"armand is a cautionary tale about turning someone immortal when they have no stable sense of self" oh this is so incredibly succinct i will think about it forever
thank you! yeah i've been thinking about it a lot lately - i haven't read tva or qotd yet, but that's been my main takeaway about armand in iwtv and tvl, especially the latter. marius kind of explains away armand's Issues as being a product of his youth, and while that's clearly part of what's going on (who among us had a stable sense of self at 14/15?), you really can't separate that out from the trauma of his past and the way he was defined and continues to define himself through his relationship to other people/cults. marius could've waited another two decades and i don't think the situation would've actually been much better...
anyway, hate to give props to lestat, but he probably did say it best: "It was as if he had no real substance. Only will kept him robust and beautiful. And when the flow of his will was interrupted, he melted like a wax doll.“
