So I've finished this season of The Vampire Lestat (aka S3 of Interview With the Vampire) and... meh? I admit that I haven't really been into this show since S1, where I did think the choice to make Louis a black man made for some interesting departures from the source material. (That said, while I think many similar criticisms derive from shallow/racist motivations, I actually do think that some of what I found interesting might have been better explored in a story not yoked to the Vampire Chronicles mythos and story scaffolding -- a "new" story, so to speak. That said, I maintain that every adaptation *is* somehow a "new" story and that these kinds of choices and deviant interpretations are valid whether I approve or not.) I recently noted just how much I hate the character Daniel Molloy, which probably does drive a lot of my dislike in this show even though it's easy to forget he even exists because he's entirely absent during the most significant story beats. And I admit to liking actually a fair number of the songs, and I do think they derive strength from the character relationships and motivations playing out in the music, but they're hardly enough to justify the rest of the show.

Anyway, final episode. The whole season has effectively been setup for Akasha's uprising -- a whole bunch of Lestat on tour, flashbacks with Gabrielle and Nicky and Marius and Akasha, patching things up with Louis, too much being interviewed on the tour bus by Daniel Molloy for no great reason except to shove this character down our throats during filler moments -- moving characters into the places and mental states they need to inhabit to play their parts when all hell breaks loose. Ending the season with Akasha would have been the logical -- and, to my mind, more exciting -- conclusion and cliffhanger. Instead, the season ends with filler. Not just any filler, but bullshit filler. Apparently fans like it? Certainly the kinds of fans who watch After Dark -- basically a half-hour talkback that airs after every episode for viewers who want a deeper dive into the episode -- like it. It annoyed me and the After Dark episode annoyed me even more.

At the end of the penultimate episode of the season, Lestat and Louis are beheaded by Armand and UGH Daniel Molloy, because for some reason Armand is in love with Daniel and has been following him around and covering up his super-duper fucked up mistakes for decades and now is his vampire sire and trying to have an actual relationship or something. It's garbage. So they beheaded Lestat and Louis, and much of this episode is Armand torturing Louis's disembodied head to get an apology for the reciprocal (was it???) toxicity of their former relationship. Meanwhile Lestat's head is in a bowling bag, reevaluating his life via a dream hallucination one-man show attended by all of the people he killed and tortured and turned. What this episode is really supposed to be -- according to the chatter on After Dark -- is these characters all forgiving themselves and taking responsibility for the harms they've done each other and finding the closure that will make them whole, fully-realized beings who are confident in themselves and their ability to love and be loved and all that jazz. During Lestat's "performance" -- which is maybe taking place in his head and drawing from his memories but also maybe some purgatory realm because sometimes we're supposed to really attribute these sentiments to the speakers even though some of them clearly can't be at that sort of event (because they are alive and otherwise indisposed) and even per the After Dark discussion they couldn't be bothered to make a determination -- Louis's dead brother comes to Lestat and thanks him for loving Louis the way he needed to be loved. How wonderful that all these people Lestat traumatized and savagely murdered came together to reassure him that he's worthy of love and not a failure.

And there's the rub. I definitely fell off the Vampire Chronicles -- in large part because I despised Queen of the Damned; I keep watching partly out of curiosity re: how they'll handle Akasha (my trope namer for a specific problem that bugs me in fiction, if you've not heard me ramble about that) -- but initially what I liked about them was that at least Rice was concerned with morality. Louis kills, but he makes a prolonged effort to avoid doing so, and his character really is sad and miserable about the harms he's authored. When Lestat becomes the POV character in the second book, he makes much of his targeting of evildoers -- because Rice understood that, at least for some audiences, a gleefully unrepentant murderer is not a character that readers will take to in the way that she wanted us to delight in Lestat. And as much as these characters were locked in tortured romances, they were necessarily of a more cerebral sort -- in Rice's novels, literal sex was off the table for vampires. (I did very much appreciate the way the novels explored blood drinking as a metaphor for sex, since I understand sex in media and elsewhere primarily as metaphor -- it's the only way I can really make sense of it from where I operate, and it's only been in recent years that I've become aware of how uncommon my understanding really is.)

At one point this season, however, Lestat and Gabrielle are out on the town and they spy a couple of newlyweds taking selfies on their honeymoon. They appreciate how cute the couple is before taking them home, gorging on their blood, and then basically having sex atop their drained corpses. And I'm supposed to care that Lestat is sad and feels like a failure who's unworthy of love. In a recent episode, Armand mind-controls a dude -- a human who was a member of Lestat's band, so a colleague and collaborator and definitely not an evildoer who needed stopping -- to make him step in front of a subway train and meet his grisly demise. Hell, in this very episode Armand makes a man slit his own throat with a meat cleaver. But I'm supposed to be sad for Armand because Louis took advantage of him and didn't love him back as deeply as he loved Louis. At one point during the After Dark episode, they're praising -- because all this is is a weird fanwank session; even when the host tries to ask about differences from the books (I want to know specifics!!) they never ever answer with anything more but the vaaaaguest inklings -- Lestat's journey and questioning, and Sam Reid (Lestat's actor) talks about a scene where Lestat is questioning whether he's evil. Why is that even a question? YES. You target newlyweds, murder them in gory fashion, and then fuck your mom (or anyone) while rolling in their remains, you are evil. Next question. Fuck all these monsters, seriously. (I need to wrap this up soon, so I'm not even getting started on Louis, but wtf. What a waste for no good reason except to keep giving Delainey Hayles -- easily the worse of the show's two Claudias -- a paycheck.)

Oh, that. It didn't happen in this episode -- that was last week's -- but there's a scene where Daniel Molloy (because fuck this character) shares an expose on YouTube where he reveals to the public that Lestat has been having a sexual relationship with his mom. Why anyone would give a shit about this I have no idea (who is following Daniel Molloy on social media??? He's the worst), but Louis is DISGUSTED. They're out here murdering people nightly, but *incest*? Even for undead creatures that clearly give no fucks in any other context about human mores or laws? GROSS. They spend several minutes screaming at each other about this, and even Lestat is so disgusted and embarrassed that he -- *Lestat* -- vomits in the midst of flailing at justifying the act. Louis screams that he should seek professional help, because yeah that's a thing that makes sense for a centuries-old rockstar serial killer who can fly and also has the blood of an Egyptian stone goddess thing coursing through him. It's insane and it's dumb.

I've been thinking a lot lately -- I've thought about it a lot before, but lately I've encountered a *lot* of it lately -- the extent to which work being authored by *fans* actually diminishes the quality and reach of the output. And from that After Dark segment, it's clear that everyone involved is approaching this from a fan perspective -- not even from a fan-of-the-books perspective, but a fan of *this incarnation* perspective. Because we're all fans and everyone's on board, we can have these characters yell at each other about bullshit and nonsense because it doesn't matter what they're saying -- it's HIGH DRAMA among characters we're rooting for because that's what we do. They can't lose us -- not even fucking Daniel Molloy -- because they can't. They can kill anyone they want and not take a moral hit or at all come off as less sympathetic because we love and forgive them and want them to be happy brutal murdering motherfuckers (or maybe not there, because I think we're also supposed to determine that undead mother-son incest is worse than enduring murder sprees). And I mean okay, fine, it's a vampire show. Lestat has always been a murderer -- though Rice did pointedly attempt to give him a moral compass he lacks in the show -- and he's definitely a vainglorious asshole in the books as well. But the way this show constantly demands sympathy and praises that it hasn't earned and really isn't attempting to earn is irritating. That's the uncritical fanboy mentality coming through -- or maybe less uncritical than unconcerned *with* criticism and unconcerned with making an argument for the underlying *why* of developments? But it ruined Doctor Who; it was present (albeit in a less wholly ruinous fashion) in Masters of the Universe; it's kinda par for the course for media adaptations these days. It's demanding validation -- even *craving* it -- for a thing that has no interest in earning said validation, but we're supposed to identify with and appreciate the need and instinctively capitulate. (Some boomer would call this characteristic of the millennial zeitgeist; I say nothing about that but I'd welcome exploration of it from someone else.) Sigh.