I am going to be very very clear here, in this moment, so that my stance is firmly stated: TVL is not just bad television, it is racist. It is not just the (already shitty) microagressive clumsiness we've seen some of before, it is outright racism and misogynoir as a choice with no attention to the harm it perpetuates and with a sort of gleeful enjoyment in the idea that it can "get away with it" by hiding behind unreliable narrators and book canon.
If seeing people talk about that, point that out, criticize that, and engage with that openly is going to ruin your experience of trying to blindly enjoy the show and cherrypick the fun bits, I do think you should ask yourself why you were watching it in the first place.
If seeing me do any of those things is going to bother you, my blog isn't for you, and my fiction definitely isn't either.
The Vampire Lestat is an obvious nightmare cocktail of isms and bad writing and bad music and bullshit, so surely renaming it Queen of the Damned is the equivalent of the cartoon villain disguising himself with glasses and a hat so SURELY the fandom can't possibly fall for--
the reason i need the weirdo armand who blends drinks based on nothing but colour and feeds garbage disposals and makes weird home movies in the show is because as much as i talk about armand and the cycles of amadeo and marius they're like...the ultimate proof that he is not what anyone has tried to make him. he's not an eternal sex slave or child bride or cult leader or abusive figure. he tries to be all these things because they're how he experienced the world in his most formative years but at the end of the day he has a big heart and he wants to be loved and he wants to experience the world as it is and he wants to watch the same movie over and over again and he wants to protect those he cares about and he wants to ride jet skis and he wants to make a human boy coffee in the mornings and he wants to build a terrible consumerist island and and he wants to be a good father and
Any TVL cast member being interviewed: yeah so when I first read the script I wanted to murder Rolin with my bare hands :) haha yeah he butchered my character so badly that I threw my laptop across the room :) aha and then I yelled at him for two hours which only resulted in minor tweaks to the script :) yeah I was so shocked and confused :) and he comes up with scenes that don’t make any sense in-universe. :) and I worry for the future of this tv show :) but it’s alright as long as you think about how [5 min in depth analysis of details that the cast member has come up themselves to justify the season despite these justifications not being evident in the actual show at all] aha :)
i had to come back to put together a few things i keep thinking about:
they already associated armand with islam via him praying as fake rashid
they conflated armand with assad, a british bangladeshi muslim (as far as i know), by referring to him as a french bengali in the show when that had nothing to do with what we previously knew about the character
armand is assisted in torturing louis by fareed, presumably supposed to be muslim
louis is beheaded and armand is using livestreaming - reminiscent of videos used of hostages beheaded by terrorist groups in west asia
armand is wearing a metal bangle reminiscent of the one sikhs wear
armand is wearing a vaguely military-looking shirt even though this is very unlike his normal taste
all this is saying to me that theyre just jumbling together anything that says to them brown person terrorist muslim torturer insane fanatic
then theres the big boss song
lyrics about armand perpetrating executions (never mind he got taught that in rome - if hes doing eugenics they are in fact catholic tinged eugenics) and stating its his decision alone who dies (ignoring the involvement of white characters)
big SS on the cd cover blatantly associating him with nazis
daniel calls him dr mengele - a nazi who tortured ppl by experimenting on them
armand and fareed desecrate a kosher space by spilling human blood in the butchers shop
so its not exactly a coherent framing but i think its still a framing
then theres the fact that his csa history, after being the subject of mockery, is now brought up seriously, at long last, in this context! what is that telling us? especially since so much focus has been given to lestat over an abuse story they made up from whole cloth.
but lestat was abused by a woman. armand, we are constantly told, was a catamite. hes a twink bottom. he was a limp, passive ragdoll for sale. his daddy groomed him into a little bitch. hes emasculated, a beige pillow, his sexual performance is so-so, hes desperate and needy, hes a pussy and a betaboi. in short, hes too gay, not lestats ideal of a masculine bisexual man. like this is some kind of corruption of character, being the receptive partner in anal sex
what the fuck are they doing here. hes a nazi, and also a brown terrorist, and also a 'passive' homosexual. what the actual fuck are they doing. they chose his indian background for him and have done nothing with it except racism.
anyway im off again. as soon as the conversations started being more about 'how dare armand be cruel to louis' instead of 'how dare the writers do this to the characters and the viewers' it felt like we slipped off the track you know?
this show, once, seemed like it wanted to be conscious of race and sexuality and the intersections of different identities and now look at what its doing. jesus fucking christ. its antiblackness and islamophobia, anti asian and queerphobic and homophobic sentiment all rolled together, like it was designed to pit different segments of the audience against each other. a known far right tactic against the left! the only question is whether anyone drove this deliberately or whether they fell into it through prejudice and ignorance of their own blind spots. one thing is clearly deliberate though - they knew in the past theyd told us armand perpetrated the trial out of fear and insecurity, and people still hated him. in tvl they told us he wasnt just willing but having a good time. they made the brown abuse survivor a happy, gleeful torturer of black people.
i feel like turning the torture scene in the finale into a louis fan vs armand fan thing is a very fandom-focused perspective to take that ultimately trivializes the very real racism of the writers and production behind it. like, the roles of both characters in that scene are obscenely racist. having louis, a black man, be brutalized and forced to take blame and apologize for abuse done to him is horrific. it’s also incredibly offensive to have a south asian, implied muslim, character be cartoonishly evil by spilling the blood of his victims (louis and regina) in a jewish butcher shop
don’t turn this into character vs character fandom war when there are layers to the racism, including pitting the main nonwhite characters against each other
I guess I am just struggling to see how anyone could watch that episode of television and think "I don't want people's critique to ruin my enjoyment of it" because like... watching it is a visceral nightmare, a somatic wrongness I feel in the body, and a misery I am undertaking one time so as to critique with full context and to avoid so much as nodding to this bullshit should I decide to continue any writing in the fandom space at all. It's punishing on so many levels I cannot imagine ignoring all of them at once.
I'm so tired of people excusing logical fallacies in TVL with "Nothing is REAL! It's all RETELLING! No one is objective and nothing is the truth!" Do you realize how weak of a narrative device that is? Don't you feel insulted that the writers would resort to something like this? To excuse their own poor writing choices? Nothing is ever real so we can change character's personalities, retcon events, shift time lines around, and you the watcher don't get to say anything, because NOTHING IS REAL.
It's like they're punishing people who were invested and cared about the show, almost as if going AHA! GOTCHA! like all I did wasn't ...caring about the characters and paying attention to what they spent two seasons setting up.
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.
At the back of my copy of The Vampire Armand, there's an old interview with Anne Rice talking about creating that novel. I've never forgotten her answer to one of the questions... It haunted me for years.
It gives incredible insight into how and why she wrote such beautiful, brutal and broken characters, and what she endured in the creation process.
BUT before you read this, I'm going to STRONGLY warn you, it goes to very very DARK places
Q: What are your work habits for a novel?
A: Once I truly begin to write, I work obsessively, in twelve-hour days, punctuated by days of long sleep and vivid dreaming. Starting time and ending time are no longer important. I might begin at 9 A.M., or after noon or at eight in the evening. I go from there. I turn on the computer and write, write, write.
My room is a mess. Notes are scribbled on the walls so that I can look up at them at the appropriate moments and insert the date, the name, whatever, when I need it. Books are stacked so high that people have to search for me when they come into the room. Opened books with marked-up pages are stacked on top of one another.
I become suicidal. I go through a horrid despair some time or other before the final page, during which everything seems meaningless—from the dawn of history to the very hour in which I am writing.
I’m intolerable to live with. But I spread myself thin over a number of loved ones and staff members so that no one person has to put up with how intense, hysterical, and miserable I am.
When I get elated and talk fast and furiously about wonderful aspects of history or the characters, or good developments in the story, people run away from me. I don’t blame them.
While the novel is being written, I try to avoid dressing for outdoors. No one can make you go out if you don’t have shoes on. Not even in the south. I wear long velvet robes and soft velvet slippers. I refuse to go out. All food is brought in. I eat hamburgers because they are easy to hold with one hand while reading and holding the book with the other hand.
In the middle of the night I read, sometimes on the carpeted floor of the bathroom, just because it’s warm. I am wretched. I don’t care anymore about being abnormal. Writing is everything. Everything. It seems impossible to write the book. It seems impossible to lift a hairbrush to brush my hair. But I do it. I put on mascara every day that I write.
This period of intense work lasts about six weeks. It’s best that way. My imagination is overheated, and my memory clogged with data of varying importance. If I go over six weeks, I begin to forget things; I feel the loss of intensity and information and I become all the more self-destructive and obsessed.
The end of the book is a big event for me. A big event. I start screaming. I put the hour and the date at the end of the last page. I expect everybody to understand, at least a little. It’s a triumph! The darkness of destiny has been driven back for a brief while. I celebrate. I scream, eat chocolate, and sleep.
Right near the end of writing The Vampire Armand, I realized I had to return to Italy, especially to Florence, and at once I began to make preparations for the trip. As soon as the novel was finished and off to the publisher’s, as soon as it could be accomplished, I flew to Italy. That gave me hope, a way out of a life threatening darkness that often follows the climax of a book. But I still ate chocolate and screamed.
While writing, I don’t want to rest. I don’t want to sleep. Why sleep? It seems stupid, except when weariness overcomes me like a giant cloud of poisonous vapor. Then I sleep fifteen to twenty hours. I tell people to go in and out of the bedroom and ignore me lying there, as if I were dead. I won’t talk on the phone. I won’t open my eyes if I don’t have to. I dream terrible, upsetting dreams.
I want to kill myself. But I can’t. I can’t do it to other people, and I have work that must be done, novels that must be written. So I don’t kill myself. Besides, I don’t think it’s good to kill oneself. It’s a horrible idea. It has a horrible effect even on acquaintances.
I think a lot about people I loved who are dead. I think of how dead they are, year after year, ever more dead.
does anyone remember the amc show interview with the vampire? one of the greatest things television gave us in its era. heartbreaking that it ended after two seasons when those characters were so beautifully crafted. i really wish we could’ve had more.
Making Claudia into a one dimensional lying angry black woman stereotype when she had a cold righteous rage that simmered through all of her injustice is just so disheartening. Her complex relationship with her parental figures was so nuanced where love, respect, disappointment, and resentment merged into a special highlight of the show. A strange rant where she's inexplicably racist and hateful to Louis over the man she compared to a literal tyrant slave owner feels so off. She has the right to be angry at them both but the implication that Louis was the worst person to her serves nothing other than the writer's agenda to discount the beauty of s1 and 2.
I really understand the anger with how the character is being bc it’s seems fast changing.
But I don’t want to be the person to say that they are keeping it like the book, but they very much are.
This is just a paragraph of a diary page from Claudia in the books, of her planning to kill Lestat:
“Perhaps in the court of my heart, I hold Louis far more accountable for my present state than ever I could blame my impulsive and simple Lestat. The fact is, one must die for this or the pain in me will never be scaled off, and immortality is but a monstrous measurement of what I shall suffer till the world revolves to its ultimate end. One must die so that the other will become ever more dependent upon me, ever more completely my slave. I would travel the world afterwards; I would have my way; I cannot endure either one of them unless that one becomes my servant in thought, word, and deed.”
She was always in the books a liar, calculating and evil child. And she saw Louis as the easiest one to manipulate, but she respected Lestat more.
I think that the writer are having a lot of difficulty translating the books materials into these new characters, yes. But the scene sadly is very much Claudia of the books.
As a VC book reader, the issue is that it’s fine for blonde white book Claudia to say this about white slave owning book Louis. It’s an inversion of his mortal role and shows how completely vampirism collapses those old meanings. But once Rolin purposefully decided to make Louis and Claudia black, different signifiers and themes became important. We know that Claudia resented and at times hated Louis. We know that she was the ‘evil of Lestat’s evil’. But we also know that she and Louis shared the bond of being two black people in a home (and world) where their blackness forever rended them other. They had a kinship. They also grew up in a time where slavery was in living memory.
There is no world where black Claudia, very specifically black Claudia, with her 4c hair and white girlfriend, would call Louis a nappy-headed slave. There is no world where black Claudia would say that she hated him more than her white rapist, something added to the show (which I’ve always said was a mistake). This was actually a change from the book that should have been made because it spits in the face of both characters.
Claudia was the perfect vampire, and the most flawed vampire because she was the child that should have never been turned. It made sense that book ghost Claudia, a woman forever trapped in a doll body, would want to rage and kill Louis on sight. But once she becomes a black teenaged woman-child, sorry, but you have to handle that rage and vengeance and spite with more nuance.
It frustrates me that non-black fans are ignoring that race and how it intersects with queerness, class and vampirism has always been at the heart of this series. And why would the writers care about book accuracy now when they’ve been happy to shit on most of TVL’s themes, characterisation and plot for this entire season. They didn’t. And if they thought they could have gotten away with having Claudia call Louis the n-word, they would’ve done.
