please consider with me the process of Armand reconnecting with his birth culture after 500 years of The Horrors and the neat experiences he might have like:
re-learning languages (and not just the liturgical sanskrit he'd've been taught as a monastic)
grieving languages when he realizes the dialects available to him to learn now are nothing like what his mother spoke to him 500 years ago
trying out so many clothes and pieces of jewelry he missed out on over the last half a millennium (no piercings, no problem, the marvels of modern jewelsmithing have given the world magnetic jewelry, the world is his oyster)
playing around with his concepts of gender through fashion because there's no longer anyone around to tell him he can't
getting pissed off apropos of nothing one day that all his classical Roman education includes absolutely no Hindu martial arts (am I suggesting Armand recreationally learns to use Chakram? maybe. sounds like a fun pastime. He's already skilled in fencing so why not some new form of blade? He has eternity, he might as well pass the time.)
discovering Bollywood film-- how many weeks does he lose to just watching movies and the endless rabbit warren of film studies? (he makes Louis go to the movies with him for this entire period, divorced or not, because Louis is the only person he knows who enjoys film.)
learning to dance, learning Kathak or Manipuri, something from the North near Delhi, and being terrible at it but also not caring (what the hell was he doing in the Rennaisance with Italy's stuffy-ass court dances when there were so many more options available?)
studying the philosophical developments that've arisen since he was last studying under a guru-- getting annoyed at having to wade through all the commercial and Westernized garbage while he's at it. (there is not much he finds more irksome than what's happened to yogic philosophy since he was last a student. why is everyone doing Victorian English calisthenics?)
bickering academically with old men in coffee shops and parks and other old-man-flavored haunts about the finer points of those philosophical developments
settling into a religious and philosophical perspective that is neither the punishing catholic-satanist literalism of Santino nor the stoic patriarchal atheism of Marius nor even the hedonistic anxious atheism of Lestat-- something a little more agnostic and animist at the same time because he comes from a life of experiencing many gods and spirits and he still sees the dead and no one gets to demand obedience from him any more.
reconnecting with Marius solely to be formally introduced to Pandora's fledgling, Arjun, who is the closest to a contemporary of time/place that he's got-- even though Arjun is 200 years older and from the south (around modern day Tamil Nadu, I think).
What i'm saying is what if the Armand the AMC adaptation gives us got to expand his identity beyond the limits colonization placed on him? Wouldn't that be neat? Like, if being a vampire is about the power that comes from existing in the liminal space between life and death, transcending the boundaries placed on a body by humans-- wouldn't Armand making inroads to his own past be a massive part of his vampiric journey?
Related, a question for the class: do y'all think mendhi would work on vampires' skin? Would the henna have to be mixed with vampire blood, as other forms of make up do, to stick?
