hello here's my little Armand essay. spoilers for season 2 and content warnings for discussions of racism, csa, intimate partner violence.
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actually, daniel molloy is so real. cause if i offered to get on my knees for a guy and he telepathically shoved me to my knees, i would get a boner too
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Will never not be obsessed w both Louis and Armand calling Daniel “boy” and it’s never lost on me that they both have the context to understand “boy” as a social caste in a way many people (esp white people) living today might not immediately recognize… I think the context w Louis is perhaps more readily obvious to modern people (understandably) but man the reality of the word “boy” is that its usage to indicate a power discrepancy really goes back to ancient history.
In Ancient Rome, you literally could not be referred to using the term for an adult male if you were enslaved. You would forever be called a boy; “puer;” regardless of age.
Boyhood in Ancient Rome is simultaneously a marginalized, romanticized, and even eroticized position. That romanticization of youth, of youthful masculinity in all its perceived contradiction, taken to its logical extreme in such a sternly patriarchal society. The puer delicatus archetype certainly didn’t suddenly disappear with Rome’s collapse; we can see how it endures through the Renaissance, just objectively. And I would say Marius acts almost as a physical representation for the influence certain Ancient Roman ideas continued to have on Renaissance Italy, in this context. Armand is someone who actively can never fully escape his casting into this role, (can even never physically grow beyond it in the books).
In Middle English, the word “boye/boi” is most typically used to describe a male servant. Its connotation has more to do with class than age. And I think many of us are aware how that idea was preserved in American slavery and the post-slavery treatment of Black men.
I think examples like these really help illuminate the ways in which “boyhood” has always been a distinct social class, and in some cases has even occupied what is essentially a third gender role, especially in strongly patriarchal and/or martial societies.
So when Louis and Armand call Daniel “boy,” well. They certainly mean it in one or two very specific ways. (Personally I think Louis is more likely to mean it in a disparaging way since that’s the only way he’s ever heard it used for him; meanwhile I think Armand is more likely to see it as something inherently vulnerable and even potentially worthy of veneration, even if it’s in a way that’s paternalistic).
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something that I think is cool about iwtv is that jacob anderson and assad zaman (actually esp assad when it comes to this specifically) really do convince me of their characters’ ages, like louis and armand genuinely do feel that old. I really believe armand is 514 years old, he carries the weight of that history in everything he does, in how he carries himself.
old man daniel literally seems like a kid when he’s in the room with them sometimes. he has so much less life experience than them, giving quippy, cocky remarks about things that, from their perspective at least, he couldn’t possibly understand. at the young age he is.
in season one daniel states very emphatically to louis “I’m not your fucking boy” and of course that’s a reference to that in the original book, he isn’t called anything except “the boy” but the thing is to louis the only drastic change in daniel, the one that’s foreign to him is his appearance, but mentally? he still sees daniel as that same kid he met in the 70s. the difference between 20 and 60 is nothing to him. he’s a boy. and you feel that.
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Lestat, surrounded by feral vampires and wracking his brain on how to save himself, nicki and gabrielle, but still finding time to flirt:
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