It's the one and only thing that got my brain perking up and start ruminating on if maybe (BIG maybe) we will get some sort of twist that will recontextualize or reveal Something More Going On. Even before I heard people on here speculating about "secret good reveal episode."
So I'll bring this down on three levels, with a hierarchy from most capable of being validated, to the least capable/the most speculative. Because those types of things do not exist on the same hierarchy, in terms of trustworthiness of information. It's important to recognize and be able to separate verifiable data - yes even in a media analysis sense - from extrapolation, which is hazy and should never be given the same weight.
The three levels are:
Observation
Contextualization
Speculation
Brace for potential future spoilers (even with me acknowledging I've definitely just been flat-out wrong while doing media speculation before. Like. I love mystery boxes, I love analyzing texts, and I love foreshadowing. And I've also been wrong many, many, many times).
Warning for spoilers for book version of TVL.
Observation:
During the scene where Lestat is having a backstage pigtailed meltdown while on the phone with his mother, Nicky is writing something on the mirror with his bloody stump.
The words on the mirror appear to spell out "Marius."
It's not perfectly easy to read, but I double checked with a friend without asking any leading questions, what she thought the blood on the mirror said. And she also said Marius.
This is the only verifiable (or refutable!) fact we have. Everything from here is trying to contextualize that information. And then speculating on what it could mean.
Contextualization:
This is where my media analysis skills perked up immediately. And I'll try to quickly ("quickly") explain why.
There is no reason we have been given as to yet for why Marius would have anything to do with this scene at all.
Nicky in these scenes has been functioning as a familiar, common type of narrative device: A specter that confronts and reveals things that the actual character needs to hear, doesn't want to hear, reveals a deeper part of their psyche, etc etc. We saw ghost!stat function ("function", imo) as this last season. But this is a very common narrative device in a broader storytelling sense.
Watsonianly, anything could mean anything. Doylistically, this is a choice the creative team made. Does that mean it will turn out to be a good choice? No. I'd even argue, probably not. But it is a choice. And one that was done for SOME reason. (Again, reason could be stupid. Could be bad. Could be meant as some sort of easter egg I can't come up with an explanation for right now. Could be meant to make people online talk and theorize, as a way to stay engaged, as I'm doing right now. Or as a red herring.)
So yeah, on it's face, this doesn't tell us anything. But it's not very likely that it is for no reason.
Which means they likely expected savvy viewers to catch this, and then begin asking questions about it (though again, that could be for very stupid or very cynical reasons). Or they expect people to catch it on a rewatch later, and recognize it as some sort of foreshadowing.
What questions did they want us to ask? That's just not possible to say without them telling us, one way or another.
And that's about all the verifiable and/or closely logical observations we can make.
Speculation:
Bird's Eye View:
This is THE farthest afield, because it's not based on any evidence. It's just conjecture. No one in this space has anything but conjecture, and all conjecture is likely to be biased by what people want to see, or what people feel like is really missing from this season.
MY bias is that what I think is missing from this season is:
all the flashbacks that are arguably the core of TVL the book (this seems like a more common complaint that a lot of people share)
the richer, more nuanced storyline between Armand and Lestat in the flashbacks in particular (Lesmand, if you will).
My very biased takeaway (not really my only one) is that, generally, we are missing scenes from the past for some reason that has to do with Marius. That's the more general, high level theory.
And more specifically, that THAT has to do with Armand.
Getting More Tinfoily:
This might be the only thing that might redeem the season for me (even though *ahem* certain plotlines have jumped the shark for me personally, and I don't think they'll ever fully regain my trust in their character writing again. Which is the highlight to me of what they did, so like. I actually don't know if this theory being right would even really right the ship for me).
But I feel like this might intersect with one of the larger unavoidable unaddressed things in TVL/TVC generally.
Which is that we know that Lestat knows that Marius is alive.
And we know in the books, that Lestat never tells Armand that. He keeps it a secret, as he was told to. It's revealed during/after the whole QotD situation, which is when Marius returns. Which is almost certainly happening in the show, too (there's the preview showing Marius, which ties in with the book's own timeline of Lestat meeting Marius. There's also the too-oft repeated "blood of Akasha" line, which means Lestat in the show HAS already met Akasha. And therefore almost certainly Marius.)
In the books, there is no real like, addressing of this. There's no moment where Armand confronts Lestat and is like, hey. What the fuck, man. You know I love Marius, and you knew he was alive for like, centuries. And you both kept this secret behind my back??
This probably sounds like it makes no sense and can't be right, but this is par for the course. Anne Rice doesn't write people who behave anything like people. She never has. You either roll with it or you get sick of it and stop reading.
However, one of the things that IWTV has done a much better job of than her (admittedly, the bar is in hell) is taking all these events and characters, and then almost remixing them into something that makes far more realistic, intuitive sense.
It seems pretty unlikely that the way they've written characters, Armand in the show would NOT have a reaction if he found this out. Or that this isn't a secret Lestat is at least somewhat aware of and feels something about whenever he ends up interacting with Armand again. Unless Lestat is given some way to justify all that, which the books definitely don't provide. (In the books, Marius is like, Armand is too stupid and baby and soft and weak-willed and also maybe annoying, blah blah thinly veiled racist implications; anyway you can't tell anyone, including him. Cool? Thanks, okay, I love you, Lestat, bye!).
I don't have anything else to add that doesn't sound extremely conspiracy theory-ish from there: Marius erased a lot of Lestat's memories of Armand to make Lestat forget he liked him, so he wouldn't feel like he'd have to tell him that Marius was still alive; Marius made Lestat promise to never talk about Armand badly about something bad in Paris, because he still cares about Armand (that seems farther fetched even than erasing his memories though); or maybe Lestat has been carrying around the secret, maybe out of duty and maybe feeling guilt, either way he tries not to think of Armand much, because he worries if he does he'll think of Marius, and since vampires read minds the cat could be out of the bag.
Etc Etc. I don't know. Stuff in that sort of ballpark. Stuff *waves vaguely* like that!
I mean otherwise, I can't imagine how Marius and the lack of good flashback episodes could matter much together. Which, maybe they don't. Maybe the writing of Marius on the mirror matters, and it's also just a flashback-poor season. And those are completely unrelated.
Also, even if I was on the right path, I have no idea how this could resolve or rectify things people don't like that have nothing to do with the flashbacks. Like the portrayal of Gabriella. Louis's subplot. I just can't imagine how anything to do with Marius would have anything at all to do with things we're seeing in the present timeline. So maybe it also doesn't. But maybe that's just because I can't see something important yet.
Or maybe the mirror doesn't actually say Marius, and the entire premise of this whole post is wrong.
Or maybe it does say Marius, but it's just bad writing. In that it truly doesn't mean anything at all
So, uh, how about that autograph art by one of the Crewniverse of Sadie having a crush on Jasper? How’s that gonna factor into the new season now that Jasper and Lars are back?
Maybe the movie gem is a Morganite? Rhodonite mentioned that she belonged to a Morganite before, so they'd probably be pretty high-ranking pink gems. It's probably an entirely new gem altogether, but it's still fun to speculate anyways!
Could be! I’m currently assuming the red heart gem is the gem of the silhouette, in which case it’s way too deep red for a Morganite (which is really pale pink) but honestly my assumption way be way the heck off so who knows
Jasper has a tendency to Kool-Aid Man through the Crystal Gems’ carefully constructed walls of white lies and lies by omission about how ugly the war for Earth was. The first time she showed up, her slow-motion freakout ended with her punching a hole through Rose’s alibi that nearly tore the Crystal Gems apart.
When she finds out the Saintly Tragic Dead Mom Figure her whole life revolved around was also the rebel leader who started the war that nearly killed her and the rest of her family, she will freak out so hard that she plows through the carefully constructed wall around What Happened at Beta/What Happened to the Alpha Kindergarten Gems, causing another huge schism to form within the team as Amethyst realizes what’s up.
I think it's ironic, and most likely intentional, that Lars is the only human to speak badly of Rose, and to mock/ridicule Steven about gem stuff, and now he will probably understand, more than any other human, Rose's significance and Homeworld. I'm excited to see how he handles everything.
hey, that’s a great observation! I am really looking forward to how Lars grows as a character, too. There’s loads of great potential in this special and I’m so, so excited
I really like the new lawyer Gem too! She seems very relateable; I too am freaking out about that trial. (Btw would you know why everyone seems to be calling her Moonstone? I realize her head is kinda moon-shaped, but her gem doesn't look like a moonstone at all?)
I feel like being a lawyer (or something similar to one) on Homeworld is a pretty terrible job in general, ‘cause, like, Gems seem to have very rigid rules and divisive punishments that I can’t imagine there’s much room for argument. And in this case, it’s the single most hated Gem in the universe on trial so it’s like, yes, extreme anxiety.
Near as I can tell, it’s just an assumption based on her moon-head. Admittedly, that was immediately my thinking but, like you said, her gem really doesn’t look at all like moonstones look, namely that moonstones are smooth, not faceted. Gems have different rules than gemstones, though.
If she’s not Moonstone, I’m thinking Kyanite is a good bet. It looks like her gem and also from, like, a gem meaning perspective, kyanite is associated with the throat chakra and is apparently good for communication, negotiations, arbitration, and settling disputes, which sounds like a Lawyer Gem is I ever saw one. But Gems don’t really play by gemstone meaning rules that closely either so who knows
Okay I saw the new promo and I have theories... we saw shots of some planet, presumably homeworld, completely covered in holes where gems were born. My guess is that homeworld completely depleted its own resources and that's why gems need to conquer other planets to produce more gems
oh yeah, I’m sure Homeworld has long since been gutted for Gem material, though I imagine it wouldn’t be too far-fetched if it was less eviscerated than the planets they conquer, out of sentiment or necessity. A lot of what we’ve seen in the promos looks metallic and the Kindergarten-looking place seems very desolate. I’m getting the image of almost, like, a civilization in the sky/built on stilts with their actual homeworld pretty much untouched nowadays.
I think its interesting that Gems seem to preserve the holes Gems come out of. Like, it seems like it would be beneficial to lop off the layer where one batch was born and seed more behind that, until there’s no more planet at all. Of course, maybe that IS what they do and they just keep some around to physically hold up what’s stationed on the planet (then again, they seem to have no problem just using spaceships/space stations)
Do you think we'll see white diamond at all for this special??? I'm starting to worry since we really didn't see any for that new promo CN just put out..
I’m not sure but I do think that, if they were to reveal White Diamond in the Wanted special, it’d probably be a surprise so they wouldn’t show her in the promos for it
