Breaking down Armand’s arc this season because it makes no sense:
1) he’s in AA in Ohio. Why he’s there, unclear. He meets Alex and inducts him into his cult following. He goes by Arun, which feels significant, but don’t worry- it never comes up again.
2) he finds Daniel and attempts to apologise to him. Why he chose now, unclear. Maybe he just wants help stopping the great conversion, but as we see later on, this is not actually really what he cares about.
3) he finds Lestat and apologises to HIM but is unsuccessful. He warns him about the great conversion, and then attends his show, allowing himself to be briefly humiliated.
4) no babe, you’re a great journalist, i was distracted by you!! he accidentally lets slip that he loves Daniel. End scene.
5) he tells Daniel about Lestat and Gabriella, and also offers to teach Dan to walk in the sun.
6) Alex, his follower, tells his brother Larry he needs to rest. Armand then repeats this to Larry, causing him to kill himself. Why? I genuinely don’t know anymore.
7) Him and Daniel make a revenge porn youtube video about Lestat fucking his mom.
8) Him and Daniel behead Lestat and Louis while Alex watches (again, who knows why he’s there or what his role is?)
9) Armand puts Louis’ severed head on a pike, demands an apology, tortures him with the help of Fareed, reveals Regina has been a plant all along, and only stops when Louis disarms him with real honest compassion. Suddenly our assumptions that he cares about stopping the great conversion are wrong. He only wants- for some fucking reason- Louis to apologise to him. He doesn’t hurt Lestat, the actual conceivable adversary.
And that’s literally it. It feels like they were aiming for three different narratives and ended up just mixing them all together. Does he want to stop the great conversion? conceivably, but ep 7 reveals his ‘evil plan’ was to get a simple apology from Louis, so clearly it’s not his main prerogative. Is he starting a cult, children of darkness style? I guess, but why Larry and why Alex? Larry’s death had seemingly no impact on anyone but his brother who was already loyal. And the apology. Why in the world would Armand want an apology? We see from season 2 of IWTV that he’s fully aware their relationship is doomed, knows it is his own fault, and that guilt is eating him alive. He’s never been a schemer, a maker of big mastermind evil plans. he just allows people to blow up his life when he gets sick of the situations he’s in so he can play the victim. Hiring Regina to- what, talk to Louis a few times? Feels aimless and out of character.
And devils minions- in the books, Armand’s redemption- develops off screen with zero answers about how it happened, without natural progression, simply so Daniel can be his evil sidekick.
This season Armand was merely a plot device used to keep us watching to see what he’d do next, only to end the next episode on the same Armand cliffhanger. Seeing his arc written out like this really shows me how incredibly aimless his writing was. Don’t get me wrong, “you were twelve, twelve! scared, poor boy, Arun.” was a beautiful moment but it shouldn’t have been tortured out of Louis like that. It felt unearned. I’m altogether very unhappy with the writing.
They’re damn lucky Assad could make any shit dialogue look brilliant.
