And I thought it was a funny play on words.

~

I met Roxanne at a book club in Brooklyn. Or was it technically Queens? Maspeth? She was talking of the girl-child Vampire Claudia.


“Why did she have to die after just one book? We were just getting to know her.”

“Well, don’t ya know, the author lost a child young.”

“I know, I read her bio too, but it was a groundbreaking character and it was too bad she was beset by so many illnesses.”

(and really, she had no one who could help her)

“Yeah, like, Lestat’s mom just ran off into the woods cryin’ about her hair.”

“But they, just, like, literally turned her into a china doll.”

“Yeah, is that some kind of anti-gay thing?”

“I don’t know, could be.”

“She was trapped in a body she didn’t want. Seems obvious enough to me.”

“Well maybe if everyone around her hadn’t been shoving her into a doll’s body.”

“But she seems to think it’s a fatal characteristic of female-dom because look at her heroes – as cis-male as you get.”

“Cis-maybe, but plenty of homosexuality, just only really male-on-male.”

“It’s still a valid expression.”

“And yet if they fail to raise a daughter then they cannot hope to propogate their specie ~”

“So thus the two fathers are failures.”

“Or their time period and starting limitations strongly affect one’s ability to rule – ahem – a household ~”

“Claudia is failed by her upbringing but also fails at the one thing she was supposed to do: destroy Lestat.”

“It is disappointing to me to see her depicted to have such a careless manner – either she was too dull to know how to destroy her Sire, which I do not believe – or she intentionally failed to follow through on her assumed task and thus her action forms one big cry for attention which admittedly lay close to her common mode of behavior, but was, when considering her intelligence, a far too risky choice of action.”

“Well, we’ve no business critiquing the actions the characters were forced into. Or, at least, the actions they took when their backs were against the wall.”

“She’s allowed to feel whatever she wants to about her own body!”

“She’s what we in modern times call clinically depressed.”

“And yet, can it not also be said that because the party had no one else to war against, they tended to war against themselves, indeed, when bored, go on little Crusades against each other and the whole of mankind?”

“Maybe she felt compelled to go on these Crusades because of her inner unhappiness.”

“Indeed, in a godless world, that is the end-of-the-line.”

“Yeah, that’s true, in her world there are no gods.”

“Isn’t it true she was some kinda Catholic?”

“Oh, but I think she really disagreed with some of their stances.”

“Some of them? All of them, bro.”