the light side of the moon

links: my art | text posts yusi, they/them

[yusiyomogi]

i mostly moved on from tvl mess (for real this time) but i'll try to answer stuff in my askbox. just in case i'll put it aside for too long again: i'm sorry. don't stop talking about it. i'm still technically in iwtv fandom, but i'll most likely ignore the show canon starting from tvl & will only (rarely) interact with the side of the fandom that focuses solely on iwtv. i'm still mildly interested in what amc does with qotd, but i won't follow what's happening with it.

[yusiyomogi]

i keep seeing all the poor little meow meow posts about lestat and thinking how much the writers fucked up his character while trying to create more sympathy for him. his character as a whole is mostly extremely off-putting for me now. sympathetic framing only works when it's enough to balance out the weight of horrible actions, and at some point "poor him" just doesn't work anymore, you as a writer would need to add some development and accountability to make the scales more even. you need to challenge the character, even (or especially) fun anti-hero types. avoiding the accountability is the last thing you wanna do.

the fact that they understood it perfectly with louis but somehow completely missed the mark with lestat is genuinely tragic. like, i just don't wanna watch anything about that character. he's not compelling. he was my second favorite before tvl...

[helianthus21]

they really ate with Claudia's "can I cry and say that i'm sorry too?" line. shame that tvl went even more white man tears about it.

[yusiyomogi]

louis is a male character and doesnt suffer misogyny or the "madonna-whore complex" thats exclusively misogynistic and sexist and affects only women. Yall never look this hard and deep toward misogyny on the show esp when its your fav male character partaking in it

(context)

i understand the instinct to react like this. male characters can't be the victims of misogyny. i hate when people use this talking point too! which is why i specifically didn't do this in my reply (if you bothered to read it). i assume the anon also meant it in more tongue-in-cheek way, because there are some similarities in dynamic for sure, but obviously it's not the right term.

but it's also an interesting philosophical topic because… well, misogyny is a part of patriarchal culture. and the way louis is treated both by characters in the show and the narrative itself does have similarities to the way women treated in this culture as well. a lot of rhetoric used against louis by his partners is very similar to the rhetoric used against women (like calling him a "whore" literally or figuratively) simply because he's in a similar position in patriarchal system: he's a domestic abuse victim of his more powerful male partners and he was specifically punished for giving too much attention to his child. also notice how the narrative weaponizes louis' (slightly more developed) emotional intelligence against him, so this kinda rhetoric exists in the writers' room as well.

i think it's a very interesting thing to think about, how our social roles and specifically our position in patriarchal hierarchy determines so much of the way we're treated by that society. and that includes all of us! iwtv was an excellent exploration of this. but we do need to be more careful with terminology, that's for sure.

[yusiyomogi]

The man hates the previous two season of his show. Can we even call it his show? I need to know how much in out he had. Reading the original pilot script vs the one broadcast I can’t believe he wrote that episode. I can’t believe the best episode of the whole show has him as a writer knowing what he wanted to do originally. Tvl was always his plan. At least he didn’t get too much control over iwtv

i've said it many times before, i think rolin was actually interested in collaborative process and that's what saved iwtv. i think he had a lot of control over iwtv, but he let the show take form on its own.

most people who worked in the writer's room with him said that writing for the show was a really fun & engaging process. i think the biggest problem was that rolin's own vision was very flawed and poisoned with irony, but he always followed the collective decision of his writing team. idk, maybe he didn't care enough for iwtv and sat back, or maybe the opposite, he wasn't too frustrated and bored with the project yet... who knows. but i think tvl is his vision, how he wanted that show to be in the first place (if we exclude amc meddling) and he did everything to "tame" the narrative and reboot the show into this version for some reason.

the writers' room had 2 musicians this time around. no black writers. no one fought too hard against his vision. but also something changed in his approach too. listening to alan taylor's interview was eye-opening because this man was genuinely confused by rolin's thought process (and he directed s1e1 & s1e2, so he was there in the start). he didn't understand why rolin messed so much with tvl ep7 when he barely changed anything in director's cut of s1e1. i think rolin really got caught up in some kinda artistic crisis or power game, and the fact that he basically has left the second half of this mess in other people's hands tells me everything i need to know.

[yusiyomogi]

"A love who will cradle you" in the end the blowjob brothers both wanted louis as their mom/parental figure and took their anger out on claudia for being on the receiving end of louis smothering love, and when they didnt have claudia to blame, their louis madonna-whore complex kicked in 🕊

no wonder that louis feels like his love is always "wrong" and that he's "never enough". he loves people in his life so much but it's never the kind of love they want and/or need from him.

you can actually see that with everyone he cares about: lestat who wants everything and will always breaks louis down until it's too suffocating and louis escapes. armand who's a mirror image of lestat in his possessiveness but also wants a softer side of louis that he never got (for many good reasons). claudia who wanted more understanding than love but got all the smothering parental love and codependency from him. daniel who wanted to be louis' lover and longed to be bound to him through vampirism, but got friend-zoned even though it meant that louis trusted him more than most.

and then all of them blame him for loving them "wrong". and claudia obviously had good reasons to be upset, while everyone else actually needed to get their asses kicked. i'll never forgive tvl for bringing louis down instead of trying to develop other characters in more interesting ways. when you think about it, armand and lestat worked as a team to break louis again. bad cop armand, good cop lestat. lestat gets "the prize" this time around by doing bare minimum while armand plays the villain. just cycles keep cycling. you can't even imagine how much i wanna disintegrate them both with space laser. i also just hate this type of storytelling that wastes my time.

the only way to save louis is to free him from the narrative. that's how we'll turn all the postmodern bullshit against the writers' room.

[lou-stat]

'Still Life' Review

[crazykuroneko]

try this. the last two points of my result is literally just IWTV lol

Genre tells you what a book contains. Your color tells you what it does to you. Discover your reading color — free, 5 minutes.

[oilpalette]

Light Through a Mandarin, 2026 by Elena Khokhryakova (Ukrainian); Oil on canvas, 40x40 cm

[dlsintegration]

happy patriarchy is bad Friday mutuals

[cryptidjeepers]

just watched a star trek episode about a planet that relied so heavily on it's computer system that they all forgot the basics of their own knowledge. and that allowed them to miss the fact that they were being posioned with radiation and nearly ending their civilization. because they couldn't use their own knowledge to figure things out. i bring this up for no reason in particular

[geestdrift]

they really had an all-time character with jacob anderson's ldpdl and this is how they treated him. truly unforgivable

[mortalfathers]

another thing about tvl is that it speaks to such a flat, liberal conception of racism… in tvl, racism only ever exists when people are trying to be racist & malicious (see: daniel’s fried chicken comment) which is a gross oversimplification of how racism presents irl & iwtv understood this at least somewhat. imo, daniel would not consider himself to be racist in seasons 1&2, in the same vein of many self-righteous american neoliberals. he has a very new york times/washington post flavour of bigotry. there’s a definite smugness when he speaks about the racial dynamics of loustat (“white master, black student, but equal in the quiet dark”) for example. he understands racism is bad but he’s snarky about it in a way that's dismissive & comes from an angle of moral superiority rather than empathy. hes still being racist!! that line IS a microagression. despite the veneer of sarcasm, he's still calling louis the "black student" to lestat’s "white master", like come on.. iwtv understood that daniel has biases and how to depict them. racism doesn’t just come in the form of bad person who hates poc.. “well-meaning” people who recognize racism is bad are just as capable of racism..

[yusiyomogi]

fields of mistria launched 1.0 version... maybe i should dive in and distract myself. i actually played this game for the first time right when i was watching iwtv for the first time, so it could be a symbolic way to end the cycle lmao. i haven't finished deltarune ch5 though, i really need to do that too.

[vfevermillion]

They had Louis apologize to Armand and then apologize that he was enslaved and then apologize for making him this way by not loving him right which is insane cause his Maker is alive. Armand calls Louis his Claudia only to force Louis to apologize as Marius' proxy. And Marius is still alive. And then to say in the 77 years they were together they never spoke about his past implying Armand's victimhood had to be talked around like Lestat and there was no space for Armand to be a victim in their relationship. This show got more smoke for Louis than Marius. And Marius is alive.

[yusiyomogi]

some other thoughts on abuse apologia in tvl. like i said before, in my opinion the writers took abuse-centric stance, either because they find this type of the narrative more "brave" and "interesting" or because they have certain beliefs they wanted to express through the fictional characters without facing much backlash.

i'm trying to connect everything from iwtv and tvl and see the statement they tried to make, and obviously iwtv is a little more careful in that regard, most likely because the writers' room had inner disagreements, and the political/cultural climate was a bit different. tvl has a more straightforward vision. not a great one of course.

tvl says that there are "real victims" and "performative victims". and the distinction they make is not based on any kinda proper research, but what looks like personal opinion festering in minds of older generations probably since early 2000s. basically tvl says that people are way too sensitive and there's some kinda rational truth, while the rest is delusional. it says that "real victims" are those who were physically assaulted without any reason by strangers. "real victims" are those who were used and weren't loved. these people deserve sympathy and support and can talk about their pain in any form they want.

and then there are "performative victims": people who carry partial accountability in relationships with their family members or partners but "blame others" for harm that was done to them. therefore, idea of material power doesn't matter at all: tvl says that you have free will, so you brought that harm on yourself either by provoking someone, by treating them coldly or by staying with someone who could be dangerous to you. and the narrative not only criticizes people who position themselves as the wronged side in such relationships, it holds immense hatred for them.

"you talked about it and it's worse" is basically the main philosophy of tvl. it asks the questions: "if it was our personal relationship and we both did wrong, why you act like you're allowed to talk about harm done to you and i don't? why you think you allowed to kick me out of our shared home?". it reads to me as something very personal and very frustrated.

and obviously in this philosophy we can see some fascinating conclusions tvl makes: lestat is a victim of magnus, but he only becomes victim of gabriella when he realized she used him (otherwise "he didn't mind"). louis is not a victim of lestat and especially armand, because spousal abuse is "always mutual" and he was emotionally distant and mean, so he "deserved it". claudia is bruce's victim, but not louis' victim because she used him and hated him (so louis needs to move on from his guilt, you see). she's potentially lestat's victim, but she retaliated, so they're "even" now. daniel is not armand's victim because armand loved him. and again, what being a "victim" even means in tvl is that these people are allowed to complain and talk about their trauma, but if you aren't "real victim" you should shut up about your feelings and admit how equally selfish and awful you were.

basically, we talked a lot how much this fandom enjoys abuse apologia and victim-blaming and never realized that the biggest enemies are the writers themselves. people who found perfect time and place to voice their personal opinions on so-called modern sensibilities and wrap it up in the show about vampires (because "they're monsters!") so no one cancels them online. all that research they allegedly did on abuse wasted, i guess.

[featherspiral]

going to curl into a ball and just die probabluy im so normal abpout this 😝😝😝😝😝so normal