#char: king himbo

[ineffably-human]

I’ve been watching through WWDITS for the first time recently and was wondering what your opinion is on why Nandor, incredible laundry list of fuckups aside, generally seems to prefer non-violence at his current stage in life?

Firstly, I'm flattered I'm getting random questions about my opinions in my inbox, so thanks and hello new friend! I'm not sure if you're partway through the series or have completed it the first time (welcome to the vampire fuck mansion, enjoy the ride!) but there will be spoilers for s3/s4 in here.

Anyway, this is my favorite thing about Nandor ever: that he's at least trying to be a more thoughtful, peaceful, even humane monster than he ever was as a human. I think it's a question of time and positioning.

Nandor peaked very early in mortal life by doing what he was good at, barreling through and taking things by force. But he never just acted alone, he was part of an army, sanctioning his actions either because it was his country or because it was his job to pillage wherever he went. The world operates very differently now. He may have had a storied mercenary career for a while, but conflicts eventually shift and he would have had a sense he was feeling left behind. And becoming a vampire probably made it harder and harder to keep that as his role in life among humans.

I also think it never completely satisfied him anyway. We know he never got to know his children. Depending on which version of the story is true, he was either abandoned by his wives when the vampiric changes were too much, or (I think s4 implies this) he abandoned each of them the same way he abandoned Marwa, checking out and moving on to the next shiny thing. His best friend was a horse, and pets are amazing but they can't talk back. He was driven out of his country, eventually, by his own people.

So when all of that was gone, Nandor was left basically alone with his own thoughts and no sense of accomplishment. Give Nandor time to think about his own feelings, and it's clear how sensitive he actually is. If the date on his Ascension Day banner is right, he was just a kid when he became a soldier so as a human it's all he ever was. And he likes fighting the way a big, physical guy who's really good at it loves fighting, but he also loves animals! And arts and crafts! He has a lot of big feelings that he doesn't understand, and that he's too proud to really analyze! And he's prone to depression and loneliness, not least because of his own actions.

So I think as a defense mechanism, he started to mentally build himself up not just as a warrior, but a warrior-king. That's partly for his own ego, like how he tried to play leader of the household in early seasons, but it's also to feel like he still had a homeland and a legacy - something to show for what was supposedly the best time of his life. And like the little monologue he has in Manhattan Night Club, thinking about diplomacy is also a way of processing his own loneliness.

Which is part of why season 3's Vampiric Council appointment kicked his depression into full gear, I think. The relationship stuff helped, Guillermo's changing role definitely helped. But he also was given a sense of just how out of his depth he was, and how this image of himself as Leader Of Vampires wasn't satisfying - it was giving him a full-on identity crisis.

[masterlalna]

I posted 30,697 times in 2022

That's 15,447 more posts than 2021!

87 posts created (0%)

30,610 posts reblogged (100%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

videodromefag

dingdongyouarewrong

butch-himbo-king

somethingintheforest

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I tagged 2,383 of my posts in 2022

#oh hey look it's not reblogged - 87 posts

#lol - 75 posts

#me - 46 posts

#suicide/ - 30 posts

#lmao - 18 posts

#blood/ - 17 posts

#true - 17 posts

#literally - 17 posts

#help - 16 posts

#lmfao - 14 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#i also hate it when ppl get on a stage n go all women r delicate fragile lambs incapable of self defense and terrified of their own shadow!

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

followed one older lesbian and now my recommended is 100% terf blogs. now i gotta doublecheck the girl i followed and uuughhhh idet theres anything i can do to fix my recc now. kill me.

2 notes - Posted January 4, 2022

#4

HELLO

2 notes - Posted November 11, 2022

#3

happy butch appreciation day from the 275th dyke with this haircut you seen today amen 🙏

5 notes - Posted August 18, 2022

#2

honestly, pick better gender goals. when i was like, idealizing looking like loki or light deathnote i felt like shit. just frowning into the mirror and groaning. but now that im like. i want to be heavy tf2. i want to be bane dc. i wanna be kingpin marvel. ppl who r, like me, fucking huge, ive felt way better. you know? i look in the mirror like i am big n powerful. i can kill someone. im not fat and sad. im fat and epic. im not saying you have to pick chars who look exactly like you (me and bane share No similarities LOL) but just celebrate aspects about yourself that you already have. reframe your narrative. youll feel better.

13 notes - Posted January 4, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

help my kitty get the surgery he needs

>>>> https://gofund.me/91d90b34 <<<<

my poor boy ate something he shouldn’t have. nothing about his condition isn’t fixable, it’s just extremely expensive!

he’s only five years old and one of the sweetest cats alive. every little bit helps. thank you so much for your time!

103 notes - Posted October 12, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[arofili]

The letters in your url

hah, clever!

A - Your current OTP(s)/OT3(s)/OTX(s)

answered here! + bonus Courferre for Les Mis :)

R - A pairing you ship that you don’t think anyone else ships

I mean, I’ve talked with some people about this ship that I think there are others who have some interest, but I’m pretty much out here all by myself rowing the Maeglin/Turin ship!!

O - Choose a song at random, which ship or character does it remind you of

chi chi this is SO much pressure!!!!!

uhhhh “East” by Sleeping At Last gives me massive emo Maedhros vibes!

Now I bear little resemblance to the king I once was. I bear little resemblance to the king I could become. Maybe paper is paper, maybe kids will be kids. But Lord, I want to remember how to feel like I did.

F - What’s the longest you’ve ever been in a fandom

does warrior cats count? because I was into that before I knew what fandom was, but then I was super into it when I discovered fandom. I was a fan from first grade to like, fucking, freshman year of high school is when I think I stopped writing fic?? embarrassingly late, RIP my street cred

I - Has tumblr caused you to stop liking any fandoms, if so, which and why

yes absolutely. i still like harry potter but the fandom annoys me. i never liked game of thrones and the fandom drives me up the wall. i’m only very passively into marvel and i can’t stand the fandom. but the big one for me is star wars, i like star wars, but literally ANY chance of me actually “getting into” star wars has been ruined by the fandom, your hot takes are bad your cold takes are bad your character and ship bashing is appalling your headcanon discourse is disgusting---

ANYWAY.

L - Say something genuinely nice about a character who isn’t one of your faves (chars you’re neutral on are fair game, as are chars you dislike)

uhhh wow this is hard, I feel like I like most characters?? especially thinking of the Silm, I think every character is sympathetic in their own light, even the ones fandom dunks on (like Thingol and Eol and Manwe). even if I’m not super into a character I generally have vague positive feelings for them...

ok, I’m gonna go with Beren! he’s like, such an archetypal character with a storyline so beloved by the author that frankly I don’t caaaaaare about him that much, but he is very brave and devoted and the definition of a himbo and he loves his eldritch wife more than should be humanly possible, and even if I don’t think he’s the most interesting character in the Legendarium I can appreciate that!

and then I again but i already did that!

[ineffably-human]

I can't get too mad about the Marwa thing. I can understand why it freaks people out, I understand the implications it could have and why instead of being something darkly absurdist, that hits some buttons for people they can't ignore. I can see where it failed, though frankly I haven't seen a single suggestion of an alternative that actually satisfies what this storyline is meant to do. And this storyline is very much meant to do something.

Maybe I was already ready to come out swinging about this because people have just flat out made things up about this character and this situation the whole season. I chew a little more drywall every time I hear a new statement that just never actually happened.

This has gotten very VERY long, please have a cut.

Let's look at pre-the Wedding Wish first:

Nandor did not 'slowly chip away' at Marwa's personality, he made one wish that altered it after she very barely had one to start with.

If this show is good at anything, it's giving us a very strong sense of who a character is over very little time. We can map out a history of Jan just from the photos on her wall. We get a sense of Shanice from her reading of a bottle of medicine and one small monologue about her Mosquito Collector motives. Gail, Meg, Charmaine, The Contessa, Coco, Nandor's wife answering questions by the gazebo with the name I forget, most of these female characters have fewer appearances than Marwa and varying degrees of plot importance but we have at least a half-decent sense of who they are.

But Marwa was the last wife standing after Nandor ruled out everything even slightly objectionable about the others because of how self-destructively insecure and selfish he is. She is never portrayed like a complete person with an inner life to begin with, all the better for him to project this obsession with a perfect past love that almost certainly didn't exist. (Or at least not how Nandor remembers them.) From a Doylist perspective, she could never have shown off more than a hint of who she was/used to be, by design.

The first thing we learn about Marwa is not her scientific space discoveries. The first thing we learn is that while she is first saying her name, Nandor cuts her off and she lets him do it without even blinking. She recites the one fact about her life like she's saying a bio in a playbill. She says she's grateful she found such an intelligent man, for some reason, so she doesn't really understand who she's marrying even if they've been together before. I've heard people observe in later episodes she stands like a Sim - but to me she seemed very flat and robotic in her first appearance.

You guys, learning about this plot I was ready for a person with a personality, I was ready for either wacky poly shenanigans or a whole-ass emotional affair, believe me. Do you know how many songs from Aida I had queued up? And I remember wondering why Marwa didn't feel 'real' to me, not even over-the-top real the way the vampires do. The people saying she was there to be an obstacle to Nandor and Guillermo baffle me, because the moment we meet her, the one thing that's clear to us is Nandor didn't find his great past love. He found a random person. One who is just off the radar enough that she was the last one left. The Baron flat-out refers to her as "the beautiful and charming what's-her-name."

Until the girls' night (which is post-wish), Marwa never exists outside the room Nandor is in. After her brief introduction, she never says anything in that first half of the season that's not about Nandor. There is almost zero difference between that and Go Flip Yourself's litany of "I agree with my husband." Meanwhile Nandor is constantly snapping at her, ignoring her existence, leaving her behind. So she's either a terrible judge of character or will allow fucking anything from this man from the start.

Why yes that is horrible! Pack your bags and escape, etc! But it's not a full, vibrant character who Nandor later whittles down to nothing. Nandor whittled the wives down to Marwa. Because this plot is about his inability to think about other people or have the maturity to be in a true relationship.

The wedding wish, the only one that explicitly makes a long-term change to Marwa's mind, Nandor makes because she voices the first preferences/desires we've heard from her the whole time. At the very least this is new behavior. But Nandor's trying to micromanage flower arrangements on a week of no sleep, not tame a willful person into a submissive doll.

He's a self-obsessed moron so his takeaway when she finally voices her doubts at the wedding is something like "oh shit, she didn't even really want to be with me" - but he's a coward and hey now she does! She even said so! At this big huge wedding he invited everyone to, and that no one believes in! So he doubles down. He has been convincing himself he's in love this whole time, now he's convincing himself it's going awesome with this person he feels basically stuck with.

---

Now, as far as post-Wedding Wish is concerned:

"Like all the same things I like," going by the exact phrasing, doesn't have to get rid of what she likes that Nandor is neutral on. It doesn't have to change anything else about her personality or behavior. It doesn't even mean she has to want all the same things he wants, it certainly doesn't mean she has to do the things he does or to robotically repeat that she agrees with him. I was ready for Marwa to take up sword fighting and bossing Guillermo around and teach Nandor how completely fucking insufferable he can be sometimes, but that isn't what happened either. She feels half there because she was always half there.

Yeah, there's a consent issue, and I feel like the show goes out of its way to show there's nothing sexual going on. The one time they talk about having sex, the Dick Wish screws it up. Nandor walks away in disgust from some very half-hearted dancing about their wedding night. Marwa sleeps in a separate bunk bed in the attic. Between the choice of a bedroom for the two of them and a place where he can be away from her completely (and get fucked by guys and watch Guillermo use the bathroom), Nandor chooses the man cave.

We have two episodes with Marwa after the wish and before 'Freddie'. Ironically, they are the most personality and agency she has had the entire time, they are the events people most often cite about how we "got to know her". (What exactly did we get to know?) And she doesn't seem to hate Nandor even secretly, they just are extremely awkward and bored together. She seems genuinely hopeful that Nandor likes the man cave but since she likes privacy just as much now, and she's not liking a marriage he isn't liking, she tricks him and makes it into her own space.

And the specific Freddie wish is that he wants to turn her into "an exact copy" of Freddie in terms of "looks, personality, everything." Freddie then proceeds to introduce himself to Nandor as if he never met him, and treats Guillermo as if he's a stranger. We could speculate Marwa is in there screaming to get out, sure, but...why would we? We are in a Ship of Theseus situation, where every part of her was replaced. There is no reason that she'd still be there. And there wasn't much of her there to start with.

The 'real' Marwa lived hundreds of years ago, we have no idea what she wanted or how she felt about her life, we have no idea how long her life went on before she died. (Or if she's even dead! She could be one of those vampires in Nandor's village at this point!) But she had her life. It already happened. Anything that happened from the moment Nandor resurrected her (which is already kind of a horrifying act, it just wasn't played as one) was already, as AV Club brilliantly put it, an extension of his own selfish desires.

I could say the djinn's version of Marwa was sort of a doll reduced to her most basic traits. I could say as someone resurrected to be nothing more than the object of 'someone's wife', she was freaking delighted to have Nandor's preferences filling up an empty space for her to use as she liked. I could say she's a fake wife the djinn invented as a decoy. Or that she stops existing whenever she leaves the room. Or that the wish just basically re-deaded her and she'd have been fine with that.

Any of those things would have just as much evidence as what people are speculating instead.

--- I get why you can fill in the worst possible thing in the blanks. There's so much to fill in about exactly who Marwa was, exactly what got changed about her, and whether any aspect of her is left. I think they may have left so much ambiguous to make it less uncomfortable, and instead left everyone thinking about the worst possible version of events.

There also aren't a lot of female characters on this show, and no regular female characters of color, and that is absolutely a deficit the show needs to make up for. Because I truly believe they write great female characters when they're actually trying to write them. Having those other examples would have made a plot like this so much less uncomfortable to watch. But Marwa could have never been that representation, because of what this plot is meant to be about. This plot isn't about Nandermo, or even about Nandor's search for romance at all. This is about all of Nandor's worst tendencies, how he's his own worst enemy.

Because this is probably what Nandor has done his entire life. As a human being Nandor was more of a monster than he is as a literal monster. Like I keep saying, he pillaged, he violently took what he wanted and left the rest to burn. We're told in this last episode that he disemboweled tons of civilians for a tapestry. (A tapestry that, in a cut line from the leaked audition script, he didn't even really like much. If that isn't a metaphor for his shiny object syndrome...)

Even if every single marriage he had was someone in love with him who wanted to be with him, he probably did some version of this: was drawn in very suddenly by the parts he liked (or invented in his head), had a very selfish, empty version of a love affair, got annoyed when things were inconvenient or difficult, and then moved on to the next shiny object.

Freddie is Wife 38 with extra steps, compounded by the djinn lamp being a magic pleasure machine - the exact worst thing to give to a warlord used to taking what he wants (and then being praised for it by everyone around him). His feelings about both Marwa and Freddie are very shallow, and also very real to Nandor in the moment and take up a lot of emotional energy. The 'love' for Freddie would have faded and left him feeling just as hollow.

We just saw the vicious cycle of his life in fast motion, in a way that ends in disaster for everyone involved. (Do you think we'd have gotten Guillermo's horrified 'what the hell is wrong with you' if we weren't supposed to be thinking that right there with him?) The difference here is that we see Nandor made a change. He understands something about love, he thinks outside himself. He does what he believes would make Marwa, 'his' Freddie, and Guillermo happiest. This season is about change.

(I want to point out, also: there's no reason Nandor getting physically beaten up would teach him anything. As a warrior, if anything he'd double down. Guillermo's genuine pain and heartbreak in the midst of what he's done is the only thing that would have gotten through to him. And it did. The hard zoom in on "what I did was...wrong" is because we almost never see him admit those things or apologize in the first place, it's meant to both say 'no shit' and emphasize that this is pretty huge for him.)

Again, I'm not saying this is okay. None of this is okay. It's not supposed to be. It's played for absurdity but it isn't played as meaningless, when the show has been playing much more horrible things for laughs for years.

I'm just saying that a lot of what people are bothered by doesn't really support the facts. It takes everything to its worst conclusion and then acts like that's both supposed to be our takeaway, and we're supposed to find it just great. Of course we aren't. If we were, Nandor would have packed Marwa's bags and made a Freddie clone. He and Guillermo would have gotten into a competition about who could date Freddie the best that would be about their own sexual tension or something. There are many many ways to turn this into something feel-good, and they chose not to.

(Not least because any of those ideas would have left out a lot of what this episode says about narcissism, codependency, Guillermo's own concealing of his identity, the way love means seeing a complete person who exists outside yourself...)

And many, many different staff writers wrote this storyline across the entire season. A number of which were women, several of which were women of color. One of those women of color is Middle Eastern and another is the co-showrunner. Of course women can write misogyny and people of color can write racism, but that also means there's no monolith of identity where the right people with the right identity will feel the right way about something at any given time, and there's only one response to have. The fuckup here, however large or small you believe it to be, did not happen because of two white guys writing this one script secretively in the dead of night.

So, I don't know. That's me. Please consider what was actually being written here, and what we actually saw, and not your headcanons or your subverted expectations. Or the things that built up in your head during the months of leaked material. And if it still makes you too uncomfortable to keep watching, then don't! But I don't think it was thoughtless or pointless, at all. Plus, literally any character can come back in this show, and they often do. So who knows what we'll see as a result of this.

[ineffably-human]

I think if we've learned anything here tonight, it's that proper care of your Nandor includes sparring for warlord enrichment. Like many breeds of warrior, a Nandor requires regular exercise, including mock-fight behaviors, an audience to tell him he's a special boy, and at least one ass-kicking per year to properly humble him. (The ass-kicking may be part of his mating cycle, this part is still under observation.)

If you don't have the time or space to spar your Nandor, he may respond with depression, aggression, and really bad impulse decisions. Trying to curb his natural instinct for bloodlust will only make things worse. He may do some stupid shit like get engaged to a perfectly lovely young woman, and then keep blowing her off to neg the guy he wants to dick him down, until he gets the attention he naturally craves.

Remember, a properly exercised Nandor makes for an affectionate and fun-loving friend around the home!

[ineffably-human]

So Nandor trained as a soldier as a youth, was made viceroy as a teenager, and mainly solved his problems by blaming another country and setting it on fire. He's not famous in history books, unless the 'misremembered his own name' theory is right; it's implied in that one episode that Genghis Khan steals his thunder a lot.

Was he even that great in life? Like did people hype him up because they had to? Do the Council vampires talk about his greatness as a human because there was a lot of killing and fucking going on, and that's what they consider impressive?

Meanwhile Guillermo, zero irony or ass-kissing: "My master, the bestest and specialest boy who ever un-lived, the very coolest and most powerful vampire with the biggest dick."

[ineffably-human]

moodboard: nandor the relentless (what we do in the shadows)

"One minute I held the key, Next the walls were closed on me And I discovered that my castles stand Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand."

[ineffably-human]

ok but I don't think I can put into words how fucking wild this Kayvan Novak interview is even if I quote like 70% of it.

the host (who is a famous comedian I guess) wants to fuck not Kayvan but Nandor specifically and goes on about it and Kayvan proceeds to dip into Nandor voice constantly

because she wants to fuck Nandor she asks if Nandor's ever gonna date anyone. Kayvan responds that Nandor is leaning more asexual currently and goes into that whole thing about Nandor having an intrinsic sadness and being a recovering addict to sex and the last vestiges of that drama being tied up in his relationship with Guillermo, where it is unhealthy but also the best thing that ever happened to him.

thirsty host is like 'aww as a girl I wanna see smooches' and Kayvan's response is 'yeah you might but he's addicted to Guillermo, non-sexually but unhealthy and codependently'

this is coming off of s2 and prior to any s3 scripts or filming. remember the question that started this was just 'is Nandor gonna go on a date'

she asks if he has a familiar or a PA in his life and he says no but his fiance reminds him if he's not living as well as he could be and encourages him to live better

he thinks if Nandor temporarily went to a human job he'd go work at a Foot Locker and he'd like bitching about the manager with people as a bonding exercise

some listener sends in an absolutely batshit relationship question that starts off being about an ex-friend of 10 years who is a selfish asshole and also unfortunately they have to still live as a roommate with them while they act like nothing is wrong.

I laugh hysterically until the question gets more and more specific and involves the term 'gaslighting' at least once and also these roommates slept together at one point bc the asshole one wanted to experiment with her sexuality.

Kayvan interprets this whole huge detailed thing as the querent having caught feelings and gotten their heart broken. everyone's ultimate conclusion is 'don't sleep with your roommates, it ends badly.'

Nandor voice promptly informs Guillermo that he's not going to sleep with him or show him his dick no matter how much he asks and after hundreds of years he probably couldn't even get hard.

the host's response to that is 'there goes my hope for an episode where Nandor has sex.'

[ineffably-human]

btw I think Nandor being married 'just once, to 37 women' means he counts it all as one marriage since there were no divorces/separations, not that he had the world's biggest/longest ceremony with 37 women at once and then the rest were concubines.

like whatever court advisor/wingman coordinated 37 courtships and/or political alliances into one giant wedding would be some kind of legend, if we ever find out that's what happened I'll eat my words (in b4 Guillermo is the guy's reincarnation). but until then I figure Nandor had a big harem and married the faves or whoever was nobility/politically favorable over his twenty-something years of being Supreme Viceroy.