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jurisffiction · 1 month ago

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okay i've been listening to Ghost Quartet the live album specifically Subway and The Photograph on repeat. and I Don't Know and The Astronomer and Four Friends and Prayer and Hero and The Wind & Rain. but let's focus on subway and the photograph.

join me in a space of trying to make a square peg fit a round hole in merging this with iwtv. ideally when i do this the outcome final aim is always "fully injective/surjective mapped amv" but i am already concurrently editing 21 iwtv amvs so that doesnt necessarily need to occur here and also i dont think it can. for reasons which i am about to explicate

also obviously just on top this is like. a song cycle that came of four white friends drinking whiskey and telling each other tales and categorically does not relate to the racial dimensions of the literal Trial. it's that and the sense of blame and responsibility for an accident versus a crime that makes this really not work at heart. But it's a shortways off, not completely orthogonal, which makes the diffraction patterns so nice to watch on the walls...

so where do you start. and obviously this is just taking the incident at the heart of Subway and not. any of the other stories. though my god i'd love to edit the entire song cycle to visuals. like I want to do with Aim & Ignite and Supernatural. Anyway. putting that aside. First instincts obviously Louis is The Photographer. he's. well. evidently. And it kind of feels like it works, except he doesn't have any of the usual archetypical thematics of photographers. being one myself i do very much resonate with the trope as threaded into the song cycle: the photographer is wracked by her inaction, her selfishness to capture others for personal benefit, but also is part driven by the want to capture the wonder of life and loved ones and see stories everywhere. Louis . well i mean very much to the point he is not so good at photography.

However, the beating heart of the song The Photograph would align very well if it is about Louis's self-hating cycles of regret. I'll table that thought for now because we'll come back to The Photograph in sequence.

Subway is a bit easier to work with, even if it produces less clear answers. Subway lays out for us a dramatis personae more close to the surface than elsewhere:

There's a driver

there's a victim

there's a pusher

there's a photographer

and,

the driver zones out

the victim plays a game

the pusher screams out

the photographer doesn't help

and,

the driver can't stop

the victim can't climb

the pusher can't stop

the photographer doesn't help.

Claudia is the victim. The driver and the pusher would be slots filled by Santiago and Armand but perhaps also the audience as jury. This also sets a frame where we're believing Armand's (and broader, the kind of post-1800s statistical/sociological storytelling) view of this all as inevitable at an individual level; events set in unstoppable motion (by Louis, The Photographer, and his arrival? His turning of Claudia?).

Santiago would be my first thought for Pusher because, well, but he also kind of works quite well as Driver (though this doesn't align outside of this particular track in the cycle). Similar conclusions for the audience as Driver or Pusher.

Of course, then, Armand works as Pusher or Driver in the shallow sense that he's in one of the blame roles; what does not work is that he holds far more of the active blame by any kind of ethical checkover of events. By the songs' arc, this places him as The Photographer. But you follow that line of thinking into The Photograph, and he is most certainly not haunted by a ghostly Claudia.

Taking that thought forward, you could make Lestat The Photographer: every time he closes his eyes, he sees her eyes, haunting. It works, but something prevents me from ascribing that specific kind of cyclic introspection of inaction in the song to Lestat by its so much more obvious fitting with Louis — who, to be clear, doesn't fit it by any external view of events we have, but simply by his own reflections on events at various points in the story.

But there's the kind of wavering issue of agency, where Louis obviously even by the stretchiest of views of the show canon can't just "help" and save Claudia from Armand. Or, by another way in, he does choose and try to help multiple times over and it doesn't actually save her. Much of a muchness either way, it grates a bit having the story told as Armand/Santiago/the Audience being roles that simply couldn't stop, Claudia merely pushed, and Louis the one who could have gotten her out but didn't. I suppose this is the foundational flaw here: that Subway is an accident (the taking of the photograph specifically being the motivated crime), while the Trial is not. (You could have Lestat and Louis as The Photographer both, but this gets muddy, I think.)

That's sort of the pause moment I reach in the thinking. I keep going back and forth; no particular setting seems to settle for long.

I really also like the list of mirror roles they read for would-be Claudia for would-be Louis (this version coming from Midnight): his sister, his lover, his child, his best friend, his little girl.

Oh, the other thought: who is the Man on the Platform — screaming about the apocalypse? In the versions I switch to and from— wait. Interlude.

As mentioned before, if you make Santiago or the Audience a role in Subway, it can't quite carry through the cycle as well as making them one of four core repeating roles (or, I suppose, alternatively making one of the core roles also play Santiago or the Audience, but the others...are there anyway, as themselves). So you instead, perhaps, have Armand and Lestat as either Driver or Pusher.

Jumping back to the Man on the Platform, then, if you leave either of them out, Armand or Lestat could, somehow, play him. Most irritatingly, this works slightly better for Lestat (re: Akasha, and being out of his own mind in the Trial), but he also works much better for the narratively-coerced roles of Driver or Pusher more than Armand. Especially Pusher, given the Pusher screams in the moment. You could, I suppose, have Armand's "I could not prevent it," sideline posturing behind the scythe as his screaming about the apocalypse, as in, a performance for distraction. Hm.

You could have Daniel as the Man simply because of his role in watching it all and knowing how it goes from his vantage in the future. I don't love it, but it's something. Or you could double and have the Man be the Ghost of Claudia, screaming that she'll come back and haunt them all (revelation).

Ah well!

If you're reading this and you're not me, good god.

Postscript note: I also thought last night that you could do essentially a Ten/Rose edit for The Photograph (though the sort of soap opera tonal aesthetic of 2006 era Doctor Who may seem a touch melodramatically ill-fitting with the song overlaid), with the beautiful coda touch of Rose is the same as everyone else., i.e., The Doctor loses so many people in this same way. And then I thought, that's indulgent, and also, I had misremembered the entire song, and Rose is The Photographer, so it's all moot. But also:

so that's lovely.

Postscript note 2: Claudia as Starchild (who reflects on being blessed — and abducted — by a stranger and the impact it had on her life)... it doesn't really work beat-by-beat. But...

Postscript note 3: Good god, everything about them having lived so many lives and forgotten all they are. If Armand was even a jot more of — well, I suppose, a human. So that's pointless to fantasise. But if he was, the lines of Scheherazade in Tango Dancer: I have a lot of memories, and I have a lot of sadness, but the two don't line up, the two don't line up / and I'm haunted by that memory of who I used to be / I was empty then, and I'm empty now, but it's not the same at all. would be beautiful. It works, somewhat, for Louis as well. And the opening: I've got a thousand one stories, every single one of them's a lie.

Of course, moreso than specific racial themes, or the apportioning of blame, the real difficulty in match-cutting the song cycle and the show is Ghost Quartet is so much about the human sense of wonder, and clinging to it, overall much more optimistic than Vampire, which even with its sense of forgiveness must remain more cruel-hearted and cold much of the time.

One blossoms at the thought of regrowing your sense of creative wonder with you the audience, the other sort of carries the same ideological imperative but via the tragedy that is the fact the vampires cannot recapture that wonder reserved for humans. The concluding Prayer: I will try to forgive myself, for living in the dark, for my loss of wonder, for forgetting how to play. I will try to forgive myself, for being absent in public, and bored before stars; for not remembering, for not being in my body, for not starting right now. I will try to see myself as I am. just does not seem like something an eternal being could ever sing with sincere believing commitment.

#this is about ghost quartet and iwtv and is just a kind of external processing on my lunch break. Thanks .#it is like very very long. I would not click that keep reading in-line on the dash. Or at all

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nalyra-dreaming · 2 years ago

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My impression is that a lot of people (me included, I have to confess) perceive the DV scene as more or less objective truth DESPITE the fact that it's told from character's POV and the show's message being "memory is a monster". Fans view what's happening on the screen through a prism of their own experiences&traumas, and I can't blame them for this. On top of that, tv show is a visual type of media, and ppl tend to believe in what they've witnessed, until they're being SHOWN that some stuff they've seen is lies. That being said, I don't think Lestat (or any other character) saying smth like "well this is not how it actually happened" can change ppl perception of events (and suggesting that we should believe a character that's coded as an abuser is problematic, I don't think I have to explain why). Fans already saw the violence, and no amount of spoken words can change that. There's just no way for verbal explanations to balance visual stuff, words don't hold the same weight as actions do. I'm afraid that the show's message doesn't align with how the show was executed, that's true for S1 at least. They clearly coded Lestat as a villain, Lou&Claudia as his victims, and if they just retell some of the past events verbally without revisiting them (reshooting some scenes from new angles, adding more context), virtually nothing will change. I'm not trying to speak for the whole fandom ofc, these are my personal concerns, nothing more.

Hey nonny!

Well, the thing about objective truth in this show is that… there isn’t any. They‘ve literally kept it in POV since the beginning, going even so far as styling Lestat’s hair in a certain way to make it clear whose POV we‘re on.

You mention that fans already saw the violence and might not be willing to accept a change in the narrative here - forgive me, but in regards to the chronicles this was nothing.

There are some fucked up things coming up. I think a lot of people need to take that mental step back to look at the bigger picture. I don’t mean this in any condescending way, but season 2 will continue season 1, the arcs are not finished, as we know. And Paris is coming up. The dismantling of Louis and Armand’s narrative is coming up. Claudia‘s death.

The thing is, Louis and Claudia painted Lestat that way - for reasons. This is in the book(s) as well, and tbh I don’t quite get where the surprise comes from that a certain reassessment will be needed.

Because LOUIS also does that, in the book. And Claudia, too. So it is only logical that we need to follow, too.

I don’t get people’s reluctance and the unwillingness to accept that simple fact. The books have been here for decades. No amount of framing/visual storytelling whatever will change the simple fact that Lestat is and will continue to be a/the main character in future seasons. And that AMC might even be planning crossovers.

Also - setting this up as villain/victim is way too easy. Sorry. But none of the vampires in the chronicles are innocent.

None.

#asks #interview with the vampire #iwtv #lestat de lioncourt #louis de pointe du lac #claudia de lioncourt #the vampire chronicles #ask nalyra

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shelfperson · 5 months ago

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i think a lot of this comes from the fact that some people don’t seem to recognize what daniel’s doing as a form of prostitution? the textual narrative surrounding that era of his life does not frame him as a victim, except for when in contact with vampires. but vampires, and especially THESE vampires, have always been symbols of sexual “perversity” and sexual danger.

which, in my opinion, is a big contributor to the moralizing that pops up in this fandom. trying to determine the True Villain in a way that just doesn’t pop up in hannibal, for example. this is a show highly concerned with sexuality. not (always) sexual IDENTITY, but the physical act of sex and it’s psychological/social effect.

and every single main character is either subtextually or textually a sexual “deviant”, assailant, or otherwise has a warped sense of their own sexuality while ALSO being the victims of sexual violence. this obviously creates a charged fandom environment, because sexual violence is for good reason the ultimate tabboo, and the show’s approach to it is to take for granted that you the viewer knows sexual violence is bad on principle, and then explore the topic from all angles. which is. hard for some people. so even if you grasp the sexual discussion, people tend to miss the nuance.

especially when, like the Paper Bag incident, the sexual exploitation at play is rarely rape. obviously armand bears the most explicit burden, and his backstory been pretty extensively covered so I don’t feel the need to rehash. same with danny.

but louis’ role as the house wife places his body under a certain amount of ownership, attempts to leave resulting in violent retribution. which is only exacerbated in his relationship with armand where consent goes out the window when mind control is involved and, like i said before, this is not a relationship where things like safewords happen. all the while, at the same time, louis is actively working as a pimp and/or killing 128 young lovers he lured to his house with drugs.

claudia’s relationship to sex can never be normal just by virtue of her body. and like louis, she spent several years extensively murdering her sexual partners who were by her own admission either much younger than her or literal paedophiles. still haven’t forgotten the breasts cut off and kept in her vanity. and none of this takes away from her experiences with sexual assault, or the horrible, horrifying violence she endured. and yet i never really see people talk about this aspect of her character, because it IS uncomfortable. Incredibly so. And her relationship with Madeleine is the natural evolution of this discussion, which is why i’m so surprised when people act blindsided or betrayed by their relationship OR when people act like there nothing at all weird happening between them.

i’ll admit, lestat’s backstory is the shallowest connect to be made here, but that’s mostly because we haven’t SEEN it. even so, there’s still a subtextual throughline here. he’s an adulterer and a domestic abuser, who was himself made subtext to the patriarchal machine that placed ownership over his body. kidnapped and left for death, after the explicitly sexual metaphor of his turning. and of course however they adapt gabrielle remains to be seen, but it’s impossible to discount an incestous relationship with one’s mother.

idk, this is really just a rant but i think a lot of the divisiveness that crops up sometimes really comes down to this. like with loumand, for instance. despite it being very clear their power dynamic is the Most Complicated, people see the very real and intentional commentary in louis being a former pimp and armand a former prostitute and make the a surface level assumption about who is at “fault” in the relationship, who exactly is the predator, when in fact there’s a whole dialogue about sexual autonomy at play here i’ve barely even gotten into.

while i see where some if it comes from, i feel like way more people took “as a former sex slave, armand is disgusted by teenage daniel’s sexual behavior” from the torture scene and not “daniel has been prostituting himself for drugs presumably for years, and armand both relates to and is repulsed by daniel as a form of projection” and i think that’s extremely fascinating.

like it’s a very consistent vampire trait that they only really get up in arms about social issues that affected them in their mortal life, and even then only when it would directly affect them now. i.e, claudia and louis being aware of and condemning racism but not really caring about european nazism despite very real parallels.

and there is. a big difference. between the ultimately consensual gross misogyny of the paper bag incident and armand being sold to a brothel as a child, then kept as a rich man’s catamite experiencing regular sexual assult.

AND armand is a man who does not experience that kind of day-to-day indignity. those are completely separate circumstances and armand doesn’t give any reaction to the memory aside from what it means for daniel. in fact, that remark has very little to do with how armand feels and everything to do with daniel’s lifelong feelings of guilt for constantly being a fucking asshole.

and the vampire armand, specifically, is not a creature prone to sympathizing with people who share his struggles anyway. especially not strangers he doesn’t know. look at the way he treats claudia, specifically. she’s in a spot similar to him, both growing up and now. constantly robbed of agency, both infantilized and adultified depending on what’s convenient, and in the books of course they’re both child vampires. and he doesn’t offer her any compassion whatsoever because he’s the type of person to take his suffering out on others and reenact his trauma with himself in marius’s place.

like mr. i-constantly-mind-control-my-lover, duchess of unsafe bdsm practices, is not offended by daniel’s understanding (or lack thereof) of power dynamics or safe and respectful sex. he’s throwing the boy across the kitchen because he doesn’t understand what makes danny special when, despite all similarities, he himself is not.

#iwtv #iwtv meta

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monstersinthecosmos · 2 years ago

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Isn't it implied that Armand was sexually abused even before Marius when he was basically a child sex trafficking victim? Kind of don't even want RJ to touch that backstory at all at this point tbh

Oh yes, I would say it's not even "implied" as much as very clearly part of his backstory. He's kidnapped and trafficked and winds up with Marius because Marius purchases him.

I will say when I talked about this yesterday I said "Especially because Armand's experience of it doesn't fit neatly into RJ's whole 'rape makes you tougher' trope since Armand doesn't ask the reader to think of it as rape." which!!!!!! I will fine tune here and say I meant his experiences with Marius are the rape he doesn't try to sell us as rape. Please don't get me started on TVA meta and Armand's reliability as a narrator since we are in AMC land today on this post. He's clear about what happens to him when he's trafficked, and when Marius first "rescues" him he's so traumatized that he's nonverbal.

So it absolutely does not make him tougher; it makes him traumatized and vulnerable. I think even his respite of living with Marius is undone when he gets to the cult and re-embraces his fervent religious beliefs. It makes me wonder if he's overcorrecting and seeing his time with Marius as sin. He doesn't recover from this for like 300 years!

But that kinda leans into like a lot of the casual readers' ambiguity about who & what Marius is, also about Anne's intentions writing it/the branding contamination of her erotica career. I would even argue that a lot of casual readers don't even make it this far into the series, anyway. This is probably the most divisive book in the series because some people read it as fun vampire erotica that's just packed to the rafters with sexy & extremely common kink tropes, other people go WAIT WHAT THE FUCK? lol.

I'm not completely buying that the team on this show actually read the whole series, or at least not as deeply as fandom nerds have 😂, and like I think everyone has to remember that Tumblr & fandoming are echochambers and people outside in the regular world tend not to be this sensitive to these topics. Especially when it comes to topics that are more familiar in queer spaces. So it wouldn't surprise me if the Venice era was read uncritically. I almost wanna say maybe even read as Anne intended but what the fuck has this show told us about what Anne intended? LOL.

But there's a lot of ambiguity in TVA with Marius's intentions again don't let me waste Marius meta on an AMC post and the thing people often romanticize about him is that he rescued Armand. And like I just wonder if the show, seeing how they're handling Claudia, would lean into the like Ricean precocious child trope and try to play it off that Armand is asking for it or enjoying it.

And much like the way they're portraying Lestat, I think it's worth noting that Marius's actons often come from grounded places, and the harm he does is not always intentional. Personally I don't think the show has framed Lestat as particularly sympathetic, although they've given us some clues about why he's like this. I think fandom is really extrapolating on that stuff and woobifying him LOL so just. WHEW WOULD THEY DO THAT TO MARIUS? HAHA. fucken yiiikes.

I am *eating popcorn gif* waiting to see if the completely rampant Lestat apologism will extend to Marius bc it's hilarious to me that he has been demonized by fandom along with his fans but yet Domestic Abuser Lestat is just sad about his ex uwu louis is so mean 2 him

So anyway yeah idk man. I'm not thrilled with what the show is saying about teenagers and sexual assault so I definitely have some concerns about Armand. But I also feel like it would be such a cop out to age him up, because him being turned at 17 and looking like that is so important to his character. All of this stuff is important to his character. Like idk I don't want them to shy away from these topics but I just hope like, if there's meaningful feedback from Season 1 maybe they write it more sensitively and with more nuance going forward.

I hate to say it but we can only hope that the show continues on its path of making it the fuck up and maybe none of this will make it to the screen anyway. hopes & prayers. please leave my son out of this adshjgkadg

#vampire pajama party on amc

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kutputli · 4 months ago

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Claudia, continued

So - Claudia as abuse survivor.

Everyone agrees that Lestat was textbook abusive parent to her right? Right. No need to even discuss that. Her reasons to need to murder him to leave make perfect sense, and can, I think, be framed as survival. But she did choose to poison him, so it wasn't man-slaughter in self-defence.

Now, like I've said before, I'm not condemning her at all. Sometimes abuse survivors have to do what they have to do. It's a fact that when no fault divorce is made easier, the number of spousal homicides go down. The reason it matters though, is that not every abuse survivor reacts with externalised violence. And it certainly isn't the ideal reaction. It is a response that indicates the utter failure of every system around them.

It's important to me because Louis was also a victim of Lestat's abuse, and I do not agree that his inability to kill Lestat was a failure of his duty of care to Claudia. I understand why Claudia feels it is. I empathise with her sense of betrayal and resentment. Especially because he used an act of violence (grabbing her by the throat) to prevent her act of violence (incinerating Lestat). But I can feel immensly for her, without condemning Lous the way she might want me to. Quark said, "The main issue is that Louis can never meaningfully put Claudia first. I think one of the main things that made Claudia leave the first time in S1 was, in addition to Lestat's abuse, is Louis' passivity."

The thing with abuse is, it almost always fractures other relationships besides the ones the victims have with abusers. We lose friends, we lose siblings, we lose loved ones. Because everyone has their own standards for what is acceptable, and what is a betrayal, and there isn't one clear absolute answer. One person's "you didn't kill the person trying to kill me" is another person's "you tried to turn me into a murderer".

And here is where Claudia's youth and inexperience show up - this person has not really had any meaningful relationships as a human child. As a vampire, she was closed in with two parent figures and taught to go on hunting sprees. She has not lived long enough to know what regret feels like. Everything is NOW and INSISTANT and HUGE to her. Again, she is entitled to plot Lestat's murder (and what a bang up job she did with it. How anyone could argue that she does not have survival skills after the head game she played on Lestat is inexplicable). But Louis's instinct to soothe things over - let's just get out and go - is an equally valid reaction. He didn't want to murder Lestat out of vengeance, he just wanted to get him out of their way so they could escape. And maybe he felt that later on Claudia might regret it. (It's safe to say that she would not.)

So inasmuch as Louis is able to put anyone first, I think he does put Claudia first. But his own survival instincts limit the choices that he sees available to him. (Sidenote: there's a book that depicts this dynamic between wife and children of an abuser really beautifully - Split by Swati Avasthi.)

However, Quark made some excellent points about season 2:

"Louis treats her interchangeably as his sister or his daughter depending on what suits him. She is a child who needs to be protected from the truth of the coven and the knowledge that Armand knows about Lestat. ("You were happy. I didn't want to ruin that.") But she is an adult who needs to handle her own problems. ("Go sit in your choice sister."). This happens in the same conversation, btw! Also him not believing her when she tells him Armand threatened her? "Doesn't sound like him". Bro! He tried to kill you an episode ago. Please be serious!"

I straight up forgot about him not believing her about Armand. I need to rewatch, even though I sort of don't want to because the weight of that lynching scene just covers the entire season in retrospective smog.

Which is why I wish we could have seen their goodbye when Claudia and Madeline left, instead of hearing it reported to Armand.

And why the cafe dinner scene was so beautiful and so heartbreaking. This was what they could have been, all four of them, sharing affection, basking in the love each had for the other.

Right up till the end, Claudia keeps reminding Louis that Lestat is, in fact, an unforgiveable abuser. I just wish she had had time to come to terms with the way that Louis chose to deal with him. I think that with time, she would have been able to reconcile their differences.

But of course, instead, we get the lynching.

How any viewer thinks they can move past that I do not know. I am aware people watch TV for many reasons, and sometimes just want to watch villians chewing scenery. But that was a fucking lynching.

And it was racialised - and that is the reason why Claudia's last threat was to the audience, not to the coven. Logically, she should have concentrated all her hatred for the vampires, because they were the ones knowingly murdering her, and who knew her and had befriended her. (That's why Louis killed them in vengeance, and not all of theatre-going Paris.)

But Claudia had to deal with the hypervisibility of being a Black actor in what was a near Minstrel show, and face the white French audience's commodified objectification of hers night after night. And then she had to watch how they pivoted, on a dime, to gleefully cheering on her lynching. Claudia understood the rules of the vampires, she had tried to respect them, she knew the consequences, she knew why Santiago and co were trying to kill her.

But this was the first time that Claudia had to deal with the nature of white supremacy, who would sit there and smugly forgive an adult man for abusing his child, but would not extend any forgiveness to the child they had entertained themselves with night after night.

Claudia already knew intimate abuse. But this was the first time she was faced with not micro, but the macro aggression of the human world. And all she could do was hold on to the one person who chose to die with her, and sing a fuck you to everyone.

It's ludicrous - the idea that her death was inevitable, when she fought with so much dignity and when she was so perceptive, and so grounded.

oh, Claudia, oh, my dear girl. The injustice to you in unforgiveable.

It's been two days since I finished watching Interview with the Vampire, and the show has been consuming all my brain space. I didn't have the energy to live blog each episode of season 2, but I want to get my reactions down, before I go in search of reading other people's. This will be a haphazard collection of thoughts, so I think what I will do is start talking character by character and see if that helps me organise things any.

Louis

This one is the beating heart of the show, and I don't see how it would have worked if they had not made him a Black man. Everything stems from what he learned during his life of how to survive and thrive and yet remain kind and compassionate, and watching him be fragile and loving and grieving is soul stirring. Perhaps other people might still have found the show engaging with the role played by a white character (given fandom's embrace of the slave owning pirates in Our Flag Means Death, I am sure a slave owning Louis would not have been an insurmountable problem).

But this story belongs to the Black Louis, and to what Jacob Anderson made of him. Just impeccable acting choices, all down the line. I am mesmerised by him.

Praise for the character aside, he is the moral heart of the show. (I know there is a case to be made for Claudia, but I will get to her after this.) I don't actually much enjoy villains presented as anti-heroes, and Louis engenders so much empathy in a show filled with rather awful people.

Of course, he loves Claudia. And I do see him putting her first to the best of his ability. Claudia may be entitled to her resentment, but that doesn't make it rational fact. Louis encouraging her to leave the first time, knowing that Lestat would follow him if he left, that's a valid choice. And then choosing not to burn Lestat... I am reminded of how few victims of domestic abuse actually murder their abusers. The main desire is always to get away. I don't condemn Louis for choosing to not kill his lover.

Claudia had no roots laid down in New Orleans, but Louis did, and he gave all of that up to support her really rather nonsensical search for mystical vampires who were not as awful as Lestat. He helped her join the coven even if he could see it was a cult. And when she introduced him to Madeline, he listened to her. He turned her for Claudia. I don't ever see a moment where he stopped actively caring for her and doing the labour to prove it. I took the line about her being a burden as fully just transparent bait for Armand.

And when Lestat shows up at the trial, its Claudia that Louis is focussed on. He Always. Puts. Her. First.

The way that Louis finds his way into a relationship with Armand is so heartbreakingly soft. We never see them in their intimate moments as dom and sub, but I get the sense that he would be a tender lover -what he wants is to be respected, to have control.

And then we come to the post-trial choices.

I can somewhat buy him sparing Armand's life during his vengeance murder spree, because it wasn't just that Armand said he had saved him during the trial - if you remember, Armand was only encouraging him to leave Paris. Louis was the one who asked. But also, Armand was the one who let him out of the coffin. He did save Louis, and Louis would have tasted the blood of the person who saved him and known it was him.

I think maybe Louis was able to get over Armand facilitating Claudia's murder, because he saw him as a victim paralysed in the same way that he himself had been. Louis knows about having to keep his head down and be complicit with an oppressive system, and I think he offered the benefit of the doubt to Armand because of that. Perhaps also - Louis forgave Claudia for attempting to murder Lestat because he could see her desparation and why she needed to do it. Maybe Louis created a story for himself where Armand was similarly trapped. I don't know. To me, his choice of staying with Armand is the one I am the most questioning of.

(All of this is presupposing that what we saw was what actually happened. There are indications that there is yet another layer to the trial that we don't know about, and because Louis wasn't there as primary witness for the end, maybe some new facts will emerge to make Armand either more sympathetic, or more manipulative.)

Louis's relationship with Daniel is endearing and charming and all things adorable. I hope they whatsapp each other often and have some uncomplicated relaxing stress-relieving sex.

As for Louis and Lestat... see, I was ok with what I saw on the screen. I saw an abuse survivor leave his second marriage the instant he found out he had been lied to, and I saw him visit the parent of his child for closure. Taking on the burden of Claudia's death is nonsense, of course, but it was believeable nonsense. In that I accept that Louis, after having learned that Lestat did lift a finger to partially save his life, spilled out from all his generosity and love, what he thought might help the wretched ex he saw eating on rats and playing on a plank.

But what I am not ok with, what repulses me to the core, is the apparent conviction of the show producers that Louis and Lestat are destined to return to each other, as the great love of each other's lives. It is true that some domestic abuse survivors never manage to completely free themselves from their abuser, and some spouses continue to stay with the abuser of their child (Alice Munro, looking at you). But that storyline is a horror story. Nothing in the framing of the show indicates that horror. And I do not wish for a season 3 that walks down that road.

#claudia de pointe du lac #interview with the vampire #my meta

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