aru

Sometime I think about how strong Daniel was to react in some way to Armand's words in San Francisco, to that deadly lullaby. After the drugs, Louis who almost killed him, those Saw-style nights, what mental strength a shitty kid from Modesto must have had to be able to answer a five-hundred-year-old vampire as powerful as Armand. "I have a thing happening in the city" and of course "I'm a young bright reporter with a point of view." Of course he was unforgettable to Armand. He wouldn't have been able to do it even if he wanted to forget him. He was always so special, he was always the boy.

It’s so funny that Armand has “ethical” eating habits for a vampire. He finds people he thinks deserve or want to die, and then he convinces them to play a game of cat and mouse with him, and he gets so visibly excited about it he’s openly flirtatious. Then he chases them through the streets for a few hours. Basically, he’s torturing them. He’s playing with his food. He’s having fun pretending to hunt. “Pretend” because if he was really hunting it wouldn’t take him any time at all. Then, once he catches them, he goes through their mind like a filing cabinet and brainwashes them into thinking they want to die, and then he kills them painlessly, which might sound better than throat-ripper Lestat’s modus operandi, but what Armand really does is subject people to physical and psychological torture for hours before removing their agency in their final moments. It’s worse. He doesn’t even leave people with their minds or dignity intact. No resistance. No hope. No clarity. Not even your final thoughts are your own. It’s presumably something Armand’s injected into your mind that he thinks you’ll like. He guts your mind like a fish before doing the same thing to your body and then goes home and is like, wow, another ethical meal for me, unlike all those savages that take bites out of random strangers. Good job, me.