Weird at last, weird at last.

these people are MAD mad they are so angry!!

amazing how every time i've expressed displeasure at things that have been left out or the way they've shown the flashbacks or gabrielle's characterization or the lack of queer intimacy or what they've done with armand in general these people have mocked me, insulted me, quote tweeted me to call me an idiot who just doesn't understand art/camp/avant garde/queer sexuality (lol)/the medium of television and all this other shit

but apparently lestat willingly fucking a guy who looks like assad zaman is where they draw the line and now they're threatening to quit the show and are finally dragging rolin lmfao

why is this the ONE thing they take issue with? lestat killing his family didn't bother them, lestat being molested by gabi didn't bother them, the season 2 finale was fine by them, they didn't give a fuck about any of these other modifications but lestat putting his penis inside of armand for fun?? (and subsequently publicly humiliating him about it) NEVER HAPPENED. SHOW'S CANCELLED, apparently

.... you must be new here.

Because you're totally right! I have been posting a lot Armand and Lestat... For the last week of the last two-ish+ years I've been active in the fandom.

I don't usually encourage people to do the weird creepy antisocial thing of stalking through someone's sm, but like. There is this thing on a blog that anyone can access that looks like a little magnifying glass. If you use it to "search" you can type in terms like, for example, "loumand" or "louis de pointe du lac" or "lestat de lioncourt." If you wanted to see what a person posts about a lot vs a little over the course of their whole blog's runtime.

But since I received two almost identical asks in the span of a few minutes, I'm going to go ahead and guess maybe you don't have the patience for all that. (And should we even bother talking about how, based on the post you are referring to and the context surrounding it, chances are almost certain that this is coming from a DM shipper who's upset I'm critiquing the way that their ship went canon negatively affects the context around loumand? And not someone who themselves actually cares about Louis as a character).

But hey, since we ARE here talking about Louis, let's refocus back on Louis! Because there's a lot to talk about in this season that I haven't gotten to yet, and why not take this as an opportunity!

That's a good point.

If Rolin & co. are remotely even bottom-of-the-barrel good writers, both the writing of Marius on the mirror and the recurring motif of "Armand told the truth" will have payoffs. I don't know that I can see any connecting tissue between the two right now though.

Just because I don't know what truth about Marius we've really heard Armand say onscreen besides his backstory + the fact that Marius is dead and died hundreds of years ago. Unless we've all been wildly misled, I think it's basically confirmed that Marius survived his killing attempt in the era Armand was with him. So Armand both is wrong about Marius being dead. But I'm not sure how that could be considered watsonianly contentious. But I'm also not sure what aspect of his past would matter, that would be contentious enough in general to have people worked up about it.

The "Armand told the truth" watsonian motif seems like it could have two different connotations, at least with what I know right now: Either Armand "told the truth" about something the cultish people care about, like maybe about the Great Conversion being a big problem or something. That seems the most watsonianly likely. But not as narratively satisfying for us the audience.

Or it could be that Armand, like Lestat, has vampire stans, and they believe some part of his explanation for how things went down in the book. Although what, it's hard to say. But it would be the most narratively satisfying if it intersects with unanswered questions like, about the trial. Or about Armand and Lestat's past.

Yeah, I just don't know that these things are connected, but it's an interesting idea, I just can't figure out the thread between them. Watsonianly, anyway.

Although, maybe it's just that like... vampires love writing things in blood? Lol, not a very creative idea, but it's thematically appropriate, I guess.

That's exactly why it's such a fuckass term to use -- they have had Armand demonstrate that he can speak and understand Hindi in season 1, which is a language that Assad has only passing familiarity with from watching Bollywood movies. And he describes French as his third language, which would put his mother tongue and Italian as first and second. Now, either you decide he taught himself Hindi while in Dubai (which makes no sense--the South Asians he would encounter would be from diverse linguistic backgrounds, so it would make much more sense to learn Arabic) or you have some wild his parents were immigrants to Delhi from Bengal so he grew up not speaking Bangla but khadi boli/Hindustani/whateverthefuck. And then you have to decide whether Armand told Lestat that he was from Bengal during their Paris years together and Lestat came up with that term after being given some sensitivity training from Christine, or that Marius told Lestat that Armand was from Bengal as part of the information that Armand himself doesn't have access to. Or that Daniel Molloy in his due diligence Talamasca-vetted book referenced Armand being from Bengal, with sources again, that we have not seen Armand have himself.

But why bother doing all these acrobatics to make the backstory work when you have Assad himself telling us in response to a question about 'Big Boss':

I love that song, but the introduction in that scene, when Lestat says, “Give it up for the French Bengali smokeshow,” I love that. That’s not an Armand thing, that’s an Assad thing. I always like when Rolin and Hannah, and Jonathan Ceniceroz, who wrote this episode, acknowledge cultural references and where we’ve come from. Being specific about him being Bengali, that’s a nice little acknowledgment.

So we already know that the term has nothing to do with Armand's backstory. It's just Rolin and Hannah being 'cute' and throwing a crumb to Assad.

The whole interview is insightful to read because Assad really seems to be wobbling over the line where he is genuinely interested in discussing his character, and where he is performing compliance with the marketing dictats.

I've said over and over again that expecting actors to be the ones to call out the writing's racism is unproductive. Not just because of the external forces of the workplace constraints making it impossible for actors to critique a place they are working it. But also because immersing yourself into a character and critiquing the writing of said character are two separate skill sets, and it is very very hard to do justice to a character if you don't believe in it. I've seen some excellent stage actors just jump into really mediocre scripts and take them seriously and act the hell out of them, and they not only elevate the material, but they also make themselves look like great actors. That's what Jacob and Assad especially are doing in this show.

But genuinely, how utterly pathetic the work conditions that Assad has to perform gratitude for an anachronistic shout-out, even as he reveals that the show-writers have been writing his character for 3 seasons, over multiple years, without even once bothering to create a coherent backstory for him. That there is zero logic being applied as to what it says for a character previously said to be from Delhi, previously shown speaking Hindi. There is zero consequence demonstrated of what such knowledge might imply for Armand's relationship with Lestat (and/or Marius). There is nothing showing that racist, edgy Lestat inventing a hyphenated identity for a brown vampire is the result of some kind of internal or external change.

but the show has both of them speaking in the same irreverent, quippy voice and cycling through the same types of jokes in a way that makes it clear this is what the writers think is funny, that this is a reflection of the writers' (esp rolin's) racism. rolin said the audience was gonna feel the whiplash of the show suddenly being taken over by lestat and feeling like we're in lestat's head, but the tone shift fails bc it specifically doesn't feel like we're in lestat's head or that the kind of narration and dialogue we're immersed in reflects lestat's character in any meaningful way- instead, it feels like rolin has taken the fact that the show is now set mostly in the present day and the general premise of "lestat is chaotic and terminally online" as a free pass to use lestat as a mouthpiece for his own voice and sense of humor. lestat isn't just any random mid-30s rockstar edgelord on tour, he's a specific character with a specific background, and while it's believable that he became terminally online and obsessed with pop culture in the 3 years since he reunited with louis in s2ep8, that doesn't mean all traces of his past and the history that shaped him is gonna vanish from the way he speaks, narrates and views other people.

me: sweet hit me with the good stuff

media: so there's this marginalized underclass of people, right?

me: okay

media: and they're like, stigmatized for something that's mostly an aspect of how they are born, or where they're from, or they're badly misunderstood, right?

me: yup, got it, I'm with ya

media: so these people are rebelling against the current social order, because it's the instrument of their suffering

me: oh good great sure

media: but also they're violent and deranged and need to be stopped

me: ...what

media: yeah they're going too far, they're trying to overthrow the system and assassinate the nice cop trying to help them and also they burned down an orphanage

me: ...why? would they burn down an orphanage??

media: extremism is bad

me: still not seeing what this has to do with their fight though???

media: also now they've shot a dog. oops they shot another dog

me: what?! why? I though their motive was to overthrow oppression??

media: yes but their suffering has also made them evil

me: ...???

media: don't worry though, the good guys will defeat them and restore the status quo

me: the status quo that's been killing people?

media: well it turns out it was only killing the kinds of awful people who burn down orphanages and shoot dogs :)

me: oh. this is actually a pro-authoritarian story, isn't it?

and on top of it, lestat looks crazy and unhinged at the concert, he's got dried blood still on his neck and he looks like a clown and calls himself a toxic bitch and anxiously-attached show pony (all of which is true and he's exemplifying on stage) before launching into a song where most of the insults boiling down to being ugly, undesirable, and desperate which lestat is in this scene. immediately after the concert he calls gabriella and leaves that message where he tries to act like the fans screaming outside are a replacement for his mom apparently deciding she's had enough of him and skipping out again. he wrote that song about armand but also he wrote that song about himself.