i just can't get over how dead my dash is. i still follow people who claim to have liked the season but they've pretty much stopped talking about it already. in fact, engagement with the show dropped off within days of the finale airing. there are some stray theories but no one really seems invested. when i do see posts from them it's either people trying to make sense of the season, coming up with excuses and expressing confusion, or people who have decided upon rewatching the episodes that they don't really work and now the newness has worn off they're disappointed.
i follow a ton of fan artists and none of them have been making art based on the events of tvl. it's either iwtv era stuff or AU art. many have just moved on completely to other shows. i also noticed a lot of people decided to start reading the books and they're now retroactively disappointed at what was left out.
the writers didn't need a big budget to do this season justice. they should've stuck to filming in europe and kept the one concert scene to the final ep. they didn't need to be on the road and visiting different cities. it didn't add anything whatsoever to the story.
rolin got snippy and blamed the budget because "you find somewhere that looks like europe and north america" but 1) many productions have achieved this. europe is a frequent stand in for north america and 2) you didn't really need to. europe has hotels and concert venues. it also has many, many old and grandiose churches. it has forests and huge country homes with acres of land, largely unchanged with time and it doesn't always cost that much to film in these places. there are period-accurate costumes for hire. you didn't need to have scenes of a tour bus on big wide north american roads or to film in canadian cities as stand ins for US ones. all we needed was daniel interviewing lestat interspersed with flashbacks. they had the fucking formula perfected. it was right there. then they could've shown the band rehearsing in any studio and built it all up to the concert
they could have given us a satisfying adaptation with the budget they had and the reason they didn't is because they didn't want to
they had a vision of rockstar lestat touring and fucking and doing drugs and recording music and that's what they prioritised over any actual story
what was the point of the failures? what was the point of lestat consenting to a interview with daniel he didn't want to give?
rolin repeatedly said the audience didn't just want two guys talking in a room again, that we didn't know what we wanted, that this season was going to be fast paced rock n roll. he made exactly what he wanted to make
unfortunately for us what he wanted to make was dogshit
