hyacinth!!

she/ her art | books | crochet

[mckatkat]

Because I love to poke a bruise:

This whole season my big issue has been, besides all of my small issues which are also very numerous so it's hard to tell the difference, that we don't know what the hell Lestat is doing or what his motivation is or why we care. I know why I cared about him as a character in seasons 1 and 2, because our point of view character did, and I know why I care about him in the books, very well, and I don't know why I'm supposed to care about him in season 3.

When I talk about adaptations I talk about this idea of there being a guiding principle that you organize your storytelling around, but I think that works for a lot of TV just in general. And this third season I don't feel like the writers really looked at the first two seasons that they made and thought about what the audience actually needed from a pivot to Lestat at all. They needed at least one principle of the season to be making the audience fall in love with Lestat. They knew the actor was charismatic and they knew that the book character was iconic, and they just kind of forgot to make the one in the show... anything?

The book TVL is about looking for a way to live with both authenticity and something you can call goodness. That's a really strong character motivation! You can do a bunch of twists on it, he can fail at his quest and be sad, he can succeed and be happy. When he's doing stuff it's not really hard to understand why, and it's likeable because that's a good motivation even though it's very difficult for him to achieve this very lofty goal. People I know who didn't like the book nearly as much as I do still get the point, they just don't personally relate to it as much.

In the show he's weirdly passive and angry constantly, but doesn't want to affect any change and is mostly just complaining? Which would make sense if I understood what he's actually complaining about, but he's mostly just griping? I can deal with a guy who complains, I read the book Interview with the Vampire? This is ridiculous.

The big original sin of this season: why do you actually want to spend time with the character of Lestat? This guy was mostly an antagonist in the prior two seasons, he testified at the trial that killed Claudia, he abused Louis. Yeah he was fun to watch, yeah we like him because of his relationship with Louis, but we don't like him or know him as a guy who is our main hero yet. Why should we care to watch his story? This season did not a single thing to answer that question!

The book answers that on like page one, you want to spend time with Lestat because he's an optimistic guy! And if that didn't work, he's telling you a linear story where he experiences character growth and change and is on a motivated quest for much of it. The questions you as a reader have keep getting answered: how did he become this vampire who seemed to embrace being a vampire so much? We see that! Why did he do a bunch of the stuff he did in the first book? We see the development of that character, and fairly early on you fall in love with that character in this book and so that question doesn't keep coming up. You stop thinking about Interview with the Vampire pretty quickly, and you start wondering, what's going to happen to Nicki? How is he going to deal with Armand? Is he going to find Marius? The kinds of questions that keep you reading a book!

In the TV show he is on a rock tour because he is bored. He is giving an interview to Daniel because he is... that's actually not explained? Maybe he's trying to correct the book, but he doesn't seem to want to give Daniel any information, so I think he just likes being mean to Daniel, but he doesn't seem to enjoy it? He is fighting vampires who are trying to kill him because they are trying to kill him. He is reconnecting with his mom because his life is in shambles, but not because he did anything, but because he's a rock star because he's bored but he's not good at being a rock star and also doesn't really seem to enjoy that that much either. He maybe wants to spend time with his mom? But he doesn't seem that happy about that either because he's making sad faces most of the time they are talking. Sometimes Louis is here, Lestat is mad at him because he did the interview that became the book, and the interview that became the book contained small factual inaccuracies that don't really change how we view what happened in the prior two seasons in any meaningful way. He doesn't like Armand because Armand is desperate and he doesn't like him and he let Louis be with Armand to punish Armand for... I mean in the show they both genuinely conspired to kill Claudia, so I don't understand Lestat's issue here. Demonstrably in the show Armand has done every single thing Lestat has wanted him to do since shortly after they met.

And he also doesn't want to tell humans vampires exist, and he also is only making an anthem for the great conversion because his mom is a cackling super villain with an absurd nonsense accent who controls him with her evil pushup bra powers. Gabriella really is far and away the worst thing in the season.

And to be fair, we also don't know why he is using an archaic piece of technology to record his story for a random mystery person who even he does not know. And he's telling this story in a similarly evasive way to the way that he is talking to Daniel, almost as though this element was very clearly added later and they didn't really think about why he would be recording this and how the motivations for it would meaningfully effect the voiceover.

What did he attempt? What did he fail at? Why are we supposed to understand why he did any of the bad things he did? Why are we supposed to like him enough to want to understand him?

Forget the human face of actor Sam Reid, and his charismatic performance. Has the show given you a single reason to like Lestat more in season 3 than you already did or didn't in seasons 1 and 2? Not because you feel bad because something bad happened to him, why do you like him? Why is he's someone whose goals you want to root for?

And also what are his goals?

I have none of those questions from the source material, and for what it's worth I had none of those questions about Louis in season 1 and 2. This isn't purposely chaotic storytelling, this is not good storytelling.

I know that the bad faith response to this is that not loving Lestat is a skill issue, so this is a me problem. I had no issue understanding his role in the first two seasons. I like Sam Reid as an actor. And as for whether or not I love the book character, all I can say is: that is a very funny thing to accuse me specifically of!

[armandsfangs]

Devil's Minion Family Portraits

I have 3 different versions of DM on my tomodachi life island so this serves as a who's who index

Canon DM and their variant ships: Nish x Young Daniel and Human!Amadeo x Vampire AU!Daniel. As of this post, Amadeo and Malloy aren't romantically involved (yet) but the other two couples are happily married

The canon DM family and their children, Lenora and Fareed

The Sengupta-Molloy family with their two kids, Rashid and Dishwater

[bifauxnenarmand]

so it’s confirmed what they pulled from tva was the armand sewing claudia’s head thing. and they thought armand just sewing anybody’s head would be in character for him. regardless of motives

[prisonhannibal]

Where does the bullshit start, Armand, Amadeo, Arun?

(observant followers may have noticed I usually don't do much detail on hair because I am bad at drawing hair but his cute little half up hairstyle inspired me to try harder this time so I hope you like it!)

[azamansource]

(x)

[enthyrea]

green knight studies except im just studying dev patel's face

[crabussy]

(guy who can draw horses and hands easily but can't draw hugs or kisses to save his life) yeah I just like it when the characters are just standing next to each other. no need to make their adoration too obvious you know. and I turned this one into a centaur,

[bigjeansss]

I love you means… [devil’s minion animatic]

[fedyjkn]

I’m back after a LOONG time!!!

[mostly-just-pathet1c]

we used to have Assad Zaman kissing boys on television

[capiscrazyforvampires]

The fact they didn't have Armand kiss a SINGLE boy in the season where they confirmed Lesmand fucked and devil's minion went Canon is offensive to me.

[depraveddame]

This is Book Crowley TO ME

[hollowwaveremnant]

Reminded by last anon - Some thoughts on Armand’s social and religious background as an Indian

Idk why the last anon called me a white woman. But they made me realize there was one more analysis post from Reddit I hadn't migrated here.

This post is borne out of a conversation I was having with someone originally on Tumblr. The original poster had expressed some doubts about the veracity of Armand's story of how he became enslaved, and made some great points about how his memory may have been tampered by Marius. While I agreed with the broad strokes of the post, something stood out to me that I don't necessarily agree with. The poster said that there would be no merchant vessels in Delhi, since it's a land-locked area, and therefore that's some evidence for his memory being tampered with when it came to his experiences as a slave. I don't want to go into the nitty-gritties of the post cos it was very nuanced, but I wanted to lend this perspective as an Indian (and someone from Delhi!), because this was something that had struck with me as well on my first viewing of the show.

I think the geographical point might be overextended a bit, because Delhi not being a port city doesn’t actually make Armand’s story impossible. In the 1500s (and I have dated this to early 1500s, during the waning years of the Delhi Sultanate), maritime merchants sent agents far inland, and enslaved people were routinely moved from places like Delhi to west-coast ports by caravan, so a child sold in Delhi absolutely could end up on a ship without ever living near the ocean. His parents wouldn’t have had to travel hundreds of miles to personally sell him off, because the slavers and brokers handled that. To simplify, the absence of a local port doesn’t negate his story; it simply means that the first leg of his journey would have been overland rather than by river or sea. These inland-to-coast trafficking networks were not anomalies but a foundational part of the Indian Ocean economy, so his story fits comfortably within the historical realities of the period. I’ll include a couple of sources to support this claim further. To be clear, the stretch of the seas that would land Armand in Europe from India would be the Arabian Sea. Someone asked me about the Yamuna being possibly used as the main river in Delhi -  the Yamuna does not flow to the Arabian Sea or to any west-coast port. It joins the Ganga and flows east toward the Bay of Bengal, so the opposite direction from where Armand would need to go to reach a Europe-bound ship. It's also not used much for major commercial waterways.

Sources for the historians of the Indian Ocean slave trade describing maritime merchants relying on inland brokers and caravan networks to source enslaved people from interior India and move them to ports like Goa and Gujarat:

Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Western Indian Ocean World (Chapter 6) - The Cambridge World History of Slavery

The Cambridge World History of Slavery - August 2021

Carrying Away the Unfortunate from India and Southeast Asia, 1500–1800

"Carrying Away the Unfortunate from India and Southeast Asia, 1500–1800" published on 20 Dec 2017 by Brill.

On a related note, I thought I’d chime into the larger fandom consensus that Armand is Muslim. To be perfectly honest, I don't see him as Muslim (or at least born Muslim), for a few reasons. So I have dated his date of birth to 1508 AD, a couple of decades away from the decline of the Delhi Sultanate and the beginning of the Mughal Empire. One of the first things to note is his name - Arun. Now, I know that he's a little unsure of his name, but let's say it *is* Arun. The Indian subcontinent had primarily been Hindu, till Islam arrived during the 7th century I think, but Islam’s influence particularly strengthened during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire eras, and a large portion of the local population converted to Islam. I don't want to get into the reasons behind that, they're complex and multi-factorial, but what's interesting to me in particular is that his name was Arun.

Now, if you know anything about Hindu names (I am an atheist but born into a Hindu family), Arun is like, almost stereotypically a Hindu name. The name means dawn, and is another name for the charioteer of Surya or the Sun (who is also worshipped as a God). So it's like, a name so deeply entwined with Hindu culture.

Typically during conversions to another religion, in this case from Hinduism to Islam, your name would also undergo a change, to something Persian or Arabic, not just to visibly identify with your new religion, but also because Hindu names are deeply entwined with your caste. This is where caste becomes impossible to ignore, because names, religion, and caste identity were tightly interwoven in 1500s North India. Again, caste is like, a deeply problematic (to say the least) but inevitable part of Hindu society, so I genuinely doubt that if he or his family had converted to Islam, they would retain their Hindu names. Something else to note - conversions would happen primarily for lower-caste Hindu people due to their social struggles as opposed to higher-caste Hindus, and it would be even more important for them to then visibly identify as Muslim. Conversion to Islam would mean being free of the shackles of the caste system (theoretically speaking - even in this day and age, the caste system has a stranglehold on Indian society, and non-Hindus are not always exempt from it either). Caste wasn’t just an identity marker - the roots of the caste system lie in identifying one’s occupation, social interactions, and mobility, which meant names (to this day, especially surnames) functioned like public caste indicators. Retaining a Hindu name after conversion would have kept those caste associations intact, and would undermine the very social protections and new status that conversion often provided. That’s why the continuity of a name like Arun makes his being born Muslim feel less likely in the historical context.

Ofc, there's a chance that he might have forgotten his Muslim name had there been conversion, but I doubt that. I leave space for that ambiguity. As for the Islamic prayers he offers in Dubai, I think of it as part of his cosplay as Fake Rashid. Again, I leave space for nuance here. He could have been drawn to Islam later on in life and might not strictly or visibly identify as Muslim, but given that religion played a key role in Bookmand's life, he might have been drawn to it. Unless you're deeply familiar with the Indian caste system and how fucked up it is, I can see how someone might very easily assume that he is (or born) Muslim. Again, I'm painting broad strokes for this, so my word isn't absolute and I don't like to give black and white answers cos nothing is set in stone when it comes to Indian culture especially. But I've yet to hear of Arun being a common  Indian Muslim name :)

TLDR: Just a long-winded way of saying that Delhi’s geography doesn’t contradict Armand’s story, and the caste name and religion dynamics of 1500s India make it far less likely that he was born Muslim.

[kneedeepinthecoffin]

[userlottie]

assad just wrapped on a local british show, Lynley. he will be in s2!

[starlightervarda]

I want Devil's Minion to become canon solely so they can keep ending up in scenarios that judge Daniel for the power imbalance / age gap only for Armand to be like

[hyacinthhues007]

Okay imagine TSOA adapted into a movie with connor storrie as achilles and assad zaman as patroclus. IMAGINEEE

[hyacinthhues007]

Random armand because I can't stop drawing this gremlin 🧡🧡