i wish vampires were real

kaien reads the vampire chronicles and watches a show reading: the vampire armand

[enigmaticdiary]

Greetings.

im here to talk about TVC as i read it and IWTV the show so I don't get institutionalized

#yapping is my fandom complaining tag #mingling is my conversations tag #research pertains to topics im focusing on in my video essay in progress. if you're in there just ignore me

Disclaimers pertaining to me and how i approach this series ⏬

1. im black

2. i kin lestat. unironically. i hate him though. things are going to get nasty and disgusting as i pick this man apart

3. Any and all of my thoughts here are a conversation with myself, its just so i can understand my own thoughts better. i struggle with putting my thoughts together elegantly so i apologize for any confusion

4. ^because of this I don't have a lot of confidence in my communication skills. I've got many thoughts and do enjoy the concept of discussion but i am nervous about misrepresenting my thoughts directly to people or just flat out being boldly wrong. my absolute worst fear.

[enigmaticdiary]

detroit...

not a very good episode of television

[murfpersonalblog]

⚰️ IWTV Works & Research Sources (Pt∞ - AMC's S1 & S2 Auction Books)

These were a lot harder, since there's no in-universe context for where these books were--they could've been in NOLA (1132, the DPDL estate), or Armand's office at TdV, or Loumand's Dubai penthouse, or wherever. So I had to just guess for most of these. 🤷‍♂️

RENAISSANCE - 18th CENTURY

1533-1592: Essais Montaigne (Claudia & Louis)

1793-1875: Le Négrier ("The Slaver") - Edouard Corbière (x x x) (The Unholy Family)

19th CENTURY

1812 - 1827: Robinson Suisse - Johann David Wyss (The Unholy Family)

1827: Vie de Napoleon - Walter Scott

1847: Le Cousin Pons - Honoré de Balzac (Louis & Claudia vs TdV) (x)

1852: Les robinsons de terre ferme - Mayne Reid (Louis & Claudia…?)

1862-1941: Lettres de femmes -Marcel Prévost (Claudeleine)

1864: La San-Felice, Tome 03 - Alexandre Dumas (Claudia vs TdV)

1866/1903: Dělníci moře - Victor Hugo (Czech translation Toilers of the Sea) (Lestat) (x)

1869: Romain Kalbris, the Adventures of a Runaway by Land and Sea - Hector Malot (Lestat / TVL) (x x x)

1871: Après la pluie, le beau temps - Countess of Ségur (Claudia) (x)

1872: A Satchel Guide to Europe - William James Rolfe, William Day Crockett (Claudia)

1875: Bible (A.J. Holman & Co.) (I reckon this belonged to either Father Matthias or the DPDLs, since it's ab American Bible company making these--unless Lestat bought it for Louis as one of his poost-Ep5 Fight mea culpas.)

1877: L'Olonnais - Gustave Aimard (Lestat)

1882 - 1886: Le Tour du Monde (Claudia)

1894: Le Lys Rouge - Anatole France (Loustat vs Loumand)

1896: Revue Spirite - Allan Kardec (x) (I wonder if this was one of Louis' books, and if he'd been contemplating contacting ghost!Claudia for a while.... 👀)

1899: The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, Vol. IV - William Dwight Whitney, Benjamin Eli Smith

20th CENTURY

1900: Théatre de J. Racine - Ernest Flammarion (TdV)

1903: La Mortelle impuissance: roman du dilettantisme ("Mortal Impotence: A Novel of Dilettantism") - Maffeo Charles Poinsot, Georges Normandy (x) (Louis’ coming of age & gay crisis)

1905: Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustre - Claude Auge (illustrated French encyclopedia)

1914: Au bord du gouffre - Victor Margueritte (WWI & Jonah...?)

1920: Les Guides Bleus Suisse - Marcel Monmarche (Claudia...?)

1923: Le Compagnon - Victor Margueritte (Claudia)

1927: La Retraite Ardente - Marcel Prévost (Claudeleine...?)

1928: Le Nouvel anacharsis - Abel Hermant (Louis & Paul...?)

1929: La France & ses colonies au XIXe siècle - Ernest Lalanne (NOLA)

1934: Die Herden Gottes - Hans Tolten (1x7, The Unholy Family’s “plan” to migrate to Argentina) (x)

1940s: Sélection du livre - La vie quotidienne à l'Elysée au temps de Charles de Gaulle, La pionnière, Le négociateur, L'enfant et l'anniverssaire oublié ("Book Selection — Daily Life at the Élysée Palace in the Time of Charles de Gaulle, The Pioneer, The Negotiator, The Child and the Forgotten Birthday") - Rudolph Frank Claude Dulong, Jeanne Williams, Frederick Forsyth (2x2 Louis; 2x6 Madeleine)

1942: L'Étranger - Albert Camus (2x2 Daniel vs Louis)

1947: Les Bonnes -Jean Genet (1x7 Claudia’s Murder Plot)

Books from the auction that I skipped and did not put on the list:

UNKNOWN DATES (alphabetical)

L'iliade - collection des ecrivains illustres par Homere - Henri Beziat

La grace et la gloire - Jean-Baptiste Terrien

Les Conflits Intersexuels et Sociaux - Edouard Docteur Toulouse

Murray's Handbook of Travel-Talk - John Murray

Sélection du livre reader's digest Bye bye Geneviève, Kajou le blaireau, Les naufragés des neiges, La nuit du renard - M. Higgins Clark G. Dubosq, E. Clarkson, R-M. Stern

[yusiyomogi]

what people often don't realize about "dear, this is a stein" scene in s2e4 is that it's not even super important if armand put those photos there or not. i can easily imagine the scenario that talamasca did it, for example, in order to put more tension between two powerful vampires.

what mattered the most in that scene (and their subsequent argument) is that it revealed hidden dynamic in dubai apartment. and i think once you fully realize all the implications of that scene, you'll also realize that there's no point at all to defend armand with technicality of "who did this".

season 1 depicted louis as someone who had full power in the apartment, since armand was pretending to be a member of the staff, someone who served louis. after it's revealed to be a disguise, armand and louis give another, more subtle performance instead: that they're equals, that they're romantic partners who do everything together. there are some suspicious details you can notice in their interactions etc, but they're almost always downplayed, made to be seen as some sorta compromise ("could i see the pages we removed?" - "we made an agreement").

and the thing is, this is the first moment when we see something very clear in their dynamic, something bigger than all the hints we got before it. the scene still doesn't say it explicitly, but it's a great opening for what's gonna be revealed in s2e5. so it's still subtle but it's also not subtle enough to be ignored anymore.

the show does some interesting things there, and i greatly enjoy thinking about them. let's look at some of them closely.

the first thing that happens after louis looks at the photographs is that he starts questioning armand. there's almost no hesitation, he immediately looks at armand and asks him "what is this?".

he also looks very distressed, even though from our pov there is seemingly no reason to think it's something more than misunderstanding or mistake in archival process. and it reveals two fascinating things at once:

1) louis is already on high-alert mode with armand, he already suspects that armand is doing something behind his back specifically to mess with his mind (and we'll come back to "mess with his mind" part a bit later).

2) armand has more control over the house than anyone else, including louis: louis immediately assumes that armand would know who put it there even if louis himself doesn't. he's asking him like he's the owner of the archive, even though it's mostly about louis' life.

and let's look at how the show masterfully frames the dynamic between two of them visually. louis is squatting of the floor in order to look at photographs, but he technically doesn't have to. this is deliberate creative decision: louis is positioned in the shot to once again look up at armand from the lower point, while armand looks down on him. it's the framing of adult talking to a child, not someone equal. very similar thing was done in s1e7 as well.

and here's the iconic line: "dear, this is a stein". armand is very condescending here, maybe a bit ironic. instead of putting himself to louis' level, like trying to look at the photos himself and maybe make some believable theories, he uses the situation to frame louis as the "hysterical" and "unreasonable" one. so even if armand didn't do this, his reaction reveals that he doesn't take louis seriously and (at the very least) doesn't mind that it makes louis look delusional in front of other people.

meanwhile louis looks increasingly anxious and desperate to be believed to. he wants to hear validation that he's not out of his mind. this is clearly not the first time something like this happened: the way louis also immediately tries to defend and explain himself demonstrates that it's a common occurrence in the house that he gets blamed for "weird" things like this. and it seems like usually armand is both the source of accusation and comfort: he implies the possibility that louis is delusional and he also calms louis down, gives him possible excuses. it's a routine.

and speaking of dismissing louis, let's look at the next thing armand does. louis asks him questions, but armand answers to daniel. the same exact thing will happen in s2e6 too when armand explains the whole san francisco incident (not looking in louis' direction at all). this is the most clear display of power: armand is calm and collected, not even looking at louis, but talking to his guest instead. there's a message here, it's like he's saying "you see, dear guest, louis sometimes acts out, but let's not blame him because he's not healthy".

another interesting thing about their dynamic: louis takes this! he's still pissed off obviously (and they will continue to argue about this later), but instead of pushing back and at least standing up to look armand in the eyes, he stops questioning him. because it's embarrassing. and now he's put in the situation where he has to apologize and explain himself to daniel. the framing is not a genuine confusion or misunderstanding, the framing is pure humiliation. and this is exactly why this scene is often compared to the painting scene in 'gaslight (1944)'.

and speaking of gaslighting, we see this scene developing into the full-blown argument later in their bedroom. and once again, the show is framing louis as standing below armand. and once again, louis looks very distressed over the situation next to mostly calm armand. and at this point it may seem like louis is simply paranoid or delusional. but this time around the audience for this is not daniel, but us and louis himself. here's another key line that reveals another hidden dynamic between louis and armand:

at this point in the show "you sure about that?" may seem like genuine frustrated reaction from armand, who's tired of being accused. and it could even be genuine! but it demonstrates how he react to louis' "paranoia": instead of finding ways to stop it or ease it, he deflects this paranoia back on louis himself.

and remember, louis already experienced hallucinations and memory lapses, louis already has doubts in his own sanity. at this point of time, he's convinced that armand knows what's better for him. so why put it there, why feed into that doubt even more? because it's all about control.

but what's also interesting, louis doesn't easily accept the excuses this time. he fights back. and he once again brings up what he thinks armand is doing: messing with his mind, trying to "coddle him". as dutifully as louis plays his role of the owner of the house, he's very aware of his position in relation to armand and what kind of control armand has over him.

and not only he's aware of it, he basically accepts this totally fucked up thing as some frustrating but unavoidable part of their life together: he's stressed, he's fighting back, he's yelling, but he's still in the bedroom with armand. they're gonna sleep in the same bed after this. it's a common occurrence that's normalized in their home.

and this theme will continue to be explored in more details in s2e5 and s2e6 ("maitre only when it's hot and convenient" - "that's how i took it"). but it was already there in s2e4.

[greedydemands]

Do you think people downplay Louis’ trauma as a black man born in the late 1800’s? saying that he had it easy compared to other black folks and other vampires given that he grew up rich(as well as all the plantation stuff) Or would you say it’s more complicated than that?

it's downplayed a thousand percent, both in surety and degree. he was born right after the civil war and riiiiight before the forceful of reconstruction. there are so many very blatant conclusions we can draw from this that are horrifying at every single level. from the start he tells us that de pointe du lac is of the lac plantation--like many free black people from the 19thc and their descendants he got his last name from the ppl that enslaved them, and since that's from his father and he specifies that his daddy's father was the one who inherited the plantation, we can assume his grandfather was born enslaved--grandfather first to have plantation implies first to be free, then his daddy loses all the money (prob partly from the encroaching sweep of jim crow, the same reason louis lost all his businesses after less than 2 decades), and the only way his grandfather would've gotten the plantation was manumission and inheritance from his slaver father who raped his mother who had probably been his favorite victim. and then florence either had the same backdrop (not likely) or was also born enslaved (most likely) prior to abolition, and i say most likely bc she wouldve been born 1840s/1850s and by then the french hierarchy of white mixed black was long gone and across the south & especially the deep south, slavery had tightened up a lot and at a peak... so probably one of many lightskin black people whose mother was raped by a white slaver. that's the family and life he's born into! that's not even generational trauma, that's just trauma, no modifiers. chattel slavery is downplayed a lot in general, and i think something that even black ppl can downplay is the depths of rape required to have as many lighter skinned black ppl as we do in the americas. i mean it's the largest and worst sex trafficking operation in the history of the world. (that the symbol of jim crow is lynching, a usually masculine violence, instead of the much much MUCH more pervasive white male rape of black women, which unfortunately made claudia getting assaulted much more common than them getting lynched).

and there's definitely a sense of ppl viewing louis being lightskin to be a marker of privilege amongst his family and although i am a notorious hater of lightskins, what privileges they do get is very complex and relative & also opens up more direct relations of subjugation from whites & higher rates of rape. this is definitely a reaosn why claudia ends up equating lestat w bruce when she gets back & also why louis is so uncomfortable/upset with the comparison before he even konws the details of it, even when he otherwise hates and fears lestat too. and also why armand deceiving louis into a sexual relationship for decades after lynching him and his daughter is so impossible for louis specifically to process. i think there's a sort of specific devastation of being a black parent & esp a maternal one in jim crow south and that constant gnawing fear of their daughter joining that high statistic, a specific devastation that i think contributes very significantly to the enmeshment. that absolute nothingness when he doesnt know where claudia is also means he doesnt know what claudia is experiencing. not only calling out for claudia with his mind--and later feeling guilty for it, thinking that how badly he wanted and missed his child put a mark on her back, that she experienced that bc he's her parent--but also the image of him surrounded by all those newspapers, glued to them, unable to throw them away, and knowing that the black press historically reported on black girls who'd been raped by white men. and this is maybe half of everything, very simplified. i think it is devastating in how plain it all is. and this doesnt undermine the class privileges but also i think everyone highly exaggerates what black well-off in jim crow south meansknfjwied like. it takes him years to pay back what cost as much as a pout and threat of silent treatment to lestat. tom is still rich decades after losing a huge source of money, louis loses everything overnight. twice. and there are a lot of trade offs

[likecopperlikesalt]

Louis' trauma (and Claudia's) is downplayed as a direct result of the Reconstruction and the post-Reconstruction era not being taught in in most US schools, except for what?-- two paragraphs in a survey textbook?

There's something about gaining rights in your living or your parents living memory only to lose them in your lifetime.

Because Louis is a specific type of creole and they're in New Orleans, Louis has a front seat to all of this Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction trauma.

Homer Plessy in Plessy v. Ferguson(1896), the plaintiff in the "separate but equal" case, went to St. Augustine, like the Du Lac family. Louis would've been about 12-18 from the time the Separate Car Act (1890) was passed to when the Supreme Court upheld the law. The very religious Paul would've been 9-15. Comité des Citoyens, the civil rights group that brought the lawsuit challenging the railroad car law, was full of wealthy Creoles and gens des couleurs, presumably like his father and mother.

If Reconstruction and its aftermath was actually taught in schools, you'd know for example:

Louis saying that Bruce burned on a bridge on Caddo Lake as part of his cover story for the coven about "Bruce" when he and Paul used to fish with their father... so loaded with possible trauma. Caddo Parish was notoriously violent.

It is actually really FOUL for Lestat to be taunting Claudia about going to college when she's self-educating and Louis for reading so much, aside from Bruce's assault. During the time Claudia was alive there was no public education available for African American children past the 5th grade in New Orleans until the opening of McDonough #35 in 1917. Claudia is self educating by going through Louis' book collection and hiding out in college libraries, which are overwhelmingly segregated.

[breha]

Is Lestat's relationship to Claudia ever that of an uncle? What other reason might there be for Claudia to call one of the men "Daddy" and the other "Uncle"? Consider the setting.

Why might the filmmakers have chosen to include references to A Doll's House, Madame Bovary, Marriage In A Free Society by Edward Carpenter, and Pelléas et Mélisande? What themes, if any, do these references reinforce?

Claudia calls Louis "the housewife" and Louis later describes himself as "ignoring all other duties of the role Claudia had mocked me for... the unhappy housewife." What does this indicate about attitudes towards gender and sexuality in the society in which the characters live? What is the significance of the word "role" here in relation to Lestat's promise in the first episode to free Louis from "all these roles you conform to"?

When Claudia first introduces the idea of reconceptualizing her relationship to Louis and Lestat as a sister, what does Lestat's reaction suggest about his opinion? In the following episode, when Lestat calls Claudia "sister, daughter, infant death," what is his tone?

In the context of the story, what is a "maker"? What kind of status in the household does Lestat believe a maker should have?

Does becoming vampires allow the characters to escape the social structures of the world around them, or do they remain trapped? In what ways, if any, does sociocultural context in regards to gender, race, sexuality, and family influence the characters and their relationships?

The article "Undoing Feminism: From the Preoedipal to Postfeminism in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles" by Janice Doane and Devon Hodges argues that the novel Interview With The Vampire "depends on an oedipal paradigm" and says that "Rice sees the oedipal moment as beginning with the father's embrace of the girl child in a patriarchal order that so restricts her possibilities for development [...] that she develops murderous rages against the father. Freud calls the oedipal stage 'a haven, a refuge' for the girl; Rice shows it to be a coffin." Do you think AMC's Interview With The Vampire is engaging with this idea? Why or why not?

[blueiight]

[bonus point questions]

8. Is Louis compared to cisgendered figures of Black masculinity in the Jim Crow era such as Paul Robeson, Richard Wright’s insert character ‘Bigger Thomas’, Jack Johnson, and social activists like Booker T. Washington & W.E.B. Dubois? If he is not, then why? [Hint: refer to your answers for Q#2 & #3]

9. What is the significance of the Storyville district in historical Black music culture, and why is AMC Louis now positioned here? What law was passed in November 1917 that is directly named in AMC’s Interview with the Vampire 1x03, and what is the significance of that with respect to Louis’s character arc and the introduction of Claudia here?

10. Who else does Claudia refer to as an ‘uncle’ besides Lestat?

[yusiyomogi]

every so often people start a new round of "louis was never empathetic, it's his facade, this is how he fools people" discourse and it's such a headache to approach it in any normal capacity. there are many things that can be true at the same time, and i think the only correct option is to allow louis the kind of complexity other characters are allowed to have.

first of all, empathy isn't a good thing by itself, it's basically a thing where you feel strongly what other people feel. having emotional empathy isn't the same thing as being a good person, despite what many people on the internet would want you to believe. you just live with the awareness of other people's feelings, and what would actually determine if you're a good person or not is how you choose to act on it. people often confuse empathy with "compassion" and "sympathy".

emotional empathy is not something you control and i can believe wholeheartedly that louis is a very empathetic person. it's what makes him spiral over other people's pain, what makes him cry over iolanta, what amplify his catholic guilt, what makes him forgive his lovers over and over again. it's very likely something he developed in his childhood, as a result of growing up with moody, critical and demanding mother he had to please. notice how she's the first (the only?) family member whose mind he tried to read.

the thing is, empathy often goes hand-in-hand with a particular kind of cruelty. louis weaponizes his empathy on a regular basis. because when you know and understand other people's feelings, you know how to hurt them stronger than anyone else (emotionally, i mean). and yes, it'll hurt you too because you're empathetic and it creates a fascinating loop of emotional pain, but it's not a problem for someone like louis who hates himself.

real question here, is louis compassionate? i'd say he's "selectively compassionate" like most people are. he does plenty of horrible things that hurt other people, many of which he fully recognizes and anguish over (see his confession scene), but keeps doing anyway. also he's a capitalist, so his capacity for compassion is obviously limited by that fact alone. i think his empathy and compassion levels do not align and this is what makes him suffer over his life choices so much.

another thing completely is that louis as a vampire seems to be "selectively compassionate" to humans he eats. people in fandom often say that this is a sign that louis "only pretends" to be empathetic, but fail to recognize that this is exactly how most people treat animals. just because most people treat dogs and cats better than cattle and chickens, doesn't make us less or more empathetic, it just makes us hypocrites by our nature. and vampires are all hypocrites, even to a bigger degree. they don't value human life, but live with humans, often enjoy human's attention and find future vampires (including their future lovers/companions) among humans.

just pointing out that louis is an empathetic character doesn't mean people wanna make him "morally superior", it's just the way he perceives the world. it's what makes him interact with the world the way he does. like, i'd argue that lestat can be pretty damn empathetic as well, especially when it comes to raw emotions, he just doesn't look too deeply into his perspective like book-lover louis does.

[enigmaticdiary]

akashastat thoughts

a thread on twitter i made last night (copy and pasted near verbatim)

i dont really "ship" them in the way i ship leslou or danlou etc, but i am really interested how they might bounce off each other even if im not invested in a genuine romance between them--sorta like how i feel about armandaniel..but a wee bit different. akasha aint in the show yet so ofc my thoughts are primarily based in book lore + kaien free real estate but i do TRY to envision how the show might potentially adapt her.

i think akashastat could be a really good gateway to exploring/even combatting lestats misogyny. its pretty baked into his character because of how misogynistic anne rice was, it really bled into her writing and just got super amplified bc of how many stories surrounded lestat akasha and lestat have a severe power imbalance so they could never love each other as equals nor do i think they Want to see each other as equals and bc of that i think that general impossibility is part of the attraction/desire as well as them mutually using each other.

akasha using lestat as in essentially making him her lackey and lestat using akasha for her blood/power (and the intimacy of it for them both!!) like a mutualistic symbiotic relationship. i dont think its an active scheming thought in their heads but the cycle feeds itself.

lestat is very misogynistic (see: his relationship with antoinette and claudia in the show and his relationship with gabrielle in tvl) and every close relationship he's had with a woman, he's been above them in status, literal vampiric power or both. (and yes i absolutely believe that lestats misogyny directly influences how he treats louis,) but akasha is obviously The outlier, she is above him, she is The Top. and i think that lestat would kind of... fetishize that?

i think hed be ecstatic that his lestatisms (eg: him intentionally being the most rebellious vampire to ever vampire. annoying fuck) would attract such a power (akasha) to him and revels in the idea that he, the vampire lestat, could be beneath someone, beneath a woman!

itd probably be exhilarating at first but i think the excitement would turn into despair when akasha drags him along on her mass murder spree, and despite his discomfort (especially when it comes to being opposed to louis,) he cannot just walk out of the sitatuion because akasha could literally just destroy him. i think itd be a sobering experience for him to feel utterly powerless beside someone, especially someone who belongs to the groups that normally would be below him (woman + person of color. MENA, potentially black.)

it could also put into perspective how louis may have felt while they were together in NOLA (obviously not a 1:1 experience, but specifically being on the very losing end of a deteriorating relationship)

tl;dr:

edit: ppl are twitter are interpretting the "mutually using each other" part as me trying to pedal some mutual abuse thing or denying lestat of his victimhood at the hands of akasha. that's not what's happening here, carry on!

[enigmaticdiary]

Oh my god how did she make a book even more boring than queen of the damned

[enigmaticdiary]

I read tale of the body thief in two weeks snd and I really liked it. Im not sure how i did that, but i did. I want to make a long post for both qotd and totbt respectively before I get further in memnoch and start to forget shit

[enigmaticdiary]

The queen of the damned update: final

I finished it

I didn't like it

[horseforeplay-deactivated202601]

so many louis misreads are just antiblackness. like accepting uncritically that he was a literal pimp (he was more of a madame / landlord / eventually the sex workers formed a co-op) and then so many people stack another lie on top of that, that louis being a pimp is *actually* recreated anywhere in his dynamic with armand.

on the show it is so clear that the master/servant thing is their mutual fantasy of the relationship as constructed by armand’s manipulations!

like i get that daniel called louis a pimp in a piece of dialogue but think for a second why daniel might’ve been wielding gender roles and antiblackness to make louis squirm. he is not being literally descriptive. characters on iwtv have complex motivations for everything they say and they are influenced by racial power dynamics.

anyways i was talking to @transmutationisms about this and he pointed out that armand’s experience of being sold into sexual slavery bore so little resemblance to the sex work that louis ran in new orleans that the only commonality is that they were both involved in the sex trade but to such different extents that it cannot be neatly replicated as “louis was a pimp and armand was a whore and now they’re really acting that out”. that assumption is so layered with antiblackness and bizarre gendered expectations and incuriosity about sex work that it nearly erodes the story being told on the show entirely. disrespectful!

[horseforeplay-deactivated202601]

great tags addition via @inthecut2003

[yentling]

To add onto those tags in a very broad sense I think Louis’s relationship with the sex industry is also reflective of his relationship with vampirism. This has always been true to some degree—book Louis was “vampiric” even before he was turned because his wealth came from the blood of human beings—but becomes very interesting as we watch AMC Louis struggle with this idea of ethical consumption as juxtaposed with Lestat’s apparent hedonism (which Louis rightly suggests has to do with his societal position as a white man)…especially as we see like Louis in Dubai use all these consenting human assistants to procure food “ethically,” but like…is very clearly still exploiting them in a way that infringes upon their livelihood.

So, in other words, I do think it’s important to understand that Louis is involved in exploiting black women, but calling him a term that is so simplistic (and full of connotations) as a “pimp” is to misunderstand his whole relationship to being a vampire.

[enigmaticdiary]

Queen of the damned update

The queen of the damned is the most interesting but boring book ive ever read in my life. But that isn't really saying much because i haven't read that many books in my life as of yet but currently it holds that title for me. I don't know how to describe it it's not necessarily a bad book and it's not Not good, but its not good or enjoyable in the same way iwtv or tvl has been for me.

I get its function right now in the grander story, it's a LOT of world building, a lot of new characters and histories to explore either in the remainder of this book or in books to come, but most of it has felt truly out of nowhere and overwhelming without the parts of the previous books that held my interest that it's been hard to really get into it.

the only chapter ive enjoyed in full was the devils minion chapter and even that felt so totally isolated from most of the set up that had been going on. Jesus, half of the book has really just been set up. i just want to get this over with I've really been reading this book since May or something, and all i really feel so far is neutrality that borders on resentment because i was hoping for another story to be really invested in but i just haven't gotten it. But maybe it'll get better in this second half

In any case some of my finer thoughts on things i have gotten past. As of writing this post i am 251 pages in. Marius and armand have just reunited.

Devils minion

Like i said i liked the devils minion chapter, regardless of my own feelings towards the fans of it in the realm of the show. the fandom has absolutely no bearing on my following thoughts, the show has a little bearing, but truthfully, not much. The show characters are so different to their book counterparts (daniel especially) that im able to seperate my feelings far enough as to not impact my enjoyment of the books. Anyway:

I thought the dynamic between armand and daniel was really fun and interesting, the fucked up vampire/human love of it all. I really liked armand chasing daniel all over the world, that the fascination in daniel was being treated like a game. But I kind of honestly lost interest in it when armand turned daniel. The genuine romance that AR tried to write between them didn't feel earned or deserved really, on Daniel's half.

Theres always been a strange air of superficiality in ARs writing to me, that's just how the tone of her writing comes off to me. Not in a bad way, i really like her writing, it speaks to me (because it's similar to how i write) and i like when scenes or interactions or whatever are able to transcend the superficial fantastical air and feels like something more genuine or believable. But armands romantic feelings for daniel, the desire to forsake his reservations about turning him and then doing so anyway didn't transcend past that threshold of genuineness for me. i just wasn't sold, is probably the simplest way for me to put it.

and i think it really just has to do with the fact that daniel is a bit of a nothing character to me. a character only really half realized, whose characterization has fully been at the whims of the characters around him (louis, armand, and inadvertently lestat as well) like. I don't know, he's just a guy to me. he was a cute boy in iwtv, gone for tvl, and comes back in qotd and in the chapter that he is reintroduced, given a name to his identity, there's not much space given to him and him alone before he meets armand and then by the end of the chapter, becomes a vampire at his now immortal companions hand.

the only concrete thing about daniel that stuck with me was his naïveté as well as selfishness to become a vampire/become more deeply involved with their kind, but once we see him again he gets just that. so now why do i care about him, why should I? I get why a character like daniel having such close proximity to armand in the way that he does can serve for insight into armands character, but like... it just circles back to my interest in armand alone, not daniels future as a vampire, or the path that their romance could take.

Anyway my thoughts boil down to: it's a fun chapter in isolation. The appeal of their dynamic that i was really into at the beginning of the chapter were lost by the end of it.

Talamasca and jesse

i like jesse, kind of. I don't dislike her at all from a general character standpoint, but at present im just a bit frustrated because of how separate she feels as a TVC character. I found it really amusing how meta her chapter felt, having a character who initially views the vampires as something completely fictional and improbable despite the fact that she literally sees ghosts. Like.. girl, you're fine with this one paranormal feat but not the other? but seeing this more """realistic""" perspective get broken down as she gets entrenched in the "fiction" of the in-world iwtv and tvl books was really fun.

But i thought her debut chapter was a slog for a large part of it, mainly just because of, once again, how seperate i feel it is from the things ive been enjoying tvc for.

David has me a bit charmed right now. Thats all i can really say about him at present.

Talamasca is funny to me. Like whats their end goal other than being nosy? Just a bunch of nosy ass bums 😭

Akasha

why are you white

Other stuff

i like khayman, pandora and maharet.

I like that post-akasha beating the shit out of him, marius is now disillusioned and resentful to both akasha and lestat because I too would be pissed off at both of them. Like i took care of you for 2000 years and then you suddenly feel like getting off your ass because of this dude that i invited into my house a single time? i would fucking CAVE lestats skull in but to be fair I want to do that all the time anyway.

I want to know more about marius and armand's history and their dynamic, past what we've already been given. Ive gotten past my initial burning resentment of marius —and don't get me wrong, i still don't like him. But i don't like lestat either and im still deeply fascinated by him. Im just at the point now where i can engage with his character past my personal distaste for him. Like there's a love between marius and armand, duh. And im really just... interested in it, from an objective standpoint. It's a core relationship and its here to stay, so I want to see what i can try to get out of it.

Like i dont know how to describe it, other than no I don't ship them. The dynamic is absolutely written romantically but at the same time, i get an absolutely bizarre adoptive father son type of love between them, just that the lines of intimacy between them has been breached and warped on account of the fact that marius is Most definitely a pedophile.

...This is way too complex for me to be able to get across properly so Im just going to stop trying for now. I really wish i was reading the vampire armand right now!

[greedydemands]

Louis does have internalized homophobia yes but nonblack ppl in this fandom have a tendency to overstate it bc they don’t want to focus on the main issue he faces, which is antiblackness in a violent white supremacist world that believed he was savage and inhuman long before he ever became a vampire. Nonblack ppl are unable to view Louis as a multifaceted character who exists outside of his nonblack love interests, and because he is black they cannot imagine him as “relatable” by any means other than his queerness, so by only focusing on his struggles with his sexuality, they can circumvent having to engage seriously with his blackness and the plain reality that this is the superstructure that defines his life and the show.

You see ppl claiming that internalized homophobia was the main reason he fled to the church in 101, as if his Black mother wasn’t blaming him for the death of his Black brother who just committed suicide, as if his Black sister wasn’t dismissing his trauma in favor of remaining the golden child, as if he wasn’t struggling with his exploitation of Black women, as if he wasn’t dealing with the crushing cognitive dissonance that WEB Dubois called “twoness,” the fact of Black American men knowing that they are human, that they have personhood and interiority and complexity and fullness in a place that denies that over and over, in a place that deems you 3/5ths human, and Louis is part of the very first generation of Black Americans who were recognized as legally human rather than animals. And on top of that he is gay, which adds second burden on top of his Blackness, but it is concretely more dangerous for him to be a gay Black man than it would be to just be a gay [white] man. When he leaves Lestat’s house after their first time, it matters that he says “you couldn’t be an openly gay Black man [in new orleans]”—if the writers wanted to just say you couldn’t be an openly gay man they would've written that, but the phrasing is in such a way that the viewer knows these things are intertwined for Louis, and the choice to say openly gay Black man rather than “You couldn’t be Black and openly gay” tells us that his gayness is tethered to and informed by his Blackness, not the other way around.

But like most of the people that Louis encounters, whether it’s blatant white supremacists like the aldermen, or his white European partner who is constantly micro aggressive to Louis and their Black child and dismisses Louis’ struggles with racism bc he thinks that “not seeing color” is at all possible or safe for Louis in the way it is for him, or his nonblack Asian partner who uses Louis’ racial trauma to lynch him and his daughter and leverages his own separation from race to gaslight Louis to believing he is an aggressive irrational angry Black man for eight decades—like these ppl, nonblack (and some of Black fandom) is only interested in leveraging Louis’ trauma as a result of antiblackness to paint him as irrational (think of all the nonblack poc who speak over Black ppl in this fandom and assume that they operate with more “rationality” than Black ppl in fandom bc they don’t see things in black and white lmao) or they minimize the racism he faced and how it all frames his entire arc, from the first episode to the last, to pretend that vampirism suddenly granted some post racial paradise wherein Black viewer’s perception on microaggressions or benign racism is simply an attempt to make everything about race and minimize what white ppl go through (think of all the white Lestat fans who refuse to view Louis as anything other than gay, bc to engage w the racial power imbalance between him and Lestat is to paint a more complicated picture of their white fave that will reflect on them in ways they don’t want to admit, because then they’ll have to realize they’re not watching the show beyond color, that implicit antiblackness and racism permeates every single thing they say, and they have to face the culpability of whiteness in ways the show demands of Lestat and that they can’t face in themselves) or just straight up white supremacists who would replace louis with a King Kong caricature of an abusive and savage Black animal that is overly aggressive and takes out his anger through on a cultured, emotional, and lovelorn feminized white blonde for no reason other than his innate brutality (think of the racists claiming that Louis coerced Lestat into reproduction, that Louis provoked Lestat into violence by refusing to recognize Lestat’s delicate emotions, that claim Louis preyed on Armand’s child sexual abuse).

If Blackness is the primary sphere through which Louis navigates the world, then not only are the nonblack villains of both seasons fully culpable as benefactors in a world built on the foundation of antiblackness and the denial of logic and reason to Black ppl, not only is their abuse heightened by the politics of racial violence that Black ppl experience at the hands of white colonizers who even if they consider themselves liberal, refuse to see beyond self serving white guilt, and at the hands nonblack ppl of color who gladly and eagerly accept racial hierarchy so long as Black ppl remain on the bottom, but Blackness as primacy rather than his gayness and attraction to men aligns him first and foremost with Claudia—and since some of these women or socialized as women viewers can relate to Claudia’s girlhood and womanhood in understanding the solidity of her subjugation, Louis’ alignment with Claudia through the shared primacy of Blackness fully challenges any equivocating on abuse or manipulation or violence. If Louis is first and foremost Black, then he is first and foremost a victim of systemic oppression that they cannot flatten to mutual toxicity in interpersonal romantic relationships, and then Lestat’s actions must be read in this context, Armand’s actions must be read in the context. When they’re all three gay men, then nonblack gay viewers who are usually women or socialized as women can place these gay men on equal or nearly equal levels of culpability and flatten the power dynamics and violence that determine the nonblack abusers’ violence against a foundationally subjugated protagonist.

For all that (usually nonblack) ppl in this fandom claim to love monstrosity and to be unapologetic about Lestat and Armand’s villainy, they don’t actually want to deal with what the show is telling us enables their monstrosity—racism, patriarchy, classism, ableism etc at every level and always overlapping. If they accept that the abuse is intertwined with permanent and varying degrees of antiblackness, then the show showing us that Lestat only cheats on Louis with white women is no longer a coincidence but a white partner who is attracted to the opposite sex cruelly leveraging their privilege against his Black homosexual partner, and it’s not just an irrational and desperate love defining this dynamic, but a conscious homophobic degradation and racist microaggression that solidifies Lestat as a monster not because of the vampirism, but beyond it. If they accept that the abuse is intertwined with antiblackness, then Armand directing the lynching while he has a sexual relationship with Louis is not just a result of a desperate and broken mind weighed down by trauma, but the deliberate use of antiblackness by a nonblack man to maintain his power by enabling and enacting white supremacist violence against two Black people who are literally disenfranchised within a racist community, and then so too is Armand also a monster beyond the vampirism.

Not only do nonblack viewers refuse to recognize that Black characters possess interiority full stop, but they refuse to recognize that Louis possesses interiority through his Blackness, that being Black and reading him as a Black character first and foremost is already enough, and already gives us a full and rich framework to work through, even before all the other full-bodied aspects of his characterization come into play. There is a distinctiveness to Black queerness, to Black femininity or masculinity, to Black disability, to Black healing, to Black redemption, to Black joy and pride and fullness. The show is fully aware of the vast and infinitely unique nuances of Blackness, and to levels that television rarely sees, but nonblack and white viewers would rather claim that the only way to recognize Louis’ nuance is to make him into the racist caricature they’re more comfortable defaulting to for the Black ppl they do or don’t (usually don’t!) encounter in their real life and media, and I don’t think it’ll ever be less harrowing as a Black viewer to recognize how fully this fandom still isn’t ready for an openly gay Black protagonist. The overwhelming majority of ppl in this fandom never got over their anger at Louis being racebent into an unapologetically Black character and that the show is keeping him as a protagonist instead of sidelining him entirely for whiteness in a way that makes them more comfortable, that keeps this "just fandom," that enables their commitment to keeping Black people out of their escapist media, and no matter how direct the show is, no matter how much context or good faith we provide, they're never going to be ready and they are always going to hate Louis simply because he is Black. But when has the world ever been ready for Black anything? Louis is still the titular vampire. 

[enigmaticdiary]

How it feels to resist the urge to blacklist armand daniel and armandaniel off my feeds after i see the 90th devils minion post after every episode and no mention of or any sort of care given to louis

[enigmaticdiary]

could no longer resist 💔

[enigmaticdiary]

WAIT THIS WASNT EVEN IN REGARD TO THE NEW EPISODE BUT I JUST GOT SPOILED HELPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP

[enigmaticdiary]

How it feels to resist the urge to blacklist armand daniel and armandaniel off my feeds after i see the 90th devils minion post after every episode and no mention of or any sort of care given to louis

[enigmaticdiary]

could no longer resist 💔

[enigmaticdiary]

episode 14

I dont have a lot of thoughts right now if im being honest because I'm still. frankly in shock about everything that occured in that episode. Just want to get these out while Im still awake and still feel this all extremely fresh. This isn't an episode analysis or anything. Just my feelings.

My feelings, right now. um. I won't say catatonic because I have gripped desperately onto my will to continue functioning but I certainly feel close to it. Felt far closer to that right after the episode ended (25 minutes ago as of me typing this sentence).

Is it embarrassing to admit that this episode left me like... physically affected? beyond crying and heart hurting. Like. I felt physically Numb. I still kind of do. Like i got ejected out of my body and i didn't realize it until I made the move to get out of my chair. I don't want to get into that further. But aside from that, i cried too. More than I thought i might.

I dont really cry at stuff! I haven't cried this season at all. (Edit: Sorry I lied i absolutely have cried this season. During ep 10 i believe) I think I cried once when I was watching season 1. I cried once while reading tvl. Like a single tear each, probably. I get really upset and emotionally invested when I'm engaged with things but I don't... cry. I was on the verge of tears for most of the episode if I'm being honest, but once claudia spoke up after Lestat's apology, the first tear fell.. And I kept crying until the end of the episode.

I was fucking mad. I was real fuckin mad. And thinking about it all is making me really mad again. It was hard for me to not feel like i was also up there on the stage with them. The psin of the trial hits differently when you're a black viewer. That shit was racist. to the core. Up and down fuckin racism and i was seething through the whole thing watching this. Essentially public lynching. I'm crying again!

I can't even think about it all clearly it's all so much to think about and trying to put my thoughts together so soon after the episode is making me confused because all my thoughts are just flooded with how horrifically angry i am.

It's a show yeah and I'm always embarrassed to be upfront with how deeply fiction can impact me but when claudia and madeleine died. I didn't feel like i was sitting in my chair in my room watching an episode of a tv show. i felt like i was in that theatre, helpless, watching a part of me die up there!!! it feels like something died in me!! and it's so fucked up because I knew what was coming i was preparing myself the whole season and i feel like me trying to brace myself just made it all the worse because there was no way I would have ever come out of this episode feeling any different to how i currently do. blind, unbraced, it don't matter.

God fuck this show, man