#amc!tvc

[littlestsnicket]

in armand’s season 2 “fanfic”, lestat does not say “i love you” with sincerity. armand frames it as transactional where lestat is exchanging sex and romance for knowledge about vampires.

i think they’ve both flattened each other in weird and very interesting ways. and discounting the changes armand had to make to take gabriella out of the story (which is quite protective of him, he hid that even from louis), i don’t think they are that different.

[littlestsnicket]

so um, what if loumand listen to lestat’s failures album together? my wild speculation i got maybe unwisely attached to based on some review spoilers (under the cut cause potentially spoilers?):

“Armand, kneel.”

Armand looks up at him from the floor, like Louis’ words had bypassed his higher brain function.

“Louis, that’s not fair. You can’t do this to me if you don’t mean it.” His voice is flat, like he’s feeling too much to express any of it, and it makes Louis’ heart try to crawl up his throat. An impossible combination of fear and affection for this half-feral shell of a boy.

“I’ll tell you what’s not fair. It’s not fair if you shatter all the glassware in my house cause you never fuckin’ learned to self-regulate for shit.”

Armand squeezed his eyes shut, expression rippling under the eyepatch, mouth pinching like he’s in physical pain.

Louis’ grown as a person, trying to actually deal with Lestat the last year. He doesn’t bait Armand even though a sizable portion of him wants a fight, especially a fight he’ll probably lose. It would feel better than this helplessness—probably, at least in the moment. But it would be worse after.

“I do mean it. Probably not how you want, but I invited you into my house. That’s not nothing.” Louis kneels before Armand and very carefully strokes his hair.

Armand fixes Louis with all of his unnerving focus channeled into his one good eye. “I tried so hard to love you.”

“I know baby, I know.”

[littlestsnicket]

armand calling himself arun makes a lot of sense to me, just like… generally regardless of armand’s exact mental state. arun is an innocent, and also a person armand has very very limited clear memory of being so there is a great degree of freedom in it.

amadeo, however, begged to be made a vampire, which—explicitly in the books and implied in the show—armand thinks is evil. also i think armand’s perception of his relationship with marius is more complicated and less rose-tinted-glasses, even in the books, than most people seem to have settled on.

[littlestsnicket]

screenshot so i’m at least attempting to credit the person that found this (also link)

this is so cool! i still think that there’s something a bit off in the execution, but there is a large part of me that would rather costume designers swing and miss a bit than play it safe, and i’m sure they didn’t have time or budget to hire specialists in historical reconstruction, although that would have been really really cool

[littlestsnicket]

i adore gaps in stories. the two years between lestat forming his band and them going on tour. the one line about him making the band rehearse that long, trying to figure out what they were supposed to be being because he knew it wasn’t really working, rather than capitalize on the peak popularity of the book

and how he did pretty much nothing but rehearse and inhale modern culture, unfortunately mostly twitter but highbrow stuff too

it says so much about him

[littlestsnicket]

last pre season 3 loumand drabble (just based on the one single spoiler gif i have seen so far there will be more, even if that is the only time they look at each other in the entire show, but it's still the end of an era!!!)

title: duck

word count: 100

loumand; armand's past but in a good-ish way for once

When Louis was properly, blindingly angry, he threw things. It was good. There were never any consequences—a few things broken perhaps, but Armand always ducked.

Armand’s ingrained instinct when he saw a blow coming was to defend himself, and the string of abuse that was his life hadn't quite managed to override it.

Louis managed to follow the impulse back, once, to a hazy, contextless memory of a giant hand ruffling curly hair, gently boxing an ear. Arun, if that was the name his parents gave him, had been loved. And it left its mark, meager as it was.

[littlestsnicket]

title: sadist

word count: 1.6k

loumand; uncomplicated kinky fluff, maintenance spanking; the title is a joke but only kind of; wildly glossed over real estate negotiations

"I need to consult with my partner," Louis says, standing from the table. The negotiations over this parcel of land had gotten tense, in an unproductive and unwarranted way, so the obvious tactic of forcing a break surprises no one. No one except Armand, Armand who is usually so attentive, so focused. But not today; he had completely lost the thread of the conversation a full minute ago.

Armand looks up at Louis, startled, so Louis raises his eyebrows. Armand frowns and stands—uncharacteristically ungainly—and lets Louis herd him out of the room.

"What..." Armand says, trailing off as Louis corrals Armand into his office. It's a more closed in, private space with a door that shuts, unlike the reading room where Louis usually prefers to do his work, which suits his purposes well now. It’s got what he needs—a nice desk chair without armrests.

Armand tracks Louis as he takes a seat. Armand’s doing such a poor job shielding his mind, Louis can literally feel his thoughts slip and grind gears. Anxious anticipation, hope, fear, all swimming in a vague wash of irritation and directionless yearning.

[read more on ao3]

[littlestsnicket]

the thing about claudia in the show is that she is driven by desire for community. she has independence, she can go off on her own, but it’s not enough for her, nor should it be. she is “doomed by the narrative” because no one with power in her community will ever see her as a first choice and she can’t break her tie to louis, even with madeleine who does choose her as much as she can.

it is a different story than the books. which is good. because adaptations fail not when they change things, but when they don’t follow through on their changes.