But it was love.

"I am the voice! I am the song! I am the night! And I can answer! I can arrange it! I can say rise, and I can say speak! And I am her! And I am she! And I, I, I, I am the answer!"

And they have to defend the show because they could get fucking fired if they don’t, actors can’t just talk shit about a project that they are still contracted to, so don’t get upset when they don’t directly start going off about how much they hate the show and the characters and the writing.

—May my touch soothe you, Daniel

they already associated armand with islam via him praying as fake rashid

they conflated armand with assad, a british bangladeshi muslim (as far as i know), by referring to him as a french bengali in the show when that had nothing to do with what we previously knew about the character

armand is assisted in torturing louis by fareed, presumably supposed to be muslim

louis is beheaded and armand is using livestreaming - reminiscent of videos used of hostages beheaded by terrorist groups in west asia

armand is wearing a metal bangle reminiscent of the one sikhs wear

armand is wearing a vaguely military-looking shirt even though this is very unlike his normal taste

all this is saying to me that theyre just jumbling together anything that says to them brown person terrorist muslim torturer insane fanatic

then theres the big boss song

lyrics about armand perpetrating executions (never mind he got taught that in rome - if hes doing eugenics they are in fact catholic tinged eugenics) and stating its his decision alone who dies (ignoring the involvement of white characters)

big SS on the cd cover blatantly associating him with nazis

daniel calls him dr mengele - a nazi who tortured ppl by experimenting on them

armand and fareed desecrate a kosher space by spilling human blood in the butchers shop

so its not exactly a coherent framing but i think its still a framing

then theres the fact that his csa history, after being the subject of mockery, is now brought up seriously, at long last, in this context! what is that telling us? especially since so much focus has been given to lestat over an abuse story they made up from whole cloth.

but lestat was abused by a woman. armand, we are constantly told, was a catamite. hes a twink bottom. he was a limp, passive ragdoll for sale. his daddy groomed him into a little bitch. hes emasculated, a beige pillow, his sexual performance is so-so, hes desperate and needy, hes a pussy and a betaboi. in short, hes too gay, not lestats ideal of a masculine bisexual man. like this is some kind of corruption of character, being the receptive partner in anal sex

what the fuck are they doing here. hes a nazi, and also a brown terrorist, and also a 'passive' homosexual. what the actual fuck are they doing. they chose his indian background for him and have done nothing with it except racism.

anyway im off again. as soon as the conversations started being more about 'how dare armand be cruel to louis' instead of 'how dare the writers do this to the characters and the viewers' it felt like we slipped off the track you know?

in s1 louis tells lestat they used to mount the heads of runaway slaves on the spikes on the park railings.

now, one episode after lestat dragged claudia from the grave to exonerate him over the train scene, when he dragged her back into captivity, we have the only character who was *literally* enslaved putting louis' head on a spike

"Come to me."

@armandsbitchboy and I were discussing the lack of sex between the main "ships" this season, and how we both actually prefer non sexual intimacy - for me this was a huge draw of the books when I was first reading them as a teenager, as well as the way the characters can have sex without actually having it, via biting and blood drinking.

This made me start thinking about the way sex is shown in TVL as opposed to series 1 and 2.

For those first two seasons sex is generally shown on screen as a pleasant experience for all concerned. Unpleasant sexual encounters such as Claudia's repeated assaults by Bruce take place offscreen.

In TVL this dynamic is reversed. Every sexual encounter we are shown is rape (Magnus), abusive (Gabriella) or indifferent (the constant groupie sex that Lestat has). The only true intimate encounter we see, between Nicky and Lestat, has a cut away before anything really happens.

I would surmise that this is deliberate and speaks to the attitude of the respective narrators towards sexual intimacy. For Louis sex is associated with love, hence why he's hurt when Lestat wants other sexual partners. Even when he does have his own encounter with someone else immediately following this conversation, it's with someone he loved.

For Lestat sex is either traumatic, or it is utilised like a drug to numb his feelings of emptiness and loneliness, as he tells us in the song of the same name. BTW, it is not uncommon at all for people with a traumatic sexual history to become hypersexual as a coping mechanism, so these two things are not incongruent.

This leads me to the idea that perhaps for Lestat non-sexual intimacy with partners he actually loves may be more important to him. One of the reasons episode 6 was by far and away my favourite episode this season was because of how closely Lestat and Louis' relationship mirrored the dynamic of the books, and how intimate they were onscreen without even a kiss.

Another point I'd like to make regarding this: I've seen many in the fandom bemoaning the lack of sex scenes between intimate partners this season (Devils Minion, Lestat and Louis, Lestat and Nicky etc).

I would say that due to the way all the other sexual encounters are shown (violent, abusive or meaningless) it would be extremely difficult to frame an intimate sexual encounter as tender and emotional. Can you imagine showing Lestat and Nicky together in the same episode Lestat is raped by Magnus? Or Lestat and Louis getting back together in this way in the same episode that Gabriella's incestuous abuse is exposed? It would leave a really foul taste to the whole thing, and during episode 6 in particular I was really hoping nothing physical happened between Lestat and Louis for precisely that reason.