right like I really enjoy the diaries so much but I cannot imagine they'd ever publish something so close to being a checklist of important Claudia character beats? Eastern Europe Claudia is furious with Louis and resentful of his relationship with Lestat! She is desperate to find other vampires and has pinned all of her hopes on that! She hates Lestat but still thinks of him regularly and in some ways he's still her benchmark for vampirism. Young Claudia is bubbly and optimistic. She recognizes that there's conflict between Louis and Lestat but thinks it's surmountable. She loves her family and is excited to grow. I do think if that was her actual diary published as a companion book to the show there'd be some padding in there. The Madeline stays with the coven scenario was very charming, but it did also remind me of something I wanted to ask you! I am kind of fascinated by how much the coven seems to have considered themselves bound by the rules of their own game- they could have just killed Louis then and there, regardless of the jury's verdict, and if they didn't want to spoil the performance they could have also just waited a day or set him on fire or beheaded him and then set him on fire, but instead they kind of went for starving him insane. Do you think it's that they have to buy into their own system, and breaking the rules will also rob them of their power and the sense of meaning they get from participating in the coven? Is it just that it's no fun to cheat at your own game? I really don't know what any of them are getting out of this aside from the satisfaction of forcing Claudia to live and die by their rules and some amusement at making an "outlaw" vampire their prey instead of a random human. Or it was all Armand's idea and they're just following along, but so far I think we're at least supposed to believe he was emotionally invested in both Louis and the coven and temporarily picked the coven because he didn't think Louis was that into him. I guess we'll see what season three reveals.
Yeah, exactly. Like those sorts of written props are there to both make sure the camera catches something that looks real in-universe, but also for the actors to be able to pick up and flip through and fully immerse themselves in their performances, so while they play a vital role in the show, again, I'd really describe them as canon-adjacent, more than canon. They're still pretty fun to unpick though, especially in the sense of those diaries and what they wanted Delainey, Jacob and even Eric and Ben to be able to respond to as performers as they use them in a scene.
As for the Coven, I think they all absolutely have buy-in as in many ways there's a hold there to mortality among the monstrosity of what they do. All the members of the Theatres des Vampires are from really different periods of history, but in many ways, the way TdV is structured holds to certain social orders that are timeless. There are rules and rituals, a social hierarchy, and expectations for everyone within the quasi-society they've established. Holding to that I think gives them individually and collectively a feeling of purpose, but I also think it grounds them in the broader isolation of immortality. If they are all operating under the same understanding, they're bound together which staves off the threat of loneliness and comes with a built-in community.
I think in a lot of ways, how Rolin's approached the Theatres des Vampires and the Paris coven is reflective of what he's said before of his personal feelings about theatre as a sort of church, which in my opinion, expands on Anne's writing which had a similar thread. There is ritual and ceremony within performing, just as there is always an element of performance to rituals and ceremony, and having the Coven operate as both theatre troupe and a quasi-congregation, with Armand filling the role of both director and a type of priest (and The Monk is an important gothic archetype in this sense, and one I tend to think Armand fits), controlling creative direction, vampiric mythos, and a religious law and order.
As a result, for the Coven, it's not that Armand's trying to date an outsider, they tolerate Louis when that's all he is, it's that it becomes increasingly clear that Armand's trying to be with a non-believer. Louis' presence then becomes a threat to the tenuous institution they've built to survive, and represents the temptation of a life outside the Coven. He's in many ways as destructive as Lestat's was in the 1700s to the Children of Satan. The two of them are heretics sitting in the pews of the faithful's mass.
The Coven doesn't actually care about punishing Claudia, who was a believer in the rituals and the community if perhaps not the institution, or killing Madeleine - in fact, Madeleine is extended the offer to join as a salvation, a symbolic baptism (choose the lord and be reborn) - but they absolutely care about punishing Louis. More than that, I think there was a vested interest in humiliating him because they felt he'd humiliated them in never believing. The trial was a part of that, the audience condemnation was a part of that, whether he metaphorically burnt at the stake or was starved beneath the rocks is almost irrelevant. His death isn't the point, the point is his degradation, preferably at the hands of the man the Coven feels he almost seduced out of the church in Armand, and the message to the masses, both in and out of the walls of the congregation. This is what happens to the non-believer, and here's the tombstone to prove it.
I feel like that's underscored by the fact that neither Claudia nor Madeleine get one. Their deaths don't matter to the Coven because despite their proclamations that it was about breaking the vampiric laws, it was never really about that. If it was, Lestat would've been on trial too, as he said. No, Claudia got no tombstone or plaque to point to, and Claudia's ashes were desecrated and Madeleine's along with her, and both were used by Santiago only to try and further violate Louis' memory of his daughter because he committed the cardinal sin of opening the church doors and raising an eyebrow at what he saw. Scepticism is touted as the enemy of faith, and Louis, who rebuked the Coven's laws and the Theatre's shows threatened both church and state for them as a result.
I think the Coven broadly understood that as the threat, just as I tend to think Armand saw Louis as the out for himself in the same way he saw the out in Lestat in the 1700s. The issue is, Lestat wasn't the out for Armand. Lestat didn't choose him and instead left him with Nicki and the Theatres des Vampires, which fell back into its own sort of dogmas as he really side-stepped into a role he was used to as a quasi-religious leader. With that context, I think Armand could see that Louis didn't love him enough to stay with him, and when presented with the risk of following Louis out and ending up alone, or the security of faith, order, coven, congregation, he was always going to go back to it.
That order though was shattered when Louis massacred the Coven, just as it was when Lestat broke the crucifix on the Children of Satan's floor, and so Armand did to Louis what he wanted to do to Lestat all those years ago - he brought him under his control.
But yes, haha, that's a bit of a sidebar - more to your point, I think the Coven's allegorically the church and moves like one. Their belief system is a perverted one, in true gothic form, and they twist it to serve their own purposes and bind them ever closer together. As a result, Louis' place as an outsider matters less than his place as a sceptic, a non-believer, as he threatens the foundations of their belief system ergo their purpose and their community. We talk a bit about the trial as a lynching, but it's also very much a witch trial, right down to Claudia and Madeleine's burning - collateral damage in pursuit of a true target, as many of them were - and Louis' stone death (there's a famous case during the Salem Witch Trials of a man being pressed to death by stones), and in that sense, as I read it, it's Louis' punishment for the sin of not believing (and the ritual made of his humiliation and degradation) that is meant to bind the Coven tighter, rather than his death.
