#do this deserve a vc tag? idk. i feel like i rambled here

[blueiight]

You know what I was thinking about one of the reasons why theres so many confederate/slave owner era vampires??…

I think its a way for white people to preserve and immortalize a time where they were allowed to be their most unhinged.

Like lowkey those are their heroes (do we see a widespread celebration of the union and union soldiers in the same way as the confederacy? why isn’t that also part of their “culture”). So if their heros are villains for trying to keep slavery alive and that era had to die then they found a way to make it undead, powerful still and also a way for them to root for those villians in a way where they don’t have to moralize it bc its the very nature of a vampire to be a monster.

So they get to push that it doesn’t make sense to moralize it in the way they’re always looking for allowances to not have to moralize the fact that they ever existed in that way and still carry a lot more of those sentiments and ways of thinking/speaking/acting than they’re willing to admit.

The vampire is from another time and frozen in the way they were when they were turned. The same way their grandparents are from a different era and stuck in their ways, but they don’t get to be forever young and desirable in their appearance by the standards of what beauty is considered to be. They want to be allowed to hold on to it as beautiful too.

It’s never really explored of contended with in any of the media that has a confederate of slave owning vampire in a way that reconciles with the racial implications of that. How they were already consuming people and exploiting and exerting control over people in their humanity and you weren’t to question them. They had the power and they didn’t want to give up that power and still don’t.

Now that lives on in a figure that is given even more power than their human counterparts and they get to be alluring and seductive and compelling. They also get special powers to aid in their consumption and compulsion. And the white reader is allowed to desire that figure bc it’s fictional and they’re meant to be monsters without ever having to question what it means that they want to be allowed to desire a non-fictional historical figure in a fictional setting so they don’t have to question why they yearn for that allowance. They free themselves from questioning why they’re always looking for allowances i.e. in micro-aggressive tactics and n-word passes (“i was singing the lyrics to the song!” and “I grew up in the hood around black people” and “my _____is black and they said it was fine”).

It’s reflected in the general anti-blackness within goth culture and vampire culture as well. The fact that the white og vc fandom was rife with racism and racist readers for so long. the author herself holding anti-black beliefs and never exploring how that shows up in her work. Just like in twilight and that author pushing against their being black vampires in the movie etc. etc. It’s exposed in the white og readers struggle to watch their beloved characters shown in an adaptation that does not allow them to hide, that challenges the allowance to have racism be an unspoken undertone in the media they consume. In an adaptation that refuses to soothe their discomfort with being challah to reflect on that part of their history and how they exist in the world today. Instead they get angry and accuse the adaptation of making their beloved characters ooc! They revise and excuse the very real examples in the very text they’ve been a fan of for years bc the text allowed them to ignore and participate in the apologia of it all and now the adaptation is not and they didn’t like that. They scapegoat and say they were expecting a romance (despite how the show was promoted) because they wanna romanticize that version of themselves and not be questioned about it ( another example: how they like to get married on plantations)…

sorry to just dump all these idk these thoughts on you, which probably have been talked about extensively and with more intelligence, but I just wanted to write it out somewhere and usually you have great discussions on your blog so yeah. hope you are having a good day 💕

i appreciate what u said. historically speaking, the confederacy was let off w/ a slap on the wrist bc more people who considered themselves union were able to sympathize more w the confederacy than they were with the struggles of black people held in bondage. not to mention the 19th century equivalent of tom cruise assassinated lincoln, and the subsequent line of presidents were so openly sympathetic to the confederacy that they pretty much destroyed what little progress was made + gave former confederates essentially free reign over the southern half of the united states to continue a system of racial apartheid. and still, the government is so concilatory to these people and their descendants. makes u think a lot about who it serves no? i cant see a time where white people wasnt given free reign to cut up in recent history or why theyd need fiction to do so cuz they already got the dub rl.. but i understand wym, in how escapism to this type of fan can entail can ‘escape from black people’ & how cultural products can reinforce the white southern usamerican mythology of the lost cause. i cant say im familiar w the goth culture tho ive loved some goth black girls, but ill trust ur word on it. tvc is rly the only vampire story ive got myself into but i find that the race dynamics in it to be its weakest , most outdated trait of it all that has received very little discussion before, during & even after the modern show adaptation of interview.. a video a thinkpiece here&there to add ur wonderful thoughts on this. but i find that type of old fan to be a loud minority overtaken by a new type tho… its easy to drag the confederate bride but not this one.

i find this newer crop of fans to be less the confederate brides & moreso ppl whove learned from the mistakes of ‘open’ racism & r subtler. cuz its moreshow how their racialist biases impacts their understandings of the narrative, what they center in their imagination& the like. its easier to drag some irrelevant bozos calling real actors UGLY saying MW better or feenin for some teenage boy who aint never acted to go play armand just cuz hes a white. but its much harder to acknowledge the subtleties in these types POV cuz ppl will just reduce me to being a dumb xyz chara stan or some abcd camp of fandom i dont even claim. getting called both a dumb louis apologist blackie & a lestat abuse apologist beating up on poor lou too. idk what i am lolz. but i digress. its relatability in hegemony is what i call it. these types r so discomfitted with a black main character, whos vulnerable, tormented, terrible & flawed. they have to reduce him to certain attributes, selective characteristics, shells of himself or drum up 2d crimes bc his evil so far had yet to target the ‘valued’ sort of victims, or fixate on a character of no color n reduce said chara to tropes too.

ive talked about how incredibly powerful it is, for the typical Black horror victim to become the monster as well as the Black man goring the white man in terms of the historical record. how finn o’shea starting off as louis’s runner & comes up and becomes ‘white’ comes at louis’s expense is hilariously ironic n somewhat [tangentially so, maybe?] comparable to how anne rice, an irish american, gained her notoriety..

he is The Vampire, as louis in the books was, he the only one who , in his torment, does not dwell underground for billions of years, does not contort himself into a beast, who simply just Is. The Vampire. making this creature Black, says a lot. even if amc did it for diversity board points, the showrunners did a beautiful job w this character. these type of fans clamor desperately so for a white, to ~debunk~lying ole lou in show verse. + tend to treat dan as if hes just an objective hardhitter & not yet another flawed character of the bunch, or want to prescribe every aspect of daniel’s life on the amazing mind gift possessed by armand de illuminatus. who conflate lestat’s whiteness, how he lords over rue royale, him unveiling his own trauma after traumatizing l+c so, his own complexity / love with some generic tropes cuz they cant relate to the fictional monster otherwise. hes david bowie w a french passport yall. wake up. its ppl who cried tears of blood for antoinette but aint give af about miss lily. its ppl who think tom anderson & fenwick were anything but racist crash test dummies to show what mainstream human power in new orleans looked like. lowkey its also people who never even much touch or have the intention of reading tvc much less get to qotd suddenly becoming #1 fans of one chapter in qotd out of the rest. itd be funny if it wasnt pathetic. how r u presented such a masterclass of a show. The Interview with The Vampire. now a canonly gay Black monstrosity of the Gilded age. his coffin is a penthouse slash billion dollar blood farm, hes regaling a dying old man he attacked in the 70s the truth& reconciliation committee but its a thriller romance with his maker, father, brother, Lover in one Lestat , the disasterclass of how he did his Daughter sister reflection Redemption Claudia. to find out the Vampire Armand holding the Gate’s Key, awaiting the end of the world, as the covid-19 pandemic reminds us of mortality?. the story shatters n is rebuilt. like omg. unlike the book interview Armand& Louis r still together!! whats going on!! in 2022-23? . but ive rambled enough. ill just be the dumb xyz stan to some ppl or someone else will reword this to make it palatable to these very same fans :/ it is what it is and it was what it was