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girderednerve · 2 days ago

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notes! from vampire show!

i don't know what exactly were show choices & what was book stuff, because the last time i tried to read an anne rice novel i was in the fourth grade, my father confiscated it (on grounds that it was 'seditious & salacious'? still confused by this decades later, like, sure, salacious i grant, but seditious? how?), & then when i stole it back to finish it i got so bored that i gave up about two-thirds of the way through, so my recollections are. vague. sort of apropos, perhaps!

my very favorite thing on this show are the scenes where the actors are visibly speaking but we can't hear what they're saying; there's such a neat closed loop between the church conversion scene in 1x01 & the reunion scene in 2x08, but there are other moments too that i like a lot (an unvoiced 'i love you' from lestat in s.1, i forget when, this is what happens when you slam through a show; of course of course of course the last exchange between claudia & madeleine). & then there's the one we see silently & then are told about, refracted through an altered memory—daniel's lifeline, given to him by a burned louis. there's something so deeply sweet about it that i kind of lost my shit, louis still bloody from his recent suicide attempt, daniel manipulated close to that edge, & louis handing him back the best defense that he could muster against armand. like it matters to me both that louis wanted to save his life & that the way he chose to do it, the narrative he gave daniel, was built from what daniel said himself. i mean obviously it's also louis' fault that he's in that situation, which is kind of the show's whole like, relational ethos, i think, & the persona that daniel builds his life around has deep limitations, but it's no less a gift. the other related scene is that september 8, 1973: armand operating as a mouthpiece for lestat, faithfully taking dictation until he doesn't; his insecurity there is so much more interesting with more context! lestat's desperation is of course very fun

the rashomon thing going on in s2 worked so well for me in part because it runs next to the cartoon parody in the théâtre & the immense performances in the framing interview narrative. we are interested in the process of recollection & artistic reframing! we are curious about whose interests these processes might serve! we are thinking about power & about complicity, sometimes in vulgar ways (camp?). ben daniels fucking ate in those scenes can i just say. i love dramatizing the experience of remembering, or remembering when you knew something; i spent a few years convinced that i didn't know about something that constantly happened in front of me, because i was living with someone who made the language to describe it impossible [sidebar i am talking about parental alcoholism in a way that makes it sound much more procedurally interesting than it was! it's my blog & i'll lie if i want to]. louis' sense of limitation about his artistic talents as a photographer was really sharp; i think there's something going on there i haven't quite teased out, but the read from jacob anderson there, unashamed of all his years of violence but really embarrassed about any impression he might have given that he was trying to pass himself off as a great artist, is so good—sincere & vulnerable, grounding. the problem of redaction: armand's direct edits to louis' & daniel's memories, louis' deliberate distortions in the first interview, his mistaken recollections (claudia's dreams, especially) in the second, the pages cut or torn from claudia's diaries. i liked the instability of louis' remembered/haunting image of lestat, & that the moment that dissolved him was louis' realization? insistence? that the lestat following him is under his control. poignant. before that it only mostly worked for me, although i love a ghost (due south!!), & sam reid is so funny (eating the photo especially, but several other moments too).

claudia is so fucking great & both of her actresses crushed the fuck out of that role. i have less to say about her because she makes me so fucking sad. i love that her journals are physically present, and i think the art department did a really good job with them as objects: her handwriting, her little arrows & notes, the way the covers change as she ages, from cute ribbons to plain & practical black staple-bound pamphlets. but they also remind us that she's never exactly speaking for herself: she's being interpreted, she's being read, she's spoken for, spoken about, not spoken to, & she's silenced. i love that louis worries about her dreams, her secret & inaccessible self! she didn't ask to be there & she's fighting her way into personhood, structurally unable to win. but she sort of wins anyway, right: she haunts, just like she promised, which is so weak it feels bad to observe but is still something. thinking about my undergrad latin class where we read ovid & the professor observed that thisbe has the longest speech in the whole metamorphoses by a woman, & it's a suicide note. what can you do with limited means? it's hard to be a woman. anyway i loved her so much (screaming at louis in her horrible dress!!!!) & i loved madeleine! i liked the parallel between louis making madeleine for claudia & lestat making claudia for louis: feeling obligation, then seeing a beloved person through her eyes (claudia bathed in light, which actually i thought looked kind of dumb but we did get it; louis saying 'she called me an angel'). i liked madeleine's frankness, her laughter, the brief moments where she & claudia were happy together, also of course madeleine's 'not yet' answer to louis' 'romantic?' question. the menstrual blood scene! concise & effective! claudia's desire for womanhood & companionship, her physical desires for blood & sexuality, bam right there in like ninety seconds. 'i'm leaving a trail, like gretel!' blammo that's television

there was a bunch of over-bright lighting & lengthy fades in s2; is this a reference to period cinema or something? it didn't quite work for me but it was Doing Something so i'm not exactly mad. while i'm talking about visual style there were some excellently framed shots (armand-as-rashid between daniel & louis in s1, against the windows, stands out; the closing shot in s2, stark & sad). i like the cities-as-fangs title card but it got a little dry, & the typography is still so so silly, but then again they're trying to make a cable tv franchise so what can i say about it. it's good to stay humble. everyone loves a little soupçon of the cw's vampire diaries? same with some of these music cues, they were simply not 4 me

acting 😭 sam reid & jacob anderson have unreal chemistry in my opinion. sam reid physical presence wild? like i am thinking about lestat walking backstage for his big reappearance in 2x07, in silhouette tossing his jacket behind him, but of course there were lots of smaller gestures i liked a great deal (hands! especially in s1). speaking of gesture i liked the parallel in s1 around the 'cloud gift': we see it first before louis' turning, when lestat first bites him & their feet leave the floor after lestat's teeth make contact (i was like 'buffy joke???' about this when it happened; reminded me of tara & willow floating over the dance floor at willow's birthday party, iconic moment in gay tv in my uninformed opinion), and then of course it's set against the horrible moment in 1x05 when lestat drops louis. what do we know, when did we know it, what power do we have, how do we use it? lestat going off-script in the horrible show trial to shame that homophobic soldier was really fun for me personally but also it felt strange to have the argument hinge on patriotism? i think there's a reading there about honesty which is probably less annoying, but obviously lestat was just pulling out whatever would hurt. guy of all time. his little face journey in magnus' old lair!! i love to have fun!! i loved jacob anderson's little action hero bit with the motorbike & the machete. was delighted when i realized that armand is actually taller than he is, because they'd managed to make it seem the opposite.

assad zaman is fabulous but i can't figure out what i think about armand. will meditate upon it. top ten scene for me is the madeleine/armand conversation, though; bitterness, survival, a little of that cold remove around true desire for connection. great blocking also.

costumes are legendary in my opinion, whoever did them absolutely should be getting emmys about it; the 1x07 party costumes, obviously, were standouts, but all of their outfits are so sharp. claudia's overalls were poignant to me, strangely modern & a little ageless; lestat with an undershirt tucked into tailored trousers with some kind of like, fancy beltloop situation? louis' parisian workwear! lestat's robes! the hats! so thoughtful & precise, really excellent stuff.

#I LOVE ART!#i'm talking about stuff that happens in the interview w/ a vamp show so cw for the kinds of things that happen in rice novels?#if u feel that this ought to have more specific tags please do say & i will append them?#other stuff also i'm sure but this is soooo long & for what. for why.#if you have watched this show & would like to talk to me about it i would be delighted btw!!

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sleepymarmot · 1 month ago

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Season 2

My overall opinion on s2: very uneven. S1 was a great season of television, s2 is more of a “makes no damn sense, compels me though”. My problems, roughly classified:

Character motivations and believability. I’ve talked about Lestat and Armand above, but there’s the entire Talamasca subplot. Why does Daniel feel safe to do any of that, to the point of exchanging messages right in front of the vampires during the interview? Why does he show his hand by asking about the fire? Conversely, why do Armand and Louis apparently not read his mind when he is acting Extremely Suspiciously? (Or do they?...) Why does Claudia not destroy the evidence of her murder attempt? At which point did Louis repress the memory of sparing Lestat, why does he act throughout the season like he did murder him even though he didn’t, far beyond what could be explained as Catholic guilt? How do Louis and Claudia manage to spend years in Paris willfully ignoring hundreds of red flags? If I have heard correctly, in the novel they got captured pretty quickly, which would make the situation far more plausible.

Pacing and narrative focus. The first half of the season is too drawn out, the finale has to cover half a dozen different plot points. The first episode could have been an email. I was watching it in disbelief; it felt like a random episode from a generic fantasy show about monster hunting. It feels as if the crew started shooting the first episodes before finishing the scripts for the final ones, and had to cram too much material into the finale because they couldn’t go back and reallocate screentime by condensing the beginning and giving more space for the conclusion.

Threat level. In s1 and s2, respectively, Lestat and Armand are simultaneously the primary love interest and the primary villain. The threat of Lestat as an antagonist slowly ramps up; in episode 5 he becomes violent, in episode 6 he finds a way back into the household then traps everyone else in it with no way out other than to kill him, in episode 7 there is constant suspense of whether he discovers the plan and makes the situation even worse. In season 2, at first there seems to be a similar progression. Armand is also introduced as an obviously dangerous and untrustworthy figure, and episode 5 reveals the horrific level of violence he is capable of. But while the fight in 1.05 changes the family irrevocably, the earth-shattering revelations of 2.05 barely affect the status quo. The interview continues; the biggest changes at the beginning of 2.06 are that Daniel now fears for his life more than before, and Louis now distrusts Armand and is openly passive-aggressive towards him — and by the end of the episode, Daniel is back to being recklessly confrontational, and Louis is back to taking Armand at his word. Then episode 7 conspicuously presents Armand’s obviously false assurances of his lack of agency, which seem to set up the big reveal of just how dangerous and powerful he truly was. And episode 8 does have a big reveal about his level of complicity and immorality… but not about his power or agency. Armand’s level of threat never goes back to where it was at the end of episode 5. That is unlike Lestat, who remained a formidable antagonist not only until the end of his own season 1, but even until the end of season 2. Horror is an important aspect of the show, and one of the primary sources of that horror is the abuse that the protagonist suffers from his romantic partners. I’m all for complex and interesting antagonists, and Armand is complex and interesting, but episodes 6-8 failed to give a satisfactory explanation of his motivations while also deflating the impact of episode 5 — the worst of both worlds.

Related to a couple of previous points: this is obviously not the genre that expects the viewers to ask “is X or Y stronger in a fight?”. Still, the characters’ relative power levels and the limitations of their vampiric abilities are important for understanding the stakes. Vampiric telepathy seems to work differently from scene to scene, which completely took me out of the story sometimes: “Can character X hear characters Y conspiring against them? Why not?” And for understanding Armand’s personality and storyline, it’s crucial to know how exactly powerful he is in relation to his subordinates. The story seemed to imply that he was more powerful than the entire coven combined, or at least a large portion of viewers seemed to think so; whether or not that is true has huge implications for how much of a lie his “I could not prevent it” really was.

Some things never make it to the screen. I’m obsessed with the gorgeous, intricate bedroom set which was on the actual show only for a couple of minutes from a couple of angles. (I can only hope that Daniel gets turned in the bedroom so that we could get a good look at it in s3.) The magnolia tree, according to one of the interviews, is a cutting of the tree that was behind the bench in 2.04… I wouldn’t even be able to tell there was a tree in that scene, let alone that it was a magnolia, let alone it was the “parent” of the magnolia from the penthouse!

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Character arcs

I’ve already voiced my opinions on what I think about the main characters, and how they have been handled in this season. Some more notes, vaguely separated by character:

- Louis is exactly my type (both in terms of narrative and attraction). What do you mean you have a protagonist whose story is about self-reflection, narrativizing one’s own experience, and having a complex relationship with violence? And also he’s that beautiful?

- Perhaps I just don’t watch enough TV, but it feels extraordinary that this summer, at the same time even, there were two different new genre show seasons where a charismatic and gorgeous black actor brilliantly performed the multifaceted lead role. It doesn’t escape my notice, though, that both Louis and the Fifteenth Doctor are reimaginings of the characters who were originally created in the middle of the 20th century as white men. Meanwhile, when I try to think of black characters from my other recent sff fandoms who were created from scratch (Finn and Reva from Star Wars, Vivienne from Dragon Age, Wyll from Baldur’s Gate 3), the first thing that comes to mind is the constant negativity and circular discourse about how much they were failed both by the original creators and the fandom. As a mixed example, shout out to Max Chapman, also a black gay co-protagonist from a show that came out in 2022 (A League of Their Own), who was treated right by the script, but then had her entire show cancelled because Amazon sucks. Anyway, what I’m saying is, it was a relief to watch a character so good that I could just appreciate him on his own merits instead of constantly feeling the need to defend him from his own writers.

- I’ve gotten intensely attached to Louis, especially in this season. I think one part of it is that in season 1, his problems were external. It seemed that he only needed to escape the people and environment that were stifling him, and he would be okay. And then season 2 was like no, it’s not that simple. He’s mentally ill like his brother was. He has hallucinations that sabotage all his attempts to move on and build a new life. His guilt and grief are fucking him up from the inside. And then the season starts to pile up so much suffering onto him, that by the end I feared each new episode. I’m glad the finale was so purposeful and thorough about giving him catharsis and leaving the viewer with a completely different aftertaste compared to the previous episodes. I can’t imagine waiting for s3 if Louis were still in the torment nexus throughout the entire hiatus.

- As I said above, Claudia and Madeleine are a breath of fresh air… which, paradoxically, feels like benevolent sexism. The two of them show what a healthy vampire relationship would look like… then immediately get murdered before they have a chance to fuck it up. I know they were never on claudeleine’s level to begin with, but imagine loustat or loumand getting killed off tragically in their honeymoon period! Only the good die young, so those who do get put on the pedestal forever, frozen in their perfection that the circumstances never allowed them to ruin.

- My brain still refuses to process that the two Claudias are the same person. Both her narrative role/importance and personality have changed too much. I can see the s2 Claudia as the same person as the runaway daughter from 1.05, but the icy lady mastermind from 1.06-1.07 is maybe a bit recognizable only during the wartime Europe tour, and disappears without a trace once she arrives in Paris.

- Since Claudia is played by adult actresses, perhaps the writers should have focused less on her perceived age and more on disability, which came to the forefront only at the very end. At the very beginning, the problem with Claudia’s existence was set up as “she’ll be cursed with a teenager’s temperament and hormones forever”. I thought the idea was compelling, but it never came true: Claudia grew into a normal adult. But instead, a similar idea seems to be explored with Armand, even though he was turned as an adult. It’s not even particularly clear in the text, I mostly started getting it from the interviews. And from what I’ve gathered, in the books he is more textually an eternal teenager, which makes sense if he was turned at that age.

- When I finished s1 and was going into s2, one of the things I was curious about was whether I would hate Armand as much as I hated Lestat. I had a guess that I would not, despite him being arguably even worse. The results are... I would say inconclusive. Both the narrative and the real life promotion of the show seem weighted in favor of Lestat and against Armand, which makes me feel weirdly defensive of the latter. One part of that unevenness is what I said above: while Lestat’s motivations and character arc seem clear and easy to follow in s1, Armand’s in s2 stay puzzling even after the finale. Another factor I’ve already mentioned is that Lestat’s abuse is more mundane and realistic, which makes him off-putting in a more visceral way. Armand lies and denies care, but he also wipes memories and implants thoughts, which makes him feel more like a fantastical monster than someone who you might encounter in real life. Armand’s autistic coding is another point for his likeability.

- Armand’s storyline is surprisingly straightforward. From what I’ve seen in the fandom, throughout the season people have been expecting him to have complex hidden motivations, presumably based on the books. But as far as we know at this point, everything that happened pre-betrayal was supposed to be taken at face value. The key things he had been lying to Louis about are both introduced and refuted in the final two episodes. Throughout the whole season, his storyline has been a combination of two common tropes: “a conservative man is torn between duty and tradition on the one side and love on the other”, and “a powerful man dislikes responsibility and seeks at least an illusion of not having it”. The former held true until the end of the flashback, the latter is still true and likely will still be in the future. His conflict of allegiance between the coven and Louis takes up the majority of his Paris screentime, and yet most of the character analysis I have encountered at the time of writing this, both in fandom meta and even the actor’s interviews, focuses on the way the trauma of his youth informs his actions, even though that trauma only gets a cursory description in one (1) scene. Is that because “love vs duty” is boring and overdone? Because his childhood trauma is more interesting, shocking, unusual? Because the coven is a bunch of tertiary one-dimensional characters that we barely distinguish from one another, but Marius is a single character who is memorable even from one short description, and fandom leans towards analysis through relationships with individuals and not institutions? Because the book readers, including Assad himself, base their understanding of the character more on his backstory depicted in the books than on what has been textual in the show so far? Probably it’s a combination of all these factors. In any case, this disparity between the show and its reception tells me that perhaps the writers should have focused more on what makes the character unique and interesting to the public, instead of the things that nobody ended up caring about. It’s no wonder that the iteration of Armand seen in 2.05 became so popular: it is more unique, more emotionally intense, more monstrously attractive. It sounds like this “gremlin” side of Armand is going to be more prominent in the next season, which is good news to me.

- In 2.01, Dreamstat didn’t work for me at all; as I said above, the amount of guilt felt disproportional for a murder that Louis prevented instead of committing. In episodes 2-4, he made more sense, so I became more at peace with his presence. But the general problem of this season is the lack of narration that would have explained the characters’ feelings and motivations, and Dreamstat is one of the biggest instances of showing something puzzling and not giving Louis’s opinion on it, leaving the viewer only with his surface reactions to base their interpretations on. In my interpretation, Dreamstat was the voice of Louis’s intrusive thoughts, fears, guilt, and grief, combined with the reactions he imagined would be characteristic of his absent ex. But apparently lots of people thought he voiced Louis’s true hidden thoughts. I think that’s absurd, but the text does not give enough evidence to categorically disprove this interpretation. That makes his intrusions into the loumand scenes especially irritating. I understand that he haunts their relationship, but his appearances are overdone enough that they feel less like “Louis can’t stop his subconscious from comparing his current boyfriend to his ex” and more like “the execs thought that the audience would be bored if their white blond fave doesn’t constantly show up and devalue the current relationship and remind everyone he’s the real endgame”. This would have been less of a problem if we saw more of loumand’s “normal” — what they are like without Dreamstat while he’s absent between the end of 2.03 and the end of 2.04, what they are like while he’s banished between the end of 2.04 and the end of 2.06. But, as I’ve said repeatedly above, we only get to see the crisis points of their relationship, and the absence of baseline to compare these crisis points to makes them difficult to understand.

- That said, season 2 unexpectedly, paradoxically, and retroactively made me like Lestat more. Not even Lestat’s actual appearances (which made me mad), but the other events. The old world vampires are just so horrible that you start to see that Lestat had some better qualities and attempted to do some things in better ways by comparison.

- In terms of Daniel’s storyline, both seasons were structured as detective stories. Throughout the season he pursues a mystery, gathers clues, and at the end he makes a bombastic speech revealing the truth. Even his personality is of a smug worldly-wise eccentric like Poirot; a far cry from the naïve boy of the original interview. But the material isn’t well suited for this story structure. There isn’t really a grand mystery here, let alone two. This means that both big finale reveals are weak, and in turn, the finale episodes that are structured around these reveals are weakened because of it. In 1.07, as I said in the notes for that episode, it is immediately obvious to everyone except Louis himself that Louis failed to kill Lestat. In 2.08, the big reveal is built around a very specific piece of material evidence being brought in with implausibly precise timing. That Talamasca deus ex machina really doesn’t make sense if you think about it for a few seconds. Raglan isn’t even sure he has the script, and half an hour later in-universe Rashid delivers said script on a silver platter. What, are the Talamasca archives in the same skyscraper or something?! Daniel should have sent the request the previous night at the latest for this to be believable.

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Style and visuals

I had problems with some of the overarching stylistic decisions of the season:

- As I just said above, season 2 seemed to have less voiceover narration than season 1. That can be given Watsonian excuses (Louis and Armand are telling the story together and focus more on the events because they dare not reveal their true feelings in front of each other), but it’s detrimental to the storytelling. In season 1, montages and generalizations that described Louis and Claudia’s feelings across a period of time made their perspectives clear and the story cohesive. Season 2 feels fractured in comparison. Sometimes you should be not only showing but also telling!

- The same problem but on a visual level is the comparative lack of wide shots. It’s especially apparent and jarring in the Dubai scenes. Season 2 uses closer shots of the character’s faces, filling the screen with them, and seems to have fewer medium and wide shots. This cuts off the character from their environment, making it more difficult to understand the spaces they exist in and their connection to them.

- The actors were often lit from one side, leaving the other side of their face in deep shadow. The most egregious case was when Armand waxed poetic about how beautiful Louis looked in the “muted lamplight” — cut to the literal worst Louis had ever been lit in the entire show, half of his face so fully in the dark it looked cut off. AMC, can I buy you a reflector?! I think I can spare a few bucks.

- The lighting overall felt very different, especially in Dubai, and especially if you go from s1 directly to s2. Remember how in the notes for 1.07 I talked about the artistic effect of different lighting in different rooms of the penthouse? I opened the next episode, and the lighting was uniformly cold and high contrast. And it constantly threw every pore and wrinkle on the actors’ faces in sharp relief. I swear that wasn’t the case in season 1, I remember its lighting to be much softer. As I said above, the shots also seemed to be closer to the actors’ faces than in season 1, which increased the effect.

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Miscellaneous notes about characters and relationships

On the emotional level, I still can’t understand why the hell Louis treated Claudia like that throughout the season. I think I’ve written some rationalizations above, like about toxic masculinity or whatever, but it still doesn’t compute in my heart.

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The last time we saw Louis and Claudia talk to each other before Madeleine’s turning, he was maintaining his cold exterior. Did he ever let Claudia know how he felt about it? How important it was to him? Did he ever manage to tell her he was proud of her for doing it right? “We can bring one in a good way” — did one of them manage to say it to each other, or could Louis only say it openly when Claudia wasn’t there? We know Claudia can see through him: she can tell that he would accept Madeleine if he only sits down and listens, and she’s right; she can tell that he’s acting cold towards her on purpose. But the way he treats her still hurts her, even if she knows him like the back of her hand. Does she see this part of him, too? That he recognizes and values her breaking the cycle all of them have been trapped in?

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Now that I think about it, an unreliable narrator who can’t lie his way out of a paper bag is such a good concept. When he describes something inaccurately, you know he isn’t doing that on purpose!

Now that the honest bad liar is stepping down from the role of the narrator, we have a problem: both Lestat and Armand are going to hide and distort the truth on purpose. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why the writers made Daniel a vampire at this exact point of the story. With Lestat, he might be able to use the mind gift to access his real thoughts, or at least try to. With Armand, maybe the maker-fledgling soul connection can serve as a lie detector?

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One thing I’ve noticed about the discussions of the show is the tension that is produced by Louis as a character being an abuse victim. On the one hand, if his circumstances are controlled by his abusers, and he cannot leave his situation, then he as lacks agency a character. On the other hand, if he is able to leave but refuses to do so, that’s victim blaming on part of the creators/viewers. It’s a catch-22. Could Louis have left Armand? If we say no, we deny Louis’s agency, flattening his character and attributing all complexity only to his nonblack partner; if we say yes, we deny Armand’s abuse, and hold Louis responsible for his own suffering. What’s supposed to be the “correct” answer here?

(My own take is that early in the relationship he technically could have left but was too suicidal to survive alone, and starting around the 1970s he was becoming progressively unable to leave, especially when Armand became overwhelmingly controlling after the interview. I suppose that would be considered fence-sitting.)

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I feel like it was a mistake to make “This is your death, Lestat” literally the final scene of the flashback. I have seen dozens of people say “Louis stayed with Armand for 77 years just to spite Lestat!” No, Louis announced he would stay with Armand that one night in 1949 just to spite Lestat. He stayed with Armand until 2022 because Armand brainwashed the hell out of him. Everyone has forgotten 2.05, because it’s the last reveal that defines the narrative in the viewer’s mind. A failure both on the part of the viewers who only focus on the latest piece of info and also center their attention on Lestat, and the writers who should have predicted this result.

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Remember how after 2.01 I said that Armand and Daniel are fighting over control over the narrative which is also control over who Louis loves? Well, it’s still true, but Daniel ended up winning... on behalf of Team Lestat. As his champion. Gave Louis to Lestat, like Lestat gave Louis to Armand. I’m curious whether Daniel himself realizes that or not. He’s the one who built the narrative that Lestat is Louis’s true love! The narrative that he forced not only on Louis, but on us the viewers through the fourth wall! A wish for season 3: address that, perhaps when Daniel and Lestat meet.

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For Claudia, Louis is her father as a human (they originate from the same community, she gets along with him better as a person), and Lestat is her father/maker as a vampire (similar feeding habits, approach to vampirism, temperament). For Daniel, Louis is his “maker” as a human journalist (saves his life and sets him on this path), and Armand is his maker as a vampire.

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Here’s a thing about the Dubai trio. One of the fundamental problems with Louis and Armand’s marriage, other than all the horrors, is that they’re that “they were both bottoms 😭” meme except on the psychological level. (Maybe on the literal level too, who knows, the show didn’t go into this much detail beyond that one scene.) Both of them are haunted by their traumatic pasts, and want a person with a strong personality whose presence would bring a fresh perspective and stop them from drowning in their insecurities; a savior who would ruin their life. Both of them found that in Lestat previously, and nobody since could play that role for them as well as he did. Both of them see that need in each other and do try to fulfill that role, but it’s not a natural fit. But have you noticed that there is someone who does play that role naturally, for the both of them simultaneously? It’s Daniel. Both in 1973 and 2022. And yes, instead of completing and repairing their relationship, he destroys it — but he is the missing piece both of them needed.

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I’ll put my take on the loumand intimacy discourse here as well. Technically it should be its own post, but I wrote it in context of all my other thoughts above, I don’t it to be visible in the tags and get reblogged separately by strangers looking to argue. So here it is:

On the one hand, this is a TV show with limited screentime, and the few scenes we get are supposed to be representative of broader patterns. So if the only scene where we see the spouses together in bed has them lying a foot apart with only a single short touch, it’s supposed to represent that they’ve grown cold and distant.

On the other hand, every scene is an individual moment from the characters’ lives and exists in the context of the rest of the show. That specific bedroom scene happens after Louis has spent the whole day (and before that, the whole week) experiencing intense grief over his murdered daughter as he focused all his strength on recalling the details of her life and their relationship. No fucking wonder he’s not in the mood! The first season has very pointedly established that Louis loses interest in that sphere when he’s miserable, and specifically when he’s miserable about losing Claudia! It it should be self-explanatory why he’s being distant with the man who sent her to her death. This scene is about Louis’s mind being occupied by everything but Armand: the inward gaze and the process of recalling and rethinking his life, the memories of Claudia that he is trying to get right, the collaboration with Daniel that is also a duel that Daniel is currently winning. Armand sees how Louis is slipping out of his reach and reasserts control by inserting himself into the interview. This is a very telling moment, but to take their physical distance in it out of context as a defining feature of their entire relationship is reductive.

There’s also a third angle, which was my own immediate interpretation. At this stage of a relationship, it’s natural if people just exist comfortably side by side, and don’t necessarily feel the need to wrap themselves around each other all the time; they shouldn’t need to use touch to prove their closeness. In fact, that’s exactly what makes Daniel suspicious: two people who have been together longer than he has been alive, sitting almost on top of each other and acting overly lovey-dovey like newlyweds. The first view of the couple in private in 2.01 felt like a glimpse backstage: actors taking off their costumes and relaxing in the quiet after a long performance, hosts retiring to their room and comparing notes on their difficult guest after a long day socializing. It was the most honest and unperformative we’d seen either of them in the present day at that point.

The discourse bothers me both on the Doylist and the Watsonian levels. The rhetoric that Louis not showing enough affection must be a problem and a symptom of his disinterest in a relationship echoes real life misogynistic pressure (I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen a male character to be subjected to so much misogyny, both in and out of universe). It was also the narrative that Lestat pushed on him. It is obvious, and also confirmed via word of god by JA, that Louis getting cold and distant sometimes is an inevitable result of his psychology and personal history, and by pushing him, Lestat made it worse. Armand, to his credit (the bar is on the floor!) at least doesn’t push — but I think it’s a conscious decision on his part, one more thing he does to demonstrate he’s a better partner than Lestat was. “Babe, look how patiently I receive the crumbs of affection you give me with no complaint, unlike Some People!”

Even outside of the things I have written above, this idea just doesn’t make sense to me on the narrative level. The problem with Louis and Armand’s marriage is that it’s built on a lie and held together with codependency and abuse, not that they don’t love each other or aren’t attracted to each other or are not sexually compatible or aren’t physically close enough. The whole point of their marriage arc, in my eyes, is that their relationship consists of two levels. On the surface, everything is fine even if unexciting, and that’s the only level that Louis’s conscious mind fully perceives at the time the second interview begins*. The unresolved conflicts and semi-forgotten horrors and forcibly forgotten horrors all lurk below the surface; before the interview began, Louis’s awareness of them has been suppressed, both by Armand’s manipulations and his own denial, and throughout the interview, even near the end, he keeps sliding back to that familiar comfort. It takes two weeks of intense recollection from Louis, constant confrontations and guidance by a prize-winning professional truth uncoverer, and a deus ex machina piece of damning material evidence to finally convince Louis that the surface level of that marriage is not a safe place to retreat to and must be discarded. That’s the entire present day storyline of the first two seasons! The entire Dubai plot hinges on the idea that Louis thinks his marriage is fine because he’s forgotten how to be the person who can see that it’s not. That’s the whole horror of it, that he lost himself, that he’s been taken from himself. If we deny that and say that actually he’s fully aware he is miserable and is still doing this to spite Lestat, or that he can’t stand Armand’s presence and doesn’t want to touch him and doesn’t want him on any level and doesn’t think he needs him, the entire plot crumbles.

…Anyway, at least some part of that discourse should be considered closed after the production designer said in an interview that they intentionally made the bed wide enough to fit extra people and with a headboard that’s easy to attach restraints to, but I guess most people don’t know or care about the word of god. Whatever. Frankly, I care more about the real-life attitudes towards relationships that people convey through their opinions than about the particulars of sex life of that one fictional couple.

* There’s slightly contradictory word of god (i.e. Jacob) regarding the level of Louis’s awareness. In the episode insider for 2.06, he says: “Louis’ known for a long time that there’s something wrong. There’s a lie being told, and that penthouse in Dubai is a bit of a prison, and I think Louis and Daniel throughout the years have been like sort of kept things for Armand.” In an interview given after the s2 finale, he says: “He brings him back because he needs help. He’s not quite sure what it is, but he just has this little thing in the back of his mind that’s telling him, ‘This isn’t right, something’s wrong here.’” Back in an interview given after the s1 finale, he said: “There are other things that he knows deep down are not true, but he has to tell himself a version of it in order to cope.” I think that’s all compatible with my interpretation of what we actually see on screen: Louis feels discomfort with his situation that he cannot understand, and ignores and suppresses it until he learns of Daniel’s diagnosis and realizes it’s now or never.

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Since I’m on that topic, here’s something I forgot to mention in my notes for 2.05. When Louis talked about chopping hands off, that really distracted me for the rest of the scene, because from the context I assumed that it was also something they’d done in the bedroom. I was like, hold on, only twenty years in, and these immortals are already mutilating each other recreationally? Is that possible, do they have Baccano-level healing?? And then I finished the episode, went online, and the fandom explained that it was a book reference. But my initial impression is a good indicator of how I’ve been perceiving them, probably because of the influences of other media: a pair of jaded decadent immortals who entertain themselves by pushing their own and each other’s boundaries with no regard for consequences. Well, I still like that interpretation. Maybe there were no sex scenes in s2 Dubai because if they bothered to actually close the bedroom door for something, it could neither be shown on television nor comprehended by the public.

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Expectations for season 3

What I expect might happen in s3, based on the interviews and posts from the people who have read the books:

Common knowledge: the main flashback story of the season is Lestat telling Daniel his version of the 18th century France story that we’ve partially seen from Armand’s perspective and heard summarized during the trial. My speculation: that storyline, and the relationship between Lestat and Armand established during it, leads into the revisit of the trial from Lestat’s perspective.

If the show creators want Lestat to be a sympathetic character and have any kind of relationship with Louis going forward, they better have a full episode long explanation locked and loaded about how ackshually Lestat was forced to be there and had absolutely no opportunity to stop the trial before it began.

I also expect to revisit Claudia’s death from Lestat’s perspective, since it’s very suspicious that it was narrated by Armand of all people.

It is also unclear from s2 why Lestat saved Louis from the sun only to leave him to die in the coffin; I expect s3 to reveal some kind of secret agreement between Lestat and Armand regarding Louis’s fate.

Daniel is trying to understand Armand through Lestat’s interview flashbacks.

There are flashbacks to Dubai after Louis left, either contained in one episode like 2.05 or woven into every episode. It is also possible we see some of the other scenes from the events of the s1-s2 interview that happened outside of Daniel’s POV.

My personal wishes:

Daniel confronts Armand with the question of why he allowed the interview and the destruction of his marriage. Like I said before, I don’t believe “he couldn’t prevent it”!

Armand turns Daniel in the bedroom, which finally allows the viewers to get a good look at the set design. In the process they break the lattice screens (the ones that look like a wooden prison), and when Louis comes back, the finds the bars of his cage destroyed.

Louis enjoys rediscovering himself, and has interactions with all three of his love interests without committing to any of them. He slowly becomes more of an action hero, like in the 2.08 revenge scene.

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Edited to add much later: Hold on. In 2.08, Lestat tells Louis that he has the blood of Akasha, and that Armand doesn’t know who that is, but Louis presumably does since the line is addressed to him. Several hours later, Louis suddenly tells Armand that he wants to go see Egypt. Where is Akasha at that point? In Egypt? Louis knows who and where she is (or was at some point), and goes to look for her? This has got to be a plot point in the future seasons! I’m checking Akasha’s wiki entry right now and it says (paraphrasing) she “called out to Marius to take her out of Egypt”, which is wild in the combination with the above. If we put it all together, Louis and Armand go research the past of Louis’s maker, and instead the trail leads them to Armand’s maker who was presumed dead. That would be a hell of a storyline! For three weeks since watching the finale I thought that we aren’t going to get loumand scenes any time soon, but this sounds like a huge flashback that’s happening sooner than later: the season 3 announcement specifies “Marius. Those Who Must Be Kept.” among the joining characters. Until this very moment the Egypt line vaguely bothered me, because it was strange for Louis in his near-catatonic state to actively want anything let alone such a specific journey, but now it makes sense!

Also, it’s interesting if loumand really do meet Marius almost immediately after the trial; that could be another turning point in their relationship that I haven’t anticipated. Warning, even wilder speculation ahead than in the paragraph above. The book readers say that all characters and even the narrative itself are very positive towards Marius, but the same doesn’t seem true for the show. My interpretation of 2.04 is that Louis was moved by Armand’s recounting of his backstory enough to motivate his actions in the later part of the episode; this makes me think that meeting Marius in person might awaken unexpected anger in Louis even during his apathetic depression period. I assume that immediately after the trial, what Louis feels for Armand is mostly cold contempt, and I’ve been also assuming that he stays in that mood for years until Armand slowly manages to chip it away. But what if that quiet hatred is interrupted by a sudden surge of protectiveness over Armand? Louis just locked himself inside the cage of companionship together with the man who sent his daughter to torturous death, expecting it to be a punishment for them both, expecting them both to continue to be dead inside for decades — and if he unexpectedly feels real sympathy for the traitor again, the kind he used to feel before the betrayal, then what? If he finds his anger at Armand redirected at the man who made Armand the way he is, then what? Would Louis even say anything, or would he stay out of it like he did with Claudia? Would it be the worst of both worlds, Louis not letting Armand know he cares but feeling guilty that he does?

Edited to add even later: Oh right, during the argument in 2.05 Louis says that the cultists killed Marius, so the two of them don’t seem to know he’s alive. If so, I see two options. Option one: the two of them don’t yet know he is alive, and the reunion happens in present day (like in the books, as far as I know?), hopefully with the effect I described above. Option two: I need to put on an even bigger tin hat and start adding memory manipulation to this already convoluted speculation.

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I haven’t seen the rockstar teaser due to aversion and secondhand embarrassment I get just from the gifs. But it seems like s3 is going to bring back the more comedic tone. If it’s something close to 1.02, I’ll be glad; I thought its balance between drama and dark comedy was unique and very well done.

Overall I am cautiously optimistic, and kind of excited to meet the rest of the flashback cast. As a person who has neither ever touched any of TVC or finished Hannibal, I nevertheless am going to dare to raise the idea of closing the IWTV-Hannibal inspiration loop by casting Gillian Anderson as Gabrielle.

As for the present day, I see the setup for pairings like this:

loustat reconciliation (ugh)

danlou slow burn friends to lovers

armandaniel slow burn enemies to lovers

I have to say that I’m not a fan of the quotes I’ve seen from the DM chapter. Everything I like about A/D in the show has nothing to do with whatever self-obliterating obsession that seems to be going on in there. Whenever I see excited posts about these characters (re)discovering capital-R romance, my reaction is “they’re going to take away my favorite disdainful bickering and power plays? :((” Also, the show versions of Armand and Daniel are The Dynamic, and the book ones don’t sound like it. Though, paradoxically, the very existence of that pairing in the book is what gives the show pairing its special sauce. Their antagonism, filled with power plays, Schrodinger’s flirting, and past secrets, is already very fun, but “and they are passionately in love in the source material” is a great metatextual enhancement.

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Final words

That’s all! Thank you to anyone who managed to get through this wall of text. I hope I’m never spending two months (almost to the day) on a thesis-length reaction post again! Side note, writing out most of it on my phone has been a deeply humbling experience, because now my phone keyboard knows all the character names, all the pairing names, and most embarrassingly, can correctly spell the word “maître”. That’s what people call fuckor!

I have a bunch of small posts in my drafts, mostly screenshot-based. I’ve also been watching films that have vague similarities with the show, based on other people’s recommendations, and writing reviews for them as usual. Also, I have a private Spotify playlist that is currently 5 hours 45 minutes long, and at some point I might break a section off of it and post it. At the end of October I’ll probably stop being as active in the fandom (because I’ll be focusing on one of my biggest fandoms coming back); hopefully, putting the show on the back burner until the new season will help me not get too bogged down by fanon and petty annoyances at other people’s opinions.

Anyway, if anyone wants to comment on something here, I appreciate it, but I’m warning in advance that after typing my brains out for 20k words, I am not sure I can meaningfully response with something I haven’t already said. There are probably many things here that I haven’t phrased clearly or well enough, but after two months of sitting on this post and periodically adding to it and editing it, I just need to publish it and move on with my life. See you in the next posts!

Interview with the Vampire notes, episodes 1.07–2.08

Here are the notes I took after watching every episode of IWTV, starting with the first season finale.

This post is just the intro; see the reblogs for the full text. I’m not sure that it’s possible to fit 20k words into one post, and even if it is, such a long post would be painful to navigate. More importantly, this way the contents of the posts shouldn’t flood the site-wide search results for pretty much every possible character and ship name I mention here. There is some negativity in these notes; if that bothers you, please scroll past.

I tried to simulate a fandom experience for myself, taking a break after each episode, checking out what other people said about it, and writing down my reactions mostly to the episode itself but sometimes to the things I’ve seen posted about it.

For context, I watched the first two episodes of season 1 back when they came out, loved them, but failed to keep up with the weekly releases and decided to catch up later. When season 2 aired, I checked out the trending posts every weekend, and after it was completed, I finally restarted the show from the beginning. Oh, and I had seen the movie half a lifetime ago as a teenager. This means that I was familiar with the premise and some of the main characters, was aware of the impending tragedy (one of the few things I remembered from the movie, and one of the reasons I was afraid to catch up and break my heart), had no idea about the events of the late season 1 or what the fandom was doing during the hiatus, but knew pretty much every major spoiler from season 2.

I didn’t take notes during season 1, because I was familiar with the opening episodes and satisfied by the following ones (I thought the first four episodes were flawless television). After the first season finale finally had things that bothered me enough to write about it, I started taking notes. Initially I just wrote down the things that I disliked or had questions about, but with each episode I got into the habit more, and had more fandom reactions to sift through and prompt further thoughts. By the end of the season, I was having long-winded arguments with myself. Since the point was to record my own evolving opinions, I didn’t go back and amend the previous entries, except for one or two marked paragraphs; all editing for that part was for clarity only. I wrote all of that in the notes app on my phone, for the first time in my life. The exception to the above is the final section with my opinions about the finale and the entire season: I kept periodically adding to my original phone notes during the almost two months between watching the episode and publishing this post. That’s why it took me so long: completionism finally took over and made me attempt to write down every thought about the show I had and attach it here, then proofread the resulting wall of text more times than it is healthy.

That’s enough for an intro. Direct links to each reblog:

1.07 – 2.03 / 2.04 / 2.05 / 2.06 / 2.07 / 2.08 / season 2

#interview with the vampire #liveblogs and reviews #blah blah blah #swearing to hide this post in the tags: fuck

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