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bigskydreaming · 1 year ago

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IWTV season finale (or more accurately the second half of it, from the end of the interview onward) has me positively vibrating with the implications (or at least my interpretation). Midway through the first actual meta I feel like I've written in years lol, but I've always felt like the series' meta narrative was ABOUT the power of narratives and all the ways they can distort the truth, make myths out of past events, turn fact into fiction and reframe and recontextualize things in all manner of ways......

From the editing of Claudia's diaries to Armand's memory manipulations to Louis' unreliable narration to the very format of Daniel's interview to the story Armand tells about Claudia's fate and how that shapes the story of Louis' life with him and on and on and on.....its a hugely sprawling, intricate web whose sole common thread is the reality that everyone's history is only history to THEM....to everyone else, its a story told to them....either BY them, or by someone else ABOUT them, or in some other way rendered mutable by the power of secondhand narration and all the ways intentional and even subconscious biases can reshape it.

I mean, even the facet of this in which Daniel's book IS as factual as possible, and is taken as such by vampires, but to humanity it reads as fiction because they view vampires as inherently fictional, and how this thematically ties back into how easily the lines between fact and fiction can be blurred merely by virtue of what you're willing to ACCEPT as true and capable of existing, vs what you WANT to be true and capable of existing, and what you'll go to any lengths to deny ever COULD be true or capable of existing.....

The paralleling of all this with the beginning of the season starting with Louis and Claudia's quest to find other vampires, whom they weren't even sure existed, and how much Claudia WANTED it to be true that there were others like them, and how quickly the very thing she searched for turned into the very thing she wanted to get away from when the reality of those other vampires turned out to be different from what she'd hoped for....

How much of what Armand said and did was built upon the foundation of knowing it played into what Louis would PREFER to believe had really happened, because the reality of who ACTUALLY saved him would by its very nature challenge certain things he'd long accepted and internalized as fact in order to make his peace with how things went between him and Lestat, ie the idea that Lestat was inherently monstrous, just look at the proof that lay in the monstrous things he'd done, ergo he was predisposed TO assume that it must have been Armand who saved him, because Lestat just wasn't capable of that, would never even WANT to, and the simple truth that regardless, he DID, subsequently required reconciling that with his fundamental perception and understanding of Lestat as of that point in time, and the fact that Armand's house of cards was in reality so, so FLIMSY, and vulnerable to toppling with just the right push but it still lasted for 77 years because it had been built upon the foundation of Armand's awareness of just how badly Louis NEEDED reality to be that simple:

Armand loved him and was there begging for his forgiveness for his part in things, ergo, of course Armand would have saved him when he had the chance.....vs Lestat had never loved him and would never in a million years genuinely apologize for anything he'd done or even admit he was wrong, let alone forgive Louis and Claudia for what they'd done to him, ergo, of course Lestat would never have saved him even if he had the chance.....

Like it really was that simple, that flimsy, and yet that enduring, Armand kept the lie going for almost 80 YEARS because he was confident about having built his narrative on the bedrock of what Louis believed to be true of Lestat, what he accepted as immutable FACT....

I REALLY want to rewatch some earlier episodes at some point, specifically Season One eps involving Claudia's diaries and stuff about Lestat, because I'm very curious how that comes across in hindsight - a lot of people have pointed out how little we really know of what Lestat actually thought of Claudia, and I'm curious now how much of Armand's editing and reframing of things made it a priority to emphasize the take that Lestat had nothing but contempt for Claudia.....like what I mean by that specifically - because none of this of course is meant to excuse or defend anything Lestat has done to either Louis or Claudia in the past, of course - what I mean there is Louis, even at the points where he's MOST prone to viewing Lestat in terms of extreme binaries, still has always been aware that he has complicated feelings about Lestat and that his love for him and his desire to believe that at least some of what he'd perceived as Lestat loving him had in fact been real....

Like, when it comes to him and Lestat, Louis KNOWS that he's an unreliable narrator, that he's never going to be 100% capable of having an objective view of how he truly feels about Lestat and how Lestat feels about him. Which could've made Armand's lies a lot more fragile, if there was even a chance Louis might even just in passing wonder "what IF Lestat had been the one to want to save me that night" and from there potentially sparking upon the possibility that wait....AM I sure he didn't......

BUT. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which are Louis' protectiveness towards Claudia, guilt about anything she suffered as a vampire due to having been the one to beg she be made one in the first place, and seeing Claudia as HIS responsibility......Louis' view of Lestat's treatment of Claudia has always been a lot less forgiving than his view of Lestat's treatment of him. The very things that make him WANT to give Lestat the benefit of the doubt in some cases when it comes to their own interactions, because he wants to believe that Lestat did in fact genuinely care about him.....go hand in hand with the unlikelihood of him giving Lestat the benefit of the doubt when it came to how he felt about Claudia, as interpreted by Louis based on Lestat's interactions with her....

AND Claudia's journals....and what she had to say - and believed - about Lestat's view of her. At various points, Louis has been as prone to outright REJECTING the possibility of Claudia being an unreliable narrator as he is to accepting that his own recollections and perceptions are unreliable....because he enshrined her and put her on a kind of pedestal in an effort to keep her memory at a distance from him, where it hurt less, felt more like something told to him in a story rather than the visceral pain of losing someone he loved like a daughter. You could call Louis a liar, because it was no worse than what he'd accused himself of. Call Claudia a liar, and you wake the revenant of all Louis' most primal, savage (and ultimately failed) efforts to protect her from harm, still haunting the few things left of her like the ghost of Louis' paternal instincts and love, cursed to linger around any mention of her because it would forever have the unfinished business of needing to protect her, even now, long after it was no longer even a possibility.

Point being, I'm wondering now how much Armand leaned into THAT, to shore up the weak spots in his story......how much the potentially (and likely) far more murky, messy, and complicated truth of Claudia and Lestat's view of and feelings about each other got left on the editing room floor of their actual history so that Armand's director's cut of the past could condense all of that into the far more simple - and polarizing - idea that Claudia hated Lestat and Lestat hated Claudia, and no matter HOW complicated and uncertain things might be when it came to the truth of Louis and Lestat's history and feelings....on THIS count, there was no doubt....Lestat would never lift a finger to help Claudia, never have a kind word to say about her, had nothing but apathy with an occasional detour into contempt when it came to her.....

And thus, Armand whispered into Louis' ear for seventy seven years worth of nights spent haunted by her memory and his guilt and belief he should have done better by her - if Louis could be certain of nothing else in this life, its that Lestat would never be on Louis' side if it meant being on Claudia's too, and for that reason alone, he couldn't POSSIBLY have been the one to save Louis that night.

It had to be Armand. Nobody else had ever understood how Louis felt about Claudia. Nobody else had ever cared that Louis had loved her so much and missed her so badly. Nobody else ever WOULD.

And so the house of cards remained standing, because fragile as it was, Louis never saw a need to push at the card at the very bottom.

Until of course, a gust of hot air named Daniel came in and huffed and puffed and blew the whole thing down.

(Largely, imo, because of the power and importance of stories, rather than the actuality of their actual interactions and things Armand had physically done to piss Daniel off and make him hold a grudge, lol. Personally, I feel like Daniel - who prides himself on his ability to see the truth, report the truth, TELL the truth rather than, y'know - "stories" - who is so vehement about his role as a truth teller rather than a story teller that he will not let a single instance of someone calling his book a novel instead of a memoir go unchallenged, someone for whom the distinction between truth and fiction is a line he's staked so much of his life's work and subsumed his very identity in - its not any one THING that happened when Daniel first met them decades ago that really pissed him off, I'd argue.....its the mere knowledge of Armand messing with his mind, muddying his memories, making it IMPOSSIBLE for Daniel to ever fully trust the truth of his own personal history....THAT was the unforgivable crime that fueled Daniel's spite and was like okay, so for Today's To Do List, I'll be wrecking your marriage, your past 80 years worth of machinations, your reputation and just overall blowing up your life in every conceivable way. RIP to this little house of cards you built here, its adorable. I brought a battering ram.)

Anyway. I'm just saying. I think the role OF narratives and their importance and power WITHIN the overall narrative of the show is one of its most fascinating aspects, and is what has me so amped for Louis' arc next season to see if they go in the direction I'm hoping they do based on his final scene, which I interpreted not even so much as Louis throwing down the gauntlet to the rest of vampirekind and saying I'm not scared of you.....so much as Louis recentering himself in his own identity, his own perception of himself rather than Louis-as-depicted-in-the-stories-of-his-loved-ones-lives, and emerging from the wreckage of the house of cards he'd spent the last 80 years living in, with a reignited desire to CHOOSE life, rather than just drift through it eternally like an immortal record of the past with no real desire to partake in the present....

And thus, having every intention of surviving whatever comes next, due to vampirekind's shared focus and aggression towards him. He's not looking to just go down swinging, IMO, the Louis of the final scene took his time getting there. He was deliberate, methodical. He took his time between kicking Armand out of the tower and returning to it and telling the collective children of the night to come at me, bro. He retraced his steps and revisited New Orleans with intent, took in a tour guide turning past events into a mythic tale with a smirk that cast no judgment on how true or not the tour guide's version was, but rather felt instead like he was enjoying the shared joke of how easily something-that-was ended up spun into something-so-much-more-folkloric-than-it-actually-had-been. He repaired his tower and redecorated his personal place of power with actual mementos of someone he loved where once there'd just been the memory of her lying over everything like a funereal shroud, heavy and haunting and unspoken and thus impossible to ever take comfort in or make peace with. He stood there for who knows how long, through who knows how many nights, and just listened to his many would-be-enemies announce themselves and their intentions towards him, all the things they planned to do to him, and then and ONLY then, he picked his moment, took a seat, settled in......

And began to tell a story.

He didn't throw caution to the wind, double down, say fuck it, if I'm going out it'll be on my terms.....IMO, the Louis of the final scene, with the same predatory glint in his eye and devil-may-care smirk he's worn in past scenes where he's given himself permission to be the monster, if he felt the moment called for it, just was past caring, or saw it as necessary to make it through the night....

This is a Louis who doesn't give a shit about any blaze of glory, this man came to win. He chose life over death once upon a time, hell, he chose life IN death, and then he did it again and again even throughout the times when he got lost and weighed down in the inevitable tragedies of life and couldn't make the most of the equally inevitable triumphs along the way.....and I feel like he's finally at a point where he's ready to make that MEAN something. On HIS terms.

There's not going to be another book with Daniel, not about him, anyway. Let Lestat have the next one. If there's a story to be told about Louis now, it won't be told in someone else's book, in Claudia's journals, in Armand's half-truths or even Lestat's regrets.

The only one telling Louis' story from here on out is Louis. And he's going to decide what it says. I feel like this is (or at least COULD be) a Louis who is preparing for a war he has every intention of winning, and he took his time and considered his options before choosing his field of battle. He armed himself with a very specific weapon for very specific reasons. The final scene is Louis issuing a challenge, yes. But its also Louis turning his enemies into his audience, and saying.....let me tell you a story.

This is the story of The Vampire Louis De Pointe Du Lac, he intones, introducing himself with pageantry picked up from those he's met along the way in his journey these past two seasons, but given his own flourishes, said in his own voice. No mere mortal, or even mere immortal....no. This is the story of the Vampire Who Yes, Just As You Accused, DID upheave your whole world by spilling your secrets to the rest of it, who yes, DID break so many of your laws, just like he has in the past and chronicled in said book as though he genuinely gives not a single fuck. Let it be known. Let it all be known! Let his personal sanctum, that private place of power most vampires and covens are zealous about keeping hidden because of how vulnerable even the most powerful of them are when stuck in their coffins at noon, be known. Let his security measures be known. Let everything they could possibly need to enact their judgment, vengeance, fury, and just overall bloodlust upon him....be known.

Because the Vampire Louis De Pointe Du Lac....owns the night, he says.

He tells them a story, that tells them everything but also tells them they know nothing, and turns everything they know about him, think they know about him, every secret or vulnerability offered up in Daniel's book, everything that could be gleaned by any of them going to Armand or Lestat or anyone else for intel on him......into irrelevant details.

Because his story he told - to an audience of jaded immortals, masters of manipulation, mind games, and the various machinations that colored so much of Louis' history with both Armand and Lestat, because they learned them from each other, learned from the same people, taught others, and on and on and on.....the story he told to an entire world of schemers, many of whom have centuries more practice than him in the art of turning fact into fiction, distorting reality into fantasy and making themselves into mythical monsters instead of just people who do monstrous things, just now with Added Years and Also Strong Branding.....

Well, the funny part about it, the thing he could be busting a gut laughing about on the inside.....

Is the story he told is not actually a story. It was fact. Truth. One hundred percent verifiable truth.....just....presented as a story.

And thus, to the practiced and cynical eyes of immortal master storytellers slash liars slash strong believers that all vampires are as prone to truth-twisting as them.....

For everything his "story" told them, the attached implication is there MUST be more he's not telling them. No vampire offers all that up, waves a red flag like that, declares war on untold legions of immortals more powerful, more experienced, more monstrous than him.....

Unless there's something he's NOT saying. Some trick. Some scheme. Some sword of Damocles hanging just out of sight over head, waiting for the first challenger foolish enough to take at face value this relatively young upstart (who nevertheless has survived over a century in the company of some of the most dangerous and unpredictable vampires out there - always a bundle of contradictions, our Louis).....and as much as they ALL agree this heretic must burn for what he did, for what he dares, laying claim to the night like that, like he has any RIGHT, let alone some greater right than THEM....

Well. SOMEONE has to take the first swing, don't they? And suddenly.....they're probably not all that eager to BE that first contender, the first to take a run down the straight shot Louis has invited them to take right to his front door and down the hall to where he can be found sleeping in his coffin incapable of defending himself.....

Because, well. There HAS to be some trick, doesn't there?

And there is, of course. The trick is that there is no trick. The lie is that the truth isn't a lie, its the actual truth. Its a simple, basic, and perilously flimsy house of cards Louis has erected around his tower as his ACTUAL fortification, but if this is his game, he's got reason to be pretty confident in it buying him a fair amount of time and allowing him plenty of maneuvering room while he engineers more of the situation to his advantage.

After all.....nobody knows better than Louis how effective something like this can be.

Its quite literally the exact same sleight of fact and fiction that Armand used to keep him contentedly playing make believe for the past seventy seven years. The more you ground a fiction in lies someone is already telling themselves or is all too willing to believe - because it falls naturally into place alongside similar-seeming and deeply-rooted beliefs - the less you actually have to LIE. The less you actually even have to do at ALL, because they're already inclined to fill in the blank spaces with their own correlating assumptions and just keep going and going from there. The fiction writes itself, because you've just given them the prompt and invited them to use their own history as a map for what makes most sense to come next.

And why wouldn't they? Vampires are natural storytellers, after all. How else does a factual species continually convince the world around them that they're really just fiction?

Armand's lie worked as long as it did because it was never a gamble at all. He knew it would work - at least for a time - because it always works. Vampires do this constantly. We've seen it time and again. They pull this gambit on each other, they pull it on themselves, they turn their own histories into stories that make them feel better whenever they peer into the past because perception is reality and if you have literal mind powers that let you alter perceptions at will its not exactly a hop skip and a jump from there to the belief that you can render reality similarly mutable.

Life is beautiful and great and wonderful and also hard and cruel and painful. And the unfortunate truth for many of us is the memories that hurt tend to have more weight than the memories that lift us up. They have an easier time sticking around, accumulating their weight, making the accumulation of decades and centuries more of a curse than a blessing unless you find some way to relieve the pressure, shed those burdens regularly. Or just get really good at telling yourself that weight, those hurts, they just aren't there. Because the things that caused them never happened. Because your immortal life has been wonderful and grand and anyone who challenges that is probably a liar who is invited to defenestrate themselves at the next available opportunity.

Armand wasn't shocked that a few pokes at his house of cards could collapse the whole web of lies. He was shocked that someone poked at it at all. He's five hundred years old. That shit just doesn't happen. That's not what they DO. Vampires only GET through as many centuries of bloody, brutals acts by LYING to themselves about those acts not being bloody or brutal or that they were done by someone else entirely, EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT, what kind of fucking BARBARIAN goes around poking at other peoples' houses of lies to see if they'll collapse when like, no shit, its OBVIOUS that it would collapse, because duh, its made of CARDBOARD, nobody is out here in Vampirelandia arguing that these things are sturdily constructed, but its not like its a problem as long as you just dont POKE at it and like, who even does that? Its RUDE!

*Enter Daniel, stage left, with jazz hands*

The older you get, the more memories you have, the more they all cram up against each other, the lines get blurred, the contents of each memory end up in each other's boxes, and when its that already that hard to tell which ones are still accurate anyway, its that much easier to just go with the stories and decide fiction's an acceptable substitute for fact any day.

Its not surprising it took a relatively young, spry and sassy septuagenarian to remind the two century plus lying liars who lie....that all of that may very well be true.....but that doesn't mean facts don't still matter. Truth doesn't still matter.

Any vampire could see the fragility of the ruse Louis' erecting here based on their own experiences doing the same thing. Most of them won't, because exposing the reality of his ruse requires an admittance of familiarity with it themselves. And that leads to acknowledging when and where they've deployed it in their own lives, with their own companions.....

And vampires, as we all know....rather famously don't spend a lot of time looking at themselves in a mirror.

The ten million Louis paid Daniel to tell his story was well worth it, and not just because it let him see what Armand had done. But because Louis already knew the power of a good story.....but Daniel reminded him that the truth has power too.

Its all in how you use it.

Related but tangential.....not gonna lie, a major inspiration for this take is just Louis fucking SMILING so much more in the last several scenes of the episode than in pretty much any of the present day scenes until now, at least in any kind of way that feels genuine and like he's actually engaged with what he's smiling at and dialed in. Like just....it feeling like being freed from the isolating house of fabrications he's spent the last several decades in has already led to him reconnecting with that fond curiosity he's had in the past, when not being alternately wallopped with Trauma and Tragedy hammers every other scene he's in. Him being able to look around and just take in stuff like "oh hey, that sparks joy. Neat. Forgot I had that emotion."

Like, I just really, REALLY like the scenes in the show (relatively few and scattered as they are) where we get.....playful Louis. The simple sincerity of just finding something amusing.....

Buuuuuut I also like when Louis is being a bitch and also when Daniel is being a bitch and I just think their being a bitch frequencies should be allowed to sync up more. As a treat. Just saying, this interpretation/take was 100% inspired by the thought of Louis finding the effectiveness of his ruse hilarious in an ironic kinda way, and being like, I wonder if Daniel thinks the joke is as funny as I do, since I think he's pretty much the only other person who'd get it without me explaining anything.

Daniel: Oh I absolutely do, except I just think its hilarious and not in an ironic way or anything, its just funny. Plus I enjoy that its at most vampires' expense, because at the risk of generalizing, literally every single vampire I've ever met has been a giant dick. So. There's that.

Louis: You do remember that you're a vampire too now, right?

Daniel: Well yeah. And I've met me, and I'm a giant dick. Where's the confusion here, Louis.

Anyway.

ALSO! The parallel of Daniel writing a fact-based memoir that exposes the truth about vampires to a world that refuses to believe it because it challenges the beliefs they already have about what is fact and what is fiction.....

And Louis armoring himself with truth told as a story to vampires that refuse to even look for the holes in that armor because to do so would risk applying fatal pressure to the fiction painted over the vulnerabilities in their own.....

.....mmmm. *chef's kiss*

So, yeah. I would love it if the above interpretation is where things go. Based on where they left Louis, I feel pretty confident I'll like wherever they take him next season regardless of how well it aligns with this take or not, but I mean. I'm egotistical enough that I'm like yeah, I would in fact like it if the show validated the two hours I just spent haphazardly rambling away in a post that started off with "So this isn't an actual meta but rather a post ABOUT a meta that I'm GOING to write but that is not actually this" and then turned into an obvious meta that didn't even have the fucking decency to be the meta that the post was initially about.

Look, I'm just saying. I would win so hard at being a vampire, I've already finished all the prerequisite courses.

Thus concludeth the rambles.

.....ugh fucking hell, just remembered that now I STILL have to write the actual meta that I was already planning to write before my brain decided hey what if instead of that we did a whole Russian nesting dolls thing that turned that meta into like, nine other metas that don't get you any closer to writing the thing that you originally set out to write hahaha this is fun, I'm fine, the show has absolutely not rewired my brain chemistry at all.

#iwtv season 2 spoilers #iwtv spoilers #iwtv season finale spoilers #omg I did an actual meta again kinda I think idk its been 84 years since I wrote actual meta #i forget how the rules work. well. not that meta has rules. YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN #and if you do. please tell me.

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