DIE HISTORIC

lu j. • name a shrub after me; something prickly and hard to eradicate.

[kira-kui-n]

"get him pregnant" well thats not my thing but to each their own

"get her pregnant" *takes up my sword and shield* i wont let you do that to her. ......................

[theburialofstrawberries]

awesome awesome interview with Emily Wilson

[soup-mother]

But like genuinely. "humans have an innate need for spirituality" should be pretty transparently a reactionary opinion. It's simply not true and equates something that some people get benefit from with it being a fundamental aspect of being human (and one that is missing it most people today). You gonna start arguing "children *need* fathers or they grow up broken" next?

[llycaons]

if only...

[jethroq]

[aphleos]

prev dont leave this in the tags

[silvergryphonart]

Literally the definition of imperialism and classism. Doesn’t matter how many peasants you sacrifice as long as the most powerful piece is left standing

[musicalhell]

Proximity of bishops to the rulers promotes theocratic oppression

[juh-was-deactivated19691231-dea]

the horse is so fuckable

[dailywomen]

ROSAMUND PIKE photographed by Grace Difford for GQ Hype (2026)

[ceofjohnlennon]

John Lennon photographed by John Howard on the set of "How I Won The War," October, 1966.

Scan © @harrisonarchive.

[ceofjohnlennon]

Many random shots of John Lennon photographed by John Howard during the filming "How I Won The War," October, 1966.

Scan © @harrisonarchive.

Look at him... So sweet.

[cursedsappho]

[sunflower-eddiediaz]

boobs should have a toggle on/off feature

[desinteresse]

Men who talk shit about gold diggers underestimate the grit it takes to put up with an insufferable man, even when money is involved. We should be thanking them for their service like they are veterans.

[4e3076]

hmm... this highly personal vent post seems like the perfect place to lay my roleplay egg...

[inkatesbush]

Ultimately better call saul reminds us not to gaslight your brother until he kills himself

[warningsine]

TVL + Claudia

So.

This has always been a structural problem imo: Claudia is absent from the present day narrative so her story can only be told through her parents. Like even when the show showed Claudia's suffering, the emotional payoff belonged to Louis and Lestat.

3.03 wishes to be 2.07, but it's not.

Claudia's rape became a device to deepen the audience's sympathy for Lestat, redirecting attention away from her.

And in a season where the main female character (Gabriella) has a pretty paper thin characterization, well. It's not a good look.

[lewyn-martell]

Haven't seen s3 yet but Claudia has always struck me as the weakest link character-wise in a story that should have by its own design her and Louis at the center. It bothered and irritated me immensely how low-effort her character build-up was compared to Louis, Lestat and sometimes even Armand. Like damn I just watched some extremely compelling defining yet subtle moment for Louis and then we turn around and Claudia is idk acting like a 7 year old when she's double that age. Pushing some racist child to the ground. Drunk giggling after some serial killing. To show how twisted she got. It's like she never escaped her position of being a doll even functionally in this narrative and that is not forgivable to me when we got her fucking diary too. And I don't think Louis seeing her as his comfort blanket is enough of an excuse either.

It gets to a point that it feels offensive that one of her few character traits of feeling always left out and incomplete (as she was made, the poor girl) is reflected on how the narrative itself treats her. This is why I could never get as hype about this show as most of the people here, along with it being a sausage party. After watching the 2 seasons I was like hmmm it feels to me you guys (writers) don't really like or care about women (Antoinette too got a whole lot of fucking nothing plus a gruesome death after being Lestat's second all season that he wanted to turn into another immortal companion)... I wonder... But now hearing about Gabrielle (or Gabriella, whatever. Boils my piss a little that they even made her name sound more feminine considering the whole gender side of it) it just cements it to me that I guess this team just does not fuck with women.

[warningsine]

Yeah, I mean, the show inherited a problem that already existed in the books. Like you said, it's a sausage party.

I know I'm being harsh when the season's not over yet, but we're more than halfway through (4 out of 7 episodes) and Gabrielle's (my bad, not Gabriella!) reinterpretation is, um, interesting to say the least.

(Both seasons 1 & 2 required patience, sure, but you couldn't call the half first of their respective episodes bad. I sincerely don't get what critics who haven't seen the finale and viewers see in the first half of season 3. Episode 4 was better, episode 3 had some strong moments.)

They made Gabrielle more manipulative, emotionally abusive and politically influential and yet so far she's been a stereotype/caricature with a horrendous "French" accent, a stupid wig and none of the complexity she had in the novels. (And I know that's not Ehle's fault, because she very much can act.)

Season 3 gives significantly more psychological depth to Lestat (the white man of the show, who's the frontman of a white band and has a white lawyer in a season that was marketed more than the previous two combined for songs that are beyond mediocre) while compressing the arcs of women like Gabrielle, who's there to fuck Lestat (are we supposed to be shocked there are incestuous sex scenes in a gothic story?) and his lookalike while screeching like a banshee.

We'll see what they'll do with Akasha, but now that the black writer is out of the picture, I don't trust them one bit.

I sure have thoughts about

them making Regina, the black girl that looks like Claudia, have an OnlyFan account, a history of scams and a stolen car.

Lestat misgendering a nonbinary guest character and humiliating Armand in a crowd of people/writing a song about him with the Nazi "SS" on it (rich coming from a white guy). Like, we get it, Lestat's an asshat. We been knew since season 1. In this season, he talks like an extremely online Tumblrlina for some reason. (The reason is that the creators need to stay away from Twitter and the stans as well as stop focusing so much on present day shenagigans when TVL the book was set in the past.)

They used Claudia's words about her rape to make Lestat more sympathetic by showing his own abuse instead. Yeah, that's her father, alright, but it's a father that abused her and threatened to kill her. It's not like there's thoughtful commentary on the cycle of abuse.

(Meanwhile, the other father of hers killed that guy who raped Claudia, but then realized that's not gonna bring her back and now we have Regina pretending to be Claudia.)

[lewyn-martell]

Thanks for your answer I really like to know your thoughts! It's very satisfying to me that you touched on the racism because even though I think Louis is a fantastic compelling Hydrogen Bomb of a character, something about the tying up of his arc in s2 still left me with a bit of a bad taste (or maybe I just don't like the fan reactions and fandom consensus)... If I understood correctly you seem to like 2.07 so it'd be interesting to get your perspective.

It's just that to me there is a heavy racialized power dynamic that is not exactly at the core of the Loustat, but that Lestat makes use of in his desire to have Louis and of course Louis feels deeply even when he doesn't want to. Even while he himself denies he was ever abused, Lestat's power over him still comes off in his narrative, not only in the vampire / maker / more experienced / holder of the "truth" (or some truths that are hard for Louis to face) way, but also in the power he sought to hold over Louis in the household and in the relationship that like it or not had a strong racial undertone. Unlike a lot of people, I don't see Louis as some abused housewife female-coded figure, whatever that means. I love that he is a patriarch, a pimp and a ruthless capitalist and can be capable of going through or being the architect of his own misery and passing it down to others. But It didn't sit right with me that Louis accepting responsibility and harder truths he had been hiding from had to include re-framings of said racialized dynamic to try and "make it more balanced," as if that's coherent.

For example, I loved to see Lestat's version of Claudia's turning. That was one of the best reframings they could have done because Louis skirts blame for so much irt Claudia. But they also went the extra mile to go like "see? Louis hit Lestat too. See? Lestat wasn't like a looming suffocating Master figure, he was an emotionally unequipped man in the weeds of a "mutually toxic relationship." See? Louis frames Lestat as the perpretator and feels weirdly victimized by him when by Lestat's POV the truth must be a balance between them and represent their relationship itself as more balanced than Louis wanted to admit.

And I am aware you can widen or bridge the gap to almost any degree you'd like when you're talking about 2 unreliable points of view (up to a point that still respects the story being told, that I personally think many fans cross). But the push of the narrative towards this kind of realization still felt really strong to me and I didn't like it. And to make things worse, I don't think Louis himself needs Lestat to "have a valid point" to have an excuse to run back to him. Especially when all he needed was the knowledge that Lestat saved him in the trial to let go of all the shit he must have narrated as en exasperating pov that has been a thorn on his side (& putting into question his whole past) into stuff that deserves serious internalizing. I don't necessarily have a problem with this intent itself when it's a huge part of his character arc, but I do have a problem with this campaign to de-victimize Louis as much as possible when I actually think he had very valid reasons to feel victimized by Lestat in particular. That no matter how he framed it, with the intent to make it worse or to make it better, Lestat was undeniably an abusive pressure in his world that did everything to trap him in it. I also massively disliked the complete turn of using Daniel in season 1 to make Louis accept how horrible Lestat was to him to in turn make the protection and love Louis showed him in the assassination plan even more of a gut-punch (a Loustat thing even *I* liked because it required facing both sides) to making Daniel the number one Loustat defender in season 2.

Also, it was nearly comical how learning that Lestat had the power to save someone and still decided to let Claudia die like that put the cherry on top of the narrative of the girl who is never chosen and never enough, even after she has actively tried to get something for herself and get out. It would have impacted me as a tragedy more if Lestat hadn't gotten the most amount of grace possible as someone who actively participated in her murder, under threat or not (smth that hadn't even been touched upon), just because Armand was the one directing everything behind the scenes. I don't care that he's been living in squalor for self inflicted misery, he should still live in salt for everything he did and saving Louis still doesn't quite cut it and it doesn't work either as a catalysis for Louis to see his life as a gift rather a curse to me. Lestat's devotion to conditional safety in exchange for the shackles of eternal love and companionship is their base dynamic and him doing it for nothing in return this time didn't strike me as romantic and psyche-altering at all, just the bare fucking minimum. Even disliking Loustat as a ship as I do, I can still appreciate all of their good scenes, and their reunion didn't feel right to me at all. This is part of why I think they're far more narratively honest in their worst moments and downfall than when they're trying to sell me their ups. I didn't need Lestat's trial monologue to have already seen him as a person rather than *just* some abusive figure and I don't appreciate toning down the latter to make him more like the former. Abusers are still people, and they can still be compelling even without this babying by the writing.

And now I hear about this racism of s3/TVL and that apprently they're retconning the fall (color me surprised 🙄) and I lose all hope for this show (nvm how I already don't like everything I'm seeing with Daniel and Armand either). The misogyny I had high hopes they would turn around. As you said, it was a feature of the books that this is men men men everywhere, but even then, I still felt like Claudia was supposed to be at its center along Louis and it still was very unbalanced. Gabrielle was supposed to be their saving grace in my eyes, but well. They're already doing everything I don't like for an incestuous dynamic and dysfunctional parent-child joint. & knowing comparisons to the source, it seems like a flattened out version in most aspects.

btw you absolutely don't have to answer everything or even at all, I do realize I'm mostly venting hhsusba

[bifauxnenarmand]

[joeychadass]

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[ripjonny]

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