a box full of dragons

terms we're going to use:

cst: common abbreviation for child sex trafficking.

csa: common abbreviation for child sexual assault. sexual assault can range from unwanted physical touch in sexualized areas of the body (which can vary culturally, or individually, or based on circumstances,) to penetrative rape.

child sexual assault is not more or less severe, more or less real, or more or less damaging to the child in question if it is penetrative or non-penetrative. in all of these discussions, please remember that how the child feels is what's important. how the victim or survivor remembers the event is very important, because they are the one who has been harmed. they are the one whose childhood was impacted, which has lifelong consequences for them that their abuser will not have to face. and to call that into question because of x, y, z immediately sets survivors into two distinct categories: survivors who can be believed, and those who can't.

when you set up those categories, you will almost always see more marginalized people placed into the second category, due to implicit bias. believe survivors also means fictional characters, as silly as that may sound to you, because when you say "oh i don't believe this fictional character was assaulted because of x, y, z," there is a 99.9% chance a real survivor who has those attributes, who relates to that character, will see that and you will do harm to them. the whole point of these conversations is how can we support survivors. how can we make survivors feel safe in our spaces. and comparing lestat’s sexual trauma and armand’s in a competitive way is inherently harmful, because it’s not a question of who had it worse, it’s a question of who has the privilege to be believed, and who will be supported. yes, there is magnitude of trauma in how many times you were assaulted, how extensive the trauma was, how badly it affected you, but to say that lestat's trauma is not as bad will just hurt people. lestat's given room to explore and heal from his trauma while simultaneously mocking, belittling and dismissing the trauma of other people because he is a cis white man.

this is especially important to remember given the way claudia's sexual assault is added to the show, and the way it's compared with lestat's sa. nobody's sa is worse than anybody else's, it's simply that repetitive trauma is more likely to have a larger effect on someone, to do more harm to them. we're not doing oppression olympics, we're trying to talk about cycles of abuse, and both lestat and armand have taken out their trauma on each other and others. what we can critique is not whether lestat's trauma was better or worse, but the fact that armand's trauma has affected more areas of his life that lestat was insulated from because of his privilege. diminishing trauma in any way is harmful, but we can point out lestat's privilege when armand is trying to make amends, no matter how shallow that attempt may or may not be, and lestat is throwing his trauma in his face, taunting him, belittling it, being racist. like. i have things i tentatively am not critiquing the show for until i see the end, but the people who are already critiquing it have excellent, excellent points about privilege and who is afforded the opportunity to heal, to work through their trauma, and who isn't. that extends to how we talk about it.

please remember there are real survivors of really horrific shit who are already alienated in many aspects of their lives who really like fictional characters we relate to. we're in the fandom, this is not some isolated space where you can say whatever and you won't hurt anybody. this also applies to every other harm you can commit, by the way. racism, imperialism, colonialism, orientalism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, aphobia, ableism, sanism, there shouldn't be spaces where you feel comfortable saying things you know might hurt someone. if you mess up and say something that hurts someone, take accountability for it. be kind. be compassionate. work out why you said that for yourself, do not put it on them. read some stuff. take a step back from social media for a couple days. try to do better. APOLOGIZE. don't get defensive. getting defensive once again makes the harm committed about you and not the person you harmed. we all struggle with this, we're all human, but we all have to keep trying. ok, back to terms:

implicit bias: a pre-reflective (that is, before thinking about it deeply, a gut reaction) attribution of particular qualities by an individual to a member of some social out group. (banaji and greenwald, implicit social cognition)

child trafficking: defined by the UN as "the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of a child for the purpose of exploitation...child shall mean any person under eighteen years of age." it also explicitly includes illegal adoption.

illegal adoption: adoption fraud or illegal adoption is when a person or institution tries to adopt or give up a child for adoption illegally. if the person who is housing the child does not have custody of them, or any legal claim to custody of them, anyone who adopts that child, especially through deceit and/or the exchange of money is partaking in illegal adoption, which is child trafficking.

child sex trafficking: sexual exploitation of children is defined in the Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography as: "The use of girls and boys in sexual activities remunerated in cash or in kind (commonly known as child prostitution) in the streets or indoors, in such places as brothels, discotheques, massage parlours, bars, hotels, restaurants, etc...The trafficking of girls and boys and adolescents for the sex trade...Child sex tourism...The production, promotion and distribution of pornography involving children...The use of children in sex shows (public or private.)"

now, onto armand (<3 do NOT put armand hate in my tags. i know all of his evils. i know what he has done wrong. i love him because his character arc is about overcoming the ways in which horrible trauma can make you an abuser, it's about making amends, it's about owning up to your own flaws and ALSO finding self love after horrible trauma. i love that guy. armand my best friend armand <3) armand is a cst survivor. many people will try to tell you he isn't. this has always been a problem, because anne rice believed that child marriage prevented csa, because marital rape isn't real. i can't find this quote right now, if anybody can find it, i would appreciate it, there are several quotes of hers that are harmful that are often difficult to find. she was a very complicated person, and she had some really fucked up ideas. so marius is both explicitly armand's abuser, but he is also portrayed in a very flattering light at times. that doesn't change that he is, explicitly, armand's abuser. i don't want to spoil too much or make this too heavy, so i'm not going to use quotes, but there are a lot of great meta posts about armand you can find that get into this. this is explicitly about impact on other people in the fandom.

armand is transported from delhi to venice under severe force, where he is sold to and sexually abused in the brothel. marius buys him and then immediately sexually assaults him. in the books it's within five minutes, maybe. we don't know about the show, but armand talks about marius' 'worshipful mercy.' we know what that is. and he can't consent, because he can't get out of that situation. he is under duress. and if you wanna check out tvl the book, go to page 351 (in the digital version at least) and read what marius says about this. because he agrees that armand's life was in his hands. he had the power and control. it doesn't matter if armand wanted it or not, because he was under duress and he was being coerced. he is a child, he cannot consent to sex with an adult, and even if he could, he is being coerced by marius lying to him, showing himself in the best light and taking care of armand's basic needs after he's been deprived of care. there are many, many, many kids who are put through hell who then think an adult is rescuing them, and want to have sex with them, because they have been groomed to see themselves as a sex object. that's not consent. that is a child desperate for love, for connection, for the good things to keep happening, for the bad things to stop happening. it's a fawn response. that is not appropriate for the adult to entertain. a teenager propositions you, you say no.

and in this case, specifically, armand having sex with marius after he enslaved him is the desired result of cst. marius didn't rescue him, he finished the process of trafficking him. the person who trafficked armand got paid, the person he was trafficked to sexually assaulted him. that's the process. both the person transporting or transferring the child and the person receiving the child are guilty of cst. nothing changed or got better for armand in the grand scheme of things just because he started getting his basic human needs met. it didn't change because he got to wear fancy clothes, because he got to have friends, because he went to lessons. children have rights, they are entitled to those things. armand being denied them to break him down into accepting his abuse and then given them back to coerce him is, again, the desired result of cst. he is rewarded for accepting the assault, reinforcing ideas that will haunt him for the rest of his life. he's being conditioned. marius gets physically abusive with him when armand doesn't do exactly what he wants--armand's rights as a human being are conditional on how beautiful and obedient he is. that is not a rescue. he was not rescued. the rest of the boys from rich families get to go out and go to university, have a career, do whatever they want with their life. armand doesn't, because he is still enslaved. marius trafficks him as a young adult--remember that payment in kind is still sex trafficking--and armand has no way of getting out of that. marius was not kind to him, he did not rescue him, he trafficked, enslaved and abused him.

so now, let's talk about how we talk about this. i've already seen some jokes that were really upsetting from people i think had good intentions, which is why i wrote this. if you see this and this was your post, i'm not trying to call you out, this was just how i felt about it. there was a post on here that was a picture of marius making that stupid face from the first promo, and the 'joke' was something like this is the face he was making when he was yelling at amadeo to come down and be sexually assaulted by his friends. how does that shame marius? how does that hurt marius, the fictional character who could make as many stupid faces as he wanted to, without ever relinquishing any of the control he had over armand? what is the joke there? it's funny he made that face? great. make fun of that stupid expression! you've included armand's trauma in a way that makes that trauma a part of the joke. it makes it less serious, and the show has already made fun of his trauma many times. if a character does it, it's understandable, that's part of the story. i might have some issue with the writing, depending, but it's part of the story. if a person in the fandom does it and never gets any pushback, it becomes part of the fandom's culture. and when i saw that post, i felt so small.

i keep thinking about it, because a couple of my mutuals reblogged it, so now i don't know how seriously they take it. it's something i have to think about, because while i was not trafficked across continents, i was trafficked, at the same age, and marius does look almost exactly like my abuser. marius has blue eyes, my abuser doesn't. that's about the difference. so i see a picture of a character who looks like a real person who hurt me (and yes, the marius defenders are right, i do hate him because he reminds me of a real pedophile, that's how art works, you put your experiences and emotions onto a story and try to reconcile them with the thoughts and feelings the people making the story put into it. that's where the meaning comes from,) who did make stupid faces a lot, because he knew that no matter what stupid, goofy shit he did, he held my life in the palm of his hand. now i know that something that literally could have killed me, that permanently changed how i relate to other people, is funny to some of the people i'm around, if it's in the right context. it's that one to one.

Daniel: Yes, fuck Armand

Also Daniel, when Armand got sad:

It's extremely common for a-spec people to get into relationships and/or have sex not because they want it or find the person attractive, but because it's something they think they need to do. Because even does it, so they must follow.

The devil within… my sofa

I haven't read the books. I'm curious about the books, and after a couple of years in this fandom, I've familiarised myself with them to some extent through sheer osmosis, but I couldn't help but notice how the most vocal book purists somehow tend tend to be the most vague in their criticism. In many other fandoms it's common practice to follow up this type of criticism with direct quotes or passages from the books or at least a summary of what happened, because how else are you gonna compare the show vs book version than by doing an actual side-by-side analysis?

And yet I've seen remarkably little of it in this fandom, especially when it comes to Gabriella, for some reason. If book Gabriella really was this super deeply and well written character completely different from the show version, then tell us, show-only fans, about her. So far, my semi-educated guess from reading between the lines and all the incidental context I've gathered is that actually she wasn't that deeply written in the books at all, quite the opposite: I suspect she was made vague enough that the fans could easily project their own ideas of her without much to either contradict or confirm it, which was naturally at risk at clashing with the show's more tangible version of her.

I think you are correct that a lot of it is that the sex has made both the incest and the abuse harder to ignore. I personally don't think it makes much of a difference or understand why other people do, but I have seen that being raised by certain people. In the book, Lestat claims Gabrielle stopped being his mother after he turned her, and so their relationship, which involves kissing and is clearly romantic, is fine. He never stops referring to her as his mother, so this is, in my opinion, exactly as bullshit as "it's different for vampires" is in the show.

We see a little more of Gabrielle's character while alive in the books than we did in episode two, I think, but a lot of that is said through her absence. She emotionally neglects Lestat and all her children, and it's clear that this is because she never wanted to be a mother or a wife in the first place. When Lestat is older, she does tell him about the dream she has about her husband/his father—that's a relatively accurate adaptation, I think, though the scene as a whole in the show really compresses things. But she also talks to him about being basically her with a penis, her surrogate penis, and I do not recall all the details of it but it is very not okay, but I feel pretty well supports the (implied?) grooming/sexual abuse in the show.

She does do some things that show a better side to her behavior towards Lestat, though, most notably in telling him to run off to Paris *with Nicki.* (Probably the best and most unselfish thing she ever did as a mother.) In general she is really supportive of their relationship. Lestat makes her a vampire in Paris, because she actually came to live with Nicki when she became sick, doing so even when Lestat had disappeared (he doesn't come back and keep living with Nicki after becoming a vampire in the book.) The loss of this is definitely an understandable grievance, especially when trans/nonbinary readings of her character can give a sense that she connected with Lestat on that level.

That's my personal reading—recognizing him chafing at society's expectations, especially as a queer man, allowed her to connect with him in a way just being his mother very much did not, and there is genuine love there. And despite the fact that there were unhealthy and potentially abusive elements of her projecting herself onto him, that's very different from what we see in Gabriella in the show. And the idea of her telling him to "be a man" and encouraging him to go fight a pack of wolves frels particularly wrong.

There's no slaughter by her and Lestat of their family, and I think that's one thing bothering people (a legitimate criticism in my opinion), which I will explain a little further down, because it kind of depends on more character work.

After Lestat makes her into a vampire, I think he kind of initiates the incest? I don't fully recall, and this is the area where Lestat is least reliable as a narrator anyway, but it's something he does in order to convince her not to leave him, and something she very much latches on to. My reading of this is that Lestat basically goes "please stay with me; if you don't like the mom/son thing we can make out instead" (because Lestat has by this time learned, partly from his mother, that people are only interested in him for his body), and Gabrielle may or may not have any real interest in him, but he said "we don't have to do the mom/son thing" and that is good enough for at least a little while, especially as she can't really go off on her own immediately.

(Also, I want to point out that Lestat is *twenty* when he becomes a vampire in the book, and it hasn't been that long since that happened, so any idea that this relationship is somehow less abusive in the book holds about zero water for me, regardless of Gabrielle's motivation.)

This is where a big part of people's issues starts to come in though, I think. In the book, Gabrielle immediately starts dressing as a man. You could argue whether that is gender-identity or purely social-expectation and power based. One of the things she does almost immediately is cut her hair, and when she finds that it has grown back when she wakes up the next night, she screams. Lestat has to cut her hair every night, if I recall correctly. This and the penis thing are a big part of why *I* read her as nonbinary/transmasc, because the hair gives me a very gutteral dysphoric feeling, but that's entirely subjective.

We see early on that she is interested in abandoning society completely, something she will spend the next ten years compromising with Lestat on. She isn't really any more keen on vampire society than human society.

In general, Gabrielle is quieter and more withdrawn in the book than in the show, I think. I felt that while she was sometimes maybe more supportive, she was not all that interested in being with him at all, but like much of this, that's a subjective reading. Again, a lot of these are issues that I feel it's unwise to make assumptions about before the season is done, and certainly when people were making these judgements on just the first two.

Now, to the part that relates to killing their family, which has some spoilers for episode four:

Lestat and Gabrielle travel for about ten years, I think. (I'm a little fuzzy on the timing on this; it's not given all that much space in the books.) At that point she is kind of done with the compromising thing and wants to go into the wilderness, which has been an issue in part because Lestat is still receiving regular correspondence from a member of the Theatre. Gabrielle's leaving is slightly complicated by news of Nicki's death (he lasts a lot longer before immolating himself, and there's like a whole ceremony involved), since she doesn't want to leave Lestat alone with that grief immediately, but she's reached the point where she's (supposedly) happy to have Lestat come along—after all, he no longer needs news about Nicki—but she's going, with or without him.

They also recieve news that most of their family has been executed in whichever French revolution is going on at the time, but Lestat's father is alive, blind, ailing, and in need of care. Lestat grieves his family somewhat and feels some obligation to his father. Gabrielle feels zero obligation, but knows Lestat does and understands that on some level, at least, and this effectively ends any possibility of him going with her.

So slaughtering her family in the show does a few things:

1) Especially with leaving her husband on a stake and letting the children find the bodies, it makes her come across as more violent, tapping into tropes about women killing their families, including their children, that very much villianize women and can bring up some issues of misogyny.

2) It makes her seem more invested in her life and family than in the book. She wants to take revenge, to express her anger and hatred of these people in a violent manner, rather than just not wanting to be around them again. To pretend that they, and that aspect of her life, are completely seperate from her. Perhaps the kills are a different way of expressing or ensuring that, but the the enthusiasm and the way she leaves the scene read very differently.

3)(spoilers for episode four!)

I don't recall if she left Lestat without saying goodbye in the book, but he was certainly aware she was leaving, and this is the point where the death of their surviving family acts as something of a catalyst and highlights some of the differences between their feelings towards that family. Also, since this is the spoiler paragraph, I will add that her talk with Lestat about all the things she isn't anymore seems to support the idea that the snippets we got of her in episode two and her gender presentation so far are maybe not the be-all end-all of her characterization in this 7-episode show crammed with layers of unreliable narrative told by her rapidly spiraling victom/son.

....

(Spoilers complete!)

My theory is that despite being a vampire Daniel is still experiencing symptoms of Parkinson as seen by his shaky hands. BUT what does antibodies have to do with this?

(x) We know that Parkinson is a neurodegenerative disease but the important part of this is that it is caused by accumulation of alpha synuclein protein that impact neuron functions.

It’s not “people who contour are themselves automatically racist” but that the desired face shape created by contouring is one that, at the end of the day, pretty much reflects existing white standards of beauty. A thinner, pointier nose, smaller chin, high angled cheekbones and (on occasion) smaller lips. Also if you’re darker skinned you have to use a much lighter shade of foundation  thus ending up with an overall lighter face.

Have we considered teffilin?