So many things about the season but ESPECIALLY the finale are pissing me off so I need to rant here before I explode. I’m so mad rn I cannot even articulate myself well but like — it all seemed so damn pointless. All of it. Lestat’s season and I learnt nothing new about Lestat, oh other than that he fucks his mom. So many things felt just like going back on the established facts of season 1&2 only to spite those characters bcs everyone’s favourite little white boy Lestat who could do no wrong ever needed to be elevated and exalted at the expense of villainising Everyone Else.
Ok first: my issues with the finale. MESSED UP!!!! All and every kind of messed up. Even if I try to “understand” it and see it in some positive light it will be AT A STRETCH
So the whole bit with the ep6 ending was… pointless? Nothing to do with the character dynamics, motivations, or the general plot (pfft as if there was a plot this season but let’s assume for a second). So they were building up to this Armand vs Lestat thing…. Only for there to be no such thing. Armand is apparently against the Great Conversion but other than the one time we don’t hear from that again and the beheading was just for… what petty vengeance?
They could have done a really suspenseful exciting episode with Armand and Daniel trying to delay the concert and hence the Great Conversion, yk given Armand’s vehement opposition to the Great Conversion and generally to the idea of making more vampires bcs he thinks it’s a curse you shouldn’t give to any mortal soul bcs he doesn’t think anyone deserves to be condemned for all eternity (see Armand’s religious trauma + the conversation with Madeline scene for reference), throw in a bit of opposition from team Lestat, And done the Loumand reunion (can you even call it that), if it was so important, decently (this being is the keyword here)
All in all, poor Armand characterisation (like did the writer’s even read the books or at least watch the previous two seasons) and that just sort of embodied in its fullest form in the finale. Armand was extremely ooc for no reason whatsoever. Wait I think I need to discuss Armand in depth bcs without the context of what they did to his character this season I cannot talk about the finale.
Gone are the days when Rolin would sit in interviews and try to explain that Armand isn’t a moustache twirling cartoon villain and he’s got real honest trauma and motivations and that the predicament of Armand is that he’s coming from a genuine place of trying to do good, or trying to survive but he ends up being in situations where he’s a wild animal caught in a trap and he’ll bite his own and someone else’s leg to free himself.
But apparently now Armand does evil stuff for shits and giggles, tortures people for no reason, beheads two of the people he loves (yes! Go read some Anne Rice), gets an innocent man to slit his throat even though Armand apparently isn’t actively violent (his whole thing being that even when he does want to kill people (nicki, the cod, the trial) he does so by pulling the strings and getting someone else to do it, his passivity and inertia being his most prominent characteristic, “his methodology is never violent”).
Till that part I said. Ok fine I can make peace with that. Maybe they’re developing his character in new and interesting directions.
But hey wait. All of this comes with a side of: humiliating Armand for lols bcs what the Beautiful Unwell want to see is their favourite white man insulting a South Asian character. Yay what fun! I’ve got so many people telling me it’s all harmless jokes and it would be if they weren’t so pointedly demeaning and/or playing directly into yucky stereotypes about South Asians.
And all this is just part of the greater writing theme of this season which is…. We cannot make Lestat look good without making Armand look bad. Which, in hindsight is a hilariously bad prompt to go with when adapting the book which is all about Lestat and Armand’s relationship. (#when there’s no lesmand in what was supposed to be the lesmand season)
And yes ofc reminder. Armand screen-time minus finale = 10 minutes and some seconds out of which speaking parts are like, only half of that. And now the fucking finale!
I really wish I knew better so I didn’t have to say this but. did they write those scenes with the sole purpose of creating some sort of infighting race war between their South Asian and Black audiences? Bcs WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. I mean I cannot go on the internet without seeing Black people spew the most hateful shit about South Asians and yes this has been part of the iwtv fandom for some time now, and post finale I can understand that they are hurt and rightfully so (bcs again what the fuck was all that) but like. come on!!!!! First of all… Isn’t it the Lestat season? Wouldn’t it have made more sense for Armand to torture Lestat? Ok fine they wanted it to be a Louis and Armand scene. Well then it could have been written in ways that weren’t infuriatingly offensive to the Black community and didn’t portray the South Asian character as a mindless racist monster doing caricature text-book white-slave-owner style violence on the Black character.
I just want the Black audiences who are upset bcs of the scene to just remember one thing. Please don’t use this as an excuse to be hateful and seeing this as a moment of brown on black violence or to racially villainize a South Asian character, or say hateful things about the South Asian community, identity and history. I’ve seen plenty of “South Asians have always sided with white people and negotiated with the oppressor instead of resisting them” and “South Asians are racist to black people and do racial violence bcs of a proximity to whiteness” (hello is the proximity to whiteness in the room with us, also pls read any textbook bcs we have a 200 smth yrs worth of history of resisting colonial rule ok! And yes acknowledging the complex relationship our community have with internalised racism and colourism (which is not solely directed at Black people it is also directed at their own) brown people have stood up for Black rights movements) ……... Bcs in that scene in generally too in the entirety of the show’s discourse, while the Black character is being obviously mistreated, the South Asian character is being villainized unnecessarily and not in the way Jacob Anderson said that poc should be allowed to be problematic characters, bcs this is playing directly into some messed up stereotypes about Brown people being violent, scary, aggressive evil villains (*cough terrorism cough*) and that, my dear friends, too is racism in case you needed reminding.
I really don’t know what they were trying to achieve with this bcs everything they did achieve sort of ended up becoming a twisted opposite version of it. They wanted to acknowledge that Louis and Armand’s relationship was mutually abusive (and yes I believe that louis did abuse Armand as much if not more, so mindless apologists please fuck off) and have Louis apologise for his part right? ..... Well not the right scenario for that Rolin!! Now it looks like he did it under duress, probably didn’t mean it AND if there’s anything he did do bad kinda pales in comparison to Armand’s Big Bad all the while giving fuel to loumand haters and giving the haters excuse for their “Armand deserves worse” mantra.
Making Armand say things like he took “aesthetic pleasure” in the trial or the exaggerating the gore aspect of Louis and Claudeliene’s deaths…. Are you serious???? Or that he put the Fred Steins in the photo collection…. God seriously? The cartoon villain agenda isn’t even secret anymore, it’s so fucking deliberate that they want the audience to perceive him as such bcs they’re putting in Exactly and precisely the shit that twitter and tumblr Armand haters discourse about all the time. Talk about audience baiting. Armand saying he didn’t care of Louis cheating on him…. Ok sure…. AMC delete season 2 ep 5 now please, that never happened.
Having Louis acknowledge Armand’s trauma and their shared history would and should have been beautiful…. I feel like it was supposed to be a moment of Louis looking past his obsession of Lestat for once and accepting that he cared for Armand too, that there was, no matter how tainted or fucked up, love between them. But by that point in the episode all the shit that has happened just makes it worse. The sincerity of Louis’s words is thrown out the window.
Listen…. The whole torture scene could be read differently I know I know. It could be a thematic parallel to Amadeo smashing Marius’s door down with an axe, his deliberate aggressive temper tantrum just being a desperate attempt to be seen or loved by the person he wants to be loved by. His “heartfelt armends” being deliberately provocative, to push Louis into talking to him, shown by the fact that he stops recording (also tangent but the whole sending this live to some selected people was like. what’s the point of this here? Who are these people?) the minute Louis starts talking about their relationship bcs this was all a performance to make Louis say he cared for him, as we see later Paul saying Louis has trouble saying it.
But only if it wasn’t executed so poorly and came from a background of giving Armand zero motivations, zero explanations for this scene suddenly coming out of nowhere and for the continuous racist rhetoric and imagery not just in the episode but the whole season.
And the cherry on top ofc how could I forget. Armand marking Louis before he leaves. Again I could read this in a positive way (at a stretch but god help me I am exhausted now) as it being a fucked up act of love, as a sign of acceptance from Armand’s side that this is over (great character development from him btw given that he didn’t considered him and Lestat over for like centuries) and his silent departure as a ‘nothing more needs to be said’, the carved initial over Louis’s heart being a romantic gesture, a ‘scars of love’ motif, his way of saying that actually he was lying about all the stuff he said in his “apology” (which by the way can I say the tone felt wayyyy odd compared to the other two apologies?!) and he did actually love Louis and he just wanted Louis to love him too bcs Louis mattered to him and he wanted to hear it from him and now he can see that Louis did love him, just not in the way he thought, or needs in Louis’s words. It’s his way of leaving one last mark and then letting go…. ONLY IF it didn’t look like racist fucking imagery right in the wake of GhostClaudia saying there’s an etching on Louis’s ribcage saying he’s a slave. I want to lowkey kms rn.
Now back to the other stuff
Why was Lestat getting full blorbo treatment sympathy show while louis was being tortured and Armand mischaracterised? Guess the white writers have a favourite child haha
So they threw in the whole Regina subplot… for what? What could have been a really deep motif for grief persevering fell totally flat and became a device for the shitty writers to exact their racist and misogynistic fantasies. Giving her a past with criminal record and having her be a sex worker…. Adding to the fact that she is used by both Louis and Armand for their fucked up self-interests. I am releasing this show has more issues than I noticed.
Claudia in purgatory/hell without Madeline but Lestat goes to heaven? Frrrr
Also when did we go from “Claudia de Lioncourt” being an insult and her saying Lestat’s blood wasn’t good enough for Madeline to…. Her calling herself Lestat’s blood or that he was her favourite???!!
The whole bit with Ghost Claudia just felt like deliberately going back on everything established in the frst two seasons ONLY for the sole purpose of putting Lestat in a positive light. In fact a LOT of the things this season felt that way…. I don’t know what they’re trying to do with that. Why make two seasons of smth when you’re going to turn around and say hey that was a lie, scratch that, that never happened in fact it was a mass hallucination.
Funnily enough not once has Lestat denied his involvement in the trial like. wow at this point they’re just making fun of our intelligence and the fools that we are we’re happily lapping up whatever’s being served. They know people are going to love and forgive Lestat no matter how much of a racist asshole we portray him to be.
Oh and how could I forget the little gem from episode 1. The vampire Sam being forgiven an given a job at Louis's hotel. How sweet. Louis is so kind. Let's just forget the part where we never forgive Armand for his involvement with the trial (even tho he was coerced by the coven) but we do forgive Sam who apparently was doing it for the love of the game when his job description was just to be a Talamasca mole he could not have done anything but he just had to write a racist script demeaning and abusing Claudia not once but Twice!
I was going to say the Devil’s Minion plot was underutilised but then I remember you underutilise something that exists in the first place. How come Armand and Daniel had more of an interesting arc in S1 when Armand was cosplaying as a mortal twink compared to S3 where we just have Armand speed-run monologue-ing 52 yrs worth of history. Put the writers in a writing class bcs whatever happened to show don’t tell? The fact that DM is one of TVC’s most popular subplots, like even Armand haters jump on the DM ship they could’ve actually used it to make the show more popular, win-win for both producers and audiences
Daniel Molloy I am so sorry they flattened out your character to just Asshole™
Also turning LDPDL into a extra/side character whose sole purpose is being the white lead’s “girlfriend” yeah S1 Claudia your housewife comment is still famous.
Also whatever happened to S1 Louis saying “our book has to be a warning” (against the Great Conversion)
Marius underutilised also why was he at the soul eating table but Armand wasn’t. ‘
No Akasha, no concert…. Also the Talamasca wanting Lestat to do the concert makes NO fucking sense…
Are they… are they trying to replace Sybelle with Alex?
And yes ofc I will never forget the erasure of trans Gabrielle in the year when transphobia is at an all-time high, trans people more threated than ever from far right governments. And ofc the decision to make her a cartoon witch.
controversial opinion: magnus was the only well written character this season
I feel like if we had less scenes of concerts and the band doing drugs and fuck-all (as if this were some kind of musical biopic ffs) we could have explored more things. Continuity, pacing, everything was so fucked man. I could get my six yr old cousin to write better. Remember when each individual iwtv episode used to feel like a full-fledged movie…. Those were the days man.
And please put the gothic vampire horror back in the vampire horror show ffs
My recommendation. Put the writers in a cabin in the woods for writing s4 so that they can go back to writing without catering to and being influenced by the wet dreams of their white fans and basing character arc wholly on racist twitter discourse
