The Vampire Armand’s PR Manager

I had someone tell me I didn’t understand the show for suggesting that Louis’s decision to leave Daniel alone with Armand was impulsive. It quite literally was.

That’s literally Louis’s entire thing. He wants so badly to be in control of his life that he holds everything back until he explodes and does something impulsive. He’s the king of never asking questions and not thinking things through.

He says verbatim: “I shouldn’t have left you alone with him.” That’s clear regret. Louis didn’t think it through at all. It wouldn’t shock me at all if he never actually made transportation arrangements for Daniel to leave Dubai, that’s how little thought he appeared to put into it.

And I get it. He had a lot of other stuff to think about at that time. Totally understandable. When you find out your life is a lie and you’ve wasted eighty years with someone, the human reporter who helped implode your relationship who you leave with your murderous ex might slip your mind. I’d probably do the same.

Let’s not pretend Louis had any kind of solid plan there. He couldn’t actually do anything to stop Armand if he wanted to. He threatened to kill him if he harmed Daniel, and guess what? Daniel was harmed and Armand doesn’t look very dead.

Louis’s messiness is half the beauty of the character. Why pretend he’s someone he’s not?

Thinking about Assad using the word hunger to describe Armand’s arc and how that one word literally summarises his entire character.

Armand isn’t just hungry. He’s completely starved. For his entire existence, everyone he has come into contact with has starved him of absolutely everything. Not one moment of his life has been normal for even an instant. He’s just been wandering the earth for 500 years with no idea what he’s searching for, just that he’s searching.

He’s never really been a person before. No one has ever afforded him the luxury. All love had been transactional, withholding, abusive and/or ended in tragedy. He doesn’t get to have anything permanent or sincere. That isn’t how it has ever worked in his experience.

Until Daniel. The only one that comes close to making him feel fulfilled. With Daniel, he gets to explore. He gets to experiment. With Daniel, we get to see Armand daring to touch the fragments of all the people he’s been forced to become and attempt to build them up into something whole. His habits and interests seem strange to us and to Daniel but he’s behaving exactly like a child would.

But Daniel scares him, and rightfully so. You wouldn’t believe the love you’d been aching for for five centuries was real either. Not when you’d spent so long starving.

My detailed plan for a Dracula adaptation that doesn’t inevitably disappoint people:

I get the movie greenlit. The budget is a billion dollars. Everyone wants to know why. That feels excessive.

The trailer comes out. It’s obscene. Explosions. Out of place sex scenes. Someone’s hanging off the side of a train at one point. Also the train is on fire. Quincey lassos Dracula at one point. Wait, there’s a cowboy in Dracula? Gun fights. Dracula with a glock. Those didn’t exist back then. Blood everywhere. Whatever other shit needs to be there to bait people into seeing the movie.

People see the movie out of morbid curiosity. This is the theatre exclusive run. They come in and sit down. The lights dim.

Then they brighten again. The doors lock. It was a trap. There was glue on all of the seats. Now they’re all trapped. The trailer was all that was filmed and the entire budget was used.

I come out with a copy of Dracula. No one is allowed to leave until they listen to me read the entire thing. I do this in every cinema in the world. When I’m done, they can leave. No one will believe them.

Bonus when it comes out on streaming: the victims of the cinema run start posting online. Everyone thinks it’s fake but they watch the movie anyway. They can’t help themselves. They press play. I emerge from the floorboards. They’re glued to the nearest surface. I hold them hostage in their own home and they listen to the entire novel. Then I release them.

Over eight billion people on earth. When I’m done, there will be no one left to claim Dracula is romantically involved with Mina. It’s foolproof.

I try to stay away from saying “[insert actor name] is just playing themselves” regarding actors I like because that sort of comment is usually reserved for actors who can’t really act.

But god damn Eric Bogosian is perfectly cast. He does come off as a better person than Daniel (who by this point in the timeline is almost certainly a serial killer) but in terms of attitude, they’re almost identical. Eric is a talented, versatile actor on top of that, but this is just an instance where an actor is born to play a character. The promotional material for Talamasca has been so much fun and Eric has been killing it.

A fictional character getting cancelled in real life and the people who make the show he’s on forcing him to issue an (incredibly disingenuous) apology might go down as one of the funniest things to happen in fandom history.

Twitter got mad at him. They made him say sorry. He was a dick about it the entire time. Daniel Molloy, the icon you are.

Being in the IWTV fandom and opening tumblr in public is riskier than Russian roulette.

You might get some tragic character analysis or some gifsets. You might also get straight up porn.

Either way, it’ll be undoubtedly beautiful (the artists in this fandom are insanely talented) but the people around you will probably be more thankful for accidentally glancing at one over the other.

Not suggesting anyone should stop posting what they’re posting btw. The fandom is a wonderful, eclectic mess, and it’s a great way to test your reflexes.