what are your thoughts on Armand as a character?
I think that every single misconception of Armand comes down to the fact that for some reason a big chunk of the fandom has decided that he's some kind of chaos god who just does things for the hell of it when that's not who he is at all. Like it's funny as a meme to say Armand just lies for fun, god knows I have
But now this has started bleeding into people's genuine meta so we end up with people dropping the most batshit theories for things Armand lied about or manipulated people to remember when there is no reason for him to have done any of that.
Armand isn't a known liar, in the books or the show. In the books especially he will straight up just be like "yeah I did all of that shit" most of the time. In the shows he gets around it by telling a version of the truth eg. saying yes when Louis asked if he saved him, not technically a lie because he did break Louis out of the vault but obviously not answering the real question Louis was asking.
The times he does lie or bend the truth, it's not out of malice, it's about survival. He's playing 4D chess with everyone not because he's an evil conniving little gremlin but because he's always trying to figure out how he gets out of each situation alive. It's how he's had to live almost his entire life. Why? You'll never fucking believe it but of course it comes back to Marius.
The thing about Marius and his time in Venice is that despite how that whole relationship reads to an outside perspective, it’s the only time Armand has ever felt safe and secure in his life (even before being kidnapped, in the books he describes how his families lives were constantly reliant on his father being able to provide for them and the village they lived in, we don’t know what it was like in his show backstory yet but it doesn’t seem like Armand even really remembers). Assad probably summed it up better than me:
“I think there’s two moments where you get to sit with an Armand who, for a couple of minutes, lets his guard down a little bit. [...] The first one is a window into Armand as Amadeo, the boy, and a glimpse into the trauma of his life and finding solace, meaning, and love in this other ancient vampire when he meets Marius. He’s recounting his feelings toward Marius, especially when he says, “I served him with all my heart, basked in his mercy.” Those are completely true things. That’s the one time where he felt completely safe for the first time in his life, and I don’t think he’s ever felt safe after that.” [x]
I’m not gonna sit here and say Marius is to blame for a bunch of satanists burning him alive and kidnapping Armand (even though it kind of was, but that’s a whole different conversation), but it was his fault for never doing anything to prepare Armand for that. Instead he let Armand live in this bubble of safety and security, just for the rug to be brutally pulled out from under him, and now we have an Armand who is probably never going to let his guard down ever again.
The choices Armand makes aren’t about what he wants or even about what he believes, they’re about staying safe. It’s why he clashes so harshly with Claudia, someone who is willing to risk everything in the pursuit of what she wants. I bring up this part from Queen of the Damned all the time but I really think it’s one of the most important character moments for Armand in the whole series.
“When Armand woke him up in Port-au-Prince, it was war he wanted to talk about. What did men in this century actually think of war? [...] The point was, Armand didn’t know what men felt. He never had. Oh, of course he’d known the pleasures of the flesh, that was par for the course. Nobody then thought children were innocent of sensuous pleasures. But of true aggression he knew little. He killed because it was his nature as a vampire; and the blood was irresistible. But why did men find war irresistible? What was the desire to clash violently against the will of another with weapons? What was the physical need to destroy?”
He doesn’t do the shit he does for shits and giggles, he does it because, in his mind, it’s the only option. Does that mean it is the only option? No, obviously not. We could talk for days about how Armand could have overpowered the coven, could have prevented it, but that’s not the point. The point is that to him the risks of attempting that were too much.
Assad said at one point that the thing Armand wants most of all is to be accepted [x], and I do think that’s true to an extent, but I think that it’s a huge conflict within him and that’s where things start to get messy. Because he wants love and acceptance so badly and it does lead to him taking more and more risks (e.g. going against the coven’s wishes and not killing Louis, allowing him and Claudia to turn Madeleine), but there still comes a point where his fear outweighs everything else which is how we end up with him allowing the trial to take place and allowing Claudia and Madeleine to die.
Anyway, the point is that I think a lot of meta and fan theories overlook this fundamental aspect of his character, so we end up with people saying shit like “Armand erased Louis’ memory of Lestat’s scars” and “Daniel’s children aren’t real, Armand just implanted those memories”. Armand doesn’t do things without a reason, and in 99% of cases that reason is that he’s trying to stay safe. There’s a logic to everything he does and I’m tired of this fanon image of him as some kind of cartoon villain when the reality is that he’s just going through life in permanent fight or flight mode. I’ll leave you with this extract from my annotations of The Vampire Armand which I WILL continue with soon.
“I was hungry, but having no hope of food, I knew this to be a pain that would spike and then, of its own, die away.”
Already setting up his tolerance for pain and the way he adjusts to and endures the conditions he finds himself in. This is the same mindset he adopts when Marius whips him. The same mindset that gets him through the cult’s torture.
Also calls back to what he said in the last chapter about his fears. “[...] that this state, like so many others with me, will prove the verge of nothing but extend itself over centuries.” Armand’s entire life has been a series of spikes and ebbs in pain. And even though he knows each painful moment will eventually pass, it must be so much worse knowing that ultimately it won’t change anything. He endures the pain, knowing it will fade, but also knowing it’s only a matter of time before it returns again.
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baratheonpilled
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