hey i accidentally deleted my blog whilst trying to delete a sideblog so. hi. welcome to my blog.
about me
i can't decide on a name for myself ever. just call me whatever you know me by and if you don’t know me by anything follow your heart.
i like having actual discussions! do not be afraid to reply to my posts. if you say something that bugs me it won't be the end of the world, i promise. generally if i don't want commentary on something i'll say so in the tags, like if i'm worried a fandom will find my posts when i don't want them to, etc, but that doesn't really apply to followers and mutuals.
current interests: Warframe, IWTV, WolfQuest.
interests that will simply never die: black sails, the bedlam stacks, the sandman
actually annoyed by long distance friends again. i want to go for a walk i want to get drinks i want to sit in the grass and write i want to go to the fucking store together
hey man. nice regional dialect. mind if i apply some baseless assumptions about your personhood to it? i was also gonna prescribe morality to it as well. if that’s cool with you
Like “I realized that I was in the wrong and now I will work hard to atone” is good and all, but “how dare you infect me with morals” will always be so much more entertaining
I mean this very gently but if you've been reading people's analysis of TVL After Dark: Episode 7 and find yourself horrified by what's allegedly in it, I encourage you to watch it yourself and come to your own conclusions on how you feel about it... while also bearing in mind that we do not know these people and cannot interpret how they're feeling based on anything we see here. It's tempting to look at the actors and go "oh they must hate this as much as we do!" or to assume that they're concealing their true feelings and misery the entire time, but again: you cannot know that, and it's dangerous to assume otherwise.
Personally I am VERY critical of the season as a whole, especially episodes 6 and 7. I am critical of the writers, including Rollins who is present in this interview, and the decisions they made that led to the way this season reads overall. So I went into this video fully expecting to find people's analysis validated in the light of that. But in actuality, I'm startled by just how much I've seen taken out of context and misinterpreted.
For example: I've seen people say that Zaman putting his hands up and saying "Let's leave it at that" after the interviewer praises the season is evidence that he was uncomfortable and wanted to avoid talking any further about it; in the same moment, Delainey makes a kind of humorous expression that people have interpreted as her being unable to hide her belief that this season actually sucks, so she's laughing at the idea that it's "the best season of television" (paraphrasing the interviewer here).
But if you actually watch the video it's clear, at least to me, that the joke with Assad isn't "actually the season sucks, let's not talk about it". It's hard for me to explain in words what I think the joke ACTUALLY is, but it's something like, responding to a compliment by being like "You're praising us, we can just stop there, interview over we heard everything we needed to hear!" . You know? I promise it makes more sense in the actual video; the fact that I'm having trouble putting it into proper context is exactly why I think people need to see it for themselves! Similarly, Delainey looking at Jones when the interviewer praises their work doesn't read as her failing to contain her poker face or whatever, it just looks like she's looking to him for a reaction like "Ooh, high praise!".
There are other examples too that I'm not going to go into too deeply because it would take too long. But briefly, here's some that I've seen talked about a lot in a way that I think misrepresents what actually happens in the video. Obvious disclaimer that I'm doing some interpreting myself here, but I'm trying to stick to what is actually shown on the screen and not what I think about what's happening in anyone's heads:
Moscovitch says she doesn't know how much of Louis' 'apology' to Armand was genuine because he was under duress. I've seen people frame that as her claiming Louis is unreliable, but to me it seemed more like a genuine acknowledgment that Louis was having this apology tortured out of him. People have said that Anderson immediately defends Louis against her - but actually, the conversation continues for a while until he circles back to it and says that although Louis was under duress, he feels it was genuine. There's no indication that he's upset or angry here any more than there was any indication that Moscovitch thinks Louis is a liar.
People have claimed that Delainey "didn't want to talk about Regina", but Delainey answers multiple questions about her.
Jones talking about why Louis apologised to Armand did come off a little iffy to me, but it's because I think it was a very poor writing decision that led to the season demonizing Louis unnecessarily rather than having him 'take accountability', not because I think Jones felt xyz way or was behaving in xyz way. There's no evidence that Jones was gleefully punishing Louis on purpose. But there is evidence that for whatever reason, he and the other writers thought that Louis hadn't taken enough accountability for what he did to Claudia. Which I personally think is dogshit, but that's another conversation...
Here's the full dialogue:
JONES: "I think it's extraordinary, after a season, maybe me and you can say, aggressively naval-gazing, and being involved in your stuff, that these words come out of your mouth… to the least, in theory, deserving person… That you go "Wait, is there some part of me, of what I did in my life, that made this guy not only separate my head but play a long game with this person? To try to, like… I clearly must have something to do with that." And that he offers up this… Especially after the seance, and all the like, "I've got work to do", that's the beginning of real work. When we talked about this season for Louis, we were like, you did put him in a graceful place, and a place that he had moved, but we kept thinking about the dress on the wall. And we were all in the room going, "No, nope. You don't get off that easy."
ANDERSON: It's like, that's Louis' way, in a small way, of like, "The fault was mine*" or like, some kind of accountability.
*Context note: this is a reference to the way that (as previously discussed in the video) Lestat saying 'the fault was mine' at the very end is supposed to be him finally, truly, actually taking accountability.
The actors don't look like they're being held at gunpoint to be here. They look like they're listening to what's being said. You can't assume that they're "using PR speak to say what they really feel without saying it" - that is mind-reading. I completely understand why people want to believe this things, believe me! But you just can't know any of that, and it's not helpful to anyone to insist otherwise. Same with assuming that anyone in the room is feeling sad, angry, or resentful because they're not actively smiling and laughing at any given moment, or trying to interpret what it means when a cast member looks to another cast member, or assuming you know how they feel about Jones and Moscovitch.
Even assuming you know how Jones and Moscovitch feel about this season or why they wrote what they wrote, or how aware or ignorant they were of the racism that they ended up portraying, is folly. You do not know. You can make assumptions, but that's all you can make. Assuming that Jones personally hates Louis or Jacob Anderson because of the way Louis is written this season is, again, not something you can know, and neither is literally anything else about how these people think or feel in their own private lives or minds.
I'm not saying don't be angry. I'm not saying that anyone is excused from the impact of their writing/directing/production decisions - I've talked relentlessly about how antiblack, racist, queerphobic, and outright nonsensical and unpleasant to watch this season has been, and I do believe Jones and Moscovitch and whoever the fuck else bear responsibility for that. But I don't think it's helpful to approach this situation, especially the video we see here, with a mindset of "I know exactly how everyone involved here thinks and feels about the decisions that were made here, and I can judge them based off of that". Reserve your anger and your judgment for the things we do and CAN know (the actual outcome and impact of the season), not what you think you can interpret or intuit about a bunch of strangers in an interview.
END OF POST READING COMPREHENSION CHECK:
Did the author of this post state that Jones and Moscovitch DON'T hate anyone, that the actors are happy to be there and have no issues with the writing or writers, or did they say that we can't know either way?
Did the author of this post state that the reader is wrong to be angry or upset about the antiblack racism, queerphobia, and general awful and harmful writing of this season, or did they state that the reader should be careful about projecting those feelings onto strangers and assuming their personal interpretation of events they weren't involved in is factual?
Is the author an [insert subject here] apologist or is their blog full of critiques of that exact thing in regards to this season of TVL?
Okay last catchup for now- BoxCarGar's fishsona heehee It's been a minute since I last did a lineless style and definitely wanna play with it more, also bc finally figured out a brush setting that works for it better lol
trying really really hard not to get into fandom discourse. but i must say. the problem with the lack of queer intimacy in this season isn’t coming from a place of “i want to watch boys kiss uwu”. and to pretend anyone is saying that is disingenuous and you know it.
the PROBLEM is that this show used to never shy away from queer intimacy. the FIRST EPISODE had one of the best sex scenes i’ve ever watched in a tv show. louis and lestat kissed all the time, they hugged and cuddled, etc. then season two, louis and armand of course, but also lestat and armand! and louis and dreamstat! narratively there was no real reason to show them making out and drinking from each other (more on that later). but they do! because this is the gay vampire show with gay vampires!
and now, what do we get from s3?
1. transphobic joke at the expense of a nonbinary vampire, they get misgendered, then they die.
2. CANON transmasc/gnc character in the books gabi is turned into a hyper femme dommy mommy character. so not only did they erase her identity from the books, but they decided to swing SO HARD in the other direction. it feels like they only made gabi SO feminine bc they really wanted to go with the incest plotline and god forbid they show lestat making out with anyone who’s not overtly feminine.
3. SO MANY sex scenes. with women. they age up baby jenks, seemingly just so she can fuck lestat. weird. then lestat kisses his mom in like every other episode, and they get PLENTY of sex scenes. NOT ONLY THAT, but she drinks from him in ep2 as well. so we get literal and metaphorical vampire sex. AND GABI ALSO FUCKS JARDA? we SEE. ON SCREEN. GABI FUCKING JARDA. it could have gotten the point across to just hear them moaning and screaming from the other room. it just feels egregious to include that but not any queer intimacy on screen at all.
4. all of the hype around dm for this season. ebogo saying he needed an intimacy coordinator, assad and eric alluding to sucking and fucking since s2 ended!! (for the record i’m not blaming either of them for the lack of onscreen queer intimacy we got this season. i’m just saying their comments led to an expectation that was not fulfilled)
5. a fetishized gross, egregious lesbian makeout from regina and fake madeline, for louis’ benefit. i have a couple questions about this because like there’s no way louis ASKED them to do that right? he’d get nothing from watching his daughtersister make out with her girlfriend. and yes i UNDERSTAND THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE UNCOMFORTABLE. but that means we’re allowed to have a deliberately uncomfortable lesbian kiss on screen but nothing else? doesn’t seem much better.
and what DONT we get from s3??
ANY QUEER INTIMACY THAT MATTERS.
sure, maybe lestat and louis aren’t at the point in modern day where they want to be physically intimate. we get the pinky touch and basically nothing else. fine. i personally think that’s a stupid justification for blatant queerphobia but fine.
lestat and nicki DONT EVEN KISS in the flashbacks of them in paris. i thought they were in love?? not enough for even a single kiss between them? louis was making out with dream!stat in s2 and lestat can’t kiss nicki even once?? if ANYONE deserved a kiss this season it was nicki and lestat. that even could have been a great narrative device! to show the difference between lestat’s intimacy with nicki juxtaposed with his scenes with gabi. but no. fine.
and in modern day as well, lestat is only allowed to be shown having casual sex with random women, or his mother. it just seems like a glaring omission from mister lestat “non-discriminating” di lioncourt. louis got to have on-screen casual sex with jonah in s1! this show has NEVER been scared of queer intimacy before. these omissions are GLARING. this problem is NOT just people missing hot men kissing on screen, and if you think that’s what literally anyone is arguing, you are being intentionally dense. this is a real problem with the season.
also it’s like… my bad i didnt watch the episode delete this if they answer it there but does that mean santiago was still alive after being beheaded?? hello?
nah, it's very much a s3 retcon of "they can survive for a few minutes, or up to two hours after being beheaded under the right conditions/if they're being actively kept alive". santiago was almost certainly dead within minutes
