Battle Cries and Champagne

I feel like anybody who follows both me and @angrybubbles is probably sick of the sight of Gothic Incest by Jenny DiPlacidi (it's always very obvious when me and Amy have read a book asdhakdja) but at the beginning of the book she talks about critical responses to Walpole's 1768 play The Mysterious Mother, and it hilarious to see that literally nothing has changed in over 250 years.

"In the play the mother reveals her incestuous capacity to her son in a scene that disrupts the gender ideologies informing conventional representations of incest in which men are the active abusers of women. Burney's discomfort with the 'dreadful' and 'atrocious' work, typical of reactions to the play, indicates a sense of how deeply it troubles ideologies of gender and sexuality that implicitly inform readings of mother-son incest as the most disturbing of all incestuous relationships." Page 2 "An uncle's sexually violent pursuit of his niece positions the female as a passive victim to an aggressive male sexuality that, while condemned for its violation of the incest taboo, nonetheless adheres to a fmiliar structure of power and sexuality. The reactions to these different configurations of incest in The Mysterious Mother and The Castle of Wolfenbach reveal a marked discomfort with incestuous behaviour that subverts heteronormative ideologies of gender and sexuality." Page 3

I feel like now though, the reaction is not so much disgust at the idea of a male victim (after all, the entire show centers largely around men being victims of various forms of abuse) but rather the idea of a female abuser.

I don't think this is a new thing in this fandom, because there are a lot of people who seem to struggle with the less palatable aspects of Claudia and Madeleine's characters too, but in those cases the response is simple to erase them completely to make it easier to view them as victims, while with Gabi that's just... impossible. You cannot look away from her abuse of Lestat, so the fandom reaction has gone in the opposite direction and closed their eyes to the aspects of her character that also make her a victim.

So far the focus of the show is Lestat, and I didn't expect for us to get a huge amount of Gabi's character outside of her relationship with him, so the show has already exceeded my expectations in that sense because what do you mean she paid a midwife to "nick her in the womb" because that was the only way to regain a shred of bodily autonomy. How did people hear that line and then log on to social media to write a thinkpiece about how Gabi is being portrayed as one dimensional, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills 😭

Then there's the other side of it and the response from book fans who are mad because "it wasn't incestuous until after they became vampires" which I just don't understand at all because that scene and her monologue are lifted directly from the book.

(page 43 of the PDF)

(page 44)

Like I'm so sorry but if you read that scene and didn't pick up what Anne was putting down then that's a literacy issue. The show writers did not pull this out of their asses, it's right there on the fucking page if you both to take more than one single second to think about the implications of this scene and the conversation. Like...

But anyway, LET'S talk about the club scene because I really loved it. And like, I do totally get why a lot of people are icked out by the constant background sexualisation of women we've seen so far in this season and I think it's valid, but right now I'm holding space for the very real and likely possibility that this is an intentional discomfort because again, we're seeing the world through the lens Lestat is presenting now and I think the misogyny and hypersexuality is very much the point and also very much tied to his relationship with Gabi.

Again we're coming at this two episodes into a seven episode season but what I've been getting so far is that the show is taking Gabi's envy of Lestat's gender and focusing in specifically on an envy of the sexual freedom that comes with being a man (in the era they were living in specifically).

In the books, maleness to Gabi represents a freedom and liberation that will always be out of reach for her as a woman, especially as the wife of the Marquis, and her vampire transformation then liberates her from the confines of that (she is no longer a woman in the sense that she no longer has to conform to societal expectations, because she is no longer human). In the show, this is still present, but it's specifically that she sees sexuality as representing freedom and liberation (which again, isn't something they've invented, it's present in what she says to Lestat in the monologue from the book). She then pushes this desire for hypersexuality onto Lestat as a way of living through him.

Side note: I have a whole thing cooking about gabistat and marimand parallels, and how both represent a sexual liberation that Lestat and Armand didn't want/weren't ready for.

So the fact that they go hunting together at a strip club, then linger outside a seedy motel while their victims fuck while Gabi pushes questions on Lestat about his own sex life, is all just building this bigger picture of hypersexuality that Gabi is pushing on Lestat as an outlet for her own feelings of confinement. And I think the key thing is that there are a lot of less-than-subtle hints throughout the episode that Lestat is not enjoying this.

That's why the kiss between Gabi and the stripper is good. It's not there for Lestat's pleasure, because Lestat is not having a good time. It's both another indicator of Gabi forcing her own sexual liberation onto Lestat and also an act of emasculation which is a very common theme in mother-son incest (she literally walked towards him rolling the ping pong balls in her hand like come onnnn).

And I'm not done, there's more! Another thing that has me kinda raising my eyebrow at fandom response so far is the fact that outside of the sexuality, people seem to be ignoring Gabi's role in Lestat's story. I keep seeing people talking about the murder of Lestat's family and the conversation is always "but Lestat wouldn't do that" "Lestat didn't kill his family in the books" "Lestat couldn't bring himself to kill his father" and I'm like... did everybody else watch a different show to me? Did everybody else miss that this was a part of Gabi's turning and that the scene was about her?😭

This was Gabi's liberation, not Lestat's. And we've already seen that Lestat will do anything to keep mama around so it's not surprising at all to me that he would join her. I really really think this is all part of a bigger narrative of Gabi's isolation of Lestat from his family and again, it's just building on things that were already present in the book.

In the books Lestat still maintains contact with his family, writing and sending presents for his nieces and nephews, and it's a source of tension between him and Gabi.

(Page 355)

Lestat's connection to his family is a representation of his continued connection to humanity even after his vampire transformation, and I think Gabi severing this in the show is so interesting. Again it just feels like another way that she is pushing her own journey of liberation onto Lestat, despite them both wanting different things.