Claudia and Lujanne are Very Similar Characters: a spark notes meta because I'm tired and all @kradogsrats' fault
Claudia and Lujanne are two characters put in early opposition of each other, and are seen to be quite different. One is a young dark mage, the other an older primal mage; one is an adversary who (tries to) trick Rayla in 2x03, and the other helps Rayla trick her in 2x03; one considers dark magic to "always have the edge," the other sees it as an abomination. Lujanne very pointedly tells Callum that he can't have magic, and Claudia very cheerfully offers to teach him some (of a sort).
However, there are a number of parallels, such as:
Claudia is a human who dates an elf, and Lujanne is an elf who dates a human, despite both holding racist views towards the other that are also reaffirmed by each other's.
Lujanne presumably grows out of this in her relationship with Allen and dynamic with Callum (embracing and accepting him as a primal mage), but we don't see enough of her to know if she considers Allen and Callum to be exceptions or not.
There are also more parallels, such as Lujanne and Claudia both offering food that isn't being entirely honest to the trio + Ellis at the Moon Nexus, which is rejected upon the illusion being revealed.
When Callum and Soren question them, respectively, in 2x01 and 4x07, Lujanne and Claudia's assertions come down to a sense of intrinsic knowing, a certainty of feeling that is hard to translate, even when Lujanne is talking about an arcanum and Claudia is talking about the oppression of humans:
We also see that Lujanne is the guardian of the Moon Nexus, which has parallels to Claudia being the one tasked with recovering Zym's egg and being his implicit defender in 1x02, though twisted... for just about the same reasons: they don't trust the other side not to use it Badly.
Lujanne also shows very little regard for humans' well being overall, similarly to how Claudia is invasive and insensitive with Lujanne when they briefly meet in 2x02.
The parallels continue. For example, both Lujanne and Claudia are the ones to reveal falsehoods to Callum and Rayla that break apart their families. For Claudia to Callum, it's that Harrow is dead; for Lujanne, it's to Rayla that the quasar diamonds are missing one, and therefore she will have to let at least one of her parents' die.
Another parallel can be how they approach truth, use, and relationships. Lujanne has little to no problems with lying, evidenced by her advice to both Rayla and Callum at different intervals; Claudia withholds or lies to multiple people, eventually taking away agency. She takes Rayla (and Lujanne's illusion plan), then uses it against Soren, and then has it used (unsuccessfully) against herself.
Lujanne's tendency to create other but unified versions of herself (ie. her disguise as a human, yes, but also her illusioned selves), ie. having multiple selves with the same persona to all, can also be an inversion of Claudia's specific duplicity and identity construction. To Soren, Callum, Ezran, Terry, Aaravos, and Viren, she is all a radically different person and version of herself, and a person that continues to be fractured rather than unified.
The fact that Lujanne explicitly enters the narrative in seeing beauty and offering compassion to Ava, proclaiming the three-legged wolf as perfect, is also noteworthy given Claudia's emphasis on being a perfectionist (4x02 and hatred of being judged/pitied) especially given that upon arriving at the Moon Nexus in 7x06, she has become an amputee herself.
Then, we have Lujanne's perspective on life and death as a cycle that is harmonized through both consistent repetition and being able to let go; where Claudia has the first one covered, she is (thus far) unable to let go of just about anything in a meaningful way. The fact that Lujanne counsels Rayla through connecting with her parents ("On the other side, the rest of the soul longs to be whole again, for it cannot pass into death incomplete. The broken souls of your family will be drawn to the coins. To you, Rayla") as something that Rayla is giving them, rather than the other way around. This is decidedly different from Claudia (or Terry's) approach, whereupon Claudia not only drags Viren from the grave but seeks out him post-6x01 ultimately for her own means, and what he can theoretically give her instead ("What do you need to find your one deep truth?" "I need to see my dad" and "My dad left this world without unfinished business").
Lastly, we have Lujanne being the guardian of the explicit border of Life and Death — upholding not only the separation of elves and humans, and humans from the Nexus, but explicitly Life and Death as well — versus Claudia being a necromancer who violates the boundary line that Lujanne protects, well...
In retrospect, Claudia enacting violence against Lujanne, specifically, and at the moment the Nexus is inverted (corrupted) feels almost obvious, namely because Claudia is supplanting Lujanne as the series' moon mage figure ("I am the Moon, the Silver Queen") through conquest, violence, and obscuration.
After all, how much of Claudia as Claudia is real now, anyway?
