did armand really turn daniel out of spite?
short answer? kind of yes. people rationalizing away/getting upset/dooming over assad's "i'm going to break you" comments, i'm totally with you that that's not the whole story, but i also think it's 1000% correct and in character. that said, DONT WORRY. devil's minion is not in danger
i've actually been meaning to talk about this and now i have the perfect opportunity! especially since assad's comments support where i've always thought armand's head was at with daniel's turning :)
i've spoken at length as recently as yesterday about the domestic side of daniel and armand's relationship, and i really do believe with my entire heart that they are good for each other and that their relationship will eventually stabilize. that said, i've also talked about how rocky the road to getting there is. this is where many of my personal gripes about people sanitizing the dm relationship come in. armand is a fucking mess. he's extraordinarily traumatized. he has been systematically stripped of any opportunity to learn how to love and be loved. he has extreme, largely unaddressed cptsd, which traps your brain in a state of hyperarousal. from armand's perspective, on a subconscious level, every bad thing that has ever happened to him is still happening. he's stuck. this is also the essence of the anne rice vampirism/trauma allegory. my girl is crazy! i say this with all the love and empathy in my heart because i am unfortunately also crazy lol
these things set armand up for failure when he approaches his relationships, and they strip him of any ability to feel secure in literally any situation. think about how cloudy your head gets when you're completely overwhelmed by fear. that's his default decision making state! the idea that it's fundamentally unsafe to exercise his autonomy or try to address his own needs has been literally tortured into him over the years and so, because those things are unavoidable parts of life, the perceived danger of approaching them can make armand impulsive and childish at times. this isn't even touching his insanely warped world view and complete lack identity, or the fact that pretty much every survival strategy he's had to learn over the past 500 years ranges from unhelpful to completely antithetical to building a stable, loving, egalitarian partnership. again, my girl is crazy. devils minion may be sweet and loving and domestic, but it will never be sustainable until some of these issues start getting excavated and addressed, and holy shit is that an infected, festering wound. excavation is going to hurt like hell.
armand's refusal to make another vampire sits at the very center of that wound, and i think his revulsion at the thought of turning anyone goes even deeper than most people realize. not only is it the single act of autonomy he's been able to maintain for the past 500 years, not only does he think that anyone he could turn would come to hate and leave him, he really truly does believe that it's the worst thing that can be done to another person.
the name of the game when it comes to armand is repression. he's a character who hides everything from himself. the weight of everything that's been done to him is unendurable, so he doesn't endure it. he seals it behind a brick wall inside of himself and tries so so desperately hard to forget it's there, but it's always going to leak through the cracks. even worse, all these things that he won't let himself think or feel mutate and metastasize inside him while he refuses to look at them. in particular, armand still loves marius, and he still doesn't really have the tools to understand what's been done to him. marius also deliberately cuts him off at the pass in tva by outright telling him he might not remember their relationship in a good light later in life and making him promise to remember that they were in love and armand chose to be with him (from page 69-70 in the mass market paperpack, i just spent twenty years trying to find it):
"—and when you think back on this time, when in half-sleep at night you remember me as your eyes close on your pillow, these moments might seem corrupt and most strange. They'll seem like sorcery and the antics of the mad, and this warm place might become the lost chamber of dark secrets and this might bring you pain."
"I won't go."
"Remember then that it was love," he said. "That this indeed was the school of love in which you healed your wounds[...]"
what that amounts to is that all the violation armand feels from years of grooming and sexual abuse, all the fear and pain he won't allow himself to access from his time with marius, gets sublimated into his feelings about his own turning. the mostly-buried resentment he feels toward marius is resentment over condemning him to this horrible life as a vampire, surely. and surely, because amadeo wanted so badly to be a vampire and to be with marius and now he's so desperately miserable, it's an impossible thing for anyone to consent to. put that all together and armand basically ends up with this subconscious conflation of rape and vampire turning, which really just manifests as an overwhelming revulsion toward the idea of turning anyone. and the thing about armand is that he's terrified to his core of hurting the people he loves the same way he was hurt, so he is completely repelled by the idea of turning daniel in a way he hasn't truly examined and can't put language to.
at the end of 2.08, armand is drowning in a super volatile and complicated sea of emotion. many many people—from devils minion truthers saying armand turned daniel out of love to tv only fans thinking it was uncomplicated spite—don't tend to take into account just how messy and fucked up and contradictory armand's feelings in that moment were. yes, armand loves daniel and is terrified of the prospect of watching him die and living in a world without him. armand also can't stand the thought of being alone and hardcore panics when louis leaves. and whose fault is that? daniel's. daniel, who armand made the biggest sacrifice of his life for. daniel, who armand broke his own heart setting free, and when he did it he went crawling back to louis, who is a source of stability and who he does love, albeit in an incredibly self-serving way. and now daniel comes back just to destroy the one life raft armand was clinging to in his absence. how dare he? how dare he do that to armand, who he always claimed to love? despite i think partially (subconsciously, again) approaching the interview as an opportunity for daniel to set him free from his marriage, armand is feeling deeply, deeply betrayed, and i think that's the thing that pushes him over the edge into turning daniel. besides, daniel hates him now. daniel sees him and knows how awful and disgusting and unworthy he is and he showed louis too and so it doesn't matter if he hates him a little more. it's all over. armand has completely and totally lost both louis and daniel. he's at rock fucking bottom in that moment and doesn't think he has anything else to lose.
i want to stress again that in absolutely no world is armand sitting there and actually thinking through any of this. no, armand is hit with all of these feelings at once like a sixteen car pileup and then he acts with that same fear-driven impulse we discussed above. while i don't think there's a world in which armand would have been able to let daniel die, i also don't think he had come to terms with turning him yet and daniel isn't dying as imminently as he was in qotd, so spite/resentment/betrayal is an important part of tipping armand into action in the tv show. and then after that, because turning someone is so monstrous to armand, because he lashed out and did the unforgivable to daniel, i imagine he is pretty much instantly overwhelmed by a crippling degree of guilt and shame, so he runs away. and then stays gone. because he just did the worst thing imaginable to the person he loves the most, and because daniel surely hates him, and because all is completely and entirely lost.
so, yes, armand did a little bit turn daniel out of spite. but also love. and fear. and desperation. and grief. and despair. its a mess. armand loves daniel more than anything, but that doesn't mean he isn't furious with him in that moment, and that doesn't mean that no part of him is lashing out. also, just because that single moment is driven in large part by anger and betrayal, it doesn't mean that daniel wasn't ultimately turned out of love, or that the biggest and most honest underlying reason for it was that armand couldn't bear to watch daniel die. armand is, i stress again, completely fucking nuts, and he's also been holding it together for so long. daniel's turning is really the ultimate breakdown of his self control. anger helped break the dam, but what's actually released is decades, if not centuries, of fear and love and desperation.
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