saintarmand - Tumblr blog

[saintarmand]

i wish communication was like. easy

[saintarmand]

i really like outsider POV, but the thing is, it fundamentally works better when whatever is going on with the characters in question is so fucking weird that no reasonable outsider could ever discern it

like, the ideal outsider POV should have at least some element of 'what the fuck is wrong with these people'.

[saintarmand]

I WANT THIS.... TO REMEMBER

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Closeups and some process stuff under the cut

this went through quite a few stages and is made of multiple parts originally intended to be individual pieces. Originally Daniel was going to be the popup but I decided I liked Claudia there a lot more (her text in the text box is "the blood is bad here" flipped and repeated)

[saintarmand]

📢REAL ROMANCE IS BACK ON MAY 12 🦇 — Watch season 2 of Interview with the Vampire on AMC & AMC+ or watch with VPN

[saintarmand]

To start, contrary to popular belief, Louis was not a hopeless romantic. Louis could love, he wasn’t a sociopath either, but he didn’t know how someone could act like they had sense while going around fantasizing and daydreaming about every little interaction. Maybe if he was attracted to women he might’ve had something good to find, but instead he was stuck with idiots like the idiots doing keg stands after 1985 in the frat backyard, and if that was what university had to offer, then there wasn’t even pragmatic romance in his near future. He took another sip of his disgusting sparkling beer and judged, judgmentally, with the near certainty that they’d all get human papillomavirus. And then the virus would live in the mouth of the stand for the rest of the semester until some unlucky douchey freshman had to clean out the house before parents came up pick their bitchass trust fund sons to go get scammed by a travel agency for their fourth vacation to the Maldives for the fourth December in a row. 

No, Louis was not a hopeless romantic. He didn’t have time for romance or hopelessness. He was in real classes so he had real assignments to finish. His mother only let him double in English and finance because their retainer did English and thought it was a great gateway to law school, so he couldn’t afford to fuck up and spend the entire summer and probably his entire life hearing his mother complain about how much of a mistake it was letting him go off to communist California instead of Tulane. Louis was never going to be stuck living at home for four more years at Tulane, but he should’ve gone to Howard. Howard would’ve had real southern men to take him home at the end of the night and blow his back out. His mom thought there were too many uppity rich light skins at Howard, which Louis figured she’d know about. If not Tulane, she sighed, then at least take advantage of his daddy’s legacy bid at Stanford. He went along with it and pretended like Stanford hadn’t been his top choice all along and like she was the one who guided him to the decision instead of years of his hard earned reverse psychology of pretending he wanted Howard or Duke the most just so that she’d find his excitement distasteful and push him towards the option least like them. Even if it was in communist California. 

But this… Louis raised his eyebrows, judgmentally. Were they trying to inject beer into their veins? This was a white frat party—duh, it was Stanford, he reminded himself—so he’d braced himself for the inevitable shock of seeing cocaine, but even shooting up beer seemed a little too much. Such scenes were reprehensible for an upstanding African American such as himself. Booker T should’ve been preaching to the white masses instead. Uplift the race, not barrels of infested beer. 

Where was Lily? Now that was an uppity light skin that Louis could speak freely to, and she was going to hear it. 

“You have not smiled even once,” a deep voice murmured into his ear as a hard body pressed along him and arms wrapped around his abdomen. 

In an instant, Louis knew three things. One, he had no idea who the fuck it was. Two, Louis was going to punch him in the balls. And three—his hands were undeniably, impossibly, twice the size of Louis’.

[saintarmand]

I cant believe this tweet is how I find out

[saintarmand]

the concept of iq has just been invented at the citadel by archmaester rickon morty

[saintarmand]

before you ship something stop and ask yourself... Is this otp material? Make sure your characters are:

Obstinate and inflexible in their actions

Terrible for each other in most circumstances

Poor communicators

[saintarmand]

louis exploring his sexuality in paris is him owning back his power in a sexual and emotional way when he wasn't doing with lestat before that. contrary to lestat who hid his powers, so his relationship with louis seemed equal, armand doesn't need to do that. he's clearly more powerful than louis, his status as the predator and king of the vampiric food chain is established but it has always been important to louis the question was never about being as powerful as his immortal companion. louis wanted the power for himself, sure, but the issue of his companion being more powerful wasn't the issue. it was that no matter what, they would treat each other as equals and not use their powers against each other to harm. emotional, intellectual equality was always louis' goal. he wanted to be seen, he wanted to be understood, to share everything so the exchange was always on equal footing. he wanted to be open and vulnerable and be able for his lover to do the same with him.

imagine the apex predator, who could literally destroy everything and anyone, let himself be vulnerable and putting himself into louis' hands. you can do to me anything you want, i'm laying bare for you, as i would want you to do with me. talk about an aphrodisiac for louis! the power laying in louis' hands, with armand showing him all of his abilities, would be a very big motivational factor for their dynamic. the megalodon shows its belly, louis never forgets about his giant set of teeth but it will never bite him. he has the power now.

[saintarmand]

What do you think of the Sansa bullied Arya take if you don’t mind me asking (just don’t answer if you don’t want to haha)

per my usual practice on Controversial Topics im putting this under a cut

At the real risk of that lot showing up in my notes again, I think this ‘Sansa bullies Arya’ pins their pre AGOT dynamic squarely on Sansa herself, rather than the way they are both being raised by the adults around them to behave towards one another. Sure, Sansa is mean to Arya sometimes during their childhood! We don’t have a lot of examples besides the oft-mentioned ‘horseface’ insults, but I think it’s fair to assume that more often than not, Sansa was looking down on Arya. Meanwhile, Arya herself feels inadequate and like she just can’t do anything right. She resents Sansa, but also worries that Sansa’s opinion of her may be true.

Fine. But where has Sansa’s opinion of Arya come from? Is it her cold black heart? Fucking no, it’s come from Septa Mordane, Catelyn, and whoever else surrounds them growing up. The men don’t seem to really give much of a shit how Arya acts because it’s not their business and she’s just a kid anyhow, but the women pointedly give many shits. In our first scene with Arya, Septa Mordane scolds her for not being good at ‘women’s work’, and there’s plenty to suggest that this is just another day in the life for Arya. Meanwhile, Sansa gets the carrot for excelling. Both Arya and Sansa are learning their own worth in this chapter, and the worth of one another. Sansa internalises the praise whilst learning that Arya is bad, and everything she mustn’t be. Arya internalises the criticisms whilst learning that Sansa is good, and everything she can never be.

They’ll be getting this from Catelyn as well. Catelyn clearly adores both her daughters, and will move heaven and earth to get them back in ACOK. But one good adjective for Catelyn is ‘dutiful’ - it’s in her house words, and it’s how she’s lived her life up to AGOT. Doing as she’s told, even when it pains her. She expects the same of her daughters, and finds those expectations satisfied in Sansa’s case, and apparently flouted in Arya’s. So again, from their own mother, Sansa internalises that Arya is bad, and that she, Sansa, is good. Arya internalises the same. If societal standards were reversed, perhaps it would be Arya lording over Sansa, but such as it is, it’s Sansa over Arya. 

Now, Sansa is a child. When children are told over and over that X is good and Y is bad, they generally don’t question it, at least until they're older and more experienced in the world. They will also parrot what they hear, often in graceless ways. Because they’re children. Sansa is told that Arya wilfully misbehaves because she’s bad, and so Sansa thinks: then I should look down on Arya. It sounds like Sansa mostly keeps her distance from her sister pre AGOT. Not always - they play together sometimes - but a lot of the time. She has internalised the teaching that Arya is an aberration, and as she herself knows the adults value obedience in girls, and she wants to please them so badly, the distance between her and Arya demonstrates to them just how good she is - she won’t descend to Arya’s behaviour. 

When Sansa does interact with Arya (pre Darry), we see her being a bit bossy - telling Arya what to do, etc. Sansa is replicating what she has seen the adults do with Arya, and is mimicking them to assert her own position as the good, obedient child. If Arya ever doesn’t want to do something, it can only be because she’s bad. 

[sidenote, it all really reminds me of these short stories me and my sister used to get read a lot as kids, called My Naughty Little Sister (lmao) by Dorothy Edwards. They're pretty old and I don’t think they ever got major circulation outside Britain, but for anyone unfamiliar, you can probably guess how these stories go. There’s an elder sister, good and obedient, who narrates short tales of her ‘naughty little sister’ doing terrible things like idk, making a terrible mess etc, and going ‘now I’m sure you [the child audience] wouldn’t do a thing like that!’ They’re supposed to be short morality tales for the children, and amuse the parent reading them aloud, who recognises the mischievous behaviour of the younger and is charmed by the haughtiness of the elder sister, who you can hear is narrating the incidents of her sister’s mischief with the disdain that she’s heard the adults do so, and is asserting her own good behaviour over said sister. And the whole fucking reason we were read these stories was because my younger sister was precisely the kind of kid who got up to all kinds of shit as a little kid (which now all of us find hilarious but DIDN’T AT THE TIME), and I was the elder sister like ‘my goodness how could she do such things as these!!’ (e.g. paint an entire bookcase with grout). It amused us both to see ourselves in the stories. You could say this was life imitating art, but I think this is simply an age old dynamic, familiar to many people with siblings: you would see how the adults spoke to another child in your family, and replicate their manner in an effort to come across as an adult. Except you weren’t an adult, so you weren’t always as graceful about it as they were. That is pre AGOT Sansa, to a T. And I’m sure that’s what GRRM, a child of three who had two sisters of his own, is replicating here.]

But I think there’s also a loneliness in being the ‘obedient child’. Doing as you’re told all the time can be boring, and living up to expectations is a lot of pressure. Sansa wants a companion in all that, but Arya has no interest in sharing in it. Arya is offering friendship, but from a place Sansa believes she can’t reach her sister - Sansa thinks she’d have to ‘descend to Arya’s level’ to accept it, and she can’t do that. You get a sense of Sansa thrilling in trying Arya’s ‘misbehaviours’ for herself when she quietly delights in behaving ‘as wicked as Arya’, but you see in this that she has to condemn such behaviours and herself for exhibiting them, all in the same breath. And in the end, I can easily imagine Sansa resents that Arya has more fun with their brothers than she ever does with Sansa herself: that the one sister she has is one she has nothing in common with. Sansa can’t find a like mind amongst her siblings, and so clings to Jeyne Poole, and the praise of the adults around her.

So with all that in mind, YES! Sansa is sometimes mean to Arya, and calls her horseface. That is because Sansa is a child, nobody is correcting her behaviour, and she understands that Arya is bad, and the way she behaves is frustrating to Sansa herself, so really what does it matter if she’s a little mean sometimes? She knows that she is good, because everyone says so. Even if she calls her sister a name now and then, she’s still the good child. 

AND THEN we get to Darry. And Sansa starts to see that society isn’t a song, and sometimes it doesn’t matter how good you are, horrible things can happen to you anyway. But she doesn’t want to believe that, because it would turn her world upside down, and her future would look a lot darker, too - Ned has not ended her engagement to Joffrey, and Sansa has to live for the foreseeable in KL. So when Arya doing the thing she ‘wasn’t supposed to’ (playing with Mycah) snowballs into a terrible miscarriage of justice where Sansa’s wolf is killed, Sansa rejects the notion that the songs could be wrong about beautiful princes, and shifts the blame onto Arya for that original 'misdemeanour'. The grief at losing Lady is terrible too (the wolves are meant to have a soul deep bond with the Stark children), and so the target of that grief likewise becomes Arya. What was previously a normal, childishly complicated sibling relationship gets twisted into something else.

This is where I think Sansa becomes different level of unpleasant towards her sister. She’s cruel about Arya’s loss of Mycah, tells Arya she wishes she were dead instead of Lady, etc etc. Arya is not giving as good as she gets here - she even tries to make amends with Sansa, but Sansa throws the offer in her face.

The reasons for Sansa’s behaviour are complicated, but not that complicated. She’s been raised to slot perfectly into this world, without ever being told what that world is really like. And when abruptly it turns out that what she’s being raised for is essentially the slaughter, she rejects it. She can’t see Joffrey as he truly is: she’s been told that princes are charming, that Kings are just, Queens are kind, and she herself will be a Queen. Sansa is going to be handed over to the Lannisters, and she’s going to live the song of her dreams, and the only thing between Sansa and the realisation of those is the thing that’s always been wrong: Bad Arya. Because again, if Arya isn't bad, then everything else is, and Sansa is in terrible danger.

No one is sitting Sansa down and explaining to her that Arya is not bad, just different from her, and that they should love one another - that there are dark forces here far stronger than them that could tear them apart, that the Lannisters are the greatest of them, and they have to fight together, not each other. Arya gets this talk, funnily enough, but not Sansa. Arya is asked to understand that Sansa is different from her, but Sansa is only ever taught to abhor that her sister as different from her. Where Arya is told to be wary of the court of King’s Landing, Ned leaves Sansa to continue her fantasies, and then, when he abruptly tries to put an end to them, he doesn’t bother to explain why. I’m not saying this is unforgivable on Ned’s part - he has a lot on his mind lol - but it’s quite obviously a major failing. Ned leaves Sansa in a fantasy world. It’s fucking Joffrey who has to step in and clarify for Sansa that actually, she’s been dreaming.

So as long as they’re together, Sansa is never able to come to terms with the fact that Arya was not the aberration, but rather, everything else was. In the absence of one another, they cannot reconcile over that fact. So yes, GRRM says they’ll have deep issues to sort through when they meet again, but those aren’t going to be the times that Sansa called her ‘horseface’ - they’re going to be about what happened since they left Winterfell, when their relationship was twisted by forces much darker than Septa Mordane. 

So no, I think the ‘Sansa is a bully’ diatribes are seriously tedious, because even if you want to insist that calling your sister ‘horseface’ a few times even qualifies, you can still accept such wrongs without deciding that that makes Sansa a fundamentally unkind person who cannot be reconciled with Arya and doesn’t deserve to be. It is on the page that the two of them miss each other. Like I genuinely cannot imagine going through everything Arya does in the story and then, upon reuniting with a sister I thought lost forever, deciding I’m actually still mad about the things she got wrong as a child that she herself has paid dearly for, both physically and emotionally. Like jesus fucking christ man. By all means let them talk about it!! But who do you think Arya is lmao

Tl;dr: Sansa is a kid in a society. She is not the arbiter of Arya’s place in society. She is not mean because she’s cruel, but because she has internalised the exact same things that Arya has, based on the example of the adults surrounding them. It just happens that those things were a carrot for Sansa and a stick for Arya. But then in the end, they weren’t a carrot for Sansa either.

tl;dr 2: clarifying once again - i am a jaime stan. i find the stark sister relationship interesting bc I have experience of a similar sisterly dynamic and find it interesting to see a version of that explored on the page. so if you think one has to be a sansa stan to observe all this then that kind of just demonstrates how dichotomous you've become on this issue lol like if I'm talking about takes I dislike re JB I don't generally feel the need to attribute them to JC fandom. let's all grow up x

tl;dr 3: no i don't hate sansa or arya, since i know these are both conclusions various people reach whenever i even mention these two. in fact i think they are both great girls! imagine

[saintarmand]

mark my words they're going to be like louis takes a more physically dominant role with armand equality <3 girl does the megalodon ever make you feel so safe by letting you hand feed it. and it purrs too and flops over on its back for more megalodon belly rubs and youre like omg my sweet megalodon :') bc it wants you to be the big spoon. But Then the megalodon controls every aspect of your life including your diet and sleep schedule and clothing bc under that onion layer there is another onion layer where you are their beautiful little specimen novitiate catboy which you are of course aware of as a result of the mental and sexual st andrews cross that you are willingly strapped onto in your shared mind palace which coincidentally has bars around it, to protect YOU of course. from the outside world. which you believe :) though at the same time as with all your men you hold the secret trump card which is just straight up leaving, their greatest fear that they have both gone to absolutely fucking insane lengths to prevent, using opposite tactics. mark my words the point is that lestat and armand use opposite tactics to get the same result (louis pussy until the heat death of the universe). mark my words that they are inventing a type of bdsm that is heretofore unseen and illegal in the eyes of interpol

[saintarmand]

“…i was haunted by my brother’s death, by the abandonment of my sister…”

majority of the conversation around paul in the amc setting revolves around the question of whodunnit, jokes about him at the second dinner table scene of the pilot, or paralleling his mental illness to louis [a parallel the show admittedly draws upon - with louis stopping his suicide attempt bc “paul forever ruining grace’s wedding night, and [louis] not wanting to do the same to claudia on the anniversary of her escape”] what i intend to focus on, is the specific nature of paul’s complaints with respect to levi, and what paul and claudia represent to louis.

in the book, paul wants louis to sell the plantations & town homes they own in new orleans, and give louis the money so that paul could travel and become a missionary saving france from the godless jacobins. the paul that we’re introduced to in the show is… similar in motivation, but fundamentally divergent. tithe the money over to st. augustine’s so the house dont fall in on them, but the first dinner table goes as this after he says that:

whats of note too is the divergence of the draft v the pilot release. the show excises the freniere family w the exception of levi himself to drive home how paul’s objections to levi’s religious and ethnic background are overruled by the lingering shadow of jim crow.

paul is also reminded that his autonomy is conditional in this first dinner scene here: louis quips back to his point about sugarcane with “if daddy was still here, you’d be locked up in that asylum over in jackson”. its a reminder of the earlier point, but also speaks to something else.

bc of paul’s profound mental illness, he would never be allowed to live an autonomous life, much less hold authority over anyone: whether its the man of the house [as louis was in the du lac family], or as a bride [grace] or as the mother [florence].

this is strongly reminiscent of claudia — someone whos personal autonomy is entirely dependent on the purview of physically mature vampires by nature of permanently being trapped in the body of a preteen. it is also reminiscent of claudia in that louis in both cases plays a sort of savior in relation to them — whether its louis taking paul out of the asylum, or louis taking claudia out of the burning rooming home. louis views paul and claudia, especially claudia, as people that save him from his own self-loathing.. claudia somehow possessing this redemptive quality re: baby jesus…

louis loves both of them deeply, but as iwtv has established, love as a feeling does not exempt someone from enacting violence toward you. in fact, the very loved one that harmed you has an entire framework of rationalizing that violent act as being ‘for your[my] own good’ as is.

the title of this little post comes from the season one finale, where louis collapses in on himself to try to make sense of why he spared lestat, invoking paul and grace to create this red herring to the ‘murder of lestat’. but truly, the thread is false. louis did not abandon grace, and lestat’s death was only an attempted murder sabotaged by louis. modern day louis in the season finale triggers himself through daniel in order to provoke armand, the “protector of his pain”, to reveal himself + question him on the death of claudia, just as he questioned lestat on the death of paul in s1e6.

[saintarmand]

[saintarmand]

While we're at it: using language that downplays genocide is a form of genocide denial.

Joe Biden isn't doing a bad job, Joe Biden is providing material support for genocide.

Israel isn't handling the situation badly, Israel is committing genocide.

Employing euphemisms minimizes the reality of this genocide. It's disrespectful and dangerous.

If you are more uncomfortable with the word genocide than you are with the reality of genocide, then you are not prepared to be part of any serious discussion. Work on that on your own time.

[saintarmand]

*tapping the mic*

Ahem-

Ignorance does not excuse racism!

[saintarmand]

[saintarmand]

only just noticed the sketch says "madeline's manequin". claudia gets her outfit from madeleine's shop! dressing her already in episode 2