#she was a roller skating instructor. a secretary. a receptionist. a fan of oranjese literature.

[57sfinest]

i'd love to hear your thoughts on klaasje

i love klaasje soooo much she's so interesting to me and i really love how they made her parallel harry in a lot of ways, but i think that specifically could be a separate post

one of the things that ruins me about her is like... she's so young to be in this situation. she's only 28 and she's become a fugitive from entities that she's not even sure are actually chasing her, which is a special kind of hell. in her eyes, her life is over, and it had barely begun. this wasn't even her plan, she was dragged into everything as a result of the capitalist machine: she did odd jobs until a banking firm picked her up and found out she was really good at corporate espionage, and because that was what finally gave her life stability, she stuck with it. she caused people to lose their jobs- some, their lives- and helped these larger companies destabilize smaller competitors and corner the market. she only did it a few times, but she tangibly ruined people's lives, including her own. and she clearly feels terrible about it, but she can't undo what she's done.

she came to martinaise to hide because no one cares about martinaise. she was staying in a hotel room, pretty much constantly on drugs to numb herself, fooling around with the odd resident, but she wasn't doing much to permanently establish herself- we see no evidence that she was trying to do any work or find someplace to live in the area. martinaise was never meant to be a place to start over, off the radar; it was just supposed to be a place where she could self-destruct in peace. when she tells harry that martinaise isn't the kind of place that calls the cops, that had been a deciding factor in her move there. she wanted that- she wanted a place hostile to people asking questions, hostile to anyone with an outside agenda. she knew that even if the residents wouldn't be particularly sympathetic to her situation, their outright hatred of outside enforcement would go a long way towards keeping her hidden, and her looks and charm and manipulation could fill in the gaps. she wanted to stop looking over her shoulder. she thought she could finally stop causing harm, and then lely gets killed and she thinks it's because of her, and because she leaves before the end of the case (or gets arrested), she *may never get to find out that it wasn't*. (yes, you can argue that dros killed lely because he was obsessed with klaasje so it's ""her fault"", which is how klaasje would probably see it if/when she found out, but it's NOT klaasje's fault. it was not something she wanted or intentionally did or even knew about. she is not to blame for dros' obsession.)

she's manipulative and a chronic liar and she'll throw anyone under the bus to save her own skin, and she'll feel bad about it later, but she won't hesitate to do it again. as we see her, she's deeply selfish: the things she talks about, she talks about in the context of how it serves her. the freedom of revachol, for example, she brings up because in a free revachol she wouldn't be extradited, not necessarily because she has some great love for the city. i think she shares some of harry's ability to know what buttons to push to get people to do what she wants: she'll exploit anything she can to throw harry off her. disco, his attraction to her, his love for the city, potentially his hatred of capitalism and/or the moralintern- she'll grab anything she can find and twist until he lets her go. and here's the thing: we're seeing all these traits when she's at her worst. she watched a man she liked be murdered right on top of her while she was already paranoid that extremely powerful people were out to get her, cracked under the stress of watching him rot outside her window and got the cops involved, then immediately realized her mistake and tried her hardest to slither out of her own mess just one last time. as much as we can joke about her being a girlboss and all that, she's a terrified, emotionally scarred young woman who (rightfully!) has NO idea how to handle the situation she finds herself in. and ruby's immediate fear of harry- so intense that she, the ex-madre drug runner and current union thug, immediately ran and hid upon hearing of his arrival- couldn't have helped reassure her. we can say all of these things about her, and i wouldn't say anyone is wrong to dislike her, but i think it's important to view her through a sympathetic lens if you want to truly understand her.

all of this kinda boils down to the fact that she's become a creature of fear. if she had a signature skill i would argue that it would be half light, or something like it. everything she's doing in the game, she's doing for self preservation. even the overwhelming amount of *partying* is just fear management. and she's good at hiding it at first, but the more you press her the more you watch her break down. she's traumatized. her wounds are freshly reopened. she's scared. of course she's scared: you're a cop with a horrible reputation and she's a fugitive who was the only witness to a convoluted murder, and the murder happened to be of a man she really liked, if only briefly. you'll have to forgive her if she's not squeaky clean. it's hard to be, in revachol.