Weird at last, weird at last.

Long time lurker, trying out this blogging thing. She/her. Multi fandom, with random obsessions that come and go. This will, however, always be a Martha Jones stan account. My fic on A03

[nicolodigenovas]

I waited hoping to find someone else assembling a comprehensive post because I did not want to doxx myself, but a few days ago on the 19th July 2026, the police killed Abderrahim Fakir, a 42 year old Moroccan-born man who was still fighting to get his Italian citizenship despite living in Italy since he was seven years old. This happened in the city of Bologna in northern Italy.

Fakir was forcibly restrained by two police officers after some people called the police saying he was screaming and kicking at a door, videos of his last moments show him shouting asking for help, saying he could not breathe, while members of the Italian Red Cross observing the scene did not intervene. Protests have erupted in the city, across all internet platforms Italians are proving to be more divided than ever between those who demand justice and others who callously say they're happy it's 'one less [criminal, by which they mean immigrant]'. This is one of the first cases where the new 'Security Decree' brought into law by our far right government this year comes into action, shielding the officers involved. In the case of Abderrahim Fakir's death, Bologna prosecutors have entered the two police officers and four emergency workers into the register required by the Security Decree that came into force in April. This is a "preliminary annotation" that allows for verification of whether their behavior was justified, without immediately placing them under investigation.

It is particularly bitter how this awful death comes around the 25th anniversary of the Genova G8, few years after the end of the long legal battle brought forward by the family of Stefano Cucchi, who was brutally murdered while in question by carabinieri in 2009. Matteo Salvini, our ever despicable Deputy Prime Minister of Italy and Minister of Infrastructure and Transport, and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni predictably side with the law enforcers and are ready to reduce Fakir to someone he wasn't. Fakir's family members have bravely spoken about him during protests, mourning the loss of a kind uncle and man, and demand justice. I am sorry if this post isn't the most well-written, I have tried my best and am open to edits if there are imperfections. I just hate to see so little coverage about this.

Italy protests: Dozens hurt in Bologna after man dies while being restrained by police

Thousands of people took to the streets demanding justice for a Moroccan-born man who died on Sunday.

[platoapproved]

there really is nothing like spending a quiet morning reading fanfiction to make you feel in awe of the creativity of others. i feel so lucky that so many different people have spent their precious time and effort and emotion on writing fics just for the joy of it. i am also lucky they were brave and generous enough to put those fics online and share them with others. i really am having one of those 'realizing the unique beauty of something completely mundane in your life that most days you take for granted' moments.

[cosmic-day]

List 10 favourite characters from 10 different fandoms, then tag ten people.

Tagged by: @androidtrashfire - thanks for the tag! I love these games, even if picking only ten characters only is haard. But here's the ten I would pick today:

Martha Jones (Doctor Who)

Armand (Interview With The Vampire)

Abed Nadir (Community)

Britta Perry (Community)

Chidi Anagonye (The Good Place)

Rebecca Bunch (Crazy Ex Girlfriend)

Naomi Nagata (The Expanse)

Parker (Leverage)

Kim Wexler (Better Call Saul)

Every single character in Black Sails (this is cheating and I don't care)

Pretty sure this list says a lot about me and probably none of it is good but anyway.

Tagging anyone else who feels like playing: @snequanimity @irenthel @hollowwaveremnant @nightislands @thebookworminthetardis @awindylife @youremyonlyhope no pressure obvously!

[ilynpilled]

[ilynpilled]

fun little malware ridden true finale conspiracy

[ilynpilled]

[ilynpilled]

now lets not rewrite history

[hightechzombie]

To be fair, they did successfully pressure Artur Conan Doyle into resurrecting Sherlock Holmes. You just have to pick easily influenceable solo authors.

[sunflowerdigs]

Dickens was also pressured into writing a second ending to Great Expectations because the ecpected ship didn't happen. I'm not even kidding, lol.

[catasters]

[claudiadpdl]

and if i said those racist haters made their random boring oc enzo just so that the human lestat apologized to didn't have to be miss lily.....................

[zer0expektation]

maybe this is just me as I shake armand around in my mind but I dont particularly love how they used "rest" in the third season? like its not just that it was used a lot, it was used a lot last season too, its just,, it feels like it was made out to be his superpower that makes people kill themselves whenever he wants? which is. not?? how it was Ever used last season. if anything, the one thing it did was make people pass out or force them to relax physically and mentally. even in THE rest scene with danny in San Francisco, its never a "kill yourself" thing, its a "be calm and hold onto that feeling as death approaches" much like santiago's "no pain" bit. whyyy did it become his suicide-superpower? why make something so simple and in moments beautiful so,,, idk, silly? lame? why take "you will feel no fear and no pain as I bring you death" turn into "lemme mind-trick you into suicide rq :D"

[depsidase]

[theaceofwords]

It's called the Global Justice Report, it is here. This is an actionable plan which can be sent to legislators and demanded of political parties. We could save the world within our lifetimes.

It has always been possible. It is still possible.

[crithir]

The horror-hilarity of Armand who said “they went mad and ended themselves” hunting his defected coven members down and shoving them into a fire with a wooden plank? Nah. Armand chopping Nicki’s hands off and then giving them back and then assisting his suicide? Pfftt. Armand punting Lestat off a tower and shattering every bone in his body because he had the audacity to come around begging for his blood after rejecting his companionship? Yawn. Armand slaughtering fledgling vampires left and right because he thinks they’re vermin? Meh.

Why would we include any of this book-canon and perfectly in character “gremlin” behavior when we could instead do racist torture porn and abuse apologia, character assassinate Armand, and narratively punish Louis because he “needs to be humbled” for some incomprehensible reason and “got off too easy” the last times he was abused and lynched? Three birds one stone, this is the gothic vampire horror show and they’re all monsters who do bad things, you just don’t get it you media illiterate dumbass! Lestat never did anything that was actually his fault btw, in fact he never really did anything at all. This is peak TV.

[angrybubbles]

Is it not weird that they haven’t mentioned marius’ grooming of armand once? or his pimping out armand? or his orientalism? His racism? Any time armand’s trauma is mentioned it’s about his time in the brothel. They could make nazi jokes about a brown former slave but nothing about his slave owner? They couldn’t even show any parallels between lestat’s relationship with gabriella and armand’s relationship with marius?

I don't think we need to use "weird" when "erasure" is the better word. The adaption erased Armand from Lestat's narrative, giving absolutely no room to have that kind of commentary. It was an adaption choice to do so.

The devastating issue with all of this, is by choosing to erase Armand fro, Lestat's story, which he was an INTEGRAL part, they avoided the potential to have anything interesting to say about racism. Okay, make Lestat goofy happy weird, and then have Armand be the bucket of cold water, because he is a reminder that no, everything is not okay goofy happy weird.

I wouldn't have liked it, but it could have said something about Armand, and the white male lead facing his narrative mirror who doesn't get the luxury of whiteness and carefree perspectives.

And instead. They did not. They made a choice to not adapt that.

Which is erasure, because TVL had space for Armand to exist in its pages. You can't tell a good story about Lestat without his narrative foil, which is Armand. If they had adapted the book, they would have had a chance to capture Lestat and Gabrielle's racism and orientalism they would have seen Armand with, and then contrast it with Lestat's "failures" in the present day, because hey we know that would be pretty fucked up now. They purposefully erased Armand from Lestat's story, so that they wouldn't have to. I can only make a guess, with all the other strange and upsetting framing choices they made this season, that it was racially motivated.

All I can say, is that I am so so so glad that we had 2x04 and 2x05, because the ways Armand's history is addressed in those episodes, on TOP of how well utilized the Loumand fight was in letting Armand react to insults to his character, lets us have these conversations within the realm of a canon that gives a fuck about the story its telling. Whoever made the 2x05 loumand fight decisions shall be reincarnated as a lotus flower.

[lakemojave]

Not gonna put this tagger on blast for this but like. No it didn't...?

[lakemojave]

Like i know the effects of long covid are well documented but this is like saying black mold is the reason jk rowling is a transmisogynist. There Are Multiple Interlocking Factors.

[lakemojave]

I do think we're in the midst of a media literacy crisis but I attribute that more to the explosion of digital media, a broad devaluing of the arts, enshittification, the creep of capitalism on our work-life balance, and the rise of pseudo intellectual tastemakers and influencers. And yes, the covid lockdown certainly allowed these elements to proliferate and evolve at a higher rate, but all this was going on even before 2020. Covid did not magically make us all stupid and reactionary, we were heading this way already.

[kizunarae]

someone needs to ask rolin jones at the sdcc panel what the writers were thinking when they made Armand the twist for a THIRD time. that's a fundamentally boring and flawed writing choice and I don't see how it's defensible on the most basic level.

ESPECIALLY in a season we keep hearing is all about Lestat! The "twist" and reveal had nothing to do with Lestat!

[thearmandthinker]

my main hot take that has come from tvl is, really, that people who don't understand polyamory AND queerness should not be writing about vampires.

[yixiaosuige]

ALSO what was the point of jarda????????????? nothing he did mattered and he disappeared basically right after he and gabriella had sex. like. did the writers literally decide to create this character solely to make gabriella sleep with lestat's doppleganger and really hammer into the viewer's head her obsession with him??????????????????????

[lesbiansidney]

the reason i need the weirdo armand who blends drinks based on nothing but colour and feeds garbage disposals and makes weird home movies in the show is because as much as i talk about armand and the cycles of amadeo and marius they're like...the ultimate proof that he is not what anyone has tried to make him. he's not an eternal sex slave or child bride or cult leader or abusive figure. he tries to be all these things because they're how he experienced the world in his most formative years but at the end of the day he has a big heart and he wants to be loved and he wants to experience the world as it is and he wants to watch the same movie over and over again and he wants to protect those he cares about and he wants to ride jet skis and he wants to make a human boy coffee in the mornings and he wants to build a terrible consumerist island and and he wants to be a good father and

[androidtrashfire]

#in a way that makes him look unrealistically stupid

No please talk about it when you get the chance. So many things fall on him as a scapegoat in order to push the narrative forward. Not to mention so many production changes that fall on him too and make him seem maliciously lying. The scars and the hair. Mentioning Lestat had a stutter… the Gabriella picture. For how deliberate they are with their artwork in the background they could’ve done a better job….. If it was planned out from the start we would’ve seen Louis and/or Claudia mention/point out the picture at least once, and the weight of Lestat hanging her picture there even though she’s not dead would be felt so much more

Hey anon, sorry for another late answer! I'm probably not firing on all cylinders; I'm getting a little sleepy! But I do think Louis has borne the narrative brunt of any production issue inconsistencies, 100% agreed.

It becomes a real (in retrospect very predictable) problem, contributing to a racist framing of the text. Whenever Louis doesn't remember something accurately on purpose, Louis is at fault. Okay, sure.

Then, whenever the narrative wants to make a big change in favor of Lestat in particular being shown as less culpable and more innocent? Well. Louis's narrative gets questioned or overwritten again for that stuff, too. Obviously a much bigger problem.

But salt in the wound? Anytime there's a small issue or change in the production, for some reason the narrative feels this bizarre pathological need to address it... and almost always clunkily. And usually by saying Louis doesn't remember important details.

:/

I think the thing about this sort of unreliable narrator story is that, for viewers who like it/are invested in it, small little details like the hair length or the scars or whatever... A smart audience will know those aren't important details to fixate on, to begin with. If we can accept an entirely new actor for Claudia - if we can suspend our disbelief for that? We can deal with characters having slightly different hair lengths between seasons. Lol. And the viewers who fixate on that like... they're new. Or not very good at following what a narrative tells us is important to pay attention to. It's fine.

But no. Instead the writers MUST address it, either in real time or after the fact. And always with the implication that Louis wasn't very good at details, comparatively. Or that he was maliciously holding things back (even if there were things that would have never been relevant to his story. Like the scars.)

Really though the thing I always come back to, that makes Louis look unrealistically incurious is the s2 finale. With the reveal of the script, + Daniel's "Armand didn't save you, Lestat did!"

There were always a bunch of unresolved questions and problems left hanging after those reveals which... really recontextualized very little, either doylistically or watsonianly. From a doylistic perspective, there's a whole other conversation to be had, but watsonianly?

I dunno. Normal people would have like. A dozen immediate follow-up questions. To make sure they fully understand what exactly those facts actually IMPLIED.

Not Louis, though, he's on a plane and off to see Lestat to both thank him and apologize to him and forgive him for [file not found, because it's unclear what Lestat himself was and wasn't culpable for after the Dubai reveals].

The only in-universe explanation we have to fall back on is that "love makes [Louis] stupid!" Which is a good piece of character writing, actually. But sometimes... mmm, sometimes the funny joke about Louis being incurious goes so far. Especially in s3.

It becomes less a watsonian character trait, and more a doylistic convenience. Useful for glossing over whatever the writers don't really want to have to take responsibility for

[userarmand]

louis + grounding armand when he starts to spiral

2.04 / 2.06 / 2.05