#discourse with the vampire

[foreignswaggersession]

yes louis and armand had filthy kinky sex between this:

and this:

y'all felt this, don't lie. feel free to argue with the wall. and don't just take it from me:

[seashantystanaccount]

70s SAN FRAN FIC IDEA::: Daniel's a part of the burgeoning disco scene, Armand hasn't danced in a hundred years and is really awkward. The love of the community helps him find his feet, their kiss is lit by the disco ball's spinning lights

I really see Armand as this scrooge-like character lol? Like he tries to avoid vulnerability through power, "enduring", and in doing so closes himself off to the joys of life, the fleeting nature of each moment. Permenance doesn't exist even for vampires. ?

[teslacoils-and-hubris]

You just know vampire discourse would be insane

0 notes

🧛‍♂️ dr.acula follow

Cannot stand these freshly turned vamplings pretending like it doesn't matter if you're drinking virgin blood or not. As if unpure blood doesn't literally weaken vampiric powers 🙄

🦇 baby-batz follow

Wait omg is this true??? Is this why I've been having so much trouble staying in bat form??

🧛‍♂️ dr.acula follow

If you can't control wolves with your mind or turn into ominous mist it's literally because nonvirgin blood is basically poison. Like yeah you can drink it if you're starving but why would you do that to yourself intentionally?

🦷 fang-fag follow

op doesn't know what they're talking about. The virgin blood thing was made up by a bunch of victorian prudes who only hated sex more than they hated women. the fact that op (who had already been a vampire for decades when the myth was started, if you believe their bio) should be Very telling.

🩸 blood-fan follow

People will try and tell you that there's something wrong with you if you vampiric powers don't come naturally to you, but it's literally fine. You have all the time in the world to figure yourself out. Literally. You'll get there I promise

🧛‍♂️ dr.acula follow

You're all degenerates undeserving of the gift of eternal life after death

🦷 fang-fag follow

Lmaoooo not op showing their whole ass! XD

💀 stake-my-heart follow

But what about the blood types thing? Couldn't this be like the blood types thing?

🦷 fang-fag follow

For the last time, feeling better after drinking blood of the same type (or compatable with the type) you had in life is a well documented scientific fact with actual evidence behind it. We know blood types are real and affect blood. Virginity is a made up social construct, which has absolutely no impact on blood at all. Red blood cells can't tell if you've fucked or not

🫁 childofthenight follow

op trying to find a tasty snack

[thisshitisridiculous]

okay but daniel molloy pulitzer prize winning journalist who wrote a book in the twilight of his career about how vampires are real and now only comes out at night definitely has an actual cult following

[sleevebuscemii]

headlines indicating lestat as a suspect in the mysterious murders of his fans have a million replies from lestat pfp accounts saying ‘actually disgusting to spread rumors perpetuating the stereotype of gay men being violent predators about one of the few queer icons we have in the rock scene right now. yall say you want queer representation in historically white conservative cis het misogynistic male spaces and then tear them down. the internaized homophobia is palpable. touch grass.’

[redstonedust]

i think vampires that drink from animals should be considered more unethical than ones that drink from humans. "ohhh its vegan" bitch no it isnt. youre gonna drain that poor wild deer and leave it woozy and weak to other predators? you're two steps left of a poacher. just go to your local gay bar and you can find 100s of people that would willingly sign up to being bitten if you dont mind them being a little freaky about it.

[yearnerspermit]

I’ll be honest the way some people talk about this show makes it sound less like they’re interested in the messy nature of people failing and remorse and guilt and atonement and redemption and regret and the capacity to change and the inability to undo what’s been done and unforgivable actions and maybe forgivable people and how you face all of it and continue to live and endure. and more like they want to be sitting in that jury, determining who’s guilty or not guilty, deciding a sentence, and walking away satisfied in the result being final

[thevoidlookedback]

Armand is not an iPad Baby, he is an iPad Grandpa and I will stand this mistaken understanding no longer.

[angelofthe2000s]

Buffy reboot please do not revive the Bangel vs Spuffy argument I am so tired

[darnmand]

A Postcolonial analysis of Marius

(Disclaimer: This is not me trying to fight with anyone, this is just my own analysis of Marius. He’s an extremely complex and difficult character and so I have a lot of thoughts about him. I don’t 100% hate or like Marius. But more importantly, I don’t make moral judgements about how OTHER people feel about Marius because at the end of the day these are fictional characters.)

~

I think a big part of what I am going to call the Marius Problem (which I am not gonna take pains to describe here bc iykyk) is that Anne herself didn’t really seem to see a huge problem with him, and that affects his portrayal in the narrative.

There is of course the obvious way he treats Armand, and anyone who is familiar with Anne’s corpus of work knows that that relationship dynamic is something she revisits a lot and often in the context of erotica which is like a whole other bag of worms but…

The thing I feel like we don’t really talk about with Marius enough is his very Western Eurocentric view of the world. From a postcolonial perspective Marius’s philosophy is deeply unsettling. The way he polarizes the “east” and “west” and the modern and medieval, reason and superstition, are very insidious ways of defining things, as is his idolization of the Enlightenment, which was at its heart a positivist, Eurocentric, and deeply prejudiced school of thought which managed to convince the world that social constructions like race and gender were “scientific” in nature.

Marius is basically the embodiment of imperialism, not because he’s some malicious Big Brother twirling his moustache but because he is a very powerful, very privileged, and deeply misguided man who is takes his experience of the world as a universal truth, and who mistakes his own subjective feelings and desires for objective morality.

One of his greatest crimes against Armand that no one talks about is that he tries to force him to conform to a culture that goes against Armand’s own nature and history, and discounts Armand’s view of the world as fundamentally flawed and wrong just because it doesn’t align with his. In the book the conflict of ideologies is between classical humanism (Marius) and Eastern Orthodoxy and mysticism (Armand). In QotD, Marius even laments his failure to “perfect” Armand. Even as he showers them with gifts and affection, Marius treats Armand, Pandora, and even Akasha like dolls. Due to the changes made to Armand’s character in the show, I imagine the dissonance will be even more intense and the suppression of Armand’s selfhood will feel even more disturbing, because it will register on the level of race as well as other forms of identity.

But regardless, the most difficult part of this is that Marius is not doing this out of malice. Marius genuinely thinks he’s doing the right thing. He thinks he’s helping Armand. He thinks he is liberating the subaltern subject from the dark shadows of superstition and oppression. He thinks he is educating a being who must not know his own self and his own rights because he is fundamentally ignorant. He does not realize that what he is trying to do is efface the Other and absorb it into himself. And he eventually abandons Armand, in part, I think, because of his failure to succeed at this mission, and so facing Armand means facing the Other in himself which he wishes to repress to be the ideal enlightened western man. Marius is not even aware of his own need to dominate.

(But please please remember that Marius’s need to dominate is not likewise reflected by a need to be subjugated in Armand. Armand is equally able to move in spheres of dominance as well as submission because Armand does understand much of what Marius does not about the nature of power. Marius does not have this kind of mobility.)

This is at the heart of imperial discourse. This is what gives it momentum, what immortalizes it— the idea that we (the West) occupy some moral high ground from which we can liberate and speak for the subaltern subjects which we ourselves have locked into oppression and victimhood.

And sadly, I don’t think Anne wrote all this into the books consciously. She herself said in an interview that her own philosophy of the world aligns more with Marius’s than with Armand’s, and I think that is part of why Marius is a fundamentally sympathetic character. She made him that way. And I don’t necessarily blame her for it because these kinds of discourses are epistemological and extremely tricky to parse out. Power is that which we cannot name. So yeah, I don’t think Anne was intentional or malicious in it either.

And I don’t think all of us who look at Marius and probably feel somewhere deep down to be like him, to have his power, are doing it because of a fundamental flaw in their humanity or their politics. It’s a flaw in the epistemological system, and I don’t think it’s a flaw anyone can really see unless they’re the Armands in that equation, or they’ve been extensively trained to see it.

And before anyone gets defensive, this is not an attack on anyone or a criticism of any individual. It is a criticism of a system of knowledge and knowing which we likely cannot escape. And it is also a call for people to look at this story differently than they might have before. A call for lovers of Marius to try to begin to understand things from Armand’s perspective, and a call for lovers of Armand to remember that he is far more than just a victim, and that it would be very dangerous and reductive and harmful to his existence as an autonomous subject to understand him in that way. And if you feel the same as I do about these things, please talk about it, don’t get stuck in the surface level dynamics of the Armand/Marius relationship.

And if you’ve stayed with me for this long, I applaud your patience and thank you for your commitment.

[foreignswaggersession]

iwtv ep. 11 (s2ep4) misconceptions pt. 4

now to tackle another big one - y'all are silly about the bench scene. when louis tells armand he used to be good at running things, y'all rushed to call him a pimp (derogatory).

fine, louis used to be a pimp, so ok to compare. what crosses the line is acting like armand is in the position of louis's prostitutes (who are not sex slaves, btw). why? listen to the advice he gives armand:

this is not advice a pimp would give a prostitute - it's advice a pimp would give another pimp, his equal, advice for how to manage his own enterprise. he's putting himself in armand's position and telling armand what he would do. just like louis "managed" finn o'shea and his prostitutes, armand manages santiago and the coven. armand recognizes this and firmly states that he's not willing to give up leadership of his coven (🧐i wonder if this will be relevant later), but listens to the rest of louis's advice.

frankly, it's ridiculous to think louis is being anything other than kind and generous when he tells armand that he can decide what he wants to do with his life:

which leads into the one of the most romantic moments in the show:

levan akin knew exactly what he was doing with this scene, and y'all are the ones who refuse to take it for what it is - sexy, foreboding, and romantic at the same time. y'all stopped letting the tale seduce you - i guess not enough blondes were on screen.

[seashantystanaccount]

I find Armand to be so realistic in how the kinds of people who do terrible things generally also refuse to take responsibility for them. When Armand says "I could not prevent it" I think he means it, like how his trauma paralyses him in a state of learned helplessness, unable to claim agency over his life choices. Like there's this knot of unresolved pain that he doesn't know how to deal with, and it leads to him only seeing himself as the victim, even as he victimises others.

[and-fishing-equipment]

it is funny as hell actually that zamasian antis started yelling "THAT'S INDUSTRY PLANT RPF!!!" and all it did was make zamasian shippers go "wait that actually makes me super hard" and spark a phenomenal wave of new fics

[susandsnell]

[brontes]

I had a thought today about all that vampires lose in the twilight lore. Sure sure they’re fast and strong and invulnerable BUT they lose the chance to earn things because of that. The Cullens are rich but like…that just happens when you invest for three centuries. They can lift incredible amounts of weight…but just by nature and not because they’ve built up to it. They build projects and make paintings and learn…but they will always lack the satisfaction that comes from managing those accomplishments amidst the regular demands of life. Edward was seventeen…he never got the chance to earn anything by the sweat of his brow or the burning of the midnight oil.

Beyond just the bloodlust, they miss out on the regular daily challenges that make our time and pleasure meaningful. Something that is easily overlooked by teenagers reading a love story but honestly something heartbreaking to contemplate.

[this-world-of-beautiful-monsters]

this is very discourse-sjw-y of me, but honestly the constant fandom presentation of Louis and Armand as hopeless bottoms who need to be "put in their place" and the implication that two queer men of color can't sexually satisfy each other without a white man to order them around feels very...uncomfortable, tbh. like can we stop.