CHERI

going through a motion 🦇🦇

[ch3ri-ch3ri-lady]

why did they make all of devil’s minion happen offscreen help. i was expecting at least one episode with flashbacks. instead we’re just told “yeah Armand’s been in love with Daniel this whole time. Yeah he stalked him for years, we just won’t show you. Oh yeah Daniel and Armand are companions now too. When did that happen? Oh offscreen idk”. Also Daniel suddenly helping Armand kill Louis and Lestat is crazy to me because out of everyone in the damn show Daniel has like the least reason to want to decapitate lestat. Lestat did nothing to him but be annoying and an incompetent interviewee.

[bifauxnenarmand]

[ch3ri-ch3ri-lady]

I can’t tell if this episode was genuinely better or if Armand was in it which put me in an agreeable mood

[once-delight]

I dunno, something about taking an AFAB character living under extreme oppression and abuse, coping unhealthily by emotional enmeshment with their son, the only human being in the world they feels any spiritual and personal connection to (and maybe slightly sexual but it's left in the air as pure tension and maybe not really incest because they see Lestat as their perfect male self so any attraction maybe is just gender euphoria?! it's complex!)

ONLY to turn around in this adaption and say actually SHE'S the abuser, not only that, a SEXUAL abuser (when Book!Gabrielle was the one SA'd by marital rape) and are much more responsible for her son's scars and trauma than the literally piece of shit husband that abused them both

is a very weird reinterpretation of Gabrielle.

Like, the reinterpretation of Louis added more complexity and nuance to his character, but this does the exact opposite for Gabrielle?

And book!Gabrielle is definitely not a flawless mother (lol!) but her and Lestat's relationship are so much more complex and WEIRD(pos) and GENDER than this straight up GABRIELLA DID AN INCEST AND NOW LESTAT HAS MOMMY ISSUES.

[5mil-sharts]

[ch3ri-ch3ri-lady]

why has daniel been lame as hell this season omg I hate it lock in

[ch3ri-ch3ri-lady]

am i the only one who doesn’t like the way that tvl is adapting the gabrielle (gabriella?)/lestat mother-son incest plotline. I rarely ever see people mention the fact that in the iwtv book there’s a heavily creepily incestuous vibe to louis/claudia’s relationship with claudia wanting to be louis’s “companion”, not daughter. The show (gladly) removed this plotline and all of Louis’s weird descriptions of his underage adoptive daughter’s “sensual” body, and was able to work Claudia’s dissatisfaction in her dynamic with Louis plotline into her wanting to be a sister, not daughter, so they could be on more equal footing. While i was expecting oedipal boy mom vibes from Gabriella and Lestat-even Gabriella fucking lestat’s body double could stay-to have her and Lestat have a legitimate sexual relationship which is treated narratively as incestuous abuse (as opposed to whatever “vampires don’t follow the moral rules of humans, don’t think about it too much” thing Anne Rice had going on) has basically hijacked Gabriella’s entire character and her entire dynamic with Lestat. They’ve removed all of Gabriella’s gender plotlines (i read somewhere that that’s because they didn’t want to reinforce the “trans people groom children” rhetoric? But ngl if i was in that writers room and i had to pick between keep Gabriella’s gender plotlines or incest plotlines i would definitely pick the gender stuff without much second thought). They’ve also made her kind of just this hypersexual being who only exists to abuse her son and make bad sex jokes-where is butch, dirt-covered, deadbeat mom mountaineering gabriella who abandons her son the moment she becomes a vampire? And has next to no interest in spending time with him? But was still the only person who showed him kindness in his family (in her own weird way), so he obsesses over her validation? Especially because she’s the first main female vampire character since Claudia, I’m definitely disappointed in the way they’ve adapted her so far.

[bifauxnenarmand]

[coldeveryseason]

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.

[ch3ri-ch3ri-lady]

Started shrieking when Armand appeared on screen and commentating all throughout the most recent episode while I watched it alone in an empty room, this is my superbowl

[snoopylovessoup]

It’s spring!

[konoko]

[fascinationstreetmp3]

it's because you're always interviewing that damn vampire

[peterbscaprisweatpants]

save me "armand told the truth" arm tattoo. "armand told the truth" arm tattoo, save me

[eosphoroz]

What if Sam is Denis? 👀

[ch3ri-ch3ri-lady]

tbh i feel like madeleine’s character/claudeleine feels a little rushed which disappoints me because the first really fleshed-out iteration of madeleine was one of the things i looked forward to the most about s2. at the same time, i’m pleasantly surprised with how captivating madeleine’s performance is as well as her chemistry with claudia. roxane duran has seriously been knocking it out of the park. common w for the iwtv casting department!

[loo-nuh-tik]