#useless meanderings on characterization and fanwork

[shineforthee]

Thinking a lot about Armand as a complex character, and Armand as someone capable of great harm to others. And then about how this knowledge is sometimes translated into how he is expected to be characterized in fandom or fanon, for lack of a better term.

Thinking also about tenderness, softness, gentleness. And how it can be easy to take a character who is violent or cruel or immoral and say that they should be written as hardened, as not yearning for any kind of softness.

As if there is not a violent sort of tenderness. As if there is not brutal love, unyielding love, a devotion strong enough that it is capable of harm.

In TVA there's this passage, while Armand is sick, where he envisions being in a glass city and is addressed by a priest. There's plenty to unpack there but we get the sense this is some threshold between life and death. And he is told this:

"Your love for others and their love for you, [and] the increase of love in life itself around you, is what matters."

I can't stop thinking about that. About how that creates a thesis, a guiding principle of sorts, for a character who goes on to do terrible horrible things. It reads like a part of a hero's journey. It reads like a beautiful, wonderful thing. He does abhorrent things for that love, because it's what matters, right? All that matters, maybe.

When we remove the layers from a character - when we decide that because they are vicious they have no desire for tenderness - we flatten the things that can make them so genuinely fascinating.

I don't have a whole lot of interest in writing or reading an Armand that is cruel for the sake of being cruel, mustache twirling torturer, boiled down to a list of what awful things he can do for shock value. It's far more interesting to me to see what that darker devotion looks like. What it looks like to believe, for 500 years, that love is all that matters and that you will never truly get enough of it. I want to feel as though it almost makes sense, what he's doing. Not by pardoning him and blaming others, but by getting a sense of just what it would take for a character who is genuinely capable of love and tenderness to weaponize that.