my final thoughts on tvl (mostly under a read more as this is a very long post):
from the moment the first episode of the vampire lestat dropped, it was evident that this show was going to be nothing more than a shoddy, poorly paced mess that cared more about humiliating louis—alongside its other black and brown characters—than telling any sort of cohesive or lovingly crafted story. the amc team set out to undo the two previous seasons of impactful writing, and punish those of us who resonated with interview with the vampire and the characters it presented to us viewers.
rolin, hannah & co. rewrote some of their powerhouse characters (louis, claudia and assad) around uplifting a white man and excusing him of the things that he's done, but even in that they failed. because this season did not make lestat more likeable; it barely fleshed out any of his past, but made it a point to show us him kissing his mother every episode, and even that was oftentimes played for no more than shock value or laughs. there was no character development on lestat's part, even when other characters' writing was sacrificed to exonerate him.
there is genuinely no winning with this fandom or show as a black viewer. when the first season came out everyone went on and on about Book Accuracy™ and how the changes made were an affront to the legacy of anne rice's story. and as a result it was review-bombed by racists for how unabashedly black it was. then season two came out and everyone took the opportunity to say that louis was lying about what happened and that he was on an equal playing field regarding lestat and armand. and critics couldn't be bothered to praise jacob, delainey and assad for their incredible performances, instead turning the spotlight on sam, despite lestat being one of the more minor characters until ep 7. and things only got worse once iwtv ended
s3/tvl started promo and already the shift was obvious. rolin talked shit from day one "it's the lestat show", "it's no longer two old men sitting in a room", "the season ended with hugs and kisses", "if you hate this season you hate lestat and daniel" etc. sam had to correct rolin twice over the things he was saying regarding other cast members. promotion for this season when above and beyond, every poster was a lestat solo and people argued that that was due to this being lestat's season. ignoring the fact that lestat was still a prominent character on many of the s2 posters. they did countless tv spots and photoshoots and a live concert and a fashion collab, and basically did everything in their power to promote this now white-led season as much as they could.
they baited people with loustat and lestat flashbacks and incredible writing, claiming that this was their best season yet, and there's been either none or very little of those things. the pacing is awful, louis been reduced to a caricature and punching bag, and not a single character feels fully flushed out or written with genuine passion. yet the book purists aren't kicking up nearly as much of a fuss. lestat being a rockstar was not as big of a plot point as it's been during this season, and they're focusing so much on that (and his relationship with gabriella) that the writing is suffering tremendously.
but then again, i can't even say that because a lot of the choices feel very sinister and intentional: all the women we've seen thus far being sexual props (dee basically just being toted around as a groupie to fuck lestat and whoever else, gabriella being a poorly constructed "femme-fatale" and fucking lestat and whoever else every episode, regina having an only fans, tc having unresolved desires about motherhood(?), christine fucking lestat/being mocked for that and also having a sex dungeon or something? the faux-madeleine kiss). what happened to our well-written and interesting characters? can women not be engaging to viewers unless they're sexual in some way, shape or form?
and louis....they've completely butchered his character to a degree that, as ive said a hundred times before, feels incredibly racist and deliberate. anyone that tries to say that the writers didn't purposefully set out to humiliate louis' character and subject him to as much antiblack racism as possible are purposefully ignoring the evidence in favor of supporting the garbage that was shoveled at us this season. what narrative explanation is there for:
louis apologizing to lestat for a book he didn't want written
louis being called a "nappy headed slave"
louis being told that he can't escape the slave mentality etched into his being
louis being told by claudia that she hates him more than her abusers, rapists, and lynchers
louis sympathizing with a man who mocked his suicide attempt
louis making a comment on being sexually assaulted as a child and never having it explored
louis specifically having his head cut off and put on display
louis being tortured by armand (the man who organized his lynching) and apologizing to armand
louis having armand carve a branding (the first letter of armand's name) into his chest following his (louis') being called a slave in the prior episode
louis' torture being broadcasted live as some sort of fucked up red-room bullshit
louis not seeing the ghost/hallucination of his brother, but that being reserved for lestat. and that ghost then apologizing to lestat on louis' behalf and thanking lestat for "loving him the way he needs to be loved".
nothing that the writers had louis experience this season did anything for his character, he was used for torture porn and to lick the wounds of his white (ex)-partner, who he still refers to as the love of his life. louis is denied the right to be a victim and expected to understand that everything he went through was ultimately a result of his own sins and flaws. why was louis not someone that armand apologized to when he wrote his letters? because those apologies were reserved for white men that he did not hurt nearly as much as louis?
why did armand torture louis but leave lestat alone? why did the writers have armand torture a black woman as a way to hurt louis, but lestat was spared from this horrific abuse? why did louis have to apologize to armand for not loving him or whatever the fuck, while lestat was, as i said, not faced with this name vitriol? i don't even care about "ship wars" at this point, but why did armand tell louis that he never really loved him? and to expand on that point; why did claudia also tell louis that lestat was the one that she actually liked? why, again and again, is louis being shown as unlovable, undesirable, and the true evil villain that has plagued everyone's past.
there is a specific sick joy taken by the writers in subjecting louis (and regina and claudia) to as much antiblackness and suffering and cruelty as possible. louis is a victim as much (and even more, at times) than any one of the other main characters this season, and yet that is constantly cast aside so they can continue to push this rhetoric that louis is The Awful, Manipulative Pimp.
nevermind the fact that lestat murdered prostitutes and kept dee around to do no more than fuck and drink from her. nevermind the fact that armand kidnapped people to be tortured and eaten for his shitty plays. nevermind the fact that lestat and armand directly contributed to the almost-lynching of louis and the lynching of his daughter and her lover. "they're all monsters, they're going to behave this way" except for when its louis, then he needs to be repeatedly punished?
and with regards to the trial: why is that never fully addressed again? lestat can be disproportionately mad at louis for a book daniel wrote and published (without his permission), but louis can't be upset at lestat for taking part in the murder of their daughter? they couldn't even be bothered to write lestat telling louis that he was under armand's control. would that have not been another way to absolve this white man of his crimes, as they're so eager to do? but because they have it said two times that lestat went there of his own volition, we're just supposed to gloss over the fact that this man knowingly planned to murder his lover, and succeeded in murdering his daughter? but louis is the one that apologizes and begs for forgiveness??
this is a quick aside, but they also completely ruined armand's character. they took such a complex, interesting and fantastic character and stripped him of all his parts. now he's just the undesirable south-asian man (which is horribly racist in and of itself) that deluded himself into thinking he and lestat had a relationship, and apologizes genuinely to his white lovers but hates the black man he lied to and brainwashed for 77 years. the writers use armand as another character (like claudia) to spew their personal hatred for louis, and believe that they will be above reproach because armand is not a white man.
armand is a survivor of csa and that is their excuse for how he brutally tortures louis and drags an apology out of him, but when does he subject gabriella to this? she abused lestat for decades and decades as both a mortal and a vampire. but since that wasn't done to armand he doesn't care? but oh wait...that argument falls apart when you realize that louis didn't sexually abuse armand either. he is being punished for something he did (not to armand) over a century ago, and if that's the case, lestat and armand and gabriella should be drawn and quartered for their crimes. but, no, nothing anyone else does matters, this season is solely about humiliating louis as much as possible. lestat and daniel actually made fun of armand's trauma this season, but it's louis that deserves to be tortured....right, right...
i really don't even care about loustat at this point, but we were told that we were going to see louis "through lestat's eyes" and that it was going to be beautiful and this was allegedly the coolest louis has ever looked. but all we've gotten is lestat being horribly cruel to louis and calling him crazy, mocking his suicide attempt, and acting put-upon when louis goes to him for help. the closest we came to genuine loustat was at the very beginning of the season. and then when the book dropped they used that as an excuse to have lestat disparage louis in one way or another every time he's mentioned or they share a scene.
every single relationship louis made in the iwtv s1 & s2 is butchered or straight-up retconned. daniel wanted to reconcile with louis but all of a sudden doesn't care about that and is willing to help armand enact his laughably villainish plan? armand was chasing after louis and begging him to understand the end of the previous season but now he's torturing louis and forcing him to apologize for...what exactly? claudia berates him and the complex feelings she had for louis are watered down to vitriolic rage and antiblack language reserved solely for only one of her parents? lestat was tearful and remorseful during the iwtv s2 finale but is now mocking louis' suicide attempt and calling him a cancerous jackal?
the finale was all of their grievances with louis and hatred for the explicit blackness of the first two (but especially first) seasons rearing its nasty, ugly head. they succeeded in destroying beloved characters and giving the racist fans that hated louis exactly what they wanted. they backed out of and changed almost every writing choice they made during iwtv s1 and s2, and even if their end goal for this show was to drive louis and lestat back together, they did that in the most manufactured and racist way possible.
there was no story told this season, we learned almost nothing new by the end of it. akasha didn't even awaken and the rockstar angle was pointless and used as nothing more than to artificially pad the runtime and make up plot points that went literally nowhere. tvl felt like the writers fucked up version of a 'fix it' fanfiction, because there was nothing that needed to be fixed in iwtv to begin with.
in conclusion, this show did not need to be made. begging jacob to come back just for his character to be treated this way was very, very callous and disrespectful to the phenomenal acting that jacob does. to say im disappointed and heartbroken for jacob, delainey and assad would be an understatement—they have been forced to defend and explain awful choices made for their characters this season despite not having been the ones to write them. and people will continue to use them as scapegoats for this season to pretend that "they were on board" with the racism and antiblackness, as if black and brown actors aren't repeatedly blacklisted for speaking out against bigoted writing choices. my heart bleeds for whatever jacob and assad will be subjected to at sdcc.
tldr; this season would have been written completely differently had louis, claudia and armand been white as they were in the books. rolin, hannah and the others writers for this season sought to create an antiblack, racist, misogynistic, misogynoir-laden mess in a failed attempt to rewrite their white lead's cruelties and victimize him at the expense of every non-white character in the show. and they delight in watching a large portion of their viewership happily consume this slop and defend every single one of their writing choices while their black and brown cast are put on the spot to defend this shit. it is obvious, and to defend or excuse it is doing no more than showing that you support what they've done and don't care about how harmful it is.
and, finally: if you're going to come into my comments or ask box to defend the blatant racism this season, please do not waste your breath. im at the point now where i will be blocking you instead of explaining my thoughts for the hundred millionth time. and beyond that, i have no desire to go back and forth with racist, media illiterate people on the internet.
a misogynistic society is so threatened by the concept of trans women - women that "had the opportunity" to be privileged men and chose not to - that they start making up privileges women have in order to explain why trans women exist. going into womens restrooms isnt a privilege, playing womens sports isnt a privilege, lesbianism isnt a privilege, yet they present them as such to try and explain why trans women are women for nefarious reasons. a misogynistic society will never understand that trans women have no ulterior motive for being women
the way some people who love tvl aren't content to just enjoy the season on its own terms but seek out and try to shut down any critique of the season shows how insecure and anxious they are about what this season depicts- and the fact that they're worried that the critics specifically of the show's bigotry might be right or might be making valid points, and what they think it might say about them that they enjoy tvl despite (or honestly sometimes because of) the writing's descent into narrative antiblackness, queerphobia and even more overt misogyny than what was in s1-s2. a lot of mostly-nonblack, and within that group mostly-white, viewers have either been completely oblivious to the textually racist choices of s3, unbothered by it, or even straight-up reveling in it- however, these are viewers who for the most part self-identify as "liberal" or "progressive" or "anti-racist", and they attach more value to those labels than they care about the work of actually being progressive and anti-racist. this is why so many white people act like being called a racist is a more grievous offense than actually being racist, and why they think a black person calling out racism (even in "polite" and conciliatory tones that are usually perceived as attacks and aggression anyway) is worse than a white person being racist. and despite a lot of performative claims about how these characters are all monsters and all evil and what they enjoy in fiction has nothing to do with their real politics or morals, these viewers identify extremely closely with the show and it's an integral part of their fannish identity online, to the point that they perceive any criticism of the show as an attack on themselves. there's also a fair amount of moral anxiety involved bc despite the performative gothic genre monster evil edgelord posting, a lot of them tacitly buy into the idea that they're good people with progressive values, this is an inherent quality about them instead of goodness or progressiveness being an active form of work that you do, therefore anything they enjoy and identify with has to be good and progressive.
and that brings us to the critique of tvl's bigotry and where the cognitive dissonance kicks in- these are liberal(tm) and progressive(tm) viewers- they're good(tm) people. and they know a good and liberal and progressive person should notice and care about racism. they've probably retweeted or reblogged some posts about how representation matters or how good jacob anderson is as louis and they might even have blacklivesmatter in their account bio. but the reality is they don't actually recognize, or if they do they don't care about, the racism in tvl- and they love tvl and still identify with it deeply, to the point that any criticism about it stings and makes them feel like they're the ones being criticized, they're the ones being judged for enjoying it. and it's one thing when the parts of the show being criticized are about awkward scripting or bad pacing, but it's another when the critique feels destabilizing to their sense of self as a liberal(tm) progressive(tm) good(tm) person- and it's a lot more comforting in the moment to lash out at the person voicing the criticism about tvl's racism or queerphobia or misogyny or anti-survivor bias and say no, the show isn't bigoted (and therefore i'm not bigoted for uncritically enjoying it), you're the problem and what you're saying is completely untrue and meaningless bc you just hate lestat/you're a bitter armand fan/you're a bitter louis fan/this is all unserious ship and stan wars and there's no depth or legitimacy to what you're saying. even if the critique at no point suggests "you're a bad person for liking this show" or "i'm judging you for liking this show" (bc liking fucked up or flawed or "problematic" media doesn't make you an inherently bad or bigoted person, it's perfectly possible to go "yeah these parts had problems, but this work still resonated with me for xyz reasons") they feel judged, they feel like they're being called a bad person, and only by finding a way to dismiss the critique wholesale can they soothe the moral anxiety they feel.
ian danskin talks about this phenomenon in his series on gamergate (if you don't know about gamergate i really rec reading up on it bc so many reactionary currents online and in fandom can be traced back to it, it's foundational, and this video series is a good intro point to explain it). here's a relevant excerpt about the hate campaigns against anita sarkeesian for announcing her series talking about misogyny in video games-
"it’s all about perception, about what jack (context- "angry jack" is the stand-in figure ian uses for mostly-white-cishet men who participated in the reactionary hate and harassment campaigns of the gamergate movement) wants the world to *feel* like. it’s a world where bigotry of all stripes exists as purely rhetorical abstractions- they’re all just ideas to him, and he can choose the ideas that make him most comfortable. all jack needs is a reason for anita sarkeesian to be wrong- or better yet, lying. the reason doesn’t have to be good, it’s purely utilitarian. it only needs to serve its purpose, to insist the doctor’s a quack and justify getting a second opinion. this is why sarkeesian’s critics can’t politely disagree with her- they have to treat her with *contempt*. the whole point is to spare themselves from actually considering her arguments, so her arguments have to be *beneath* consideration…most of sarkeesian’s detractors are not trying to destroy her, although they do want her gone. jack is not a psychopath- since his only understanding of a sexist is shunning, shaming or incarcerating, he reads any critique of his gender politics as an appeal to shun, shame or incarcerate *him*. he’s a guy who’s terrified of who he is if the world sarkeesian describes is real, of how he’d be treated there, of what it would ask of him, of what his conscience would tell him to do."
and although the iwtvl fandom skews more politically "liberal" and is dominated by women and queerfolk (still white-majority and white-centric though, as most fandoms are) we're seeing a different version of the same phenomenon happening with the response to tvl. we've even seen with the white-majority critics who are so defensive of even a minority of fan criticism being fielded at tvl- of the reception to the season being merely mixed/uneven with the general audience than universally glowing- that they wrote multiple articles berating fans for "watching tvl wrong" and not being patient enough with the show, despite their awareness of s3ep6 and its antiblack dialogue. (some of those white critics have ofc started publicly backpedaling.) and we're still seeing it with the way so many fans with alleged progressive beliefs have committed themselves to not only defending tvl and denying its racism on their own pages, but actively seek out critique that upsets them and makes them feel attacked so they can try to "debunk" it and prove the people sharing those critical thoughts are lying or making things up and there's nothing substantive behind what we say. and ironically, by trying so hard to protect their progressive self-image, they end up playing into the exact type of conservative rhetoric and denial that has fox news pundits talking about how america isn't a racist country and black people are trying to make them falsely believe america is a racist country by continuing to be uppity troublemakers and talking about racism, or how if you talk about white supremacist christian hegemony you're attacking everyone who enjoys christmas or something. we can all pretend the problem doesn't exist if you don't create the problem by giving voice to it. there's no antiblackness here. there's no queerphobia here. i'm a good and progressive person and i would never passively go along with a bigoted status quo- you're lying to take away the things i enjoy and identify with (you're lying to slander me). if no one says the emperor has no clothes, we can all close our eyes and ears to what's plainly there and keep talking about the wonderful stitching on the emperor's shirt.
people thinking louis lied or was "just joking" about being molested by his cousin- even though louis also being a csa/incest victim on the same show where claudia, armand and lestat are, and where claudia's rape by bruce was an original addition that isn't found in the source material is not remotely unrealistic- is directly related to the way this episode presents claudia as a malicious manipulator about lestat threatening her on the train btw. the framing in s3ep6 opens the door for mostly-nonblack antiblack and anti-survivor viewers to question and dismiss the black leads' victimhood and frame this as "objective" and "media literate" engagement- plenty of them are already talking down to and mocking viewers who take what louis said seriously.
and ofc people will say to justify the ghost claudia scene "survivors lying about specific things doesn't mean they aren't survivors/what they said about their abuse in general isn't true" or "why won't you let claudia be a monster same as the male characters are" and these are bad faith rationalizations bc the people who claim they love the idea of claudia lying about lestat threatening her are the same people who would be up in arms about the merest suggestion that lestat lied about anything his mortal family in auvergne or gabriella did to him. and wrt the point about survivors lying not invalidating the truth of their experience, yes, this is something that's true about survivors in real life, but that is real life and tvl is a fictional story written by nonblack people- you have to be honest and ask yourself if the writers were remotely interested in claudia's interiority or experiences as a survivor when they wrote her in s3ep6 or if they were only trying to backpedal about one of the worst things lestat has ever done in an effort to make him more palatable and use a black character- a black woman who was lynched, which makes the use of antiblack dialogue for claudia even more ghoulish- as a mouthpiece to spew antiblack vitriol at the sole surviving black lead on the show.
"claudia lied about what lestat said in the train scene bc she was desperate to leave and get louis to leave with her and she needed something to move louis into action" could've been pulled off as a survivor-centric plot choice if it had been foreshadowed properly and if it had been introduced during s1-s2, when claudia was still an active protagonist in the story, her pov was represented in her own voice and there were still black writers on staff. it could've folded into the thematic arc of louis' story wrt pursuing truth and been handled in the context where the focus was claudia's pain, claudia's entrapment and resolve to escape no matter what, and landed on a note that centered the fundamental truth of claudia's experiences as an abuse victim and how she outwitted lestat and freed both herself and louis from him. how this concept is addressed in s3ep6 is not that- to start with, the entire seance and the entire season are within lestat's pov. the idea that we're "finally hearing the real claudia" is false bc everything from what she says to her mannerisms to how she looks as a ghost are filtered through her abusive white father's pov.
how the train scene is mentioned in the seance isn't presented in the context of claudia convincing louis to escape lestat and outmaneuvering lestat- it's in the context of humiliating louis for being gullible and easy to manipulate for *checks notes* believing his daughter when she told him her other father threatened to do worse than rape her. louis is constantly villainized by viewers for the bad ways he reacts to armand and lestat's history of sa and for how claudia had to push louis to leave once lestat's abuse escalated in s1ep5-s1ep7- but when louis reacts to claudia as a good, responsible parent should and believes her when she tells him lestat threatened her, that too is presented as a sign of louis' weakness, stupidity and passivity. (and people are being willfully obtuse about this bc everyone largely agrees "except he just threatened me with it" "nah doesn't sound like him" in s2ep4 was one of louis' worst moments ever.) this decision can't be separated from the nonblack writers also choosing to have claudia volley explicitly antiblack, bioessentialist vitriol at louis and framing her as possessing an internalized antiblackness she never expressed in her own diaries ("bleak, black life" where her white companion was the only good thing about it.) when claudia compared herself and louis to lestat's slaves in s1 (back when the show had black writers) her words about herself and louis being lestat's slaves from the book was adapted as a incisive comment about lestat's oppressive control and white supremacy- lestat and his behavior were the focus of her mockery. but when ghost claudia calls louis a slave bc he has a mark on his ribs in s3, it plays into the white supremacist idea that was reinforced through decades of enslavement in the states where enslavers and their enablers argued black people had inherent, biologically ingrained passive traits and needed the white race's superior guidance to control and protect them.
and regardless of what in-universe reasoning people buy into to explain ghost claudia saying that, the problem is the all-nonblack writers choosing to write that rhetoric for a black woman who was murdered in a lynching (that the show refuses to call a lynching) and the white showrunner gleefully calling arguably the most antiblack scene of the show the best scene they ever wrote for their dead black fem lead (yes s3ep6 is worse than all of s2ep7 or s1ep3 or anything else the white supremacists in nola or the kkkoven did, bc in those scenes the focus was on the evil of the white supremacists while in s3ep6 the antiblackness is metatextual, reflective of the writers' biases and uncritically framed)
claudia could've called louis out for putting hands on her same as lestat had done- she could've pulled on the stories in merrick's mind from her family to call louis out for profiting off the backs of working class black women and then tryna make claudia, one black girl then woman among many, the symbol of his redemption at the expense of her pain. hell they even could've explained claudia's rage mainly being targeted at louis and not as much at lestat by having the seance be louis' idea, giving louis a several-episode arc of interacting with merrick then convincing her to call on claudia's spirit so claudia would be angry at him for wanting to yank her into the world of the living again to assuage his own guilt, instead of nonblack writers thinking the primary way to wound and call out a black lynching survivor is by having a black woman who didn't survive that lynching use antiblack language. it didn't feel incisive or truly cutting or had anything to do with louis' canon flaws unless you already thought the worst of him (as many viewers do) and fanon'ed him as the kind of eternally passive, navel-gazing patsy he was in the source material. louis in the show is not that character, and it exposes the thoughtlessness and antiblackness of the all-nonblack writers that they adapted the merrick scene without considering how louis and claudia's show characters and dynamic would modify the scene. the only change they seem to have made based on louis and claudia's blackness is by throwing in antiblack dialogue. it's such a tarantino (derogatory) move where the white showrunner knows he can't say certain things about black characters as himself irl, so he uses a black character as a mouthpiece in a fictional script to express that racist impulse.
when you take all of this into account, it's completely unsurprising that a large number of viewers who watched this scene and saw nothing wrong with it or even reveled in the antiblackness of it bc they've been feening for louis to be humbled and humiliated and taken down a peg for 4 years now (he's too arrogant and uppity you see) have also decided louis isn't telling the truth about being molested in the same episode, and he was just being provocative or he was just joking bc they can't conceptualize that louis is a victim of csa/incest like the other main characters are- they need to maintain this image they have of louis as "the most privileged black man in america", an inherently sexually predatory eternal pimp, and play into this either/or idea of sexual abusers and victims as discrete categories with no overlap in order to continue rationalizing their lack of empathy for him. (even though the framing of the entire bar scene is unserious and the tone it aims for undercuts the severity of lestat's reaction on the sidewalk and grinds that emotional momentum to a halt too.) and it's so predictable that so many antiblack viewers would be emboldened to deny louis being a survivor after watching s3ep6, saying he was never molested and it didn't happen even when louis says it did, bc this episode in its narrative framing is built on denying a black woman her depth and interiority in service of her abusive white father's arc.
A gothic horror show with a chilling twist: the horror is reserved exclusively for the Black characters.
Are you into watching Black characters suffer for no reason other than shock value? Are you into watching Black characters be tortured, then made to apologize to their abusers? Are you into Black characters being told that slavery is in their DNA? Are you into watching Black characters be branded like cattle by their torturer and abuser? Are you into watching Black characters be brutalized, humiliated, and blamed for their own suffering? Do you enjoy victim-blaming? What about abuse apologia? Are you drawn to narratives that seem more interested in excusing these things than condemning them?
If so, then The Vampire Lestat, streaming on AMC+, is the show for you. You'll love it.
And don't feel bad. After all, it's just fiction, and fiction has nothing to do with the real world. We all live in a vacuum, right?
Whatttt is with the tendency of Tumblr users to seek absolution from every single person who offhandedly posts about disagreeing with something they do
I say this not unkindly, but firmly: to function as a member of a social species, you have to get comfortable with the idea that not everyone will like you
Each state gets to decide how their state is represented in Congress
This has been a common method for a long time in some states
The idea is that a Senator's sibling/spouse/parent/child knows their intentions and policies better than a political rival or a random person would. It's a pretty good way to prevent political assassinations tbh
An unelected individual getting grandfathered into a real political position due to their blood or legal relationship with a deceased elected official is not pretty good actually
So I know that a lot of sources including google are claiming or are under the impression that Ringo Starr doesn't have the elf stones so I just wanted to clear things up reliably once and for all:
Yes, he did post about to gifting them to Barry Keoghan, the actor portraying him in the upcoming films, as a good luck charm for his role. However, the photo he posted was of him handing Keoghan a small leather sack, while elf stones famously erode all kinds of skin. Additionally, Ringo is on the record (I think? I swear I read this but I can't find the interview. Please reach out if you know what I'm talking about) that he keeps the stones away from cameras to prevent power-dampening effects.
It's likely that what he gave was a pouch of prop elf stones as a show of good faith, which could also be related to the old legend that a false elf stone will become real in a moment of need. Some people when presented with this evidence claim that while the photo was staged, the real stones were handed over in private, but this seems far fetched to me, especially since it's widely accepted that Ringo bound himself to the stones for nine and ninety years when he acquired them.
With all that said: Please stop spreading misinformation about the elf stones. If you don't have all the info, don't state your own assumptions as fact. And please do not listen to google's AI on important topics like these. All signs point to Ringo Starr currently being in possession of the elf stones.
tangentwithtanner
