your local cryptid

for some reason they felt the need to retcon everything we've seen of him so far just to drop the underwhelming and overdone plot twist that armand has been lying about everything the whole time.

at some point during his cartoon villain monologue they quickly mention that armand planted the steins just to fuck with louis's head when in s2 the implication was always that he was coddling louis and making sure that he wasn't unhappy so that he wouldn't fucking leave him. the way armand controlled louis was specifically by "protecting his happiness", by keeping him calm and content in his gilded cage. he made himself subservient to louis in order to make him dependant on him. THAT'S how armand manipulates, out of fear, out of his obsession with control. it's something we're never told but that, in its subtlety, makes him so complex and fascinating. so it all gets thrown out the window to me when all we see him do is be evil for the sake of being evil without a genuine attempt at an arc or motivation.

and it's wild because the set up was there. we see him get involved with his AA cult at the beginning of the season and as ridiculous as it seems, it makes perfect sense. armand seeks purpose, he seeks control, he seeks routine, he seeks belonging. so it makes sense that, after watching everything he had built and "protected" for 70 years crumble, he needed to find something else to cling to. and they started heavily hinting at that thing being opposing the great conversion. so why set everything up for it and then not deliver??? why make it about louis instead? WHY NOT MAKE IT ABOUT LESTAT? especially with how little we have seen of their relationship, it could have been the perfect chance to delve into it a bit more and finally fucking do something with the tension that has been bubbling under the surface all season.

season one and two never felt the need to beat you over the head with an answer to everything. they allowed the story to speak for itself, they allowed the audience to pick apart the psyche of these characters to try and make sense of why they do what they do without necessarily needing one clear objective outcome. it generates endless analysis and discussions and yes, plenty of discourse too, but it's what made me fall in love with the show. s2 never explicitly tells us that armand put those pictures there, it just implies it and lets the viewer decide what to do with that information, how to fit it alongside the narrative that is slowly unraveling in front of us. we don't need to know for sure whether it was armand who messed with the photos because it doesn't matter. what matters is that loumand's relationship is coming apart at the seams, what matters is that louis is distrustful of armand, what matters is that the interview is destabilizing decades of "peace" by forcing them to confront their past.