baby strange.

incarnation; a kind of bloody light.

[serafinomostro]

⌗SERAFINOMOSTRO.     an  independent   &   semi-selective   portrayal  of  the   vampire   armand  of  anne   rice’s   vampire   chronicles   /   amc’s   interview   with   the   vampire   ———   as  cherished  by  john seraf,   est.   2017.  writer  is  over  twenty-one,   minors   do   not   interact.   expect   canon-typical   triggering/dead dove   content.   read rules before following!

rules.    ༊·˚    muse.    ༊·˚    pinterest.    ༊·˚    ooc.

[asteriskless]

excerpt from last summer of innocence by Danez Smith in ‘Bodies Built for Game’

[serafinomostro]

anyway hello again, in light of the decidedly equivocal treatment of dm in season three, i am back with another lukewarm take on what actually makes their relationship meaningful & unique #tome <3

when discussing the decade-long relationship between armand and daniel, anne rice once described it as “the epitome of the fluctuations of dominance and submission” before concluding with an apparent contradiction: that armand somehow always dominates, even when yielding. the temptation is to resolve this paradox by asking which of them is “really” the dominant one. is armand inherently the master because he possesses overwhelming supernatural power, at least in the first phase of their relationship? or does daniel ultimately command the entire dynamic because armand repeatedly capitulates to his desires? i think that these kinds of questions themselves misunderstand devil’s minion completely. if i may:

power between armand and daniel does not typically just “change hands”, so to speak. it fluctuates, & often outright refuses ownership altogether. with each encounter between the two of them, power readjusts itself. their intimacy becomes unique because of what it collapses, not what it upholds. what emerges, then, is something stranger than the more predictable patterns of gay sadomasochism (at least, as it is commonly depicted in fiction) alone. devil’s minion imagines an erotic relationship in which domination & submission cease to function as opposites; they instead become mutually constitutive. every surrender conceals an ritual of agency, and every assertion of authority simultaneously reveals extraordinary, almost unbelievable vulnerability. it is an experiment in what queer intimacy might become once mastery (particularly, as something rooted in cis-heteronormative binaries) begins to fail.

leo bersani’s work, i think, provides an unusually productive vocabulary for understanding this kind of instability. throughout “is the rectum a grave?” and later in intimacies, bersani repeatedly returns to a proposition that remains deeply unsettling even to seasoned queer perverts, such as myself: that sexuality is valuable, not because it confirms identity (though, of course, it can & does), but because it actually threatens it.

bersani describes erotic experience as possessing a fundamentally “self-shattering” quality. elsewhere, he and adam phillips suggest that intimacy becomes possible only through “a relation in which we cease to be identical with ourselves”. this, to me, is almost an exact description of the devil’s minion i have been psychoanalyzing for years. every genuinely intimate encounter between armand & daniel actually ends up destabilizing identity rather than affirming it. daniel loses his memories, armand loses the elaborate structures through which he has survived for centuries, and neither of them actually leaves the relationship more coherent than before. both become increasingly difficult to distinguish from the selves they imagined themselves to be.

perhaps bersani’s most devastating suggestion is that love asks us to become less rather than more: notably less autonomous, less self-contained, or just less convinced of the fantasy that we exist independently of another consciousness. i personally think that no vampire in anne’s body of work resists that dissolution more desperately, or more violently, than armand, & no one accomplishes it more completely than daniel. anne herself made an observation that initially appears almost contradictory: that armand “likes to be dominated”, and “wants a teacher”. but, superficially anyway, nothing about armand should permit that kind of a statement. he’s near-ancient, physically invulnerable, capable of reading minds, erasing memories, even killing daniel effortlessly should he suddenly wish to do so. & yet authority has always functioned as an erotic category for him, and this tendency extends far beyond sexuality. 

for five centuries, armand repeatedly installs another figure into the position of absolute certainty: marius, santino, louis, lestat, daniel. each becomes, however briefly, or performatively, someone imagined to possess knowledge & power forever unavailable to him. lacan described this structure as the subject supposed to know. armand continually falls in love with certainty itself, or, perhaps more accurately, with the fantasy that certainty exists. submission, for armand, therefore becomes less the relinquishing of agency than the hope that agency might briefly become unnecessary. daniel occupies the opposite position, or he at least appears to. he’s younger, mortal, considerably poor, addicted to drugs, & then later to armand’s blood. anne obviously even allowed him to call himself the devil's minion, seemingly confirming the hierarchy implied by that title, except daniel refuses nearly every psychological expectation of submission: he leaves, he argues, he laughs at armand, he aggressively demands immortality repeatedly despite being refused. but perhaps most importantly, daniel desires armand as though armand were simply another frightened, vulnerable person rather than an omnipotent entity. his greatest act of resistance is not necessarily refusing armand’s supernatural authority, it’s his refusal to form his desire for armand around it, or as a result of it. 

lacan’s formulation that “love is giving what you do not have” becomes strangely literal here, where armand offers daniel certainty, despite possessing almost none himself. he offers permanence despite believing eternity to be a curse, & protection while continually failing to protect either of them. daniel, meanwhile, offers armand something equally impossible: a world in which armand no longer needs to perform mastery at all. neither actually possesses what they give, yet they both continue offering it. love, to dm, has become an exchange of impossibilities.

jessica benjamin’s body of work allows us to push this paradox even further. in the bonds of love, she argues that domination & submission are not opposites, but mutually sustaining attempts to solve the “unbearable problem” of recognizing another subject. the other person must remain sufficiently separate to be real, yet sufficiently controllable not to destroy us. domination & submission both try to resolve this kind of tension, though of course neither succeeds. seen through benjamin’s lens, armand’s erotic life becomes almost painfully legible, to me, in his repeated oscillation between mastery & surrender. less a preference than a defense against mutual recognition itself. in other words: to dominate is to prevent another consciousness from becoming fully unpredictable, & then to submit is to imagine someone else capable of carrying the burden of existence for you. daniel actually refuses both fantasies. he insists on remaining irreducibly himself, and he insists, just as stubbornly, that armand do the same.

foucault’s understanding of power offers perhaps the clearest explanation for why anne’s own paradox never resolves. power, foucault insists, is not possessed; it is exercised. it exists only within relations. so the question therefore ceases to be: who dominates?, and instead it becomes: well, how does domination operate?

armand disciplines daniel through surveillance, wealth, immortality, psychic intrusion, & obviously through his overwhelming physical superiority. daniel disciplines armand through persistence, unpredictability, emotional/sexual availability, & the simple refusal to stop seeing him as someone capable of being earnestly loved. power thus moves continuously between them, or rather, it never belonged to either one of them, truly, in the first place. this is precisely why the sexual dynamics of dm resist conventional readings of queer masculinity. anne herself delighted in reversing expectations. armand, despite his age & extraordinary power, repeatedly desires positions culturally associated with submission. daniel, physically weaker & psychologically dependent, repeatedly occupies positions associated with command.

the tv adaptation complicates this inversion too. daniel is no longer twenty-something and petulant; he’s upwards of seventy, his body now bearing the visible history of an entire human life. he is broader, rougher, louder, physically older than the vampire across from him. armand, meanwhile, remains visually youthful, conventionally beautiful, carrying within his erotic life unmistakable traces of trauma, regression, & surrender. every visual shorthand through which audiences have been taught to recognize dominance immediately begin to fail. the “categories” remain, but their certainty disappears.

bersani again: the self survives intimacy only by briefly consenting to its own dissolution. dm stages precisely this kind of dissolution over and over again, not because either of them actually wishes to become truly powerless, but because each, in different ways, longs to be relieved of the exhausting labor of remaining entirely himself. the tragedy is that neither can accomplish this alone. only the other possesses that terrible privilege.

returning to my sort-of “mission statement” now, anne wrote that armand always dominates, even when yielding. i think she was describing something stranger than maybe even she realized. i think probably domination has already ceased to be the correct word. perhaps what dm finally imagines is not mastery, nor submission, but two people continually discovering that love demands the surrender of those categories before it ever asks for the surrender of bodies, whether it’s a psychosexual cat & mouse game or actual sex. the most submissive act in devil’s minion, to me, isn’t an explicitly sexual one. it the allowing of the self to finally become recognizable to another person.

note: i drew primarily upon leo bersani’s conception of erotic self-shattering, jessica benjamin’s theory of domination and mutual recognition, jacques lacan’s theories of desire and the sujet supposé savoir (the “subject supposed to know”), and michel foucault’s relational conception of power. anne rice’s own commentary in the vampire companion serves as the central interpretive point of departure. if you find this sort of thing as fascinating as i do, i put together a little “bibliography” of works i referenced here and also some “suggested reading” as well <3 thank you for reading <3

primary texts

anne rice, the vampire companion: the official guide to anne rice’s the vampire chronicles, 1993

jessica benjamin, the bonds of love: psychoanalysis, feminism, and the problem of domination, 1988

leo bersani, is the rectum a grave? in aids: cultural analysis/cultural activism, 1988

leo bersani and adam phillips, intimacies, 2008

michel foucault, the history of sexuality, volume i: an introduction, 1978

michel foucault, friendship as a way of life, interview, 1981

jacques lacan, the seminar of jacques lacan, book xi: the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, 1978

jacques lacan, écrits, tr. bruce fink, 2006

related reading

roland barthes, a lover’s discourse, 1977

georges bataille, erotism: death and sensuality, 1957

eve kosofsky sedgwick, epistemology of the closet, 1990

[gabriehle]

a   kiss   to   cut   the   lion's   mane.     independent,   private,   &.   low   activity   gabrielle   de   lioncourt   of   anne   rice's   the   vampire   chronicles.   self—canon   based   with   book   inspiration.   held   dearly   by   saph,   25,   she/they/he.

carrd.          ☾𓃦☽             sideblog.             𓅓𓆣             psd.             

[terrorignitis]

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

[serafinomostro]

hi i swear i’m still alive but is anyone going to point out the very bizarre fact that samuel beckett is being so loudly referenced and now armand has the james joyce eyepatch. am actively losing my shit over this

[serafinomostro]

remember when there was whimsy. remember when there was hope

[serafinomostro]

🫩

i swear this isn’t a 3k rant like yesterday but does anyone else feel like the iwtv writers’ room is just kind of like almost hysterically ridiculously racist taking any opportunity they can to vilify and/or punish their vampires of color or is that just me

[serafinomostro]

🫩

I don’t wanna be dramatic but I think the thing I feel more profoundly than anything else at the moment is disappointment. Obviously, I confess a great deal of that disappointment comes from the almost total absence of Devil’s Minion this season. Armand gets maybe ten minutes of screen time, and Daniel of course fares better, but the relationship between them, which the writers themselves repeatedly encouraged us to anticipate, is… almost nonexistent. When Armand and Daniel actually are seen together, they’re usually arguing, which is fine, but sometimes the dialogue was so bizarre I found myself struggling to recognize either character at all. Then, after all of that, the actual transition from hostility to romance apparently happens almost entirely off-screen during a vague time skip. And so by the time the show finally hints that they have become romantically involved, we have missed the one thing I honestly wanted to see more than anything, which is how they got there.

Anyway. What frustrates me to no end is that I had no reason to expect an abundance of DM in the first place. I mean, Daniel isn’t even in The Vampire Lestat. Anne probably hadn’t even named him yet. By all accounts, I ought to be grateful that Daniel appears in this adaptation at all. And I am. The reason I expected more is, again, because the writers told us to, and I think this distinction matters, because my disappointment with this season can’t just be dismissed as me being upset that my favorite ship didn’t get enough screen time boohoo wah wah wah poor me. It’s not that. If the writers had actually decided to adapt The Vampire Lestat faithfully, I mean, to go all the way back and allow Lestat to tell his story as he tells it in the novel, I would have been perfectly willing to wait for Armand and Daniel. And after seeing what we ultimately were given, I desperately wish they had.

The Vampire Lestat is one of the most special & vibrant novels I have ever read and, without question, one of my favorites in the Chronicles. It’s one of the strongest examples of immersive high Gothic romanticism I can think of. The structure and the atmosphere were absolutely already there. The story was already almost ridiculously cinematic. It didn’t need to be fixed. It would have absolutely tolerated being carefully reframed to better fit the narrative changes AMC brought in in seasons one and two, but it didn’t need or deserve to be, well, rewritten. I would have loved, and was expecting, an entire season immersed in Lestat’s childhood, the wolves, with Nicolas in Paris, Magnus, Gabrielle, Armand, the inception of the Théâtre des Vampires, later Marius. I really, really wanted to see Armand and Lestat in Paris, and I know we saw glimpses, but man, I really had higher hopes. And (I realize the irony here; anyone who knows me knows the way I personally feel about Nicki) I wanted Nicolas to be allowed to exist as a person before becoming another one of modern-day Lestat’s crazed hallucinations. At least for longer than just a few beats. I would have accepted Daniel appearing only occasionally, or not at all, if that were the artistic decision the adaptation wanted to make. Instead, somehow, I feel now like I actually was ripped off of both stories.

We didn’t get the immersive adaptation of The Vampire Lestat that might have justified putting the present-day ensemble aside… but like, we also didn’t get the abundant Devil’s Minion that supposedly justified expecting something different. And I think Nicolas is perhaps the most painful example of what was lost in the process. In the novel, Nicolas certainly cannot be reduced to just “Lestat’s first boyfriend”, or a tragic figure from his past. He is Lestat’s first great confrontation with the limits of his own relentless optimism. Nicki is a person he loves and desperately wants to save and fundamentally cannot. His eventual suicide by fire is horrific & enormously meaningful, not least because it mirrors the fate of Magnus. But in the show, we see Nicolas properly “alive” for what feels like a few minutes before he becomes just another ghost haunting modern-day Lestat. We don’t even see his (very important!) death. Instead, Lestat like kinda-sorta tells us that Armand killed Nicki, apparently as an act of mercy, apparently “for” Lestat, because Nicki had become so profoundly unwell. And to me, that is not a minor adaptation choice. It completely redistributes the moral & emotional responsibility for Nicolas’s death among Nicolas, Armand, and Lestat. It changes what his death means. And for what?

I’ll say so again, I have never expected this show to reproduce the novels word for word, and some of its deviations from the books have been among its most interesting choices. But if you are going to fundamentally change something, I am of the belief that the change should, I dunno, mean something. And again & again, this season seems to change things just to make them flatter. And I guess most extreme example of that, obviously, is the revelation that Armand and Daniel have now beheaded Louis and Lestat. They are still alive & will presumably be fine, we already have body-flipping plotlines and future scenes establishing that Louis, at least, is still alive and in possession of his head, but the sheer absurdity of the decision remains. Nothing even remotely comparable happens in the novels, and now it seems the fandom is senselessly divided over an action whose motivation the showrunners themselves apparently cannot be bothered to adequately explain. I feel like it’s worth saying I am not at all offended or upset at the level of violence here. The gore the merrier, if you ask me. I’m also not one of those weirdos who’s going to be all, like, Armand did a bad thing and I don’t want Armand to do bad things. Not nearly! I want him to do more bad things. Part of what makes Armand so special & so frightening is in fact how maniacal and deranged he can be. (We have extremely good examples of this behavior scattered throughout the books; Nicki’s hands, Denis, Frankenclaudia, even Riccardo, if you maybe stop for a second and consider Riccardo’s fate as the sort of catalyst for the sort of sadistic behavior that follows Armand for the rest of his life, which I do. I will probably get into his weird latent semi-erotic psychosexual hangup on dismemberment in another post.)

I really just think my discomfort here is, again, the element of shock value. It absolutely seems, to me anyway, that the writers are totally floundering & trying to kick up as much dust as possible to distract us, the viewers, from the glaringly obvious fact that they have no fucking idea what the hell they’re doing. Or maybe they do. I’d be so glad to be wrong. But (and I would love to hear from other long-time book readers on this, too, please) I feel like we have exited “camp” territory and have crossed over into something completely unrecognizable from the sexy, scary, distinctly Ricean paradise seasons one & two so generously gave to us.

Anyway, one more time for the people in the back, my problem with the Loustat head-chopping is not that Armand did something terrible. Armand does terrible things and his moral compass is actually quite simple to understand, I think, when you consider his reactionary patterns throughout history. The problem is that I cannot for the life of me locate the psychological bridge between the character I know & the action the very bad script is requiring him to perform. It absolutely is not moral outrage. It is a characterization problem & it is part of a much much larger problem that plagued this entire season. To me, that is unquestionably the substitution of shock for interiority. The show gives us these enormous events without giving said events enough psychological interweaving to really mean anything. We are continuously being expected to essentially reverse-engineer acts of cruelty & violence ourselves and so fandom ends up fighting over why a character did something because the text itself has failed to tell us. Which, if you know me, is typically the absolute least of my worries. I actually really don’t think everything needs to be spelled out for us. I am a strong proponent of media literacy and I believe there are a great many things that ought to be shown & not told. But holy fuck, dude. If you’re gonna switch up this bad, at least make it add up.

I think Armand suffers especially badly from this. This is a character who is explicitly a survivor of trafficking, forced prostitution, outright rape, & the lifelong commodification of his body. And he is not incidentally a survivor of these things. They are, apparently, foundational to his characterization. He is a Bengali boy taken from South Asia, trafficked across continents, sold into sexual slavery, & eventually purchased by a white man. Before he can have anything resembling autonomy, his body has already been made into a Thing. His sexual image has already belonged to other people for centuries. And this specific history, of course, does not mean Armand is incapable of inflicting sexual harm on another person; I can’t believe I need to say this, but victimhood does not confer moral purity, & I would never want Armand sanitized into a character incapable of cruelty simply because he has suffered himself. But if you are going to write like this particular survivor participating in the acquisition & dissemination of someone else’s intimate sexual material without their consent, using sexual exposure and humiliation as a weapon against another person before literally beheading said person and the love of their life, that should be an extraordinarily psychologically loaded decision. For instance, if it meant putting a stop to the Great Conversion, thus sparing Lestat in the process, great. Armand told the truth, or whatever. But it apparently does not have the first thing to do with that. So. Uh. 🤷‍♂️ And I’m not saying Armand wouldn’t do something like that just for the hell of it, I think it actually could have been extremely on-brand and that it totally could have worked, if we had spent more time building up to that moment. Armand does horrific shit in the books just to do it. David even asks him at one point, “why the hell would you do something like that?” and Armand essentially replies, “funny :)”. So it could absolutely work. Just not now, & not like this. It is all so random, and the writers seem to be aware of that. That’s why they’re saying shit like, “this is part one of two, your questions are still going to be answered!”, as if that excuses seven episodes of nonsense and poor writing. They are incredibly fortunate to have such a devoted & enduring fandom. No one who isn’t a die-hard fan is going to watch an entire season of television just so they can wait three more years for the first half to make sense.

So, instead of building up to a decapitation fest that might have actually been really satisfying, the script seems to expect me to accept that Armand can rationalize obtaining & distributing what can only be described as “revenge porn” of Lestat and Gabriella because he wants to hurt Lestat before he chops him up. So, where is the interiority? And where then is the recognition of the grotesque irony? Where is the connection to the centuries Armand himself spent being transformed into an object for other people’s consumption? If you want Armand to cross that line, then show me what it means for him to cross it, because otherwise his (and Lestat’s!) trauma is not characterization as much as becomes decoration. And this still is only half the problem; rape and sexual violence are so prevalent in gothic lit, & to me it remains one of the only subgenres that still refuses to pretend sexual violence is separate from power, religion, family, etc. Armand and Lestat have a bizarre, deeply coercive non-con dynamic in the novel, & that already exists. Why not tap into that? This angle the writers have chosen (the “revenge porn”, if you’ll forgive me to say it one more time) completely neglects the actual inherent Lesmand queerness that was made abundantly available to us and instead creates this completely out-of-character distance that is just so entirely beyond me I don’t presently have the words for it. It can absolutely be fucked up. It should absolutely be non-con. The revenge porn angle is literally ridiculous and it makes everyone involved look stupid. I can’t, y’all. When Armand and Lestat’s history, and through that, Lestat and Gabrielle’s history, is reduced to a punchline or a big reveal or something like that, I think it doesn’t just wear down the strength and uniqueness of their dynamics. It’s not just offensive because it was a tacky way to handle layers and layers of incest & rape. I think it begins to erode the entire moral register of the Gothic genre as a whole here.

I swear I’m almost done, but this all becomes that much more uncomfortable when I consider how thoroughly the adaptation has racialized Armand’s history when compared to the novels. This adaptation made a deliberate choice to reimagine him as a South Asian man whose childhood involves enslavement & sexual exploitation, and more recently, the script has explicitly identified him as Bengali. Those changes necessarily alter the historical & political implications of his entire story. You cannot take a character who has been reconceived as a brown child trafficked out of South Asia, incorporate racialized sexual violence into his history, & then treat that history as though it exists in a vacuum whenever the narrative finds it inconvenient. You fucking made those choices. You have to write the character who results from them. And this is where my frustration with Armand becomes impossible to separate from my frustration with the season’s treatment of race, gender, & sexual exploitation more broadly, because there is obviously a pattern here. Again and again, the show seems fascinated by marginalized people as images or as objects while demonstrating remarkably little interest in the interior lives of the people inhabiting them. I think Claudia/Regina is perhaps the most obvious example. Think of the way Mr. Jones himself went on record saying Claudia’s adaptation-specific rape in season one was put in to “make her stronger”. Think of Regina’s job as a sex worker, and how that information is framed to us. The character Gabriella feels like one huge gratuitously misogynistic joke. Book Gabrielle is already profoundly transgressive! She does not need to be transformed into some kinda hypersexualized cartoon villain to suddenly become interesting. Her traumatized separation from femininity, motherhood, domesticity, civilization, & even just, like, I mean, ordinary human intimacy is what makes her “strange” already. Her vampirism allows her to liberate her sexually while also allowing her to escape categories of personhood that she has personally experienced as confinement. There is something actually radical in that that I know for a fact is deeply deeply personal & empowering to a ton of people who love this series, & reducing her instead to a very simple, sexually voracious “whore-villain” type is not at all an amplification of Anne’s original transgression, nor does it do anything to amplify her abuse of Lestat. It’s a retreat into one of the oldest misogynistic archetypes available. Again, for the somehow-still-uninitiated, the issue is not that women must always be good. The issue is that they ought to be real people in much the same way the man vampires are more than allowed to be real people. Camp has left the building. I’m not a puritan. I wanted this season to be filthy. Instead it’s a bunch of white people in a room snickering about racist jokes and finding new & exciting ways to trivialize rape.

This is more or less why I find it so difficult to dismiss the season’s racial politics as just a collection of unfortunate lines or isolated instances of tone-deaf writing. When those moments exist alongside the show’s recurring willingness to turn Black & brown characters into things upon which other characters’ traumas or desires are enacted, they really begin to form a pattern & the composition of the writers’ room absolutely matters here. When the language becomes this level of racially grotesque, or the imagery begins reproducing historical stereotypes, the absence of Black writers from the room is not irrelevant. I’m not saying it’s impossible to tell this kind of story that way, but it is certainly A Choice to have told it in the way this particular group of writers chose to tell it. Absolutely none of these characters need to be sanitized into virtuous representatives of their respective identities, of course not, but complexity requires substance. That’s kind of the fundamental problem. You cannot invoke histories of racial & sexual violence for their dramatic power and then refuse responsibility for the meanings those histories create. And to think they could’ve just done the book.

And I think perhaps that is what makes this season’s profound vacancy so frustrating. Nothing happened. It is based on & now surrounded by extraordinarily potent material but the show simply does not seem to realize when it has stumbled into it. That is such a mind-blowing waste, because these characters (and these actors!) deserved writers willing to follow those implications the whole the way down. The material was already transgressive, the writers did not need to make it more shocking. They somehow managed to make a show both completely overstuffed & completely empty. So many things technically happen, and still I finished hours of television feeling like precisely nothing at all had happened. Plot is not character development. Daniel and Armand undergo what should be an enormous transformation in their relationship out of frame, and we are left only with the aftermath. Louis and Lestat are subjected to an act of spectacular violence that cannot even carry the weight of permanent consequence because we already know they’re going to survive it. The show keeps on skipping what actually matters. That’s what I find so disappointing. It isn’s because the show didn’t give me exactly what I wanted. It think it’s because I can see multiple better versions of this season hiding inside the one we got, or, tooting my own horn here, even in the stuff I have been writing with my friends.

TL;DR, The story I love wasn’t told and the story I was promised wasn’t told either. I was more than prepared to wait for DM. I would have traded an entire season of my absolute favorite pairing for a beautiful & thoughtful adaptation of one of my favorite books. This season was a joke. But I have been writing Armand for almost thirteen years now and I have no plans to stop doing that. The world I have built for him means a lot to me, and so this blog will remain mostly headcanon-based until further notice. If you have read this far, I thank you. ❤️

[lrdhightower]

independent   and   selective   portrayal   of   ormund   hightower   of   asoiaf.   portrayal   is   considerably    television   show   based   due   to   character   being   given   more   of   a   storyline   within   season   three   of   house   of   the   dragon,   but   writer   is   more   book   oriented.   mature   &   canon   compliant   content   will   be   present.   minors   do   not   interact.   low   to   medium   activity,   spoilers   will   be   present   and   tagged   with   hotd   spoilers. as   told   by   saph,   twenty-five,   she   /   they   /   he,   cst. 

psd   credit.   temporary   rules:

my   name   is   saph!   i   am   twenty-five   years   old,   and   use   she/they/he   pronouns.   i   am   neurodivergent   &   mentally/chronically   ill.   i   am   queer   and   trans.   i   have   memory   issues   so   if   i   refollow   or   repeat   things,   please   forgive   me.   because   of   this,   i   ask   that   i   am   hardblocked   if   you   choose   to   unfollow.   i   won't   reach   out   to   ask   why   if   we   haven't   interacted   much. all   edits   are   made   by   me.   do   not   steal   my   content   and/or   ideas   without   at   least   reaching   out   and   asking   if   it’s   okay   first.   psd   used   in   my   icons   is   my   own. i   am   open   to   most   forms   of   interaction   except   unprompted   gif/one-liner   starters.   i   really   struggle   with   these   and   it   often   leaves   me   feeling   guilty   for   ignoring   them,   etc.   please   refrain   from   sending   them   and   just   reach   out   to   me.   i   am   plot   oriented   and   would   prefer   to   have   solid   interactions   or   ideas   going.   my   ims   are   always   open   for   plotting,   but   please   do   not   leave   all   the   work   to   me.   i   expect   mutual   effort   in   the   plotting   process. i   am   open   to   exclusivity   if   we   have   plotted   and   interacted   consistently.   i   am   more   interested   in   mains   which   includes   multiple   versions   of   the   same   characters,   but   there's   a   bit   more   priority   with   the   writers   that   are   my   mains   and   have   plotted   with   me.   this   makes   it   easier   for   me   to   keep   up   with   replies   and   plotting.   i   am   semi-selective   with   shipping.   i   am   duplicate   friendly. dead   dove   themes   present.   don't   follow   if   you   are   not   okay   with   canon   compliant   themes.   i   have   trauma   related   to   incest   so   i   do   request   a   head's   up   before   it   is   thrown   into   a   plot.   i   don't   mind   writing   it,   though,   if   it   is   done   in   a   way   that   is   compatible   with   my   boundaries.   that   being   said,   i   obviously   do   not   condone   it. please   do   not   interact   if   you   meet   basic   dni-criteria.   additionally,   do   not   interact   if   you   are   incapable   of   direct   communication   with   tone   indicators.   i   understand   neurodivergence   and   anxiety   as   i   have   both,   but   i   do   not   tolerate   a   lack   of   clear   communication   between   writers,   especially   if   said   lack   of   communicating   creates   unnecessary   drama. i   will   never   use   AI   for   writing   or   graphics   and   i   will   not   interact   if   you   choose   to   use   it.   mdni,   acab,   blm,   fuck    isr*el,   fuck    ice.    🇵🇸   🏳️‍⚧️ 

[serafinomostro]

hi i swear i’m still alive but is anyone going to point out the very bizarre fact that samuel beckett is being so loudly referenced and now armand has the james joyce eyepatch. am actively losing my shit over this

[kinkydorah]

ASSAD ZAMAN as ARMAND THE VAMPIRE LESTAT 1.01

[serafinomostro]

so i’m NOT doing great how about yall!

[kinkydorah]

i feel high

[leneemusing]

JEALOUS, FIERCLY PROTECTIVE & TERRITORIAL PROMPTS

feel free to edit pronouns as needed! content warning for some strong language,  threats and implied violence.

to each other:

❝  you’re mine. only mine.  ❞

❝  i’m all yours.  ❞

❝  mine.  ❞

❝  yours.  ❞

❝  we belong to each other.   ❞

❝  you belong to me.  ❞

❝  i belong to you.  only ever you.  ❞

❝  i just didn’t like the way they were looking at you.  like you weren’t mine.  ❞

❝  you know i’m yours,  right?  i only have eyes for you.  ❞

❝  no one else is ever gonna have a chance with me.  you’re it.  you’re all i want.  ❞

❝  i chose you.  and i need you to trust that my decision is final.  trust me.  ❞

❝  wait are you jealous?  ❞

❝  aw,  baby.  it’s cute when you’re jealous.  ❞

❝  i don’t like the way they keep staring at you.   ❞

❝  i don’t like how they keep staring at me.   ❞

❝  are they making you uncomfortable?  i can do something about it.  ❞

❝  no one should even get to look at you unless you want them to.  ❞

❝  stop—  it’s okay.  they’re not worth your anger.  just kiss me.  ❞

❝  stop saying i’m jealous.  i’m not—  i just.  i don’t like having to share. ❞

❝  i’m not jealous,  who said i’m jealous?  ❞

❝  well if i’m all yours then kiss me like it.  ❞

❝  show everyone who i belong to.  ❞

❝  i’m gonna remind them you’re mine.  ❞

❝  i want everyone here to see that you’re mine.  ❞

❝  i want everyone here to see that i’m yours.  ❞

❝  hey—  look at me.  why are you all upset?  ❞

❝  you can’t keep getting your feathers all ruffled when anyone else gives me attention.  ❞

❝  they don’t deserve you—  i don’t deserve you.  but at least i’m aware of it.  ❞

❝  i promise there’s no one else.  you have my heart completely.  ❞

❝  hey,  is this asshole bothering you?  ❞

❝  tell me you’re mine.  ❞

to a third party:

❝  get the fuck away from them!  ❞

❝  look at them like that again and you’ll won’t be seeing anything.  ❞

❝  don’t you dare touch them.  ❞

❝  yeah it’s time to walk the fuck away.  ❞

❝  you’re gonna lose a finger if you don’t get outta my sight right now.  ❞

❝  you heard them,  get lost.  ❞

❝  lucky for you,  i don’t wanna ruin their night.  but i see you sniffing around here again you might not be so fortunate.  ❞

❝  you wanna lose a limb?  beat it,  fucker.  ❞

❝  see,  i woulda left it alone.  but you made them fucking cry.  so now you’re gonna lose your eyes.  ❞

❝  hey,  they said ‘no.’  ❞

❝  hey asshole,  shut the fuck up or i’ll make you shut up.  ❞

❝  what did you just say to them,  you little shit?  ❞

❝  oh yeah.  now you’re all quiet.  not so bold when you’re not the toughest guy in the room,  huh?  ❞

❝  get lost.  ❞

❝  go.  ❞

❝  leave.  before my patience runs out.  ❞

❝  get the fuck outta their face.  ❞

❝  hey,  that’s enough.  ❞

actions:

[ CLAIM ]  for one muse to possessively place their hands on their shoulders or hips. 

[ HOLD ]  for one muse to slide their arm around the other in a possessive way. 

[ SHELTER ]  for one muse to lean into the other’s side or hug them to seek comfort from a crowd or individual while in public. 

[ STAKE ]  for one muse to protectively and/or possessively stand behind the other to intimidate a third party. 

[ RESCUE ]  for one muse to intervene upon seeing a third party making the other one uncomfortable. 

[ CHASE ]  for one muse to interrupt and make a third party leave the other alone out of jealousy/possessiveness. 

[ TENSION ]  for one muse to get in a fight on behalf of the other. 

[ STOP ]  for one muse to break up a fight which started because of them. 

[ MEND ]  for one muse to treat the other’s wounds they got from protecting them. 

[ SCOLD ]  for one muse to treat the other’s wounds they got from fighting over them. 

[ CARESS ]  for one muse to possessively kiss the other in public.

[ TAKE ]  for one muse to passionately kiss the other,  fueled by jealousy. 

[ TAUNT ]  for one muse to flirt with a third party to try and get the other to act possessively. 

[ REMIND ]  for our muses to have passionate sex meant to remind one party who they belong to. 

[ EMBRACE ]  for one muse to dominate the other due to possessiveness/jealousy. 

[ LINKED ]  for one muse to hold the other’s hand in public to stake claim. 

[ INTERTWINE ]  for one muse to hold the other’s hand in public in a comforting manner. 

[themotionwaltz]

ASSAD ZAMAN as THE VAMPIRE ARMAND in INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE / THE VAMPIRE LESTAT (2022—)

(these originate from this video!)

[serafinomostro]

armand, simone weil, & the erotics of decreation, or, whatever in the world you might call the place where my head has been over the past several weeks

i know this space is intended for dramatic writing & that lately it has been not quite that, but i hope if you’ve taken the time to find yourself here that you’ll continue to bear with me and understand that to love and appreciate a thing like armand is to become a sort of slave to theories & the never-ending creeping rootstalks of his almost-indescribable condition. lately i have been working very hard and feeling very exhausted, so i apologize in advance if all of this here turns out to be complete gibberish. i cannot seem to stop thinking about the path from armand to simone weil and it seems i will not rest till i do something about it. so: armand can, i think, be read through simone weil’s notion of decreation, particularly in the extent to which suffering ceases, for him, to function as experience, and instead becomes a mode of organizing subjectivity itself… that is to say, not only in the banal sense of “religious suffering” that is so frequently attributed to him. after all, suffering alone explains very little in anne rice’s universe; all of her vampires suffer, most of them extremely so. armand’s peculiarity lives someplace else, in the sense that he does not just endure or tolerate “affliction” but that he embraces and searches for it, along with renunciation & repression. psychoanalytically speaking, an ascetic is not someone “without desire,” but someone in an obsessively-structured relationship with desire: this includes mastering, fearing, transforming & ritualizing the notion of desire through the long, complicated practice of weilian decreation. freud, lacan, and plenty of classic stoicism (askesis) are also obviously at play here, but the main takeaway at this point is that armand’s asceticism is less a simple “self-discipline” and more an in-depth psychological strategy. he is managing centuries of inner conflict in a strikingly decreative manner: the denial and/or control of desire & pleasure prevents shame and loss of control, and becomes a way of avoiding emotional attachment, and in many armand-specific cases, satisfaction is refused because it actually becomes intensified through extreme deprivation. renunciation becomes meaningful & pleasurable in itself. 

perhaps more precisely: armand experiences the self as something that must either be mastered completely, or surrendered entirely. no stable middle position has ever appeared, & likely will not ever appear, psychologically available to him. to me this is where decreation becomes extremely useful: madame weil described decreation as the gradual undoing of the “i” before god. she wrote, “we possess nothing in this world other than the power to say ‘i’.” the spiritual task therefore becomes subtraction. i think the knee-jerk instinct is towards self-fulfillment, but in this case, it’s self-reduction. (you can imagine armand’s simone weil to lestat’s simone de beauvoir, if it helps.) 

what’s striking too about armand is the extent to which an almost identical logic informs both his spirituality & his erotic life. from the beginning, his identity exists through dispossession. arun is trafficked, of course renamed, aestheticized, transformed into amadeo long, long before he becomes armand. the body appears in these early formations as occupied territory. selfhood almost does not even enter the equation. immediately the collapse (or the blurring? the “sublimation”?) of several categories that typically remain rigid is abundantly obvious: we have beauty and violation, reverence and possession, spiritual elevation and erotic use. marius obviously does not just feed, house & educate amadeo in exchange for his “services”. amadeo is forced to become an object (or a mastercomputer… iykyk) through this bizarre staged transcendence, but the consequence is actually not chaos. not on the surface, anyway. armand isn’t psychologically disordered in the conventional sense. if anything, kind of the opposite problem is introduced in an extraordinary over-organization or hyper-analysis of the psyche. philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, ritual, aesthetic perfection, sexual deviance, archives, surveillance, diagrams, etc etc, everything a compulsive system. but these things really do not ground him in reality so much as they produce an increasingly abstract distance from it. his asceticism is so obsessive it becomes like a never-ending erotic fantasy. 

in my last long and meandering armandysis, i turned to anne carson (who, in 2005, actually borrowed simone weil’s decreation concept) and her rather perfect line “two hundred and ten million years of desire wash through me”, which again to me approaches this particular psychic experience with just flabbergasting precision. desire is not an interior truth; it is something transpersonal, and it is as ancient as armand is. so i find it pretty plain to understand, then, why asceticism & eroticism become so incredibly difficult to separate in armand. they’re not opposites! they are technologies for managing engulfment. the apparent contradiction governing him (absolute self-possession vs. a longing for absolute dissolution) is therefore not contradictory at all. it’s just the same impulse working in different syntactic positions. even armand’s masochism reflects this structure: submission offers not so much the “pleasures” of passivity than the possibility of controlled disappearance. for instance, if decreation can be chosen, perhaps even ritualized, then ideally it will cease to be annihilation, or literal de-creation, in the traumatic sense. this is old news. of course it is. but the alter-egos of “rashid” & “arun” are tell-tale signs of long-term decreation, and they are inherently linked to sexual and/or violent submission. 

the question “am i my history i have endured?” becomes especially revealing at this point, because it isn’t just a semi-rhetorical question about armand’s trauma. it’s a question about whether affliction (malheur in weilspeak) eventually abolishes the distinction between subject & wound. weil visits this particular terror repeatedly in gravity and grace: that suffering destroys the self’s sense of meaning & identity, forcing objecthood. armand’s literal entire psychic structure can almost be read as a defense against precisely this reduction, although one that paradoxically reproduces more or less the same conditions, voluntarily. (i know “decreation yes/affliction no” can be confusing so, to me, the key distinction regarding armand is: decreation is a consent to diminish the ego; affliction is the destruction of the conditions under which consent is even meaningful.)

this is why the underground religiosity of the children of darkness eventually digs such a tough hook in him. starvation, mutilation, deprivation, and namely ritualized shame are being used to punish desire, for one thing, but through this elaborate self-harming, affliction has become legible and sacred. & perhaps this is the deepest affinity between armand and weil: they both treat selfhood, itself, as the root of the eternal problem. and it’s not because the self is inherently sinful in a simple moral sense, but because the self remains almost intolerably vulnerable to possession, dependency, humiliation, desire, history, time, etc etc etc. decreation thus feels less like transcendence than it does like a fantasy of invulnerability through self-erasure.

armand does differ from dear madame weil, however, in one crucial respect & i think i would be remiss not to touch on that here too. weil’s decreation still moves, of course, toward god. however severe and thankless her asceticism becomes, her “annihilation” clings to metaphysical orientation. armand possesses no such optimism i fear. every transcendent structure that has claimed him, whether it comes to him in spheres of religion, beauty, love, and/or authority, has also violated him, & promises to do it again. the result is a form of decreation void of redemption, one fragmented self endlessly & frantically attempting to reduce itself, without ever arriving at peace.

“have i crawled an inch forward?” … the inherent despair of this question is in its suspicion that centuries of transformation may amount only to more of the same. just this repetition of erotic insanity, forever & forever, punishment without reward, always. to me it is one of the few moments where we catch a glimpse of the “real” armand, in a brief second where he realizes exactly how impossible his personal quest to decreate actually is.

[serafinomostro]

hey all ⁠♡ i am absolutely around & have mostly been working behind the scenes on a bunch of extra informational pages for my blog that will be going up soonish probably. (you cannot however convince me to make a carrd for pete’s sake i did my time i will NOT do it again!!!!) anyway, i wanted to tell you guys that after reading this deliriously naughty fanfic probably like five times i have finally decided to start putting together a big page of all of armand’s “jobs”, for lack of a better term… think along the lines of curator/conservator/archivist, botanical toxicologist/phytochemist, informal psychoanalyst, medievalist, etc etc. i think it would be a great way to share a little bit more about my specific portrayal of him & also provide some scenarios about how armand might interact with muses outside the AR universe. i love u guys & have been much more active on disco lately, so please let me know if you wanna exchange info there too 👼