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Hiii! I watched the finale with my friends today and the one thing that we were all a bit hung up on was - what did Armand want from Louis in terms of an apology. What exactly does he think Louis needs to apologize for? And in connection with that - was Fraudia always a means to get Louis to apologize to Armand? Or was she a way to get to him and torture him a bit and then as Armand’s apologies went no where she became a useful tool to hang over his head? Od love to hear your thoughts! I love crowd sourcing in the project that is “Understanding and Loving the Vampire Armand”

Also I love your blog and writing!! Okay byyeeee

Hi! Thank you for your kind words and for inviting me to yap about Armand! I'm very happy to do so always. I'm not a big analysis guy, so this won't be straight textual analysis but just my own view, which is informed by the show, to some extent the books (but less so because I've only read excerpts of TVA), by things Assad has said, and by my own personal viewpoint as someone who experienced sexual and emotional abuse as an adolescent (though not to the degree Armand did) and subsequent difficulty engaging in healthy relationships as an adult. I apologize in advance for not hunting down sources for interviews, I just don't know where I would even begin.

Please note: I think analyzing the reality of Armand's relationship with Marius is beyond my scope here, and I wouldn't want to do it without first reading TVA anyway, so I'll mostly be focusing on Armand's subjective experience.

While Armand is stuck physically in the body of a 27 year old by vampirism, he is stuck emotionally in adolescence by trauma (Assad has alluded to this as well). Sold by his parents (or led to believe he was), so horribly abused in the brothel that he stopped talking and can't be sure of his own name, he was then rescued by an adoptive father whom he loved deeply. With Marius, he experienced joy and safety for the first time in his memory. Then, all too soon, he had that snatched away from him by The Children of Satan, who told him that the only life of joy he'd ever known was immoral and wrong and tortured him until he renounced it.

Armand is able to acknowledge some of the harm done to him by Marius, but he has never been able to let go of that period of time as the happiest of his life, the time he felt safest and most loved. It was also his adolescence, and a period of extreme emotional volatility, and he grew up very quickly in many ways even while experiencing the emotional reality of a traumatized child— the sexual aspect of his relationship with Marius, running Marius's household when Marius was off tending to Those Who Must Be Kept, and drinking an awful lot.

Armand's sense of self is fractured. To survive the brothel required one version of himself, Marius another, The Children of Satan yet another, and on and on. He has survived through mirroring and masking to such an extent that he no longer knows who he is, and doubts that he even has a self at all ("a room without walls").

Now we come to his relationship with Louis. Already, before Louis's arrival, Armand had created a version of himself that was more artistic, metropolitan, philosophical, and debonair than he'd been while leading the Children of Satan. A lot of this is real, it's not like it's made up from whole cloth— Armand was an artistic prodigy as a child, and then found deep meaning in Marius's art and philosophy— but he's cherry picking which attributes of himself to present to those around him to keep himself safe. Louis, as it turns out, is attracted to a lot of these qualities. He himself is a very philosophical and debonair man, intelligent and creative, with artistic ambition and a desire to have his intelligence and vision recognized. The difference is that the cult requires Armand to lead and to wield power, and Louis offers to allow him to put that down, which is a huge relief to Armand. He never wanted to lead anyone, and the period of time when he was happiest was when he was in the role of student, under Marius's power.

When you don't know who you are, when everything hurts and you don't know how to make the pain stop, when you have been forced to perform competency and control even though inside you feel like a lost, hurt child, it is a huge relief for someone else to offer to take the reins. It's also terrifying.

So here are some things Armand might want Louis to apologize for, whether they make sense or not, whether he could articulate them or not:

Offering Armand the safety and comfort of being a child who needs guidance and then instead demanding the performance of competent adulthood from him for 77 years.

Is this fair to Louis? No! Of course not. It is the emotional reality of a damaged child.

Now, what Armand can articulate is that he feels as if he has "wasted nearly a century", and I think this ties into what Assad has said about Louis using Armand. Louis himself acknowledges that he used Armand to punish Lestat. Though of course Armand could have left at any time, he feels as if Louis has kept him trapped in a loveless relationship, offering him just enough affection and the performance of love to keep him there, all the while knowing that he will never love Armand, he's wasting Armand's time, and all of it is really about Lestat (who also rejected Armand. Ouch.).

Now again, is this fair? Is it fair for Armand to say, "I love how you withhold," and then get mad at Louis for withholding? Is it fair for him to have it laid out for him in front of his eyes that Louis is staying with him to punish Lestat ("this is your death, Lestat") and then get angry at Louis for wasting his time half a century later? No! But none of this is about what's fair. It's about a hurt, lost kid who is so desperate to be loved that he will cling to a man he knows is in love with someone else for decades so that he won't be alone.

Also, Armand has been really stifled by Louis's performance of morality. Louis really wants to think that he is a moral monster, that he's above it all, and he's not. And so for Armand to try for decades to be the person Louis wants him to be only to realize that Louis is a hypocrite who doesn't live up to his own standards pisses him off. Louis throws him into the wall and in response he wants to do something truly monstrous after keeping such careful control over himself for so long. Oh, you thought I was bad? Look how much worse I can be. (Side note: this is part of why his relationship with Daniel will be so freeing for him— because Daniel loves him for his monstrosity and Louis never did).

Daniel says, "Maitre only when hot or convenient," as if that's what Armand wants, but I don't believe that it is. When Armand says, "Are you asking or making me?" he wants Louis to make him. He's never going to just submit, that's not who he is. This is, after all, the kid who tore down Marius's door with an axe. He pushes back and acts out because he wants Louis to take control from him. None of this is a game to him. But to Louis, it is a game. To Louis, it's a sexual dynamic. Meanwhile, Armand wants his dad back. And insofar as it does permeate the rest of their relationship, they fall back into Louis using Armand and Armand performing to try to meet Louis's needs in a way that is transactional. It's sort of maddeningly close to being what Armand wants without actually providing him with any of the care that he's looking for out of the dynamic. Armand's emotional needs are consistently neglected.

Armand brushes off the boys in San Francisco, saying that Louis's guilt bound him to him and allowed him his time with Daniel, and I don't doubt that that's true, but I also don't think it's the whole story. Armand was angry with Louis about all the boys he was sleeping with and draining in San Francisco, at the very least because of the infidelity, but perhaps also because some of those boys were uncomfortably similar to Amadeo.

Armand is also angry with Louis for making him carry the weight of Claudia's death for all of eternity. He feels that he should be able to earn forgiveness for it. "A well tread bed of hot coals I blistered my feet on for 77 years." Again, Louis didn't deceive him about this. He told him from jump that he would never forgive him. But Armand still feels that it's not fair.

Oh, and, Armand lost his coven because of Louis. Louis was so angry that Armand would choose the coven over him, but in the end, he proved Armand right— Louis's love did not last as long as the safety of the coven had. Again, is that fair? No! If Armand had chosen Louis from the beginning and Claudia hadn't died, Armand and Louis's relationship might have lasted longer. Well, at least until Lestat showed up again. So maybe not. But they'll never know.

As for Fraudia, I'm not sure whether I think he had a whole plan in mind from jump or just knew he could use her in some way to hurt Louis. This has been a huge debate in fandom for ages— does Armand scheme, or is he basically just improv-ing his way through everything? I don't have as strong feelings about this as some people do. The whole thing struck me as the creativity and pettiness of a child with the resources of an adult. Armand thinks that if he apologizes, then Louis has to apologize. It's kid logic. But he obviously knew it wasn't going to go down that way because he had Regina waiting in the wings. And the whole Regina thing— he wants to hurt Louis as badly as he possibly can because he feels so hurt. I think if pressed, I would say I don't think he knew precisely what he was going to do with Regina when he set out to find a doppelganger. He certainly didn't know that Daniel's book was going to lead to him having cult followers. But it's been three years, and in that time he has been seethingly angry, and lonely, and lost, and instead of choosing to spend that time on building a new relationship with Daniel, he chose to spend it figuring out how to hurt Louis as much as possible and how to get from him the apology he feels he deserves.

One of the effects of the type of abuse Armand has suffered is a separation from your own self. When he says, "I told you I loved you, but did I?" I really believe he doesn't know. And when he talks about taking aesthetic pleasure in Louis's death, or in other ways distances himself from his own emotional investment in the relationship, I don't dismiss that entirely but I'm also not inclined to take it at face value. Framing yourself as a villain can feel empowering when you have been disempowered. He's saying all of this when he's already been rejected and he's feeling out of control. It's so much more comfortable for him to think "I successfully tricked you into helping me stay alive" than it is for him to think "I wanted to love you and I wanted you to love me and I failed." Because then he was in control. He can think of himself as a person who is in control. But he's not.

Of course, that invites the observation that Armand is not the one framing him as a villain— Lestat is. And the implications of that? Well, I imagine we'll learn more in season 4. If Armand were telling this story himself, it would probably look a little different.

Also, he's a theater kid. He's a director. He's super into projections and he loves Time Bandits and Blade Runner. It's not lost on him that this whole machete-beheading-butchershop-dead daughter doppelganger thing is rad as hell.

I will conclude with a poem I wrote many years ago, in the aftermath of my own abuse:

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get in the coffin, close the lid, and bang