Nobody pulled the trigger-they just stepped aside

everyone is late teens-early thirties. these are worlds flattened in their demographics to the coveting of sexually available youth. there are no mothers with young children, no sons caring for older mothers, no elderly people who aren't evil and no children that aren't cardboard cutouts instead of developing people.

i knowww this is a symptom of me not being the target audience for this, and i understand that people don't come to these books for complex worlds but for erotica and romance, i know! so this is my caveat before i rant more that i'm not being super serious i'm just discussing something i've noticed i appreciate in more complex worlds

it especially stings in medieval fantasy (and by that i mean largely Western medieval fantasy) settings. it reeks of an inability or refusal to conceptualize a society and communities (or lack thereof) isolated from modern capitalist ideals, particularly the nuclear family. you don't know the kind of labor elderly women did to keep the world running in the premodern era.

who taught your nondescript background serfs to embroider the belts they're wearing? who made their 'roughspun tunics?' who weaved their blankets? who cares for the children while the parents are working in the fields? who brews their ale? who passes on their stories, medical knowledge, songs? why aren't there any older women in your clergy, helping manage your estates, present in your royal court? who are your midwives? who does your teenaged protagonist learn from and look up to?

beyond that, how do you treat your old women? are they all evil witches, all tradition-obsessed backward fossils, all smothering female relatives, all background extras? are they and their bodies cheap punchlines and jumpscares? where do your women go when they're too old for you to imagine them with sexual appetites and complex personalities beyond grandmothers and jealous evil hags?

children exist as infants or late teens only, ironing out the uncomfortable ugly years of a person becoming a person, teens without acne and without social awkwardness and fully developed in their competencies and personalities without the difficult part of growing up and learning included. babies are allowed because they're cute, they're basically props, a goalpost for the main romance of the book to satisfy heteropatriarchal expectations of couples instead of the main characters subverting any expectations. not to mention that most of these protagonists i can't imagine being 12, 13 years old. they sprung up fully formed at 19 before being whisked away by a love interest so overtly sexual he circles around to being sexless and utterly unappealing.

don't get me STARTED on how i hate seeing characters propping up relationships of main characters instead of being complex on their own.

I am especially bothered by the lack of men-doing-parenting, old-people-being-active, people-with-limited-mobility, pregnant-people-being-active, and worlds in which romance is the prevalent driver but there’s no goddamn babies.

Anyway, I agree that I don’t expect a huge amount from this kind of fiction. Instead, it shows that these people are invisible to the author in real life- and that the author themselves has relatively little life experience and depth of character , which is not an age thing or an activity level thing; an author like Jane Austen formed a rich understanding of human relationships from being single her whole life and sitting quietly in a house. Life experience and depth of character comes from turning over problems and understanding them from many sides.

The beat where Claudia knocks Merrick forwards, knocks out her front tooth, and both Louis and Lestat lean forwards, lean into it - - it's a heartstopper, because they know, we know, it's actually her. The killer down in New Orleans who clogged the Mississippi with corpses, the girl who slit one of her fathers' throats, who wore the ring of his mistress, who goaded her other father to Europe and nearly left him in No Man's Land, who ridiculed him long, long before this episode (and in similar terms). This fanged and ruthless woman who they love enough to welcome at her worst. They don't want her filed down, they want the spark in the dark, in her eyes as Louis said two episodes ago.