Daniel is racist and somehow manages to be the most consistently misogynistic person on the show when Lestat and Armand exist so it’s so bizarre to me that everything he says is taken as fact or word of God and it’s so annoying when ppl say he’s the audience stand in because 1) not for Black viewers that’s for sure and 2) why do you need someone in the show to be speaking for you. It’s just so lazy because it gives an excuse to ignore the ways that Daniel and Louis’ relationship is actually more complicated than just powerful vampire vs weak human, and like everything, this reduction is bc fans aren’t understanding the role of race here—in a show where every layer of Louis’ life is impacted by his racialization as a Black man, of course plot device character that’s entirely in service of moving Louis’ plot along is also engaging in that racialization… it is in fact narratively important that Daniel is an asshole entitled self professed liberal who believes he possesses more interiority and objectivity than Louis, and that he is so rude to Louis even though Louis could kill him without lifting a finger. Literally the only person who could possess this level of audacity is an old white man whose had the world handed to him at every step and has the typical American liberal white savior complex.
I’ve thought a lot about why is Daniel white like what is it serving especially because he’s SOOOO WHITE. he’s a more recognizable sort of whiteness than even Lestat because Lestat when Louis meets him is so informed by his vampirism and when he’s human by his poverty and poor whites are always aspiring to whiteness in a continued performance that’s different from Daniel’s comfortable late stage capitalist neoliberal American whiteness that the viewer is used to, a whiteness that is so ubiquitous it’s seen as secondary, maybe tertiary to Daniel’s personhood—and on the meta hand, this positionality is obviously why nonblack and especially white viewers over-identify with Daniel, he is their societal Neutral, so he must be imbued with objectivity—but on the textual hand, the level of entitlement he has that pushes Louis to breakdown in 107 and Armand to step in to challenge Daniel’s white entitlement with a “natural” unquestioning power that he incorrectly thinks will make Daniel step down—that’s a harder sell if Daniel was also race and or genderbent. A bisexual boomer American man of color (and let’s assume Black) would probably have more respect for Louis and a woman would have more respect for Claudia (I’m not saying a white woman would have ENOUGH respect, but she’d probably find Claudia more relatable than Daniel does). A man of color wouldn’t “joke” about making sex costumes out of Claudia’s rape out of respect for Louis’ position as her father, and a woman of any race is less likely to make any rape jokes. But Daniel naturally assumes himself to be superior than Louis and Claudia AND Armand. He’s rude to Armand long before he knows Armand is a vampire and certainly before he knows Armand tortured him. Even in 201, he puts real Rashid in the uncomfortable position of using him as a soundboard to insult and be racially migroaggressive towards his employer, uncaring as ever about how his actions could affect anyone unless it affects him.
His friendship with Louis is just as complicated as every other relationship in the show, bc Daniel doesn’t manage to empathize with Louis until it becomes personal. He starts feeling bad for Louis in s2 only bc he realizes he’s been duped by Armand too and that his intrinsic belief in his hierarchical superiority over Louis is challenged now that he knows Armand is at the top of the pyramid and not also beneath him. The issue for Daniel isn’t that Louis experiences abuse—how could it be when he spent all of s1 taking every possible chance to mock Louis’ trauma, victim blame him, and act as if Louis was simply too stupid to recognize the abuse he experienced at the hands of his white husband while living as a gay man in Jim Crow…? No, the issue is that now that his feelings have been hurt and his ego has been bruised by Armand, then perhaps that means Louis’ feelings might also matter. The same thing repeats with 205, when they realize what really happened in 1973. What does it mean that the first time we’re shown Daniel consistently display kindness to Louis for an entire episode, it’s because he’s realizing once again that he has a bigger place in the story than he thought before? If something so horrific could happen to him, then maybe Louis actually does deserve to be treated as someone with full subjectivity and who could be equal enough to Daniel so as to deserve friendship.
His empathy and care is entirely fueled by his own interests—even the line as about Claudia making her parents look like whiny queens only comes in the midst of his Shady AF Comebacks about the then-teen’s diary bc he can personally align himself against Louis and Lestat with her. Where can you get such pure and believable entitlement and self absorption that’s so natural and unquestionable if not through an old white western man? And then his decision to ignore Louis’ requests for the book not to be published bc he just unearthed deep and terrifying traumas, including but not limited to the fact that he’s been living with and being brainwashed by his dead daughter’s murderer for 77 years, is the nexus of Daniel’s belief that just bc the information exists, he should get to profit off it. And not only does he profit off of it, but he does so after letting a surveillance group that we’ve seen represented through another older white man go through and cut up Louis’ trauma into digestible bites so that Daniel can then go on television to argue with another white man on the validity of Louis’ trauma. AND THEN. After all that. He calls Louis and he’s like We should make sex toys out of these hundreds of pages recounting your trauma and abuse so that I can gain even more fame and attention. And this is the character that so much of fandom thinks is the objective audience stand in that speaks the hard truths. I think the harder truth is what it says about those who feel represented by him
