#i could write an essay about this

[narryffdreaming]

[mostlyvoid-partiallyflowers]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[queenlokibeth]

Something something marie's first time using her powers in the show being when she accidentally hurts those she loves something something the last time she uses them is when she accidentally hurts someone while protecting someone she loves something something i'm gonna go scream

[criticalbeauregard]

thinking about agathario and "as it was" by hozier

the whole thing but i mean:

There is a roadway, muddy and foxgloved Whenever I'd have life enough, my heart is screamin' of And in a few days I will be there, love Whatever here that's left of me is yours, just as it was

and also, their first reunion as themselves:

Tell me if, somehow, some of it remains How long you would wait for me and how long I've been away The shape that I'm in now, your shape in the doorway Make your good love known to me or just tell me 'bout your day

[solisitude]

mid-wizarding war wolfstar where both of them think the other has betrayed the order remus to sirius is this song

[tumbler-nerd13]

“Amity’s song is little miss perfect” this

“Luz’s song is Ordinary” that

What if I said Hunters song is Top of My School by Katheryn Lynn-Rose?!?

[buddiex911]

I recently reread “people we meet on vacation” and poppy & alex are SO buck & eddie it killed me. the determination not to love your best friend. poppy constantly referring to her secret love for alex as an increasing percentage is so buck falling more and more in love with eddie. eddie being painfully in love with buck the whole time but buck never seeing it just like how alex was with poppy. I could go on and on and on.

[antiyourwokehomophobia2]

I think there’s something to be said for being touched = feeling vulnerable and therefore “feminine”. And being uncomfortable with your (female) body. I don’t think it’s healthy either but I guess it adds up

Dude, those are my exact thoughts. There's discomfort surrounding being "feminine" and vulnerable since being touched is associated with both of those things. Unfortunately, laying beneath someone and having them touch you is associated heavily with being feminine.

[cutemeat]

theres not nearly enough appreciation for how the dee/charlie relationship is SUCH a perfect satire and subversion of how m/f relationships are treated in film and television

[lemoncholy-stars]

i don’t think i’ve ever seen a better performance than doechii’s tiny desk concert holy shit

[nessbunnie]

me frantically trying to explain how i was disappointed in isagi kaiser team up ( I'M SURE KANESHIRO'S GONNA COOK W THIS I'M NOT HATING ON HIM ) and wanted isagi and ness to team up bc kaiser left ness and that's a good reason for ness to realize that he doesn't need to follow a new king and that he's a great soccer player even without him being below kaiser

[heartfeltletters-written]

go your own way by fleetwood mac

Lindsey Buckingham really wrote this and then turned to Stevie and was like "this is your part here u go" CRAAAAAZY

[tvisnoton]

Ranpo is one of the most complex characters in all of BSD, I'm so serious. I can talk my shit if yall want.

[ionianodyssey]

I think the ai talked about in the post where you said you hate ai bc you are in tech industry, is talking about stuff like video game enemy ai & pathfinder. And what about ai finding cancer while still in its early stages & saving lives?

When a tool for solving problems is used for good. It's good.

To get into a little bit of detail: AI is a very large and ambiguous set of tools that can be used to solve problems. Depending on who you ask, they'll give you a different definition of AI. Even if two people gave the same definition, neither of them could come to a consensus of what problem solving tools are AI and which ones aren't. A big part of why it has such an ambiguous definition is that what constitutes "AI" 100 years ago was literally just the 1920s version of a computer. With each generation, there's a general trend of "the problem solving tools our parents created aren't actually AI, so let's make new and better problem solving tools and call them AI." If you asked an AI researcher today if they consider video game pathfinding or video game AI to be AI, they would probably tell you no.

A lot of AI research in a nutshell is some very smart people trying to find new and hopefully better ways to solve problems. But for the past few years AI has become more and more of a buzzword in the business sector, which has leaked its way into research, and now a lot of very smart people are throwing their head at the wall inventing things that already exist. But because they can call it "AI" because it uses more recently developed ideas, it's considered Good and Very Cool. I don't really agree with this, and I've seen university professors and deans that are so absorbed by the AI bubble that they're trying to make everything under the sun run on AI. Reinventing the wheel. This sort of creates a feedback loop where software engineers are taught that anything called AI is The Best. And so they try and make everything AI. And this slowly trickles down into the corners of the internet and public thought until (sorry for the jump in my reasoning) dudes in their basements start trying to make AI things that are just reinventing the wheel, unnecessary or just outright harmful. And feeling like the one voice trying to say "maybe we give this word far more credit than it deserves" in a crowd of tech bros is just a real drag, you feel? But the difficult part is that there is a bubble going on, and one can genuinely make money from this, fueling the bubble and lining your pockets if you know when to dip. So, under capitalism, everyone is incentivized to invest into this newfangled tech with a very misleading name.

But credit where credit is due. AI, GPTs, and a lot of the new forms of AI being improved and put into use have already found innumerable uses to help people with disability, as well as use in the medical field. Which brings joy to my heart, knowing that enough people have cared about these derpy little machines long enough, believing that one day, maybe they will be able to think. That we were able to create some genuinely interesting tools that would've blown alan turings mind.

TL;DR AI under capitalism is often bad, but it still does good, which is very cool. We're in a tech bubble.

[feralshadowdemon]

all the bsd characters give off varying degrees of neurodivergent

[whirling-fangs]

↺ : My muse and the past. (Do they live in the past and struggle to let go of past grievances, or move on more easily, is there anything in their past they want to forget, e.t.c.) 

Headcanon meme from ages ago

Inosuke almost never thinks about the past. His mind is, in many ways, similar to an animal's. He rarely reflects upon the past, neither does he project himself in the far future. He ensures his survival day after day, night after night.

As he comes into contact more with humans, however, he starts to understand the importance of the past. He likes to brag about his achievements, which forces him to reminisce distant events. His childhood memory is rather foggy, even more than usual for a boy his age, but he relies mostly on the feelings and sensations rather than the actual images.

Until the Natagumo Mountain incident, Inosuke had never dwelled over any event for so long. He lost a little piece of his "innocence" on that day, after such a close brush with death. The long lost memories that flickered before his eyes, right before the demon crushed his skull, made him realize that there is more to his life than the day he's currently living.

Ever since that day, Inosuke finds himself thinking about the past more often. Random, meaningless memories spring to his mind, along with deeper ones. Every time he's forced to lie in a hospital bed, with nothing but his mind to keep himself busy, he finds his brain assaulted with the past.

Inosuke never thought about the past because he didn't have the luxury to do so. As he abandons his wild life, and becomes more accustomed to having his basic needs fulfilled without having to fight for it... the past becomes more proeminent.

And more often than not, Inosuke finds himself wishing that he could make it all stop.