sleepymarmot

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"Wilf quiet, fascinated by these two" THE END OF TIME: PART TWO, 2010

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Wait hang on pause I glossed over it before but dhawan!master was on earth for seventy seven straight years? He saw his own run as prime minister. Wh

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DOCTOR WHO — Listen (S08E04) directed by Douglas Mackinnon | written by Steven Moffat ››› Jenna Coleman as Clara Oswald

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OMG LOOK AT IT

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babe it’s december! post hunters in the snow

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Moonrise, 1884

Stanisław Masłowski

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I swear I must be cursed, because across the last handful of play sessions the expert NPCs chose the Orgnum deck, if my count is correct, eight times in a row

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Reddit informed me that a lead normally only found in Sunspire is available this week for purchase in the Infinite Archive...

So I headed there, checked the shop, and discovered something far more personally important on sale this week:

The Spires of the 34th Sermon, which normally can be found only in the Infinite Archive as a random drop, a readable furnishing version of a text about my favorite sermon, one of the best pieces of Vivec-related writing in the game, and possibly the first and/or only canonical instance of Vivec being referred to with they/he pronouns. I went a bit crazy after discovering it earlier this year and tried to grind for it a bit with no success, and now it just drops in my lap!

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this is so hashtag married

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Paris loumand is like. dreamstat telling Louis that Armand is no good. Claudia telling Louis that Armand is no good. fucking ARMAND is telling Louis that Armand is no good! he tells Louis to fucking dump him and gtfo of Paris!!! and Louis continues to believe in him!!! believe in his love, believe in his ability to keep his shit together and not stab Louis in the back worse than Lestat ever did! and then when Armand does exactly that Louis pretends to believe in him again out of spite, although on some level he really does seem to end up kind of trusting Armand again. then when he can't hold onto that facade anymore, when Armand has apparently been (rightfully) excised from his life for good, he stays in the home they built together, lived in together, ran their various insane schemes from together. the surface decorations are different, but the bones are the same!! he believes in this place he and Armand made enough to make his stand against the entire vampire world from there!!! fuck. fucking fuck.

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Louis and Armand were so in love in Paris it made them stupid because firstly if Armand made my daughtersister wear a creepily infantilized costume and perform a play that jabs at her insecurities I would have separated Armand's head from his neck at the dress rehearsal and secondly if Louis humiliated me in front of my entire coven by rejecting me as his companion after we had already fucked on every surface imaginable I would have set him on fire immediately no trial needed

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Except he's not! Like that's…the problem in large part? Armand is not following the rules, he's not leading by example anymore, so of course things are kind of falling apart. If he was fulfilling his duties as coven master, he would have killed Louis when he told Santiago he would/when Claudia got sworn into the coven. Or at least chased Louis out of Paris. But not only has he been extremely lenient with Louis but everyone also knows it's special favoritism because Armand and Louis are together/fucking. And I think on some level Armand knows/understands this, which is why he is so distraught. It's not that he doesn't know how to fix it, but he doesn't know how to fix it without giving up his relationship with Louis and that's something he also desperately doesn't want to do, even as he tells Louis to leave Paris. (And then Louis suggests a way out and Armand clings to it, despite any misgivings.)

I don't have any deep observation here or anything, I just love this scene so much. So much going on here. And just the tragic romance of it - Armand the rule follower, Armand the rule enforcer, Armand the traditionalist, who has allowed himself to be stifled and boxed in by all those rules and expectations, does/choosing something for himself just once...and immediately gets fucked over by it.

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So much of their relationship was based around the fact that Louis wanted to feel powerful and Armand wanted to feel innocent.

It could have worked out so much better between the two of them if those needs had been treated as vulnerabilities to be shared; indulged when appropriate. Instead of roles they both had to constantly perform, lest everything fall apart.

It's not that they didn't love each other or even that they weren't a good fit. It's that they both were obviously too terrified to let the relationship grow into something more vulnerable and three-dimensional than the roles they'd chosen to play.

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by the way they were hunting gay men for pleasure and sport in paris and san francisco👆this also fits in very neatly into how they collaborate and tolerate one another’s feeding practices in dubai (damek, malik). their negotiations when it comes to feeding practices forms a very important thread in the show - it goes hand-in-hand with the negotiations pertaining to their relationship and how they’re consequently able to make their marriage last; their collaboration with respect to their feeding also makes sense because drinking blood is a very sensual act for vampires - so they’re also helping each other find pleasure in that sense even when they’re not sharing blood between themselves. there’s a reason most of louis’s victims in nola, paris, sf & dubai are usuallymen.

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I love how this can be interpreted as either masturbation or self harm. And because it's Armand, everyone has settled on: both, simultaneously. Armand de Masochism!

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Post s2 cryptids ~