fuck reform uk

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.

Yet in the centuries of his long obedience, Armand kept two secrets to himself. These were his property, these secrets, more purely his than the coffin in which he locked himself by day, or the few amulets he wore. The first was that no matter how great his loneliness, or how long the search for brothers and sisters in whom he might find some comfort, he never worked the Dark Trick himself. He wouldn’t give that to Satan, no Child of Darkness made by him. And the other secret, which he kept from his followers for their sake, was simply the extent of his ever deepening despair.

Traditional mirror mazes are dark and creepy. This one is brightly lit, and colorful.

The triangular grid makes it that much more disorienting.

The pillars help to obscure the difference between the mirrors and the openings -- so it doesn't NEED to be dark.

The Indigenous people who farmed and hunted here (and still farm and hunt in what land they have been able to keep and reclaim) were able to grow miles of upon miles of crops with multiple harvests a year, encouraging this biodiversity by creating forest gardens with incredible amounts of food from staples like corn and squash to local fruits like pawpaws to European imports like apples alongside controlled burns which allowed fields and buffalo ranges to expand.

Nowadays my state is known almost exclusively for its fields of nothing but corn and soy beans. Driving through in between the comparatively small cities you'll see nothing but fields where the plethora of different trees and plants were chopped down mile by mile, the remaining wetlands drained and flattened, and the rich black soils robbed of their nutrients through decades upon decades of monocrop agriculture now preserved through the life blood of petrochemical fertilizers which destroy the surrounding environment.

This process was done mile by mile as the tens of thousands of Indigenous people were killed and displaced by settlers and the US army, the land measured and sold acre by acre to white settlers who raped the land as described, filling the pockets of wealthy land speculators (like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) who bought the land directly from the government in schemes so corrupt historians have dedicated entire careers to mapping out their dramas.