moon

PATREON

Daniel, you are here…?

just couldn’t stop thinking about this machete which Assad mentioned in the interview ahh

(Disclaimer: This is not me trying to fight with anyone, this is just my own analysis of Marius. He’s an extremely complex and difficult character and so I have a lot of thoughts about him. I don’t 100% hate or like Marius. But more importantly, I don’t make moral judgements about how OTHER people feel about Marius because at the end of the day these are fictional characters.)

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I think a big part of what I am going to call the Marius Problem (which I am not gonna take pains to describe here bc iykyk) is that Anne herself didn’t really seem to see a huge problem with him, and that affects his portrayal in the narrative.

There is of course the obvious way he treats Armand, and anyone who is familiar with Anne’s corpus of work knows that that relationship dynamic is something she revisits a lot and often in the context of erotica which is like a whole other bag of worms but…

The thing I feel like we don’t really talk about with Marius enough is his very Western Eurocentric view of the world. From a postcolonial perspective Marius’s philosophy is deeply unsettling. The way he polarizes the “east” and “west” and the modern and medieval, reason and superstition, are very insidious ways of defining things, as is his idolization of the Enlightenment, which was at its heart a positivist, Eurocentric, and deeply prejudiced school of thought which managed to convince the world that social constructions like race and gender were “scientific” in nature.

Marius is basically the embodiment of imperialism, not because he’s some malicious Big Brother twirling his moustache but because he is a very powerful, very privileged, and deeply misguided man who is takes his experience of the world as a universal truth, and who mistakes his own subjective feelings and desires for objective morality.

One of his greatest crimes against Armand that no one talks about is that he tries to force him to conform to a culture that goes against Armand’s own nature and history, and discounts Armand’s view of the world as fundamentally flawed and wrong just because it doesn’t align with his. In the book the conflict of ideologies is between classical humanism (Marius) and Eastern Orthodoxy and mysticism (Armand). In QotD, Marius even laments his failure to “perfect” Armand. Due to the changes made to Armand’s character in the show, I imagine the dissonance will be even more intense and the suppression of Armand’s selfhood will feel even more disturbing, because it will register on the level of race as well as other forms of identity.

But regardless, the most difficult part of this is that Marius is not doing this out of malice. Marius genuinely thinks he’s doing the right thing. He thinks he’s helping Armand. He thinks he is liberating the subaltern subject from the dark shadows of superstition and oppression. He thinks he is educating a being who must not know his own self and his own rights because he is fundamentally ignorant. He does not realize that what he is trying to do is efface the Other and absorb it into himself. And he eventually abandons Armand, in part, I think, because of his failure to succeed at this mission, and so facing Armand means facing the Other in himself which he wishes to repress to be the ideal enlightened western man. Marius is not even aware of his own need to dominate.

(But please please remember that Marius’s need to dominate is not likewise reflected by a need to be subjugated in Armand. Armand is equally able to move in spheres of dominance as well as submission because Armand does understand much of what Marius does not about the nature of power. Marius does not have this kind of mobility.)

This is at the heart of imperial discourse. This is what gives it momentum, what immortalizes it— the idea that we (the West) occupy some moral high ground from which we can liberate and speak for the subaltern subjects which we ourselves have locked into oppression and victimhood.

And sadly, I don’t think Anne wrote all this into the books consciously. She herself said in an interview that her own philosophy of the world aligns more with Marius’s than with Armand’s, and I think that is part of why Marius is a fundamentally sympathetic character. She made him that way. And I don’t necessarily blame her for it because these kinds of discourses are epistemological and extremely tricky to parse out. Power is that which we cannot name. So yeah, I don’t think Anne was intentional or malicious in it either.

And I don’t think all of us who look at Marius and probably feel somewhere deep down to be like him, to have his power, are doing it because of a fundamental flaw in their humanity or their politics. It’s a flaw in the epistemological system, and I don’t think it’s a flaw anyone can really see unless they’re the Armands in that equation, or they’ve been extensively trained to see it.

And before anyone gets defensive, this is not an attack on anyone or a criticism of any individual. It is a criticism of a system of knowledge and knowing which we likely cannot escape. And it is also a call for people to look at this story differently than they might have before. A call for lovers of Marius to try to begin to understand things from Armand’s perspective, and a call for lovers of Armand to remember that he is far more than just a victim, and that it would be very dangerous and reductive and harmful to his existence as an autonomous subject to understand him in that way. And if you feel the same as I do about these things, please talk about it, don’t get stuck in the surface level dynamics of the Armand/Marius relationship.

short answer? kind of yes. people rationalizing away/getting upset/dooming over assad's "i'm going to break you" comments, i'm totally with you that that's not the whole story, but i also think it's 1000% correct and in character. that said, DONT WORRY. devil's minion is not in danger

i've actually been meaning to talk about this and now i have the perfect opportunity! especially since assad's comments support where i've always thought armand's head was at with daniel's turning :)

i've spoken at length as recently as yesterday about the domestic side of daniel and armand's relationship, and i really do believe with my entire heart that they are good for each other and that their relationship will eventually stabilize. that said, i've also talked about how rocky the road to getting there is. this is where many of my personal gripes about people sanitizing the dm relationship come in. armand is a fucking mess. he's extraordinarily traumatized. he has been systematically stripped of any opportunity to learn how to love and be loved. he has extreme, largely unaddressed cptsd, which traps your brain in a state of hyperarousal. from armand's perspective, on a subconscious level, every bad thing that has ever happened to him is still happening. he's stuck. this is also the essence of the anne rice vampirism/trauma allegory. my girl is crazy! i say this with all the love and empathy in my heart because i am unfortunately also crazy lol

these things set armand up for failure when he approaches his relationships, and they strip him of any ability to feel secure in literally any situation. think about how cloudy your head gets when you're completely overwhelmed by fear. that's his default decision making state! the idea that it's fundamentally unsafe to exercise his autonomy or try to address his own needs has been literally tortured into him over the years and so, because those things are unavoidable parts of life, the perceived danger of approaching them can make armand impulsive and childish at times. this isn't even touching his insanely warped world view and complete lack identity, or the fact that pretty much every survival strategy he's had to learn over the past 500 years ranges from unhelpful to completely antithetical to building a stable, loving, egalitarian partnership. again, my girl is crazy. devils minion may be sweet and loving and domestic, but it will never be sustainable until some of these issues start getting excavated and addressed, and holy shit is that an infected, festering wound. excavation is going to hurt like hell.

armand's refusal to make another vampire sits at the very center of that wound, and i think his revulsion at the thought of turning anyone goes even deeper than most people realize. not only is it the single act of autonomy he's been able to maintain for the past 500 years, not only does he think that anyone he could turn would come to hate and leave him, he really truly does believe that it's the worst thing that can be done to another person.

the name of the game when it comes to armand is repression. he's a character who hides everything from himself. the weight of everything that's been done to him is unendurable, so he doesn't endure it. he seals it behind a brick wall inside of himself and tries so so desperately hard to forget it's there, but it's always going to leak through the cracks. even worse, all these things that he won't let himself think or feel mutate and metastasize inside him while he refuses to look at them. in particular, armand still loves marius, and he still doesn't really have the tools to understand what's been done to him. marius also deliberately cuts him off at the pass in tva by outright telling him he might not remember their relationship in a good light later in life and making him promise to remember that they were in love and armand chose their relationship (from page 69-70 in the mass market paperpack, i just spent twenty years trying to find it):

"—and when you think back on this time, when in half-sleep at night you remember me as your eyes close on your pillow, these moments might seem corrupt and most strange. They'll seem like sorcery and the antics of the mad, and this warm place might become the lost chamber of dark secrets and this might bring you pain." "I won't go." "Remember then that it was love," he said. "That this indeed was the school of love in which you healed your wounds..."

what that amounts to is that all the violation armand feels from years of grooming and sexual abuse, all the fear and pain he won't allow himself to access from his time with marius, gets sublimated into his feelings about his own turning. the mostly-buried resentment he feels toward marius is resentment over condemning him to this horrible life as a vampire, surely. and surely, because amadeo wanted so badly to be a vampire and to be with marius and now he's so desperately miserable, it's an impossible thing for anyone to consent to. put that all together and armand basically ends up with this subconscious conflation of rape and vampire turning, which really just manifests as an overwhelming revulsion toward the idea of turning anyone. and the thing about armand is that he's terrified to his core of hurting the people he loves the same way he was hurt, so he is completely repelled by the idea of turning daniel in a way he hasn't truly examined and can't put language to.

at the end of 2.08, armand is drowning in a super volatile and complicated sea of emotion. many many people—from devils minion truthers saying armand turned daniel out of love to tv only fans thinking it was uncomplicated spite—don't tend to take into account just how messy and fucked up and contradictory armand's feelings in that moment were. yes, armand loves daniel and is terrified of the prospect of watching him die and living in a world without him. armand also can't stand the thought of being alone and hardcore panics when louis leaves. and whose fault is that? daniel's. daniel, who armand made the biggest sacrifice of his life for. daniel, who armand broke his own heart setting free, and when he did it he went crawling back to louis, who is a source of stability and who he does love, albeit in an incredibly self-serving way. and now daniel comes back just to destroy the one life raft armand was clinging to in his absence. how dare he? how dare he do that to armand, who he always claimed to love? despite i think partially (subconsciously, again) approaching the interview as an opportunity for daniel to set him free from his marriage, armand is feeling deeply, deeply betrayed, and i think that's the thing that pushes him over the edge into turning daniel. besides, daniel hates him now. daniel sees him and knows how awful and disgusting and unworthy he is and he showed louis too and so it doesn't matter if he hates him a little more. it's all over. armand has completely and totally lost both louis and daniel. he's at rock fucking bottom in that moment and doesn't think he has anything else to lose.

i want to stress again that in absolutely no world is armand sitting there and actually thinking through any of this. no, armand is hit with all of these feelings at once like a sixteen car pileup and then he acts with that same fear-driven impulse we discussed above. while i don't think there's a world in which armand would have been able to let daniel die, i also don't think he had come to terms with turning him yet and daniel isn't dying as imminently as he was in qotd, so spite/resentment/betrayal is an important part of tipping armand into action in the tv show. and then after that, because turning someone is so monstrous to armand, because he lashed out and did the unforgivable to daniel, i imagine he is pretty much instantly overwhelmed by a crippling degree of guilt and shame, so he runs away. and then stays gone. because he just did the worst thing imaginable to the person he loves the most, and because daniel surely hates him, and because all is completely and entirely lost.