the vampire Armand completely fail in Season 3, and even Assad couldn't save him
Let's get straight to the point. I adore Armand with all my heart. This is important for context. I accept him in any form: when he behaves well, when he is kind, and even when he commits objectively villainous acts. My problem is not that he is a villain in the show. My problem is what kind of villain the season 3 writers turned him into. I don't understand their intentions.
1. Canonical evil vs. invented "cartoonish" evil. According to Anne Rice's books, there is more than enough material to demonstrate Armand's evil deeds. This ground is incredibly fertile, and all his book villainies are thoughtfully scripted because Anne Rice knew what she was writing. They can be explained from the perspective of the character's psychology. If they wanted to show us "gremlin" Armand, they could have revealed: his time in his cult, the disgusting relationship with the boy Denis, how he threw Lestat off the tower and forcibly dragged him to trial, how he scalps his victims. There is plenty of ground, just take it and adapt it, explore it!
All his shitty actions have a rational explanation; nothing arises from nothing! For example, his service in the cult is a direct reference to his childhood with the monks and his desire to serve and believe in God. His relationship with Denis in the first book is a distorted dynamic of his relationship with Marius; he is trying to take something under control in the way he knows how to love, flipping the dynamic and becoming Marius himself for Denis. Later, he applies this retrospective to Daniel Molloy, becoming a Marius for him. He threw Lestat off the tower because Lestat didn't come back for him, abandoned him, left Nicky, and didn't respond to his feelings, and Armand's character has been explosive since childhood (we remember his anger at Marius and the scene where he broke down the door with an axe). He scalps people and engages in various perversions because he is a forever-teenager who is insanely fascinated by everything new in this world and rebels in the way he thinks is right. He has a distorted morality, but a morality nonetheless!
Instead of this, the writers invent a completely new plot, not understanding how to answer the new questions they pose. They don't remove some villainies from the past, but add others from the future, reducing his complex character to a cartoonish villain with a twirled mustache. They are, pardon me, shitting on our plate.
They completely stripped Armand of any backstory, his relationship with religion, his role in Lestat's life, and his influence on the plot. For example, I want to remind you that it was from a conversation with Armand that Lestat learned about Marius and set out to search for him, and here Marius found Lestat himself. :/
2. Twisted logic of guilt. Everyone and anyone should have apologized to Armand, but not Louis. Louis is not guilty of anything before Armand. This is despite the fact that I adore Armand, but Louis is truly not the person who should have been subjected to such twisted torture. This completely turns the dynamic of their relationship upside down.
3. Destruction of polyamory — the foundation of the universe. This is my main conceptual complaint. The entire universe of Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles is built on polyamory. In the first two seasons, we saw this: Louis indeed felt extremely tender feelings for Armand, he loved him, and at the same time was torn by his love for Lestat. It was beautiful, beautifully shown, and it was interesting to watch. To accept the new reality of season 3, in which Louis "always loved only Lestat," is nonsense. I do not believe that Louis did not love Armand. They had a relationship that eventually ran its course. That's normal. But they were built on feelings, because in Anne Rice's universe with its polyamory, this is normal.
4. The writers hold the viewer for a fool. All of this turns into some kind of children's show where the viewers are treated as utter fools. As people incapablef psychological analysis of emotional scenes, incapable of critically evaluating the script. It feels like the season 3 writers skipped literature classes. We got an Armand who has "no goal, only a path" — to be evil for evil's sake. I don't understand what the point of this is at all.
5. Queerbaiting the Daniel storyline. His entire storyline with Daniel is thoroughly ruined. Armand simply stalked him, and it led to nothing. We were given no romance. This is outright queerbaiting.
6. The only gold in this shit. The only nugget of gold here is the acting. Jacob, Assad, and Delainey played brilliantly; they are magnificent in the scenes they were given.
I really hope that there will either be no fourth season, or it will be with completely different writers. I cannot accept this reality. For me now, only the first two seasons and the books exist. That's it. The third season did not happen, I did not see it, I deny its existence.
