darkness is a color

And no, Armand doesn’t refer to him as an abuser on TVA. And no, it doesn't romanticize abuse because he's traumatized or any other bullshit you've come up with in recent years to justify why you're supposed to like this book.

No, the book isn’t about real people, you don’t have to save anyone.

I will not hold that against them as I know I'm reading about evil vampires doing evil vampire things during different historical periods, ranging from Antiquity to the 20th century (I will not include the 21th century because the golden age was def in the late 20th century when it comes to these books.)

But I love that people's 'punching bag' is the man that would agree with their hottest woke takes if they have them, who gives a shit that he practiced pederasty in the 15th century when Armand was considered a man by all standards?

Armand definitely does not care and I sleep well knowing that if he had the chance (has the chance if we're talking show!Armand) he'd jump on Marius the first instance he got.

one of my favorite things about marius is that he's intended to be an authoritative figure to the coven, while having very little of his own life together lol it's been very fun for me to recontextualize him by reading the books at different points in my life. i find his struggle with responsibility so much more relatable now than i did ten or fifteen years ago. and we giggle about his arrogance because nobody put him in charge, but damned if we can't all relate to knowing if we don't do something ourselves, then it won't get done right, and possibly won't get done at all

I largely see this from people who feel the need to diagnose fictional characters after what is usually one occasion of, or one extended incident of hallucination episodes and like let's get two things clear:

1) "madness" in fiction is, for better or worse, a literary device. yes this can be problematic and often is, but its also silly to dismiss this literally millennia old storytelling device just because its problematic. and this "madness" often is portrayed in the form of hallucinations. like I said, you don't have to enjoy this device but its something that has existed for a very long time and you cannot honestly analysis a text by ignoring it or misrepresenting what the text is trying to convey. and rarely is the text trying to portray a person with a real diagnosable mental disorder

2) one or even a handful of hallucination episodes does not in real life equate to schizophrenia. most people will experience a hallucination in their life. if can be caused by extreme stress, physical illness, lack of sleep, drugs, food poisoning, all kinds of things. I've hallucinated before when I had a very high fever. I even offhandly told my doctor about it and her response was something like "Yeah fevers are no joke." There was no concern for my mental health from one single bout of hallucination, and this was a doctor who knew I have a mental illness that did historically get mistaken for schizophrenia. And to be clear, my doctor's reaction was correct, I wasn't concerned about it, I was just bringing it up in conversation when we were talking about vaccination side effects. You reading this will probably hallucinate at some point in your life. Hallucinating is incredibly normal as a human experience. And there is a shocking amount of yall who think that hallucinating automatically equals schizophrenia when it isn't even the only mental illness where that is a symptom.