glory to the martyrs. victory to the resistance.

Best Outfit - Round 4 Match 11

You punch a white supremacist and they use your mugshot to reveal who you are. Classic media.

hiiiii darling <3

to begin by caveating: my dislike of claudeleine is twofold 1) its an undermining of claudia's character to pair her with a woman whose defining plot point is that she fucked a nazi boy and not explore that 2) i think implications of this and fan response is, at its core, extremely misogynistic

1) the first episode sets up the conceit that claudia is now "above" the trivialities of human relations. i can still tenuously be on board with this as being in character for her. war is hard. traversing warzones at night as two Black vampires with the brother youre mad as fuck at is hard. maybe poor sweet claudia has bigger things going on right now than the threat of nazism. (and i love 201 probably best in the season but the politics of this episode kinda sucks in general. rampant russophobia through the nazi-soviet horseshoe theory + the suggestion the blood is bad because of suffering in wartorn europe but not under the jim crow rule?) however theres a difference between claudia feeling a segmentation between herself and human politics after leaving new orleans hurt and isolated and being completely uninterested in madeleine's nazi affiliations. until 204 we have to assume she doesnt even know that madeleine "just" fucked a nazi boy because she was lonely -- shes just been told of her "affiliations". this could mean anything! claudia has spent half of s1 despising lestat and comparing him to nazis/hitler as a symbol of her hatred. but now she doesnt care? in what world would nazism not be an interrogatable offence for anyone, let alone a Black woman intimately acquianted with racist white society? i cant emphasise enough: they introduced the topic of nazism into claudeleine. no one forced them to do this. if they didnt want to reckon with it at all, what was the point?

2) madeleine is afforded the divine essentialist goodness of womanhood / lesbianism. lestat and armand are monstrous abusers and this is communicated through nazism as symbol. madeleine's affiliation with nazism has no narrative or interpersonal consequences because how could we dare imply that relationships between women could be anything other than perfect and harmonious? madeleine's repeated interest in young boys and claudia's child body pose no conflict for them (nevermind claudia's nightmare future of forever being desired either by old men or little boys; ok if its women), madeleine being a white woman poses no conflict for them, her nazi affiliations poses no conflict for them. what is the point?? everyone in the cast feels a need to talk at length about how perfect they are for each other but they dont even bother to set up an originary connection between them. why does claudia like madeleine? shes a weird white lady? that's all we get??? why does madeleine like claudia? its as if its enough to shove women / lesbianism in our face as a symbol and we as an audience will eat it up, no matter how offensively out of character the content is.

and. ok i lied maybe its threefold. but theyre all interlinked. 3) ive never seen a claudeleine stan not take the stance, even if subtlely, of "thank god claudia is away from her evil Black mother and with her lovely white girlfriend now". how many times do we have to read that madeleine was the only one who ever loved / understood her? where???? she met that girl two weeks ago!!! i hate it. and of course s3 just makes this angle explicit but im not touching that season :-) edit: also people often diminish claudias relationship with charlie over madeleine in the same way. hm....

but all that is caveating my dislike i suppose. to answer your actual question of whether they couldve been interesting: if the season wasnt cowardly and / or madeleine was a completely different character, yes! claudia being bisexual is so so beautiful =^_^= and theres so many individual parts of their scenes that i find darling. the gentleness with which claudia approaches madeleine after she's attacked + the implications for how she engages with other women and other victims. agh! @alluratron has talked about their ideas for if madeleine had been an algerian woman which i adore. if the show wanted me to see canon claudeleine as anything other than a cop-out it needed to actually engage with the above critiques -> what does it mean that madeleine is repeatedly interested in teenagers? why is madeleine unaffected by vampirism? everything is so harmonious because they have to be the only perfect pairing. its so glaringly misogynistic to offer them so little internality.

ultimately i do still enjoy s2 but u see some of the awful politics of s3 bleeding in, primarily where women r present -> the coven's writing is all shallow and surrounding santiago / claudia's grouping of louis in with lestat/bruce/antoinette against the "one good one" despite them always being a pair against all three figures (fine in isolation perhaps; poor when continuing to press on the bruise of white frenchwoman madeleine 'saving' her louis) / the awfulllll scene at the end of 206 where they return from the beautiful harmony of the french countryside (😑) so claudia can berate louis for treating her like a child and essentially thank armand for toughening her up and reify her and madeleine's perfect love. madeleine always at the scene of the crime!!!!!

and as much as claudia accepts herself as fully vampiric and does not really concern herself with human morality on a day to day basis (the main quality lestat admires in her) i think she also shows every sign of feeling a certain responsibility to her Blackness. (but she also doesn't regard it as a wretched condition which is why the 'bleak black life' line in the seance is sooooo. tiresome. to say the least) and it is obviously a bizarre inconsistency to have her go from utilizing the moral language of crimes against humanity (comparing lestat to a slave master and to a nazi) to being like la dee da abt her gf bedding down with a wermacht soldier.

i think there are hints of smth interesting in madeleine but we never got there. and i think its best defined as a kind of.. blaséness? a french version of horatio from hamlet "fortune's buffets and rewards Hast ta'en with equal thanks"? the "then go bang" speech, the way she makes the decision to be turned somewhat lightly / does not seem to regard it as either a curse nor an initiation into some great and powerful society. i think claudia, who is defined (in season 1 at least) as feeling rlly intense highs and lows, and is surrounded by intensely sentimental people in loustat and the coven, might appreciate seeing a different way to live in her. but again, there's no real exploration of this and they don't even kiss so we don't rlly have a physical chemistry to base their connection off of. i don't think anyone can confidently say what claudia and madeleine would like. talk about. or how they would describe each other if asked. yk.

[ID: a Tweet by whoinvitedtomaa: even though jacob is *obviously* referencing louis' dysmphoria from being gay, i don't think a transfeminine reading of louis' iwtv narrative is outlandish or wrong. i actually think it lines up perfectly with the story from where it began to where it ended in s2 /ID]