professional nerd

Blogs about art, history, Interview with the Vampire, Hannibal, X-Men, and other cool things. Professional nerd. Early 30s, aroace/mixed/Black/she and her. Sometimes writes fic and meta, and creates other fandom content (see pinned post). Free Palestine!

[brawlingdiscontent]

Welcome to my blog! I generally post about cool things/history/art/nature, and some fandoms. Pretty much everything is on the queue but now that they added the auto-queue button, I'm too lazy to tag.

Follow the links for shortcuts to my:

Interview with the Vampire (2022) (mainly tag-based):

Silly speculation

All meta (tag)

Select meta (page, described with links)

Photo edits

Fanvids (not mine - just a collection of some great ones)

Hannibal Meta

Cherik Fic (Charles Xavier/Erik Lehnsherr, X-Men First Class) - also check out my ao3 page

[pommegf]

sights on the southwest coastal path, Cornwall.

[lioncourtz]

SARAH AFFUL as Merrick Mayfair

THE VAMPIRE LESTAT 03.06 | "Montreal"

[crucifiedeye]

This was parked in front of the club

[ricochets]

[archrui]

My coven is Claudia

[runawaymarbles]

I always feel so cheated in stories when characters are walking around with this Big Guilt and then...you find out that the thing wasn't their fault at all. And not in a "they thought they did it but it turns out they were set up" way, or even a "accepting that just because they did A which caused B which caused C it doesn't mean C was their fault", way but where they finally lay out the sequence of events and it's clear that any thinking person would not connect them. Like, fucking commit!!! The character isn't LESS compelling if they actually did the thing! You can't have the haunted brooding meow meow who is...also completely blameless

[brawlingdiscontent]

For everyone who was (fairly) asking, 'the vampire piss, when are they going to explain the narrative function of the vampire piss?'

This was the narrative function:

Bonus reaction image:

Proof:

[pmamtraveller]

Youran Tang

[angelicdewdrop]

[leomacgivena]

Xユーザーのカソクキセンパイ@ワコォさん：「春日大社参道」

[coldeveryseason]

one of iwtv's key narrative themes was "love and abuse can coexist in the same relationship" but tvl has seemingly replaced that with "love redeems abuse"- instead of engaging with the weight of louis as a survivor of antiblack violence/gaslighting/psychological abuse or engaging with the weight of lestat as a survivor of incestuous sexual/emotional abuse, the narrative condemns loumand and gabistat bc armand and gabriella didn't truly love their victims. the show has this really weird and problematic idea that as long as there's love in a relationship, that can make up for all kinds of harm and violence...but if there's a lack of love that's the breaking point. and i just find that really weak as a theme and disconnected from the emotional reality of abuse survivors- it also feels like a cop-out for the writers to avoid confronting the nature of the abuse of either fan favorite (armand) or author's darling (gabriella) characters.

textually engaging with the fact that armand is a lyncher and the violence he does to louis is often directly pulled from the violence done to black people under enslavement and segregation would mean the nonblack writers would have to textually engage with blackness as a central theme and question their own impulses like why the show disproportionaly and voyeuristically depicts the brutalization of black bodies- textually engaging with the fact that gabriella has been raping her own son for over 200 years would mean the misogynistic writers would have to engage with the subject of sexual abuse and assault beyond "louis the pimp" and question their own impulses like why so many of gabriella's scenes with lestat are played for taboo titillation or "comic relief". it's a lot easier to sidestep all of that and go "oh these relationships were fucked up and doomed bc there's no real love there".

and this reductive and anti-survivor take on "love conquers all" even reflects in how the writers approach relationships that aren't meant to be narrative dead-ends. the lack of care in how they wrote loustat this season makes a lot of sense when you realize the writers think they can depict lestat doing and saying all kinds of shit to louis and it doesn't matter, they don't have to show lestat expressing true contrition or growth bc they love each other (or so we're told) abuse doesn't matter if there's love ok

[artemisiasea]

From Octavia Butler’s notebooks, 1988

[brawlingdiscontent]

Me, a clown: Oh, the 'burning witches' thing they keep hinting at must be part of a (finally!) emergent feminist storyline (foreshadowed through textual ties between Akasha's speech and Claudia' story) extending the show's exploration of how power, including structural power, creates cascading cycles of abuse--- and, just like with the male characters, offering Gabi some complexity and dimension, demonstrating that she's not just an evil sexy mommy but that her indefensible abuse of Lestat is a kind of displacement of the patriarchal violence she's witnessed and faced herself....so bringing him to the witch burnings is an unkind attempt to make her favourite child understand the existence and reality of this violence (and, on a meta level, it serves to introduce this theme for the incoming Akasha plot).

Reality: It's there because Gabi thought Lestat was a little BITCH and wanted to toughen him up and to demonstrate that the REAL victim of the witch burnings was LESTAT!!!

[havingapoemwithyou]

Poems from Palestine | The Baffler

A series of poems from Palestine, curated by the poet and translators Fady Joudah and Lena Tuffaha.

A series of poems from Palestine, curated by the poet and translators Fady Joudah and Lena Tuffaha.

[armthearmour]

A Warhammer shaped like a fist clutching a Rondel Dagger, Germany, ca. 1450, from Fricker Auction House.

[english-history-trip]

For International Chocolate Day (7 July), the beginning of a long tongue-in-cheek poem "In the due praise of Divine Chocolate" written in 1651 by Diego de Vadesforte. At the time, chocolate had only recently been brought to Europe from the Americas, and was taken solely as a drink. The rest of the poem is available here.