swag lord

some more iwtv pieces!

episode 3: armand goes to an AA meeting-- but we don't know why he's there.

episode 4: armand is sponsoring alex-- again we don't know why, but alex sees him as a god. armand goes to apologize to lestat and daniel. lestat rejects the apology entirely, humiliates him in front of an audience. daniel rejects it initially, though he does go to find armand after the concert.

episode 5: armand meets with daniel again, trying desperately to make himself understood. they reconcile.

episode 6: armand and daniel decapitate louis and lestat, seemingly out of nowhere

now, episode 7:

finally it's explained why armand went to AA-- to find susceptible followers. remember he found daniel, an addict, 50 years ago-- i like to think that past devil's minion will be canon, so armand has had an addict as a devotee before.

armand gives louis his apology, and forces louis to either apologize, or die. this clarifies for us why he did the apology tour-- as a last chance for daniel and lestat to repent. daniel succeeded (and armand obv was biased by love), lestat failed. since lestat already failed, daniel got to keep his head. since louis hadn't been put through the apology yet, armand kept his head to interrogate it.

i really see this whole scene as an excellent continuation of armand's character! what's important is that he sees himself as the one wronged. this is a consistent character trait of his. this is why he gives everyone a chance to apologize. if they can make amends, they can keep their lives. in the end, what saves louis? the acknowledgement of armand's traumatic past, what he needed from a lover to heal from that, and all the ways that louis was unable to provide that healing.

once louis acknowledges armand as the victim, he's allowed to live.

i feel like these lines express that so well. armand doesn’t torture louis because of the cheating, or because he was in love with lestat, or because of the great laws or the paris coven.

armand’s ultimate grievance is that louis forced him to spend 77 years begging for absolution. he wants louis to apologise for the century he ‘wasted’ with louis as ‘his claudia’. essentially, louis denied armand the role of victim.

“that is not nothing. that deserves amends.”

that’s why armand only spares louis once he directly acknowledges what happened to him as a child. after 77 years of “we didn’t talk about it much”, he’s only satisfied once louis has proven that he sees him as the vulnerable, victimised child that he sees in himself. (LOUIS IS SO KIND)

hey guys? Do we maybe think that Armand's tit-for-tat mentality, and the way he's been tallying up his and everyone else's sins against each other is a problem? Is it maybe possible that Louis managing to find empathy for Armand in the face of the monstrosity being done to him, and that radical act of kindness and honesty (about the ways he unintentionally hurt Armand) moving Armand so much that it nearly breaks him, is idk a major theme of this whole season?

you know, sorta like how Lestat was holding onto his feelings of betrayal about the book, and all it did to serve him was make him absolutely miserable and lonely and push him into the arms of someone actively harming him. And how it was only after he let that go, and helped Louis even though he still thought that Louis didn't give a shit about him, that they were able to connect again and be happier than we've ever seen them.

Or like how Louis was able to look past his initial feelings of revulsion and betrayal about the Sophia lie, and offered comfort and a space to speak honestly, and how that granted him a deeper understanding of Lestat, and ultimately strengthened their bond.

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.