aWhiteTulip

So basically how Armand is set up here - and actually if you squint a bit and ignore how much of a mess s2 was in terms of characterisation always sort of has been - is that he's the defender of the old order of vampirism. Like I say, it's always sort of there, if you believe he's sincere in the catacombs in 2x3, and if you take Santiago's word that he "has a gravely attachment to the great laws", but in s2 (and most of the subsequent analysis), people treated the laws as just an excuse for getting what he wants.

This season is saying NOPE all of that is actually wrong and he's actually DOES buy into the Cult rules he was indoctrinated into in the 16th century and never actually properly deprogrammed from. Go figure.

I also think this might be the reason he actually turned Daniel? Like, the fifth great law is clear that /no vampire will reveal his nature to a mortal and let that mortal live/, but Louis has hold him not to kill Daniel, has said if he does Louis will kill him, and Louis has Buffy levels of competence killing vampires so I think Armand would be kind of an idiot not to take that threat seriously. So he turns Daniel, not out of love as in the books or out of spite like Louis thinks, but because the great laws kind of don't leave him another option and he believes in them!

Now Art, you may be wondering, Law five subsection B says that no vampire must commit to writing the history of the vampires, lest that history be found by mortals and believed.

And yes that is an unpleasant stone in the shoe of my argument. BUT! I have several options as to why in fact he would consider it the lesser of vampire crimes.

Feel free to select as fits your headcanons before we are jossed in the next few episodes by the writing team's consistent talent for messy and ill-thought through characterisation.

Number One: In 2x3, Armand describes how Lestat predicted the twenty four hour rolling news cycle and tiktok. This was actually the reason why all those "Armand was lying it was somebody else who started the TdV" sounded so daft to me; it was a story beat about Lestat's canonical character trait of being ahead of his time rather than anything else, making it a lie would be a weird thing to do from a storytelling perspective. Lestat having predicted CNN and the BBC push notification and news fatigue, and Armand's gleeful use of that as Directeur Artistique suggests that he had already kind of considered this section of the law amended to account for modern sensibilities. "Sometimes you've watched [us kill] on the evening news. You've never been easier to distract" suggests that he's pretty blasé about humans actually believing Daniel - which is his main concern even as early as s2! In S1 he's mostly concerned about Vampires (hence fake Rashid and "you're chronicling a suicide") but in s2, the reason for the great laws is outright stated to be to protect vampires from humanity and not vice versa.

Number 2: given this is Louis' old man reason I don't see why it can't also be Armand's Old Man reason - he doesn't think people read anymore. This is kind of a sub reason for number one but also much less complicated and tied up in previous character beats. He's old and thinks the kids don't do books. He'll worry when the rights are acquired to adapt it as a vert.

And finally, number 3, my favourite reason: the reason for the six week gap between the end of the interview and the turning is because Daniel wrote the book as a human. Having been told about vampires as a mortal, he was turned to satisfy Law Five , subsection A, his having written the book as a human provides a nice little loophole to Five subsection B that most vampires probably don't care about but I guarantee Armand does. There. Easy. Boom.

Anyway where was I? That was a long tangent sorry. MINOR ANTAGONISTS! Yes.

Armand's on-screen arc in three first half of the season imo was a red herring. I'm agnostic re: whether he is actually apologetic or sincere about the twelve steps (both two separate questions and if I was placing my bets I'd say yes to the latter less so to the former) but it's less important than what actually happens (& what doesn't) in these scenes.

He can't get a word in for Daniel being a racist homophobe in his face in the first apology, Which I think is interesting. Not the racism or homophobia, that's just what the writers have been doing for laughs since s2. But the fact that he can't say what he wanted to say, and then leaves after the rapture happens. We don't actually know what he was going to say there's BUT we get an indication later, when he actually can get a word in: you are courting great danger with Lestat. He's going to get us all killed. The great conversion is a danger to all vampires and Lestat is leading it.

Lestat is a different kettle of fish, he gets the apology out no problem and then avoids falling onto Lestat's dick, job done, check that off the list, of to psych myself up to apologise to Louis and get deservedly set on fire. But then. He turns around. One more thing, says evil vampire Columbo. And Lestat knows what he's going to say. The great conversion is a danger to all vampires. The humans won't allow it. Shut the fuck up. Stop encouraging them. Lestat playcates him initially - I'm getting bored, I only have a few stops left. Subtext: I will stop soon.

But then when he accepts Lestat's invitation, and at the concert he puts a big old spotlight on Armand, revealing him for all the humans to see. And sings a cringe worthy diss track that yeah, is insensitive about Armand's colonial nightmare history. But we've seen how Armand reacts to people being insensitive about that in 2x5: he goes lower, shouts right back. Here, he leaves. And I think that's because the actual meat of the song Big Boss isn't about Armand, really. It's about the Great Laws, and about how they're wrong. The chorus is mocking the laws themselves rather than Armand, and he realises he's got to change tack.

Bc from the earliest teaser for s3, Armand has been set up as a figurehead of the Old Order. We know now that's what 'Armand told the truth' means: that the Great Laws need to stay in place to keep vampires safe. That is what the Fang Gang comes after Lestat for in ep 1, what Bruce says in so many words, but it becomes most clear at the concert: "No vampire shall ever reveal his nature to a mortal and let that mortal live"//"Armand told the truth!".

Next episode, after bailing and giving up on convincing Lestat, he gives Daniel a reason to join him, since he actually does love Daniel (???) ok I'll take his word for it since the After Dark and cast interviews seem to suggest that. So he loves Daniel (rushed, tell don't show, but whatever) and wants to keep him safe from the incoming whirlwind reaping that vampires have sown that he's so concerned about. In the interim Lestat is shot by a vampire conspiracy theorist, whose manifesto positions vampires as what they are shown to be in text: parasites incapable of living in harmony with humanity or nature (uhhhhhhhh). So he's right that once humans start to believe in vampires, they'll try to get rid of them. Then he kills Larry. A mortal who knows about vampires. Who helped reveal the existence of vampires to the world. And then he looks at the camera, discordant notes, episode ends.

So if I'm being honest, and I hate to give the writers credit bc this season has been a MESS, uh, Armand is a more coherent antagonist in s3 than he was in s2. Sorry, sorry, I know, but the twist ending of s2 doesn't make sense and exists only to prop up the Loustat reunion. It's bad fanfic. Armand is at his most coherent as an antagonist in s2 in 2x5 where he's full horror villain and also whaddayaknow, also motivated by preserving the secrecy of vampires from humanity. Incredible. On this one occasion they took the thing that worked and expanded on it instead of retconning.

But the way Armand is set up and framed here feels organic! It feels like he, alone, actually has a real connection to the previous season and the publication of the book. His ideology is consistent, his behaviour doesn't make logical sense but DOES make sense for his character, and his opposition to Lestat feels situational more than personal which I LOVE!! If the whole season was written with this attitude, I think it would be better, because the writers don't CARE about whether the audience thinks Armand is sympathetic or not. All the other characters this season fell bogged down by the writers hitting the audience over the head with what they want them to think: ohhhh don't you feel SORRY for Lestat, does he not suffer are you not sorry you hated him in S1 without knowing the ~~~✨full story✨~~~? Ohhhhh don't forget Louis is a predatory billionaire with a habit of using vulnerable people too satisfy his selfish emotional needs! He's not so sympathetic after all, huh? Are we going to elaborate to be empathetic to these traits that were obviously developed due to the endless horrors he's been subjected to since birth? No and fuck you. He's getting back with Lestat btw. That is his function this season. And to be clear armand does kind of suffer from a similar problem too Louis: AKA the writers are less interested in his trauma and more interested in villainising him bc they care less about the interiority of nonwhite characters.

But even though the racism that impacts Armand's writing is still heinous, he escapes the real problem with Louis' arc: that it's all written in service of him being forced back with Lestat. Like an evil fic on ao3. Armand's shift from the books: treated as unloved and unlovable, intentionally positioning him so that he's the object of contempt from all the other characters and from the audience is racist. Like, it just is. But this isn't a new development, it was in pursuit of removing him categorically as competition for Lestat in terms of as a romantic partner to Louis first and foremost. His positioning as a foil to Lestat fell flat in s2 primarily because the writers were not interested at all in treating them as "two sides of the same coin".

Side bar: If your analysis of Lestat and Armand rests on them both being as bad as each other I implore you to watch the show again, because the writers are only paying the absolute barest level of lip service to that idea. In fact, Armand is treated by the framing as categorically worse than Lestat in every way, which is cemented by the reunion, even though the actual meat of his actions do not meet the standard of this framing.

Anyway what I'm saying is that even though it took a truly heinous amount of racism to get his character here, in fact, he's now freer than Louis is character-wise. Unlike his position in s2, a rival to Lestat because the writers are weird about monogamy, and want to take him out as a viable love interest to the guy they ship with Lestat, his position as a rival in s3 is ideological. It stems from differing life experience to Lestat. He's kind of got a point this season, which he certainly wasn't allowed to in the previous one!

On a Watsonian level, his being unlovable has freed him to commit the crimes necessary to stand against the great conversion. On a Doylist level, his being unlovable has freed him from the trap of having his interiority and independence broken in pursuit of him settling down in "happy" fanfic domesticity that should, if the writers were interested in themes and individual characters, be off the table for all of these people.

Categorically fuck these writers for the way this has all been carried out, but it's at least a little bit satisfying that despite them clearly disliking the fact that Armand has a lot of fans, and thinking he's just ontologically inferior and less sympathetic in every way to Lestat, he's allowed to be more of an active character than the other mains, who are hampered by the writers' need to have everyone feel the same way as they do about them, or to end up in relationships they otherwise would have grown beyond.

Wrote all that and realise I haven't said anything about Daniel. Uhhh despite what well meaning fandom analysts say, he actually was being used as a writer avatar in S1 and s2, the writers are just Like That. Sorry. You can tell, not by his dickish irreverence towards Louis, but by the story beats he's attached to: the two reveals at the end of each season we're actually true, and his torture at the hands of Armand in 2x5 signposts Armand being the series' ultimate evil.

Anyway now he's a vampire he's set himself against Lestat (something only antagonists do in this season) and that means we're no longer supposed to take his part. They've brought back his racism and dialled it up - mostly for shock value and laughs (once again fuck these writers) but also to highlight a preexisting dubious morality that we were previously supposed to write off as age and profession-related when it was directed towards nonwhite main characters.

This is all generally offensive writing, and the way that the DM reveal was handled (as someone who's agnostic re: past DM vs present DM) was rushed and incomprehensible, but the upshot of it is that actually Daniel is allowed to function as a character outside Lestat also. This is incidentally not a privilege afforded to Gabrielle, who's twisted and warped into the series antagonist for further Lestat whump like this is a fucking late noughties early tens multi-chapter on fanfiction dot net.

Daniel hates Lestat now and honestly more power to him so do I, but the actual in story consequence of this means that he is also freer as a narrative player than either Louis or Gabrielle or poor fucking Claudia.

So yes despite the otherworldly levels of offensive writing it's taken to get here, I do kind of appreciate that Daniel and Armand are able to exist as players in the narrative unbound from Lestat's all consuming character breaking effect. Especially Armand who, I cannot stress enough, was a nonwhite antagonist specifically positioned in the most negative possible light to make the main character's white abuser more palatable.

No props to the writers. The rest of the everything about this shows that any complexity here was absolutely secondary to their need to have an antagonist working externally against Lestat (& also needed something for Daniel to do I guess) and you can tell by the fact that 80% of the show's screentime has been haphazard moral justification of their fave and rock band BS.