louis and claudia and the theory of the dark fantastic
last summer i read ebony elizabeth thomas' excellent the dark fantastic: race and the imagination from harry potter to the hunger games about the portrayal of black girls and women in sff media and i wanted to bring her theory of the "dark fantastic"- an analysis of cyclical narrative patterns developed from how "dark other" characters are framed in media- to louis and claudia on interview with the vampire. like thomas writes in the screencap above, it's extremely rare for black characters to not only be protagonists in vampire media but to be the central subject who desires the vampire, the central object of the vampire's desire, and ultimately the central vampire themselves. louis is both the subject who desires the vampire and the object of the vampire's desire in s1ep1, when lestat pursues and seduces him- and louis and claudia share the role of the "central vampire" as leads of the first two seasons after lestat turns them in s1ep1 and s1ep4 respectively. (also note that thomas is a black scholar and centers black characters, esp black women, in her media analysis and i'm applying her theory to black leads here, but her theory could be applied to any racialized or othered person in media.)
louis and claudia are extremely unique in the vampire genre bc they're black protagonists in a historically-white, historically-xenophobic-and-antiblack genre who face mainly nonblack antagonists (and many of those antagonists are textually antiblack, targeting and tormenting louis and claudia for their blackness) and bc they're sympathetic, humanized vampires who fully embody the carnal eroticism that's always been integral to vampires' appeal as supernatural creatures. but all of louis and claudia's complexity, interiority and uniqueness don't exempt them from "the dark other" role that's imposed on racialized characters in fantasy media, and their arcs in iwtv are a perfect fit for the steps of the dark fantastic cycle- spectacle, hesitation, violence, and haunting- in thomas' literary framework. let's get into each step under the cut.
spectacle- the display of the visual or existential difference of the dark other, marveling at what can be seen or unseen
hesitation- the dark other interrupting the "waking dream" of the fantastic, disrupting the idealized fantasy world with their presence- causing unwelcome feelings of fear, desire or longing
violence- the existential dilemma of the dark other and the feelings they cause being stamped out with violence- destroying the dark other to restore the status quo
haunting- the dark other haunting the narrative despite their material destruction
and steps 1-4 endlessly repeat in this cycle- the haunting turns into a spectacle when the presence of the dark other becomes a threat again- unless the 5th and final step, emancipation, subverts and ends the cycle. thomas notes that not only is emancipation of the dark other rarely depicted, it's often rejected by audiences who can't accept liberated black characters. often even the potential, not reality, of a liberated black character is enough to prompt audience backlash.
louis and claudia's arcs both feature spectacle- we're introduced to louis performing a carefully controlled facade of hardness to maintain his social standing and safety- "you couldn't look weak on liberty, you never knew who was watching" in a scene where his performative violence attracts the attention of the european vampire- "the big man of liberty st" "truly...an exceptional negro", hypervisible as a black creole man, singled out as an "exception" by wealthy white property owners as the only black man at their regular poker game. louis' hypervisibility multiplies once he starts living more openly as a gay black man in an interracial relationship, disrupting the norms of a society where both miscegenation and queerness, "crimes against nature" are illegal- rumors of him "out cattin' with some white man" get back to his sister grace, indicating that louis is always surveilled offscreen.
and while claudia isn't a public figure in nola like louis was, she's still treated as a spectacle, from the racist white girls who target her when they see her walking on the street ("darkie playing dress up in the dark") to her objectification as the "doll-like sister" in what tom calls their "fag, pederast trio" on rue royale. this continues in eastern europe- a nazi guard expresses amusement and surprise at the "black ukrainians", they draw hostile gazes when emilia brings them to other romanian villagers (claudia's even called a "crow" by one of the children) and once they arrive in paris, they're surveilled and stalked for months by the paris coven who are unsettled by their freedom and lack of adherence to strict vampire power structures. ("who was the master?? neither, it seemed")
in the 2nd step, hesitation, we see how louis and claudia disrupt the regulated world of the paris coven and how the paris coven lashes out against them for it, initially more at louis than claudia bc even though claudia tries to initially assimilate and play by their rules- so they perform a fake welcoming civility towards her, intended to deceive and lure her into the cult until she's formally bound by their laws- louis rejects them from the start. and claudia, despite her (misguided, even though it's not her fault) faith in her new companions, is still a disruptive force to them, as the sole black woman in the coven and the only black person who wants to perform onstage, decentering the nonblack stars. claudia's temporarily compliance with the coven's rules means they intially direct their hatred towards louis, seeing him as an aberration and a threat to their way of life- francis says "he will be the ruin of us"- who needs to be destroyed.
and this is a point where i'd like to add some more nuance to thomas' framework bc the division of racialization in iwtv s1-s2 that's at the forefront of the story isn't "all bipoc v white" but "black v nonblack", demonstrating how nonblack poc will also choose complicity with white supremacy and violently enact antiblackness to gain and maintain social status. armand is south asian, tuan and quang pham are southeast asian and planche is black- but in louis and claudia's story, there's no material difference between them as agents of antiblack violence and the white characters who are also agents of antiblack violence- it makes no difference to the black victim if the person lynching them is white or poc, and anyone can be antiblack regardless of personal identity- louis and claudia are a specific kind of "dark other" as black protagonists.
when the coven's desire to violently subjugate, punish and destroy louis and claudia reaches a boiling point, that brings us to the 3rd step, violence- and while there's a strong argument that the baby lulu play also covers the 1st step, spectacle, the fact that it's a show drawing on minstrel tropes with the unspoken goal of torturing and humiliating claudia for the state of her body is what makes it an act of textual violence. once claudia escapes the coven with her chosen companion, ending the baby lulu play, the coven starts plotting to lynch her and louis. the lynching is the climax of the dramatic arc of the first 2 seasons and the greatest act of antiblack violence inflicted on the black protagonists, where they're tortured, maimed, humiliated and darvo'd onstage, until claudia's executed onstage by burning her alive in the sun- and louis would've been executed right next to her if the lynching had gone "according to plan".
bc louis and claudia are sympathetic characters and claudia's murder is framed as a tragedy, not a righteous victory, iwtv subverts the idea of light (white) being a cleansing or purifying force for good- it's a destructive tool weaponized by lynchers here.
and with that we arrive at the 4th step, haunting- while iwtv s3/tvl promises a possibly literal haunting if claudia's ghost returns, she's already haunting the narrative in s1-s2- claudia promises to come back and murder the lynch mob, yeah- "if there's an afterlife, i'm gonna come back and fucking kill all of you. and if there isn't an afterlife, i'm still gonna find a way"- but the entire interview in a way is louis being haunted by claudia as he lives a confined half-life punishing himself (and lestat and armand) for her murder. the louis who was vivacious, social, engaged with life and art and the world around him that we saw in his early days in nola and early days in paris is gone, and the interview slowly reveals the fact that he's still subjugated under his lyncher's power while claudia's memory hangs over him.
"darkness must be destroyed, or there is no story"- there would be no story, no interview, if claudia wasn't dead, and louis' narration at the start of s2ep8 indicates that he sees his entire life as an inevitable road to claudia's death bc of his weakness and susceptibility to lestat, his failure to kill him that brought lestat back across the atlantic to murder louis and their daughter.
claudia never gets to escape the dark fantastic cycle- since there's no resurrection for her coming, by the time we "meet" her in her flashbacks she's already become trapped in this loop and entered another cycle with spectacle, her diaries read by at least 3 others she didn't consent to seeing them and presented to daniel for his book. but louis' story temporarily flirts with emancipation- at the end of the interview, he finds out the truth about his daughter's murder, sets daniel's laptop on fire as a tacit way of revoking consent for the book's publication, and returns to nola liberated from the last of his abusers. the return of his natural accent indicates he's starting to come back to himself, exiting the shell of the still, emotionally repressed, almost robotic demeanor he had in dubai.
but when louis goes on that true crime tour, we realize louis and claudia are still being treated as the mysterious, hated figures of rue royale they were in the 1930s/40 and stereotyped as a nameless hustler running a voodoo cult and "his child bride". and any hope of louis' arc ending with true emancipation, at least at this point of the story, is extinguished with the time skip forward several years, after daniel's published the book. louis has been thrust back into the 1st step of the cycle, and this time he and claudia have been turned into a global spectacle- and vampires around the world are already calling for his head for disrupting for wrecking havoc on their order, foreshadowing the hesitation step.
"it is this dilemma that ultimately repositions the dark other as the spectacle that creates hesitation and elicits violence anew...spawning sequels..." sequels?? and if we look at iwtv's sequel/its 3rd season, we can see how louis has been misrepresented and othered by daniel turning him into a spectacle- "i didn't like myself in it. passive. selfish. a liar. and not the lying to myself kind, a fucking liar"- and he's on track to replay the dark fantastic cycle, the target of violence by both human readers, knowing how antiblack and anti-survivor general audiences can be, and by the direct retaliation of vampires around the world.
Hey. If people aren't aware, Microsoft admitted they know who you and where you are at all times and will give your info to the police.
They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.
Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.
You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.
This article specifically notes:
For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.
GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.
Other important quotes:
What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.
Two things back that up:
There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.
Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.
friend is trying to sell her car bc shes moving to a state with vehicle inspections and her prius lives in defiance of god. anyway so shes cleaning it out at my apartment complex bc we have dumpsters and her roommate forgot to pay the trash bill. i will be liveblogging my experience watching her do this and you will understand why i refuse to help her
guys theres a pile of chicken bones down there from wingstop im so scared
AND i hear "hey dude can i use ur washing machine real quick" and she pulls out a pair of pants from, i shit you not, 1940 and theyre moldified into a SOLID. those pants survived a war and couldnt last a year in her fucking shitbox istfg
i swear to god im not exaggerating here. anyway heres an incomplete list of everything we found inside:
-axe (stolen)
-earrings made out of dentures
-flavored condoms
-a quilt
-hello kitty sweater (stolen from a DIFFERENT ex-friend with a felony charge)
-deer spine
-baseball sized wad of human hair
-""sex apron""
-uranium glass plate
-pile of non-uranium non-car glass
-rollerblades
-complete phantom of the opera cd set
-magic the gathering cards mold-ified into a brick
-lego millennium falcon
-a CUTLASS??? (for "self defense")
-the back bumper of the car
-an entire fucking ant colony
and finally, perhaps the most disturbing,
-a pack of vanilla wax melts, inexplicably unmelted and intact despite sitting inside this terrarium-with-a-prius-wrapped-around-it in 100 degree heat for god knows how long
i must stress: before today she DID NOT KNOW about the ant colony in there . she thought ants just really liked to climb inside anytime the car was parked.
bringing this post back bc i found a video of her offering me the phantom cd set and i said no because the box was coated in a syrupy mat of human hair and she was confused because "we know whos hair it is" ???? as if the origin of the hair was the only fucking holdup
"boys have dirty rooms but clean cars, girls have clean rooms but dirty cars" is a statistical error. Most car owners keep it neat regardless of gender. Ants Georgette, who drives around in a Prius-shaped ant colony (their little ant feet do the Fred Flintstone thing), is an outlier adn should not have been counted.
I got a job at a gas station across from a casino and a guy keeps coming in to buy whole cartons of cigarettes and talks in the third person calling himself "snake eyes pete" and every time I tell him his total hes like "tell ya what if old Pete rolls a snake eyes why dont you give it to him for free?" and he rolls the same set of loaded dice on the counter and it does not matter how many times he rolls snake eyes I will not give him the cartons for free he gets so mad
Snakeyes Pete is from Toronto he gave me a button once that said "Canadians have the best luck" and i said i thought that was the Irish and he said "I fucking hate the irish" and i said okay
The sad part is there’s a decent chance a large proportion of them can be blamed on one spider.
The tarantula that bit JRR Tolkien as a child.
He swore he didn’t have a spider phobia and the experience had nothing to do with the man-eating giant spiders in The Hobbit, the even more giant and even more man-eating spider in Lord of the Rings, or the unholy eldritch spider from outside creation that plunged the world into darkness and made literal Satan scream like a little kid in the Silmarillion. Very few people believe him.
Given LotR’s influence in the fantasy genre, there is a high probability that tarantula is the progenitor of even more fictional spiders than Ungoliant was.
“fantasy universes have too many spiders” factoid actually just statistical error. Georgs Spider, who bit JRR Tolkein & is to blame for menacing over 10,000 fantasy universes, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
gay people: strike me down. you’ve won. i’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows i deserve to die at your hand. you are my only friend. i am undone without you.
It's wild to watch the phrase "tumblr sexyman" morph into "man that tumblr thinks is sexy," because when I first saw the phrase come into use, I always saw it used in reference to the phenomenon of "when presented with a wide array of fictional characters, tumblr will always pick the skinny white man to obsess over, and if the fan-favorite character has no canonical human appearance, the fandom will inevitably create a popular fanon of the character as as a skinny white man."
When I hear "tumblr sexyman," I think of Cecil Night Vale being constantly depicted as a skinny white man instead of literally anything else. I think of the background character white men who get elevated over protagonists that are women, people of color, or otherwise not the white man power fantasy.
"Tumblr sexyman" is, like. An insult. I DON'T want any of my blorbos to win a "tumblr sexyman" poll. "Tumblr sexyman" is the exact opposite of what I want my own OCs to be. If any of my characters ever get called "tumblr sexyman," I will have to immediately re-evaluate myself and the art I'm making.
Oncelercest, because if there aren't two skinny white men to ship, tumblr fandom will start shipping the skinny white man with himself.
Bill Cipher inexplicably being fanon'd as a white twink despite being a fucking triangle.
Everyone fawning over Marvel Loki while shoving every woman and Black person in the MCU aside.
The way nearly every single character in Hazbin Hotel has the same "tall and skinny" body type, along with all the criticisms Black audience members have made about the issues with Alastor's design.
The way tumblr got obsessed with the white man villain in Sinners.
secretary birds look pretty normal but for some reason people have collectively decided to photograph them like they're [takes a moment to find an acceptable way to say this] women
I think ianthe is a lesbian but she would fuck augustine if he asked and they'd both have a bad time. she's also definitely fucked babs at least once and they also had a bad time
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