#we have a claudeleine beginning

[elrondsscribe]

Imma just say Claudia 🤝 me: SPELLBOUND

[donnapalude]

not the first to say it but i think some care should be taken in untangling the implications of claudia's 14yo body for claudeleine.

in 105 claudia first exposes the conundrum of her sexuality by telling louis and lestat:

what human would want me? perverts? like the uncle at the roomin' house who used to watch me pee? or little boys? and years from now...still little boys?

the thought that plagues claudia is that her body is so sexually undesireable that she will never be able to experience love, sex, and companionship. the situation has some similarities with that of other people that are sexually marginalised by society. but it also presents unique concerns that i don't think should be flattened through excessive comparison. the specific issue caused by being an adult in a child's body is that it inevitably condemns claudia to either be with adults attracted to children or to be an adult that commits sexual acts towards children. according to some, madeleine presents a solution to this by simply "seeing the adult in claudia". which i am sure she does. but that has nothing to do with being able to feel sexual attraction towards the body of a pubescent girl. which is what their relationship implies.

there are a couple of posts that propose using disabilities as a frame of reference for claudia's story and i think there are some interesting points made on other issues she faces. but i am not sure the analogy is fitting with regard to sexual attraction. disabled adults have adult bodies. the fact that society at large tends to consider them unattractive stems from ableist beauty standards. the argument that madeleine could "learn" to be attracted to claudia's body through a process that resembles a deconstruction of those beauty standards is both inaccurate and fairly offensive to people with disabilities. disabled bodies are not a pathological or amoral object of desire. to find them sexually appealing is both possible and benign and it requires only to avoid harmful preconceptions. being attracted to children's bodies is a pathological sexual inclination. as far as i am aware scientific evidence goes against the idea it can be "learned" or "unlearned". and even if it was hypotetically possible, "learning" it would just leave you with an adult that is now capable of feeling sexual attraction towards a child. ETA: not all cases of singular attraction for underage people are fully pathologisable if there is no larger pattern. which does not mean they are immediately justifiable, i am making a technical distinction between a sexual inclination where children are the exclusive/primary object of attraction and situations where that attraction is isolated. but to unlearn ableist beauty standards means to unlearn false correlations between disability and sex in a way that permanently removes them. to work your brain around being attracted to someone that looks like a child means working against the true correlation between children's bodies and availability to sex. which leaves some room for nuance when that correlation does not hold true in a specific case but we can't say the correlation itself is something harmful that needs to be deconstructed. the full comparison to other disabilities remains best avoided in my opinion.

in other words, a sexual relationship between madeleine and claudia necessarily entails that madeleine looks at a pubescent body and feels genuine sexual desire for it. and this either because she felt that attraction from the beginning or because (through a literary fiction) she becomes able to develop it. i understand the moral implications are blurred here because claudia is mentally an adult and no harm would come to her from sexual contact. but it is still an uncomfortable thought and i think it would be fair to let it be uncomfortable instead of presenting a moral equivalence with attraction to disabled people.

i've seen one comparison that seems more adequate, which is that of some cases of hormonal deficiency where puberty is completely halted so that the person actually has the body of a child. i freely admit i am not well-read enough on the topic and not enough of an expert in the general subject to comfortably explain how this works. therefore, i will just be rebutting the arguments made by some posts based on their own statements, if anyone wants to chip in with more detailed information please do. but taking those posts at face value, what we are discussing are adults with bodies that are prepubescent. if that is the case, it feels fair to point out that this specific situation would not present the same implications as other disabilities with regard to sexual desire. for the reasons explained above, i really don't think that the inability to feel attraction for a body that is objectively childlike can be so freely boiled down to only ableism. and conversely that the ability to be attracted to it should be acritically celebrated without leaving space to at least consider more unsavoury options. (again, i accept criticism on this stance, maybe there is something i am missing)

what also strikes me as concerning, is that i have seen several posts dismissing the general inference that there could be hebephilic implications in claudeleine, by claiming that madeleine's attraction can without a doubt be justified either (i) because some 14yos have bodies similar to adults or (ii) by a deconstruction of beauty standards that unfairly penalise adult women looking extremely young. i think these arguments, if made acritically and framed as an inevitability, come worringly close to apologism. the idea that some people (especially girls) develop "early" or that they are easily mistaken for a particularly "youngish" adult and that this confusion absolves sexual approaches towards them, is a well-known justification used by child predators. human appearance varies wildly, i am not saying it's impossible that some individuals can look a lot older or a lot younger. i am just bothered by the clear desire to frame this conclusion as the only one possible, because it betrays a need to sanitise a ship at the expense of wider social implications that stem from making these assumptions and also at the expense of what the text is telling us.

textually everyone in the show, including madeleine, has no doubt that claudia is a child as soon as they see her basically. and such an emphasis is put on this being an incredible obstacle for her sexual life that i think we must read her appearance in-universe as something that would be extremely off-putting for adults in a sexual context. some suspension of disbelief is needed given delainey's actual age. but i don't think there would be much of a point in presenting this issue as so thematically relevant if it could be solved by saying "she could easily pass as a 21yo" or "it's ok, i have seen many grown women looking exactly like that". more importantly, it does not get solved this way. claudia and madeleine have a discussion where claudia's body is clearly identified by both as actually pubescent. madeleine explictly sees that body as that of a young adolescent. there is nothing that tells us that madeleine arrives at being attracted to that body through any angle of rielaboration about women sometimes looking younger etc. there is also nothing that confirms without a doubt that her attraction started after discovering claudia's real age. the assumption that there must be an alternative rationalisation is just refusing to stare at the fact that she may simply like the body of young people. she also has a possible history of it: while her exact age is ambiguous, she is clearly a fully adult woman and she had a prior relationship with a 19yo soldier.

i understand this may be off-putting to some and i don't exactly mind discussions that try to explore different interpretations generally speaking (although the blanket comparison to disabilities really does not work for me on this topic). i am also not trying to single out specific authors of specific posts because frankly i don't know their entire blogging history and i have no idea if they have tackled all of this in the past. but, as a general consideration, i find it a bit worrying that the entire fandom has collectively and immediately jumped to all the possible explanations in the world to justify the depiction of a character canonically attracted to at least two people having the body of teenagers. this spasmodic attempt to flee any implication of hebephilia at all costs, without even discussing it (afaik), does not sit well with me. it points to a tendency to simply decide to ignore unpleasant facts when they don't fit a desired outcome, which, in this case, is to have an unproblematic lesbian ship. i just wish these considerations could become part of the discussion in a way they currently aren't.

(and btw, i still like claudeleine regardless, i am not clutching my pearls with this post. i am ok with these themes being explored in a fictional setting etc etc. just so i don't get reblogs from people saying this ship is disgusting)

[nalyra-dreaming]

Hey,

Feel free to ignore if not an interesting question! But before we get into the finale where I imagine many emotions may arise and there may be many new things to add, I wonder if you have any favourite moments from S2 so far and/or any things that have surprised you?

And anyone in comments or reblogs - I'd love to hear this from anyone!

If anyone's interested, for me here are some things I have loved:

Armand. Assad's Armand has been even more glorious than I could have imagined. Armand is my second favourite character in the books and I honestly did not think it was possible that Armand could be elevated even beyond how much I love book-Armand, but Assad has achieved that! Episode 4 and 5 especially I was just speechless afterwards how incredible Assad is.

DreamStat. I have absolutely adored DreamStat. I did not miss Lestat in episodes 1-5 AT ALL because I adored DreamStat so much and because even if the DreamStat in an episode was only 30 seconds, it was always 30 seconds of 100% emotion. I loved how they used DreamStat to convey feelings; to convey Louis' internal world and experience and subconscious, to covey Loustat's love and connection and to express vampiric longing and transgressive thoughts, feelings and emotions. Absolutely adored it. Ironically, the episodes I missed Lestat in most this season were E3, which he was in the most but I found Armands storytime-Lestat too unnerving... and obviously E6 as he wasn't in it bar 2 seconds!

Claudeleine. Oh my: Madeleine and Claudeleine were both written utterly perfectly. Madeleine, again, I feel so much more from than book-Madeleine and she was simply exquisite.

E5 - A Masterpiece.

The music. The piece that opened S2E1 - Imagine Never Being Able to Dream remains my favourite so far from this season (I haven't listened to the S2 score yet so there may be some new thing I love more in E8 I have yet to hear.) When I first watched E1 I was so moved by this piece I had to watch the first 10/15 minutes of the episode... it was at least 3 times over as I couldn't even focus on what Louis and Claudia were saying, I was so moved by the music.

I've been surprised they haven't resolved everything, or at least more things with memory. I thought memories would be (pretty much, if not entirely) resolved by the end of S2 and from S3 on that we'd be working in (relative) truths. I also thought the stuff with memory would be a lot more to do with Louis and Daniel uncovering their own true memories. For example I was surprised that some memory revisits were part of the trial as opposed to Louis' perspective. We did do some of that in E5 of course, but that felt only the beginning to me.

Hey!

I actually concur with a lot of what you listed here ;)

Especially Assad‘s Armand… and the memories-in-Dubai thing. I had expected it to be a lot more uncovering for Louis and Daniel as well, but I can see it why they didn’t. Still, as said before, I would have preferred a slightly different season setup (with more time to actually resolve things before it ends).

I do love that Claudia and Madeleine got a proper arc. You feel for them. I also love the OST and my personal favorite piece of it will come up still 😏 I did not think Loumand would go that dark, and I don’t think there’s much chance of reconciliation once it breaks in Dubai tbh. But… we’ll see. I loved DreamStat being Louis‘ inner voice and I also find e3 weird… I adore the harlequin Lestat though, even if only a fanfic 😅 Santiago was so much more than I had anticipated and I loved how they made the… labyrinthian… depths.. :) of coven life clear.

I did not like them doing Merrick in SF, and I have already written a few notes on it all for an after-the-season post. But we’ll see if they pick it up in the last ep.

So these are my thoughts (for now^^) - anyone want to chime in?;))