mailorderfictionalcharacter

[mailorderfictionalcharacter]

armand’s costumes are such an interesting data point re: his nebulous sense of identity.

when analyzing any costume, there are always many factors to consider: the setting, the character’s personal taste and economic constraints, storytelling concerns like tone and genre, etc. with armand, we also need to remember that he’s 500 years old and violently disconnected from his human origins. everything he wears has an element of disguise, selected to blend into a new environment.

armand was enslaved as a child in 16th century delhi, and barely remembers his mortal life. unlike louis - who can return to new orleans after 80 years and reconnect with his past - armand has no home to return to. his whole backstory, even his name, is rife with traumatic subtext, leaving him with an obsessive need for structure and control. this adds an extra layer of meaning to costuming choices that initially seem like straightforward menswear. 

armand’s 1940s wardrobe is very put-together - primarily three-piece suits and coats that make him look wealthier and more formal than louis, who is purposefully dressing down. most of these outfits are tailored to bulk up armand's frame, leaning into the "maitre" persona. and like his business-casual dubai wardrobe, he always leaves his collar open. when i interviewed costume designer carol cutshall, she described this as a symbolic power move, signalling that he's an apex predator who doesn't need to protect his throat.

my personal interpretation is that while armand clearly likes to look good, he has a complicated relationship with attractiveness. he doesn't always want to draw attention. his color palette is shadowy (black, grey, brown, olive green), and he’s much less flashy than the other Théâtre vamps. however when he’s feeling confident and flirty, he becomes more of a power-dresser - for instance his hunting outfit with the big coat and sunglasses, or his habit of wearing kohl.

interestingly, most of armand's 1940s costumes set him apart from the coven. the Théâtre vampires dress like cabaret performers, embracing a lot of period-specific styles. by contrast armand is more timeless and neutral. in fact, due to the relatively minor changes in men's suits over the past 100 years, there's a lot of overlap between his wardrobe in the 1940s, '70s and 2020s:

the rest of the Théâtre squad share an unofficial uniform of boldly clashing monochrome patterns with pops of bright color. meanwhile armand has a very plain wardrobe, emphasizing the image of him as a businesslike authority figure surrounded by zany artistes. he only wears subtle stripes on a few occasions in the '40s, reflecting the recurring prison motif we see in lestat's trial suit and (most famously) the dubai penthouse bedroom:

if we ask the question, "what does this person like to wear?" there are easy answers for lestat, louis and claudia. we understand their tastes, and the motives behind them. but armand is more enigmatic. we can recognize through-lines in his wardrobe, but his "taste" is dominated by whatever role he's currently decided to embody, whether that's a parisian theater director or a real estate mogul in dubai.

the times when he appears to have the most fun with clothing are when he steals a pair of sunglasses from his human dinner (!) and when he's pretending to be rashid. in other words, when he's explicitly performing for an audience. "real armand" is still a mystery.

(i may write more about armand's dubai wardrobe later, but for now, you can find all of my iwtv costumes posts on this tag!)

[mailorderfictionalcharacter]

It seems like the older I get, the more irrationally angry casual censorship makes me. And it isn't just the "unalive" "grape" alleged filter-dodging vernacular, but the way normal words will be peppered with asterisks, or screenshots will have words like "gay" "hell" "fuck" etc either partially or entirely blurred. Who is this helping? What is the purpose of it, except to reinforce shame and elevate a flimsy perception of purity and safety, however those things manifest. It's so tiresome and I'm sick of it.

[mailorderfictionalcharacter]

really everyone you love has something miserably wrong with them or an obvious flaw that won't ever be fixed but like it's up to you what kind of person you can and cannot deal with. someone in my family has anger issues which I can handle and diffuse with no problem, but a person who can't tolerate yelling could not be close to him. another person I know is very anxious & needs constant reassurance and she gets along famously with gentler and more straightforward people than myself, but I can't handle being second guessed all the time. someone who is loosey goosey with their morals wouldn't bother me, but a person with a profound sense of justice makes me feel afraid of getting on their bad side. none of these traits actually make someone a bad person & just because there are personalities I can't handle doesnt mean I'M a bad person either. litany against callout posts for stupid shit and simple incompatibilities we all have to live on this earth together & need to learn how to deal with each other

[mailorderfictionalcharacter]

Randomly remembered something I saw online and can't remember the exact details of - a translation of an ancient Egyptian letter that a young soldier sent his family from abroad, I think from Rome. While all the other details are lost to me, I distinctly remember the tone of the letter, because the attitude in it was so shockingly different to the way I was raised. In Finnish, the word for "conceited" is literally "self-loving", and there's a saying about how self-praise reeks, and any kind of praise of one's own is downright shameful. Entire generations have been raised with the idea that saying anything positive about your own children will rot their moral core.

And this guy in this letter was like "Dear father, dear mother, I am now here in Rome! I am sure to prosper thanks to how excellently you have raised me. I have commissioned a picture of myself in my new uniform, so you can see how handsome I look in it."

Like... Damn. Imagine raising a kid to be that unwaveringly confident in their own worth and prospects, and unhesitant to praise you as well. Why would you raise your kid any other way.

[mailorderfictionalcharacter]

happy pride to that one person's dad who loathes remembering pronouns so much he thinks we should abolish them completely. he was so right, we should forcethem the cis.

[mailorderfictionalcharacter]

The people who go "well who's going to look after you when you're old?" when you say you're not having kids are breathtakingly naive. Our next-door neighbour, somewhere in her mid-80s, has a son, grandkids, and a grear-granddaughter, and who's the one she calls when she needs help, and checks that she's not spending christmas alone? Me and my boyfriend.

Having kids is irrelevant if the answer to that question is still going to be "the mentally ill faggots next door."

[mailorderfictionalcharacter]

[mailorderfictionalcharacter]

If I were a conductor I would say things on the intercom like “let's all give a warm welcome to the basking ridge people who are about to join us on our trip. i hope none of them are those hateful souls who fought against the establishment of a mosque in their community these past few years"

[mailorderfictionalcharacter]

Who would you rank as your top 10 Iron Man writers?

10 whole writers definitely do not immediately come to mind but denny o'neil, kurt buseik, mike grell, and ryan north as well as ?? whatever rdj was on when he supposedly improvised half of iron man 1 (i just rewatched this movie recently ugh it's so fucking good). i also really like bendis but he can be pretty hit or miss

[mailorderfictionalcharacter]

Where's my Breakfast?

Oil on Panel 30x30 cm

Artist: Daniel Arthur

[mailorderfictionalcharacter]

youre monogamous? oh… it’s ethical, right? ethical monogamy? okay good for you! i mean pretty much every monogamous couple i’ve met didn’t work out but maybe you guys will beat the odds! haha. so is it a sex thing? you guys have sex with- just each other? huh. how does that work? i could never do monogamy, i’m too jealous, i’d worry my partner would leave me for someone else instead of dating us both… how do you deal with the jealousy? is it hard? like, how hard? extremely? do you think you’ll break up? i mean in the long run these things rarely work out,

[mailorderfictionalcharacter]

watching Seven Samurai

[mailorderfictionalcharacter]

currently fighting with my mother via text message. it's a brave new world.

[mailorderfictionalcharacter]

[mailorderfictionalcharacter]

there’s something so pleasant about making fun of things with your friends and something so soul-sucking about scrolling through a social media feed of hundreds of people making fun of completely different things. pettiness is best when paired with emotional intimacy, unfortunately.

[mailorderfictionalcharacter]

ANHEDONIA REMEDIES!

GET YOUR ANHEDONIA REMEDIES HERE!

if you are lost in the rut, i am begging you to read this essay by Sasha Chapin suggesting what, essentially, my take, are potential jump-starts back into living life in real time. like actually experiencing experiences

do it now! don’t lose months, years, or decades! there is a life beyond doomscrolling, and it’s finite (sorry. sorry. i know okay)

[mailorderfictionalcharacter]

Voltaire's Prayer

“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it." -Volaire’s letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville, 16 May 1767

I’m inordinately fond of sex, in the political sense.  It’s saved us so often from the worst parts of ourselves.

As far as anti-authoritarian elements of the human experience go, sex is right up there with curiosity and the search for truth- maybe even more so.  When a new tyrant comes to town, shutting down the universities and the libraries is only the second thing they try.  The first thing is to regulate human sexuality to within an inch of its life.  Rules for marriage, rules for courtship, rules for which genitals may touch and where they may touch and when they may touch.  Rules for who and rules for whom.  Rules for which kinds of sex must doom characters in literature, rules for which things may be described as sexy, rules for which things may be described in a sexy way.

Of course they do!  If you’re trying to bind a large polity together under a common ideological narrative, to render people predictable enough to quash dissent and legible enough to exert power through them, the last thing you need is a bunch of folks running around being horny about stuff without permission.  Nature gifted us with a great capacity for reason and community; we have the innate opportunity to learn about ourselves and our neighbors, and to form complex societies based on that understanding.  It was Aristotle who first called us the political animal, and the fruits of that extraordinary capacity will always be within our reach, if only we can come together within a shared understanding.  The invention of the city is the great triumph of our species, and with it we conquer the universe.

But also this extraordinary, reasoning mind has been sculpted from the raw clay of a biology that’s anchored in sexual reproduction, and this ends up being very, very funny.

The problem isn’t so much that the sex instinct exists, per se.  It’s how it’s implemented.  Like most biological forms, the full complement of 86 billion(!) neurons in your brain aren’t encoded in a particular configuration; the brain is much too complex to be described so precisely in the only ~725 megabytes or so of human DNA.  The particular shape of your brain is in there somewhere- the lobes and subregions responsible for vision, memory, cognition, all that- but only up to a point.  The genius and fundamental limitation of genetics is that, below a certain level, the genes instead describe a process for the production and reproduction of specialized cells, and simply constructs them in such a way that they can be relied upon to order themselves as they go.

This is all well and good when we’re talking about kidneys and livers, but the fact that you can encode any kind of specific behavioral instinct in a brain this way is nothing short of a minor miracle.  Think about it!  Spiders don’t have a ‘spider web’ gene, the gene is for ‘proteins that come together in self-assembling electrochemically sensitive gelatin tissue which, when complete, encodes patterns that operate organ systems such as legs and spinnerets in such a way as to reliably create silk webs.’  This is absurdly impressive, and also completely insane.

What I’m getting at is, powerful behavioral instincts in a complex animal aren’t precise instruction manuals by which we pursue evolutionarily advantageous behaviors.  Sex and eros are prior to logic or language, let alone strategy.  Sex is a double-thick electrical wire discharging lightning bolts right through the middle of our cognitive centers, installed in the brain by a surgeon wearing mittens.  It’s an untethered firehose whipping chaotically through the cathedral, unpredictably spraying golden reliquaries with substances unmentionable.  It’s the first and greatest anarchist.

I really can’t overstate my gratitude for this.

Obviously this results in any number of deeply goofy outcomes by way of kinks and odd sexual practices- it gets tangled with pain centers, with random bits of anatomy and proprioception, with our taboos and aversions, with our greatest terrors or our greatest yearnings or just arbitrary stimuli from adolescence, and of course it gets enmeshed so often with our notions of power and submission.  It imbues these things with a fascination and potency out of all proportion with their mundane meanings.  And ultimately, you end up with human pleasures and human values that diverge so far from banal evolutionary imperatives as to be all but unrecognizable.

Even when this process somehow manages to propagate through the brain in such a way as to drive behaviors that are legibly aligned towards some adaptive constraint- e.g. heterosexual mating practices resulting in biological reproduction and careful childrearing- it’s still madness.  Love and sex penetrate deeply across tribal and national and racial boundaries, across economic interests, across battle-lines and enmities.  We become traitors, apostates, emigrants, and artists.  Declare a law, and in short order some hot-headed young people come along to break it in the name of sexual passions you could not possibly have seen coming.  Divide your neighborhood into us and them, and by the time the ink is dry on your proclamation there will be a forbidden relationship across the fence.  There is no social order, no ethical system, no theory of human nature that can entirely withstand contact with the full spectrum of human sexuality, because sex and eros are always going to be exactly as bonkers as the complexity of the human mind and culture will allow, plus a little extra just to be sure.

This isn’t always a delight, of course.  Many prohibitions exist for a very good reason, and the chaos of human sexuality makes no exemptions for true evil.  Some of us end up really, truly victims of this process.  But for all the dangers, the chaos at the root of all this isn’t oriented towards evil.  Chaos just means chaos, essentially arbitrary and hence absurd in character.

And in the grand analysis, we are so lucky to have this thing moving through our communities, this ridiculous madness that guarantees that there will be cracks in every wall and slips exploding cigars in the pockets of the powerful few.  Not in everybody as individuals, of course, and not everybody the same amount; asexuality is certainly one of the outcomes that all this mad gallivanting through our brains can produce.  Sexuality would never be so predictable as to guarantee its own existence, after all.  That’s part of what makes the joke so funny.

But all of us, regardless of sexuality, get to live in a world where the grand anarchy of sex is constantly driving home this lesson that no category is inviolate and no law is perfect.  That we should not and cannot take ourselves too seriously, or forget that we’re animals.  That we don’t exist only for the sake of others, or within their understanding.  That cities are made of cooperation, grace, and forbearance- not conformity or mere compliance.

People sometimes worry about immortality.  In the political sense, I mean.  They worry about eternal dictatorships and unconquerable gerontocracies.  This fear isn’t entirely unjustified; death has often played a role in progress and liberation.  But as long as enough of us are still getting horny without permission, still falling in love in stupid ways, I think we’ll be okay.  Romeo and Juliet don’t have to die at the end to make a difference in the world, as long as they’re brave enough to get weird with it.