the x and v from a to z

gabrielle in the novels is a flawed character. as a human woman, she was deeply frustrated with her lot in life, and as such was often emotionally withdrawn and cold towards her family. she was not a great mother, and yes you can say she was guilty of some degree of emotional incest with lestat. but there is a big difference between emotional incest and sexual abuse.

translating anne rice’s intentions when it comes to sex in her vampire books can be tricky. it’s not a stretch to have lestat and louis’ book relationship, which is largely chaste aside from a few kisses, turned into an overtly sexual one - it’s safe to say that if anne could have had her male leads boning in her book, she would have. but i feel like i can pretty confidently say that wasn’t her intention with lestat and gabrielle, as complicated as their relationship is. it is clear that once gabrielle is turned, they’re not really mother and son anymore. there is a moment when gabrielle puts on a men’s outfit, and lestat starts blushing at the sight of her ankles. but that’s it - they’re companions, and very loyal to one another for a time, but they’re not even that affectionate. and furthermore, while anne was often sideways with the way she talked about romance between men, she was not with her heterosexual pairings, even incestuous ones. like, there are graphic incestuous sex scenes in her books, this was not something she was shy about. if that was what she intended with lestat and gabrielle, we would have known.

but more importantly, it's really about what gabrielle represented and who she was to the books. a lot of readers viewed gabrielle as trans-coded, but nearly all of anne's female characters stemmed from frustrations with being a woman in a man's world. claudia, despite being largely read by fans as being a representation of anne's late daughter, anne actually said was a representation of her own discomfort with her assigned gender (of course, claudia can be both of those things, but apparently this is what anne actually intended in writing her). how claudia felt as an adult, mature vampire in a child's body was how anne felt about living in a woman's body. gabrielle's character tells a similar story, but one more to do with being a mother and a wife, and the discomfort of being forced into that role by the nature of just being born female.

i was sixteen when I first read the vampire lestat, but I saw a lot of myself in gabrielle's aloofness. the friction between her and lestat as vampires was their different approaches to the vampire life. lestat wanted to be close to humanity. he was fascinated by art and music, and he liked falling in love and being around people. gabrielle didn't want to have anything to do with people. she wanted to get lost in the jungle and sit on the lip of a volcano. she wanted to go places that no human had ever been. if you've lived a life that was constantly controlled by the people around you, this makes a lot of sense. lestat did not live with the same limitations that gabrielle did, so he didn't understand her desire.

i loved gabrielle. i loved that she was defiant and androgynous and ferociously independent. i loved that she wasn't easy to like or be around, i loved that she never really took a companion other than lestat (i think there was a suggestion that she and jessie had a bit of a connection, but it was brief). i loved that she still cared for lestat and felt responsible for him, even if they weren't the companions they once were. and to see all of that flattened out into abuser just honestly breaks my heart. and it feels cruel to take a character that just wanted some fucking freedom and turn her into a monster.

i don't like to make assumptions about what's going in the writers' heads (even though a lot of other people in fandom do), but this choice with gabrielle/gabriella is really upsetting when you think about it. they did not have to go this way with this story at all. like, was it really so hard to write a complicated female character without turning her into a villain? much the same way claudia, who was an incredibly complex and vivid character, seemed to be reduced to her rage in this season, when she was so much more than that.