![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
in response to a tumblr ask about intertexts - i would like to do a proper dvd commentary for this one one day; this is the raw material.
fic is here.
my main one to start was maybe claudia from interview with the vampire, both book and show (although more show). and working out feelings about her arc and about people's responses to it. claudia being turned at 14 and trapped eternally in her adolescent body without the opportunity to grow up is a horror and a tragedy, but to think it is only that is to agree with the coven that she is fundamentally broken without an undeath worth living. i kept coming back to that scene where she tells louis she was still breathing and by now she would have a husband and babies. and claudia is both right that her being denied this is heartwrenchingly sad...and also having a husband and babies is MY nightmare, and from the person we see claudia grow into, it doesn't seem like it would actually make her happy either.
dead she gets to read dickinson, and see paris, and find lesbian love, and see the flowers bloom from the dead. as jacob anderson says, claudia is a "wonderful vampire." more than any of them, she ends up figuring it out. and the tragedy in s2 becomes not that she was made in the first place but that the existence forced on her which she fought so hard to make meaning of and to make livable is then stolen for her. but it's still sad. she's still dead, she still didn't have a choice, and she still will never get to know what she made of her human existence, and this is always a loss. i wanted to grapple with this idea of being turned as both violation and liberation, trauma and gift. if i did my job right with the fic, that comes across with rhaenyra.
( this got long, so: )
fic is here.
my main one to start was maybe claudia from interview with the vampire, both book and show (although more show). and working out feelings about her arc and about people's responses to it. claudia being turned at 14 and trapped eternally in her adolescent body without the opportunity to grow up is a horror and a tragedy, but to think it is only that is to agree with the coven that she is fundamentally broken without an undeath worth living. i kept coming back to that scene where she tells louis she was still breathing and by now she would have a husband and babies. and claudia is both right that her being denied this is heartwrenchingly sad...and also having a husband and babies is MY nightmare, and from the person we see claudia grow into, it doesn't seem like it would actually make her happy either.
dead she gets to read dickinson, and see paris, and find lesbian love, and see the flowers bloom from the dead. as jacob anderson says, claudia is a "wonderful vampire." more than any of them, she ends up figuring it out. and the tragedy in s2 becomes not that she was made in the first place but that the existence forced on her which she fought so hard to make meaning of and to make livable is then stolen for her. but it's still sad. she's still dead, she still didn't have a choice, and she still will never get to know what she made of her human existence, and this is always a loss. i wanted to grapple with this idea of being turned as both violation and liberation, trauma and gift. if i did my job right with the fic, that comes across with rhaenyra.
( this got long, so: )
