Icon!

Yeah, I'll probably even watch that out of desperation.

I'm grateful I had the vampire chronicles growing up & now understand even more why I felt so seen in them (took me decades to realize how abnormal my way of doing sex & gender is).

Your 'yum' happens to crush my soul, but such is life. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Okay, enjoy. I gve S2 a go out of desperation for vampy gay content, but it just crushed my soul even more.

Sam Reid's Lestat is divine, though. What a terrible waste.

I get the feeling you read the books after seeing the show?

I wish I could come at them from that perspective (& then what's one more phallocentric, cis-normative gay romp - at least it's gay! I'd perhaps have loved it)

Since I cannot undo coming of age alongside these books, it's not an option.

Yeah, sorry, that just misses the point & value of the books for me. IWTV as gay (yet depressingly not queer) telenovella is just not okay with me. My favourite pair in my youth was Malloy + Armand, which is obv also entirely ruined too.

Basically the show ruined everything I loved since I was 11.

S1 Lestat is way more whackadoodle than how Louis portrays him in the book & they gender swapped the 'replacement' youth Lestat secretly turned & made it into an affair that Lestat lies about breaking off, so he just became the lying, volatile (messy), cheating bisexual.

Notice how even the physical act of PiV penetration in the excerpt you chose does not work the way cis het sex works for normies & that adds to the pathos of the scene. There's a grief that comes w queerness, w not being able to just be normal (& in that scene also the alienation of old age).

I'd like to hope that AR would not regret queering the vampires by redirecting physical intimacy to blood drinking. It was singularly brilliant way of queering her vampires (hugely important for those of us growing up queer in some way).

The sex IS forefront - just not cis-normative sex.

Wow, I wish I were you then. I think that the show just entirely misses the point. Maybe the writers couldn't comprehend that Anne Rice neutralized genitals for all vamps & how that fundamentally queers everything, so they trashed it.

Aged up Claudia to rape her.
Lestat as biphobic caricature.

It's frustrating how GOOD Sam Reid's performance of Lestat is too. Like, the material falls so, so, so far short of his performance, which makes the whole thing even more heart-breaking/infuriating.