I'm Not Coherent Enough To Say It But I'm Glad Someone Who Is Smart And Who Can At Least Try To Analyze

i'm not coherent enough to say it but i'm glad someone who is smart and who can at least try to analyze media recognized the thing with madeleine and the nazi soldier probably didnt go down as louis and armand described it! i thought the scene showing her hair being buzzed would make it obvious for everyone else but apparently not :/

I think it’s fair for people to interpret Madeleine’s actions however they want, because when Madeleine retells the story to Claudia she frames it as a love story and something she did for fun. Later on, it’s suggested that’s not true, when she tells the story about seeing her neighbor starve to death and how traumatic it was to find the corpse. Originally, she says something something like “I found whatever love I needed to survive,” making it sound romantic, but with the added context, it makes that statement much more literal. Madeleine hates being portrayed as a victim, so it makes sense she would cast her actions in a worse and more willing light than they really were. The shearing doesn’t really change anything for me; the French were shaving the heads of any woman who had “consorted” with Nazi soldiers, whether those women were assaulted, or had acted under duress (where I’d categorize Madeleine), or were actual Nazi collaborators. The more important thing is that Madeleine isn’t really a good person. He responses to Armand’s interview are supposed to be unnerving. It’s unnerving that a person could be utterly fine with being turned into a monster. But as Madeleine says, she already is one. The social stigma she’s faced and the years of war have destroyed everything and everyone she knew, and now she has nothing, so she might as well be a vampire and stay with Claudia. That doesn’t make it less unnerving, but it does make it more sympathetic. The enduring impression the audience gets of Madeleine is that she’s a pragmatist. She slept with the soldier to survive, she’s willing to become a vampire to survive. She’s not ideologically motivated the way some other characters are. She’s a survivor, and she cuts out the parts of herself that can’t survive. It’s what makes it so romantic when she chooses to die with Claudia. She did so much to survive and she threw it away to die for Claudia.

it's always so fascinating and heartbreaking when a character in a story is simultaneously idolized and abused. a chosen prophet destined for martyrdom. a child prodigy forced to grow up too fast. a powerful warrior raised as nothing but a weapon. there's just something so uniquely messed up about singing someone's praises whilst destroying them.

the way claudia is never allowed to tell her own story and only ever exists as a subject in someone else's narrative. a child not allowed to speak up against her parents a performer forced to repeat the same song a writer deprived of her diaries an accused without the right of defense. and the way they let her have her last words with madeleine, out of earshot and inconsequential to the narrative, and therefore finally her own. the way we don't know what she says, but we do know that she gets to say it. that finally she gets to say it.

Haircut

Rin from The Poppy War by RF Kuang

something so poetic about the actress change for Claudia in s2 actually. something about how she’s only defined in relation to Louis in s1, and once we start seeing her from Armand’s and Madeline’s and eventually Lestat’s perspective she’s a whole different woman. like the fact that when we see the scene where she’s turned again, see the version Lestat showed Louis during the trial, she’s quite literally a different person. we will never know what she was actually like, we only have her words and the reconstructions other people have made of her, and those reconstructions are so contradictory and incomplete that we don’t even have a clear picture of what she looks like in a visual medium. memory is a monster and it fucking ate her

I love stories where a character's quest for revenge leads them to bring the whole world down around them. Stories where you can feel the character's rage, misery and suffering as they cause the same to countless others