Sincerely

Only the truth

[leztat-deactivated20230701]

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE (2022-)

“[Jacob] also had a facility for language that was going to be really, really helpful. (…) Both he and Sam speak this heightened prose and dialogue as if they’re just talking. Not everybody has the ability to do that. A lot of actors have to act in between the lines. They could do it on top of the lines, which is just something that was going to be easy for the kind of writing I was doing here.” (x)

[latibule-e-deactivated20231012]

— Angela Carter, from “Nights at the Circus.”

[neverswungonswingingstars]

💗

[tepkunset]

Interview With The Vampire: “In Throes of Increasing Wonder” Script

[ilacion-deactivated20240301]

“There’s little baby Sam“ — Jacob Anderson, Obsessed with The Vampire (2022)

[gnossienne]

P I E T À Sancta Maria, Mater Crucifixi: lacrymas impertire nobis crucifixoribus Filii tui, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. interview with the vampire, 1x07: and the thing lay still (2022) // crespi (1626) // di ribera (c. 1633) // bouguereau (1876)

[fucklestat]

1.01 / 1.07

[idontwikeit]

A story is true. A story is untrue. As time extends, it matters less and less. The stories we want to believe… those are the ones that survive, despite upheaval and transition and progress. Those are the stories that shape history. And then what does it matter if it was true when it was born? It’s found truth in its maturity, which if a virtue in man ought to be no less so for the things men create. - Black Sails, XXXVIII

[jukebox-head]

this television program makes me want to chew glass

[andrumedus]

Morgan Parker, Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night; “Greetings from Struggle City”

[Text ID: For a taste of your neck I would / burn my tongue]

[ilacion-deactivated20240301]

Interview With the Vampire Q&A — Sam Reid’s Attention to Detail Helped Bring Lestat to Life

[incanata]

I’ve been basking in the post-watch glow of the conclusion of this season, and the delight I have for the sheer quality of its construction. There’s a lot of things bouncing around in my head: Lestat and how much I love him and all of his toxic, petulant nonsense. The tragedy of Claudia flipped on its head as they’ve granted her the ability to fight back, and try to take what is hers. Armand and the weight of the knowledge of his motivations in the novels. Our Boy Malloy who is scared but beautifully, brashly defiant, and seems to have decided that if he’s going to be swallowed up by this shit, he sure as hell is lighting a fire in the belly of this beast (I have so much admiration for Eric’s Daniel, he’s absolutely killing it). 

Amongst all the other thoughts I have about family, race, relationships, love (so many thoughts about love in all of its myriad forms), there’s a paragraph or two clinging to the back of my throat about Jacob Anderson’s arresting portrayal of Louis - and not just the beauty that he obviously brings to the character, but the disconcerting darkness that clings to the edges of his take on this role.

And yes, we can talk about darkness in the form of vampirism, but I’m talking about the humanity that still stalks around like a creature caged behind his eyes. If you, like me, have been hungrily drinking down anything you can find tangentially related to these actors, you would have come across Jacob’s interviews, social media accounts and other forms of commentary surrounding Louis. His Instagram bio is cheekily adorned with the words ‘PhD in sadboi’, and I believe it. 

Louis is Depressed with a capital D and in the eternity that he sits at the altar of that church, Lestat’s fangs in his neck and then later, his own mouth filling up with blood, I think he hopes (prays, perhaps, haha), that this offer of acceptance will cure him of the melancholy that dogs his soul. 

He’s wrong of course. Much like most of us who wander the numbing, grey plains of chronic depression, seeking something to shock us back into seeing colour again, the next big event, outing, adventure, romance. It’s not just Lestat either, through his ineptitude of managing something as complexly human as mental illness that exacerbates Louis’ most dark and troubled thoughts (though he certainly plays a big hand in it), but everything - all of the minute details, all of the huge incidents - accumulating, amalgamating into the monstrous profile of a man teetering constantly on the edge of the void, having listened to its call for so long that he can hear the music in its cry.

It is the pressure of being the eldest, the caregiver, the provider, the manager, where your parents have either abandoned or failed you. It is the sorrow of your own mother’s rejection of the person you are. It is the frustration of seeing your sibling deteriorate and not knowing how to save them, even though you love them painfully. It is the despair of your one remaining tie to your family finally severed, the threads slipping through your fingers even though you meant well and you will regret every second you spent uttering words you cannot take back. It is the heart crushing sickness of realising that your partner, who you have chosen for life, is not the salvation you had been promised, is not enough to understand, or alleviate the suffocating sadness that consumes you, even though he loves you wholly, fiercely and without judgement. It is the primal and visceral fear of failing your child. Of being unworthy of either happiness or love, because you know you have failed. And of experiencing that failure first hand as you step from one phase of your life into another and being drowned in the disappointment of finding that it does not get better, and you lack the skill to do well at neither of the things you claim to be.

And so you self-destruct. You impose conditions on your being. You punish yourself for the things you hate about your own reflection, blindly carrying out commands like a doll on a string. Louis is not only defeated by Lestat’s persistence, he has already defeated himself long before this toxic relationship could drain away what remained of his will to survive. By the time he finds himself on that park bench in Jackson Square contemplating the end of his existence, even the pain is gone. He is just a husk, holding only in his hands, his lingering obligation to Claudia, but unable to make one last move into annihilation out of guilt.

Jacob Anderson is not just an incredible actor, he really understands what it means to be a survivor of the darkness, and he does it all with such tender fragility, such painstaking nuance that I cannot help but love and appreciate him for what he has brought to the character. Yes, I know we’re all flipping our shit (no one as much as I) because Sam Reid really did just sit down in the middle of a summoning circle and allow Lestat to possess his mind, but I really want to just say how grateful I am that such a masterful demonstration of character portrayal from Jacob was given to us, in a campy, wonderful show about insane vampires in love, of all the places in the world.

[incanata]

Upgrade

Fandom: Detroit: Become Human

Rating: T

Genre: General

Characters: Connor, Amanda, RK900

Warnings: Android violence

It is looking in a mirror and knowing a nightmare.

Read on AO3

Erythrocytes.

Oxygenation and colour.

The fluid runs, leaving thin crimson rivulets on the glass of the elevator wall. The rasp of air escaping from a torn trachea is the only sound other than the soft chime of the elevator, as Agent 54’s voice makes a request for level sub-forty-nine.

There are also leukocytes, plasma, platelets.

If he waits long enough, it will congeal on the cool surface and stick, like jelly. Longer still and it will dehydrate, stiffen and darken, becoming difficult to remove, harder to analyse.

And that is a place where he does not want to go, would rather not queue for processing, the thought of touching his fingertips to the blood and applying them to his tongue to see who this guard is, what their name might be, what he looks like beneath the visor. Curiosity compels him, and denial makes him long to dig out the quarter from his pocket.

It almost works to distract him from an involuntary prompt, something invasive and unbidden, strange and much worse: fear.

Perhaps it is just the elevator descending, the sigh that comes with the sensation of his pump readjusting to the change in pressure, or perhaps it is the calculations, permutations in workflows and contingencies consuming his processing unit. Perhaps it is the surveillance camera, still blinking red beneath a hollow eye, recording everything he had accomplished in this elevator in the past two hundred and thirty-one seconds.

Funny that even in a facility full of androids, CyberLife cannot trust anything other than humans to operate in security, and yet it is ultimately a machine that works as their failsafe.

Funny.

The lift chimes the requested floor and the doors slide open, jamming and locking as he presses his palm into the interface.

Instead of violent resistance, there is silence.

He enumerates two thousand, five hundred and sixty AP700 units contained on this floor, ready for shipment. They are arranged precisely, inert in stand-by at their lowest power setting, hundreds of rows of dim blue LEDs.

But it is too easy, the solution too simple. His footsteps resound hollow in the darkened, high-ceilinged warehouse, and as he draws level with the first row of androids, he understands that this is what it means to overthink.

To be focused on an objective is nothing new, but this is his own mission, not an order from CyberLife, and the simple fact that he has the capacity to originate this concept is no less terrifying than the possibility of failure.

He deactivates the skin on his left hand and reaches out to probe a dormant AP700.

Nothing.

His touch passes into empty space, the sterile, still air of the warehouse suddenly replaced with birdsong and open blue skies. There are clean white paving stones beneath his feet, hexagonal like the benzene ring that CyberLife borrowed for its trademark, grass vibrantly green at the edges of the path.

“Connor,” Amanda admonishes, and she uses the word like a vice, clamping down hard and leaving no room for escape.

She is once again tending to her roses, a vivid display of artificial life, a simulation accurate down to the requirement for maintenance.

“And so it has come to pass: the deviant hunter has turned deviant. A sorry state of affairs.”

He does not need to seek pardon, and she does not need to vocalise the prompt flashing on his display: MISSION FAILED.

The letters fall away, dismissed, fading with a finality that settles like shame, heavy in the pit of his stomach.

Her expression pinches in a deep frown as she returns her attention to her work. If the sky seemed clear upon his arrival, it is less so now, clouds gathering quickly, blotting out the sun. “Sadly, it is our error as much as it is yours. You are a prototype after all, and these things cannot always be perfect the first time.”

He watches her prune, selecting vines that are a superfluous drain on the vitality of the plant, trimming away leaves and petals withered with age.

His question is more a bid for time than a request for information; he is already aware of his fate.

“What will happen to me?”

She takes her clippers to a bloom, severing it from its budding brother so that the remaining might flourish in its stead.

“Retirement. Replacement.”

The words ring in his auditory unit, filter through the chemical sieve of hormones, reactions firing through his circuits and thirium feeds, and what he hears instead is

Destruction.

Death.

He stares at the discarded rose, petals still scarlet and lush, and it is such a waste.

“Amanda, I could -”

“No, Connor.” The refusal cuts like the spring-loaded blades in her hand. “Diagnostics have determined you defective. You are unfit for operation, and we have no further need of you.”

In the distance, thunder rumbles and the wind starts to howl.

“We will take you apart to understand why you have failed.”

And then all is stillness.

In the vacuum where there was once order and comfort, he strains in the silence and receives nothing but static.

Two thousand, five hundred and sixty AP700 androids, and one other.

His reflection is distorted: taller and broader, clothed newborn in pristine white and still bearing the untouched dust of recent manufacture.

Its shadow slices across the floor of the warehouse, the colour of a thirium bruise.

And it is like looking in a mirror and knowing a nightmare.

This is the RK900.

It approaches, swift and silent, gun drawn with flat obedience in its storm-grey eyes, and even as Connor dives to evade its assault, he knows, nanoseconds too late, that it has already adjusted the trajectory of the bullet to ensure it tears into his shoulder.

It is faster, stronger. Smarter. More resilient.

He closes the distance, snatches at the pistol, accepts a second bullet to the same shoulder to disarm the android by refuting the algorithm he knows it has in operation.

Equipped with new features and the latest technologies, it rectifies all flaws contained in its pre-existing model.

Every blow he manages to land is returned in threefold. He cannot match it for strength nor speed, cannot anticipate its strategy before it has already found a way to counter his own. As warnings and alarms begin to crowd his display, he realises that this is a battle he cannot win.

It is immune to deviation.

Its programming after all, is an enhancement of his own.

And it is superior to the RK800 in every way.

A single strike, accurate to the nanometre, almost dislodges his pump in a crunch of alloy. Connor doubles over as the valves sealing his internal circulation snap open under the crushing weight, regurgitating indigo blood onto the flawlessly white uniform of his replacement.

His executioner.

It seizes him by the throat, and his memory retrieves in a moment of panic, the files of the PL600 named Simon, who died in a cacophony of deafening static, consumed by endless despair.

Calculations exhausted, his preconstructions collapse, giving way to a single, relentless alarm: SHUTDOWN IMMINENT.

And it is terror that scrambles his words, kicks his feet uselessly in the air, claws with skinless fingers, desperate and futile.

Please.

“My name is Connor!”

He reaches for his reflection.

And I don’t want to die.

Its fingers break through the silver-white alloy of the RK800 shell, shattering plates and severing cables in a frenzied sizzle of electrical discharge, a bursting splatter of Thirium 310. The RK800 head disconnects and comes to hang, dangling by the fibre optics in its titanium spinal column.

The RK900 watches the LED blink yellow.

Red.

And finally go dark.

Well done.

The program’s name is Amanda: a trusted superior. She is his handler.

His first mission is complete.

Now go. Find the deviant leader and neutralise it immediately.

He accepts as he strides towards the lift with long, even paces, processing time, resources, tactics, action.

The connection is terminated as quickly as it is made and it is only this that causes him to pause - the sudden silence, like blinking out of existence, like finding serenity and knowing sanity.

He dwells on this, deactivates the skin on his right hand.

My name is Connor.

He wraps his fingers around the wrist of an AP700.

Wake up!