I saw some posts about âdepiction is not endorsementâ and it is a valid argument in media discourse, but I don't think that's what's actually happening with tvl though. I agree that some scenes are being read with the worst intention possible, but I don't believe the criticisms regarding anti-Blackness and Orientalism are baseless. Depicting murder doesn't mean supporting murder, depicting racism doesn't mean supporting racism and all that, especially in the gothic horror genre where taboos are meant to be explored.
But the problem lies in how the show actually handles these themes. I'm gonna assume that most people watching tvl have already watched iwtv and already know about its dark themes. Iwtv was far from perfect and certainly had its own racial missteps, yet the racial criticisms surrounding it were significantly quieter than those directed at tvl. Thats because tvlâs writing is doing something worse. When look at its three main characters of color, it stops feeling like a portrayal of racism and starts feeling like the show is agreeing with it.Â
1. Claudia's SĂŠance
The issue with Claudia's sĂŠance scene is that while it claims to adapt a moment from Merrick, it completely ignores the showâs established context while failing to faithfully translate the source material as well.
In Merrick, Claudia's intent toward Louis stems from a fundamentally different dynamic, trapped in the physical body of a 5-year-old child, book Claudia inherently requires a caretaker to survive, which is why she desires to make one of her creators her "slave" and that they become entirely dependent on her.Â
Show Claudia, however, is introduced as a 14-year-old who learns to navigate the world independently, making this entire âslaveâ dynamic logically non-applicable to her characterization. Also in ss1, when Claudia calls Lestat "master" it is an intentional critique of the race dynamics in how Jim Crow era present in their house, she wants Louis to recognize their shared oppression, even if he refuses to acknowledge it.
Yet, the show abandons this nuanced racial framing and instead has her hurl racial insults at Louis such as "nappy little head". What is the narrative purpose of this hostility? If the goal was to show that her toxicity toward Louis stems from caring about him more, why not actually anchor it in their canonical dynamic? Â
So the show adapts the hate but not the love, was it really that difficult to adapt just one more line from the text to reflect her true feelings? She has legitimate grievances against both Louis and Lestat, but they cut that nuanced emotional tragedy between Louis and Claudia. If the show set out to adapt sÊance scene, why also erase the part where she repeatedly calls Louis "Father" throughout the passage, only to replace that complex, lingering bond with a line declaring that at least Lestat is her blood?
This rewrite subtly paints Lestat as the better parent while framing Louis as the sole origin of her misery. But letâs be real, Louis is far from perfect, but who was the one physically and mentally abusing her to the point where she decided to kill him? Who dragged her off the train when she tried to leave? And who crossed the ocean to actively participate in her lynching? Who is the one that got dragged away and still tried to hold on to her and who is the one who chose not to save her? By erasing her love for Louis and substituting it with a racialized insult and a defense of Lestat's bloodline, the show flattens a complex tragedy into a narrative that whitewashes abusive dynamics at Louis and Claudia's expense.
2. Louis as the Pimp
The narrative repeatedly emphasizes Louis's history as a pimp to an exhausting degree, as if pimping were his sole defining personality trait. In iwtv, Louis's struggles with race, exploitation, and morality were treated with gravitas, we understood the oppressive systemic realities he was forced to navigate. In tvl, however, reducing his entire identity to this specific trope without adequate nuance risks reinforcing racialized stereotypes rather than critiquing them. Why is Louis's past as a pimp continuously dragged out and weaponized against him at every turn, yet we never see characters reflexively branding Lestat as a "domestic abuser" or a "lyncher" every time he enters a room? Unless I severely misunderstand gothic conventions, are we supposed to believe that being a pimp is the ultimate, unforgivable crime in this universe, while domestic abuse and participating in a lynching are just harmless gothic fun? Hyper-focusing on Louis's mortal failings while glossing over Lestat's actions, then we have a double standard in how it assigns moral guilt to its black protagonist.Â
3. Armand and Fetishized Orientalism
Insults targeting Armandâs sexuality, appearance have persisted from season 1 to season 3 without a single moment of meaningful narrative pushback. There is something really careless about how the show crafts Armand, giving him a Bengali heritage simply because Assad is of Bengali descent (as Assad himself confirmed in interview), devaluing his appearance, diminishing his charisma, and stripping away the intense attraction other characters canonically have toward him.
Even if we charitably assume the show intended to highlight the implicit anti-Asian and desexualization of South Asian men by showing how the characters around Armand deny their attraction to him, this is still terrible execution. Rather than challenging these microaggressions, the narrative actively feeds into the worst kinds of stereotypes. Instead of framing Armand as a nuanced victim navigating systemic racism, the show paints him as purely scheming, venomous, cowardly, undesirable, and pathetic.
When Louis faced racism in season 1, it was treated with narrative weight and systemic critique. In contrast, the Orientalism directed at Armand is consistently framed as a punchline, something for the audience to laugh at rather than interrogate. Worse still, if Armand ever seeks genuine sympathy for his traumatic past, he is either openly mocked or forced to coercively extract that empathy from someone else. I dont know why they have to do this in tvl either when the book already establishes quite well Armandâs trauma, but I suppose turning racial microaggressions into comedy and reducing a South Asian character's trauma to pathetic desperation evil for 3 seasons straight make the show more compelling in their mind. I don't need the other characters to forgive Armand's actions because of his past or anything like that, I just need the story to genuinely handle the trauma of his past well ONCE and not some okay fleeting moments between horrible writing like this.
Art should make us uncomfortable but there is a difference between confronting audiences with uncomfortable truths and hiding behind genre conventions to bypass accountability for careless framing. And when racialized tropes are used repeatedly without critical counterweight, it stops feeling like a commentary on gothic dark themes and starts feeling like narrative endorsement.
