example of lestat's antiblackness is so transparent in its clumsiness.