Just your average late-20s woman who loves media analysis and reading fanfiction at 2 a.m. on a week night ~
Current obsessions:
AMC IWTV
Anne Rice's VC
MDZS/CQL/The Untamed
TGCF
Word of Honor/Faraway Wanderers
other danmei & C-BL
My favourite characters/ships/dynamics:
MDZS/CQL:
Jin Guangyao (probably my #1 fav MDZS character)
Wangxian, Xiyao, Xuexiao
anything that explores the Lan clan & clan members relationships with each other (Lan Sizhui & Lan Wangji, Lan Wangji & Lan Xichen, either of them & Lan Qiren etc.)
any character and their dynamic with JGY (mostly platonic, except for Lan Xichen), so Jin Ling, Jiang Cheng, Jin Zixuan, Jiang Yanli, Wei Wuxian, Xue Yang...
Wei Wuxian, Nie Huaisang, Lang Wangji, Lan Xichen, Lan Sizhui, Xue Yang, Xiao Xingchen, Jiang Yanli, Wen Ning, Wen Qing ... (non-exhaustive list tbh)
interested in other rare pairs & platonic dynamics!
Word of Honor: Wen Kexing, Xie'er/Xie Wang, Wen Kexing x Zhou Zishu
Also I don’t like Lestat being older than Nicki or their dynamic in general. Nicki was always someone who had a little more experience in the world than Lestat and someone who was constantly a grounding force for him, which honestly I think is one of the unspoken reasons their relationship began to crumble as humans. The poor, naive, overly optimistic, sensitive man Nicki brought to Paris, who Nicki had to constantly comfort and ground, who Nicki helped get a job, who Nicki read scripts to so he could do that job, ends up so much happier, more successful, getting everything he’s ever wanted. That’s a big part of the resentment in my opinion, Nicki gives everything to Lestat, someone who should amount to nothing just like him, and Lestat uses that to excel while Nicki’s still in the orchestra pit. Giving Lestat any natural advantage over Nicki, making him the “mature” one sort of defeats all of that. Lestat appearing as the more unglued, immature, emotional partner is also what makes it hit extra hard when Nicki goes insane and Lestat has to be the one to try everything to ground him and ultimately fails.
it's been weeks since the s3 finale aired and i still can't believe they turned armand into a queer coded villain. like old school "you're supposed to be afraid of how crazy and unpredictable and emotionally volatile and sexually predatory and, frankly, gay this character is" which is almost impressive considering this is textually a show where almost every character is bisexual and the characters who aren't bisexual are gay
i fucking love a queer coded villain, that describes like 90 percent of all characters i love, but i'm not unaware of how homophobic it is the vast majority of the time, and in tvl they were REALLY doubling down on the fact that we're supposed to view armand as both an irrationally spiteful sadist whose preferred method of control is to violate you bodily ("mind cock," which may as well be "mind rape") AND as impotent and emasculated. i mean they literally have daniel call him a "friendless bottom twink sociopath" this isn't even speculation on my part this is just what's in the fucking show.
assad is a PHENOMENAL actor who's proven he can sell even the shittiest script but every time i've gone back to watch ep7 i've been floored by what they've done to armand as a character. he's become a batman villain! he has goons who do his bidding! he takes hostages! he spouts off quippy one liners that sound nothing like how he's spoken in any other episode of this series!
obviously so much of this is specially racist writing, too, it can't be divorced from that context. just...never in a million years did i think the queer vampire show could ever be capable of doing this to one of its characters. it's shocking how regressive the writing for this series has become in every conceivable way.
The camera zooming into Rolin laughing at this part specifically during the DM line read 👀 Which, apparently, is exactly Rolin's type of humor:
Throughout S1-3, to quote Snequanimity:
"Armand, we are constantly told, was a catamite. He's a twink bottom. He was a limp, passive ragdoll for sale. His daddy groomed him into a little bitch. He's emasculated, a beige pillow, his sexual performance is so-so, he's desperate and needy, he's a pussy and a betaboi. In short, he's too gay, not Lestat's ideal of a masculine bisexual man. like this is some kind of corruption of character, being the receptive partner in anal sex"
Recently, ONE journalist has FINALLY commented on this
and that's because the journalist himself is a gay Indian man:
they fucked up lesmand so bad it looks like lestat dislikes armand solely because hes racist. he wasnt forced in the trial and they share equal blame, nickis death was assisted suicide he agreed on. No explicit harm was shown save the head cutting...the hate boner he has for armand is disproportionate to whats actually shown of his actions in tvl. All the orientalists jokes before the finale, uplifting santiago, because......what?? Exactly what is he so angry and mad at? getting with louis?
useless writers room didn't even know what to do with the juiciest dynamic in the vampire chronicles 👎
digging into edward said's orientalism again and finding parts of his critiques of flaubert and lane incredibly relevant to tvl's treatment of armand
throughout tvl we are encouraged to think of the character of armand almost exclusively through the lens of sex. this is not in itself a problem; armand's sexuality was important to his character before he was adapted as south asian and coded as muslim. however, the particular forms that this focus takes are strikingly different from his white, christian book counterpart, those being mockery of his sexual submission/deviance...
...mockery of the (alleged, we'll get to it) unrequitedness of his sexual interests and the inappropriate emotions he attaches to them...
...and, perhaps most disturbingly, disparaging references to his history of sexual enslavement.
despite all this, midseason, i thought they could turn it around. i had thought the reason they'd put so fine a point on lestat and armand's sucking and fucking all over paris was building to some grand deconstruction of lestat's hypocrisy towards armand. this, of course, never materialized, casting this plot element in a rather different light.
notice in all of the screencaps so far, armand's sexuality is being spoken about by white characters, in and out of his presence. and what does armand have to say about his own sexuality? about any of this treatment?
[screencap not found]
let's not forget.
it is my contention that the inclusion of this framing device, as well as all of the material discussed above, transforms tvl into a work of textual orientalism. not only is the subject of armand's sexuality, which has been newly characterized as repellent, unseemly, and offensive, exclusively filtered through the lens of white observers. he is literally, canonically being spoken for by a white frenchman for a majority of his screen time in this season.
somewhere out there exists a world where iwtv season 4 is just a retcon for tvl and its revealed that was just lestats coke addled imagination and at the very least there could be something to say abt how he perceives himself vs how others perceive him and also how ridiculously antiquatedly racist he is and the rest of the cast are complicated interesting people again. and its armand focused. But alas
Assad Zaman told Autumn Bottom Brown that he reads your fanfiction, and that's how I know the internet will be shutting down permanently at midnight, EDT.
Reblogging to apologize to Assad for insinuating he was doing something he shouldn't be, when realistically, we should all be reading fanfiction to cope with the way the writing diverged from the story we thought we would be getting.
Ohhh boy, 307 just so happened to drop right before life became extremely busy so i haven't had time to truly reflect on it or write any sort of long form post regarding the episode. But here we are now, folks, and I would like to highlight how the finale of TVL made me come to terms with the real fatal flaw of season 3....
Now, I actually enjoyed watching this episode quite a lot. I was latched onto every scene, emotionally invested in every character... in the moment, the episode was good. So what's the problem, then? Well, the problem is this: When the episode was over, it was over. Feelings fade away, investment ceases to exist, and I'm left feeling remarkably dull as I get up from the couch. And as I go to debrief with my mom little can come out of my mouth besides praise for the actors performances and a myriad of questions that more or less always boiled down to "why did they do [x]? what was the point of [y]?" Gone are the days of taking notes during 205 and having an hour long discussion about character motivations afterwards, gone are the days of finishing an episode and being left with a ball of emotion weighing down on my shoulders to carry for the next few days. The Vampire Lestat lacks the heart the first two seasons had. And here's the thing: I think that was intentional.
The amount of marketing that went into season 3 is a stark contrast from the previous 2. Not only that, but the marketing focused on one thing: Lestat the rockstar. A plot point that is scarcely relevant in the book they were claiming to adapt, and yet it somehow became the entire premise of the show. It seems like a bizarre hill to die on, but in actuality, it was the strategic one. Truly, what is more marketable than a sexy, white, blond vampire rockstar doing drugs, having sex, and showing off on stage to be gawked at, all tied together by a shocking little incestual bow? Why else would they take such a small part of the source material and blow it up into the entire plot of the adaptation if not to market it to a new, more generalized audience? An audience that doesn't go into television wanting to have deep discussions afterwards, an audience that doesn't want the pure emotional weight of raw feelings, an audience that simply wants to be entertained. (I feel it necessary to note that there's nothing wrong with this!! It's totally understandable that some people don't want to watch television and be met with existentialism lol, it's nothing to do with audience preference and everything to do with writers choices and marketting).
I think TVL starts to make a lot more sense when you view it from this lens. The lack of queer intimacy in a show that was once unapologetic about it, the watering down of certain character's actions to make them more appealing, the lack of nuance and overwhelming presence of a singular villain that can be linked as the source of all the protagonists issues: all of this is more digestible than a deeply philosophical, gothic tv show featuring bi-racial, queer relationships and a refusal to indulge in black and white thinking. A show where every character is a monster and therefore unanimously flawed, unanimously revolting. Rolin Jones, in an interview, claims the past seasons are 'cuddly'. But I think it's the exact opposite. IWTV challenged it's audience and left them to travel the dimly lit Devil's Road alone, TVL holds their hand and guides them down the bright, distinguishable path of the 'Devil's Road', all while pointing out every landmark along the way and telling them what to think about it.
So that empty feeling each episode leaves you with? It's not a flaw, but a feature. These episodes make you feel hallow because they, themselves, are intentionally hollow! It's a shame the writers took a book series written by the damned, for the damned, and turned it into something marketable and inoffensive to the wider audience. Anne's vampires are outcasts for one reason or another, and they need to form their own community in order to endure that fact, just as those of us who are outcasted by society need our own communities to flourish. IWTV seasons one and two opened it's doors to us and invited us into this wonderfully dark, gothic world where we could be understood, giving us that community. TVL, however, casted us aside in favor of the conventional, the easily understandable, things of which our lives will always reject.
TVL makes more sense when you view every insult and degrading rant other characters say to louis and armand as rolin jones' own opinions of them. When you see the way he talks about louis and armand in interviews and responds to fans of armand it’s very obvious he dislikes these characters and wants to humble them and use them to prop up lestat, the character he adores. And he can have his opinions, sure, but having these opinions bleed through the writing and the way other characters speak to/about them in a very racist way while propping up his favorite white character is very unprofessional.
A lot of people have noted that of all the things Claudia could go after Louis for, hanging up her dress seems a particularly weird one to fixate on (which I agreed with) and then I was going back over this TV Guide article and:
It was Jacob's idea. It feels so fucking targeted.
Look I dislike TVL as much as the next fellow but Sam Reid does NOT fumble. His acting is the only good thing about Lestat in tvl… I do agree with him at 2 points in this article and it’s that the sex scenes are bad and unnecessary and disgusting. And that the show tries to be funny but fails most of the time.
But otherwise this review was WACK. He dislikes it for all the wrong reasons…
We’re absolutely going to need to revisit the whole “how easy it was for me to lead a cult for 400 years” line because…
No the fuck it wasn’t. It was not easy. It was actually very explicitly not easy. I know Armand believes that, what with that sort of being the point of cult programming, and I know there are weirdos in this fandom who call him a sellout for succumbing to the cult, but the cult had to break him apart and turn him into a different person in order for it to feel “easy.” Santino when I fucking catch you.
Assad Zaman's Armand has been so under-utilised this season that Lestat and Louis appearing together was only slightly less annoying than Gabriella and Lestat. I know Loustat's going to get back together, and it can wait. We've had 2 beautiful seasons detailing their beginning and break. The character most effectively carrying the burden & mythology of vampirism is Armand. No one brings the horror element of this series quite like he does. I'm tired of not seeing him. Where are his lessons in monstrosity? His seduction through the same? COME ON!!
Eat the Rude @homoeroticgrief - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
