#out of NOLA

[kirk]

jam reiderson cut of iwtv s2 bloopers (x)

[ourkingsteve]

I would like to remind everyone that this show is about dragons and is in fact a work of fiction which we are meant to enjoy and have fun with

[alliluyevas]

Was engaging in my favorite hobby of Curating Lists (specifically in this case of the states I have visited and the ones I have yet to visit) and was wondering…which state would you all most like to visit that you haven’t been to yet and what city/area/site would you want to go there for?

[dailyloopdeloop]

:0 fellow louisiana loop enjoyer!!!!

[prouvaireafterdark]

I know we’re kind of just supposed to take Louis’ word on why the Romanian vampires can’t make fledglings right, but…

Louis, baby, if it was depression that was making the blood unusable, I’m pretty sure even Lestat, powerful as he is, wouldn’t have been able to turn you

[cementcornfield]

When I go back home, I eat so good I don't think it's cheating.

[lafamilledelioncourt]

Fine, FINE. I'll write the Loustat reunion one-shot as a companion piece.

But if I'm going to do it, you have to read the main fic while I write it!

I don't feed the Loustat gremlins until the rest of us get love to on AO3.

(click here to access fic)

[aintnobodysbusinessifido]

It was a process.

[rebecca--barnes]

Nah I fell asleep when TTPD started and missed THIS?!

[pynkhues]

You write such great Louis meta that I was curious about your opinion on something. I’m not sure if you’ve written something about this before or not so if you have please disregard!

The show is very clear with us since the first episode that Louis is capable of violence against those he loves most obviously including Paul and Lestat. But I also see a connecting thread with Louis conflating/connecting sex and violence as well. The scene at Antoinette’s is the most obvious but when I started thinking about it, it seems like this is a common thing for him. The murders in the park in Paris, where he’s seeing dreamstat. The 128 boys in SF. Maybe his relationship with Armand, even. Maybe with Jonah, where he was biting his own arm to keep from killing him (probably also because of hunger so I’m less sure about that one, or maybe that’s part of it too).

I started thinking about this reading analyses of the long face lyrics and people’s confusion about Lestat calling himself piano and Louis forte. And on the one hand I’m like *shrug* maybe it’s not that deep or it’s meant to irritate Louis- and on the other I’m like welllll Louis does kind of come at him aggressively sometimes, so maybe this is Lestat’s actual pov.

Thank you for your kind words, anon! And yeah, I definitely see what you mean and agree. I’m not sure if it’s necessarily the conflation of violence and sex themselves, but I do think an enormous part of Louis’ character is about the repression of self until that self explodes violently out of him. To me, it’s ultimately that that feeds into Louis’ complex relationship with power and control which is often reflected in exertions of physical autonomy, both over his own body and the bodies of other people (and not even just sexually – a huge part of his relationship with Claudia is in his platonic dominion over her body, from having Lestat make her for him in the first place, to trying to control what she eats, what she wears and, most significantly, her role within the family unit [her transition to sister is, after all, just a placation. Dreamstat proves that, just as the coven calling her a feminine denouement of his name ‘Baby Lulu’ is. She is always her father’s daughter]).

Louis’ repression vs Louis’ oppression

One of the most interesting changes that the show has made is in changing Louis’ race, and while there has plenty said about that, the shift from the book as a purely repressed character, to one who’s repression is fueled by racial and societal oppression has elevated not just the character, but the show. Louis’ limitations aren’t just the ones he internalizes anymore, they’re externalized – when we meet him, he hasn’t picked a role as he has in the book, it’s been a role forced upon him by the era, the city and the systemic structures in place around him. He has to play the tough pimp down in the Black brothels he himself runs to cement his social power there, but he also has to play subservient, placating, and second-class to white society to gain any social power there.

The result is Louis represses different parts of himself as a result of oppression twice over – he’s repressing the softer, loving parts of himself working the part of Storyville he has power in, while repressing the harder, more ruthless parts of himself working the part of Storyville he doesn’t, to say nothing of having to repress his queerness in a religious household and a homophobic society. I think this makes him a melting pot in more ways than one, because it makes his authentic self hard even for him to identify within himself. He spends so much of his time code switching and repressing different parts of himself, yes, to survive, but also to advance which I think is a less talked about part of his character.

Like, Louis’ not just a survivor of his situation, he’s an ambitious man who seeks to elevate his social position and gain social power. I do think that’s partially borne out of the implied fall from grace his father had, and being pushed into the role of family patriarch at a pretty young age, and his singular rage at being locked out of NOLA’s upper echelons in the 1910s through 40s, but I also think it’s just a vital part of his character. Louis’ a social climber first, and a capitalist second! It’s one of the things that I find most interesting about him, and I love that the show leant into it with Louis actually gaining social power through his relationship with Lestat, even if it doesn’t always look like it (i.e. him having to play Black employee to his white husband at the opera).

Louis leverages that social power (and Lestat’s whiteness) to allow first professional advancement through the acquisition of The Fair Play Saloon – both his biggest competitor and a symbol of the white society he was locked out of, and turning it into The Azaelia, but also I’d argue the perception of personal advancement through having Lestat make him a child, something he also believed that he was locked out of as a gay man. Claudia's not just self-affirmant to Louis, but a symbol of achievement over society in the same way The Azaelia was, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she was born out of the death of it.

Okay, but what’s that got to do with body autonomy, sex and violence?

Yes! Right! Get back on track, Sophie, haha. Look, both Louis’ survival and advancement are really determined by his ability to control himself and choose what to be and when. Like I said above, he has to repress different parts of himself to be able to work different parts of society, and I do think there’s a resentment of the fact that he has to do that at all. He can’t float through life authentically because he’s not granted the same privilege of straight, white men, and even when he has someone who passes for that on his arm, he’s still limited in how he’s able to wield Lestat’s social power out of the house in that particular era.

That – understandably! – stokes an enormous amount of feeling. Yes, rage is a big one, but I also think grief and hurt and sheer weight, and Louis as a character tends to repress all of that too. He struggles to self-manage his emotions because he’s never been allowed the space to, and even when Lestat tries to give him that space, Lestat has exactly 0% capacity to understand him. Louis and Lestat are very, very different characters from very, very different eras and countries, and I think fundamentally don’t understand each other, despite loving each other deeply, and in a lot of ways, that’s probably part of the appeal for them.

Louis though I think does view managing his emotions as intrinsically linked to controlling himself / his body, which comes to this point that Louis presents himself as a very cerebral character, but he’s not really. He might talk a lot, read a lot, enjoy art a lot, but Louis’ always been both practical and physical. How he handles himself, how he processes trauma, how he hides from himself and others, hell, how he enjoys himself isn’t necessarily something he thinks about, it’s something he does, and usually does with his or somebody else’s body.

He hides his sexuality using Miss Lily's body, he represses his vampirism with an animal diet, he combats feelings of powerlessness, boredom, malaise with exertions of power, pleasure, comfort over and with other people’s bodies, whether that’s making Lestat turn Claudia (an exertion of power not just over Claudia, but Lestat too), the scene at Antoinette’s (significantly being after an enormous loss of power with Lestat’s act of abuse), murdering Lestat at the Mardi Gras Ball (and saving him / grabbing Claudia too), depending on Claudia for his own happiness in Europe, grabbing Santiago’s tongue at the restaurant, his D/s relationship with Armand and using Armand’s body to perform power over the Coven, the murder of the coven and Alderman Fenwick to process trauma and oppression, the 128 boys in San Francisco with Armand waiting at home, the rocks in his ankles, the comfort of the embrace in the reunion with Lestat. Hell, even the interview becomes a physical act given the way he flies Daniel out and then weaponises his Parkinson's against him.

We spend so much time with Louis playing passive as he narrates the events of his life in Dubai that I think it can be easy to overlook how physical he actually is as a character, and the importance bodily autonomy plays in his connection to himself and his connection to others. The fact that that can and does manifest aggressively / violently sometimes (particularly after periods of feeling powerless, traumatised or overwhelmed) is absolutely a part of that, but even beyond that, I think he does have a real physical vocabulary that he often tries to depict as more cerebral because I think it makes him feel more in control of himself.  

So yeah, I think you're right in that Lestat thinking Louis' forte probably is pretty accurate to how Lestat sees him.

[iwanthermidnightz]

gracie abrams performing ‘that’s so true’ — eras tour nola n1 ⭐️

[jellogram]

This reminded of the time I was waiting for the bus at night in New Orleans and this young guy who was absolutely off his shit on god-knows-what started yelling at me and calling me a bitch and a cunt and all this lovely stuff and I was just stonewalling him and looking straight ahead and he then did this to EVERYONE else at the bus stop too but after a few minutes he got quiet and he was like "....I'm really sorry, it's been a really bad day" and he started hugging people and we were all like "Hey bro it's okay" and he was like "I just want to go to the library" and it was like 1am so idk what he thought he'd do there but we realized he was at the wrong stop and needed the bus going the other way so we pointed to the stop across the street and he thanked us vigorously and then proceeded to very slowly meander his way into oncoming traffic and at this point all the bus stop patrons have banded together so it's like "NO NO BRO YOU GOTTA VEER LEFT" "Whaaat?" "ON YOUR LEFT do you think he's gonna make it?" "He's almost there YOUR OTHER LEFT BUDDY" and after several minutes of watching this dude play crackhead frogger he did in fact make it to the other bus stop without getting hit by a car (which is pretty impressive for the French Quarter at 1am even when you're stone-cold sober) but our bus came first so I never found out if he made it to the library.

It was a great moment of camaraderie among bus stop strangers. It's like that time a pigeon got into the mall and we all teamed up to guide it back out the door.

[ask-triangulum]

Do you know Dracula?

THAT GUY OWES ME MONEY! YOU SET A GUY UP WITH IMMORTALITY AND HE GOES AND DIES BEFORE PAYING HIS DEBTS, YEESH WHAT A LOSER...

5-22-5-14 8-15-15-11-5-4 20-8-5 7-21-25 21-16 23-9-20-8 1 6-1-13-9-12-9-1-18 23-8-1-20 4-15 9 7-5-20-? 14-15-20-8-9-14-7!

[lupismaris]

Sometimes self care is having a very stern talking to with the wounded scared parts of yourself that don't want to do the hard and difficult things and reminding them that nothing will get better if the hard and difficult things aren't even attempted

And then as a reward you promise to buy those wounded parts of yourself an entirely hot pink/pastel pink practice set if they agree to do the work required, as a little treat

[cementcornfield]

You lucky Trevor didn't throw me the ball more in the national championship bro, we would've won.

[sunsetcorvid]

shoutout to the scene that had me in literal tears. /srs