"The Vampire Lestat" Spoilers for eps 1 & 2...
So when I said that the only reason they aged up Claudia and had her cast by an adult woman was because they wanted to sexualize her people said I was fucking nuts. Never mind that the show itself makes that a possibility by not challenging that Claudia's first boyfriend totally let it go when she said she was 18. Either he believed her or the show did nothing to inform us that he purposely dated her with the understanding that he was dating a woman he understood to be a child. They've now done the same thing to Baby Jenks, hired a bootleg version of the girl who plays Wednesday and had Lestat fuck her. In the book she's 13 and never meets Lestat. I was already certain of their reasoning and didn't need it validated but they absolutely did just reinforced it. I guess according to television networks if you want to pull in a straight, probably male, audience all you have to do is sexualize little girls. It didn't add anything to the story and doing it to Claudia completely took away from the story. But straight male pedophiles are super important so they gotta give them what they want!
Then they give Lestat and Gabrielle, now Gabriella for some godforsaken reason, probably because they think the audience is too stupid to accept the name "Gabrielle" as feminine, an incestuous relationship that they decidedly do not have in the books. I was REALLY hoping they weren't going to do this because it would have been the most obvious and obnoxious sexual edgelord shit you could do. And then they did it. Is this the price we pay for wanting an explicitly gay version of "The Vampire Chronicles?" If we accept perfectly normal sexuality between adult people we also have to take adults sexualizing children without even the explicit acknowledgement that it's a fucked up thing to do and parent child incest? What's the takeaway here? Is this obnoxious edgelord shit or are they trying to equate these things on some level? I genuinely don't understand the reasoning. It adds nothing and in the case of Gabrielle takes away from the character. Also, this performance is kind of crazy. I love Jennifer Ehle, she's my Lizzy forever, but this performance is nuts. Lastly, making Lestat and Gabrielle kill their family just shrinks the world for me. It makes it less part of the "real world" and I don't understand it other than to give every single thing in this series an "edgy" quality that I think it needs. It feels so fucking try hard. Lestat's real family dies during the French Revolution, it puts them and their nobility in a moment in time. I liked that. As it was they really did nothing more to humanize or even characterize the family than was done in the books but give them a completely callous end. Eh.
I don't know, I'm having a hard time understanding this adaptation and we're 3 seasons in. There's definitely stuff I like about it but I think the desire or perhaps "need" to do everything for shock value is taking away from good storytelling and I think this show is a clear example of that. It's also tonally at a 10 all the time which does very little for me and I don't think is good storytelling.
