so one thing about The Vampire Armand (armand's POV book) and Blood & Gold (marius' pov book) is that armand describes himself as being a total pain in the ass--a bad student, out drinking, totally irresponsible. won't paint, won't write. slut. nuisance. always causing a problem. sneaky and greedy and gluttonous. but marius doesn't describe him that way; he says armand was diligent and doesn't find fault. now, it's possible that Marius is just trying to cover for himself here and not admit that he wasn't a very good teacher. but I also think it's very possible............. that armand describes himself............. as worse than he was. feckless. and reckless. and unhelpful. and bad. because he sees himself as bad. because he still thinks he let everyone down. bad armand . that's why all these things happened
And this was his first and only experience of ordinary adolescence: in Kiev Rus, he'd been torn between the monks and his dad, who each harboured a different ambition for him. He wasn't doing the usual youngster thing of going round with a gang of friends getting into amusing trouble. Instead, he was painting religious ikons and having very big feelings about them and trying to figure out if he had the courage to bury himself alive and die walled up and accompanied only by the cries of the likewise starving. I never get used to the sheer utter horror that is his backstory... to the contrast of it.
And because he was a teenager, he was still backtalking his dad in a developmentally normal way... but he lacked a peer group to compare himself to, or in which to discover himself in relation to others.
Little wonder that when the chance of sex and drink and rock and roll finally materialises for him, and he's got his gang of boys go go round with, and Bianca to moon over and Lord Harlech to play dangerous games with, to him this feels incredibly wicked. He's still judging it by the standards of his old life.
Whereas Marius, who's had like twenty years of catching stray thoughts from apprentices who are up to perfectly normal teenage devilment, is philosophical until and unless Armand either comes to physical harm, or does something out of character: i.e. Marius really didn't see that axe coming.
And sue, they have their whole complicated psychosexual thing going on about that, but when we are privy to Marius's secret thoughts about him, he's not worried that Armand's a little hellion; he's worried that he's "the wizened funereal spirit of a dead man in a child's clothes".... like, he's afraid this kid is in a constant state of spiritual crisis and isn't letting his hair down enough.
