ice pick

nia | she/her | 29 | jakarta sleep deprived stem girlie 18+ currently blogging: iwtv, fellow travelers. art blog: saltroclus

[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.

[picsthatmakeyougohmm]

hmmm

[suhaylah]

Early Summer Garden, Sunsoaked Hillside, and Single Sunset Fountain (2022) Paintings available in my shop! Check them out if you’re interested :) shop: suhaylah.bigcartel.com instagram: @suhaylah.h

[kuromi-hoemie]

me when i see an animal that is known for being in my area

[niarchery]

at least there's egg martabak 🤤 (> trying not to think abt the tvl cast at sdcc in a couple of days)

[gaypeople]

[armandology]

they need to do this to lestats band season 4 episode 1 before i have to listen to another single second of music or wonder why the fuck they're getting more screen time than armand

[70sscifiart]

Nigerian artist and actor Bolaji Badejo, who played the titular Alien in Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic

[raisinchallah]

its just so baffling because it seems like they deeply resent that they have to like deal with the fallout of horribly abusive relationships or like think about the implications of what they wrote but its like literally nobody forced you to make the show just about abusive relationships like this you did this.. this was the adaptational choice you made why are you mad

[vorreitenertiqui]

#no seriously they CHOSE to do this #they CHOSE to change Louis's Claudia's and Armand's race they decided on this no one twisted their arm about it??? baffling #and now that I'm thinking back... what did Rolin say again about why he cast a black man as Louis? like don't quote me on this #but wasn't it bc he didn't want to deal with the fallout of having Louis being a plantation owner??? #actually do quote me on this I just found the article from Den of Geek where he talks about it: #'To be perfectly frank I didn’t know how to tell the plantation owner story. I wasn’t going to be the writer to do it.' #like... in hindsight that was a warning sign this man did NOT think the race change through he simply didn't want the story to have to deal #with having to write around a topic he clearly considered too complicated and uncomfortable to engage with #and so decided 'okay what is the farthest away from white stuffy plantation owner in the 1800s? I know a black pimp from the late 1900s' #on top of that they CLEARLY didn't anticipate the fallout of the drop during episode 5 and they've been playing catch-up ever since #I firmly believe that's where a lot of the resentment comes from #rolin's writing team during s1 created a story about abuse and privilege and multi-faceted complicated characters. #but rolin himself always wanted a fun vampire romp with no consequences and sexy lestat and iwtv was meant to be prologue to that #but after season 1 he had to engage with topics during promo and interviews that he never wanted to deal with #like how much responsibility Lestat carries for the abuse heaped on his black family and how his privilege allows him so much more space #and gives him social power and influence over them and how that creates a palpable wall between them which makes his abuse even worse #rolin never WANTED iwtv to be this sort of success where people engage with it so deeply and care about all the details and the stories #of the characters that rolin himself - from the way they have been shown in tvl - clearly thinks are just side-pieces to Lestat's main show #he wanted to be able to focus on Lestat and only Lestat (the ooc version of him that lives in his head) #and instead people were asking Lestat be held accountable and for him to be shown as the flawed complicated difficult character that he is #and Rolin - as shown by tvl - clearly doesn't like that #that's also why the s2 finale had the narrative bend itself (and the characterization of several characters) into pretzels just to make su #that we got the Loustat reunion and Loumand divorce #bc they had to hurry the story along and into a direction that looked contrived then and looks actively malicious now #like that was when the cracks were really starting to spread but clearly that was forced into the story so they could start with tvl #and through tvl they continued to systematically dismantle the story that they build for the first two seasons #those... are a lot of tags sorry but god this really - in the end - once again comes down to a writer not thinking through their decisions #when they start a story and then flinching away from the consequences of those decisions when the narrative demands a fallout

(Tags via @universesvisiting)

[niarchery]

every couple of weeks my sister finds her dog another silly little outfit

[dajo42]

need a polite way to say "im not engaging in a discussion on this topic with you because the conclusions you have reached are based on so many interwoven layers of misconceptions it would be easier to just like, hard reset your whole brain, just start over as a baby and try again"

[ladypaperwriterson]

[louclaudia]

"thank you for loving him, for loving him the way he needs to be loved"

[niarchery]

I will face TVL. I will permit TVL to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where TVL has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

[userarmand]

assad while rolin's speaking. me too dude.

[artfullyplacedsemicolon]

The tl;dw is just that the writers want to brutalise Black characters on screen but they don't want to villainise any of their white characters by having them behave in a way that will get any backlash so they just make their one significant brown character do it and that checks all racist boxes for them.

[armandyke]

I think that basically any Armand meta I do for the next however many years until a new season, unless I'm explicitly analysing stuff from season 3, is just gonna have the disclaimer that I'm not taking anything from this season into consideration because what we have is so incomplete and bare bones and clearly filtered to an insane degree through Lestat's lens that it's basically just meaningless compared to what we know of him from the first two seasons. Like unless they get a follow up season that is almost entirely dedicated to replaying all of the events from this season through an objective lens and filling in the MYRIAD of gaps that have been left (let's be real Armand's arc is almost entirely made up of gaps) there's never gonna be anything usable here.

[armandyke]

Unfortunately in terms of meta analysis I'm basically gonna have to give this season the same treatment as Interview With the Vampire (1994) and Queen of the Damned (2002). Like yeah Armand is in there but that's not what we're talking about right now and we all know it.