a staple gun, or in love

things armand loves:

structure

group of people meeting regularly and following the same rules

abstinence and self-denial

he sees an AA meeting and his eyes light up with a kaching noise like in a cartoon. he’s like oh great, rules given to me by a higher power? an opportunity for self-flagellation? set steps i have to follow to cleanse me of my sins?

I’ve done my best 😭

Sorry to immediately get devil's minion pilled on my lesmand post but I need to immediately point out Armand showing up to give his apology to Daniel in a comfy little sweater vs giving his apology to Lestat while dressed up to the nines. The lesmand hypersexual trauma cycle never ceases.

"He would do more damage than the queen ever did." is gonna have me spiralling for weeks until the finale because what the fuck could Armand possibly do that is worse than literal genocide 😭 At first I thought he was referring to what had already happened with Claudia but it definitely sounds like he's referring to something that is still to come in his narration. And the thing is Lestat is incredibly self-absorbed so I'm assuming when he says do more damage he means damage to Lestat rather than damage to the world at large, which could mean he's either going to do something to hurt/endanger Lestat or possibly Louis (Regina get behind me). Idk idk but I'm so intrigued what did he doooo??

Lestat just narrating right over Armand speaking is something I predicted in my s3 bingo card that I never got around to physically making, so you're all just gonna have to take my word on it but I knew this would happen at least once lmao.

I imagine some people are taking the fact that Armand follows the same script for Daniel and Lestat's apologies as a sign of insincerity but I just think it's really endearing 😭 He's been practising this 😭

"whilst sharing your body and blood" will the lesmand deniers finally pipe down or are they still finding a way to claim that Armand is lying about them sleeping together? Even while Lestat is standing right there in front of him.

"I artlessly assumed companionship which was, upon reflection, wish fulfilling delusion rooted in childhood conflict." This is the line I could build an entire dissertation on like this is so SAD. But also the fact that he's referring to his relationship with Marius as childhood conflict... first of all so you admit you were a child, second of all has my boy been unpacking that shit in therapy too?

Lestat responding to this by stripping down in front of him makes me feel so fucking unwell. Armand starts talking about his childhood abuse and Lestat's response is to deflect and turn it into a sexual situation jesus fucking christ.

The thing is though I know that this is indicative of Lestat's response to his own sexual trauma so I am doing my best to give grace to that also (I still need to kill him but he's been killed before and he was fine), and honestly this entire scene really solidifies the way Lestat and Armand's trauma's conflict with each other in ways that make it borderline impossible for them to ever fully connect. One of them will always be on the defensive, and both of their defensive responses are triggering to the other and they're just stuck in this endless loop and it's so sad because there's a world out there were they could both understand each other better than anybody else ever has, but idk if they can ever get there.

I'm gonna come back to that line again I'm not done but I'm working chronologically through the scene. I really enjoy the fact that Armand is apologising for his treatment of Louis to Lestat. It really speaks volumes about how Armand views relationships, how he understands love, that he considers his treatment of Louis to be a slight to Lestat as well, like Louis is Lestat's property that Armand has damaged in some way. And of course I'm gonna bring it all the way back to Marius because that's exactly how Marius speaks about the violence inflicted on Amadeo by Santino and his coven. It's not about the pain Amadeo experienced, it's about how all this was done to slight Marius, how they took something that was his.

"At first, I felt it was you torturing me. Now I know it was richness of character." "No, it was torture." The really juicy thing about this scene is that I keep calling it "Armand's apology" when in actual fact, he never apologises for anything. What he's actually doing is reframing everything that happened in a way that paints Lestat as good and kind and blameless and himself as somebody who has simply misunderstood Lestat's good intentions throughout the entirety of their relationship. It's not an apology, it's a self-flagellation, and what I really love is that Lestat doesn't accept it. He doesn't let Armand paint him that way, he just straight up says "no, you're wrong, I was hurting you on purpose because what you did was fucked". Armand is kind of stuck in this "but I didn't mean to" mentality which I love about him, very much still fixated on trying to explain why he acted the way he did because if they just understood then they'd stop being mad at him. He doesn't want forgiveness, he wants to be told he did nothing wrong. But at the heart of it he just wants to be understood. (And as a derranged bitch with BPD I felt that so fucking hard).

The thing is though, the way he's approaching this whole thing is veering dangerously close into victim blaming himself, which scares the hell out of me because if he has been starting to unpack his relationship with Marius in the same way then that's gonna be heartbreaking to go through. "wish fulfilling delusion rooted in childhood conflict" is going to come back to haunt me personally.

"You are a fuck cloud, Armand, it's your nature." First of all, Lestat, I will pay you twenty American dollars if you can tell me what the fuck that means. Like I understand he means that Armand is a curse (which is fucking rude) but I don't think anybody in the entire history of humankind has ever put the words fuck and cloud together to mean that. This is the man who kicked off in the last episode because apparently Daniel and Louis didn't do a good enough job of capturing his eloquent dialogue. Sure.

ASSAD ZAMAN as The Vampire Armand Interview with the Vampire: 3x04