I snort sugar

Even if it was easier to watch in the Global South, those (re)viewers would rarely be invited to screen the episodes or to cover them for major outlets.

This season has me seriously reflecting on the previous two, and I may have been too generous in finding intent behind what now seems incidental. Was Assad a case of colour-blind, not colour-conscious, casting? Maybe. A few location changes in his backstory aren't enough to convince me otherwise.

It's crazy to show so little understanding of Orientalism with this character, especially since so much of his trauma's the result of him being fetishised.

It's crazy to not revisit his account that Nicki, a white descendant of the crumbling French aristocracy, called him an anti-Roma slur in 1800's Paris. Has that also been written off as 'Armand fanfiction?' Because it was a good indicator of how fascists would've received him. Yet, he was leading a coven of white Europeans as Paris fell to the Nazis, and seemingly emerged unbothered. Yeah, Madeleine was human and exposed, but she should not be the only one with horrors to recount from that time.

But I maintain that they had to have deliberately done it. Because race IS important with Armand. But western (and Global South) audiences are no longer going to see a Ukrainian Armand as the “dark inferior” to “great Russia” and western Europe. Western Europe viewed Ukrainians like that for centuries, but have stopped. now the only people in the world to see Ukraine like that are Russians. For the rest of the audience, he would just be a white man.

My point being, the Book already has an Armand who is a racial minority to a lot of of the other characters. I no longer trust that these show runners understand the visual language of racism. But they once did! And so I think the casting of Assad Zaman is actually deliberate and perfect: they’ve updated the character to read as racialized to a western audience, and they’ve still got an actor who is gorgeous, almost angelic, who you can map onto several pieces of Renaissance art. And, whose background and timeline can still contain a slave trade believably, and even a loose link to Ukraine itself through the Tatars!

It’s wild, because even now, there are places where a lot of care is being put into his ethnic identity, then the showrunners undo that. Case in point: The shirt that he’s wearing in the butcher shop is done by a Ukrainian designer, and Assad put a lot of work into learning about the design. But the way the butcher shop scene is lit to make Armand look monstrous, it just looks like a brown shirt!

Exploring the idea of Armand‘s coercion via white coven could’ve been really interesting! It’s 1940s Paris! He just escaped a concentration camp - he looks, as Nicki so cruelly commented, Romani! He has darker skin than Louis’s Of course his position in the coven is not stable! Vichy France was not stable! But we don’t spend any time on that either, just a quick reveal as Louis’s vitals are fading.