To The World

// D x 27 x INFJ x He+They // Currently reading: Capital Vol 1-3 K. Marx//Girl With the Dragon Tattoo S. Larsson

[dxxtruction]

Shop gallery quality art prints by Drew Bryan.

My print store is live!

[snequanimity]

i had to come back to put together a few things i keep thinking about:

they already associated armand with islam via him praying as fake rashid

they conflated armand with assad, a british bangladeshi muslim (as far as i know), by referring to him as a french bengali in the show when that had nothing to do with what we previously knew about the character

armand is assisted in torturing louis by fareed, presumably supposed to be muslim

louis is beheaded and armand is using livestreaming - reminiscent of videos used of hostages beheaded by terrorist groups in west asia

armand is wearing a metal bangle reminiscent of the one sikhs wear

armand is wearing a vaguely military-looking shirt even though this is very unlike his normal taste

all this is saying to me that theyre just jumbling together anything that says to them brown person terrorist muslim torturer insane fanatic

then theres the big boss song

lyrics about armand perpetrating executions (never mind he got taught that in rome - if hes doing eugenics they are in fact catholic tinged eugenics) and stating its his decision alone who dies (ignoring the involvement of white characters)

big SS on the cd cover blatantly associating him with nazis

daniel calls him dr mengele - a nazi who tortured ppl by experimenting on them

armand and fareed desecrate a kosher space by spilling human blood in the butchers shop

so its not exactly a coherent framing but i think its still a framing

then theres the fact that his csa history, after being the subject of mockery, is now brought up seriously, at long last, in this context! what is that telling us? especially since so much focus has been given to lestat over an abuse story they made up from whole cloth.

but lestat was abused by a woman. armand, we are constantly told, was a catamite. hes a twink bottom. he was a limp, passive ragdoll for sale. his daddy groomed him into a little bitch. hes emasculated, a beige pillow, his sexual performance is so-so, hes desperate and needy, hes a pussy and a betaboi. in short, hes too gay, not lestats ideal of a masculine bisexual man. like this is some kind of corruption of character, being the receptive partner in anal sex

what the fuck are they doing here. hes a nazi, and also a brown terrorist, and also a 'passive' homosexual. what the actual fuck are they doing. they chose his indian background for him and have done nothing with it except racism.

anyway im off again. as soon as the conversations started being more about 'how dare armand be cruel to louis' instead of 'how dare the writers do this to the characters and the viewers' it felt like we slipped off the track you know?

this show, once, seemed like it wanted to be conscious of race and sexuality and the intersections of different identities and now look at what its doing. jesus fucking christ. its antiblackness and islamophobia, anti asian and queerphobic and homophobic sentiment all rolled together, like it was designed to pit different segments of the audience against each other. a known far right tactic against the left! the only question is whether anyone drove this deliberately or whether they fell into it through prejudice and ignorance of their own blind spots. one thing is clearly deliberate though - they knew in the past theyd told us armand perpetrated the trial out of fear and insecurity, and people still hated him. in tvl they told us he wasnt just willing but having a good time. they made the brown abuse survivor a happy, gleeful torturer of black people.

[userarmand]

Put your camera away, my American friend. Be one with us.

[whooshsoohw]

Listen, Armand is my favorite character, so I'm obviously biased toward him. I've always thought Louis was pretty shitty to Armand in a lot of ways, and it made sense to me that Armand would be angry about that. But I never thought Louis really owed him anything considering how much more Armand hurt Louis.

So to me it's wild that, judging from the interviews, the writers genuinely seemed to think that during the torture scene, people would sympathize with Armand and the pain his relationship with Louis caused him, and recognize that he had a point in what he was demanding. Like maybe don't frame that around torture if that's the reaction you were hoping for?

You invalidate almost every discussion that could be had about the ways Louis hurt Armand if you make Armand that directly and furiously violent toward him. And that's not even taking into account that, even before that, the concept of Louis somehow owing Armand an apology was kind of absurd. But you could have made it work before the torture scene, to show how gracious Louis was and how much their 77 years together did matter, even if they were bad. You still could have written that in a compelling way if you'd removed the violence.

Like not even the most anti-Louis, pro-Armand fics go to those lengths to brutalize Louis over the ways he hurt Armand. At most, they usually have Louis acknowledge that he did hurt Armand in some ways and express genuine regret for it, and that's enough.

On top of that, this new brutal event kind of ruins Season 2 for me. Before, you could still look at Armand's side of things and understand where he was coming from. Now it's much easier to walk away thinking he's just a psychopath and maybe always was. The writers have kept insisting (even after this torture scene!) that he's not a one-dimensional cartoon villain, but they've made every effort to make him come across that way.

Honestly, I feel like the people who got lost in "the aesthetic pleasure" of making Armand gremlin out were the writers themselves. They didn't stop to think about what they were actually communicating about these characters and their relationship by presenting Armand's violence in such a graphic, gory, calculated way.

[antigonickpdf]

the thought i keep coming back to with the finale, and this season in general, is a sense of… infestation, i guess is the best way to describe it. because for the first two seasons, iwtv was a work that— even with all its gothic/horror themes— seemed deeply compassionate at its core, and it remained devoted to beauty and love in a way that felt like a reprieve from (even a small rebellion against) the rising fascism of the culture surrounding it. and now it feels like the hatefulness it was pushing back against has infested it somehow, like a swarm of fuckin termites, which has not only ruined this season but also calls into question the structural soundness of what came before it. like, how did we even get here? was this sort of mean-spirited derision always just lying in wait? idk. i don’t want to make a bad season of tv deeper than it is, but it does feel like witnessing another loss in the cultural battle when a careful, compassionate work that ostensibly cared about the marginalised experiences it depicted becomes just another conduit for hatred toward vulnerable groups. what a fucking bummer, man

[whooshsoohw]

What bothers me the most about Armand's arc this season is his characterization as a premeditated schemer. It turns him into the cunning, one-note villain the writers and cast kept insisting he wasn't. The concept of him demanding an apology from Louis and genuinely believing Louis owed him one is fine. Although that wasn't their dynamic in the books, the change does bother me because why transplant that dynamic onto Loumand when Lesmand is right there to explore and deepen? Plus, Armand has already done enough to Louis, and the optics of the situation do matter, especially if you're going to have Louis give him a sincere moment of connection and frame it as earned and somewhat heartwarming.

But if you were going to do that, I think a much better approach would've been to have Armand come to Louis with his own apology while expecting one in return, only to become angry and violent on impulse when Louis refused to give it to him. It would've made the point about how dangerous, delusional, unstable, and sadistic he can be without betraying the characterization the show had already established.

Because almost every time Armand has done something violent or harmful, it's been impulsive. San Francisco was driven by emotional weariness, anger, and impulse. His lie about the extent of his participation in the trial, and about saving Louis, was a spur-of-the-moment decision when he saw an opportunity and seized it, not something he'd been planning beforehand. The only thing he planned carefully over a long period of time was the trial, and even then it wasn't his idea in the first place. Someone else came up with it, and he went along with it.

A person who is constantly in survival mode, who stays on sinking boats because they're too afraid that if they jump and swim they'll never find land, only an endless sea that will drown them, just isn't someone who takes initiative as a master planner. They aren't the kind of person who orchestrates something as complex as the entire Regina scheme or constructs an elaborate torture scenario. They'd improvise it instead, just like they did in San Francisco.

Up until this season, the show consistently characterized Armand as someone whose manipulation and violence were primarily reactive, adaptive, opportunistic, and rooted in survival. This season shifts him toward a more proactive, long-term scheming role, and to me that feels like a meaningful change in characterization rather than a natural extension of what came before. I also think it's a less interesting and less psychologically complex version of the character.

[petaltexturedskies]

The world is violent and mercurial — it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love — love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.

Tennessee Williams

[fay989]

Any TVL cast member being interviewed: yeah so when I first read the script I wanted to murder Rolin with my bare hands :) haha yeah he butchered my character so badly that I threw my laptop across the room :) aha and then I yelled at him for two hours which only resulted in minor tweaks to the script :) yeah I was so shocked and confused :) and he comes up with scenes that don’t make any sense in-universe. :) and I worry for the future of this tv show :) but it’s alright as long as you think about how [5 min in depth analysis of details that the cast member has come up themselves to justify the season despite these justifications not being evident in the actual show at all] aha :)

[mournfulroses]

Sylvia Plath, from a diary entry featured in The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

[jeyneofpoole]

he sometimes lingers

[tpwrtrmnky]

"Waah waah but what if I don't like it when my intended-as-apolitical work gets analysed and people start claiming it has reactionary politics" so this can be avoided by developing a better understanding of politics

[thearmandthinker]

anyways loumand is the most fascinating, most beautiful, most complex romance in the books and through season one and two and that is all i care about. fuck whatever the hell they decided to do in season three, my man armand would legitimately never fucking do that shit.

[usuallydeepalpaca-blog]

What happens when two POC men are so catastrophically beautiful next to each other the white showrunners feel the need to make them pay. The most interesting dynamic in that fuckass show for a reason

[neverloumandover]

Anyway. Armand never willingly participated in the trial... he could prevent it but he was too scared to. Lestat didn't save Louis, Armand did, secretly glad that Louis was only his without claudia. Regretting that. The grief overwhelmed Louis. The lie was casting a shadow over Armand. They couldn't be what they might have been.

But they loved each other. Knew each other better than anyone. Louis shared his story about that cousin... one night, quietly, almost out of nowhere. Armand held him. Like Louis did whenever Armand shared. They loved each other, but when they fought they went for blood. They knew where to hurt. Armand kept the lie. Louis kept resenting him for his role in Claudia's death.

Yet love remained. So did happiness. The passion had faded away, but they didn't need it. They loved each other, understood each other, even with rhe shadows in their lives.

Then it was over, and Armand still reaches for Louis after a nightmare. Louis still thinks he hears Armans around the house. He feels so guilty for missing someone that has hurt him. Armand buys books for Louis before throwing them away. Louis still take photos of pretty boats to show Armand. But he won't go back.

And then... then Louis finds out about Marius.

[dxxtruction]

There's a part of me that very guiltily hopes for it, simply for the fact I wanna have some slither of good faith this was the plan or something. But it doesn't even matter if they 'cleverly' walk this whole season back somehow, through (what would seem the obvious direction to me) undoing all the terrible 'rewriting' of the truth he's been doing with 'the failures', to finally finish his punish and torture tour of Louis, which started from the beginning with the tour itself (or the trail really), in order to make himself feel better about being depicted truthfully, in order to make fun of and exploit the fact Louis memory is faulty and unreliable in the most violent way possible. Plan to have him listen to this, think it's all true, and come chasing after him with apologies again, like he did after Dubai. Or whatever. I can at least then have seen any fucking point to this if that's what the play is. Lestat de Darvo gaslighter domestic abuser doing his big one by weaving a basket and filling it with bullshit. But like... its not ''clever'' at that point, you just gave yourselves an excuse to put victims, women, POC, trans people, and disabled people, through the absolute wringer of a terrible and violent season. It's trashy, in not a fun way. You wanted any fans of this, besides the worst of them, so dismayed and betrayed and hurt by it. It's plain cruelty and plain racism. Fuck you. Like, I'd want good faith simply to not feel this terrible to have invested at all, but I don't think any of this was worth the road to get there. Double fuck you.

[the-sensitive-sadist]

Domme and Dom fucking their sub together but instead of any type of coordination or structured scene they just take turns obliterating their sub's holes. Just forcing themselves inside with absolutely zero regard for the pleasure, dignity, comfort, or even the humanity of their pet. Just using them like a toy, an object, a set of tight, fuckable holes and a pretty face that looks better when it's wincing in pain.

[soviet-furries]

Plasticine Hedgehog (Пластилиновый ёжик)

Soyuzmultfilm, 1969

[vampire-scripture]

Rice on Adaptation

What movie do you not want to see?