immortal_amc: Ready to take center stage

From Emmy Magazine

iwtv + text posts part 49

ldpdl, ethnicity, and the false monolith of blackness

there's this false tendency to think amc louis being made black is pandering, or a means of removing louis from his oh-so-detailed /sarcasm/ background in the books. i also find that people tend to not even understand what show louis's ethnic background is, despite rolin jones the showrunner and even the fictional louis both coalescing around this multigenerational explanation of the gens de couleur in new orleans, and how jim crow disempowered them.

I came around to his ethnicity a sort of interesting way which is through Lestat. [ … ] I was like lets give him a legitimate a third attempt at figuring how to be with somebody for the rest of his life and how to not repeat your mistakes. [ … ] I started from there so it had to be someone with some money cause he had to be with his own folks and I thought he wanted someone who could fight back and who could be a challenge and would force him to restrain himself. And nobody at AMC was interested in 7 seasons of the regretful plantation owner, so we made Louis come from a lineage that did have a plantation and did own slaves.

rolin jones in the s1 post-finale episode of the podcast names how he came to this understanding of louis's character. lestat, after failing to make a bride of his mother, and a concubine of nicki, was seeking for someone of a similar background, or the most approximate equivalent. he would not have been interested in louis if louis was an anglophone baptist black man descended from upper-south arrivals into new orleans, nor would he have been interested in louis if louis was a poor black creole honestly s1 does not give a good reading of claudia's ethnic bg in new orleans, but since she cannot understand french, we can presume shes either a poor creole removed from her cultural background with her vampiric adoption narrative in mind, or was also of an anglophone baptist black background like claudia was. louis coming from this fallen sort of gentry, the free gens de couleur, similar to that of the tvl lestat who came from this barren aristocracy dating back to the crusades, was key to lestat's long-term goals with louis.

Capital accrued from plantations of sugar and the blood of men who looked like my great grandfather but did not have his standing. But then decades of Jim Crow and the electrified light of a new century had vanquished any idea of a free man of color. - AMC IWTV 1x01

louis was of the first generations of the gens de couleur to be born, raised into, and face the institutional and personal ramifications of being viewed as black in america. this fuels much of the character's rage as he moves through storyville, trying to continue the similar modality of exploitation to the contrary of pretty baby with brooke shields, majority of the brothel circuit was statistically black girls + women being sexually pawned off to white men but ultimately failing to do so bc of the anglophone white american class that now rules over him. [tom anderson, alderman fenwick, finn o’shea starting out as louis’s subordinate then ending w/ him entering whiteness by having a sporting house throwing torches at louis’s brothel in s1e3]

By 1850, the free population of color, beset by the hostility of white supremacy, was economically diminished and residentially segregated. The Americanization of Louisiana, and in particular New Orleans, was completed before the state became the sixth to secede from the Union in 1861 in the struggle over the perpetuation of slavery. [link] The Democratic redeemers who came to power in 1877 lost no time in redefining the Negro's "place" in Louisiana life. They immediately restored the color line in the New Orleans public schools and offered silent support to de facto segregation practices in places of public accommodation. With the assistance of two landmark decisions by the United States Supreme Court, the redeemers soon dismantled the egalitarian legal apparatus put together piece by piece under the Radicals. Finally in 1890 they began to write their "final solution" into Louisiana law with a series of "separate but equal" statutes. Soon New Orleans Negroes were again segregated in virtually every public pursuit. [link]

I WANT THIS.... TO REMEMBER

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Closeups and some process stuff under the cut

this went through quite a few stages and is made of multiple parts originally intended to be individual pieces. Originally Daniel was going to be the popup but I decided I liked Claudia there a lot more (her text in the text box is "the blood is bad here" flipped and repeated)

ma petite beauty for an art trade with the talented and kind @/anektem !!

thank you for suggesting this! this was my first ever art trade and I can’t believe it was with one of my most favorite fanartists!!! ♥️

(also, this was my first time drawing claudia and it was SO relaxing!)

I want one thing from the remainder of this series post-s5 and it’s for Rayla to have reduced/lost her fear of water and Claudia to have developed one

...💔

i love it when characters are unfair, actually. i love it when they’re uncouth and cranky and hypocritical, i love it when they have cognitive dissonances, i love it when they make good and bad choices for the wrong reasons. i love when they’re short to anger and hard to understand. i love it when they’ve destroyed themselves for nothing but can’t even see either part of it yet. i love it when they’re messy and selfish and bad at communicating. i love it when they get convinced of their own ego and stuck in a feedback loop regarding their own warped paranoia. i love it when characters actively make their lives unknowingly harder for themselves. i love it when characters don’t know they’re in a story. i love it when characters are like real people

Chrysanthemums

they would’ve run the PTA like the navy

theeee dynamic of all time tbh.......

“…i was haunted by my brother’s death, by the abandonment of my sister…”

majority of the conversation around paul in the amc setting revolves around the question of whodunnit, jokes about him at the second dinner table scene of the pilot, or paralleling his mental illness to louis [a parallel the show admittedly draws upon - with louis stopping his suicide attempt bc “paul forever ruining grace’s wedding night, and [louis] not wanting to do the same to claudia on the anniversary of her escape”] what i intend to focus on, is the specific nature of paul’s complaints with respect to levi, and what paul and claudia represent to louis.

in the book, paul wants louis to sell the plantations & town homes they own in new orleans, and give louis the money so that paul could travel and become a missionary saving france from the godless jacobins. the paul that we’re introduced to in the show is… similar in motivation, but fundamentally divergent. tithe the money over to st. augustine’s so the house dont fall in on them, but the first dinner table goes as this after he says that:

whats of note too is the divergence of the draft v the pilot release. the show excises the freniere family w the exception of levi himself to drive home how paul’s objections to levi’s religious and ethnic background are overruled by the lingering shadow of jim crow.

paul is also reminded that his autonomy is conditional in this first dinner scene here: louis quips back to his point about sugarcane with “if daddy was still here, you’d be locked up in that asylum over in jackson”. its a reminder of the earlier point, but also speaks to something else.

bc of paul’s profound mental illness, he would never be allowed to live an autonomous life, much less hold authority over anyone: whether its the man of the house [as louis was in the du lac family], or as a bride [grace] or as the mother [florence].

this is strongly reminiscent of claudia — someone whos personal autonomy is entirely dependent on the purview of physically mature vampires by nature of permanently being trapped in the body of a preteen. it is also reminiscent of claudia in that louis in both cases plays a sort of savior in relation to them — whether its louis taking paul out of the asylum, or louis taking claudia out of the burning rooming home. louis views paul and claudia, especially claudia, as people that save him from his own self-loathing.. claudia somehow possessing this redemptive quality re: baby jesus…

louis loves both of them deeply, but as iwtv has established, love as a feeling does not exempt someone from enacting violence toward you. in fact, the very loved one that harmed you has an entire framework of rationalizing that violent act as being ‘for your[my] own good’ as is.

the title of this little post comes from the season one finale, where louis collapses in on himself to try to make sense of why he spared lestat, invoking paul and grace to create this red herring to the ‘murder of lestat’. but truly, the thread is false. louis did not abandon grace, and lestat’s death was only an attempted murder sabotaged by louis. modern day louis in the season finale triggers himself through daniel in order to provoke armand, the “protector of his pain”, to reveal himself + question him on the death of claudia, just as he questioned lestat on the death of paul in s1e6.

It's never been about me.