Is anyone else terrified of the sheer amount of devotion Claudia has towards Viren? She has been training since she was a child and is now a prodigy, she fully believes everything he says about the egg being a weapon and is fully ready to murder a girl her age to keep it from elven hands, she’s never shown to disagree with Viren on anything and just instinctively obeys him, Soren wants to make Viren happy, but Claudia, whether she knows it or not, wants to keep him happy.
There’s also a certain level of disassociation going on with her. She never stops to really question her father or any of his decisions, she never really stops to think how potentially terrible using so much dark magic can be for her. She is shown to be fully comfortable in rooms with dead magical creatures, she uses those said dead creatures to further her magic. When Viren tells her to choose the egg over Soren, there’s a moment when she looks lost, but she attempts to deflect it by joking and by reassuring herself that the situation will never come to that, of course it won’t. The switching souls spell is not an innocent solution, it casts away an innocent life to save King Harrow’s, and yet Claudia looks so excited and so happy to have found what she believes to be a perfectly reasonable and remarkable way out. She feels things too intensely and she’s in a situation where that can ruin everything, so she’s unconsciously pushed herself to not feel them at all. Doing this helps her survive. Anger? Guilt? Frustration? Despair? Does she display any of these? No. Every other character does. Claudia has been disassociating with these emotions for so long that they’ve become a natural, instinctive reaction.
Her reliance on dark magic is also legitimately horrifying. She uses dark magic every single day. She uses it so often that her first reaction to the chain is to use magic to free herself instead of searching for the key. She views dark magic as something casual, something mundane, without knowing how terrible its effects are. Her being so curious by spells is not cute or funny, it’s terrifying. On the surface, it may seem like she’s interested in learning, and that she sees magic as a fun toy that can sometimes be useful, but on a deeper level she views it as a weapon, something to be used to achieve whatever is necessary for her to achieve. Claudia may enjoy magic for the sake of magic, but Viren doesn’t, and her upbringing has caused her to replicate Viren without even knowing that she does.
Viren loves her so much, she’s clearly the favored child, but he has been consciously or unconsciously molding her into a weapon, into his version of a perfect daughter, and it’s so subtle that Claudia doesn’t even realize it, and it’s heartbreaking.
Claudia may be a wonderful person, but she is not okay, and there’s no guarantee that it will end well for her. This can either lead to her switching sides and coping in a healthy manner, or drowning until it’s too late to reach out for help, because by then she’s already lost.
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