actually im not worried about the future of devil's minion at all bc if they don't let armand and daniel kiss next season im 100% sure assad and eric will make their own nasty make out session tape in character and leak it to us. they'll probably invite luke brandon field into it too.
I had a dream I was talking to Assad Zaman about TVL and I asked him why Armand switched gears and spent the entire final episode torturing Louis instead of preventing the great conversion and he was like 'girl i don't know either'
Assad Zaman: There’s something about Armand when he’s not being observed that I took [from the books]. I think if you know the books you know that he’s… the specific alien quality about… when you’re in stasis, you’re almost on standby. Statuesque. You’re unable to emote or think anything because everything you do is shaped on either being obsessed with someone, manipulating someone, or trying to survive your trauma in someway. What do those people do when they’re not being observed? The way Anne Rice describes Armand, several times, is sort of this ethereal, alien quality that doesn’t quite feel like it’s… She called it childish, but I don’t see it as childish. I see it more as like an alien that’s unable to understand himself, his own needs[?], only able to play a part. So when there’s no one to see them, they kind of just go a little bit dead, soulless, that kind of thing. That’s something that I took on, tried to.
So the writers have finally addressed Lestat’s role in the trial by saying he wasn’t forced against his will. I don’t understand why we have to learn this information through supplemental interviews with the writers and cast. And since they have basically decided to not adapt any of the actual awful things Armand does to Lestat and Nicki and his 18th century coven from the book, why was Lestat so antagonist and cruel to Armand the whole season?? He also said he let Armand leave with Louis to punish them?? What is the point of this??
I don't want this buried in replies or reblogs, so I'm going with this:
Hannah being Jewish is not why her writing choices for Armand are being questioned. It's the matter of her past Zionist sympathies. And having seen the false conflation between Judaism and Zionism used to justify and obscure some of the worst modern crimes against humanity, I'm not accepting it. No one should.
Similarly, Rolin Jones' previous work on Weeds is being used to contextualise his portrayals of Armand, Louis, & Claudia. Salient critiques of that program include racist stereotyping & Zionist propaganda. There's no public information on whether Jones is Jewish, and it's irrelevant.
Why do people believe that Hannah may have residual Zionist sympathies?
Hannah Moscovitch, whose play East of Berlin examines the Holocaust’s legacy and is coming to Dublin, is not against gender quotas
East of Berlin, which opens at Project Arts Centre in a new production by Brinkmanship Theatre, was inspired by the time Moscovitch spent at a kibbutz in Israel when she was 18. "There were 30 young people, English and American Jews, and one [young man] whose grandfather had murdered Jews during the war. He was doing penance for his family's history, and his presence really stuck in my mind."
What's the problem with a kibbutz?
A major reason why Bernie Sanders' resistance to Zionism—or rather the 'Netanyahu government'—means little when confronting the settler colonial occupation, is his continued idealisation of the kibbutzim movement. This colonial practice—with its basis in Prussian expansion—and land theft movement operates under the guise of a communal utopia, because it offered a greater chance of assimilating newcomers & dispossessing Indigenous Palestinians. And in Hannah's kibbutz's case, native Syrians near the illegally occupied Golan Heights.
Labor Zionists tried to build a communal utopia. They created an oppressive form of ethnic nationalism instead.
The most prominent Jewish Human Rights body in Occupied Palestine, B'Tselem, has long documented the systemic land theft, going right back to the kibbutzim movement. Much like Birthright and the IDF, these collectives of Indigenous elimination are maintained by western foreigners' participation & settlement.
Why is it irresponsible to frame a brown, Muslim-coded character as a Nazi in the third year of a live-streamed genocide against Palestine's majority Muslim population?
Because likening Palestinians and the broader 'Muslim world' to the Nazis is one of the most enduring justifications for indiscriminate violence against them. Every genocidal society frames their victims as both their lessers and existential, inhuman threats that can only be handled through brute force—expulsion & extermination. It's why the Nazis utilised biological racism & called for 'racial hygiene.' It's how the international human rights ecosystem came to appropriate Slobodan Milosevic's idea of 'ethnic cleansing,' which he used to justify the genocide of Bosnian Muslims.
The Jewish far right has been calling Palestinians "Nazis" for almost 80 years, casting them as an irredeemable enemy in an eternal war.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stresses he never meant to claim an Islamic leader persuaded Adolf Hitler to adopt the Final Solut
There are ongoing genocides whose perpetrators relish images like this:
Storytelling comes with responsibilities. Moscovitch has publicly used her body to further Zionism, with no documented remorse over that act. As we're in the third year of the Palestinian genocide, Moscovitch's public stance is still one of unchallenged support. If she's not ready to change that, despite the United Nations finally labelling the Zionist-led genocide in Gaza, she at least needs to be more careful. That includes finding other mad scientists to reference when villainising brown Muslim characters; Mengele won't fly. It means ensuring that any story bearing your name & authority doesn't present a brown South Asian man as somehow untouched by Paris' Nazi occupation. How would he have achieved that besides either hiding or collaborating? And with that skin tone, no amount of collaboration would've saved him. If he thrived under such oppression, what would that make him?
I've waffled on, but Moscovitch is key to creating a product with reach. Whether deliberate or not, her position and power over this series' Muslim representation is cause for public scrutiny. We're all watching the same world events unfold. Her promotion gives her even less room for harm, deliberate or otherwise.
in an ideal world qotd will have an episode from khayman's perspective and it just randomly jump cuts to armand looking beautiful every 10 minutes or so
Finally done with my Fake-Rashid/Armand pin-up!! I've been super into editorial illustrations from the 1960s/70s at the moment, so I decided to play around with a very vibrant color palette :D (close-ups below!)