only serious in the tags

the show makes Armand bad sometimes

the show makes Lestat and Louis more desired by more people than Armand is, even though it also shows that Armand is desired by many people

You're trying to dress it up but that's basically what it is, being an Armand stan who's not happy.

I'm sorry!! If the show didn't want criticism re: how they race swapped an antagonist with (in the most generous interpretation) extremely little care and consideration!! They should simply have done it better. Repeatedly and consistently making a character they race swapped to be a brown person into a more violent, less stable, less loveable, more cowardly and more manipulative and deceitful character with fewer of his redeeming qualities or positive moments is like textbook racism.

Back in season two, with the added focus on Armand as a character and the consequent need to delve into his background at least a little, the writers had a choice: adapt his book backstory, or change his background completely à la Louis? They not only firmly chose the former, they doubled down by making Marius' actions re: Armand even more reprehensible than the source material by writing the painting donation monologue. This is planting your flag in the ground as firmly as it gets - you can't walk that back now. We've written in that line about "daddy vampire groomed me into a little bitch". We've committed. The audience will interpret Armand's actions and patterns of behavior as a consequence, in part, of this backstory - as they should!

One thing they also committed to way back in season 1 via an offhand mention? Those Who Must Be Kept. Ergo, we're adapting Akasha ("I have the blood of Akasha in me. He doesn't know who that is."). Ergo, TWMBK should probably be, well, kept by someone.

I can only speculate why they made the s3 writing choices they did, but I am pretty comfortable assuming that changing the beat of "book!Lestat finds out about Armand's backstory, immediately imprints on the very idea of Marius like a baby duckling and chases his (presumed to be very much dead) phantom across continents for years even when he is told it is a fool's errand and actually finds him to become his favored golden child and everything Akasha-related is purely a consequence of Lestat's own impulsive decisions explicitly counter to Marius' instructions" to "Lestat is never shown to have any particular thoughts about Marius at all, is essentially teleported to his lair by plot magic, barely exchanges two sentences with him before Marius fucks off offscreen and everything Akasha-related is a product of happenstance and coincidence and Lestat following Marius'(!) suggestion he play the damn violin via mimicry" was made because the writers assumed the audience would be repulsed by Lestat as a character if he was shown having any genuine affinity towards Marius. If he was shown idolizing him as a compassionate and patient and wise mentor/father/lover figure. Because the inherent murder-necessitating existence as a vampire is one thing, but pimping out Armand? Well. That is quite a different matter. And we see how the writers have chosen to have "pimp" follow Louis around in the 21st century.

You would think a room full of writers would be foaming at the mouth to get to explore something as complex as the duality of Marius as Armand's (romanticized, perhaps not recognised as such by Armand himself just yet) abuser vs. Lestat's charming mentor, and the way Armand would react to the information that Marius was alive this entire time and chose to leave him alone in Paris and that he instead let in Lestat of all people in on secrets he had explicitly denied Armand the knowledge of when he begged for it in the past. Have Armand's resentment of Lestat have something to do with the Marius of it all rather than just personal rejection as a companion, perhaps!

But we can't have that dynamic now without actually establishing Marius as a person that is important and valued to Lestat, now, can we. That would get messy. So, TWMBK speedrun it is. But THEN they still insist on placing Marius at Lestat's hallucination table in the finale? Who the fuck is show!Marius to show!Lestat anyway? Some weirdo who was his temporary boss at one point and who yelled at him one time? They're complete strangers to each other!

They could have dealt with Marius in so many different ways! Ways entirely diverging from Anne Rice's "most everyone treats Marius as the paragon of wisdom" shtick! But that would still have required baseline character work! Cowards!

So, no Marius in any way that matters. Instead, the show makes Gabrielle into the groomer as a major plot point for Lestat's backstory while Armand is spinning his wheels as a character in between half-hearted Devil's Minion crumbs until his time as the Designated Season Finale Plot Twist Villain has come.

The season 1 ending reveal? That shit never made any, like, sense, it was clearly just there to be a capital T Twist (that I always thought must have been super lame for show-only watchers, because they don't even know who Armand is and why they should care). Sure, people kept making memes about kink roleplay after the season dropped ("heeheehaha Armand has to listen to his husband wax poetic about their shared ex's dick"), but the entire season "arc" of fake Rashid is brushed aside for a bitchy Daniel joke comment and that's it. Sure, whatever. I guess. At least it gave us a lot of Devil's Minion fanfiction.

Season 2 rolls around. Armand gets the double whammy of being made both weaker and more maliciously manipulative than his book counterpart ever was. Weaker in several ways - weaker in his convictions (he wants Louis "more than anything in the world"? No, he doesn't, he is willing to have him lynched to appease Santiago and the coven at a moment's notice! He is in fact very willing to give up on Louis!) and influence (He bows to the whims of the same Santiago he had at his complete mercy feat. Shakespearean insults in a previous episode! He is not in control of the actual coven to the point where they all point and laugh at him to his face re: "Companions? - Yes/No."! He could not possibly even attempt to save Louis from the sham trial, Lestat does that!). Even in his own version of the Paris tale, he is discarded by Lestat all-too-easily. His marriage to Louis is built on spite, not so much any actual fascination or love Louis holds for him for his own sake rather than in comparison to Lestat. He gets added backstory trauma in addition to his ALREADY VERY TRAUMATIC source material backstory. The traumatic backstory monologue in the Louvre, so beautifully performed by Assad Zaman, is undercut by a cut of Hallucination Lestat barking for... comedic? ... effect.

Louis gets stripped of the character beat of knowing about Armand's involvement in Claudia's trial the whole time and STILL choosing him. Instead, the new season finale twist is a... gasp! Armand betrayal! Is the audience shocked yet? Armand, who the show made a thief of both Daniel's and Louis' memories, who oh-so-cruelly let Louis suffer in sunburnt agony before deigning to give him his healing blood, who tortured Daniel for days. Armand, whose response to this grand reveal is to sit there dumbly, call out to Louis, silently stare at Daniel and get slammed into a wall. The last shot we see of him is cowering on the ground, covered in debris. The follow-up to the OG plot twist is that Armand has done another shocking thing - Daniel is now a vampire! SURE. Okay. Let's still see where they go with this, I thought.

Season three airs. The Paris era of Armand's satanic cult is not revisited at all. Armand's seemingly only autonomous action towards Nicki is his initial kidnapping - he doesn't actually cut off his hands and lock him in solitary confinement as a measure to counter his erratic moods, you see, he now just stands in a corner and has to be prompted by Lestat to "help" Nicki. We cut away from Nicki's actual death. Show!Armand does not get to push Lestat off a tower to break every single bone in his body, to gloat at his disheveled and pathetic state post-trial. If anything, Lestat gets to gloat over Armand's lack of knowledge re: Akasha (and Marius by extension, but the show is very particularly skittish about actually doing anything substantial with Marius as a character or even let Armand explore any feelings he might have about that dynamic, which given the Louvre monologue is A CHOICE). Armand - book!canonically very much a switch, by the way - spends the season being insulted by several characters specifically for being a bottom sub sprinkled with a general sense of derision and implication that characters find the thought of genuinely loving him, or even having mind-blowing ("rings of Saturn"-esque, pehaps) sex with him either hilarious (Lestat) or gag-inducing (Daniel). A character who was originally defined by being essentially too desirable for his own good.

Vampire!Daniel is a non-starter - no true exploration of his new existence and all of his scenes with Armand fall flat because while especially their season 2 dynamic was built on tension and things left unsaid, season 3 seems to think "tell don't show" is a winning strategy. Unless you hardcore project a certain well-known chapter from Anne Rice's Queen of the Damned (1988) onto this (which you can't, you are forced to make up fanfic to fill in the gaps to make up for substantial deviations even in the best case scenario), there is nothing of substance to hold onto. Armand gets instead to be insulted by his only fledgling (and past lover? Show is still technically ambiguous on that part) re: his "shitty" blood, with the implication that what keeps Daniel with him is not even anything like journalistic or personal curiosity, but the prospect of incest gossip and the ability to walk in the sun. "Ooooh just wait maybe in season four-" shut up boooo tomato tomato, I simply do not believe the writers care about developing their dynamic at this point. AO3 is all we have left, folks.

Armand gets no character to truly bounce off of this season. Freshly divorced-from ex-husband Louis? Torture sequence and the Regina reveal as Shocking Plot Twist #3.5 (aren't they tired). Past lover and complicated narrative foil Lestat? He is dismissed and insulted and little else. Gabriella? She gets to make snide comments about Marius while show!Armand does not even get to fire back with cutting insights about the true emotional disconnect between her and Lestat and the resulting instability of their bond, mainly because the character assassination of Gabrielle has made that point null and void! Marius? Essentially not relevant, somehow (HOW?). You know who Armand gets to hang around with? Lestat's fucking band OCs. Just what we were all looking forward to, I am sure.

Like many, many people already said: I WANT Armand to do terrible things, but I want them to be IN CHARACTER. I want his character to still be treated seriously. But so far the main role Armand seems to have been assigned is "plot twist dispenser and temporary obstacle to Loustat OTP".