Armand told the truth

Rolin Jones and the wonderful writers do not hate Armand. They’re not trying to insult his fans. They’re certainly not trying to insult Assad. They’re grown adults. They are working professionals. They also like Armand as a character and they very obviously like Assad. They wrote a quick little scene referencing the fact that he doesn’t mind how people pronounce his name and that’s it. It was a nice scene.

It’s easy to view these scenes where characters who have every reason to dislike Armand insult him as the writers secretly hating him when you yourself hate him and his fans and you can’t separate fandom drama from the actual show. But it’s childish and frankly pretty embarrassing to insist that the crew think the same. It would be even more embarrassing for them to actually behave that way, and if you think it wouldn’t also negatively affect Assad then you are being utterly illogical. He has to go to work on a set where the writers don’t care about his character and don’t think he’s important and you don’t see an issue with that? The subtext of these sorts of assertions are… well I don’t think calling them microaggressions is accurate anymore. I think they’re pretty blatant.

It would be like insisting the writers hate Lestat because of all the jokes they’ve made about Armand being a more popular in-universe character, except without the racist undertones. That’s clearly not the case. Please take some time away from the internet. These are real people and they don’t care about your bizarre grudges. They’re trying to honour Anne’s work and Armand is, unfortunately for you, a huge part of that.

I want him dead and yet feel oddly (and preemptively) protective of him.

On one end, we have the AI-generating faux-intellectuals who victim blame Armand and think real-life victims of pederasty could consent just because it was legal at the time. On the other, we’re going to have people who think you can’t even speak positively about what he brings to the story without it being viewed as a moral failing.