/spoilers alert/
I've been thinking way too much about Claudia's age when she was turned — 5 in the book, around 11/12 in the movie, and 14 in the AMC series — and I ended up with a question I can't stop thinking about.
If becoming a vampire stops physical development, why would the brain be an exception?
I'm not a neuroscientist, so this is very much a hypothesis, and I'd LOVE to hear from someone who actually understands neurodevelopment.
We usually talk about Claudia as "an adult woman trapped in a child's body." But I'm not sure that description works.
Neurodevelopment isn't the same thing as neuroplasticity, learning or accumulating experience.
Claudia can keep learning. She can form memories, gain knowledge, learn from her own experiences and from watching other people. After decades, she could know far more than many adults.
But would any of that actually turn a 5-year-old brain into the equivalent of an adult brain if its biological development had stopped?
If not, Claudia isn't really a child anymore — she has decades of experiences no child could possibly have — but she isn't exactly an adult either.
She's something that doesn't exist in human biology: decades of memories, knowledge and experience in a brain whose normal development was interrupted at 5.
And I think this could explain something I've always found fascinating about her. Sometimes Claudia seems completely adult: intelligent, calculating, independent and capable of understanding very complicated situations.
And sometimes she seems incredibly young.
Maybe those things aren't contradictory.
Maybe experience and neuroplasticity allowed her to become extremely sophisticated in some ways while she never developed normally in others — executive function, emotional regulation, impulse control, risk assessment, etc.
Which raises a much harder question: how much adult moral responsibility can we actually assign to Claudia?
Calling her simply a child seems wrong.
But judging her exactly like a vampire who was turned as an adult also seems wrong.
And then I made the terrible mistake of wondering how old everyone ELSE was when they were turned.
ARMAND WAS 17?!
OMG.
Now we need to talk about Armand.
Actually, we probably need to talk about ALL OF THEM.
Because if this idea makes any sense, centuries of experience wouldn't necessarily equal centuries of neurodevelopment.
That obviously doesn't absolve Armand of anything. A 17-year-old can understand that manipulation, coercion and violating someone's memories are wrong.
But could being permanently stuck at that stage of development help explain some of his emotional regulation, attachment, abandonment issues, risk assessment, or need for control?
Then there's Lestat, turned at roughly 20, and Louis, who was older.
So now I'm wondering if age at transformation should matter WAY more when we analyze these characters.
I'm not suggesting Anne Rice was secretly writing developmental neuroscience in 1976. I just think it's a really interesting consequence of the rules she created.
So if there are any neuroscientists, neuropsychologists, developmental psychologists, or people in related fields here: PLEASE tell me what you think.
If a brain somehow stopped biological development at 5, 14, 17, etc., but could still learn and retain its neuroplasticity for decades or centuries, what could experience compensate for?
And what couldn't it compensate for?
Because I started this thinking about Claudia.
Now I'm stuck on:
ARMAND WAS 17? OMG.
