Real claudeleine being shielded from us by Claudia not writing anything about it, we don't see them kiss, we don't hear their last words to another. Fake claudeliene kissing in the middle of the diner to satisfy their customer. It's about perversion, it's about fakeness, it's about fetishization, it's about fucking porn parodies.
And Louis' name in Lestat's phone being a reference to Tis Pity She's a Whore which is about incestuous relationship between brother and sister....
Totally, anon, that level of exploitation runs really rampantly through that sequence and this arc more broadly. Kind of interestingly though, I don't necessarily think the pornification of Claudia and Madeline's relationship there was purely about exploitation (although it was there), but also really deeply rooted in fantasy and Louis having to reconcile with exactly what her age at both her deaths deprived her of. It felt really tied to the conversation all the way back in 1.05 to me in that sense, where Claudia grapples with this reality of her romantic and sexual future:
Madeleine was, in many ways, a part of Louis' own grappling with that, and his decision to make her for Claudia was as much an acknowledgement of what he'd done to her as it was an attempt to absolve himself of that. He knew, even then, that he couldn't love her enough or in the ways that she wanted, and while he resented giving her a companion (I do always tend to see Madeleine's turning as symbolically a father giving his daughter away), it's also important that Claudia and Louis made her together. The act in itself was an incestuous one - Claudia had been daughter, sister, now, there, she and Louis were also mother and father, making a daughter in Madeleine to whom Louis would feel no bond.
The deliberate juxtaposition in this episode with 2.06, the last time outside of the trial Louis sees them, is the exploitation and sexualisation of their memory, but I think it's also Louis trying to repeat the cycle and make a third with Regina again, collapsing his role as father and husband as they are during Madeleine's turning (especially interesting then that Louis and Regina roleplay as siblings then instead). A part of that though is, I think, Louis trying to imagine an adult life for Claudia that she never truly got the chance to live.
In some ways, this scene feels more in-conversation with the Bruce sequence to me than it does with the scenes of Regina in the last episode, because it's inherently about empty fantasy first, exploitation second. Regina's not Claudia, this woman isn't Madeleine, yes, they're both being paid to be there, but seemingly knowingly, willingly, which means Louis' sitting with regret and an ending he's trying to re-write. He can't deal with Bruce now and have it mean anything because Claudia is dead, he can't make believe Claudia an autonomous, adult life, because Claudia is dead, and he can't have a stranger roleplay a romance with her either, because not only is Claudia dead, but so is Madeleine, his first and only fledgling. The past isn't reconciled through recreation, nor is it truly remembered.
It teeters on the tightrope of fantasy and exploitation, and in doing so, Louis perverts memory - literally, in this case - and ultimately heals nothing.
