KentoJAP

But wait, there’s more!

“I saw Claudia as a woman in a child’s body,” says Rice. “There are women who are eternally called girls - cute, sweet, adorable pinchable, and soft- when in fact they have a strong mind that’s very threatening” - The Vampire Companion

‘Let tears gather in your eyes. You haven’t tears enough for what you’ve done to me. (...) Monsters! To give me immortality in this hopeless guise. - Claudia, Interview with the Vampire

Claudia is brilliant and dangerous. Yet her fathers treat her as a "doll", a child. Part of her character arc is fueled by rage, caused by this constant paternalism.

Of course, Lestat gave me a doll as usual, the replica of me, which as always wears a duplicate of my newest dress. (...) And what should I do with it? Play with it as if I were really a child? "Is there a message here, my beloved father?" I asked him this evening. "That I shall be a doll forever myself?" - Claudia's Diary, The Queen of the Damned

There is a great interview in which Anne talks about the rage in the character of Claudia, I'll try to make a gifset of it for this week ^^.

Still, it is wild to see some interviews (old interviews) of a bestselling author, in which the host asks things like: "what does your husband think about you writing "x"?".

IWTV wasn't published until 1976.

Women in the United States were not legally allowed to have a credit card or get a home loan in their own name, without their husband's approval, until 1974. Laws were just being put into place regarding discriminating against women in hiring and discriminating in pay for women. Most women still couldn't get birth control without their husband's approval. There was no such thing as no fault divorce, or even the concept of marital rape.

While there was no law against a woman getting a driver's license on her own, in the 60s and 70s it could still depend on where you lived and who was working the DMV that day. Anne herself did not have a driver's license and did not drive because Stan would not permit her to drive.

I wish I could remember the exact interview, because she did talk extensively about how in her early days of writing their mutual friends would just refer to her as 'Stan's wife'. 'Stan's wife' wrote a book. 'Stan's wife' is getting published. 'Stan, how is your wife getting on with her book?' being asked while she's in the room. No matter how libertine we view the 1970s, socially women still weren't really looked at outside their roles as wives.

Ya'll couldn't even handle HER.

So much about Naboo culture is infuriating from a logical standpoint. They have a queen, okay. A constitutionally elected queen? Weird, okay. Don't know why they'd do that but... She's FOURTEEN? Excuse me? Is it a ceremonial thing or, oh no it's not? Legit head of state? Why does she dress like that? Why does she talk like that? I'm so tired.

Here's the explainer. Let me go cook.

There's this joke in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where the last living human goes back in time and finds out humans aren't actually from Earth, but an alien culture that tricked all the middle managers, pedantic weirdos, and other infuriating folk into getting in a space arc which they gave the wrong evacuation coordinates to simply get rid of them. The Naboo are like this but they're all artists and poets and hippies, but like classy ones. They fled their home planet during a war and crash landed on Naboo, then did a colonism to the Gungans because, hey, they were fleeing a war and it was do or die. This spiritual rot in their creation story is later rectified by Padmé. But it's super important to their cultural psychology. They're hippies, but will subjugate if needed. They are "peaceful" but I guarantee you every single one of them has a tiny extremely shiny pistol up their sleeve and they will draw down on you if backed against a wall.

The scene that I think says it all is at the end of Phantom Menace when Padmé is surrounded by Nute Gunray and his droids, they've got her dead to rights, but Sabé her double creates a distraction so the queen can make it to her throne. This one piece of furniture is the Naboo in a nutshell. It's richly carved with artistic details, it has two seats to the side so the queen's handmaidens can read the lips of people in the back of the room and use hand signals to communicate with the queen while she can remain focused mostly on who is speaking to her. It is hundreds of years old. And it has a secret compartment in the armrest that is FULL OF GUNS. Layers of artistic opulence hiding their true intentions.

The Naboo were created to be backwards compatible with Princess Leia. They're compassionate pacifists, but they will shot you if needed.

Why do they elect teenage royalty? It's a little creepy. It's giving "age of consent is emotional maturity". It makes no sense.

The explanation they give outsiders is they want youthful idealism untainted by cynicism. What they don't tell you is that they take kids with stated interest in politics and put them in an advanced highly competitive Leadership Academy which is like Model UN mixed with Battle Royale. Well, they don't kill each other but it's intense. It's like what the clones went though just all diplomacy training and tea ceremonies all the time. Which is crazy but so Naboo.

Oh, and all the delegates for the royalty election run using pseudonyms for security. Imagine voting for the head of state but you can't run a background check. It's so crazy.

Why does Padmé dress like that? Well, fashion is one of Naboo's major industries so it's like she's wearing the entire Fall line catalog at once. To advertise not only the talent of her people, but to show how much they favor her. BUT that dress has multiple layers of padding and resin armor. And aforementioned spots for those little silver blasters. And it breaks up her silhouette making her harder to shoot. And it's so elaborate you pay more attention to the crazy dress and not if the person wearing it is really the queen or a decoy. Everything about Naboo is like this.

Queen Amidala has that weird accent while Padmé does not. Because all her handmaidens helped create the accent together so they all can imitate it. It's like if you gave girls at a rowdy sleepover the job of federal counterintelligence. That's what they came up with.

The handmaidens wear colorful identical clothes so you can't tell them apart, hoods to partially conceal their identity, and they don't wear the queen's fancy makeup. So one of them can be the queen and spy on people in the audience. Because the Naboo don't trust shit for shit.

Their public face is so silly to hide all the truly weird shit they do behind the scenes.

They use their reputation as artist hippies to conceal multiple layers of subterfuge and disguise their methods of self defense and assuage their paranoia due to wartime trauma and their disturbing colonial past. All of them are completely off their rocker even by Star Wars standards. And I love them so much. They put on a show so everyone thinks they have them figured out but what they have going on is far more weirder and more sinister than meets the eye. You know how catty, neurotic, and competitive art school students stereotypically are? Yeah, planet art student. Love them!

There was one episode with a trans woman getting different gender-affirming operations, including breast implants. It showed the procedure, and (what I found so fascinating that it's stuck with me for decades), as soon as the doctor put the implant in, a censor blur popped up on the nipple.

And you just know there was a meeting between the TLC lawyers and the editors and producers of the show to discuss what the difference was between a "man nipple" (can be shown) and a "woman nipple" (no no must obscure, 'tis naughty). And they decided that as soon as the implant goes in and the nipple has more mass behind it, that's the moment when it becomes a woman's nipple and must be hidden to comply with TV rules.

But it's the same nipple. On the same person. I know what it looks like; I just saw it. But TV and obscenity rules are rules, and the rules say woman nipple = sexual and therefore explicit, but man nipple = neutral, just fine.

“He’s huge!! So chubby!”

“Is he gonna goddamn dive already for fuck’s sake?”

They can also hold their breath for 20 minutes so he probably wasn’t too stressed from being caught in the net.

HIM: