Kate the Great

some book armand descriptions that tickled me

still don’t understand how you call boring someone who, at any given moment, might lick your boots or chop your hands off and you have no way of predicting what it will be tonight

The issue with Louis is that he needs constant up and down (like Lestat) emotionally speaking to stay entertained and feed his drama addiction. Armand is more a consistent simmering level of bonkers that occasionally turns into an explosion. You have to wait it out for the big explosions or look past the surface to see the simmering low level bonkers which Louis isn’t really interested in doing.

dracula after bdsm (bat dracula sex monster): and now i vill perform the afterscare

Louis: I'm sorry you were burdened out of spite 😩 I shouldn't have left you alone with him

Daniel (who was rescued out of love) alone with him, getting his guts rearranged on the nightly in the villa on the island they own together: No problem, man 🚬

what kinda interview is that 🤨

Kinda insane that in the show that is rooted firmly in its use of the unreliable narrator trope, it seems all too common that:

1. People believe Armand had to have turned Daniel out of spite just because Louis said so.

2. Armand was lying about Lestat being attracted to him, a character who is known for being alluring and attractive.

I wonder what the common denominator between those two things are? So anything anyone says about Armand is true, but everything Armand says is automatically a lie? Okay, sure.

I guess it bothers me because Assad is so beautiful and he nails how charming and seductive Armand is meant to be. Why are people so determined to deny that characters in-universe might find him attractive? No one had an issue believing it in the books. He also captured the fragility and very real vulnerability Armand exhibits in fleeting moments. He’s such a gorgeous character and it sucks to see people overlook Assad’s work.

If you came away from season 2 thinking Armand is a “moustache-twirling villain” as I believe Assad(?) put it, whose every action is rooted in callousness and pure evil, you are watching the wrong show. There are much worse characters than him and even they are layered and complex.

Yes, Armand is evil. Yes, he did terrible things. Yes, he lies often. But he is not the Big Bad a lot of people pretend he is and not every word out of his mouth is a lie. There is so much more to him and why he acts the way he does. The actors have said so, the show-runner said so, the writers said so, the books said so, the show itself said so. Read between the lines please. Or just read the actual lines. It’s not even subtext.

He’s morally grey like everyone else and he’s going to have a lot more screen time so if you insist on hating him, I’d prepare yourself for that. He and Lestat have a very real history. It’s just a little weird how people purposely mischaracterise him (and all the other characters in the process). He’d be so boring if he was the one-note villain many seem to believe he is.

For the Lestat thing I think a lot of people are defaulting to TVL, and while it is true that Armand’s recollection left out details and overly romanticized based on that—and while Armand and Lestat don’t end up really getting together—Lestat is described as being attracted to Armand.

People seem to only remember that they had an enemies like dynamic and that Lestat rejected him and go—“oh that must mean Lestat was disgusted by him”—which is not true. This is one of the few examples of Lestat not giving into his desires. Lestat loves Armand he just can’t be with Armand. They are star crossed.

As for the spite thing I’m not going to lie it is somewhat believable from a show only perspective—it’s not technically a refutation of anything Armand said to assume it’s true. I give fans the benefit of the doubt there. With book context it’s very much not likely lol.

Armand during a fight calling human Daniel a bastard or some other insult and Daniel replies with "yeah well, back at you, bc you are what you eat"

Look if you can’t handle Louis being a flawed character, then you really need to take a step back and evaluate your own bias before you start accusing other people of bigotry. Because the bottom line is lionizing or idealizing Louis just because he’s black is just as if not more harmful than villainizing him. I have said this about Armand, and the same goes for Louis. Viewing solely as a victim of the things that happen to him denies his agency and locks him into objecthood. Yes, Louis experiences racial oppression. And yes, Louis has many good qualities but he is still flawed because real people are flawed. He is selfish, materialistic, and often cruel. But I love that about Louis because it makes him sympathetic. It makes him feel real. It makes his character arc more powerful. Part of loving a character or a human being is being able to recognize their flaws and accept them. You cannot claim to love a character but deny them the right to be fucked up sometimes. To err is to human, and denying poc characters (or people) the right to err is denying them their humanity.

People citing the fact that Armand and Daniel brwak up after turning as a reason they won't get together in the show

If Armand had turned Young Daniel, then yeah, absolutely. But the biggest change to the show IS Daniel Molloy.

Instead of books "written" by the characters themselves, we get him continuing to interview these vampires.

Instead of being turned in the throes of addiction and actively dying, he is turned when he is clean and older and secure in himself.

There will obviously be conflict and it's not gonna be a rom com. But they are gonna end up together. They fixed it, y'all. Everyone is gonna get their forgiveness arc with the person they're meant to be with and despite Anne Rice apparently not giving a shit about Daniel, the writers clearly care about him a LOT.

We're gonna be okaaaay

It’s bad reasoning regardless because Daniel and Armand are back together by the end of the book series anyway. They don’t stay broken up there either.

They’re endgame in the books as well y’all. It wouldn’t be out of left field for them to be endgame in the series. Also I don’t think they’ll go past QotD adaptation wise which is the DM book so…….

I reaaaally don't like making any kind of animation but this trend was too devil's minion to not jump in😵‍💫

realized there are two times that armand states he and louis were together 70 years and not 77...timeline in the show makes my head hurt a little

the show loves doing this. 70 years ago is not when the "one night" happens. talamasca puts the theater burning in 1949. why is he excluding 7 years? and dont tell me mr. armand de desperate "47 more than lestat" would round down

so...hey...

if armand did give daniel his blood for the first time in 1978 and this is referencing that.....if you add 7 years, then you get 1985, which is when book!daniel is turned and when we theorize they break up in the show.....so armand could be removing the 7 years that belong to daniel

which could mean nothing i guess

Aww

*puts in head in my hands* When does this toruture end for us

thinking about that super creepy thing AR does in the books where vampires get paler over time and whiteness is very explicitly linked to health/age/power, with even vampires of color being stripped of their melanin over the centuries. and how although the show doesn't do this (thank god) we do get a somewhat similar image of how it might work in this shot where Louis is drained mid-turning

he just ends up kinda of gray and washed-out instead of white, but there's a similar element of losing color to vampirism. and when he does get that color back, his eyes are green, something that's ofc extremely unusual for a Black person

but is clearly intended as a callback to the eyes of book!Louis, who after all was a slaveowner (and who framed his and Lestat's early relationship as being Lestat wanting to steal the plantation), signifying the racialized violence that has shaped this series since 1976 and will continue to shape the show. these green eyes are the first thing Louis's sister notices has changed about him and end up representing his larger dislocation from his family and local Black community. on the other hand, his new powers and Eurocentric eye color aren't enough to protect him from such racial violence as legal discrimination or lynchings.

noticeably, we don't get a similar loss skin of tone for Claudia (the only person of color we've seen transforming on the show so far), at least far as I can tell

I'm not sure if they changed their mind about the greyed skin effect (perhaps they realized was too close to the "white" faces in the book for comfort), if they just didn't have the time, if it was intended to be a sly foreshadowing of how Claudia's memory of this event has been distorted (especially since we don't actually see her face during the more accurate 2x07 turning)

or something else entirely. notably, Claudia doesn't end up with the blue eyes of her book self after turning,

and neither does Armand (I guess they decided brown eyes weren't creepy enough lol).

their eye colors, while not Eurocentric, are intended to signify "inhumanity," which opens a whole other can of worms in regard to the racialization of thes characters and the racial structures they either resist (Claudia) or conform to and attempt to weaponize (Armand)

tldr; vampiric power is no longer represented exclusively by physical whiteness, but does exist in conversation with the specter of whiteness both physical and cultural, in a way that we'll probably see more of for whatever disturbing situations come next.

I think the losing color/greyness effect is meant to visualize to us that he’s experiencing significant blood loss. That’s where the white effect prescribed to European vampires comes from—white people’s corpses look more white due to lack of circulation. While POC tend to have more of a greying effect similar to what Louis looks like after heavy blood loss.

Daniel had a very similar greying out effect to his skin after Louis drains him—he’s a lot paler and more ashen. Madeline is also pale and grey while turning and then back to her normal skin tone afterwards. Once the blood from the maker is drunken circulation restarts and the skin stops looking so corpse like.

I think Claudia does look a little greyer and paler than her normal skin tone during turning as well—but the burns make it less noticeable. I also think Lestat was more careful on the blood loss with her already being injured—she was close to death already.

Agreed on the eye color analysis though, that’s really interesting!

the devil's minion chapter is so good because the core of why armand and daniel work so well together is that they're certified yappers! they're out there harassing the locals about philosophy and sex. "my lover and i really dug your answers on anatheism. would you like to bed him while i watch from the chair?" people were probably getting so sick of them. that's why they kept moving around!

demon boyfriend who stalks you and bites you but also takes you to museum exhibits. so he’s really a mixed bag if you think about it

yeah fuck them for not submitting assad for the emmys. i was trying to be reasonable about this for the longest time but this is such a glaring omission that i just can't anymore

I was gonna leave this in the tags but no. I need to say it with my whole chest cuz I’m done with this fandom.

I understand just as much as anyone that TVC is about Lestat. I get it, but he was BARELY in season 2. Was Sam good in the parts he was in? Yes absolutely, but to put him above Assad who was basically in the ENTIRETY of season 2 and put soooo much effort into the role of Armand it affected him somewhat? Y’all are tripping. Episode 5 alone in its entirety is better than that small scene with Louis and Lestat at the end. Idc. I said what I said.

Sam Reid is going to have plenty of opportunities to be recognized for the role of Lestat (as he should because don’t get it twisted I LOVE Sam’s acting). Lestat is the MAIN FUCKING CHARACTER. Assad will not. And it’s fucking disgusting at this point. He barely got promotion for season 2. Gets disrespected constantly by fans who can’t separate actor from character (and also lack a fundamental understanding of who Armand is as a character because you can understand nuance when the actor is the “right” shade, huh?) and is not going to have another opportunity like this for this show. Maybe he’ll get lucky and get in something where he gets the recognition he deserves, but 🤷🏾‍♀️

The bottom line is Sam Reid has the absolute blessing to play a character that Anne Rice loved SO much, she made the entire franchise about him. He will be seen on screen for at least two to three more seasons to come (I’m doubting they will do every book adaptation as a season tbh). Assad got to play a character that pops in and out of the narrative and he ATE EVERY SCENE HE WAS IN. That’s the LITERAL definition of a Supporting Actor. While I wanna believe that AMC only submitted Sam because they didn’t want to pit the two against each other, I also think that they should’ve went with the obvious choice. The person who actually DID the support in season two. Not the person who barely had any screen time.

And if anyone takes this as Sam Reid hate, I don’t know what to tell you. You obviously didn’t watch the same show as I did if you think Assad doesn’t deserve (or deserves less) recognition than Sam does, both are wonderful actors. Both deserve to be recognized for that. Sam would’ve gotten his chance. Assad will not. At least not for IWTV.