Neon

I don't think when he went looking for someone who looked like Claudia he'd really mapped the rest of it out yet other than finding the tool that he could use to hurt Louis the most. Everything after that, I think included a lot of improvisation. And I think he was curious to see how Louis would react and was happy to keep escalating things with him and Regina for that reason. It was only when Louis stopped seeing Regina that Armand made his move.

And collecting cult followers might not seem like a thing he'd do because initially he was forced to lead them, but he's having a crisis of identity on so many different levels. It makes sense to me that he'd fall back into the familiar, no matter what he means to do with them.

Louis swept into his home city, demanded special treatment and to be exempt from coven rules even though Armand already knew he was a vampire killer and was cutting him slack, then put the coven in direct danger of exposure while absolutely refusing any chance to get the fuck out or join the coven that Armand was offering him, while offering him literally 0 verbal affection, very little physical affection, and not even CONFIRMING that they were in a relationship, WHILE evoking his half-remembered real name that he associates with his years as a child slave in a brothel INTO A BDSM DYNAMIC, THEN when Armand was like "Ok, my coven is gonna mutiny if I don't kill you so I'll have to kill you" he proceeded to burn his life's work down and kill 12/13 people Armand had spend the past 200 years with, THEN he explicitly dragged Armand along in a loveless relationship for 77 years JUST TO SPITE LESTAT, WHILE cheating on him more than 200+ times over and over and over

And to be clear those diverse voices shouldn't just be there to write for Louis. They should be there to contribute to entirety of the plot just like Anusree Roy should absolutely be back as a voice to add authenticity to Armand while also getting to write about stuff that has nothing to do with him as she did this season.

That said: I do think other criticism about the structure, plotting, and pacing is less to do with objectively bad writing vs. what people got compared to what people thought they were going to get compared to what they wanted to get.

It sucks when that happens. It sucks when you have expectations for a show and that's not what you get. It sucks when you think you could do better. It sucks when you have scenes from a book that you really want to see and it's decided by other people that isn't something they want to focus on. It does not inherently make the writing bad.

Most importantly, beyond that, it doesn't make Rolin Jones evil. It doesn't make Hannah Moscovitch evil. It doesn't make Daniel Hart evil. It doesn't make Ryan Kattner evil. It doesn't make Kevin Hanna, Anusree Roy, or Jonathan Ceniceroz evil. It might make them writers you don't enjoy. Cool! I have loads of those. It might mean the show is made by people you don't enjoy - fair. It happens.

But I implore you to temper your language. Some people are going WAY too far in calling for firings, violence, weird parasocial stuff in real life that is volatile and dangerous. Whatever you think that's going to achieve, it's not going to do it. At best, AMC decides it's not worth the hassle and cancels the show. At worst, someone gets really, really hurt.