#iwtv timeline

[cbrownjc]

Hola! Writing from Sweden! I love spoilers so no problem from me.

But why would Louis burning/being killed wake Lestat up?

If eveything has happened before he went to a coma, why is armand still around. They broke it off way before the start of the interview.

And lastly. If he isn’t inte a coma. Is it possible the rockstar thing hasn’t happened and he thinks Louis is dead until the book is published? Or is he off doing his thing?

Hey Anon,

Well, honestly, the book doesn't really give an explanation as to why Lestat woke up. Before then, only music was able to rouse him briefly. But Louis trying to kill himself finally had Lestat up and completely awake, and not going back to sleep again afterward.

The reader is basically IMO supposed to infer that it was love that woke him the final time. Lestat more or less implies that's the reason why he won't go back to sleep and he's worked through his post-Memnoch ordeal and will stay awake now when he's talking to David Talbot about it:

As to when things happened, no I don't believe everything happened before this second interview if we are in Lestat's post-Memnoch coma situation right now.

See, I think a mistake that many people are making with this adaptation, is thinking that everything had to have happened in the exact order in which they happened in the books. That just isn't the case IMO. Things can very easily be switched around timeline-wise and still work IMO. Especially because the timeline has already been moved ahead when it comes to some things, not least of which is when Louis was turned and when Louis and Armand first meet each other.

Lestat and Armand both have an extra 150 years or so (and even more in Armand's case) of life to account for in the show's universe than they do in the books because of when Louis was turned in the show vs the books.

The Devil's Minion and Lestat's rockstar career could have both very well happened in the past. In the case of The Devil's Minion, for example, I'm like 95% sure it happened in the past. But that does not mean the events surrounding things like Akasha's awakening also had to have happened in the past as well, even if those two things did.

In the books, Louis and Armand were together for about 60 years - from c.1870 to 1929. In the show, Louis and Armand meet around 1945, given the diary entry Daniel skimmed in EP4 that has Claudia saying they finally arrived in Paris in 1945 (which would have been just after WWII ended). Between 1945 and 1973 when they first meet Daniel in San Francisco, that is only 28 years. Nowhere near the almost 60 years, they spent together in the book before they broke up. (And the 44 years after that before Louis first met Daniel.) And 1945 to 2022 is 77 years. We have no idea if Armand and Louis split for a time or so - or not - before they started living together again now in Dubai.

Louis and Armand being together now doesn't really mean much honestly. Armand and Louis were living together at the start of the book Prince Lestat, which is set in 2014. Just because certain events that, in the books, preceded Prince Lestat may not have happened yet, doesn't mean the show can't have decided to set that particular plot point of them living together to be happening now, even if things in previous books before it haven't happened yet in the show's timeline.

As to your last question, I actually thought about it for a while, and I've settled on thinking Louis does know Lestat's alive right now. (Just currently in a coma-sleep-like state.) I don't think Louis knew at all after the events of Paris. I think he truly thought Lestat was dead. But, just as in the books, I think Louis found out the truth about Lestat being alive when Lestat pulled the rockstar thing. Because yes, I too think Lestat's rockstar career happened in the past, back in the 1980s.

And before someone asks, I said in another post about this that Lestat's rockstar career was basically the equivalent of being a one-hit-wonder. His band had one big concert (that kinda ended badly) and then that was it. After that event, the band changed their name back to Satan's Night Out and Lestat never took the stage as a rockstar again. I may have just been a little kid at the time, but I did live through the 1980s and I can't name every one-hit-wonder band from that time. Daniel's memories are already hinted at as having holes and blocks in them. That he didn't automatically recognize the name The Vampire Lestat doesn't mean much at all right now IMO.

So yes, at the moment, I think Lestat's rockstar career bit happened in the past. I also think the reason that career happened was for a different reason than why he did in the books since IWTV was never published in the 1970s in this universe. Lestat would have had no reason to answer that book with his own book and videos. And the only thing I feel for sure that has happened in the past from Queen of the Damned is the Devil's Minion storyline.

Everything else is very up in the air for me, particularly Akasha's rising. I can very well see it having happened in the 1980s like in the books; I can see it being set up with the whole "great conversion" thing the show has made up to happen in the modern day. However, I can also see it being something that happened during Lestat and Armand's missing 150 years before Louis enters the picture. I just don't know yet.

However, I don't think that it has to happen in response or tied to Lesat's rockstar career. You can do both things at different time points and still make it work IMO.

[revolutionary-catboy]

16yo me would not believe if I told him that in the year 2022 both hannibal and iwtv would be trending next to each other on tumblr dot com

[hermit-frog]

Jacob Anderson as Louis de Pointe du Lac   Interview with the Vampire | 1.07  

[fuzziiwuzzii]

Piercing (very important)

For Lestat's birth week @nocontextlestat :3

[captain-noir]

whats your favourite girl you’re deranged ldpdl moment? mine’s in ep2 when hes shit-talking lestat per usual  re the opera and the tenor being like ‘lestat was a SNOBBY nasty bitch who killed an innocent man of MIDDLING talent for an offending note. it was SO barbaric daniel it very nearly put me off killing forever but lestat had a way about him x 3 and i didnt want to disappoint so i pretended to enjoy it and we drained and feasted on him all. night. long. and we could do that because lestat was an Artist of Death. i, a mere babybird of a fledgling, a fumbling botched vampire had no stomach for such DEPRAVITY. i did however feel CHARGED listening to the thoughts and reading the mind of the tenor. i relished in the quiet almost meditative remembrance of a rich picturesque life in italy, of the warm hearth of a loving home, the weather-beaten face of a doting father who taught him to fish, the deep blue waters and the open horizon. it was TRANSCENDENT. anyway, i havent killed since the year 2000. i sit here a master of my own instincts unlike the rest of the vampires who are slaves to the blood. 

*waiter enters the scene with a bloodbag* the ab negative you ordered, fresh from the farm. 

daniel: what farm!?

louis: what farm indeed

[viensamoimoncher]

since I've been cursed to remember that Jared Leto was a forerunner to play Lestat, I couldn't help thinking:

wouldn't it be funny as hell if Lestat, upon waking and entering his rockstar era, encounters Leto playing someone who's cosplaying as 'the vampire Lestat'?

[thedaswolves]

Basically Louis for last decades... and Armand for last century and a half (don't pretend Armand)... and every Lestat book fan irl for the last 40 years.. and Anne Rice herself 😂

[nativehueofresolution]

something something armand waiting a century in paris with lestat oceans away, hoping he'll return so they can be together vs armand staying with louis for around a century waiting for him to return to himself so they can be together. lestat rejecting him and leaving vs louis reciprocating and wanting to run away with him, only to be so broken by the time they are together he's left emotionally. lestat stating openly the qualities about armand that disgust him and burying the fact that he does still love him vs louis staying with armand as his companion, wishing for most of that time armand would leave him alone and not doing much to hide that, and yet being crushed when armand finally does leave.

[susiephone]

Daniel: wait your Lestat is Lestat the musician?

Louis: yes but that's not the point, the point is my eternal bond with him and the way he both damned and saved my soul-

Daniel: LESTAT FROM THE FUCKING WARPED TOUR?

[shoutdontwhisper]

Louis calling Armand the love his life... 

[o0anapher0o]

I don't know if this has been discussed to death already but I just looked up Tintoretto. Mostly because I had never heard of this guy and the comment that Marius was a contemporary of his has been bothering me for ages. I'm by no means an expert on renaissance art but I still refuse to believe this guy is famous enough to be useful as a reference point. However.

I know we're on a slightly shifted timeline with Armand as well, since they've aged him up and moved his becoming a vampire back to 1508 (based on the 514 years age he gives) but the thing is Tintoretto was born in 1518 and probably didn't pick up a paintbrush until the 1530s. So if that comment is meant to date that painting that would mean the painting is from a time when Armand very likely thought Marius was dead.

I've seen people speculate that Armand wouldn't have put up a Marius painting if they hadn't made up someway at some point. I'm not sure I agree, but if this painting actually supposed to be from the mid 1500s that at the very least proves that Armand in 2022 knows that Marius didn't die in Venice.

[mareenique]

After reading many brilliant thoughts by others about it, I’ve managed to put my own thoughts about AMC’s IWTV and race in order and write it down. I’m only talking about the tv series because I’ve only recently started reading the books and it’s been a while since I watched the movie, so I won’t compare them. I’m also a white European woman so I’m sure there are things that I’m missing, but maybe I can still contribute something.

-------

One thing that was a big take-away for me while watching this series in regard to how it talks about race, is how you don’t have to be a racist in order to profit from a racist society and your place within white supremacy.

Or in other words: Lestat expresses how strange and stupid he finds the racial hierarchy that he encounters in America (and surely doesn’t believe in the race theory of the time, contrary to the other white rich men Louis has to deal with on a daily basis) but he still profits from his place in a racist society.

The show explicitly shows us that neither Louis wealth nor his existence as a vampire allow him to get away from how he is perceived and treated. And Lestat doesn’t get it. Because he sees himself as an individual. Someone who is neither connected to humanity, nor to whiteness. But Louis doesn’t get that luxury.

I think what upsets some people is that because in this adaptation Louis (and Claudia) are Black suddenly Lestat can also no longer be seen as an individual but also as someone in the context of how he is racialized = white. And that‘s something that makes us white people so uncomfortable when we are forced to do it for the first time (or the xxxth time, if we don’t learn to work through it...), because we are so used to seeing ourselves purely as individuals. And it really enhances the story in my opinion. Because the story was always set in “our” reality, not in a race-, gender-, or class-less fantasy world. But now race can’t be ignored. Just like it can’t and shouldn’t be ignored in the real world. Just like homophobia (external and internal) isn’t ignored in this series either. And it’s not done in a way that tells the majority audience “oh no look, sad Black/gay people.” but in a way that resonates with the minority audience (as far as I can tell) and forces the majority audience to think about why they are feeling uncomfortable and sit with it.

Over on my Twitter I talked about how wonderfully not sensational (not “oh look! two MEN kissing!”) the intimate scenes between Louis and Lestat are in this series are, how their homosexuality isn’t shown as shocking or scandalous to the viewer but treated as just two people in a (very complicated) love story. But I’m sure that someone with a lot of unresolved homophobia might feel very uncomfortable with that, and that’s good. I hope they sit with that feeling and THINK. But I’m getting off-track.

Lestat doesn’t think of Louis and Claudia as “lesser than” because of their race, however he also doesn’t see them as his equals. Which is probably because he just knows how much they don’t know and how vulnerable they will be in the “world out there”. But he also doesn’t tell them, yes because he wants to protect them, but also BECAUSE he doesn’t see them as equals.

After ep 6, I’ve seen some posts where people were upset about Claudia talking about Lestat as “massa” when she speaks to Louis, but I think it’s really just her interpreting not being treated as an equal in the way that comes most natural to her given the world she grew up in: She would read his behavior as racism and misogyny. Yes it’s uncomfortable, but it makes sense in the story and the timeline.

She emphasizes the racial context in her conversations with Louis because she knows that their connecting elements are that they’re both Black and they’ve both been turned by Lestat and thus belong to him in a way. So she does what she thinks she has to do to get Louis on her side. Because she knows she can’t break free of Lestat on her own.

And Lestat in that train scene is such a perfect performance of how you can be horribly racist and misogynistic without actively thinking that the other person is “less than” because of their race or gender, but simply by employing the tools that you have been handed IN a racist and misogynistic society. He wants to make her stay because he doesn’t want Louis to retreat back into his shell again like the last time Claudia was gone. But how does he do that? By employing the tools handed to him by a racist and misogynistic society: He uses the image of the cage and his knowledge about the abuse that happened to her against her. As a white man both of these tools (racism and misogyny) are easy for him to use in order to get what he wants, because there are systems of oppression behind his words that make them more powerful. Does he know that that’s what he’s doing, or does he just pick the low hanging fruits handed to him by the society he lives in? I don’t know.

But I mean, it’s basically summed up in Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) quote, right?

"If a white man wants to lynch me, that's his problem. If he's got the power to lynch me, that's my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it's a question of power."

So anyone being angry about how “the series made Lestat racist and he wouldn’t do that” is missing a point in my opinion. I don’t think the series ever portrays him as a racist in the way that it does with the other white characters around him. The series just shows us what every white person living in a society rooted in white supremacy is capable of doing (not because we are inherently bad or whatever bs) because we live in a society that allows us to do these things, and gives our actions power if we follow the easy route and choose to act in a way that is in line with the power structure we exist in.

The racism of the time that the story Louis is telling us is set in is very overt and so we can see it more easily and it’s more easy to see why it’s wrong. So we don’t want ourselves or the white characters we love to be associated with THAT.

But rather than stopping there, we should take the lesson taught to us and allow it to reflect on how we view the story as a whole. How do we view our own emotional relationship to the characters in this context, and how do we or don’t we relate to them and why?

-------

Louis in the present is very rich and thus somewhat outside of the restraints still put on racialized people in our modern world. But I hope the series will keep the way they are incorporating race, gender and sexuality in the past story line in the present story line as well. So far we’ve only seen our modern day vampire(s) interact with one person: Daniel. So it hasn't really come up. Aside maybe from the way Daniel sees no issue with interrupting Rashid during prayer (which could be read as a comment about the way western anti-religious people often have low respect for religiosity, especially non-Christian religiosity. But tbh I don't think it's THAT deep and just another random incident of Daniel being a bit blunt and a bit rude). But I wonder how things might change once we step outside of that tower in Dubai and meet other vampires and see how they interact with the world.

And maybe there is also a comment about race in how present day Louis chooses to surround himself with a majority of non-white humans in Dubai. Now that he is in a situation where he gets to make the rules about who he keeps around, how and where he lives, and how he sustains himself, this is the environment he had built for himself. He is rich enough to exist outside of a human-made white majority power structure, and rich enough to have human blood without going against his personal moral codex.

That seems like a pretty perfect situation from the perspective of past!Louis. But even if we can say that he has achieved to break free from a lot of the restraints of a racist and homophobic world in the present day, he still doesn’t seem like he enjoys the kind of life he has now, living nearly alone in that beautiful but also cold and sterile tower...

[prettysweetprettysweet]

we have so many questions and there's only so many they can address in one episode. i dont care about anything else i just need to know about Rashid! christ alive give us answers about Rashid!