The Ghosts In The Attic Never Quite Leave
As Des requested - a mini far-too-long essay on Lotte and Christine's metamorphoses. This is about Lotte Karsten at the RPG Bellum Letale, for those intrigued.
Des, I swear the others will be shorter. >_>
When I first started piecing together Lotte, I had only a brief experience in analyzing Christine as a playable character. The end of The Phantom of the Opera is incredibly vague on what goes through her mind and how the experience leaves her. As I was viewing Lotte as more of a reincarnate as I conceived her, I decided to go with a personality that would suit Christine at the end of the novel. Getting Lotte to that point though was necessary; it didn’t make sense per her childhood that she would immediately have issues with guilt, extreme paranoia, and a tendency to worry about those around her. Mimicking events in the novel to create a similar state was done.
Let’s begin with Christine. Through the novel, we’re given her history secondhand as her experience with Erik firsthand. This provides a good enough analysis of her personality which is more reliable than Raoul for most of the novel - he moves back and forth between adoring her and cursing her, giving an unrealistic light to her behavior.
She starts out as a generally unnoticeable child - what’s most memorable is her father’s travels throughout Europe and her love of music and stories. As she gets older she is more schooled and taught to be a pretty typical Victorian lady, save for her continuance of her dreaming. She dearly loves her father and is repeatedly made out to be a “good girl” which can be taken in two ways - she wasn’t sneaking around, kissing servant boys and she wasn’t as modernly seen a bad kid by any means.
However, her father grows sick and dies around her pre-teen years, when a girl tends to realize her parents aren’t the best thing ever. It’s made clear in later comments that Christine does realize her father isn’t the greatest thing since jammed bread - he isn’t invincible, his mind wanders some, and he seems to believe in the Angel of Music. She goes along with and believes it, even after he dies. With him dies her passion and she goes from being a lively girl to a quiet, emotionless one.
Erik’s tutelage sparks a few things - one, faith in her father, two, some of her old passion (which she only shows around him or Mamma Valerius, until the Gala that the novel opens with), and three, the beginning of awareness. She realizes her feelings for Raoul because of him and also some of the repercussions of her actions - she’s not as aware of consequences until he begins tutoring her and as a result, he’s taken on a parental role with her so she grows up a tad more. However, she’s relatively carefree and worry-free until he threatens to leave her if she continues with Raoul. Even this amount of worrying is fairly normal.
Christine is a mainly a fearless figure until the chandelier drops; but what’s noticeable as that she doesn’t start sobbing over the people in the audience. She cares about The Voice and Raoul only, in a strange move, that’s a bit selfish. She believes the Voice to be celestial only - why should be concerned? It isn’t brought up again though as she’s dragged underground and the fiasco with Erik occurs. While there, she’s fairly brave - noticeably so as she does attempt to fight back though is drugged or stopped on multiple occasions. Eventually guilting by Erik makes her stay, until the singing and mask disaster happens. Simply put, at that point Christine starts to be truly afraid and develops a paranoia - however, it only concerns him and what he will do. In a certain translation of the novel I have, he threatens to share his coffin-bed with her as its large enough for both. The multiple levels of this are really horrifying - in that same translation, she’s about to kill herself until she hears him play his Don Juan. Needless to say, Christine is a bit prone to over-dramatics.
We’ll fast-forward here as things are obvious. Until Raoul offers to take Christine away, her fears are incredibly self-centered. Though she’s terrified of Erik hurting Raoul, she mainly fears for herself - her life, her freedom, her virtue. Granted there isn’t much of a reason for her to fear for others at this time, she inconveniences the opera by running to Mamma Valerius and again and again, puts her own sanity and health first. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it’s an observation that’s different by the time Erik abducts her during Faust, during the second half of the novel. At that point, she is terrified of him and the guilt/pity is next to nil. She attempts to kill herself when she learns he wants to marry her and has a breakdown when she learns of his plans to blow up the opera.
Christine doesn’t immediately give in and sacrifice herself. In fact, she’s too scared to make a decision until she learns the Daroga and Raoul are in the torture chamber. She doesn’t ask for them to save her - noticeably, Christine never asks someone to free her. Raoul offers to take her away on his own and she can scarcely believe it. She tells them to go, immediately giving away Erik’s plans. Things go…well as they do and I won’t give a full re-cap. It ends though with Christine unsure of her decision until the last possible moment, where she chooses the scorpion.
This, however, isn’t really the changing point in Christine’s personality and state of mind. It’s after when she makes the deal to be Erik’s living bride - as there’s the unspoken knowledge that if she was to marry him, she’d kill herself - if he saves Raoul and the Daroga. That and following through on her word as she lets him kiss her is what changes her into a truly sacrificing figure and though she cries mainly for herself (as I see it), she does manage to feel some pity for him at the end. This is also noticeably the first time she doesn’t shy away from Erik’s face and isn’t faking it. (So we assume, as we hear the story from Erik himself. Unreliable narrator and all…) She’s accepted it and because she did - truly did what she thought was the right thing - saves herself (and though she doesn’t know it, Raoul.) He “frees” her in the sense of handing her over to Raoul and before she leaves, kisses his forehead.
We’re given no further information on Christine, other than she did return and leave the ring on Erik’s finger and buried him as he requested. (Guilted again.) However, there’s a few assumptions that can be made on how she was afterwards and that I’ve assumed in-game as references (See the dream log with Lotte and Bran.) PTSD came into play, through a fear of being trapped as well as being on stage with the spotlight on her. I doubt she performed beyond a simple town choir after the events of the novel. I think that the fact that Erik basically killed himself hit her very hard and she would have felt guilt for it afterwards. And while she definitely wanted to be with Raoul, there would have been a tiny part of her that thought she should have insisted she stay so he didn’t end up dead because of her - yet at the same time, she was well aware of the fact that she couldn’t go back. I think she would have had more fears as a result and been a less selfish person, who was aware of those around her getting hurt - and terrified of feeling guilty for it.
Further “fanon” here - I think Christine died young, possibly in childbirth. It’s usually the way these things went at the time. Taking this, Lotte’s own personality was created so that she already had the repercussions of Christine’s actions (viewed positively or negatively). By the time she arrived in Bellum, she was a dreamless, paranoid girl who was far too easily guilted by those around her.
Mirroring things as best I could - Lotte’s childhood with her father Henry was very similar to Christine’s with Daddy Daaé. Both travelled with their fathers in near poverty, using their music to pay their way and being oblivious until someone stepped in to take care of them. Lotte however was much younger when this happened and more childish. She didn’t view the government as a good thing, mainly because her father didn’t. Some of the repercussions of Christine were already at play here - she was incredibly eager to believe what others said, especially those she idolized. Lotte’s love of her father was blind; she never saw the bad side of him and his word was law. He was far from being a good father - for example, she met Diego while left in a square as he went to give a music lesson - but he wasn’t the worst. He did love her and perhaps, didn’t know how to be the best one. Regardless, Lotte loved him and because he died when she was so young, she never saw him as anything other than a God. Unlike Christine who saw her father slowly die as she grew older, Lotte’s father died in a freak accident when she was seven. The experience was more of a shock and she was unprepared - allowing the voices to come and by a comfort, after his death, like the Angel of Music was supposed to be for Christine.
To interrupt here - the voices were supposed to explain an aspect of the premade that said that she was hearing The Phantom’s voice and thought she was going mad. In my mind, it didn’t make sense - in this day and age, most people would just assume it was someone else. So what if she really was mad? …and things took off from there. The voices led to Lotte’s paranoia as she became “crazy” and was ridiculed by her peers. She shut down fully, giving up on her dreams and retreating into herself. She became afraid to dream, as Erik made Christine afraid to use her voice (I don’t know myself when I sing.) The ballet was an outlet and fortunately she began to attempt being normal and fit in - to hide her own fears and worries. She let people get close and began to worry about them - them getting hurt from small or great things, as she was afraid of losing them as she lost her father.
Until she got to Bellum, Lotte stuck to groups. She was the nice girl in the corner, a part of things and yet not - and she was mostly content with this. People like James and Valerie were clung to as she blindly trusted that they’d look out for her and protect her, as surrogates for her father. (And if we look at Christine, for Raoul and even Erik. By the end of the novel a seemingly independent women was forced to rely on the men in her life - even after she saves herself. Go figure.) Her dating history tends to reflect the same thing - after a failed relationship with a quarterback, she attempted to date a friend who was perhaps too nice for his own good. Later on, there was a dancing partner who eventually fell for a friend. Each of these people ended up failing her though - because the type of blind trust she put in them was the same she had for her father. They wouldn’t do anything to hurt her, they’d protect her from her fears and the rest of the world. Her quarterback boyfriend got an injury and couldn’t make time for her - eventually breaking up with her because he didn’t have time for her any more (in actuality, he was seeing an old friend of his) - the nice guy who was more of a friend, took her to prom where she got horrifically drunk on the punch and didn’t exactly take the best care of her he could (in actuality, he had no idea the punch was spiked and drove her home after she started having a fit over the pop music and didn’t lay a hand on her.) The dance partner was well…she should have seen that coming. He was eying her dancer friend for ages and eventually chose to be her partner and ended up dating her. She saw it coming and accepted it more quietly - and stopped talking to him.
Valerie failed her when Lotte lost her job - she didn’t understand that Lotte wasn’t at fault and thus Lotte shut down and didn’t try and connect with her again. James and Lotte have fought over several things and their relationship is full of ups and downs and awkwardness - but the real point of Lotte realizing she couldn’t trust her was the continual shut downs when it came to the fables.
As more things happened to her in Bellum and she experienced the insanity, Lotte drew in on herself, becoming this little cocoon of fear and paranoia. Losing her job and hearing Bran made her disconnect from the rest of the world, so she barely left her apartment. With the knowledge of Christine and the fact that an Erik might come, Lotte had at that point reached the point where Christine was at the end of the novel - terrified, unsure of her own decisions, and while dreaming more, definitely not to the potential that she could be.
Of course, since that point Lotte has developed - she’s slowly realizing that she doesn’t have to sacrifice herself and can have her own desires. She’s learning to not trust all of her instincts and is slightly less afraid then before. At this point her fears are mainly of being scared, the building (which include her voices), and to an extent Bran. Very recently, she’s realized that she can speak up - and that it’s better to do that, then shut down and let people walk over her. She’s growing away from Christine in a sense, by sharing some of her traits before the end of the novel - almost moving in reverse if we compare personality traits. In the long run? I think she has the potential to step forward and become her own person - to love music as she truly does and get over a large amount of her fears, to stop relying on others so much, and possibly stopping herself from being manipulated by guilt.
Des, I swear the others will be shorter. >_>
When I first started piecing together Lotte, I had only a brief experience in analyzing Christine as a playable character. The end of The Phantom of the Opera is incredibly vague on what goes through her mind and how the experience leaves her. As I was viewing Lotte as more of a reincarnate as I conceived her, I decided to go with a personality that would suit Christine at the end of the novel. Getting Lotte to that point though was necessary; it didn’t make sense per her childhood that she would immediately have issues with guilt, extreme paranoia, and a tendency to worry about those around her. Mimicking events in the novel to create a similar state was done.
Let’s begin with Christine. Through the novel, we’re given her history secondhand as her experience with Erik firsthand. This provides a good enough analysis of her personality which is more reliable than Raoul for most of the novel - he moves back and forth between adoring her and cursing her, giving an unrealistic light to her behavior.
She starts out as a generally unnoticeable child - what’s most memorable is her father’s travels throughout Europe and her love of music and stories. As she gets older she is more schooled and taught to be a pretty typical Victorian lady, save for her continuance of her dreaming. She dearly loves her father and is repeatedly made out to be a “good girl” which can be taken in two ways - she wasn’t sneaking around, kissing servant boys and she wasn’t as modernly seen a bad kid by any means.
However, her father grows sick and dies around her pre-teen years, when a girl tends to realize her parents aren’t the best thing ever. It’s made clear in later comments that Christine does realize her father isn’t the greatest thing since jammed bread - he isn’t invincible, his mind wanders some, and he seems to believe in the Angel of Music. She goes along with and believes it, even after he dies. With him dies her passion and she goes from being a lively girl to a quiet, emotionless one.
Erik’s tutelage sparks a few things - one, faith in her father, two, some of her old passion (which she only shows around him or Mamma Valerius, until the Gala that the novel opens with), and three, the beginning of awareness. She realizes her feelings for Raoul because of him and also some of the repercussions of her actions - she’s not as aware of consequences until he begins tutoring her and as a result, he’s taken on a parental role with her so she grows up a tad more. However, she’s relatively carefree and worry-free until he threatens to leave her if she continues with Raoul. Even this amount of worrying is fairly normal.
Christine is a mainly a fearless figure until the chandelier drops; but what’s noticeable as that she doesn’t start sobbing over the people in the audience. She cares about The Voice and Raoul only, in a strange move, that’s a bit selfish. She believes the Voice to be celestial only - why should be concerned? It isn’t brought up again though as she’s dragged underground and the fiasco with Erik occurs. While there, she’s fairly brave - noticeably so as she does attempt to fight back though is drugged or stopped on multiple occasions. Eventually guilting by Erik makes her stay, until the singing and mask disaster happens. Simply put, at that point Christine starts to be truly afraid and develops a paranoia - however, it only concerns him and what he will do. In a certain translation of the novel I have, he threatens to share his coffin-bed with her as its large enough for both. The multiple levels of this are really horrifying - in that same translation, she’s about to kill herself until she hears him play his Don Juan. Needless to say, Christine is a bit prone to over-dramatics.
We’ll fast-forward here as things are obvious. Until Raoul offers to take Christine away, her fears are incredibly self-centered. Though she’s terrified of Erik hurting Raoul, she mainly fears for herself - her life, her freedom, her virtue. Granted there isn’t much of a reason for her to fear for others at this time, she inconveniences the opera by running to Mamma Valerius and again and again, puts her own sanity and health first. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it’s an observation that’s different by the time Erik abducts her during Faust, during the second half of the novel. At that point, she is terrified of him and the guilt/pity is next to nil. She attempts to kill herself when she learns he wants to marry her and has a breakdown when she learns of his plans to blow up the opera.
Christine doesn’t immediately give in and sacrifice herself. In fact, she’s too scared to make a decision until she learns the Daroga and Raoul are in the torture chamber. She doesn’t ask for them to save her - noticeably, Christine never asks someone to free her. Raoul offers to take her away on his own and she can scarcely believe it. She tells them to go, immediately giving away Erik’s plans. Things go…well as they do and I won’t give a full re-cap. It ends though with Christine unsure of her decision until the last possible moment, where she chooses the scorpion.
This, however, isn’t really the changing point in Christine’s personality and state of mind. It’s after when she makes the deal to be Erik’s living bride - as there’s the unspoken knowledge that if she was to marry him, she’d kill herself - if he saves Raoul and the Daroga. That and following through on her word as she lets him kiss her is what changes her into a truly sacrificing figure and though she cries mainly for herself (as I see it), she does manage to feel some pity for him at the end. This is also noticeably the first time she doesn’t shy away from Erik’s face and isn’t faking it. (So we assume, as we hear the story from Erik himself. Unreliable narrator and all…) She’s accepted it and because she did - truly did what she thought was the right thing - saves herself (and though she doesn’t know it, Raoul.) He “frees” her in the sense of handing her over to Raoul and before she leaves, kisses his forehead.
We’re given no further information on Christine, other than she did return and leave the ring on Erik’s finger and buried him as he requested. (Guilted again.) However, there’s a few assumptions that can be made on how she was afterwards and that I’ve assumed in-game as references (See the dream log with Lotte and Bran.) PTSD came into play, through a fear of being trapped as well as being on stage with the spotlight on her. I doubt she performed beyond a simple town choir after the events of the novel. I think that the fact that Erik basically killed himself hit her very hard and she would have felt guilt for it afterwards. And while she definitely wanted to be with Raoul, there would have been a tiny part of her that thought she should have insisted she stay so he didn’t end up dead because of her - yet at the same time, she was well aware of the fact that she couldn’t go back. I think she would have had more fears as a result and been a less selfish person, who was aware of those around her getting hurt - and terrified of feeling guilty for it.
Further “fanon” here - I think Christine died young, possibly in childbirth. It’s usually the way these things went at the time. Taking this, Lotte’s own personality was created so that she already had the repercussions of Christine’s actions (viewed positively or negatively). By the time she arrived in Bellum, she was a dreamless, paranoid girl who was far too easily guilted by those around her.
Mirroring things as best I could - Lotte’s childhood with her father Henry was very similar to Christine’s with Daddy Daaé. Both travelled with their fathers in near poverty, using their music to pay their way and being oblivious until someone stepped in to take care of them. Lotte however was much younger when this happened and more childish. She didn’t view the government as a good thing, mainly because her father didn’t. Some of the repercussions of Christine were already at play here - she was incredibly eager to believe what others said, especially those she idolized. Lotte’s love of her father was blind; she never saw the bad side of him and his word was law. He was far from being a good father - for example, she met Diego while left in a square as he went to give a music lesson - but he wasn’t the worst. He did love her and perhaps, didn’t know how to be the best one. Regardless, Lotte loved him and because he died when she was so young, she never saw him as anything other than a God. Unlike Christine who saw her father slowly die as she grew older, Lotte’s father died in a freak accident when she was seven. The experience was more of a shock and she was unprepared - allowing the voices to come and by a comfort, after his death, like the Angel of Music was supposed to be for Christine.
To interrupt here - the voices were supposed to explain an aspect of the premade that said that she was hearing The Phantom’s voice and thought she was going mad. In my mind, it didn’t make sense - in this day and age, most people would just assume it was someone else. So what if she really was mad? …and things took off from there. The voices led to Lotte’s paranoia as she became “crazy” and was ridiculed by her peers. She shut down fully, giving up on her dreams and retreating into herself. She became afraid to dream, as Erik made Christine afraid to use her voice (I don’t know myself when I sing.) The ballet was an outlet and fortunately she began to attempt being normal and fit in - to hide her own fears and worries. She let people get close and began to worry about them - them getting hurt from small or great things, as she was afraid of losing them as she lost her father.
Until she got to Bellum, Lotte stuck to groups. She was the nice girl in the corner, a part of things and yet not - and she was mostly content with this. People like James and Valerie were clung to as she blindly trusted that they’d look out for her and protect her, as surrogates for her father. (And if we look at Christine, for Raoul and even Erik. By the end of the novel a seemingly independent women was forced to rely on the men in her life - even after she saves herself. Go figure.) Her dating history tends to reflect the same thing - after a failed relationship with a quarterback, she attempted to date a friend who was perhaps too nice for his own good. Later on, there was a dancing partner who eventually fell for a friend. Each of these people ended up failing her though - because the type of blind trust she put in them was the same she had for her father. They wouldn’t do anything to hurt her, they’d protect her from her fears and the rest of the world. Her quarterback boyfriend got an injury and couldn’t make time for her - eventually breaking up with her because he didn’t have time for her any more (in actuality, he was seeing an old friend of his) - the nice guy who was more of a friend, took her to prom where she got horrifically drunk on the punch and didn’t exactly take the best care of her he could (in actuality, he had no idea the punch was spiked and drove her home after she started having a fit over the pop music and didn’t lay a hand on her.) The dance partner was well…she should have seen that coming. He was eying her dancer friend for ages and eventually chose to be her partner and ended up dating her. She saw it coming and accepted it more quietly - and stopped talking to him.
Valerie failed her when Lotte lost her job - she didn’t understand that Lotte wasn’t at fault and thus Lotte shut down and didn’t try and connect with her again. James and Lotte have fought over several things and their relationship is full of ups and downs and awkwardness - but the real point of Lotte realizing she couldn’t trust her was the continual shut downs when it came to the fables.
As more things happened to her in Bellum and she experienced the insanity, Lotte drew in on herself, becoming this little cocoon of fear and paranoia. Losing her job and hearing Bran made her disconnect from the rest of the world, so she barely left her apartment. With the knowledge of Christine and the fact that an Erik might come, Lotte had at that point reached the point where Christine was at the end of the novel - terrified, unsure of her own decisions, and while dreaming more, definitely not to the potential that she could be.
Of course, since that point Lotte has developed - she’s slowly realizing that she doesn’t have to sacrifice herself and can have her own desires. She’s learning to not trust all of her instincts and is slightly less afraid then before. At this point her fears are mainly of being scared, the building (which include her voices), and to an extent Bran. Very recently, she’s realized that she can speak up - and that it’s better to do that, then shut down and let people walk over her. She’s growing away from Christine in a sense, by sharing some of her traits before the end of the novel - almost moving in reverse if we compare personality traits. In the long run? I think she has the potential to step forward and become her own person - to love music as she truly does and get over a large amount of her fears, to stop relying on others so much, and possibly stopping herself from being manipulated by guilt.