Budget Lesmand || TVL Meta
So since I'm not ready for a seven hour long rewatch, I'm doing meta on a single seismic shift to the story of The Vampire Lestat, which is original, imaginative, and fascinating, but the catalyst for which seems to be working inside a slashed budget.
**SPOILERS**
for The Vampire Lestat, 1x07
**SPOILERS*
So here's a thing people buried in fandoms have a tendency to not understand: historical flashbacks are way more expensive than they look, let alone recreating such scenes after the sets are torn down. It really is a miracle the first season had such stunning and faithful flashbacks.
But not only can this season not afford the same, but something like three quarters of TVL was set in the late eighteenth century, something almost out of the question this time.
So how do they tell the story when they can't go back? They move the story to the present. It's not as noticeable if you fixate on most of the characters or plot lines, but it's very apparent when you look at the protagonist and antagonist of the book. So let's do that!
In the book, Lestat drops an album, makes a bunch of music videos, gains a ton of mortal fans, then gives one concert and it's over. No more Rockstat. So why does the show have a tour and a large vampire following?
Well, in le past de book, Lestat was the unwilling reformer of the Théâtre des Vampires, the point of which was to bring the Paris vampires out of the dark ages and into the figurative light.
The Great Conversion is this pushed to its cataclysmic limit. Because the world is more connected now, all it takes is for a hashtag to trend and suddenly a hometown idea can become a global movement.
In the end, just like in the book, Lestat abandons his movement and he and his mother have a falling out that leads them into going their separate ways, because they greatly disagree about what it means to be a vampire and walk the Devil's Road.
Gabriella doesn't give a shit about mortals and connections and Lestat mourns his humanity and wants to be seen. In the show, Gabriella high jacks Lestat's tour to make it about vampire rebellion instead of the sort of reunion with humanity that Lestat started it for.
There's a lot of tragedies this season, but one of them is in Lestat watching his album flop because he made it for vampire ears only, when what he really wanted was to just be known and loved.
There's a lot of that going around, isn't there?
In the book, Armand stays with the Children of Darkness, not because he worships Satan, but because, after everything he's lost and the madness it's inflicted on him, he doesn't know what else to do.
Everything else has been taken from him by unimaginable violence and cruelty, so when Lestat destroys the coven he destroys Armand's life. Armand becomes dangerously unmoored and when that happens to vampires, they usually burn. So Armand feels like his options are to either defeat Lestat and restore the coven, or kill himself.
But Lestat and Armand have plot armor, so in the end, he'd defeated and begs Lestat for guidance to survive. But Lestat walks away from the consequences of all his actions -- Nicki, the theater, everything -- leaves Armand holding the bag, and in the wake of this abandonment, Armand falls in love with Lestat and hopes, like a discarded toy in a Disney movie, that Lestat will return and fill his life with meaning.
But when Lestat comes back to him, he only wants a suck-suck from Armand's sexy ancient blood, because Claudia (the five-year-old he turned into a vampire) poisoned and perforated him, and his true love, Louis de Arson du ShitRocker, set his ass on fire and he's not recovering. Armand is truly the last person Lestat should've gone to.
He could've gone to Marius, but... plot things.
So Armand, enraged at the audacity of blond men and suddenly filled with the most creative energy anyone's ever had, decides to ruin Lestat's life by forcing him to testify in a hasty trial that would kill Claudia for trying to murder him, and then runs off with Louis. But before he does, he begs Lestat to love him one last time, and when Lestat lies and says he doesn't out of spite, Armand pushes him off Magnus' tower and breaks all his bones.
In another book, Armand reveals he tried, in the hours before Claudia's execution, to give her an adult body by switching her head with another unnamed vampire, but it super-didn't work.
Meanwhile, in the show, Armand becomes dangerously unmoored when Louis dumps him and so seemingly forms (probably just commandeers) the new Children of Darkness to be his army under the promise of preventing the Great Conversion. He plots to endear Louis to a grifter who looks like Claudia, seemingly so he'll have leverage, then cuts Louis' head off so he can pin him down long enough to get closure.
"And then I'm gonna find a big ol' butcher knife and chop your head off. And then I'm gonna walk that head all the way to Audubon Park. And I'm gonna feed it to the fսcking lions. And I'm gonna laaauugh!"
-- Louis, giving Armand date night ideas.
Armand holds Louis, Lestat's body, and Regina hostage, makes Louis listen to his full apology, and demands that Louis return the favor, furious that he wasted seventy-five years slaving to earn the love and forgiveness of a man who only strung him along, torturing him with shame and neglect all the while.
Out of spite, Louis refuses to give him anything but insults until he's in severe decline, and then he uses telepathy to apologize. The show leaves it up in the air as to whether Louis comes clean with a sincere apology, or just uses Armand's pain to manipulate him into surrender, but this is where we part from the parallels with the books.
Because in the books, Armand's trauma from being trafficked as a boy is treated like something he holds onto because he's childish, and that his daddy Marius could have reasonably been able to diddle it out of him. Or as the man himself calls it, "the school of love".
No one in the source material ever said anything this emotionally intelligent about what he went through, or connected the dots from the abuse he endured to the monster he became, let alone between Louis' mortal occupation and his immortal companion.
Whether it's a cynical trick (twisting the Arun knife to escape the evil Gremlin), an endearing kindness (gifting badly needed grace to a fellow sinner) or something in between, is left up to interpretation.
Louis also reveals that, while Armand was bought by Marius when he was fifteen, he was originally sold into slavery by his parents when he was twelve, explaining why there's so much darkness in Armand. It's an unexpected insight, and Armand surrenders to it, healing Regina and leaving the pieces for Dr. Fareed to put back together.
Armand's relationship with Lestat -- the romance and the rivalry -- were left out of Lestat's retelling, leaving only clues that there's more to be revealed in possible future seasons.
For example, even though there was no call for it, everyone around Lestat, including the people in his head, called Armand his ex-boyfriend. When Gabriella sees Lestat depressed, she mockingly asks if it's because Armand cried over his diss track, implying she thinks Lestat would be upset by that. And it's inferred by both Nicki and Marius that they buffed Paris to a mirror shine.
So it stands to reason, if the rumpy-pumpy was omitted from Lestat's telling, the fighting to the death and the breaking of bones probably was, too. Sam Reid claims the imaginary concert in Lestat's mind doesn't include everyone who matters to him, because if it did, Armand would be there. And he also claims there's things about the eighteenth century that Lestat wasn't ready to admit yet.
On top of that, Lestat reacts to Armand being back in his life like he knows he's a dangerous monster, but responds to the threat by flashing his naked body at Armand, goading and belittling him, and dismissing him to Gabriella as an easily spankable obstacle, instead of treating him like a guy who can and will mind-cock him off a cliff.
That is to say, he's painting Armand with a broad, beige brush.
So while I don't expect parent company Paramount, of the Censorship Paramounts, to let them get as gay with it as season one, they certainly can do all the horrific violence they want, and there does seem to be the promise of Armand playing a bigger role in Part Two of the story of Lestat's precious little life.
