•old man yaoi aficionado•

tv shows & movies blog

[sillystigmata]

And I’ve always said that.

[vampire-wtch]

The DM stuff this season is especially hilarious when you remember these are all events Lestat felt were important enough to imagine his own version of to include in The Failures. He's deadass writing fanfic about them in his memoir. Bless.

[kookiedeadbutterflies]

You know what’s really funny? This is exactly how Devil’s Minion happened in QOTD.

It was a really random chapter that came out of nowhere in the story that spanned from the moment Armand and Daniel met to their courtship to their companionship and Daniel’s eventual turning in one short story.

And then you realize The Vampire Lestat and QOTD is technically narrated by Lestat and you realize that Devil’s Minion is technically a fanfic written, inserted, and published by Lestat in a book.

Lestat is the ultimate ArmanDaniel fan.

[suddenly-frankenstein]

the actor manager who couldn't manage

[preacherboyd]

The Vampire Lestat | The Devil's Road

[thevtuberlestat]

armand sees apology as a humiliation ritual where you crawl on the ground and let people kick you until they've satisfied every vindictive bone in their body and lestat sees apology as a great personal sacrifice where you give people enough gifts to buy their love send tweet

[lestatrocks]

louis smiling and confirming to regina that hes gay is so funny to me.... no no i didnt want SEX oh god, you mustve thought i was so creepy haha. Noooo omg i want you to act like my dead vampire daughter who was also a stand in for my humam sister who died believing me to be a monster. which i am.

[loopnoid]

i've been told there's a repost of this silly old comic going around so here's the real one

[nightislands]

the type of shit armand and daniel are up to while lestat’s having a mental breakdown hallucinating his dead ex with no hands

[anonymous56702]

let’s be completely real. lestat was in his feelings and wrote big boss’s lyrics 20 minutes before that concert and was like, hey salamander, I figured out what we can do with your weird song. i wanna diss this guy and he’s gonna be there tonight. it’s the most lestat thing that the show has done so far. he did not think it through.

[l-e-s-l-u-t]

[whatrudoingbree]

Random IWTV & TVL thought 172,846:

You don’t like the line where Daniel referred to Louis as a bucket of Louisiana fried chicken… GOOD, you’re a decent human. It’s not supposed to make you feel good. That’s the POINT. The older white man who has been extremely rude, and crass and slightly homophobic, and racially insensitive, and throws terms like “battered wife” and “rent boy” around got WORSE after vampirism… surprise fucking surprise.

You don’t like when Lestat, Louis, and Daniel toss around Armand’s sex slave trauma…GOOD, you’re a decent human. It’s not supposed to make you feel good. That’s the point, to make you aware that your fave can be just as shitty as every other character. You’re not supposed to put them on a pedestal, they’re characters not ROLE MODELS.

Y’all want complex characters until they stop making you feel good. Until they challenge your sensibilities. Until they reflect reality too close for comfort.

You can feel however you want about the show, or writing, or characters (that’s your right and you were going to do it anyways). But to the viewers that are like “I hate it and I hate anyone that doesn’t share my very specific and very personal view points 🫨😡🫨”, just stop watching 😐 Stop torturing yourself and everyone else with your self prescribed masochism which is the show you claim to hate.

There’s a difference between calling out racism in the fandom (of which there is plenty) but shooting shots wildly into the crowd because the show gave you too big emotions that you refuse to process without lashing out is tired.

[bifauxnenarmand]

[winkypants]

Me opening tumblr to discover children whining about 🧛 VAMPIRES 🧛 being bad ❌PEOPLE ❌

[ladypaperwriterson]

"You simply cannot trust Louis, he's a completely unreliable narrator and every single thing he ever said should be put to question! It's so good that we finally have Lestat's version, which is obviously the only true one - so good to finally have a reliable narrator!"

The reliable narrator:

[entretienavecunvampire]

armand going to AA meetings and following the 12 steps is actually so unexpectedly in character for him

things armand loves:

structure

group of people meeting regularly and following the same rules

abstinence and self-denial

he sees an AA meeting and his eyes light up with a kaching noise like in a cartoon. he’s like oh great, rules given to me by a higher power? an opportunity for self-flagellation? set steps i have to follow to cleanse me of my sins?

of COURSE he’s signing up instantly and attending 3 meetings a day

[belovedblabber]

A female friend group WOULD fix Armand but Anne Rice often forgot to consider women as people and so this did not happen

[fay989]

I’m a little drunk and tired so this isn’t going to be as eloquently written as it deserves to be, howeverrr,

I think it’s evident that in the IWTV/TVL fandom, there’s this simmering debate about moralizing the characters/show vs analyzing the show through a more critical & distant lense. And it reminds me of this time in college when I gave a presentation on a controversial religious sect and I was all “well, they’re good because of blah blah blah, but…. they’re bad because of blah blah”. And my professor interrupted me in the middle of the presentation and goes “this is the problem with Your Generation™️, you want to moralize everything and center yourself, but you will have a more impactful analysis if you stop inputting your own opinion and just analyze what is actually happening.”

So it’s kinda like the joke of there being a ‘Woke 1’ era vs the (current) beginning of ‘Woke 2’, you know? There’s an emerging bend towards understanding that identity politics and moralization flattens your (our) understanding and analysis of fictional events, or of historical events, etc. There’s an emergent recognition & reflection of how identity politics has been used by the far right & the capitalist class to keep people divided and bickering. And stating this DOES NOT therefore mean that identity politics should be trashed altogether, or that there’s no such thing as marginalization or privilege, etc. It just means that viewing things purely through the lens of identity politics is, by definition, reductionist, and that this element of this type of analysis is essentially why it has persisted for so long…because we talk in circles and circles and, in many cases, the result is… what?

In fact, I’m not even bagging on identity politics in particular, it’s just the prevalent method of our time. Like, analyzing anything through the lens of any one viewpoint is reductionist. That’s what reductionist means… to reduce to one thing, one viewpoint, etc. In political theory classes you may be asked to write papers on topics from the perspective of certain theories, like camera lenses, and even though you don’t agree with a particular theory, you need to write the goddamn paper anyway. It is okay, and safe, and can even be fun, to engage with art or concepts that you don’t personally agree with.

And I sorta think that this is why IWTV has become so popular, besides the good writing, etc, etc. I think, when we look back in 10 years, this show is going to be so clearly ‘of it’s time’ [affectionate] in the sense that it forces people to battle with this idea of there being a grey area. All of the characters suck and all of them are great. They’re literal monsters, remember? Like, they murder people? Like just cuz they’re hot doesn’t mean they’re not monsters. You like Lestat despite him abusing Louis by dropping him from 5,000 feet or whatever. You like Louis even though he’s creeping on some waitress. You like Claudia even though she accidentally murdered the men she dated. You like Armand even though— even though, even though, even though.

And I think this season so far has created the start of some fantastic discourse about the cycle of abuse. It reminds me a lot of this Gabor Maté video (around the 20min mark) where he discusses how a traumatic childhood event manifests in his relationship style with his wife. And he says that doesn’t excuse him and absolve him from responsibility, but rather it makes him ask what can he do to liberate himself so that he doesn’t continue this cycle of imposing his issues onto his wife. Do you see how this is a deeper & more effective analysis than “bad man in relationship is bad”?

So anyway, I think that’s the underlying reason of why this show is so popular within the broader context of our societal consciousness (for lack of a less-pretentious way to say it). We’re being introduced to this muscle that we haven’t had to exercise in a decade, or two, or maybe never. We’re being forced to recon with the idea of there being grey areas and nuance. At the end of the day, characters are tools in the story, in the same way the lighting or the setting or the background score are tools. You know what I mean? It’s uncomfortable and that’s what makes it interesting, it makes you chew on it. A little friction isn’t bad. And in fact, not to be dramatic, but slowly adjusting to the idea of experiencing friction is probably necessary as we descend into fascism, etc etc. And pondering about a TV show is a very safe and easy way to do that.