not even joking when i say this is how i used to feel and how i still feel occasionally tbh but being in this fandom is like. ok ogre thinks you're not actually reading ulysses with ogre but you're doing sth else completely non-ulysses related and it makes ogre feel very very scared.

The thing is that when I post stuff like “and i’m always saying this” I’m not trying to prove that I have the most ‘correct’ takes all this time (even though the vindication does feel immediately satisfying ngl lol). I don’t think the goal of engaging with a piece of media should be to prove that you are right and other people are wrong (a pervasive mindset I’ve seen in this fandom where a lot of people are much more invested in what other fans think in relation to their own perception of the show and not. Actually engaging in the material of the show by themselves) (and I’m not saying that I’m above engaging in this behavior too #partoftheproblem). But on the other hand as someone who was a fan of these books back when I was a teenager (sorry) I do think that a lot of how I interpret the books and these characters just happens to align with how the show and its creatives interpret them. Like even when idgaf about AR or her legacy or adaptational faithfulness one thing that I have to admit and give credits to the show is how well it adapts the essence of these characters and stories. And I don’t even think how I come to these interpretations is even a huge intellectual feat if anything I think my reading is quite basic ToT. Buuuuut the thing that I think is central to this problem of how disconnected popular fandom interpretations of the show is to the actual material, and what I also think is central to 99% of the discourse surrounding this show, is anti-Blackness. Like, that’s it, full stop. The presence of Louis as a Black man is so disruptive because anti-Blackness is so pervasive in our culture that so much of it informs how we view the world, or actually how much of it distorts our perception of the world. If Louis was white then a lot of this dissonance between canon and fanon would not exist, quite frankly. For all the lying and whitewashing and historical revisionism book fans like to do when accusing the show of being an unfaithful adaptation/having bad writing, as someone who was also a book fan (again sorry) looking at it I’m just like. Well that’s just not true. But the juxtaposition of Louis being Black and Lestat being white is so great a force it literally warps people’s perception of what was in the books as well as what is in the show: because Louis is Black and Lestat is white, Louis has to be bigger and stronger and overpowering and cold and harsh and Lestat has to be weak and soft and passive and small. Similarly, their power dynamic has to be flattened and equalized because Lestat holding absolute power over Louis is scary and confronting to the majority of white liberal audience. And a long long list of inane discourse and controversial topics that almost always trace back to this line of thinking. And while there’s a lot of talk about media literacy when it comes to this discussion that I do agree with and that I don’t think are completely unrelated, but sometimes it really does just come back to anti-Blackness. To be quite honest. 

pausing that gq bts clip to see them bounce

"I’m curious about the physicality of your character, Jacob. There are times when physically he feels very free or it seems that he moves with this fluidity, and there are other times when there is such a stillness to him, as if he’s containing so much within his body. How did you think about how he shows up physically in the world? 

JA: I think that's it, I think you’ve said it, really. I think he’s… to contain all of those multitudes in your brain is such an overwhelming experience. It’s so overstimulating. I think you have to sort of create a solid shell around it, really to protect yourself and I guess by extension protect others from this… It’s like when someone shakes up a can. I used to think of Louis physically as like, this soda can that’s been shook. One too many times then it’s gonna… it has to pop at some point. But yeah that requires some rigidity, I think, in the way that he presents himself."

(From NPR's 1A podcast)

based on a photo from that new gq shoot

getting such a strong The Fall (2006) vibes from this ack!!!

FAWWKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK

convinced that they released the weakest songs first to accommodate us to the reality of flopstat

in a similar vein to the last post but i think there's a common presumption when it comes to stories about trauma and abuse that the supposed end goal should be the victim of said trauma and abuse coming out "better" and "healed", that the goal is to move on. and when you interrogate this nebulous idea of what being "healed" means usually it comes down to all traces of the trauma being completely erase from the character's body, as if nothing has ever happened, as if they are a completely diffrent person unmarred by abuse. and even though i don't always levy realism as a metric for good writing i just don't think that's realistic. to be honest

this is probably me being an atheist/growing up in a secular environment but there's sth so... culturally christian? abt the concept of redemption arcs that i can't quite put my finger on or really be content with lol

inspired by peter steele's playgirl cover

i love love but it's so scary <- gonna say this every day until the season stops airing