[lighthouseweeper]

Nicki having to turn up to work amidst the violence of the French Revolution

[professional-rat-eater]

Choosing to believe that Daniel actually did use Lestat’s head as a bowling ball but it didn’t work and just kinda slid halfway up the lane and made a really loud squeaking noise and left behind a blood trail and Lestat was so embarrassed his head couldn’t knock over a single pin that he just omitted from his retelling.

[leonkennedysprostate]

i ♥️ filtering tags i ♥️ blocking blogs i ♥️ scrolling and not engaging i ♥️ curating my online experience

[maxwyl]

i want to see something rq:

*this is intended to measure personal feelings about akasha rather than opinions about her character as an element of the narrative. eg) you can hate her but love and value her as a well written character and aspect of the story

feelings about akasha

i’ve read qotd recently & i love akasha

i’ve read qotd recently & i have complicated or neutral feelings

i’ve read qotd recently & i hate akasha

i read qotd a long time ago & i love akasha

i read qotd a long time ago & i have complicated or neutral feelings

i read qotd a long time ago & i hate akasha

i haven't read qotd & i love akasha

i haven't read qotd & i have complicated or neutral feelings

i haven't read qotd & i hate akasha

infinite nuance/im bald

Voting ended onAug 5

[caprincornedits]

Claudia x Madeleine || Meet You At The Graveyard

📺 • Interview with the Vampire | The Vampire Lestat [2022-] 🎵 • Cleffy - Meet you at the Graveyard

[un-jardin-sauvage]

[dizzyghoast]

every so often i remember how awesome the modern interconnected multicultural world is. i grew up getting to hear fairy tales from all over the world. africa, asia, europe, america. everywhere in between. i can have bagels for breakfast, curry for lunch, and ramen for dinner without even leaving the city limits. music and art and philosophy and technology that originated thousands of miles and years apart from eachother have come together and interwoven into something greater than the sum of its parts. its hard not fall into despair when thinking about the horrors but god. god the wonders.

[dizzyghoast]

you can have friends on the other side of the planet! neither of you even has to travel!!!!! you can just talk to them whenever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[piratewithvigor]

How many of these movies have you seen that people said “you haven’t seen [blank] yet??” to me about

[willgrahamscock]

[hanniballecterscock]

things are getting… spicy in the spice section

[willgrahamscock]

[wisteria-lodge]

The Circle & the Line

I want to talk about one of my favorite pieces of visual symbolism / visual storytelling in The Vampire Lestat.

Like, I think of it as the season's primary motif. A circle, and a line. That's the bowling alley + bowling ball. It's the ice-cream scoop. It's the tour bus + wheels ("the wheels on Lestat go round and round.") It's the music note. The first thing Lestat says to Louis is "a balloon is nice" and - in case we missed that - here's Louis with a bunch of balloons.

(and that word "nice" is important. It comes back in the finale as a happy ending, instead of the "not enough" Lestat feels it is in the beginning.)

We even have some incidental circles-and-lines, that aren't there for any reason other than visual cohesion.

(I like that the wrecking ball is the image the showrunner decided to put over his name.) (I also think that the stripper + stripper pole images belong here, but they were blocked by the tumblr content gods)

So... what does it mean?

So the line is Lestat. Movement, progress, action, tight barreling forward. This is a season full of hallways, corridors, long tables, alleys. Our main set is the tour bus. And Lestat? Always always doing a walk-and-talk, walk-and-sign-the-paper. He's showering when he's talking to Armand, he's watching strippers when he's talking to Christine and Gabriella, he's always doing SOMETHING. He refers to himself as things like the "scalpel" and the "last of the sutures." Y'know. Lines.

I think the constant movement gives him the illusion of control. Lestat's spent a pretty large chunk of his life trapped and stagnant (first by his family, then by Marius/Akasha). The thing about the "long table" is that it ISN'T him sitting at the head.

It's his father, it's Magnus, it's Gabriella, and it's a victory when he can finally do this:

Symbolically taking responsibility for the 'direction' his life is going.

And the most extreme version of Lestat-as-line is when he's speeding in the car, driving as a way to escape his memories of Magnus.

Because of course, that's the reason for this. Lestat is trying to escape his trauma by keeping himself busy, existing as just a body, just keep going, just keep going. Don't think about it.

But then the car flips, rotates. The next shot is the world upside down - we're rolling. The line is becoming the circle.

Because if the LINE is action, then the CIRCLE is contemplation and reflection. It's being inside your own head.

Which is very much where LOUIS has been trapped this whole season. Lestat is always moving? Louis is never moving. He's sitting, he's still. He's reliving and revisiting the past, cycling inside his own head, unable to move forward.

Our introduction to Louis is as a head on Lestat's iPad. Only a head.

And one more circle I want to throw in:

Like, the obvious interpretation of this shot is that Gabriella has Lestat by the balls. BUT... if circles are thoughts, contemplation, reflection. Well, that's showing us visually WHY Lestat doesn't particularly want to go there. Gabriella's in his head, making sure he circles around and around without making any progress, just like she plays with those ping-pong balls.

That's why it's lovely that the first time Lestat and Louis REALLY talk this season, make some real progress... it's in a parked car. Lestat is able to be still when he's with Louis. He can sit and think and process. And Louis can lean on Lestat's action, can get him to go in and end the situation with Regina, because he can't do it himself.

And that's why the finale, with its Beetlejuice-esque beheading, is kind of brilliant. Because really? The circle and the line... that's just a head and a body. Lestat has been finding pockets of stillness all season - with Louis, while composing (that's why it's important that he has to record the album in a literal underground bunker) but it's only when he is ONLY his head that he is forced to unpack, process, and come to the conclusion that he wants to stop. He doesn't want to go on stage.

And Louis' body (without his head) gets to struggle, and reach, and get out of Armand's saw trap. Get up out of the chair he's been sitting in all season.

[iimpavidwrites]

I am contemplating the poetry of “an eager black hole” and “a room without walls”. Let’s talk about metaphors.

Indulge me here. Walk with me.

The black hole piece of this metaphor pair is a little easier to understand. Black holes are infinite gravity. They consume everything. They break down everything into its component parts and then even smaller until they are unrecognizable. Black holes consume all of space and turn it into condensed, solid, unknowable singularity.

This is transparently what Daniel does as a reporter, as an interviewer. He said he doesn’t do portraiture but he can be as incisive as any painter when the urge strikes him. This is how Daniel defines himself— “a bright reporter with a point of view”— for his whole life. He knows exactly what he is and what he does.

But “a room without walls, ceiling, a floor”, what is that? It is not a matching void at all. It’s a room. A poorly built room but a room nonetheless.

A room’s purpose is to be a container— that is what its boundaries (walls, floor, ceiling) are for. When a “room” has none of those bounding elements anything can get into or leave it, everything flows in and out at the prompting of any outside influence. It is very easy to redefine the area the “room” contains until it becomes infinite. Suddenly there’s nothing but the space of that room expanding ever outward like the universe itself.

This says a lot about Armand’s sense of self: it is not broken but fluid. Sometimes shallow, sometimes deep, always shifting and certain to fill any shape or size of container it is poured into. This is no way to live an entirely happy existence.

To me, these little bits of imagery Armand uses to describe Daniel and his own self concept suggest that Armand perceives Daniel as a force capable of containing him— that ever-shifting nebulous expanse that Armand himself cannot define. Moreover the metaphors, placed beside each other, suggest that Daniel serves as the gravitational force that can condense the scope of the room that is Armand until there is something solid. Maybe it will not resemble anything that came before it, maybe it will be barely-identifiable from its component parts… but instead of containing all things, there will be singularity.

I have to wonder: does this scare Armand? How accustomed has he become to being entirely without walls, ceiling, a floor? Does he react to this fundamental threat to his sense of himself with fight, flight, freeze, fawn? All four?

Armand is the vastness of space and Daniel is a galaxy-devouring black hole.

This is what makes Daniel so fascinating.

[jesterbells]

[dontreadreviews]

"Vampires are fully erotic. I want to live in that zone"

Eric refuses to hide his vampire kink, and I love him for that.

[atouchofsass]

extremely confused by people suggesting claudia is in Thee Christian Hell and lestat was about to go to Thee Christian Heaven first of all nobody said anything about either of those places in the show second of all that's not how it works in mennoch and third "spidery-ass nowhere" and "silver threads" sounds exactly like the same place described by people in vastly different states of mind

[fuckthisshit-ugh]

please read this even if you're not indian. especially if you're not indian.

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

reblog. share. don't scroll past.

[roczath]

India’s youth-led Cockroach movement vows to keep demanding reforms after police crackdown

Supporters of India’s youth-led Cockroach movement demanding educational reforms and government accountability say they will continue their

AP News coverage as of July 21.

[elaienar]

Explained: How India's biggest medical entrance exam descended into crisis

An alleged paper leak, an unprecedented nationwide retest and mounting political pressure have thrust NEET, India's medical entrance examina

NEET-UG: India students resit intense medical exam after paper leak allegations

Millions of candidates face biometric checks and frisking as air force deployed to secure exam papers.

‘Come back, my son’: Indian exam leak leaves trail of death, despair, anger

More than two million aspiring doctors took India’s NEET examination. However, the test was compromised and cancelled.

Here's some reporting on the NEET.

[endiness]

"There's nothing more we can do here." "But be men!"

[samreid-jacobanderson-archive]

More pictures of Jacob, Sheila and Sam from TV Insider

Photo Credit: MCP Photo