The only person who has ever shown compassion to Lesmand is Louis. And yet they are the ones who brutalize him the most. Not their own abusers. Not each other, who they supposedly resent and have a love/hate relationship. But Louis. Again and again, they punish him for ânot loving them enough.â
These centuries old manchildren keep displacing their anger onto their partner while casting themselves as the victims, and somehow the fandom goes along with it.
What frustrates me most is that I love Armand as a character. But this isnât the Loumand from the books. This isnât who Armand should be tormenting. Why are the writers so determined to turn Louis into nothing but Lesmandâs emotional and physical punching bag?
And the Paul scene? Please leave Paul alone, Lestat. Paul believed his brother deserved so much more. The two of them loved each other unconditionally, something that stands in stark contrast to âI crushed what I couldnât ownâ and âI gave you to Armand.â
I genuinely hate this season.
I think I need to draw Louis instead and honor the character from Seasons 1 and 2, and honestly, even the Louis weâve known up until now. Because no matter what this season insists on saying about him, Louis always tried to find meaning, to understand, and to become better.
Jacob Anderson once said that Louis blames himself for things that arenât his fault, and thatâs exactly what this feels like. Louis desperately needs to stop empathizing with people who are actively abusing him.
Showing compassion to your abuser while theyâre still harming you, before theyâve even genuinely acknowledged what theyâve done, isnât healing.
all this explicit body horror only being reserved for black bodies in this show on top of the racially charged language and the bastardization of the black characters idk anymore man
they really came back to the writers room and said letâs humble louis. the victim of domestic abuse and racialized violence and marital rape who has only sort of become more confident needs to be taken down a peg. this is the most bold tonal switch ever made in television
that finale was shit. this show is ran by white supremacists. armand brands louis like heâs a fucking slave and carves an A in his chest. armand tortures louisâ dying body while lestatâs body is left alone. louis gets a painful victim-blaming apology forced outta him through torture and lestat gets a hallucination dinner. regina was used as a pawn by armand to torture louis with claudiaâs face and lead him to breaking down. regina is forced to slit her wrists and watch a man slit his throat while shes tied to a chair across louisâ decapitated head. but armand is given a heartfelt apology from the black person heâs actively torturing and killing. oh and also louâs torture is broadcasted and livedtreamed in a dark web snuffporn chatroom for random people to watch. how is this not the trial all over again??? armandâs âi took aesthetic pleasure in making your death visually exhilarating.â (an actual line from the show referencing why armand lynched louclaudia) all over again. this season and episode is horrifically racist. idk how i ever thought this show cared about black people.
I hate the masculization amc Louis experiences by the fandom because hes black....hes literally compared to a woman so many times and is such a complex character but you dont see shit because you hate black people and want to justify the abuse hurled to him by both of his romantic partners in canon!!!!!
really though, considering ep5 is written by hannah, i can't believe that the writers didn't understand how lestat's behavior looked like in that episode. lestat hasn't changed and he's still acting abusive to louis. it's louis who's changed and doesn't react as much as lestat wants him to (but he still unfortunately responds with self-flagellation when he's dealing with lestat in person).
i don't trust the writers nearly as much as i used to, but this is so fucking obvious that i don't think a professional writer who wrote two excellent episodes with realistic and complex depictions of abuse and even said that louis' victimhood won't ever be denied would be ignorant to not understand what she wrote. i mean, every writer has their blind spots, but it's simply impossible for me to believe.
i had a lot of fears in regards to louis in this season (if you know... you know), but i think if they truly wanted to villainize louis, they'd depict louis doing awful things to lestat. the worst louis has done this season was being weird with a woman who looked like his daughter & treating claudia as extension of himself again. it has nothing to do with lestat. and if they wanted to "humble" louis we'd see a lot more of him getting angry and jelous.
nothing like this happened. if you look past the framing and lestat's anger depicted through his pov, nothing happened. and if you take this season as "lestat hasn't changed at all", it starts making much more sense. lestat is acting as abuser who got his shit called out in public. and the more i go into this season, the more deliberate it seems.
this whole thing where Louis is called being a groomer and pimp (words that do not describe what he is doing with respect to Regina) reminds me of the boys where the fanbase would continuously deny that the female characters were raped when the show explicitly said that they were but when hughie was sexually harassed/assaulted, they said it was rape. itâs just telling how easily people will ignore definitions whenever it is convenient for however sympathetic they want certain characters to be.
people calling louis a pimp for paying regina to act as his dead daughter⌠thatâs not a pimp thatâs something entirely new and different. fandomâs insistence on positioning louis as the âpimpâ in his relationships to daniel, armand, lestat (who exploited/abused him) claudia, and now regina based off the line daniel said in 1.07 is extremely racially charged and also incorrect. why are people so quick to draw these associations and take danielâs racist statements meant to provoke louis as objective fact?
Finding Sam Reid for Lestat and having the good sense to update Louis to a Black, Creole capitalist dealing with his own falling house, like... pulling that off, JACOB ANDERSON, having these tools, pulling off Real Rashid and Armand and ASSAD ZAMAN and tHIS is what you're doing with it? Was the steak too tender, the lobster too juicy, the butter too buttery? Did you need to shove this fine spread off the table and replace it with a half smoked and soggy swisher sweets, an uncooked banquet meal, and a bag of funyuns? Oh, you threw glitter on the Funyuns? I DON'T CARE! WHAT DID YOU DO WITH THE FEAST????
iâm going to hold your hand when i say this. rachel reid has demonstrated such a degree of carelessness when it comes to shaneâs relationship with his race that itâs okay to disregard the text when analyzing shaneâs experiences with racism
Rachel Reid never had any intent behind making Shane a person of color and this passage below is the biggest proof of that:
âIlya glanced at the end of the table, where Shane was sitting.As Ilya had suspected, Shane looked confused and uncomfortable. Hockey had never made Shane sad for a minute of his life. Ilya couldn't pretend to know how it felt to be let down by the game he loved-not in the way Max or Ryan had been-but he was more aware of hockey'sflaws than Shane was. He'd been paying more attention, over the past few years, to the darker side of his sport.â
More on why Rachel Reidâs racial bias becomes extremely evident throughout Shaneâs arc below the cut.
So while writing a fic where Shane talks to his son about how hockey is hard for people that look like them and how itâs okay if he doesnât want to play hockey because of it, I recalled a few lines in The Long Game that donât sit right with me.
I have talked about how Rachel Reidâs refusal to engage with white supremacy as a core problem in hockey harms her analysis of the other problems that are present in hockey.
But this to me sits differently to that.
This to me is the clearest evidence that not a lick of thought was put into writing Shane as a biracial Asian man in a sport that is dominated by white people and a white supremacist culture to its core. It is also pretty clear that she doesnât think much of Shane with regards to his character motivations in the Long Game.
So letâs unpack this:
Rachel Reid, at least from Ilyaâs point of view has stated that Shane looks *confused* and uncomfortable by discussion of hockeyâs flaws. Iâll give you uncomfortable since itâs always uncomfortable when flaws in a thing you love as much as Shane loves hockey are brought up. But confused?
You are going to sit here and tell me a gay, autistic, biracial Asian man who has played hockey his entire life is unaware as to why some hockey players hate the institution? As if this isnât the same institution that is the reason Shane canât be public with the man he loves. As if he wasnât an Asian child playing hockey in Canada. And Asian child that was good at hockey.
To make my points in this, I will be using examples from prior to 2020 only despite, with an April 2022 release date, the long game manuscript being due April 2021 at the latest, which was after the hockey world had started reckoning with race.
There is extensive documentation of racism including anti Asian racism in Canadian Hockey that spans decades.
But letâs get more specific and talk about specific hockey players who have been open about their experiences:
Larry Kwong is the first person of Asian descent to be drafted and play in the National Hockey League. His debut season was in 1948 and he spent only 60 seconds on the ice. This was his only NHL game. Kwong is known for breaking the color barrier in ice hockey, despite First Nations players having played in the NHL first. I, personally, do not known enough First Nations history to comment on why that is.
In November 2019, a Calgary Flames coach resigned for being racially abusive to his players.
It took until 2019 for the NHL to implement stricter consequences for slurs.
A 13 year old Black child was racially abused by the opposing team and their fan, also in 2019.
Val James spoke about his experiences of racism in 2015.
Of the 8676 men that have played in the NHL, only 45 of them have identified as Asian. For the math challenged, that is 0.5% of total NHL players and many of these men are from recent years.
Shane is a minority (Asian) within a minority (people of color) in a sport that is dominated by white people.
There is zero, zero, zero chance that an Asian child makes it through peewee hockey without at least one experience of racism directed at them (or their parents). There is zero chance that that same child who turns out to be very good at hockey also makes it through triple A, major juniors, and all the way into the NHL without a single hockey related incident making a biracial Asian child sad.
Sidney Crosby has talked about adults encouraging their children to make dirty hits on him because he was very good at hockey.
An asian child in that same set of circumstances is in for a worse fate than Crosby because they are Asian and they are good at a sport that racist white Canadians tie to their national identity. Whatever abuse Sidney Crosby, who Shane is based partly off of, double it and give it to Shane and you might get close to how he was treated as a child.
Shane wouldâve been exposed to the worst of hockeyâs racism probably from the moment that anyone realized how good he was. Heâs always been the best everywhere heâs played which means heâs always been outperforming white children which means heâs always been exposed to the worst racism that Canadian hockey culture has to offer.
We know this because white kids in hockey get bullied for being good. We know this because children of color in hockey get bullied for being not white.
And Shane is BOTH!!!!!
Even removing hockey culture, do you not know that Asian children experience racism and prejudice in Canada, that they experience at school and on the playground and at the park and at summer camp, why the fuck wouldnât it be present in hockey when itâs the same damn kids? It is the âCanadians are too progressive to be racist!â bullshit that is their national image because theyâre marginally better than their neighbors to the south but it doesnât mean that racism doesnât exist.
The idea that a person of color doesnât know how bad hockey culture can be is absurd. The idea that said personâs white immigrant partner is somehow more aware of hockeyâs flaws than a person of color is absurd. The idea that a person of color is totally unaware and even confused by discussion of hockeyâs flaws is so difficult to imagine that itâs laughable.
The idea that hockey has never made Shane sad is functionally impossible. It relies on a history of Canada that doesnât exist, and certainly one that doesnât exist in the GCU universe seeing as Scottâs coach talks about the racism he faced and that doesnât all go away in a few decades, especially in an organization so reticent to change as the NHL.
Like, be so forreal, a biracial Asian man in a league that has had less than 45 Asian players total, who billeted and played hockey in a majority white city, who grew up playing hockey in Canada and then joined a league with a racism problem that is documented by the book has zero awareness of the flaws of hockey?
Are you seriously going to try and sell me on that?
The only logical explanation is that Rachel Reid wasnât writing Shane as a person of color. She was writing him from her white lens without a lick of regard to the ethnic background she gave him and it makes Shaneâs character lack so much dimension and depth in the long game.
Shane is the person who doesnât want to come out for no reason or the one who is so attached to his terrible team and teammates that he doesnât notice hockeyâs flaws instead of him being one of literally probably 5 Asian men in a league that starts the racial abuse at peewee and continues into the big leagues who has to manage being Asian and gay and dating his rival and all the implications that come with it.
You canât both make Shane an Asian man in hockey and make him totally oblivious to hockeyâs flaws.
trinity santos is a study in fandom misogyny because they gave her all the characteristics fandoms usually salivate for in men, being gruff, quippy and misunderstood with a tragic backstory but a heart of gold beneath it all. they put all this into her AND let her be a lesbian. she's everything you could ever want in a character but she's not a man so half the fandom either hates her or constantly mischaracterizes her as petty, callous and aggressive while doing mental gymnastics to baby the male characters around her
low-key rooting for whittaker to get with farm lady just bc hucklerobby is just a âputting the two most prominent white male characters together regardless of whether it makes senseâ ship and people are deeply annoying about it on this website
People do not appreciate how young both Ahsoka and Anakin were during the start and end of the war. So many fans in the fandom infantilise Obi-wan because he is the youngest on the council and he faces immeasurable pressure as an high general. However, in the effort to emphasise the youth of Obi-wan, the youth of Anakin and Ahsoka is instead overlooked. (Despite the fact he is 16 and 19 years older than Anakin and Ahsoka respectively)
Ahsoka enters the war as a fourteen year old child. She is barely a teenager and she's still growing (in human standards). No one in their right mind would send a stubborn headstrong teenager into a war zone -- but the Jedi do (which I will rant about some other time).
And then we have her guardian, Anakin Skywalker, 19 year old who just lost an arm and a mother and was thrust into the position of General of the GAR and Jedi Knight in the blink of an eye. Barely an adult himself, he was entrusted with the guardianship of Ahsoka, a child, in a war zone no less.
