bestworstideaever

[bestworstideaever]

one thing that will never fail to make me stop believing in something is the group of people who believe in it too. not sure what this would be called

[bestworstideaever]

Armand's red flags in 2.02

You know how people kept accusing Lestat of isolating Louis from his family? And then Louis actually kept visiting his family, so if Lestat was isolating him, he did a really shit job of it?

Yeahhh. Armand shows us how it's really done.

Disclaimer: Armand is my favorite, precious boy, and I will defend his right to be as fucked-up as he damn well pleases, but he is indeed very fucked-up. So don't come at me accusing me of being biased in favor of Lestat (and even if I was, so what? this is Tumblr, not BBC News). I love Lestat, I love them all, but Armand is my trash son and if he isn't horrifically fucked-up on the show like he is in the books, it's a massive betrayal of the complexity of his character and the logical outcomes of his background. He hurts, and like any creature in pain, lashes out because of it. He knows how to do all kinds of diabolical shit, but he doesn't know how to be a person, and that's why I love him (trying to remember who the Youtuber was who said, "No one's a hero, everyone's a victim" about this series because they were so right).

First off, Assad is truly phenomenal at creating this effect:

If you don't suspect Armand of the shit he's about to pull, it's not your fault. This is how he is. Part of it is real innocence, in a way, or perhaps an inverse of innocence--he doesn't realize this shit isn't normal.

So it's very striking to me how Armand laid the foundation for his relationship with Louis so subtly and early on. He approached Louis in the park while he was alone, Claudia nowhere to be seen even though his invitation was for her as well. Claudia would ask questions. Armand wants to dangle the carrot before any questions are fired off. By the time anyone in the coven actually speaks with Claudia, she is already sold on them all. There is no time for her to form suspicions. With Claudia on board, Armand has free access to Louis. She feels at home with the coven, so she's not watching Armand too closely.

Then at the Delacroix mansion, Armand warns Louis against the rest of the coven. He says "a few of" the coven members are unforgiving, though he doesn't say who, which would be useful information if Louis is to defend himself (spoiler alert: it's all of them), just tells Louis to close his mind to the others. So Claudia is with the rest of the coven, while Louis is available only to Armand. Armand does not give this warning to Claudia. The only person she can hear it from is Louis, who she won't believe. They're now spending time apart, weakening the link between them. Armand knows he can seduce the hell out of anyone he desires, and once he does that, all he really needs is to break the filament binding Louis to Claudia and he's got what he wants.

He also warns him not to contact Roget again, which is probably good advice, but what Armand knows that Louis doesn't is that Lestat is alive. And Roget is the one person in the world Lestat would be able to contact if he could. So in the unlikely event that Lestat gets the chance to call Roget, Louis will not hear of it.

In just a few sentences, Armand has managed to distance Louis from Claudia, Lestat, and everyone else in the coven.

And how does he do it? By making sense, basically, by preying on Louis' preexisting (and sensible) fears about the coven. It makes sense for Louis to be on his guard. But Armand has set it up so he appears to be "different" from the rest of the coven, the only one Louis can trust, while issuing vague warnings about everyone else. And while Armand in the book is a pretty hands-off leader with the TdV, don't think for one second he can't do anything to protect Louis and Claudia himself. Here, he's acting like he has no sway with these people. He does. No matter what he says, he does.

So yeah. I'm really impressed with how smart the writers are being about this so far.

[bestworstideaever]

I have a hard time talking about American law enforcement, because I have ptsd (like a therapist told me this and everything) from my own experiences with cops and because it's so balls quaking insane.

Like, a cop in the United States can pull you over for any reason. Which is a nice way of saying no reason, because literally anything can be used after the fact as justification. A cop can say its cuz you looked at him, or didnt look at him, or it looked like you were holding something, or looked like you were driving too perfectly for it to be natural. It's insane.

There are apparently no circumstances where a cop can't just kill you. The line the courts have applied is "reasonably believed" you were a threat, but that's such a nebulous nothing limit that people get shot for reaching for their license, having their phone in their hand, you're running away with no weapon, not being able to follow conflicting commands, like anything. And cops are almost never charged, because every court is going to believe he could "reasonably believe" he was threatened. Fuck, if you give me enough time, I can make any situation seem juuuuust plausibly threatening enough to pass that bar. It's insane.

A cop can just rob you. Like tell you to give him your wallet, take all the cash out, and just walk away with it. Exactly like you would imagine getting robbed in an alley would go, except no one can help. And he doesn't even have to hide it, he just drops it in a box at the station and they put it in their bank account. It's legal. You can't prove it wasn't drug money. I can't prove any money wasn't at some point drug money. It's insane.

If a cop just walks in your front door and says "I'm here to kill you and your entire family" YOU ARE GOING TO PRISON IF YOU STOP HIM. There is no positive defense for assaulting a police officer in the United States, and doubly so if you kill him. You have effectively no defense against a homicidal cop, which happens same as any other job. Unless for some reason you have cameras all thru your house and clearly caught the audio of him saying that he's there just to kill you, you have zero chance of not going to prison, probably for life. And that's assuming you aren't killed "resisting arrest" while being taken into custody. It is a crime, in this country, for you to defend yourself under any circumstances if the person you're defending yourself from is a cop. That's insane.

You don't have civil rights if a cop says so. You have the right to have a gun, right? A lot of states have open carry. A cop can shoot you if he sees you have a gun. Doesn't matter if you have a license and everything. So you effectively don't have the right to bear arms if a cop can shoot you for exercising it. You have the right to protest. Unless a cop tells you to stop. He doesn't need a real reason to tell you to stop. And if you don't stop, you can be arrested or shot. So you don't really have the right to protest, do you? A cop cant just search your car or house, right? Unless he claims he heard something, or smelled something, neither of which can be proven. So a cop can search whatever he wants, as long as he pretends there was a "reason". So you dont have protection from unreasonable search and seizure, do you? These are no longer rights- they're things the cops allow.. for now. But legally, those rights have already been found to not actually be rights, because any random cop can decide to take that right from you, for any reason. It's insane.

These aren't like crazy things that I'm just making up, these aren't some weird twisted way I'm looking at something, these are all very real things that we all just.. ignore? Police abolitionists and the media bring these things up all the time, and the overwhelming response to it is: so what? Don't break the law and it won't matter. Blue lives matter. More police funding. Cops should have tanks. It's insane. And I always feel like im just rambling and sound insane when I say this kind of stuff because if you wrote a book and had the dystopian government doing the stuff that the police in this country do every single day, those same people who "back the blue" would line up to say stuff like "*Books government* wouldnt have a chance before us real americans stopped them" on twitter and not even get a hint of the irony.

[bestworstideaever]

is that piece of media actually bad, or is it just not following the blueprint you projected onto it? is that work actually not good, or are you just demanding something from it that is absolutely antithetical to its themes, genre, tone, and narrative goal? is that story actually poorly written, or do you just dislike that it is not the specific things you wanted from it that it never set out to be, never was, and never is going to become? is it actually bad, or is it actually well-executed and you just dislike the story it chose to be because it isn't catering to your specific desires and expectations?

[bestworstideaever]

[bestworstideaever]

Loving the new counterpoint that not only is posting activism, not posting is complicity. Why doesn't everyone with any fame or internet presence immediately release a lengthy but perfectly-worded statement telling us where they stand on every issue? Is it because they're evil??? It must be because they're evil

And then the usual answer is "they don't post online very much". Which is all very suspicious, don't they know everything of importance is done by posts on social media now

[bestworstideaever]

I truly fuck with people who understand that I won’t talk to them everyday but the love is still there.

[bestworstideaever]

[bestworstideaever]

“Alito and Thomas have told and shown us time and time again that this is the America they want. Alito’s Dobbs opinion cites common law going back to the thirteenth century characterizing abortion as a crime, as if something that was commonly believed 700 years ago should influence us today. Thomas’s infamous Dobbs concurrence warned us that Dobbs was just the beginning, and the court is coming for same-sex marriage and even contraceptive rights. This is not calling balls and strikes, people. This is monomaniacal, steroidal judicial activism. Alito and his cohort are not on the court to interpret law. They are on the court to change society. They are part of a movement dedicated to same. This is what makes them Leninists—vanguard members of a severe and narrow ideological movement that seeks total power for the purpose of fundamentally reordering society. Lenin used cruder methods, early twentieth-century tsarist Russia being altogether more welcoming of crude and violent methods than twenty-first century democratic America. But the impulses are identical.”

— Alito and Thomas Aren’t Really Jurists. They’re Theocratic Leninists.

[bestworstideaever]

I don’t know I feel like the impulse to condemn the Chee morally is sort of a waste of time. The Chee are buckwild. They don’t make sense. I don’t look at a “steel-and-ivory” anthropomorphic-dog-shaped physically unstoppable hardwired pacifist android from the dawn of time that has lived in a weird high tech basement with the same bickering collective of like forty people for the last umpteen thousand years and think “That’s a guy who’s gonna have ethics that make sense to me.” They’re not human; they’re not even a viable narrative analog for humans. I don’t think Erek King’s bizarre deal is really a functional referendum on the merits of pacifism in the context of an ongoing war of empire. Mans isn’t even a pacifist. He’s got a slug in solitary confinement in his head. IMO he’s more of an extremely hypothetical sci fi case study in like, the deranged energy that your ethical framework acquires if you’re only accountable to one profoundly insular group of people for literal millennia. It’s about ingroup loyalty. It’s also about the impossibility of being both immortal and meaningfully beholden to any given moment in history. It’s also a little bit about being an angel abandoned by God and forced to choose between running on obsolete instructions or falling from a grace that decayed aeons ago.  

[bestworstideaever]

disregard

[bestworstideaever]

what’s y’all’s favorite fruit? mine is this one:

[bestworstideaever]

Interview with the Vampire | 2x01 “What Can the Damned Really Say to the Damned”

[bestworstideaever]

NOT DANIEL CALLING HIM SHAH RUKH KHAN LMAO

[bestworstideaever]

Assad Zaman in Interview with the Vampire season 2 episode 2 "Do you know what it means to be loved by death?" (2024) dir. Levan Akin

[bestworstideaever]

that show is a comedy → 2/?

[bestworstideaever]

you know what's sad,it was Claudia who wanted to find other vampires and she was killed by her own kind.

The horrific tragedy of it all... to think Lestat was the worst™, and refusing to listen to him (as Delainey confirmed), to run right into the ones he warned them about.

And I bet the show will make it even worse through the prolonged time frame, and I think they have hinted at that with the Judas' Kiss and the photographs already because both Louis and Claudia will find love and community, and acceptance there.

And then just when they are happy - as Louis' subconscious warned him about(!) - it will be ripped from them.