#at least there is a point to this race

[cecoeur]

How do you sleep at night? No one to hide behind Betrayed every alibi you had You had every chance to make amends instead you got drunk on bitterness And you still claim that you're innocent, it's sad

[awkwardrocker]

I need everyone upset about Liam's promotion to understand that it had nothing to do with him being better/worse than Yuki. Yuki outperformed him. Yuki deserved the chance. BUT Yuki is not a Redbull driver. He is a Honda driver. He has no loyalty to Redbull and that is why he did not get a chance next to Max. It's not that he didn't deserve it. It's pure business.

Redbull are ending their relationship with Honda. They are creating their own engines. It's likely seen as a big liability to Redbull to have Yuki actively involved in any tests or even near anything involving the 2026 engine.

This is not an attack on Yuki or his character or anything like that, so please do not take it that way. But, Yuki's loyalty to a different engine manufacturer is a major risk to any new manufacturer like the Ford/Redbull powertrain. You just never know. I'm not saying he doesn't deserve a good drive, but Yuki's loyalty will forever be to Honda (as it should) and that poses a lot of risks for Redbull.

Once again, I am not commenting on Yuki's character or making assumptions about him when I say this, but there are a lot of big concerns if he gets promoted. He could ditch them for Aston immediately because Honda asks, he could share information about the new engine to Honda, or he could give questionable feedback that negatively impacts the new powertrain. Maybe he wouldn't do these things. But if there's even the most miniscule potential that he could, it would make any team hesitant. F1 is rampant with cheating allegations and questionable tactics to win. The teams will want to protect themselves in any eventuality. And that is what's working against Yuki so greatly.

Yuki has proven to be a very competent driver over the past year, but let's not forget that he nearly lost his seat in 2023 and the rumored reason he stayed is due to Honda. He owes his career to Honda, not Redbull. And at the end of the day, that's his main flaw within this team. It's not his driving. It's not his temper. It's not anything else. It's purely who he is aligned to poltically in the racing world. Is that fair? No. Is that how racing works? Unfortunately, yes.

[hey-its-sybarite]

“Let's tell more stories. Let's be monsters and enjoy it. Let's be problematic. Give us the space to be a problem.”

[mostlyvoid-partiallyflowers]

The most recent episode of Interview with a Vampire let's us see Lestat's side of the story and see how it compares to Louis' accounting of their relationship. As a result, it reaffirms just how unreliable of a narrator Louis is, but it also further illuminates elements of his character that the director and writers have been playing with since the beginning of the show.

There's this part in the episode where Lestat turns to Louis and apologizes and it's framed with Lestat turned to Louis on one side and Claudia on his other side. They're the angel and devil on Louis' shoulders, but who is the angel and who is the devil? And as my friend said, Armand and Daniel are placed into that same dynamic with Louis later on. We are being asked to decide who to trust, who's telling the truth, who's the good guy, but the fact of unreliability robs us of that decision.

This whole story is about Louis, he's the protagonist, though not the narrator, and he is constantly being pulled in two directions, no matter when or where he is in his story. He's a mind split in two, divided by nature and circumstance. He's vampire and human, owner and owned, father and child, angel and devil. He's both telling the story and being told the story. His history is a story he tells himself, and as we've seen, sometimes that story is not whole.

Louis is the angel who saved Claudia from the fire but he's also the devil who sentenced her to an life of endless torment, the adult trapped in the body of a child. He's the angel who rescued Lestat from his grief and also the devil who abandoned him, who couldn't love him, could only kill and leave him.

He's pulled in two directions, internally and externally at all times and so it's no wonder that he feels the need to confess, first to the priest, then Daniel, and then Daniel again.

He's desperate to be heard, a Black man with power in Jim Crow America who's controlled by his position as someone with a seat at the table but one who will never be considered equal. He doesn't belong to the Black community or the white community, he can't. He acts as a go-between, a bridge, one who is pushed and pulled until he can't take it anymore. He's a fledgling child to an undead father, he's a young queer man discovering his sexual identity with an infinitely experienced partner. He's confessing because he wants to be absolved, that human part of him that was raised Catholic, that child who believed, he wants to be saved. He wants to be seen.

Louis wants to attain a forever life that is morally pure, but he can't. He's been soiled by sin, by "the devil," as he calls Lestat, and he can never be clean again. Deep down, I think he knows this, but he can't stop trying to repent. He tries to self-flagellate by staying with Lestat and then tries to repent by killing him, but can't actually follow through. He follows Claudia to Europe to try and assuage his guilt. He sets himself on fire, attempts to burn himself at the stake, to purify his body, rid himself of the dark gift.

Louis is a man endlessly trying to account for the pain he has caused and he ultimately fails, over and over again, because he can't get rid of what he is. A monster. He's an endlessly hungry monster. He's hungry for love, for respect, for power, for forgiveness, for death. He's a hole that can never be filled. He can never truly acquire any of those things because he will always be punishing himself for wanting and needing them in the first place. He will never truly believe he deserves them and as a result, can't accept them if they are ever offered. He can never be absolved for he has damned himself by accepting the dark gift and thus has tainted himself past the point of saving.

[inkpotsprite]

Just thinking about that trial in Paris. Louis and Claudia vs Lestat. They really never had a chance. Not just because the whole thing was rigged and everyone made sure their punishment was inevitable; but because it was two black people against a white man in the 1940s. They never would have won. Which just adds another layer of tragedy to the whole thing.

[charles-leclerc-official]

i keep thinking about suzuka and how the mclarens were caught out by charles doing a one-stop. they should have known if a one-stop is possible charles is taking it !! suzuka was literally foreshadowing. oh how delicious the narratives this season are

I said that race is really going to be a defining moment in the season, and it really was because it showed the rest of the teams what the Ferrari is capable of, and specifically what Charles is capable of.

On a side note at the end of the year I will be adding up how many points Charles took off Mclaren through tyre management alone

[bluektw]

I'm late to the party

BUT WHAT A RACE

First and foremost

ZHOU IN 13TH

Again, you all don't understand my love for him (and Sauber), he had TWO overtakes in the final laps and we didn't see it

I NEED TO SEE IT

Russell's radio when he won warmed my heart, it was so cute.

And what a race for Hamilton, it was awesome.

Also, congrats Vertsappen, winning his fourth championship.

Also why are Leclerc fans and Sainz fans fighting again??? I saw a bit on Twitter but I'm not understanding anything (Yes I saw the radio, and I was like dude ??? Say that in private??? I'm a Leclerc fan but that was a bit too much for me)

[that-binchh]

as much as i love reading cherik fics, i do have to turn off my brain every time because every fic seems to have a line or two about how mutant issues is the most pressing social injustice. and like as a black person, that line is so tone deaf to me because racism in the x-men world is both visible and invisible, which is actually so true to reality that it lowkey makes me sick.

[sebv81]

he even looks good when he's out in Q1... alexander albon how you move me

[vehemourn]

went to post this on twitter but i didnt wanna get banned . crazy that u can scrape my entire lifes work and i cant even tell u to die over it <3

[compromised-emotionally]

Racebending Interview with the Vampire: Power, Companionship and the Search for Freedom

I wrote a paper for a queer studies class that I'm kinda proud of. It's not particularly mindblowing as it was just a 200 level course, and it's kind of dry cause I was trying to stay formal. It's mostly just referencing other writings on race and queer studies and relating them to the show. It's about how the choice to racebend Louis deepens and transforms the thematic explorations of queerness in the original text. I wanted to share it below because I worked hard on it, even if no one reads this lol:

 

Racebending Interview with the Vampire: Power, Companionship and the Search for Freedom

Interview with the Vampire was originally a novel by Anne Rice, published in 1976. The novel told the story of a Louisiana plantation owner turned vampire named Louis de Pont du Lac, the French vampire named Lestat who was Louis’ maker, and the life they shared together. A film adaption was released in 1994 starring Brad Pitt as Louis and Tom Cruise as Lestat, that, like the book, displayed their relationship as deep but never explicitly sexual. It was not until the 2022 AMC television series that Louis and Lestat’s story was allowed to be explicitly romantic and sexual. The series was made further transformatively progressive with the casting of Black-British actor Jacob Anderson as Louis. In Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Munoz stated “A soft multicultural inclusion of race and ethnicity does not, on its own, lead to a progressive identity discourse” (pg10). Rather than just using “color-blind” casting for empty representation, Louis’ character was changed from slave owner to a black Creole man in the early 20th century. The addition of racial elements deepened thematic explorations of the nonnormative. By racebending Louis, AMC’s Interview with a Vampire expands on the original works’ examination of the vampire as a societal “other” and metaphor for homosexuality as well as Louis’ struggle to assimilate to vampire life. It relates the power dynamics between Lestat and Louis as creator/created to racial dynamics and interlocking systems of oppression.  

            Episode 3 “Is My Very Nature That of the Devil” opens with Lestat and Louis sitting in a park, as Lestat pontificates about the history of that park and reads a column about its design in the newspaper. Louis replies asking if the story mentioned how they used to put the severed heads of runaway slaves on the gates, then ponders if there’s a “greater purpose” for vampires on Earth. Lestat does not take Louis seriously, telling Louis that only that he (Lestat) is his creator and he put him on this Earth for pleasure. This interaction is emblematic of their relationship throughout the show. Lestat repeatedly minimizes the importance and legitimacy of Louis’ struggles, both the external oppressions he faces and his internal struggle to adjust to vampiric life. Vampirism acts as a direct parallel to living a queer life in the original text, though that symmetry is more complicated in the series since there is also explicit queerness in the show.  If humanity is the dominant, normative group in this universe, then Lestat’s approach to vampirism can be read as counteridentificatory. Lestat considers himself and Louis to be completely separate from human society, and has none of Louis’ impulses to assimilate with the human community or hold on to any ties to it.  Louis, conversely, still values the things that were important to him before turning: his club, “appearances”, his relationship with his family. He decides in this episode that he no longer wants to kill people, that he will feed off of animals alone. Lestat interprets this as a Louis denying his “true” identity as both a vampire and a queer man, an attempt to assimilate and identify with humans while rejecting Lestat and their shared identity. In some ways this is understandable, as the drinking of blood within this text is explicitly linked to their sex drive. But Lestat is also continuously upset throughout this episode when Louis refers to the black community of New Orleans as “his people��.  Despite the fact that Louis’ resilience and strength as a black man succeeding in a white world was one of the things that first attracted Lestat to Louis, he cannot comprehend why he still feels such kinship with the race he has always been a part of.

            Lestat treated turning Louis into a vampire as if that would supersede or eliminate the other aspects of his identity. The only difference that mattered to Lestat was vampire vs human, paralleling Cohen’s critique of white queer activism that envisions the world in a hetero/queer divide (Cohen, pg 447). When Lestat turned Louis at the end of the first episode, part of his pitch and promise to him was that as a vampire, racial oppressions would no longer hold him back. Lestat’s proposal was that becoming a vampire would give him (Louis) the power to counteridentify from the racist system, as well as freedom from loneliness and companionship in the form of a life with Lestat. Throughout this episode, Louis is grappling with the lie of that promise. Though he has a physical strength and power of a vampire, he must still move through world as black man in the early 20th century and deal with all the indignities that come along with that. He is also lonelier than anticipated, with a partner who will not acknowledge their differences. Audra Lorde said this of difference “…community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist” (pg 112). E. Patrick Johnson expounds further on this in his article on quare studies, explaining that such communities and theories are not progressive ones, and that LGBTQ of color cannot afford to adopt such theories for themselves.

Louis begins working to integrate the different aspects of himself and his new immortal life into a theory of self that feels true to his experience and acceptable, feeling “the tug and pull of having to choose between which parts […] to claim and wear and which parts have served to cloak us from the knowledge of ourselves” (Moraga and Anzaldua, pg 23). Louis reunites with an old lover, a black soldier passing through on his way to deployment. They have sex out in the Bayou and Louis feels some true companionship, but this is followed by a series of emotionally fraught failures that isolate and disempower him further. He is rejected by and frightens his family. He gets news that his nightclub/brothel is being shut down due to segregationist laws. Lestat throughout this is throwing a temper tantrum over Louis’ dalliance with the solder, despite being the one to open the relationship and begin an affair with the singer at Louis’ club (a white woman). Lestat’s reaction here, paired with the way he shows his disdain for Louis’ choices throughout this episode, display how unsettled Lestat is when he is not in control of Louis, when Louis acts as an independent equal rather than adoring student. Louis pushes aside Lestat’s attention grabbing antics in favor of meeting with a group of white businessmen and politicians in an attempt to save his club. He had interacted with this group before regularly, in a manner that could be viewed as dis-identificatory. He had regular poker games with them, laughing at their jokes, sometimes letting them win, while simultaneously influencing their opinions and nudging them towards social policies that would help him “working on, with, and against a cultural form” (Munoz, pg 12). Johnson’s piece on Quare theory points out that disidentification has always been “the process through which people of color could survive a white supremacist society” (pg12). He gave them a performance of “Mr. Du Lac”, a version of himself that made them comfortable enough to for him to influence their opinions and actions toward him and his businesses. But his previous tactics are no longer working; he can hear the thoughts of the white men insulting and demeaning him while they outwardly suggest that Lestat acts as “the face” of his business. It is also an interesting visual note that Lestat is framed throughout this scene alongside the other white men in the room, despite theoretically coming to support Louis. The degrading tone of their thoughts as they offer outward sympathies suggests that Louis’ tactics with them were always more assimilating and conforming than he wished them to be. If his persona and his performance with them never actually gained him any respect, than perhaps this was little more than a minstrel show.

The beginning of the Munoz essay states:

[…] disidentification is not always an adequate strategy of resistance or survival for all minority subjects. At times, resistance needs to be pronounced and direct; on other occasions queers of color and minority subjects need to follow a conformist path if they hope to survive a hostile public sphere. pg 5.

Louis’ initial response to this realization was a type of malicious compliance: hanging a “coloreds only” sign on his establishment, thereby technically following segregationist wishes. This of course only brings further retaliation from the establishment. Louis’ final response to this situation is his first and most direct counter action He declares himself a vampire for the first time aloud, scaring the alderman and letting him feel powerless for the first time. He kills the man, and hangs his body on a fence with a whites only sign (likely the same fence where the heads of runaway slaves were once posted). But Louis does not get to revel in this at all, as it brings immediate retaliation via the burning of the black neighborhood and businesses of New Orleans. Lestat instead is the ecstatic one; he believes this act of violence is a sign that Louis has finally embraced only vampirism, still misunderstanding the reasons and meaning behind Louis’ rage that drove him to murder the alderman. It pushes Louis away from Lestat again, roaming the burning streets of the place he once belonged, lost and unsure of what the correct approach is to finding community, home, and freedom. Louis wavers, unclear and undecided on how to find this meaning (the writing asks the same; his attempts to play friendly brought only mockery and his show of rebellion brought destruction). It is not until he suddenly hears the voice of Claudia, a 14-year-old Creole girl crying out in his mind for help, that he seems to find an answer. He finds her dying in a burning boarding house and brings her to Lestat to be turned into a vampire. The become a family – “Daddy Lou” “Uncle Les” and Claudia.

            There’s so much to examine in this series even when just considering Louis’ relationship with Lestat and the world around him. But it would be an oversight to not spend some time on Claudia, who would become the guiding motivation and emotional core for Louis. Because Lestat is the one who turned both Louis and Claudia, he is unable to read either of their minds. This further eats at Lestat, this companionship which he cannot share, this difference that he cannot stamp out. After accidentally killing a boy she loved, Claudia grows resentful of the immortal life they’ve subjected her to (Episode 104). Her mind grows but she stays perpetually trapped in the mind of a teenager, and she begrudges being made permanently infantilized. She leaves them to travel on her own and try to learn more about vampires than the little information that Lestat offered.  But when she finally meets another vampire and is excited to find kinship, he rapes her. After this, she decides to return home, but only to retrieve Louis, who has been depressed without her. She recognizes the truth that Audra Lorde stated in Sister Outsider:

Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. Pg112

She is unwilling to trust Lestat, who has continuously demonstrated an unwillingness to grow, to empathize, to “recognize those differences and deal effectively with the distortions…” (Lorde, pg 122).  Lestat reacts to the threat of abandonment with a great act of domestic violence, beating Louis and dropping him from the sky, which almost kills him (Episode 105). Louis eventually forgives Lestat for this in the next episode, but Claudia does not. Though all three characters share the nonnormative vampire identity, Lestat chooses to wield his status as their maker as an oppressive tool against them. All three become more feared and hated as the series goes on. Their home is vandalized on multiple occasions, and it’s made clear by the end of the series that they will need to leave town. But despite this shared struggle, Lestat cannot or will not stand in solidarity with Louis and Claudia. “…our future survival is predicated on our ability to relate within equality” (Lorde 122). Louis’ condition for forgiving Lestat was that he was honest and treated both Louis and Claudia as equals. But Lestat values his control over their lives over having them as true companions, even after promising change; he lies and manipulates them both and threatens Claudia with sexual violence (via letting her know he can invite the vampire who raped her to their home).

Change means growth, and growth can be painful. But we sharpen self-definition by exposing the self in work and struggle together with those whom we define as different from ourselves, although sharing the same goal. Lorde, pg. 123

            Claudia changes and grows the most over the course of the series, beginning as a child but gaining maturity and intelligence as she experiences the pain and joy the world has to offer.  She desires freedom for the first time in her human or immortal life, and feels that both her and Louis can achieve it if they work to free themselves at last from Lestat as a master. By the end of Episode 106, she has finally convinced Louis of the same.

            Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire was already an intriguing piece of queer media that was progressive for its time and how it used vampirism as a vehicle to explore homosexuality, struggle, and longing. In the behind-the-scenes interview piece, producer Adam O’Byrne expressed the production’s desire to reckon with the media in a new way, as they were a new generation interpreting this art. Johnson stated: “quare studies offers a more utilitarian theory of identity politics, focusing not just on performers and effects, but also on contexts and historical situatedness” (pg13). With this new reckoning and interpretation of this media, the artistic team took a piece of queer media and transformed it into “Quare”. With all the inherent complexities of racial relations examined in this interpretation, the audience is able to explore the dynamics of power, freedom, longing and companionship in a deeper and more complicated way than was offered in the original text.

Bibliography

Ep 103 “Is My Very Nature That of a Devil” Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, teleplay by Rolin Jones & Hannah Moscovitch, directed by Keith Powell, AMC Studios, 2022.

Ep 104 “…the ruthless pursuit of blood with all a child’s demanding” Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, teleplay by Eleanor Burgess, directed by Keith Powell, AMC Studios, 2022.

Ep 105 “A vile hunger for your hammering heart” Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, teleplay by Colin Albert, directed by Levan Akin, AMC Studios, 2022.

Ep 106 “Like Angels Put in Hell by God” Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, teleplay by Hannah Moscovitch, directed by Levan Akin, AMC Studios, 2022.

Ep 8.1 “Interview with the Vampire: Behind the Scenes” Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, AMC Studios, 2022.

Lorde, Audra. Sister Outsider, The Crossing Press, Year, pgs. 110-123.

Munoz, Jose Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

E. Patrick Johnson (2001) "Quare" studies, or (almost) everything I know about

queer studies I learned from my grandmother, Text and Performance Quarterly, 21:1, 1-25, DOI: 10.1080/10462930128119

Cathy J. Cohen; Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?. GLQ 1 May 1997; 3 (4): 437–465. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3-4-437

Moraga and Anzaldua, Entering the Lives of Others Theory in the Flesh, 23

[tealfruit]

I'm sorry for continuing to reference the inheritance cycle but also I'm not bc it turns out the overall worldbuilding in those books for the most part fucks severely and also shaped my brain very much in my formative years

[httpiastri]

will: “how much are you looking forward to getting back to japan?”

liam: “well i don’t know if i’m driving yet…”

[introspectivememories]

NICO: WE SHARED THE LIFT THIS MORNING! I WAS GOING TO THE POOL TRAMPOLINE WITH MY TWO DAUGHTERS AND HE WAS GOING TO THE RACETRACK. PINKHAM: VERY DIFFERENT LIVES YOU'RE CURRENTLY LEADING.

[adamnablelittledevil]

Trying to talk to somebody about Louis outside of Lestat and making it very clear to the other person and they still keep talking about loustat. And on the very first reply. It wasn't even, like, a while later the conversation accidentally went to loustat. The person didn't even try, really. SMFH.

[charbies]

How are you painting all of these linktober prompts daily ?!?!!? They’re so detailed and amazing omg

LOL my dear linktober enjoyer, thank you so much for saying this, and I'm glad you asked

Truth is, I'm not exactly doing them daily (ᵕ—ᴗ—)

I started making thumbnails for the prompts back in September. Last year was my first linktober, and I tried to daily draw and finish prompts same-day and I burnt out so hard and bailed around day 10. I learned the hard way that it was just too tough and sadly I'm not good at working a daily pace because I get too invested in my coloring and rendering process.

So basically this year I finished 90% of my thumbnails by end of September, then on the weekends in October I try to fully render like 4 or 5 posts from my thumbnails. I still make little tweaks to various prompts pretty much every day of October. Each of my posts takes anywhere from 1-4 hours to finish, and I can't do that level of drawing nightly because 1) I work in mental health and am too tired at night with no time lol and 2) that would destroy my hand and wrist probably

Here's process of thumbnails from a few of my more recent posts. I try to prioritize getting good composition flow & values, and then throw down local color and call it a day

In my opinion, it's safe to assume that unless someone does art for a living, they are likely doing a lot of prep and baby steps behind the scenes like this. I'm happy to be open about it to give this matter more transparency & normalcy

Moral of the story, there's no shame doing what works best for you so you can actually enjoy your hobbies! :)