CW: Mentions of Armand's backstory and forced prostitution, cycles of abuse/enabling, the mutually dubiously consensual sex between Bianca and Armand
Bianca Solderini's mischaracterisation in some Modern AUs is so interesting to me. I will ramble about it!
I understand why people want her to fulfil the same role as she does in The Vampire Armand, because that upholds Armand's characterisation, but doing so fundamentally misunderstands her, in my opinion. I also think people can automatically expect more maturity and caretaking from women than men (and be vitriolic when they don’t provide it) even in a TV and book series all about cycles of abuse and victims hurting and failing each other.
Of course Venetian Bianca is okay with the “relationship” between Armand and Marius! She's a fashionable courtesan, and this is an accepted social practice, so she doesn't question it. But Bianca of the 20th or 21st century has not grown up with those social norms – so why would she just defend it or turn a blind eye to it for no reason? It really misses out on the way in which "boy" in Renaissance Venice is a social class not just of age but of gender - between man and woman.
Women don't get to be "girls" in the same way. Noblewomen, like Bianca, could be married off as young as eleven (though fourteen to sixteen would have been far more normal) to men in their thirties and beyond. Interestingly, in a record from a real Bianca, Bianca Morosini Giustinian, she specifies that if unmarried her daughters and sons should both inherit age twenty, but if her daughters are married at sixteen then they’re old enough to inherit. The defining factor for male adulthood is age, usually around twenty, but the factor for female adulthood is marriage. There’s a completely different system at play. The reason why cortigiana onesta or "honest courtesans" like Bianca even existed was because Venetian noblemen did not tend to marry until after they were twenty seven, long past when their female contemporaries had become wives. Noblemen wanted sex and female company, but due to social standing they would seek out upper-class courtesans who had expensive homes and salons (or else boys).
Armand and Bianca fulfil the same social role in many ways. She lives in luxurious surroundings, but she is still a young sex worker who is involuntarily sent from Florence to Venice by a male cousin who takes her earnings, forces her to assassinate people, and calls her “my whore”. In Blood and Gold Marius says she’s nineteen or twenty when Armand is fifteen. Given she’s already well established in Venice when Marius meets her this probably started when she was herself seventeen or eighteen – given Anne Rice, I think we’d know if she’d started out younger.
Bianca is very worried and guilty about being forced to be an assassin because she is a moral person, but being forced into being a courtesan isn’t something she ever registers as wrong – which makes sense! She is able to turn away potential suitors - something a married woman could never do to her husband. She has her own money, artistic and philosophical interests, no children, and can run her own household how she likes. Her exchanging sex for that lifestyle isn’t different from the way she’d sign over any sexual rights to her husband as a wife.
Because of his social role, I think she projects those ideas of women and consent onto Armand as Marius’ “lover”. If Armand were a fifteen year old Venetian nobleman he’d be an adolescent, but as a foreign, lower-class apprentice he instead takes on a more similar role to a Venetian woman. As such, having a quasi-husband who is older, richer, and more powerful is, in a circular logic, what makes him mature enough to have an adult lover. The practice of pederasty between artists and apprentices is also relevant, Marius is providing housing and an education, so therefore Armand provides sex in return. That transactional set-up also isn’t dissimilar from the life of a courtesan, who exchanged sex not just for money but also cultural and artistic exchanges.
TL;DR Bianca never thinks what's happening to Armand is wrong, because she never thinks what's happening to her is wrong.
Initially, Bianca is an adult and Armand is the child hiding under her bed, she's more educated, she has her own income, and of course she's older. However, Armand is going to be able to outgrow his social role and become a man, where courtesans often exited their roles into destitution or death by syphilis. The sex between them is a key moment in those social roles shifting – Armand proving he’s a man because he takes an active role with a woman, rather than being the submissive boy. While he describes it as a “rape”, we do see Bianca consents/is interested, as well as being older, and I think that the word is more indicative of Armand’s mixture of guilt and excitement in being the sexual partner with more power for the first time. (Plus the Anne Rice of it all.) In my opinion it is about as consensual as either character is capable of at that point.
Of course neither fully outgrows their social role -- Armand is turned at seventeen, so he never does become a man, rather he is always, in the books, the boy masquerading as a gentleman. In the show he does get to grow up - though he’s also Indian, so even though he’s turned later in his mortal life he can’t assimilate into Italian high society in the way Marius’ other boys do, and of course he stays with Marius. Bianca is turned at twenty-one or twenty-two, so she is never discarded in the way many courtesans were, never pregnant or destitute, and instead stays with Marius for hundreds of years.
In a modern AU if Bianca is just an heiress or Marius' wife, she's a kind, brave and intelligent person who I think would obviously have a problem with a relationship between a fifteen year old and a fifty year old! We see that accusation coming out even in canon – “A magician you might be, but you are no angel, Marius. Not you with your boys."
However–
In service of her story, not just Armand's, I think we can have more complex and perhaps dangerous conversations about how Bianca's view of herself could become projected onto "Amadeo". Whether she's a high-end escort, or had her own relationships with grown men at his age, or some other backstory, she should be identifying so closely with him that she can't be objective about what's happening. When Marius invites her to play hostess for his house in Blood and Gold, he reminds her he “has neither wife nor daughter” and he also describes her as a “child woman”. He initially plans to turn Bianca!! Being the creep that he is, it’s only a fifteen year old victim of human trafficking coming onto the scene that he decides maybe nineteen isn’t young enough for his new immortal companion…
The way in which a victim justifying what happens to herself becomes justifying it happening to someone else is more messy to explore but more interesting than Bianca just not realising what’s going on.
Cycles of abuse and the role of the enabler are so fascinating, and Bianca is always defined as kind and loving – but those traits can be what makes her more likely to “keep the peace” between Marius and Amadeo, or respecting Marius telling her to stay away from Amadeo when he’s “ill” (by blaming her for being too much), or ultimately how she’s manipulated into being Marius’ partner for hundreds of years when he’d throw her away in a moment for Pandora. When they meet again in 1800s Paris, Armand and Bianca are unable to speak to each other or even to reach for and recognise each other.
It's interesting for Bianca to be Armand’s friend without really feeling that difference between adult and child, to be the person who saw him hiding under the bed and offered him hugs and reassurance rather than ever saying this situation is wrong. And of course the story ends there, in canon, and she very much can fail him and that can be a discussion. If it isn't blatantly obvious, I do think there's also space for stories about her coming to recognise she's failed him and then being able to realise things about his situation she isn't able to about her own. (And maybe then start thinking about herself and needing to take more agency – like her leaving Marius later on!)
Love her or hate her, she’s Armand’s foil for a reason.
i learned so much from this great take, ty op!
