#that whole conversation also between loumand in that scene

[usernamesoft]

okay but what if armand just took louis out on a silly little art date but then louis got super philosopcal and was like ‘well who are you then?’ and armand had to change his main date activity to trauma dump

[lioncourtie]

hurricanes & sun-dented rooms: a symbolic analysis of relationships in interview with the vampire. 

˖⋆࿐໋

hello. i have decided to resurrect this blog to point out a symbolic element that caught my eye after my first watch of interview with the vampire’s eighth episode, the unholy finale of what was quite frankly one of the best seasons out there.

now, i know that maybe this wasn’t that intentional, even if the remarkably talented crew behind the show loves incorporating hidden, symbolic details in it , but the visible sunray during the loumand reunion (post burning the theatre des vampires, all hail the pointe du lac heir) was so flagrant to me. quite literally, i felt as thought it was denting the scene, keeping both characters apart, louis on one side, calmer, proud of his newly accomplished plan, yet still tormented by the trial, and armand, desperately trying to lie, to convince, to make louis stagger so that they'd once again end up on the same side.

different feelings, different states of mind, different motivations.

now, we all know how vampires die most of the time: sun exposure, right? and what was right in the middle of the room, as present as a third entity? the sun, keeping them apart, even if, for the seventy years that followed, louis had granted armand his forgiveness, however never whole, after the latter had lied to him about his implications in the trial, and therefore, in the death of his beloved daughter.

but alsoooooo. one thing that i keep hearing is armand being a seventy year rebound for louis, and while i do agree with that statement, i also feel like that postburningodowntheatredesvampires paris apartment scene showcases that very aspect of their relationship well. two people who will never be able to fully merge, to fully meet, to be one, because they'll forever be set apart by the sun, by death. the death of louis and lestat (the real soulmates, after all) after that scene in magnus’ lair. the death of claudia, as orchestrated by armand, even if unknown at the time, remains still in the midst of their closeness, their proximity clouded by that energy, those lies. louis flew toxicity only to make his home in a manipulator's, a liar's warm, welcoming, yearning arms, only to realize that the abuse had shape shifted. a relationship built on lies and fragments of memories can never last forever, after all. and while lestat isn't that much better, (and boy am i not getting into this conversation today!!!!), he is louis’s love. one and only real love, bound together by the unique maker creation red string of fate, by shared dreams, promises, tragedies, and a daughter. who (arguably) died at their hand, but first and foremost, in front of their eyes. anne rice's characters will always be toxic, part vile, part good, but always fucked, and everyone has their own interpretation of why these two or these two belong together: that was mine, heavily shortened.

now, if we take a peek (not too long or i’ll curl up in a ball and die), at the loustat reunion scene, yes, as in, those ten minutes of emotional torture, what do we hear? the almost ominous sound of windy weather. yeah, nature was having a breakdown too lmfao.

This Odette, said to be at least a three. Could be a four.

typical new orleans: a hurricane is on its way. and louis du pointe du lac has business to tend to. he's eternal. all is well. he sees the rat killing sketchy gangstpire, follows him, dives into whatever the hell remains of lestat’s lair, they talk, they bawl, they embrace each other like two star-crossed fucking lovers who haven't touched each other in a millenium… and the hurricane outside, odette’s introduction, grows stronger. the windowpanes rattle, clatter, sirens are heard from the streets, the wind only grows stronger, fiercer. and amidst all that chaos, that upcoming destruction, they stand as one, in the middle of it all, holding onto one another.

if loumand were to forever have that fossé, that gap between the two of them, loustat were the opposite. hurricanes bring death and havoc, but those two things were keeping them together. they saw death, gave death, offered death to strangers, to one another at a certain point, and that is what their love is about, in the end. lies and death kept louis and armand seemingly apart, but louis and lestat built their relationships on death, mourning their daughter’s demise and their love’s revival in the middle of a damn hurricane. loumand's relationship was always headed towards its death, its extinction, as if the bricks were meant to crack sooner or later, as if that sun ray would have lured them in and set the whole thing ablaze, then to dust. but loustat were always meant to find each other again, in my most humble opinion, fighting the chaos side by side.

know your soulmates, folks.

𓊆ྀི❤︎𓊇ྀི

[nalyra-dreaming]

I start to think it's not really a loumand season with the amount of times Lestat is mentioned so far. It's more like loumand and Lestat in between. I won't be surprised if he is there every conversation and every intimacy. That idea about a threesome, not really a threesome seems very real to me. They are both fucking obsessed with the same person, and it seems that he is looming over their whole relationship more than it was in the books. Maybe I'm a delulu and think into it too much, but we got that mention in the 2/2 vids they dropped, when I expected none, and the whole Dubai situation was stale as it is but now it feels like yearning from Rashmand too for some reason.

Well, I mean, it's clever to leave Lestat out of the teasers and published content for now, because if you do not know the books the upcoming twists will take you by surprise, no matter how they spin them. And there are a lot of new viewers, and also those who do not plan on reading the books (which is fine).

I think it IS Loumand season next season... but probably not 100% the way (some) fans expect it to be? Like, as you said, they are both obsessed with the same person, and it is Louis' luck Armand falls for him... but Loumand is far from wholesome in Paris, and the "Gaslight" posters at the SDCC clearly referenced that as well.

And we know that they are including parts of "before". Of the theater's origins. Of Lesmand's origins.

Oh and yes, of course, ending both teaser and scene with "Lestat" is a choice as well, and it brings us back to what the writers have said:

O’Byrne promises that Louis’ first love, Lestat, will also figure prominently next season, even though “he has been knocked down a peg.”

Prominently. I mean, we also have to get to season 3 and The Vampire Lestat somehow... :)

So far, nothing I have seen or heard of the next season makes me believe that they'll change the actual emotional points - if we actually get to see the "surgery" (for example)? I'm not sure, we were also sure we would get Swamp!stat. Maybe they're only playing with our expectations here, but that's ... a detail, in the grand scheme of things. They'll put their own spin on things, and I honestly cannot wait to see it.

Dubai depends a LOT on where we "are" in the books. There are several possibilities, and the Loumand there also depends heavily on the actual state of things. But, I have said it before, Dubai is also heavily Devil's Minion coded. Daniel cannot be dismissed in all of this, nor can the other vampires (hinted at or shown) be ignored.

Sooooo..... Personally I do not think you're "delulu". Especially given the upcoming seasons and what Jacob said recently... it just wouldn't make sense imho:)

[sleepymarmot]

2.06 – Like the Light by Which God Made the World Before He Made Light

Louis could bear to play a hypermasculine patriarch businessman for like two scenes and then tapped out lmfao. It was NOT a good look on him; at first I assumed he was only posturing for Armand, but when he came home and started talking to Claudia in the same tone, I got worried. Luckily, it didn’t stick.

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Something is ringing false about the Dubai scenes. Daniel’s fear for his life is unconvincing; throughout the entire show up to the last episode he’d had the fearlessness of a man with nothing to lose, why the change of heart? The time jump between episodes 5 and 6 is also surprising, I assumed the episode would continue where the previous one left off, but apparently everyone had this Very Important Conversation offscreen?

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WLW 1 : MLM 0. Love loses: the episode. Really, loumand couldn’t get a single episode where they were happy together? Last time we saw them in Paris they were committing to the relationship, the next time we see them in Paris it’s already dissolving.

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The men get entire seasons dedicated to their complicated romances, and the women get together for one episode, demonstrate a positive example of a healthy relationship, then get killed off in the next one. Do I need to explain the sexism? Yes, it’s an adaptation which is necessarily limited by the flaws of its source material, but they could have done more.

Claudia feels sidelined the whole season. The recast also doesn’t help, since the two actresses have fairly different acting styles, and their Claudias feel more like two different interpretations of the same concept than the same character with a different face. Though the way her appearance is styled with zero intent of establishing visual continuity doesn’t help either. It occurred to me recently that the season really needed an episode fully narrated by Claudia, like 1.04 was. It would have reestablished the character voice and the viewer’s emotional connection with her, and compensated for her diminished screentime. As it is, she is lost among the sea of new and returning characters.

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Madeleine’s traumatic backstory is being publicly shamed and now she’s going to be publicly shamed and executed...

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Louis and Armand

As with the previous episode (and probably the final ones), I’ve already seen most of this one in gif form. The one scene that was completely incomprehensible without context was “Are you asking or making me?” so I was looking forward to finding out what it was about. Turns out it was about both of them rolling a crit fail on this social interaction. Louis is inviting his significant other to his daughter’s wedding which is also his own childbirth, a deeply meaningful event for him, and said significant other lacks the emotional maturity to answer seriously and instead turns it into a guilt-trippy kink thing Louis is already getting tired of. Armand continues to feel torn between his old values and his new relationship, and asks his significant other to make it easier for him and also re-declare his love and commitment by doing their special call-and-response, and when that doesn’t happen, feels rejected and abandoned. For Louis love is passionate spontaneity, and for Armand love is faithfully adhering to an approved script. They just got together and are already talking past each other. The trial hasn’t happened yet. Incredible. In Mass Effect terms, Louis had both the paragon (I’m asking) and the renegade (I’m making you) interrupts available, but he let them time out and got the bad version of the encounter. (And there’s also no way Louis would have picked the renegade option because this is an important family event and he wanted Armand to be there genuinely, not lurking in the corner being miserable and also getting off on being miserable.) Louis isn’t even mad, just disappointed (hm.), he reassures and comforts Armand before leaving, but it’s too late: Armand would have probably been satisfied with either answer, but he saw Louis was disgusted that he even asked in the first place, and that was it. This also brings really sad context to the similar scene from the previous episode: in 1973 Louis knows to play along because he’s learned what happens when he doesn’t.

(Louis: So we’re not going to have this conversation in good faith then? Okay, suit yourself, see you later. Armand: You’re not rocking with me ⁉️ I’m going to kill Claudia)

Not to be reductive, but the implication that this scene was the last straw for Armand is tragically funny. You know how sometimes you say the wrong thing in a conversation and your partner cringes and looks at you with pity, and it makes you so embarrassed and mad that you decide to kill him and his entire family about it?

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I don’t know if I mentioned it before but I find Armand’s “duty-vs-love” thing so unengaging and stereotypical, and unfortunately it takes up the vast majority of his screentime in Paris... There’s a lot of interesting things to his character that we see in Dubai and San Francisco, but the “main” storyline, in which he is The Love Interest, focuses on the one thing you could get in many other stories.

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I wonder how long the time skip between Paris in episodes 4 and 6 is supposed to be. The bench scene has a fairly traditional romantic tone, intimate and almost ceremonial. In episode 6 the tone seems to be dissonant on purpose; both Louis and Armand seem to regress into their worst selves, Louis’s rough persona even bleeds into his interaction with Claudia at home, he takes a step back and then the next time we see him he’s not excited to play this game anymore. Was this always supposed to be nothing but a maladaptive manifestation of their most immature past selves, the posturing cold-hearted businessman and the irresponsible child? Or was there something good there that got out of hand? It’s sad to think about, and kind of ruins the bench scene retroactively.

And it’s very intentional that the scene in Armand’s office draws a direct line: Louis’s relationship with art becoming hollow just like his relationship with Armand (an artist) does. We know Louis cares about the modern visual art and has a good eye for it even if he has neither talent nor patience to become a good photographer himself. At the start of the scene he sounds excited and inspired, explaining what is remarkable about the painting... and then he talks about it as an investment. Similarly, what seemed to be a genuine gesture of reaching out to Armand and accepting his gift of emotional vulnerability has become a performance for the coven to peek at through the glass doors.

(By the way, was there an ulterior motive to that performance? I would have said that it was a part of the plan they had talked about, to shift some of the power from Armand to Santiago (with the eventual goal of making Santiago look like a worse leader), and they were doing it by making it look like Armand was too distracted to focus on his duties... But nothing in the actual text of the episode confirms that, and the relevance to the season’s themes seems to exist on the Doylist level only.)

I don’t mean to sound judgmental about what these serial murderers do and say to each other in the bedroom — but while Armand can change his masks at will, Louis cannot, and the role he plays with Armand bleeds into other aspects of his life. He’s not an actor or a liar, he can’t pretend: we’ve seen it in 1.07, we’ve seen it in his pathetic attempts to hide the truth about Lestat in this season. Maybe his entire marriage with Armand is going to be like this, playing the role of a happy spouse until he starts to believe it wholeheartedly.

Parallel: Lestat being attracted to Louis pulling a knife on his beloved little brother to maintain his macho public image vs Louis coming home from his toxic masculinity display for Armand’s benefit and talking to Claudia still in the tone of the strict, emotionally stunted patriarch.

And another: 1.01 Louis knows his business is exploitative but still engages in it for his family; 2.04-2.06 Louis dislikes the coven rules and the cruelty of their performances, but decides to help Armand run it.

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In the light of all of the above, it’s also wild that Daniel basically says to Armand “I remember the time you acted as my servant, and you were good at it”. Daniel, why are you flirting with him right now?

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A loumand fanvid to “No Light, No Light” has to exist, right?

Next: 2.07 →

Interview with the Vampire notes, episodes 1.07–2.08

Here are the notes I took after watching every episode of IWTV, starting with the first season finale.

This post is just the intro; see the reblogs for the full text. I’m not sure that it’s possible to fit 20k words into one post, and even if it is, such a long post would be painful to navigate. More importantly, this way the contents of the posts shouldn’t flood the site-wide search results for pretty much every possible character and ship name I mention here. There is some negativity in these notes; if that bothers you, please scroll past.

I tried to simulate a fandom experience for myself, taking a break after each episode, checking out what other people said about it, and writing down my reactions mostly to the episode itself but sometimes to the things I’ve seen posted about it.

For context, I watched the first two episodes of season 1 back when they came out, loved them, but failed to keep up with the weekly releases and decided to catch up later. When season 2 aired, I checked out the trending posts every weekend, and after it was completed, I finally restarted the show from the beginning. Oh, and I had seen the movie half a lifetime ago as a teenager. This means that I was familiar with the premise and some of the main characters, was aware of the impending tragedy (one of the few things I remembered from the movie, and one of the reasons I was afraid to catch up and break my heart), had no idea about the events of the late season 1 or what the fandom was doing during the hiatus, but knew pretty much every major spoiler from season 2.

I didn’t take notes during season 1, because I was familiar with the opening episodes and satisfied by the following ones (I thought the first four episodes were flawless television). After the first season finale finally had things that bothered me enough to write about it, I started taking notes. Initially I just wrote down the things that I disliked or had questions about, but with each episode I got into the habit more, and had more fandom reactions to sift through and prompt further thoughts. By the end of the season, I was having long-winded arguments with myself. Since the point was to record my own evolving opinions, I didn’t go back and amend the previous entries, except for one or two marked paragraphs; all editing for that part was for clarity only. I wrote all of that in the notes app on my phone, for the first time in my life. The exception to the above is the final section with my opinions about the finale and the entire season: I kept periodically adding to my original phone notes during the almost two months between watching the episode and publishing this post. That’s why it took me so long: completionism finally took over and made me attempt to write down every thought about the show I had and attach it here, then proofread the resulting wall of text more times than it is healthy.

That’s enough for an intro. Direct links to each reblog:

1.07 – 2.03 / 2.04 / 2.05 / 2.06 / 2.07 / 2.08 / season 2

[nalyra-dreaming]

Idk how some people still believe "love of my life" Line. Jacob clearly stated he and Armand were instructed by Rolin to think of Graduate last scene when acting it out. You don't even have to watch whole movie, it's iconic scene description of which you can freely find. Whole point of scene is "realization that maybe it was mistake" With one character still desperate to keep smiling and holding into delusion that thing work out (but failing) (Louis)

Also (in my person opinion) nobody between three of them actually believe love of my life line. I love theory of loumand trying to make Daniel remember. I don't think Louis was improvising here, but I think it was last effort because whole interview fell from its course with Daniel tearing narrative apart. We need to remember that Dubai are from Daniel's perspective, we don't see where Loumand go and what are they doing out of scene and we can't hear their mental conversations. I imagine Louis dropping LOML line and Armand in his mind going "ok we're doing this, think it'll work?" And Louis going "well we need to try anyway because now the only buried memories that are returning are mine"

Haha I love that last bit, with Loumand mentally prepaing this ;))

But yeah, re The Graduate there is a great analysis thread here. It was indeed quite deliberate.