Hello! I'm Katy, a writer and artist working on a queer BIPOC gothic vampire book series and visual novel 🦇
Decided I'd make a little post to announce I'm currently open to commissions.
I'm waiting on a student summer job for the month of July, but in the meantime my finals are over and I thought I'd open some slots.
I am opening 3 slots for now, but I might open more. I will draw OCs and fanart, but mainly for Castlevania, Interview with the Vampire (the TV show), Resident Evil. I will gladly draw OC x Canon too. Read what I will/won't draw first, and my DNI list.
Here are some examples of my art below! More details on my Ko-Fi page (please contact me on Instagram first so we may discuss the commission before you pay for anything) Reshares are appreciated ✨🦇
https://angstqueenart.carrd.co (link to my carrd page)
Commissions Open! Click to see Angst Queen/Katy's commission menu.
Adapting TVl without addressing all the white supremacy in the text should get you shot. Also, why even adapt it at that point?????? If you dont address the white supremacy, you'll just end up reproducing it. You cannot escape all the racial implications that YOUVE SET UP BY RACE BENDING 3 OUT OF 5 OF THE MAIN CAST😭.
i had to come back to put together a few things i keep thinking about:
they already associated armand with islam via him praying as fake rashid
they conflated armand with assad, a british bangladeshi muslim (as far as i know), by referring to him as a french bengali in the show when that had nothing to do with what we previously knew about the character
armand is assisted in torturing louis by fareed, presumably supposed to be muslim
louis is beheaded and armand is using livestreaming - reminiscent of videos used of hostages beheaded by terrorist groups in west asia
armand is wearing a metal bangle reminiscent of the one sikhs wear
armand is wearing a vaguely military-looking shirt even though this is very unlike his normal taste
all this is saying to me that theyre just jumbling together anything that says to them brown person terrorist muslim torturer insane fanatic
then theres the big boss song
lyrics about armand perpetrating executions (never mind he got taught that in rome - if hes doing eugenics they are in fact catholic tinged eugenics) and stating its his decision alone who dies (ignoring the involvement of white characters)
big SS on the cd cover blatantly associating him with nazis
daniel calls him dr mengele - a nazi who tortured ppl by experimenting on them
armand and fareed desecrate a kosher space by spilling human blood in the butchers shop
so its not exactly a coherent framing but i think its still a framing
then theres the fact that his csa history, after being the subject of mockery, is now brought up seriously, at long last, in this context! what is that telling us? especially since so much focus has been given to lestat over an abuse story they made up from whole cloth.
but lestat was abused by a woman. armand, we are constantly told, was a catamite. hes a twink bottom. he was a limp, passive ragdoll for sale. his daddy groomed him into a little bitch. hes emasculated, a beige pillow, his sexual performance is so-so, hes desperate and needy, hes a pussy and a betaboi. in short, hes too gay, not lestats ideal of a masculine bisexual man. like this is some kind of corruption of character, being the receptive partner in anal sex
what the fuck are they doing here. hes a nazi, and also a brown terrorist, and also a 'passive' homosexual. what the actual fuck are they doing. they chose his indian background for him and have done nothing with it except racism.
anyway im off again. as soon as the conversations started being more about 'how dare armand be cruel to louis' instead of 'how dare the writers do this to the characters and the viewers' it felt like we slipped off the track you know?
this show, once, seemed like it wanted to be conscious of race and sexuality and the intersections of different identities and now look at what its doing. jesus fucking christ. its antiblackness and islamophobia, anti asian and queerphobic and homophobic sentiment all rolled together, like it was designed to pit different segments of the audience against each other. a known far right tactic against the left! the only question is whether anyone drove this deliberately or whether they fell into it through prejudice and ignorance of their own blind spots. one thing is clearly deliberate though - they knew in the past theyd told us armand perpetrated the trial out of fear and insecurity, and people still hated him. in tvl they told us he wasnt just willing but having a good time. they made the brown abuse survivor a happy, gleeful torturer of black people.
If this is what we were supposed to take away from a character like Louis why would anyone love/like him? It begs the question what are Louis’ redeeming qualities? Why do these men continue to stay with him and obsess over him?
Original post
I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this. Ultimately, I think this is all a response.
I still think Season 1 was fine. I think they knew the story they wanted to tell and approached it with open minds and excitement to adapt it. But then AMC gave them the green light to expand Louis’ arc across two seasons. Surprising but okay! And so, at least in my opinion, they did create S1 out of genuine creativity and love for the material.
But then it released and seeing how popular Loustat was, seeing people actually really like, some even love Jacob’s Louis, it made them approach S2 differently. Nobody behind the scenes was expecting for Loucob to be as loved as he is, whether people like him for himself or like him as an extension of Loustat. Even Jacob seemed to be surprised, having initially viewed his arc as a stepping stone before they’d dive into Lestat later. His shock & confusion in interviews after S2 but before they started shooting S3 was clear. He was surprised to still be brought on for in-depth interviews at all.
I wouldn’t call it lightning in a bottle. That would mean intent. It’s more like they were drinking beers in the backyard just shooting the shit before lightning freaked everybody out by zapping past the lid. While of course they didn’t plan to tell a lackluster story, I think the richness of Louis’ character was a complete accident. I think they all thought it could be perceived as good, not as fucking great.
And this is why Season 2 started us down the path of being controversial among the fanbase. And by “controversial” I genuinely mean “debated”, because people have very different opinions of it. The S2 reunion scene is heavily debated (primarily in Louis spaces) with half saying they hated it and the other half enjoying it. You have half the fanbase happy with Lestat’s apology during the trial, and half saying Santiago was right and that Lestat was too hard on himself.
Season 1 was clearer on how things were to be interpreted. While there’s definitely argument for how fans/crowds/mobs take ideas and run with them regardless of intent, nothing in Season 1 garnered as many different interpretations as the content in Season 2. I think this is because this is when the team behind the show started, seemingly, disagreeing with each other.
This is how you get “wait what was Louis’ apology to Lestat in the finale about? Was that Louis coming to terms with himself, or was that the show engaging in victim blaming?” And everyone has different POVs on it. It’s clear now, that the ambiguity behind the scene, behind quite a few scenes in S2, is because the writers themselves couldn’t agree on what they wanted them to mean.
But with all the people they’ve let go for Season 3, and the new ones they hired on, it’s obvious which side remained on-staff and the kinds of likeminded people they got to take the others’ place.
So now, in Season 3, there is no debate. There is no “hm I can see this interpretation but I can also see this interpretation….” There’s no ambiguity. This side of the team, the side that viewed Louis’ apology in S2 as Louis apologizing for ‘abusing’ Lestat, that seemed to view Louis’ charred, crumbling body apologizing to Armand as deserved punishment instead of horrific abuse, are the ones that have stayed and taken over the show.
And we KNOW debates started happening in the Season 2 writer’s room given the recent interview where Rolin briefly mentioned it, such as whether Louis asked Armand to erase his memories or if he never did. Certain things in Season 2 are controversial among fans, because the writers themselves started disagreeing on characterizations and important story beats.
So with this portion of the team let go vs the ones that were called back + those newly hired to replace the former, this is how we got Season 3. A season that is not as ambiguous as Season 2 where the writers were fist fighting when they put pen to paper. We are back to the single vision of Season 1.
Except this vision wasn’t born from heartfelt creativity and love for the material. It’s out of agreed upon resentment and shared biases. You even have the production designers of all crew members throwing in “I always liked Lestat more” unprompted when their job has NOTHING to do with character preference. Season 3 is the way it is, because these are the people who originally wanted Louis’ arc to only be compiled into a single season, and were irritated when fans kept wanting more. Whether they wanted more of Loucob or simply wanted more of Loustat as a duo.
And Rolin’s “we wrote from the gut” or “the id” and all of his sayings that they wrote instinctively lays it out that this whole mess is emotional retaliation. The writing behind Season 3 is a temper tantrum.
Not just as retaliation to Louis, but to everyone. Assad’s Armand shot through the ROOF and instantly became one of the most popular characters in S2. I’d even argue is Thee second most popular after Lestat (I’d say Daniel is the second most popular among casual viewers whereas among non-casual viewers, it’s Armand.) With DM shooting to the stars as the most popular ship among non-casual viewers. (And DM does beat out Loustat in terms of popularity when looking at the dedicated fanbase.)
But once again, this seems to have pissed That Side™️ of the creative team off after Season 2’s release. With none of them expecting Assad’s Armand to be as beloved or for DM to be as highly desired as they are. And you can see this frustration in all of Armand & DM’s “development” in Season 3.
Why Armand had less than 15 minutes total of screentime across episodes 1-6 before reducing into a maniacal villain in 3x07. Why DM’s eagerly anticipated relationship happened completely off screen, and both characters butchered so it would be intentionally unsatisfying once revealed. (And the excuse that they’re a minor / secondary relationship so they were never going to be as focused on doesn’t make sense when looking at Claudeleine. Who was still emotionally moving and well paced even in the midst of the Loumand-Dreamstat-Loustat triangle.)
The “meta” that they kept talking about in pre-S3 interviews isn’t that the writers just kept the fanbase in mind while making it, it’s that the entirety of Season 3 is a response to the fans themselves. It’s less about the actual characters that were written in Seasons 1 & 2, and comes off more as one long Twitter thread titled “My IWTV Hot Takes”
Because you also can’t say any of this was for Lestat. It’s very reminiscent to Season 2, when Lestat point blank says “I hurt Louis because I wanted to hurt him” and a portion of the fanbase shoved a pacifier in his mouth to shut him up and for years afterwards kept saying “No he didn’t mean it.” Even Samstat was reduced from a character into a figurehead.
Loucob became a punching bag, Claudlainey and Assad’s Armand were weaponized against Loucob while simultaneously reduced to punching bags too, and the writers put Samstat on the same idealized pedestal that the characters Magnus, Marius, and Gabriella are supposed to be condemned for, treating him as a concept rather than a person.
Sorry, my response turned into something else lol. But “Why would the writers write Louis this way? Why would anyone like him?” My personal opinion after really trying to understand what on earth has happened, is that no, they likely were not writing like this since S1. The season just doesn’t make sense from that POV. Everything we’re seeing right now is reactionary.
Season 1 was a story created out of actual interest, Season 2 was when the boat started to rock, and Season 3 isn’t a season at all. It’s a cokerant thread on Twitter. It’s a callout post on Tumblr. A 72-part TikTok story. It’s little more than the writers’ tantrum because fans weren’t playing with their dolls the way they wanted us to.
i feel like turning the torture scene in the finale into a louis fan vs armand fan thing is a very fandom-focused perspective to take that ultimately trivializes the very real racism of the writers and production behind it. like, the roles of both characters in that scene are obscenely racist. having louis, a black man, be brutalized and forced to take blame and apologize for abuse done to him is horrific. it’s also incredibly offensive to have a south asian, implied muslim, character be cartoonishly evil by spilling the blood of his victims (louis and regina) in a jewish butcher shop
don’t turn this into character vs character fandom war when there are layers to the racism, including pitting the main nonwhite characters against each other
Okay I’m going to make one post on my thoughts right now regarding Armand in season 3 and then I will shut up. I never make long posts like this because I don’t think I’m eloquent or particularly good at explaining my thoughts but Armand… my baby. I am keeping this spoiler free regarding the details of the finale.
Probably the best thing this season did was explore the incestual relationship between Lestat and Gabrielle imo. Even though I dislike most of what they did with her character, they understood the relationship and its consequences here. The shame, the urge to return again and again to your abuser, the internal conflict, the fear of abandonment that very much shapes Lestat’s identity, how trauma rewires your brain and changes everything…
YET. Lol.
They do not seem to have the same understanding of trauma and its complex nuances when it comes to Armand. I really thought they understood him in IWTV but TVL has changed my opinion. Centuries old. Sex trafficked and exploited as a child. Yet reduced to this.
Armand is a manipulator. That’s not up for debate. He lies. He withholds information. Again and again he has shown that lies of omission are a basic survival tactic of his. But manipulation isn't the same thing as being an evil mastermind orchestrating his revenge years in advance.
IMO Armand feels less like some grand evil mastermind and more like someone whose entire personality was built around survival. Rather than a hunter, an animal trapped and cornered who has learnt to survive. He was trafficked as a child, repeatedly abused by the people who held power over him, and spent centuries reinforcing those survival tactics. The abuse he has endured and the way he has learnt to survive are core to understanding him.
I don't see him as someone scheming for years to enact some elaborate plan. I see someone who reacts. Someone who manipulates in the moment because it's what has always kept him alive. Someone who lies by omission because direct confrontation feels dangerous. Someone who constantly calculates how to preserve the relationships he thinks he needs, even when those choices are harmful to everyone involved.
Armand is not a revengeful evil genius. Why’s he being portrayed as some sort of cartoon villain? He's a survivor who has become incredibly skilled at adapting to the people around him, convincing himself that whatever he does in the moment is necessary. This makes him tragic and heartbreaking to watch because as viewers we know it’s not the best option… it’s never the best option but it’s what he has learnt keeps him alive.
My issue isn’t even really his actions this season (that’s a discussion for another time) but the psychology and motivations behind those actions. It’s not consistent. I never wanted a sanitised Armand, in fact I want him to be worse. I support Armand and his many many wrongs lol. My problem is the motivation behind these actions. Armand is a character whose entire identity is shaped by trauma and I’m skeptical that they can do his character justice, especially if they do ever decide to delve into his backstory.
The question with Armand was never were his actions wrong or was he responsible. It was always understanding WHY he did those things.
I’m not going to go into Devil’s Minion right now, I want to think on it. The Devil’s Minion chapter is still the absolute peak of romance to me.
Last thing before I go to bed, as a writer/artist myself, my disappointment with IWTV/TVL and how it turned out is immense. I was hyperfixated on this show for years, I was genuinely so giddy and excited to see Black and Brown vampires, so s3 felt like a gut punch. I still adore the actors' acting, but my love for the show has turned sour as I feel like us POC fans have been slapped in the face purposefully for ever finding comfort in those characters.
I myself am writing my own original works with queer BIPOC vampires, so you guys can understand why this kind of shows are important to me. I'm a Brown, queer (bi/demi) fem enby, and specifically I'm Algerian Amazigh (indigenous people of North Africa, not Arab btw). I started writing books and a visual novel centered around Black/Brown characters because I was sick of vampire media always centering white characters, I wanted to see myself in the genre, and I wanted others to also see themselves in it.
I'm being vulnerable here, but vampire stories have always been fascinating to me since I was a kid, and I related far too much to many vampire characters as a child already. So having my own vampire/half-vampire characters and creating my own lore for them is frankly a dream come true. I truly cherish everyone who supports me in my life to create stories, and I know I'll never stop doing it because it's what I love.
I'm so sad iwtv turned out this way, I'll forever mourn my favorite characters being written this way. Claudia, Armand and Louis, you'll always be my favorites 😞🩷
Also, if you guys haven't watched it already, I highly recommend Castlevania and Castlevania Nocturne (its sequel)
Got my driver's license theory exam to take tomorrow so I'm trying to sleep, but God, I needed to talk a bit about that scene in s3ep7 between Louis/Armand. I'm so disgusted y'all.
Spoilers under the cut for the finale/s3ep7
First of all, that entire scene makes no sense and it's so clearly some kind of racist torture porn the writers are gleefully partaking in to humiliate and beat down on their Black characters. Literally WHY would Armand torture Louis?? I'm sorry what... The fact that they chose that moment for Armand to make his ""apology"" to Louis, when Lestat/Daniel didn't get brutally tortured while getting theirs... Yeah sure sure, that's totally not racist writing...
And again, why would Louis ever apologize to Armand about anything? I am so pissed as a huge fan of Armand actually because this frankly paints Armand as some kind of cartoonish villain, when in the book, Louis does apologize to Armand for being a poor companion, but this is NOT the same context.
Btw, all the discussion Armand/Louis have, could've been done without the torture. This makes Louis' understanding of Armand's trauma and enslavement/trafficking as a child feel cheap and unearned, because Louis is coerced/forced to empathize with Armand as he's being brutally tortured (and Regina is threatened and tortured too). This entire scene could've been just an actual discussion, but nooo. You don't understand, we HAD to make the Brown man evil and the Black man get humiliated and tortured while it's on broadcast to some white supremacists online 🙄
And on Regina too. Gosh, I literally knew where this was going from the moment they introduced her. Of COURSE she'd get tortured to harm Louis. Yet again, Black women are used by this show to further the narrative for men. She's given no further characterization, because who needs that huh? Black women getting written well and respectfully?? That could never happen...
And can I talk about how disturbing it is to constantly make Armand be the one to harm Black characters in such extreme ways? All while Armand's race as a Brown (Bengali) man is never discussed or acknowledged in the way he's written except to villainize him and humiliate him.
Frankly, I would've liked to speak about how Armand as a character could've been used to comment on the harm Brown ppl can cause to Black ppl (because anti-Blackness is very present in our communities, I'm North African, so I speak on that very often). But this falls short, as Armand is just used as the vessel so the writers can write anti-Black scenes, without having to implicate white characters (Lestat). Like, having Lestat "save" Louis from the trial and putting everything on Armand just makes it easier to make Lestat a white savior while Armand is the "evil Brown man" every season.
This also falls short because the writers literally HATE Louis and have humiliated him all s3, to "humble" him. (Same thing s1 racist characters said about him btw, calling him "arrogant") So they're just using Black and Brown characters to throw slurs and making them violent towards one another, while white characters get away with it as "innocent uwu wittle babies who never did anything wrong". Which also harms Lestat's writing because now he's so hollow and none of his actions seem to have ever mattered. Ok I guess..
And the fact Armand's trauma is only acknowledged in a scene that's extremely anti-Black and racist, just feels like a punch in the face of BIPOC Armand fans who were hoping for nuanced writing for him. It's like they said "here, damn 🙄 that scene you wanted". Except nobody asked for that. We didn't want Louis to get tortured into sympathizing with Armand. That's so horrific I truly have no words.
Is TVL/iwtv s3 competiting for most racist show?? It's crazy.
These show writers hate Black/Brown people and it SHOWS.
Wdym your Black characters are only ever used to get tortured for existing, while white characters get away with way worse. Wdym your Brown, Indian character, is written like a two dimensional villain who's used to spark the hatred of the audience as being the one to blame for everything bad that ever happened (and he's used as the character to enact anti-Black violence/torture ofc). And don't get me started on the subtle/not so subtle islamophobia and anti-Indian racism. Wdym Black girls/women are either tortured, sexualized to hell and back (or both) and used as a way for the writers to insert racist language in the show.
And clearly, these writers hate their Black/Brown fans because they've consciously written the fan favorite characters in a way that butchered them, rid them of all their complexities.
Fuck this show, honestly. I have nothing but love for the Black/Brown actors who did their best and served amazing performances.
The tl;dw is just that the writers want to brutalise Black characters on screen but they don't want to villainise any of their white characters by having them behave in a way that will get any backlash so they just make their one significant brown character do it and that checks all racist boxes for them.
"i hope you die" is boring and bland. "I hope your favorite show that used to have actual respect for its Black/Brown characters, gets more and more racist, misogynistic and bigoted on a new season after taking away all their Black writers, panders to white supremacists, makes a Black man beg for forgiveness from his own abusers and be reduced to "a pimp", that a Brown man is made into the unanimous twirling mustache villain who is used to take the weight of the show's anti-Black violence off white characters (cause surely our white blorbos could never be racist, it's all the Indian man's fault!), and I hope Black women are used to further the story of (white) men and excuse a white man in the worst season of TV ever seen" is unique, terrifying, and possible. Surely this has never happened. Surely...
And yes this is about TVL. IWTV writers, you're going to hell for this btw.
I'm fresh out the hospital just to be clear so I'm not going to make a deeper analysis at the time, I've talked about it more on Instagram so those who follow me there know what I thought of this season, but I'll be back to discuss it. And before someone comes for me saying "ooh you didn't understand the show/you didn't watch it properly", the writing literally makes no sense. Take away all the racism and bigotry and the plot still makes no fucking sense. I can't believe the books somehow make more sense than what we got. Baffling.
Well, there goes my hyperfixation with this show. They massacred my faves I'm done with this. As a brown woman whose fav characters were Claudia, Armand and Louis, I found this season sickening. No other words.
with few exceptions we have only seen black characters graphically get brutalized. they had closeups of louis’s body and face after lestat tried to murder him showing the extent of what was done, we saw just how burned and disfigured he was after her suicide attempt, claudia’s death is one of the most graphic i’ve seen on any tv show, we got closeups of their ankles slashed and shots of louis being kicked in the head and claudia being shoved into a box of live rats by the coven members. the majority of louis’s scenes in episode 7 were of his decapitated head on a pike, forced to look at his body as it flailed, begging to die, forced to apologize in something so close to a saw trap that it was bordering on copyright infringement while being painted as cruel and deserving of the abuse and then branded by armand.
we didn’t see any shots of lestat’s head in the bowling bag. we saw him burn, but it was portrayed as comical. we did not see bruce as he died, we did not see lestat get torn up by the wolves, we did not watch nicki die. in the majority of the scenes where a white character is injured, the action is cut away, out of frame, out of focus, mostly implied.
the extent of what we saw of the brutality of black characters now feels almost fetishistic. at the end of episode 105, lestat is floating in the air looking dreamy and louis is beaten to a pulp on the ground; episode 207, lestat is put together in a suit with his hair done and louis and claudia have been severely beaten. like, after this season, the rest of the show just looks weird.
i've seen people talk about the choice of words in episode 6 like "you know, black people do talk like that sometimes and even worse, so it's fine." and obviously, you can see this however you want to see it, and if that's how you feel then that's just that. the thing for me is, though, that while yes that is true, and i've heard, for example, my own family call other black people slaves and whatnot for acting extremely subservient to white people, that's not what's going on in the show because these words don't exist in a vacuum. this is a writer's room that is mostly white and doesn't have a single black person in it (or rather, one that used to have black writers but those weren't called back), for a show that sidelined the actors of color for most of it's promotion before release earlier this year, in a season that has been constantly microaggressive towards the characters of color (who were also sidelined) and constantly punching down the black main character of the previous seasons while overlooking or exporting the white mc's faults. because of this, i just can't look at this with kind eyes. it's not like blackness has been handled tastefully at any point of this season. so when you have claudia say all of those things to louis while almost hyping up lestat (i mean, the blood comment? when she asked louis to turn madeleine because she didn't want his blood in her, at least from what i remember?) initially, i can't see anything but lack of sensitivity and ignorance (being generous) from the writers. this isn't the same as if those words were coming out of a black person's mouth.
i understand why claudia would be angrier at louis, i understand that it's like that in the books. but in the books these were white characters, they knowingly made them black, and at least in the previous seasons they seemed to be aware that this changes things and that they can't just adapt the books 1:1 and that they have to be careful with how they handle these characters. they could have made claudia be angry at louis and express all that anger without calling him nappy-headed (which, by the way, upsets me even more when i'm reminded of that note jacob wrote for the hairstylist this season talking about how his hair is his achilles' heel*) or a slave. and well, if they didn't want to think about it (race, that is) at all long-term, maybe they should have written about a bunch of white characters instead.
i'm also not saying that people can't write about things that they aren't or have never experienced, of course. i believe someone who isn't black could write great stories about black characters. but it has to be tasteful, and because of what i said in the first paragraph i just don't think this is tasteful at all. i don't think they had any care with how they took any of the characters' races into account, especially not louis's. i don't they they took it into account at all, actually, beyond "oh yeah, he's black, let's make daniel call him louisiana fried chicken! and then make claudia call him *insert all that shit again*! because we can!"
what makes it worse for me is that they sold this show as a race-conscious adaptation, as i've said in another post. the only reason i gave a fuck about it when normally i don't even try to like adaptations of books i like was the fact that they were doing it like that, and i'm sure it was the same for many people. and also that they swore up and down they were not going to sideline louis like in the books, even if lestat will be the new lead. hell, the end of s2 gave me this impression. so they solidified this show and garnered a fanbase with this concept of race-consciouness and how they would handle that so much better than the source material and how they will treat the black main characters with a lot of care, only to abandon all of that in the third season (including the source material lol, but this isn't even the biggest sin for me atm.)
but basically, to reiterate, no, i don't think the fact that sometimes black people talk like this makes it any better in this case.
*that line about the hair is so unnecessary... i can even see why they thought the slave comparison made sense, but this? was it added for shock or something?
Actually I don’t feel that bad that Daniel was ditched by his vampire dad for two years because now maybe he understands even a fraction of what he put both of his daughters through.
I mean both of them. Some shitty dads try a little harder on the second marriage and second kid, which is still fucked but it’s something. But you just didn’t bother either time. Okay.
Look at me, I’m Daniel Molloy. I’m a huge piece of shit. I was a bad person when I was alive and now the most beautiful vampire in the world is obsessed with me. I get to live with him for the rest of time on the island he bought me. Man, fuck you.
i've seen a lot of people defend the increase in uncritical antiblackness and racist scripts in tvl/s3 by saying "well lestat and daniel are racist white men, ofc they make racist comments" and it's like, well yeah that's true but they shouldn't be making racist comments with the exact same voice and with seemingly the exact same pov. lestat is a french aristocrat from the late 18th century who grew up in a rural backwater and then moved to paris at the height of the french revolution, during the enlightenment when many modern ideas of "whiteness" were being defined, lived in new orleans during the jim crow regime in the early 20th century and then was significantly isolated from human society until 2022- daniel is an american man (possibly of jewish or armenian heritage since he's played by luke and eric) who grew up middle class in modesto california (a small city that had a significant population increase during the post-wwii baby boom) in the late 20th century and spent most of his adulthood in liberal urban centers around the states. there's little to no overlap in their lived experiences- lestat was in his shack era for the vast majority of daniel's lifetime. they come from radically different cultural contexts and even though they would both have racist views that fit the norms of white supremacist society, they wouldn't have the same racist views or express their racism in the same way.
but the show has both of them speaking in the same irreverent, quippy voice and cycling through the same types of jokes in a way that makes it clear this is what the writers think is funny, that this is a reflection of the writers' (esp rolin's) racism. rolin said the audience was gonna feel the whiplash of the show suddenly being taken over by lestat and feeling like we're in lestat's head, but the tone shift fails bc it specifically doesn't feel like we're in lestat's head or that the kind of narration and dialogue we're immersed in reflects lestat's character in any meaningful way- instead, it feels like rolin has taken the fact that the show is now set mostly in the present day and the general premise of "lestat is chaotic and terminally online" as a free pass to use lestat as a mouthpiece for his own voice and sense of humor. lestat isn't just any random mid-30s rockstar edgelord on tour, he's a specific character with a specific background, and while it's believable that he became terminally online and obsessed with pop culture in the 3 years since he reunited with louis in s2ep8, that doesn't mean all traces of his past and the history that shaped him is gonna vanish from the way he speaks, narrates and views other people.
for a season that's meant to be all about digging into lestat's character and everything that made him who and what he is, the writers seem to have completely disregarded that when shaping lestat's voice this season- and why "oh well aren't they supposed to be racist white guys anyway" isn't an excuse for the racism we're seeing in the scripts. (and honestly even daniel's voice, even though his context is a lot closer to the context the show's writers would have, doesn't always land right- a man who spent most of the 70s/80s in gay bars wouldn't be calling a 6 ft tall beefcake a "twink" and his septuagenarian ass wouldn't have adopted the 2020s derogatory use of the term where people use "twink" as a substitute for "fag" either. he'd just say fag.) if the writers had done more research and had lestat doing archaic 18th-century racism pulls while contrasting that with his misuse of 2020s slang he doesn't fully understand, if daniel was actually speaking like a white guy who survived the aids crisis and cut his teeth as a journalist in late 20th century good-ol-boy newsrooms, i could give the show more grace and say there was some intentionality behind their dialogue- but everything so far just points to the writers themselves thinking "so armand is an abused sub bottom, that's his defining trait" and shoving dialogue about that into every other character's mouth without thinking if that specific person would actually say or think that. there's no reason a 265 yo french former rural aristocrat, a 72-yo usamerican journalist, and a 20-something french-canadian bookseller should be making the same kind of "armand is a beta bottom lawl" comment- but they are doing that in the show, bc the writers think it's funny and expect the audience to laugh along with them.
“And because he is an Indian guy people think they are woke if they believe him. He uses his race card to his advantage” i’m just ?!?!?&;):&,$:$,
if they’re making marius worse in the show, THANK GOD! maybe some of these marius enjoyers will Wake Up 😭
It's low-key funny because that other anon was literally pulling the "race card" themselves.
I never mentioned Armand's race anywhere. I just said that it's objectively shitty to assume that someone is lying about being sexually abused for sympathy points.
And anon just assumed that I must only believe Armand was a victim of SA because he's Indian and I want to be "woke".
Katy/Angst Queen @angstqueenart - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
