pfft I Know How to Life

welp time to be emotionally healthy on tumblr dot com HH/HB fan, also fan of probably everything else Tumblr likes. Major (adult), and lover of fiction.

[icanlife]

Now that The Vampire Lestat had ended, I thought I'd make a tier list of all of the IWTV/TVL episodes! (Though the only one I found didn't have episode titles so I'll write it out below it as well.)

TVL was such a different show from IWTV, so I wanted to run through that comparison of my own enjoyment/investment with the previous seasons, because I still see all the hallmarks of writing style and core themes that make me love the show across all seasons.

(And, disclaimer if you need it, I loved TVL so if that's not your vibe, I ask you to refrain from going crazy about that?)

Here's the tier list! And I did try to order the episodes within the tiers as well, but some are very close!

S++: S2E5 S+: S3E6, S1E1, S3E3, S1E7, S2E7 S: S3E7, S3E4, S2E8, S1E4, S1E5, S3E5 A: S1E2, S2E2, S1E6 B+: S1E3, S2E4, S2E3, S2E6, S3E2, S3E1, S2E1

You may notice that I do not feel neutral about the episodes of my favorite show of all time. That's probably why it's my favorite show of all time. In my opinion, as a big lover of the craft of theater and someone who sees that in the writing crew, I think every one of these episodes is extremely well-crafted.

In terms of overall patterns:

I definitely already knew that I think Season 1 is the best season in terms of a overall story and consistency. Every episode had me on the edge of my seat following its narrative, no "weak links" really. I apparently struggled to put any of S1 in just "Great" tier. I think I was genuinely just extremely invested in the story focus on Louis' mortal life in NOLA and how he painfully transitioned into vampiric life, the building of the Unholy Family, and the collapse of the Unholy Family. I think I loved the setting of NOLA because of what it meant to and brought to Louis' character, and maybe I'm just a sucker for Unholy Family. Because I am. Maybe it's the core of the whole show to me. I want more flashbacks. S4 now.

Season 2 was great, the new story in Paris was great, but for the sort of personal-mind-preference reasons above I guess the NOLA story spoke to me more. But at the same time, S2 has some of the best episodes in the whole series. S2E5 is a masterwork, it's the star of the whole series in my opinion. It is an incredible stageplay on my screen. Like, Mr Robot S4E7 levels of perfect television episode. (Anyone?) The trial episode and finale are also incredible. S2 works so well because IWTV/TVL are structured around resolution of previous plot points and ideas, and asking the audience to be patient for incredible payoffs. S2E5 pays off a season of foreshadowing, and so do S2E7 and S2E8, and they end up being the best of the show because of that.

It's very hard to rank these seasons because of this.

Onto Season 3/The Vampire Lestat. It follows a similar trajectory to S2 in my mind because the later episodes get more and more gratifying as they payoff their setups, some setups going back to even S1E1. (Writers of Paul scene in S3E7 when I catch you....) I find the progression of tone from beginning to end of S3 essential to S3's payoffs. I think S3E6 is one of the greatest in the series, it delivers the Claudia moment, the Louis and Lestat episode, and the Louis fatal flaw exploration that we have been building up to since S1E1. (Confession booth scene hallelujah???) Everything has been leading up to seeing these three characters as they can be portrayed now. I also think the progression of the Gabriella storyline is so incredibly impacting, and that is also brought to a head in S3E6 with probably the best acting moment in the whole series. (This episode is greedy.) S3E3 is an all-timer, I can't even talk about it, it's, yeah, and it's also where the breakdown of the entire format of S3 starts. And from the S2E5 love you can probably tell I'm an Armand lover, and everything this season of the "Armends" is maybe my favorite of what I've seen of his character. Loved it all.

I guess I did this because I see a lot of continuity in the storytelling style of IWTV that I wanted to honor in this love letter. And I want more. That's my big ask. My biggest complaint with TVL is I want the more that they are clearly planning. Haha AMC. Please.

And shoutout to S3E3 and S3E6 for somehow being the only episodes of this show to make me sob like I was dying. Usually I happily revel in fictional despair, but whatever terrible drug they're putting in Lestat's abuse storylines and Sam Reid's facial acting is hitting me somewhere way too deep. I hope they keep destroying me!

[icanlife]

I’m not an Homer’s Odyssey superfan or anything, just had two GREAT teachers in my high school English class and my college Classics course who made The Odyssey enjoyable and memorable, who definitely made me appreciate the cocky smartassery of Odysseus’ character, but I did LOVE The Odyssey movie, which I saw last night!

And I am a person who embarrassed myself to my family for a month quoting the Nobody scene from Homer leading up to the movie! My favorite scene from the story! To watch it with them and have it never happen! I am disappointed!

But I am in complete understanding with Nolan’s vision about why he changed what he did and the meaning of those changes. Thought it was an incredible movie and I very much so love what he did with the story.

It’s what you’ve heard! The gods do not appear! Athena is there, but she really isn’t. And would it surprise you to hear that the reason why Athena isn’t really here and what that means for the story of this movie is my favorite part?

Every change Nolan makes is in explicit service of the story he’s trying to tell, and once you get to the end of it, you get it. This isn’t The Odyssey from Ancient Greece. This is a story that obviously comes from the here and now, utilizing the meaning of this epic in our culture to connect the experiences of the past to our present. And I left that movie thinking that, yeah, that was a great idea.

Basically, all I want to say is narrow standards set by expectations are too often a barrier to enjoying and understanding something great. The Odyssey is very aware of its source material, and exists in commentary with it. Its changes are made with full awareness. And I think you should to see it!

Spoilers under the cut because I need to say more! And yes, spoilers are real, because while this movie follows the events of Homer’s Odyssey, the core of it is different.

Well, if you’re here, this is an anti-war movie. I have been informed by my family that Christopher Nolan makes anti-war movies, and I forgot that he directed Oppenheimer. Now I see the connection, taking an extremely impactful story from history about war, from the perspective of a key participant, and telling a story of incredible regret.

The Odyssey movie is about Odysseus’ PTSD at the horrors he enabled in the sacking of Troy. The guilt he feels about tricking people under the guise of a gift of peace to slaughter them and destroy their home.

In THIS version of the Odyssey, Odysseus is not a heroic champion of the Greek value of guest-friendship, as he is in Homer’s tale, he is THE violator of it.

Athena is not Odysseus’ sponsor diety in this movie, if anything she’s not Athena at all, she’s the vision of Odysseus’ guilt of an innocent young girl he watched be beheaded at his feet at Athena’s temple, right as the temple’s Athens statue was beheaded itself. He had offered the Horse as a gift to Athena and used it to murder the innocents at her temple. The Athena that appears to him is one he betrayed and violated, but, if I’m reading Zendaya’s performance correctly, still wants to love him and for him to move forward despite the hurt.

There are no gods as characters in this movie, though they seem very real, because the point is human culpability for their own actions.

The entire journey of the Odyssey is recontextualized with the stated fact that Odysseus does not want to go home. He can’t face himself and the man he’s become. He’s not worthy of his wife, son, or country. This isn’t Homer’s story about a man of unending determination fighting against every obstacle thrown his way to get back home, here the obstacle IS Odysseus, and every obstacle may as well be a manifestation of his own desire.

One of the main themes of this movie next to the inexcusable ugliness of war is xenophobia.

Homer’s Odyssey displays these themes in how it depicts dangerous creatures and the temptations of powerful women outside of Greece. But in The Odyssey, this is deconstructed.

There is no scene of Odysseus expertly trouncing on a cyclops with his massive brain and gloating, there’s just Odysseus breaking into a person’s home, eating his cheese, and horrifically (and if you hear the sound design in an IMAX theater, you are meant to feel this pain so much it hurts your ears) blinds the man before ever considering or checking that he could communicate or talk with words.

There is no seducing witch Circe, there's only a woman scared of the soldiers of the world and how they take and conquer without consideration. The movie makes the point that Odysseus' men are animals.

Throughout the movie Odysseus and his men go from place to place expecting all the food they need from every shore, using "Zeus' Law" of guest-friendship as their justification.

And throughout the movie, we hear about the Greeks' fears of the "Sea Peoples" who come from the ocean and take and steal, threatening their civilization. A Greek crew arrive at a village and burn it when met with resistance, and say, "We're not the raiding Sea People you thought we were, we're heroes from the battle of Troy."

Odysseus tells Penelope at the end that they, the Greek soldiers from Troy, ransacking a city and killing its people, journeying home with a need for supplies and no morals left, are the "Sea Peoples" that the Greeks have been rumoring fearfully will end their society. There were no foreigners invading their lands, they were the ones destabilizing their own home.

(By the way, this is based in historical accounts on the collapse of the Bronze Age where Homer's Odyssey is set. There was historical blame for "Sea Peoples" invading and causing the collapse of the Bronze Age, specifically from Egyptian accounts. But modern historians look back and see that the collapse was likely coming from internal resource struggles and revolts and that these peoples were partially migrating people forced out by turmoil - Source 1, Source 2)

Nolan's The Odyssey is a modern retelling of Homer's Odyssey, not in the way that it's Odysseus chilling in 2026, but it's incorporating the foresight of what we now know about war, about pillaging, about xenophobia, and about PTSD into what the story of Odysseus can mean to us now.

And, yeah, I love it! I rated it 8/10 on Letterboxd. It's not even on my faves list but I was able to write an essay about it because I saw 5 people in the tag who hadn't seen it complaining about it not including stuff from Homer's story. What the need to clarify can do to a man.

(Also, I've never seen EPIC. For some reason I thought it was a TikTok thing - I don't have TikTok - but I guess it never was. And then I took my Classics course and my cool professor with a ponytail said he heard Odysseus angsted about killing a baby in it and hated the idea because Odysseus in lore was the champion of wanting to kill that baby. And I nodded my head with him because everything I hear about Greek lore Odysseus makes him a crazy cold snake man to me. But I'll probably watch it at some point, as a theater kid.)

[lukelemon-art]

☀️Touching the sun☀️

I would imagine it starts with small things and tiny steps… And drinking buckets of your maker's blood, but that's a matter for some art in the future.

[reject-tiefling]

They are all waiting for you outside the bathroom

[tcsformerbandmate]

It can be true simultaneously that Louis is not sorry that he punished Armand for Paris, he’s not sorry that Lestat is the true love of his life, and that he genuinely feels empathy for Armand.

I believe everything after Armand turned off the camera was real.

[kexiu-0415]

How can we reach the GOOD ENGING ?

（Have no idea about the low res, You can find clearer pic on my X )🥲

[gregrulzok]

I'm sorry but if you can't perceive a story as queer without there being explicit male/male cock in ass penetrative sex, the problem isn't with the story the problem is that your mind is poisoned with fetishism, male-centerdness and biphobia.

If a story that centers largely on a bisexual man and his gay ex-husband as they deal with the grief of their dead child and assorted various traumas isn't queer enough for you because there's not enough on screen man ass and fucking, maybe either ask yourself why you reduce queerness to gay sex or take your ass back to Heated Rivalry

[blueberry-matty]

one thing i think this fandom lacks is the understanding that many things can be true at the same time.

did Armand partake in the ruthless murder of Claudia? absolutely.

did Louis enable the fucked up power dynamics of pimp/sex slave between him and Armand? absolutely.

was Lestat a victim? absolutely.

did he also perpetuate the same cycles of abuse he himself was a victim of? absolutely.

do i wish the season had a different pacing and had more scenes from the TVL book? absolutely.

do i think the season works as a part 1 of 2 of a very long arc? absolutely (and i had soooo much fun watching it).

i have said this a billion times already but i do believe complexity and nuance are the key words here.

with that being said, that's all i'll say about this for now (and for a long time). i want to have fun with this show i cherish so incredibly much.

[muireana]

How it feels when you really love the entire season of The Vampire Lestat:

[inexpressiblybeautiful]

By the way I noticed that the shot in 3x07 after Lestat says he always loved Louis is not the same as the one in the actual episode 1x06.

The first one is the one from 1x06 where it focuses more on Louis and the bottom one is from 3x07 where I assume the shot is from Lestat's POV. In both cases he says "I hate you." The video I made the screenshot from for the 2nd case didn't have subtitles but you can lipread him saying that.

How many of these do they have in that vault of theirs? It's like they decided "Yes, let's use this primarily for Lestat specific reasons as it's from his POV." Imagine waiting 4 years for this. 😩

IWTVTVL is truly the gift that keeps on giving.

[cloudabserk]

“fujoshis are harmful to gay men” not this gay man.

[doublepriesticide]

so lemme get this straight. this season, armand was masterminding the whole regina thing, stalking alex, getting up to some fishy business as an AA sponsor, sabotaging lestat’s rock career, inadvertently becoming the figurehead for a cult, and involving himself with illicit vampire medical research? there should be a union for antagonists. putting in this many evil hours has to be against canada’s evil labor laws.

[icanlife]

The amount of times I STILL have to see people saying that they were disappointed because TVL wasn’t like IWTV S1 & 2. Like, damn, it’s almost like we changed the title or something for some reason, I don’t know…

[abilusanji]

The thing about fanfiction after writing original fiction for so long is that it feels like taking weighted clothes off. If I wanted a cool plot twist or a reveal or a mystery I had to set up all the expectations myself. I had to set up the red herrings, the clues, the boundaries of what was reasonable.

In fanfiction I drop a name from canon I never referenced before and it will carry the weight that a hundred pages of set up would carry in original fiction.

Do you have any fucking idea how intoxicating that is.

[abilusanji]

The shared language of a fandom in fanfiction is so amazingly conducive to a type of story telling that we lost when public domain was gutted as a legal concept. And it's such a thrilling way to make stories and I weep for how rare it is to encounter.

Like you sort of get a ghoulish attempt with star wars style "look it's revan" but it's still only a handful of people who get to play. With fandom everyone gets to play with the full toolbox, with infinite chances to try.

[loustatified]

inject it

[monsterfucker-molloy]

Armand’s beauty is directly proportional to how insane he’s acting

[livixbobbiex]

Armand's monologue from TVL Episode 7

Full spoiler warning!

"I have been enduring intense conversations with myself in the three years since our companionship ended. And as part of that journey, I wish to say something from the deepest regions of my soul. Two grievous lies, gross betrayals. The first is a well trod pit of hot coals I blistered my feet on for 77 years. I chose my coven over you, lured you into a production of a play in which your death would act as the grotesque climax. The coven was twisting my arm, but... I took aesthetic pleasure in making your death visually exhilarating. All of which was made worse by our heady lovemaking throughout this period of betrayal, and... The second. I shamefully took credit when Lestat saved your life. That lie bound you to me, and it lay like a corpse in the boiler room of our companionship. Many times, I told myself the lie did not matter because what we had built, a love that served as a bunker against time, was weightier and more consequential than the lie, but it wasn't true. The lie did matter because the corpse was there, calling forth the facts. And, as for the many boys you drugged. drained, and lay with, I feigned resentment when, in fact, I welcomed your straying because your guilt in their aftermath bound you to me all the more tightly and allowed me my hours of observation with Daniel. I told you I loved you, but did I? Hm? Did I? Or was it a clinging to the underside of anyone who would help me survive? And when I look back on who I've deceived, how I've deceived, how easy it was for me to lead a cult for 400 years, to burn in ritual any who broke the archaic laws we lived by, I- I think I might be a room without walls, floors, a ceiling. An infinite nothing. Also yes. I put the Fred Steins in your photo collection just to fuck with your head. And that is my full and heartfelt 'Armends'. And now, it's your turn. [It's a Saturday morning] which means we won't be disturbed, as it's an observant butchery, and it's their Shabbos. All the shops along this avenue are closed. I was hoping time and perspective would have made you eager to repent. My blunder. I haven't properly laid out your predicament. This is your sundered head. And this is your petulant body. And this is the glorious air between on which the two of you still manage to communicate a good 2 hours and 12 minutes since uncoupling. If you weren't Lestat's progeny, this would not be happening. You would be dead. Which is why this is being live-cast to a very important room gathered in Budapest. You are special, Louis. Yes, our former doctor, back in research where he thrives, studying us, analysing us. But was he doing that all along? Hm? In Dubai? In Lestat's bus? He will say he was not here. And, if you reconsider your amends and survive, you most probably won't remember him. Or this. Don't print the obituary just yet. Getting some much needed rest before the big concert, aren't we? I backdoored myself into his band, enjoyed ruining for the sake of ruining. Where is his- where is his head? It's with my companion. I think you know you've wronged me. And I think you know the specific ways in which you've done it. Yes, you seem to be caught in that sentiment. Regrettably, your maker's body has not induced you to own it. So one additional motivation. We broke in yesterday afternoon, glamoured a kindly brisket-carving butcher early home to Shabbos. We owe him new knives and a deep clean. You may own the night, Louis, but you're as kosher as clams casino. Also, we brought her. Waitress, sister, daughter. None of those things."