#iwtv22

[wisesnail]

You know me... Once I start...🙈

Have a speed paint of Jacob Anderson as Louis <:

Prints and other stuff on my RedBubble and Threadless (I’m Wisesnail on both <; )    

[shadowvalkyrie]

One of the differences between the Vampire Chronicles books and the Interview with a Vampire TV show I find most striking is the focus on the character's relationships with each other.

One of the central elements of the books (especially the earlier ones) is loneliness. A persistent sense of alienation that is only partially explained by being a predatory monster amongst humans.

Louis is already lonely as a human, and becoming immortal just adds more weight to that loneliness. There is a sense of being in the wrong place, in the wrong time, surrounded people that don't really understand him and his bottomless grief.

Meanwhile, Lestat is a narcissist, unable to genuinely connect to anyone, because they keep betraying him and/or dying, so he creates this solipsistic existence in which he is the centre of the universe and everyone else just exists to adore him, but because that fails to fill the persistent void in his soul, he has to stage ever more elaborate adventures in a pointless search for meaning. He falls in love with sometimes his prey - fated to be brief moments of stirring tragedy for him to bask in, catching fleeting glimpses of their souls as he drinks them up - and other times the people least interested in him, so that he can always be on a quest to win them over - only to drop/kill them once he has. And of course Louis is his main obsession, because Louis cannot be won over.

Louis is too lost in his depression to respond the way Lestat (thinks he) wants. So they are doomed to forever circle around each other in throes of agonised wishful thinking and longing for a mutual understanding that just cannot happen. (Symbolised by the way their thoughts are always closed to each other as sire and fledgeling.)

Similarly, the rest of the characters have their own issues. Claudia raging against being trapped in the body of a child forever, wanting to be free from the people who made her and deny her any agency, find people of her own, but unable to escape her limitations. Armand with his political machinations, games of power and control that don't, in the long run, go anywhere, because the older vampires he competes against and shares the playing field with are barely people anymore. Any triumphs and losses are doomed to be forever hollow and unfulfilling. And so it goes for practically everyone.

But of course all these thoughts and feelings are by their very nature deeply introspective. Excellent for a novel, but terrible for TV.

So instead of the interpersonal lacunae, the aimless eternal wanderings of the lost immortals through a changing world they cannot quite touch, the show focuses on the relationships of the characters with each other in a more immediate way. By exposing their dysfunctionality a lot more mercilessly than the books (where a lot of the love and longing is taken at face value, as the one constant between the lines of the unreliable narration - in a sense of "the love didn't fix anything but it was there"), it exposes that same lack of connection.

The characters don't seem as obviously lonely, because they spend more time together, and always have this strong focus on each other, the push and pull of passion at the centre, rather than the cold bleakness the books often depict, but in the end you get a similar sense of unbridgeable distance and inescapable grief (and the fine thread of psychological horror that comes with the enormity of it, stretched out over centuries), which I think is masterfully done.

[shadowvalkyrie]

There's a lot of posts criticising the race-bending of Louis in the new Interview with the Vampire adaptation.

And I don't mean the "but he's white in the books" argument, which is easy to dismiss as the whining of white racists, who can't handle their fave having a little extra melanin.

I'm talking about a whole other type of criticism, namely that of concerned anti-racists who go "of course they make the black character a pimp and a criminal, that's so offensive", which... misses the point by a mile.

I won't defend this writing choice on a historical basis either - enough people have pointed out that he obviously couldn't stay a plantation owner, and that there were very few avenues open to black people at the time to become that rich by legal means.

If the writers had wanted, they could have still found some way to handwave that money. But they didn't, because Louis being a pimp is very intentional. Just like book!Louis being a plantation owner was very intentional.

The vampires are not the heroes of the story. They're villain protagonists. They have to be rich and they more specifically have to be rich at the expense of other people for the metaphor to work. Because vampirism is, by its very nature, a parasitic existence that comes exclusively at the cost of human suffering.

And the whole point is that the characters who adapt well to it? Were already parasites in their pre-vampire lives. Lestat the old-world aristocrat as much as Louis the plantation owner, and now Louis the pimp. It's no accident that Claudia, the previous innocent is struggling with her new vampiric existence and going more than a little unhinged in the process. She didn't have to live with that cognitive dissonance already before and doesn't have the mental mechanisms in place to deal with it that Lestat and Louis do.

Erasing the aspect of moral guilt from Louis's vita, to remove what looks uncomfortably like a racist cliché at a cursory glance in a misunderstood attempt to make the narrative more PC, would erase one of his most fundamental character traits.

If Lestat had picked a poor boy, that would have made their story a lot more romantic than Lestat choosing Louis in part so he could live off his money. If Louis had been wealthy through honest work, he would have been too straightforward a victim of Lestat's seduction.

But the whole point of Louis's character is that he is both victim and perpetrator. That he is an unreliable narrator. That he is - above all else - a hypocrite. And that he already is all of these things before he ever becomes a vampire.

Sure, he'll make a big production out of treating his whores fairly, out of drinking animal blood rather than human blood, will wallow in his guilt and his grief, and cry big crocodile tears... But when it comes down to it, he'll still kill, still choose his power over right and wrong, still accept that others have to suffer on his behalf and on behalf of his doomed romance with Lestat. He will blame Lestat for his warped unholy existence... but never end it either.

[bluedevil]

lestat is such a nasty little snake. i hate him. i need to murder him

[bluedevil]

okay well claudia can do whatever she wants forever

[bluedevil]

I HEARD YOUR HEARTS DANCING

[bluedevil]

louis should kill lestat

[bluedevil]

oh my g-d? louis?