The only person who has ever shown compassion to Lesmand is Louis. And yet they are the ones who brutalize him the most. Not their own abusers. Not each other, who they supposedly resent and have a love/hate relationship. But Louis. Again and again, they punish him for ânot loving them enough.â
These centuries old manchildren keep displacing their anger onto their partner while casting themselves as the victims, and somehow the fandom goes along with it.
What frustrates me most is that I love Armand as a character. But this isnât the Loumand from the books. This isnât who Armand should be tormenting. Why are the writers so determined to turn Louis into nothing but Lesmandâs emotional and physical punching bag?
And the Paul scene? Please leave Paul alone, Lestat. Paul believed his brother deserved so much more. The two of them loved each other unconditionally, something that stands in stark contrast to âI crushed what I couldnât ownâ and âI gave you to Armand.â
I genuinely hate this season.
I think I need to draw Louis instead and honor the character from Seasons 1 and 2, and honestly, even the Louis weâve known up until now. Because no matter what this season insists on saying about him, Louis always tried to find meaning, to understand, and to become better.
Jacob Anderson once said that Louis blames himself for things that arenât his fault, and thatâs exactly what this feels like. Louis desperately needs to stop empathizing with people who are actively abusing him.
Showing compassion to your abuser while theyâre still harming you, before theyâve even genuinely acknowledged what theyâve done, isnât healing.
the implication that lestat was going to go to heaven while claudia is actively in hell (or atleast purgatory) really cracks me up. he is worse than her in every way like his ass is NOT seeing the pearly gates lol
so lets get this straight... in season 2, sam didn't want lestat to laugh during the louvre scene, but rolin insisted. this season, we skip over the vampire armand chapter of the vampire lestat, which includes his backstory abt being trafficked & a csa victim. we have lestat sing a song alluding to armands history of sexual abuse that's kind of meant to be a shitty thing but also somewhat "justified" (based on what cast & crew have been saying). we see armands fathermakergroomer before any of the history/context between armand & marius. and then we have armand and daniel release a video of lestat being incestuously abused by his mother??? without any sort of commentary on anything??? not to mention the line abt armand erasing the memories of daniel "using a student aggressively" and im supposed to believe this show cares about his character?
I have seen a lot of people responding to critiques of TVL with 'depiction doesn't equal endorsement' which, like, of course! This is media analysis 101. But conversely and equally obviously, depiction doesn't NOT equal endorsement. When determining endorsement or lack thereof what matters is the show's framing or approach to depiction (both intentional and unintentional).
There are like 10,000 things to say about this framing in TVL but for now I will focus on the extremely significant and outsized power of the image. Images are much more powerful than things like subtext. Whatever other messaging might going be on, when the image, over and over again, is that of the brutalized bodies of Black people (and ONLY Black people) on screen, that says and does something.
Depiction also always carries with it the risk of reification, of 'making real', and entrenching the existence of what it depicts. This is the foundation of the extremely well-established critique of realism and its political limits.
It also comes with a cost. Depiction can be violent. Watching racism, sexism, sexual abuse, etc., can wound, and it will wound certain groups more than others. This isn't to say that these things should never be depicted, but that creators should ask themselves "who is wounded? Is the wounding worth the point we're trying to convey?" Interesting that the creators chose not to depict Nicki burning or Lestat's severed head, but had no such hesitation, for example, in showing long, lingering, repeated shots of Claudia being reduced to ash.
I wish people would actually consider/engage with the critiques rather than dismissing them offhand with empty/ambiguous statements like this.
Any TVL cast member being interviewed: yeah so when I first read the script I wanted to murder Rolin with my bare hands :) haha yeah he butchered my character so badly that I threw my laptop across the room :) aha and then I yelled at him for two hours which only resulted in minor tweaks to the script :) yeah I was so shocked and confused :) and he comes up with scenes that donât make any sense in-universe. :) and I worry for the future of this tv show :) but itâs alright as long as you think about how [5 min in depth analysis of details that the cast member has come up themselves to justify the season despite these justifications not being evident in the actual show at all] aha :)
so armand wanted atonement from both louis and lestat but he only tortured & branded louis while lestat got a nice lil letter and we dont see him suffering from the beheading?
Iâm writing my initial thoughts before seeing any other opinions on here or Twitter or elsewhere. Iâll need to rewatch the season as a whole.
Ending another season with the torture of a Black character for almost the entirety of the episode and forcing him to apologize to his lyncher âŚâŚ the obsession with reducing to that Black character to âthe pimpâ at nearly every turn âŚâŚ
Rolin Jones saying Claudia wasnât at the long table bc she âsaid everything she wanted to sayâ to Lestat at that seance âŚ. Mind you we all watched the same seance wherein she mostly threw racialized insults at Louis the entire time âŚâŚ
Taking an entire season to get to a point where your main character even starts to maybe consider perhaps think of taking responsibility for his actions is crazy, when you spend 6.5 of 7 episodes talking in memes and showing gratuitous incestuous abuse âŚâŚ..
Incredible acting from Assad and Sam in particular in this episode, and from the whole cast throughout the season. The majority of the music was great.
None of that changes the fact that this season was mostly a nothingburger. One that took the source material and the first 2 seasons and, in my opinion, laughed in the faces of everyone who loves them :))))))
truly the way this season has made me feel like a clown like sorry i enjoyed the tv show you wrote thats on me my fucking bad glad ur just dancing around stamping on everything i found interesting and mocking me for liking it ok like truly what the FUCK happened in these two years
The more I think about it the more Iâm like. Why hire a Bengali writer with a body of work that specifically explores things like sexual violence, sex work, poverty, etc and then. Armand is barely onscreen all season and his trauma is constantly being mocked. Like dude did you hire her just bc she knows Toronto?? I have to imagine things with this season underwent major changes partway through, probably more than once, bc the end result doesnât make any sense otherwise.
Can I be honest? I don't really know how well Anusree Roy could have written Armand from that angle which you are referring to. Like okay maybe I shouldn't say this when I have personally not known any of her works. But when I found out she is part of the writing team, I went through synopsis of her list of works and tbh I didn't really know how to feel about it. She is possibly upper caste (surname Roy), upper class Non Residential Indian ( NRI) and she primarily writes about the drudgery of life for the most oppressed here in India. And all I could think about was: how would she know? How would she ever begin to imagine? To me the synopsis of her works appeared to be voyeuristic and fetishistic for the viewing pleasure of the Western audience. I could be hella wrong sure, but I wouldn't ever know because she is a Canadian citizen, and all of her plays open mostly in Canada.
If this is what we were supposed to take away from a character like Louis why would anyone love/like him? It begs the question what are Louisâ redeeming qualities? Why do these men continue to stay with him and obsess over him?
Original post
Iâve been trying to wrap my head around this. Ultimately, I think this is all a response.
I still think Season 1 was fine. I think they knew the story they wanted to tell and approached it with open minds and excitement to adapt it. But then AMC gave them the green light to expand Louisâ arc across two seasons. Surprising but okay! And so, at least in my opinion, they did create S1 out of genuine creativity and love for the material.
But then it released and seeing how popular Loustat was, seeing people actually really like, some even love Jacobâs Louis, it made them approach S2 differently. Nobody behind the scenes was expecting for Loucob to be as loved as he is, whether people like him for himself or like him as an extension of Loustat. Even Jacob seemed to be surprised, having initially viewed his arc as a stepping stone before theyâd dive into Lestat later. His shock & confusion in interviews after S2 but before they started shooting S3 was clear. He was surprised to still be brought on for in-depth interviews at all.
I wouldnât call it lightning in a bottle. That would mean intent. Itâs more like they were drinking beers in the backyard just shooting the shit before lightning freaked everybody out by zapping past the lid. While of course they didnât plan to tell a lackluster story, I think the richness of Louisâ character was a complete accident. I think they all thought it could be perceived as good, not as fucking great.
And this is why Season 2 started us down the path of being controversial among the fanbase. And by âcontroversialâ I genuinely mean âdebatedâ, because people have very different opinions of it. The S2 reunion scene is heavily debated (primarily in Louis spaces) with half saying they hated it and the other half enjoying it. You have half the fanbase happy with Lestatâs apology during the trial, and half saying Santiago was right and that Lestat was too hard on himself.
Season 1 was clearer on how things were to be interpreted. While thereâs definitely argument for how fans/crowds/mobs take ideas and run with them regardless of intent, nothing in Season 1 garnered as many different interpretations as the content in Season 2. I think this is because this is when the team behind the show started, seemingly, disagreeing with each other.
This is how you get âwait what was Louisâ apology to Lestat in the finale about? Was that Louis coming to terms with himself, or was that the show engaging in victim blaming?â And everyone has different POVs on it. Itâs clear now, that the ambiguity behind the scene, behind quite a few scenes in S2, is because the writers themselves couldnât agree on what they wanted them to mean.
But with all the people theyâve let go for Season 3, and the new ones they hired on, itâs obvious which side remained on-staff and the kinds of likeminded people they got to take the othersâ place.
So now, in Season 3, there is no debate. There is no âhm I can see this interpretation but I can also see this interpretationâŚ.â Thereâs no ambiguity. This side of the team, the side that viewed Louisâ apology in S2 as Louis apologizing for âabusingâ Lestat, that seemed to view Louisâ charred, crumbling body apologizing to Armand as deserved punishment instead of horrific abuse, are the ones that have stayed and taken over the show.
And we KNOW debates started happening in the Season 2 writerâs room given the recent interview where Rolin briefly mentioned it, such as whether Louis asked Armand to erase his memories or if he never did. Certain things in Season 2 are controversial among fans, because the writers themselves started disagreeing on characterizations and important story beats.
So with this portion of the team let go vs the ones that were called back + those newly hired to replace the former, this is how we got Season 3. A season that is not as ambiguous as Season 2 where the writers were fist fighting when they put pen to paper. We are back to the single vision of Season 1.
Except this vision wasnât born from heartfelt creativity and love for the material. Itâs out of agreed upon resentment and shared biases. You even have the production designers of all crew members throwing in âI always liked Lestat moreâ unprompted when their job has NOTHING to do with character preference. Season 3 is the way it is, because these are the people who originally wanted Louisâ arc to only be compiled into a single season, and were irritated when fans kept wanting more. Whether they wanted more of Loucob or simply wanted more of Loustat as a duo.
And Rolinâs âwe wrote from the gutâ or âthe idâ and all of his sayings that they wrote instinctively lays it out that this whole mess is emotional retaliation. The writing behind Season 3 is a temper tantrum.
Not just as retaliation to Louis, but to everyone. Assadâs Armand shot through the ROOF and instantly became one of the most popular characters in S2. Iâd even argue is Thee second most popular after Lestat (Iâd say Daniel is the second most popular among casual viewers whereas among non-casual viewers, itâs Armand.) With DM shooting to the stars as the most popular ship among non-casual viewers. (And DM does beat out Loustat in terms of popularity when looking at the dedicated fanbase.)
But once again, this seems to have pissed That Sideâ˘ď¸ of the creative team off after Season 2âs release. With none of them expecting Assadâs Armand to be as beloved or for DM to be as highly desired as they are. And you can see this frustration in all of Armand & DMâs âdevelopmentâ in Season 3.
Why Armand had less than 15 minutes total of screentime across episodes 1-6 before reducing into a maniacal villain in 3x07. Why DMâs eagerly anticipated relationship happened completely off screen, and both characters butchered so it would be intentionally unsatisfying once revealed. (And the excuse that theyâre a minor / secondary relationship so they were never going to be as focused on doesnât make sense when looking at Claudeleine. Who was still emotionally moving and well paced even in the midst of the Loumand-Dreamstat-Loustat triangle.)
The âmetaâ that they kept talking about in pre-S3 interviews isnât that the writers just kept the fanbase in mind while making it, itâs that the entirety of Season 3 is a response to the fans themselves. Itâs less about the actual characters that were written in Seasons 1 & 2, and comes off more as one long Twitter thread titled âMy IWTV Hot Takesâ
Because you also canât say any of this was for Lestat. Itâs very reminiscent to Season 2, when Lestat point blank says âI hurt Louis because I wanted to hurt himâ and a portion of the fanbase shoved a pacifier in his mouth to shut him up and for years afterwards kept saying âNo he didnât mean it.â Even Samstat was reduced from a character into a figurehead.
Loucob became a punching bag, Claudlainey and Assadâs Armand were weaponized against Loucob while simultaneously reduced to punching bags too, and the writers put Samstat on the same idealized pedestal that the characters Magnus, Marius, and Gabriella are supposed to be condemned for, treating him as a concept rather than a person.
Sorry, my response turned into something else lol. But âWhy would the writers write Louis this way? Why would anyone like him?â My personal opinion after really trying to understand what on earth has happened, is that no, they likely were not writing like this since S1. The season just doesnât make sense from that POV. Everything weâre seeing right now is reactionary.
Season 1 was a story created out of actual interest, Season 2 was when the boat started to rock, and Season 3 isnât a season at all. Itâs a cokerant thread on Twitter. Itâs a callout post on Tumblr. A 72-part TikTok story. Itâs little more than the writersâ tantrum because fans werenât playing with their dolls the way they wanted us to.
Remember when I pointed out that people generally are so desensitized towards abuse and unjust "provoked" violence towards Black people in media and reality that both the audience and the nonblack writers were going to start to handwave Louis' abuse away as unimportant, comedic, and not as severe as it was portrayed in the actual material? And everyone jumped me like I was crazy...
I want to add more analysis and critique from the perspective of how often people see the type of content that was shown in the first two seasons as normal social media slop. We see violence and sometimes domestic violence against black people so often on TikTok body cam footage and blacksploitation film that I genuinely believe that the way the show and its audience have panned out regarding racial themes is entirely affected by this larger phenomenon. Think: Precious memes, or footage of racist violence, footage of parents threatening to beat their black children, looping over and over as a TikTok audio trend. (All real examples btw, some happening dozens of times)
It's in everything from NCIS and SVU to TikTok skits and AI racebait. Every ten scrolls is either some irony-poisoned joke about Black suffering or a third-hand recount of real-life violence. Both digital blackface and black suffering are among the backbones of social media and fiction.
It's not hard to find a crime or courthouse show about Black suffering or domestic violence against black women. It's not difficult to find memes mocking victims of police brutality, and although one might not agree with those memes, the simple act of seeing floods of that sort of content poisons the viewers' reaction to it later down the line. First, it's a flinch, and next it's 'not surprising, oh well'.
Seeing a Black person being unjustly abused, punished, unsympathetically dropped by their own community, or literally lynched is not an uncommon event to witness. It's a common trope in media, and it's also a common event in reality. It's something that people rarely share prolonged sympathy and understanding for.
They click, scroll, move on, and take their black box off of their social media a day later. Supposed allies on Twitter will plainly go "I'm so tired of seeing stuff like this, I have to stop watching things like this UGH!" while joking about how disturbing and off-putting it is, with little emotion shown towards the actual victim presented.
The recent season of IWTV (TVL) has been really disturbing in how much it feels like the show, and its audience has succumbed to this disease as well. Louis' suffering is considered trivial, unimportant, or funny to some. His victimization is now considered "old news" by the writers and an "inconvenience" by its own audience. You see thousands of hours of media showing a Black person getting beaten by their partner or receiving an unfair punishment, and suddenly "Louis is being dramatic". Because YOU have seen it all before, because YOU are tired of seeing it, and YOU are no longer shocked by it. And it's nearly impossible to not connect it to how people have been treating both real and fictional Black victims in media for centuries.
This constant wave of our own suffering on the news, being played up for laughs in memes, or being scrolled past in shock, has created a deep lack of empathy and desensitization towards us. It's become a welcome pattern; it's become a boring fatigue.
Suddenly, after this season has started, people have begun making DV jokes about beating Louis or joke edits showing Lestat beating him... something that was earlier frowned upon. This has gone from one-offs that quickly get deleted to constant jokes about it. It's almost as if... the audience has become tired of pretending to care... (see where I'm going with this? It's a pattern.)
It's as if, despite intentionally writing an immensely deep, nuanced trauma onto this character, they decided after only two seasons of him that they were tired of it. And it's hard to say, but it feels as if they got tired of hearing about their own character's suffering and decided to move on. And it's hard to not believe that race plays a part in it when the show has gotten rid of all of its Black writers while this season consistently makes racialized jokes at his expense.
I love IWTV, but if this pattern continues, I'm genuinely gonna lose my marbles because this constant timer on how long Black people are allowed to be seen as sympathetic in media is devestating. And I really expect better from the show whose primary themes in the first season WERE RACE TO BEGIN WITH.
Lestat ends Season 3 saying the destruction was his fault and you know what. I bet Season 4 is going to go so hard on explaining how actually it was Gabriella's, Akasha's, and somehow Louis's fault if you think about it and while Lestat is nice to take the blame at the end of the day he was manipulated and used and is the real victim (again). His "realization" will be retconed to nothing just like his apology to Louis at the trial. I can literally see the script.
iâm sick of ppl trying to equivocate that claudia couldâve been that hateful and mad at louis without the racism. no she wouldnât be. the entire thing is out of character for the iwtv canon, stop trying to give an inch when none of it even matters anymore. even in the books itâs clear that itâs not fully claudia and louis was shittier to her there. or accepting that he was a pimp after all even if thatâs not ~all he was. no he wasnât. we have long since traced back to the exact real life brothel owner the s1 writers transferred 1:1 to louis. missing and honoring the black writers who made iwtv also means respecting the story THEY wrote, and we donât have to concede some bullshit about louis having been selfish or cruel or equally at fault for claudiaâs abuse. itâs still victim blaming to say the seance was right that louis didnât change bc heâs taking the abuser back. itâs victim blaming to equivocate that he and armand equally couldnât consent to the bdsm and that louis was a bad dom even if he still didnât need to apologize to armand. that antiblack torture scene has nothing to do w louisâ relationship with armand, it has no basis in canon at all, they just wanted the nbpoc to torture louis bc of the optics bc why the fuck would fareed even be there lol? donât internalize this white supremacist revisionist bullshit, this show used to mean a lot to jacob for a reason, he and delainey came back for a reason, and we know they were lied to. louis was never selfish or a pimp or cruelly culpable for withholding to the powerful men who hated and battered him, thatâs not softening his agency for perfect victimhood. claudia came back to see him because she loved him and loved him until her very last breath. we know what we saw
I always wondered how Louis would feel about sleeping in a coffin after being buried alive within rocks inside one, especially since Louis and Armand slept in a bed in Dubai. And then they addressed it in a shitty throw away line. Like really, fuck me, I guess for wanting his trauma to be explored.
