Claudia's death and Lestat and Louis' failures to love and protect her over choosing each other os the heart of The Vampire Chronicles, and Rolin is telling it that way with the "Phantom of the Opera" framing device, and Lestat's "The Failures" album which will be intended to be heard only by Louis as his apology to him and Claudia
Episode 3.1 begins with a framing device pulled directly from The Phantom of the Opera. The framing device is important because it is the men who outlived Christine bidding on objects in remembrance of her, and the ending of the framing device is one man at Christine’s grave with his winnings from the auction, only to find his rival has already been to the grave and left behind a rose. The Phantom bid against Christian and let him win because Christine chose Christian, but it had never stopped the Phantom from also loving her all this time, and this is an admission to Christine and Christian that they were right to haven chosen each other and an apology to Christine and Christian for the violence and emotional torment the Phantom subjected them to out of jealousy.
The auction establishes that:
-Lestat is considered to be dead
-Louis is alive but missing a leg
-Armand is alive but missing an eye and with facial disfigurement that is not entirely concealed by an eyepatch
-Louis and Armand are on if not good terms then at least fondly tolerant, as evidenced by Louis’ and Armand’s shared secretive little grin
-Raglan James is there
-Lestat considers himself only partially to blame for the “near destruction of the Y chromosome” [and later says "Armand did more damage than she (Akasha) ever did, establishing that Armand breaking the Great Laws to turn Daniel resulted not in a true vampire fledgling but the prototype for what would become the tissue originator of the adaptations Replimoids, creatures that have young Daniel's face, kill and drain humans but require powerful vampire blood to stay alive, and (like Daniel's preference for Grasshoppers but saying he prefers "savory most days") prefers O negative (universal donor) to AB positive (universal reciñient), inadvertently creating a severe bottle neck in the human population and mass starvation of vampires after the great conversion because as Gabi established there are only 9 active Rh null donors (people with O negative blood type who have never been exposed to/developed antibodies to Rh factor) and 45 people in the world with that blood type, and their blood is donated and usef to become a medication that saves hundreds of thousands of women and infant's lives a year due to Rh factor incompatability.]
Rh factor, or Rhesus factor, is a type of protein found on red blood cells. Complications can occur when a pregnant woman is Rh-negative and
-And, most importantly, if we as a member of the “auction”/audience want to hear the only copy of Lestat’s recording The Failures in Existence, we must be prepared to spend a lot of money. Rolin chose to frame the rest of the story of The Vampire Chronicles this way because he is baiting AMC to SPEND THE DAMN MONEY to greenlight seasons 4 and 5 and as a plea to us as the audience to support the show with our money to put pressure on AMC! The Phantom of the Opera framing device is important because even if seasons 4 and 5 aren’t greenlit, Rolin can end the first and only season of TVL and the whole The Vampire Chronicles on the epilogue/framing device that will tell us as the audience how everything shook out, and that “The Failures” is a spoken word album and apology that was only ever intended for Louis’ ears alone, and THAT is why we as the audience heard the details of Claudia’s journal in the telling, because Louis knew them and ONLY Louis knew them, and we were reliving the events with Louis as he remembered them.
The framing device ends with Louis going to visit Lestat’s “grave” empty-handed, only to find that Armand has left his winnings from the auction there for Louis, including Lestat’s still-sealed albums and the full magnum of blood there solely for Louis to find. Louis and the audience will understand that Armand has chosen to live without the eye in penance and apology for his role in killing Claudia, silently telling Louis he is “leaving the damage to remember the damage” he did, and as a memorial to Daniel, his missing other half, that Armand loved Lestat and both, but they were right for choosing each other over him.
Rolin James will be there, but will be revealed to either be Really Rashid in a glamor, Really Rashid having body-swapped into him, or being forced to act as a proxy/puppet for Really Rashid who steps out behind him, revealed to be the one actually in charge of whatever super secret “clean up all this supernatural vampire apocalypse bullshit” secret agency was behind the auction. Really Rashid tells Louis “capitalism” de Pointe du Lac to take a vacation and he has heard Auvergne is particularly nice this time of year. Rashid will give Louis a Night Island or Talamasca sweatshirt hoodie, which is suspicious because of how hot and humid it is in New Orleans where they are and Auvergne where Rashid recommended. If Raglan is there he will point this out, and Louis will tell him “shut up, Raglan” and deliberately pronounces it wrong with the em-PHAS-is on the wrong syllable. Rashid smiles coyly. Louis will put the sweatshirt on skeptically and Rashid will nod towards the hoodie pocket, where Louis finds his own initials embroidered in a call back to Dream!Stat in Paris with Louis, Really Rashid, and the audience understanding that Lestat is alive, waiting for Louis in Auverne where it all started if Louis wants to see him after he has finished listening to Lestat’s apology “the failures”, and Louis understands that Lestat keeps Louis’ initials not only over his heart but right over his dick. Louis shakes his head and rolls his eyes Ertha Kitt-style.
Lestat’s voice over (imitating Daniel's narration of his Practicum course that began the series) There are stories that deserve to be told, there are stories that are better when you don’t know the ending, and there are some stories–
[Armand in Daniel’s Brooklyn apartment, telling what he believes is a hallucination of Old Daniel “you’re not here” only for Daniel to reach out and physically touch his hand with all the fucking yearning and unresolved sexual tension of Mr. Darcy helping Elizabeth into the carriage in the 2005 Pride and Prejudice adaptation, and we get a gasp and a desperately aching “Beloved–?”]
--are no one’s fucking business but their own, and even Gremlins deserve their happy endings. As for myself? In the words of the great American poet Samuel Clemons–”
“Mark Twain, you pretentious fuck,” Louis grumbles fondly.
Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Louis, mon cher, I will not say come to me, only that I await you.
Louis travel montage to Auvergne like the montage to Dubai in season 1. Louis arrives to Lestat’s run down family estate. He’s swarmed by massif puppies and curious horses turn to him in the fields. There is a tiny, sad sign about “the vampire lestat museum” and Louis encounters Jarda!Lestat, a pathetic grifter trying to pry every penny out of his lookalikeness. Jarda!Lestat reveals himself to be Lestat playing Jarda playing Lestat by telling Louis “Perhaps Armand was telling the truth–I can play the part of a clown after all.” Lestat reveals he has been hiding here in his own birthplace disguised as Jarda because no one actually cares about his mortal past and it’s so patently ridiculous no one would ever believe it.
Lestat and Louis discuss Claudia, with Lestat revealing that Armand saved some of her and Madeleine’s mingled ashes from the Theatro and hid them, preserving her memory when Louis couldn’t, and they had been hidden in the magnolia tree all this time. Louis and Lestat discuss what to do with the ashes, where/whether to bury them, and Louis reveals Claudia and Madeleine had meant to travel the world together when Madeleine suggested they return to Paris to say good-bye to Louis. Louis apologizes, telling Lestat “you said I’d regret it every day for the rest of my life, and I do, I do” and Lestat takes his hand and says “I do, too” showing their relationship which was framed as a marriage in a church could only be restored by addressing their failures to each other and especially their shared failures as fathers/brother/uncle/Makers to Claudia. Louis and Lestst agree to release the ashes instead of burying them, so no one can exploit their grave or their story or disturb their rest. Lestat reveals the small urn to Louis, on which Armand had inscribed the immortal companions Madeleine and Claudia Eparvier, coven of 2. The final shot is of the ashes being released into the wind to travel together forever fulfilling Louis’ vision while turning Madeleine of Claudia dressed in yellow in the afternoon light.
don't you love it when you point out colonialist, racist, and ableist rhetoric by an all white writer's room that deliberately fired all their writers of color for their White Boi Special season and get called a Kapo on tumblr.com?
Someone with questionable media literacy:
Why are fans complaining that the TVL finale flattens and dehumanizes Armand's character? He's a traumatized child wirh the power of a monster who lashes out at the people he loves just like the books!
Me:
Which would have hit if the writers led up to it at all throughout the season or if it was aimed at Lestat or Marius or even in conversation with Louis after Armand apologized to two white men and accepted their vitriol and public humiliation. We want gremlin Armand but not in a way that negates his entire storyline or his love for Louis or the harm he's suffered under white supremacy and colonialism during his childhood, with Marius, with Gabi, under the Nazis, from Santiago, and even from Lestat. Would have loved to see him wrecking shit like Louis on the Fang Gang but against vampires in support of the great conversion. Instead we got "victims of CSA can never actually consent to sex let alone a BDSM dynamic because that's inherently abusive" levels of patronizing racist ableism. The amount of trust and love Armand had for Louis in season 2 to hand over that level of control was beautiful and the writers said "so that was all a lie"
Same person now with zero media literacy:
The fact that Louis, the most important person in his life for the last 77 years, was the focus of Armand's violence in no way implies that Louis was deserving of that violence. You want a morality play. You want the Hays Code reimagined to enforce your own moral code.
Me;
Hays Code? It's tumblr, no one here and queer wants the Hays Code.We want morally gtey and complex characters who do not serve a narrative of colonialism and racism. Armand torturing Marius or Lestat is the writer's room punching up. But Desi Armand torturing Black Louis when in the books Armand was the one who walked away and went to Lestat and told him Louis was actually still alive and floundering in this new century without him? Nah, fam. Miss me with that racist shit.
In another world where this season wasn't so shit I would be giggling about Danny saying "he's on the vampire spectrum" bc yeah that's exactly how I would explain my flavour of autism actually
heartbroken over tvl. there are pieces of my favorite show in there somewhere but the character writing and plot decisions this season are baffling. i miss the subtlety and care given to each character. iwtv will always have a special place in my heart, but i can’t say the same about the vampire lestat.
for me it’s just like. what was the precedent for any of that? like, narratively. armand and louis don’t interact before this. armand makes one comment about louis the entire season. it’s a negative one, but it doesn’t contain the sort of malice that would trigger saw trap alarm bells in me. maybe that’s on me but idk. i feel very familiar with armand as a character, with hindsight i can step into his shoes and understand how he might get to this point. apparently he was behind the regina thing (eyeroll) so i get that he’s been ruminating for a while. the idea that he’d grow bitter about his and louis’s relationship and think he’s entitled to an apology is not entirely out of character. but a little indication that he was feeling that way would’ve gone a long way. you don’t have to spoil the saw trap, but can’t you at least show me where his head is at so it feels sort of earned? they’ve kept his motivations so secret this season, to me this all felt very out of nowhere. i was thinking he was concerned about the great conversion, apparently not so much. i thought, given that he made larry kill himself and helped release lestat’s sex tape (i can’t believe the words i’m typing btw), that he was trying to sabotage lestat’s band, but that’s not it either. i mean, lestat embarrassed armand publically and told him to kill himself. that would serve as precedent in my book, but alas, no torture for lestat’s bodiless head. i get that they needed him to be in his death hallucination or whatever but still. when i watched episode 6 i was actually pretty surprised they had armand beheading louis instead of lestat. i really miss that ignorance. making louis the target of this feels contrived to me. and it sucks, because those scenes had some content that might have really spoken to me, but i cannot find enough peace in my own mind to enjoy them yet because louis in that situation is too hard to stomach !
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.
it’s really awesome how the tvl writers refuse to let the weight of any intense scene sink in, but are fine to let lestat meaninglessly jack himself off for the last twenty minutes of the finale.
there is a deep vein running throughout this show that dictates there can't be any solidarity, mutual love or even the most basic cordial relationship between two non-white characters, each black+brown character must love only their respective white partners
#bury your gays and women in refrigerators and the black guy dies first are all about treating marginalized people like props#to further the story of the (white straight male) protagonist#that's not the same thing as a tragedy! some stories are tragedies! whose story has weight and meaning - that's the question
The weakest part of the season for me was the dialogue. They took a big swing (and mostly missed) with the numerous pop culture references in these verbose ass word salad speeches to convey Lestat was saying a whole lot without meaning much but Jesus Christ, having Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Daniel Molloy talk about yaoi and being a manther — please save me. It was too on the nose, too meta, too and self aware. Show us Lestat serving cunt; we don’t actually need to hear him say that phrase.
And yes a lot of it is supposed to be cringe inducing on purpose but that doesn’t make it, like, good. For me, it broke immersion more often than not.
My next point relates this to the conversation happening around race at the moment. Claudia calling Louis a “slave” is wrong not because I don’t think Claudia is incapable of wielding anti-Black insults or that us Black people don’t ever use that kind of language against each other. However I think in context she would have said something more akin to calling him an “Uncle Tom”. There is a nuance to even the awful things we say to each other. Even when Louis compared the word fledgling to slave, it didn’t ring true to me. A comparable comparison would have been the n-word in that scene.
Also with this point, I’m not attempting to strip agency from the actors. The performers for Louis and Claudia are Black, however they aren’t Black American. There’s a specificity to how we speak to one another that you aren’t going to get without Black Americans in the writers room.
I’ve been talking quite a bit on this about the differences in how Black on Black verbal abuse/harm has boundary lines that most dare not cross because there are just some things you do not say to one another.
And I’m glad someone (OP) also has pointed out that it is very necessary, actually, to have Black Americans in the writing room because the racism and historical oppression they’ve endured is different to that of Asian Americans which is different to that of Mexican/Latino Americans, and so on. Each group has experienced racism and violence but the ways in which that violence is delivered differs. And this is exceedingly true when you try to have POC writers/actors (who have not lived the American POC experience) speak on behalf of characters that are, in the show, Black Americans that lived as humans in the post-slavery Jim Crow south—and in New Orleans no less!
It’s just so glaring the disconnect that is blanketed with the assumption that all minorities experience the same flavor of racism and that it doesn’t matter if you’re English or American or French, all racism is the same (/sarcasm). Black Americans, especially in the Jim Crow south in the 1910’s onward battled a very unique (and I don’t say that with kindness) brand of violence and it irks me that the layers upon layers of identity the community built around protecting its people from that violence have been removed and now we got two Black actirs from the UK using terms like a “slave” on each other when the actual term that is used and understood to be offensive without being downright disgusting is “Uncle Tom” because “Uncle Tom” is understood to be a wake-up call for the person it’s directed at just as much as it’s meant to be a slap in the face.
Again, it’s a culture thing and by not being initiated into, brought into, or a part of that culture, you miss the entire context on why certain things are acceptable and others aren’t
armand and lestat were vampires before louis was even a twinkle in his mama’s eye. tf does his mortal occupation of sexually exploiting mostly Black women have to do w them and their trauma and why must he answer to them for it? he’s done nothing to those men but occasionally not put their wellbeing first. mind you, men that stalked him and wouldn’t let him go once they got him. but they’re his prisoners and the exploited ones? like who is this evil unrepentant pimp the writers keep talking about? did i hallucinate an incredibly intoxicated and suicidal louis in confession expressing shame and regret or was it really willie dynamite? i mean wtf is going on? was lestat not a john and did he not become co-owner of the azalea (originally tom anderson’s), but he’s not a pimp? as if lestat didn’t kill miss lily, a sex worker! there have seemingly been no Black women of significance in louis’ life since claudia, so how and why are we to believe these writers genuinely care? not that these writers have the bandwidth for exploring ANY of that but let’s just be real. this season really is payback for s1 not being accepted as the “everybody’s equally an evil monster” show where historical accuracy was just set dressing and not to be genuinely engaged with. it’s payback for the work those Black writers put in and were praised for (because clear as day now that none of that was rolin or hannah’s doing).
"We were little boys. And the priest was teaching us our prayers. And the priest took us out to see the place where they burnt the witches in the old days, the old stakes and the blackened ground."
"Ah, that place." I shuddered. "That horrid, horrid place."
"You began to scream and to cry. They sent someone for the Marquise herself because your nurse couldn't quiet you."
"I was a dreadful child," I said, trying to shrug it off. Of course I did remember now—screaming, being carried home, nightmares about the fires. Someone bathing my forehead and saying, "Lestat, wake up."
But I hadn't thought of that little scene in years. It was the place itself I thought about whenever I drew near it—the thicket of blackened stakes, the images of men and women and children burnt alive.
Nicolas was studying me. "When your mother came to get you, she said it was all ignorance and cruelty. She was so angry with the priest for telling us the old tales."
I nodded.
The final horror to hear they had all died for nothing, those long-forgotten people of our own village, that they had been innocent. "Victims of superstition," she had said. "There were no real witches." No wonder I had screamed and screamed.
the vampire lestat (anne rice, 1985) | part 1: lelio rising (4) | lestat is reminded by nicolas of the time they saw the witches' place
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 don’t make any sense in-universe. :) and I worry for the future of this tv show :) but it’s 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 :)
the tvl writers really just said “fuck everybody” this season. they hate autistic people, they hate csa survivors, they hate brown people, they hate lesbians, they hate nonbinary people, they hate domestic abuse victims, they especially hate women, and most of all they hate black people.
I don't even understand why Armand would choose Louis for the vampire decapitation experiment. We know that Louis is weaker than Lestat, he has a history of under eating (only eat rats and cats) which makes him not as strong, meaning he would totally suck ass as a test subject on how long a vampire can last decapitated. Fareed keeps taking about "a vampire of Lestat's breeding" (he has the blood of Akasha!) which just felt like foreshadowing of him wanting to experiment on Lestat (also him experimenting on Lestat aligns with what he did in the books). Plus this whole time we thought Armand wanted to decapitate Lestat to stop his concert and Louis was just unfortunate collateral damage. It just felt like all the neon signs pointed TO Lestat and they wanted to pull a bait and switch on us so they made Louis the victim of horrific abuse again.
