i was talking about this earlier but...........claudia's haunting of lestat is featured quite heavily throughout the books, both literal and metaphorical. the often quoted line from tvl "oh, lestat, you deserve everything that ever happened to you. you'd better not die. you might actually go to hell" is an internal thought lestat has about what he did to claudia. his relationship to her, his love, pride, and acknowledgement of the pain he caused her is foundational to lestat's character in the books. she's haunting him all throughout body thief! he cries out for her when he's in hell in memnoch! claudia is incredibly important to book lestat's characterization.
and......so far in the show........we get one song, which...beautiful, doesn't actually encapsulate or fix anything, not while lestat is actively avoiding being blamed for the horrific abuse he put her and louis through. and then the seance scene, where louis endures way more of the brunt than lestat does by miles. maybe things'll change in 3x07 (especially since we know we're getting the long table scene + "i've been a monster, this is my reckoning").........but i'm not really get the most claudia is haunting lestat and he cannot avoid her energy like i did in the books.
It happened again. The TVL episode aired and the tag stopped trending on tumblr on Monday. I don’t know if that’s an indictment on the episode or season that it lacks any depth or people are done giving it a chance because of the rampant misogyny and anti blackness. But people finish discussing the episode within a couple of days. It’s providing very little of consequence and I think the fandom is slowly moving on (at least on tumblr). It’s both sad and understandable because everything emotional is treated so poorly. How did the show that spent two seasons building up to the trial and death of Claudia treat all the serious issues being covered this season so carelessly. How was Louis so casual about Claudia hating him so much and possibly being tormented and alone in hell?? How was he more distraught about Armand saying “she didn’t love you” in San Francisco compared to her telling this to his face?? It feels insanely ooc for him to react so callously at the end of the episode.
Even Lestat finally confronting his abuse at the hands of Gabriella are so easily resolved with “I need to work on myself” at the bench scene. It feels narratively unearned for him to be over it so quickly after this happening for over 200 years and it was still happening last episode. One conversation with Louis and he’s ready to work on himself??
And that ending with Armand and Daniel is so unserious because there are no stakes to it. Louis is literally fine in the future from episode one and Lestat has already said he does the concert to wake Akasha up in the VO. It’s so silly to have their heads cut off knowing it will all work out probably at the start of the next episode. And again Armand is used as a shock value cliffhanger that further demonises him in a season where he has gotten no character development. There is something so surface level and empty about this season.
Call to Action - Reporting Anti-Blackness in The Vampire Lestat (2026)
I'm not tagging this as "tvlcritical" because this issue goes beyond audience or critic opinions of AMC's The Vampire Lestat (TVL) also known as Season 3 of Interview with the Vampire. This isn’t a difference of character perspective, tone, “immoral characters”, “gothic fiction”—the writing in the "Montreal" episode is blatant hatred for Black people.
What happened?
The episode titled "Montreal" aired on Sunday, July 12, 2026 with Kevin Hanna and Ryan Kattner credited as writers; the rest of the writer's room consists of Rolin Jones, Hannah Moscovitch, Jonathan Ceniceroz, Anusree Roy, and Daniel Hart. There are zero Black writers on TVL.
3x06 is violently and proudly anti-Black, full stop. The language written and greenlit by AMC was racist, full stop. The Black actors—Jacob Anderson, Delainey Hayles, and Sarah Afful—are not responsible for the script written by a non-Black writer's room. These actors work in a deeply anti-Black industry and have to navigate the ever-present threat of being fired and/or blacklisted for any "flaw" in their performance and conduct on set/in promotional materials or events.
There is zero excuse or justification for the anti-Black language used in TVL to date. We cannot allow this hatred to be met with silence.
What can I do?
Report this episode to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Hollywood Bureau which specializes in anti-Blackness in television and film. Important details to include is the writers, episode release date, and the racist material in question. All of this information is available under the cut.
Emails to the NAACP should be addressed as "ATTENTION: Report, Hollywood Bureau" and sent to [email protected]
Emails to AMC can be sent to three TVL-specific Public Relations contacts:
The choice is yours, but I will personally be copying the AMC contacts on my email to the NAACP. This is a serious matter and it needs to be treated as such.
Many thanks to @dulacloverboy for pulling contact info together for the NAACP and AMC <3
AMC Network’s “The Vampire Lestat” (2026) episode titled “Montreal” aired on Sunday, July 12, 2026.
Credited writers are Kevin Hanna and Ryan Kattner. There are zero Black writers on staff for "The Vampire Lestat".
The "Montreal" episode included the following language:
00:44:24 - "'Cause there's a little etching on your ribcage says you're a 'slave'."
00:45:10 - "Get this into your nappy little head."
00:46:08 - "How I ginned up the train for the slave, here."
00:47:27 - "The one good thing in my bleak, Black life."
ok so i have now seen The Scene in context and well. i think some criticisms of it are wrong but i think more of them (at least the takes i’m seeing on my dash) are right.
i don’t have a problem with claudia being angry at louis, or claudia being cruel, or claudia being flawed. i don’t have a problem with her not finding happiness in the afterlife. i can accept claudia having hated louis the whole time, in fact in a different context i’d be clapping & cheering while she ripped him to shreds. i can accept the claudia we saw in the last two seasons being a softened version of her as seen through louis’s eyes. i can accept claudia’s ghost saying callous, untrue, & racist things with the intention to hurt louis, even if i’d have preferred such a storyline be handled by black writers. i can accept if it wasn’t claudia who merrick summoned but an evil spirit. i can even accept lestat lying about what ghost claudia said to paint himself in a better light, although i think that would be stupid, because i love this show and i desperately want it to be good and i’m willing to make delusional excuses and the alternative would be so unforgivably bad that i don’t even want to consider it.
because if claudia really did say all that and mean it—and there’s no indication that we should believe otherwise—then that scene directly violates multiple worthwhile promises made to the audience in season 1 about how domestic violence, sexual abuse, & race would be handled when in order to tear louis down claudia holds up her white abuser as the “better” parent, admits to lying about her sexual trauma, and spouts vile racist shit for no reason. they could have just as (if not more!) effectively expressed her well-deserved rage at louis in literally any other way and yet they chose to do it via turbo misogynoir in a move that’s completely antithetical to the values that the show once professed to uphold and through which it attracted its core audience. and that’s what’s truly indefensible to me.
no they have some crazy level of hubris to have one book be adapted over the course of two seasons, and then the next season they're (allegedly) adapting tvl, with half of qotd happening in the background, while setting up stuff for body thief book. and each book is like 500+ pages long. they didn't even have enough time to scratch the surface of tvl with their song and dance, WHY is merrick here 😭
I've seen a few people say, "well, they can't do 12 seasons, they HAVE to do this."
No one was asking them to do twelve seasons. In my opinion, there's not a reason to adapt past Memnoch the Devil for the screen. And they SPENT THE TIME AND MONEY ON A TALAMASCA SHOW! Actually adapt TVL, have Lestat be doing interviews with Daniel and maybe in between he's recording things for Louis. Have him be devastated that he didn't tell Louis and Claudia the full truth of his origins and what other vampires were underneath the hurt and anger he feels at Louis about the book to supplement. Show us that present day Lestat is writing songs or filming music videos or something. Make the songs ACTUALLY MATTER. Make them gothic romance and an emotional punctuation on what Lestat has just told us!
Then use Talamasca to... Idk, introduce us to the fucking Talamasca first of all, a thing that show wasn't interested in for some fucking reason. Give me David (even if you want to kill and ret con for the sake of RJ I guess) and Jesse. That would be enough. Have Jesse uncovering her repressed memories as the Talamasca is like, "wtf is Lestat doing, wtf, wtf" You could possibly even trick me into caring about one of your little witches (you can't, but you could try <3 ).
And then even if production dies, or it's cancelled, or some cast member retires and becomes an astronaut, you had these beautiful stories. It feels like they were randomizing Fandom [derogatory] Anne Rice pages and just going, yeah, sure, how can we make that dumb and misogynistic and transphobic and biphobic and racist? sounds good, shoot it.
So then yeah, WHAT DO YOU MEAN MERRICK
MERRICK????? girl... you can't have Merrick, you haven't finished your WOLFKILLER EVEN
I think this is also the episode for me where the whole constant refrain that you "need to rewatch the season a second time" officially feels like the most baffling marketing stance I've ever heard. Specifically because people have leaned on that so hard for episode SIX, rather than episode SEVEN. Which supposedly now, neither we nor screeners have seen.
That big Marketing Mantra that keeps getting repeated by writers and screeners alike just feels so, SO baffling!! "Needing" to rewatch something for everything to make sense is a feature of twist-heavy narratives. In which the writers intentionally write in a twist that recontextualizes the rest of the book/film/episode/show/season. It would make sense if these writers had written something like that, because they've loved doing things like that in the past... But as of ep6, we still haven't gotten anything like that!!
There was no massive recontextualizing twist to the last episode (ep6). Unless you squint and see the Claudia monologue through that angle, which... maybe you could. Say, if you weren't paying attention. And if the writers hadn't forgotten what they'd actually written into the first season scenes. And if the writers had somehow missed while writing that scene, that the Claudia monologue recontextualizes THE FIRST SEASON. NOT THE THIRD.
Because it has nothing to do with anything going on in the rest of s3/TVL s1, whatever you want to call it. It's not like some sort of highly intelligent, very cogent, massively planned-in-advance retcon or recontextualization of things going on in s3.
It just... isn't.
And meanwhile, nothing else happening in the episode was a recontextualization of things going on this season either!!!
I feel honestly, very bamboozled by this rhetoric. And much more suspicious and mistrusting of the relationship between amc and screeners now.
Like what did Autumn Brown and others even MEAN when, having seen all 6 episodes, they talk about going back and "picking up things" now? Like... I have watched almost every episode 2x myself atp. And while some things are generally more watchable and less grating a second time?
That's... not the same thing as getting plot points, characterization, or twists in ep6 that would retroactively make the rest of the season make sense.
Did the screeners get a wildly different ep6 than everyone else? Or are they just weird fucking liars? Or is it an emperor's new clothes situation, where the amc team was so aggressive in their language that after ep6 "everything would make sense," that no single screener wanted to come across looking like the dumbass pointing out that the emperor was actually just naked the whole time?
"Be patient."
"It'll all come together and make sense by the time you get to episode 6."
"You really have to watch the whole season twice to really understand it."
WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT! AND WHY ARE ALL THE SCREENERS WHO'VE ONLY SEEN THROUGH EP6 ALSO SAYING THIS?! DID YOU ACTUALLY PUT A MAJOR TWIST IN EP7 AND THEN JUST FORGET HOW MANY EPISODES YOU WROTE/WHAT EVENTS YOU PUT INTO EACH EPISODE?
“we can’t believe X because it was lestat’s perspective, we can’t believe any of the scenes with claudia from the first two seasons because they were from louis’s perspective”
i’m sorry. i understand that this is the Unreliable Narrator Show but if we’re supposed to be weary of every single scene because anything we see could be a misremembering or a lie, what the fuck am i watching the show for. i want to believe at least SOME of what im spending time every week to watch actually happened. it feels like the writers don’t actually need to have consistent writing for ANY character because they can just hand-wave anything that doesn’t work as being a “biased recollection of events”. so like why should i be expected to care about what’s being shown to me then.
“we can’t believe X because it was lestat’s perspective, we can’t believe any of the scenes with claudia from the first two seasons because they were from louis’s perspective”
i’m sorry. i understand that this is the Unreliable Narrator Show but if we’re supposed to be weary of every single scene because anything we see could be a misremembering or a lie, what the fuck am i watching the show for. i want to believe at least SOME of what im spending time every week to watch actually happened. it feels like the writers don’t actually need to have consistent writing for ANY character because they can just hand-wave anything that doesn’t work as being a “biased recollection of events”. so like why should i be expected to care about what’s being shown to me then.
it’s kind of insane how many people are defending the claudia scene in s3e6. nobody is upset at claudia being angry, nobody is upset at claudia harbouring resentment towards louis. many of my favourite scenes in the past seasons are claudia chewing louis out for his constant mistreatment of her. what people are mad about is the unnecessary racism that we know came from an all white writers room in a season that has been riddled with mocking microaggressions. it is insulting and it is a let down. they are hand waving lestat of any culpability and tearing down and humiliating louis instead. there is a gross favouritism happening in the writers room that people are being purposefully ignorant of and that is what we are upset about. claudia deserves to rip both of those men to shreds for what they did to her but you are being willfully obtuse if your take-away from these criticisms is that we don’t want claudia to be angry or we think louis was a perfect parent. that is not the point being made and you all know it.
tvl fails so badly narratively because after two seasons of exploring themes of memory and trauma and grief and four years of discussing said things we are suddenly dropped somewhere with 5 nonsensical framing devices all stacked on top of each other, actions with no real consequences that are given no context, and two second clips of the actual events of the book it’s pretending to adapt. i feel bad for everyone who read tvl between seasons. i feel bad in general.
the season started in media res while also being 90% exposition, relying on shock humor, already dated references to current-ish events, and a gag at the end of every episode that winds up being immensely inconsequential. they do so little with the characters. and i do not care if this is how lestat sees people. if i wanted an un-interrogated narrative, i would read an anne rice book.
so claudia is being tortured in purgatory without her true love and also she was actually mean and aggressive and hated louis more than lestat, called him a slave, and admitted to lying about lestat threatening her with rape. with no black writers in the writers room.
so we get lestat and his mother kissing sloppy and fucking each other in like every other episode but louis and lestat are together for the majority of the episode and no kisses. right right
that specific brand of vampire media that’s like “you’re a late 90s-early 00s vampire in a leather jacket and sunglasses in some sleazy underground goth club that’s playing electro industrial/aggrotech/goth rock music” ruined me on all other vamp media, I too want to be a vampire in a leather jacket & sunglasses in some sleazy underground goth club that’s playing electro industrial/aggrotech/goth rock music
There are some points of tvl criticism I'm willing to debate and where I can very much see both sides (or even think the #haters are stretching it a little) but like. You cannot really deny that this season has shown a pattern of prioritizing white characters and their emotional journey over characters of color. On top of that, so many of the jokes are "punching down", starting with the pronoun joke in ep 1 followed by a continuous barrage of throw-away comments. And then, six episodes into a season with an all-white writers room, we have Claudia say "there's something etched in your ribs that says you're a slave". There's no reckoning with how horrifically racist this statement is, neither in the text nor the paratext. It's just sitting there, poisoning what otherwise could have been an incredible scene. Poisoning a season that felt like it was actually slowly finding its footing. It's white privilege to watch that scene and not feel, on some level, attacked by those racist words put in a Black actor's mouth by white writers. To not be haunted by the racist implications of "my bleak, black life." Before, a lot of the writing choices registered as thoughtless; at this point, it's hard to see them as anything but malicious.
Also, not to be petty on main, but can we now at least agree that we were right when we said the lack of Armand content in promo was because there was going to be very little actual Armand in this season?
