#claire week

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⭐💘 Happy Claire day! Happy Valentine’s Day! Clairentine’s!

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⭐🦋UC Berkeley's Insect Expo '10, "A Celebration of Insect Biology": Biology undergraduate Claribel M. Swanson's butterfly showcase.

For day four, we have 20-year-old bio undergraduate Claire! I’ve been meaning to show Claire’s insect collection, so this was the perfect opportunity to do so. This is her at the beginning of her third year at UC Berkeley, in 2010.

I planned on making this beetle-focused, but I changed my mind when I started drafting it. I had to draw butterflies!! Butterflies have become a Claire thing and it wasn’t originally planned (ladybugs were the insects I had always associated her with); but sometimes it works like that. I like how butterflies often represent freedom, rebirth, metamorphosis. This fits Claire in so many ways; I can see how she’d identify with these ideas, especially during this period of her life. She was alone in the world for the first time.

Zoom in! They turned out great, I think. Case one comprises mostly of butterflies found throughout Europe (though some of them are also present in North America); Claire collected them while on a trip abroad with her father. The other two cases were partially collected, partially gifts from her father.

Here's a version without the camera flash + my original mspaint concept doodle for this, because it's funny:

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⭐🧸 Famedolls.com: Miss Claire Swanson has stepped out of the silver screen and stepped right into yours! You can dress her up, print her, email her, save her -- and she can play any of your favourite roles!

Claire in the Flash in all its glory. It must be a testament to your fame to have dress-up games made in your image. I wonder if she ever played this one. If she did, I know she got extremely annoyed there are no Faustine outfits here. And, like, she totally doesn't look like that!? Who's responsible for this!? How can she take it down!?

Here’s a gif with every outfit available in-game. You have Claire’s signature look, the outfit she wears for Hunt’s dinner party, a red carpet look, her iconic red dress + boots from Ticket to Ride, Laura Pilant’s bloodied jacket from Out Of Time, and her Odette costume from Wild Flowers.

Here's a bonus. Claribel Marie-Poupée (1976)!

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⭐❤️Claire Swanson for Wonderland.’s February 2018 Valentine's Special issue: "Your Toxic Valentine"

Starting Claire Week with a Valentine's Day-themed magazine spread! Since it's the first day, I thought it'd be nice to have a brief introduction/reintroduction to Claire. This is a compilation of information present on her reference sheet, her Wikipedia article, her ancient Myspace profile, her lore dump, and random posts I've made on this account. And every magazine comes with an interview:

Most questions are from this post! They were all really great and were perfect for this, so thank you to everyone who commented something <3. This week will be chronological, in a way, so consider this the birth of Claire. This phrasing, yeah.

And of course, here's the full picture:

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“Until I met Shelley I [could?] justly say that he was my God—and I remember many childish instances of the [ex]cess of attachment I bore for him.”

This is the second piece for Claire’s childhood. She’s around 17 here, given she's already blonde. For her mother, I chose ballet because I think it's representative of the wounds she (Christine) passed on to Claire. For her father, I chose himself.

Words are from A Thousand Acres, by Jane Smiley, while reference for the drawing was The Fortune Hunter, by J.X. Leyendecker. Excerpt is from the footnotes of Mathilda by Mary Shelley.

I mentioned Claire's father steps in and takes her out of ballet after she gets injured.

From this point on, her father was everything to her. Claire gets ecstatic that he was finally giving her some attention. He will love her. This is when Claire takes a break from her (very) intense schedule of dance + theatre classes and, instead, intensifies her academic education. This... interference strains (even further) Claire's parents' marriage, and from this point on she becomes a pawn in their relationship. Father and Mother use Claire for their own interests, but he's much better at it than she is. Actually, put bluntly: Claire takes her mother's place. So it's Claire accompanying her father to his fancy events, and it's Claire going to church with him, and it's Claire travelling to Europe with him. Christine stays at home. There's a lot of enmeshment and boundary blurring here.

I know yesterday's and today's posts were rather sad, and my intention is not to make a melodrama, but I think these are things I'd never really written about and I thought I'd use the opportunity to explore it better. I think this is all very important to understand decisions Claire makes as an adult, the situations she puts herself in, and the way she sees the world. Tomorrow's post is a happier one! 🦋

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⭐🦢 Wild Flowers (2019), dir. by Tina MacIntyre. Starring Claire Swanson.

The only constant throughout Anna's (Swanson) life have been her pointe shoes. As Anna mourns her mediocre career, she's finally given the chance to replace her company's prima ballerina for their production of "Swan Lake”. Just as rehearsals start, Anna's mother passes away. Struck with grief, Anna tries not to get overwhelmed by the intense pressure of the double role of Odette and Odile, all the while navigating her complex feelings on her life, her mother, and on ballet.

Here's the poster for Wild Flowers (2019), the ballet-centric movie Claire stars in, has a terrible time reliving the horrors of her childhood, and eventually wins the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Anna Tierney.

I like making Claire’s filmography connect with her personally, be it a lot or just a little. It’s amusing to me, but I think it says a lot about Claire, her decisions in universe, her awareness of her own person, and her relationship to and with art. I go a little into Claire and ballet under the cut.

Before I turned this into a Swan Lake-themed movie, I wanted to do something with Ophelia (hence the name). Both Odette and Ophelia struggle with agency in their stories, and both drown in a lake at the end. I switched Ophelia's father dying to Anna's mother, though (like Odette's, in a way).

I chose to represent her ballerina self as her adult self — and not child Claire. 29-year-old Claire is still 12-year-old Claribel. Ballet is very important to understand her: it's a mechanism in which young girls are conditioned to desire impossible beauty standards, sexualised from a young age as a fetished ideal, and taught to see themselves as an object to be admired -- they’re art, they’re not a person. Not to mention the pressure of performance/the environment itself, and, in Claire's case, parental abuse.

Claire was forced to go on pointe shoes before the recommended age (she was 9), and she also developed a case of Sever's disease; then, she gets a very bad injury around the time she's 13, which is when her father steps in and takes her out of ballet. Claire continues to be pretty active through her teenage years/adulthood, though (cheerleading, tennis, rollerblading, performing, etc.) which contributes to her pain. She doesn't know about her medical history, as I've said before, so she just endures it.

I don't want to be a downer! It's not all sad. I think the process of making this movie is important for Claire to start thinking about her childhood. It helps her see things clearer. It'll take her some years to fully make peace with Claribel, but she'll get there.

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⭐🌹 Sub rosa (adverb): literally "under the rose" in New Latin.

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, and also Claire's birthday. So today's post is about wanting to be loved. And since she loves scrapbooking:

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dream girl evil

wikipedia // bubblegum bitch - marina // sacred and profane love - titian // dream girl evil - florence and the machine // sub rosa // the most prevalent form of degradation in erotic life  - sigmund freud // to the end - my chemical romance // vertigo - alfred hitchcock // fuck me (i didn't know how to say) - crawlers // erotism: death and sensuality - georges bataille // i'm only here for you entertainment