Do you feel a bit like whatever the show is doing with G is being buried under everyone's expectations for what a female-mother-vampire character should be? (We need Akasha and other women stat... )
Like with the club scene, I'm not 100% sure yet what's the what, but I can't imagine they have G kissing a woman just to pander to the male audience gaze (I feel like G would be styled more form-fitting/revealing if that was the aim of the scene? Egg on my face if I'm wrong in the end).
I mean /I'm/ also biased because I want it to be a nod also to the 70s lesbian vampire films, so I'm not one to talk (I want a queer female vampire 😅), but I feel like many people are eager for a reason to not think deeply about her unless she's doing exactly what they want on screen.
Again, maybe I'll be wrong and it's all shallow and 2-D...but I'm holding on til ep 7. She's somehow too obscene and too tame at the same time...which makes me feel like nobody wants to crack her open and see what ticks.
Do you have any thoughts about Gabi and gender?
God I have so much to say because there are so many different aspects to the reaction to Gabi.
I'm honestly like... so shocked that I'm in the minority of people who really love what the show is doing with Gabi so far. I watched episode 2 and was so excited to see what everyone had to say about Gabi but I guess for a moment I lived in a world where misogyny didn't exist or something. Insert "'we need more complex female characters' you can't even handle Gabrielle" meme here.
And yeah I do think a lot of fandom perception is being heavily scewed by disgust. And I don't mean disgust at incest in general (which is absolutely valid and is the intended response), I mean specific disgust at incest and incestuous abuse from a mother.
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.
In conclusion I think this episode is gonna be up there with one of my favourites of the entire show and Gabi is very quickly rising the ranks to become one of my favourite characters. I really love what the show is doing with her and I think the general fandom reaction is much more of a reflection of their own misogyny than the writers. Yes the incest is definitely a step further than the other forms of abuse we've seen in the show so far, but why is it tainting fandom reception so strongly compared to the male characters who are all abusive in their own ways yet are beloved by fans? She's not two dimensional, fandom just refuses to sit with their disgust long enough to look at her complexities.
Okay so Victorian erotica is literally the most heinous, morally bankrupt, horrific shit I've ever read - but I've read a fair bit, partly from historical interest but also because a while back I helped a friend with a university project she was doing about censorship and pornography in 19th century England.
Anyway I need to share with you all the most hilarious line that has ever been written, circa 1887:
I feel like this excerpt is significantly enhanced by knowing that the novel in question is a first-person narrative written from the perspective of an inexplicably sapient flea who lives on Bella's body, and that's why the third priest's penis is described in this way: from the narrator's perspective it literally blots out the sky.
I miss when you could go into the tags of a fandom and find really cool people making shit purely for the love of it, nowadays you join a fandom and it's essential for your sanity to make 2-3 mutuals who get you and then get the fuck outa there as fast as possible or you’ll develop a deep resentment for it
i think this captures the defining pathology of the collective social media psyche right now. we are in the thrall of people who are wantonly cruel but who also demand to be coddled at all times in every way
I would actually make the argument that the heart of the problem here is not either about fans, as the article claims, or production companies being exploitative cowards, as some of the comments are claiming. The heart of the problem is the increasingly eroding privacy we are seeing in the modern age.
There's some people in the comments saying "fandoms have always been like this" and others saying "No, it's worse than it was." And both are to some extent right. Fans (or at least a small percentage of fans, and the larger a fanbase gets the larger a group this will describe) have always been Like That; but they did not always have the level of access to creators and actors that they have now.
The notion that a performer needs to be constantly available to public scrutiny, that their personal information should by default be available to any rando with google, is pretty new. It used to be that actors would only be expected to engage with the public on limited, specific, and controlled occasions, usually with security provided. Now they're being asked to rawdog exposure to the mob 24/7 on their own.
(Also, production companies have always always always been exploitative cowards, just to get that straight; reading the biographies of literally any actress from golden Hollywood years makes that clear. It's just, again, more public now.)
There has also been a negative feedback loop as fandoms come to realize that the constant access they have to creatives increases their leverage and power. It did not use to be the case that this was so; fandoms pre-internet largely worked under the assumption that they didn't really have any meaningful way to contact or influence the publication houses. Even if they sent a letter or a campaign of letters, they wouldn't even know whether the letters were being received or read unless the publishing house chose to respond. So, without that expectation of access, the drama usually stayed internal. Nowadays, with constant immediate feedback from creators and publishers, fans are ever more incentivized to act out to try to push an agenda, get attention, or just vent whatever is going on in their lives onto a face contractually obliged to be friendly to them.
INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE 3.02: Toledo TVLTwT/IWTVTwT Version.
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Crazy how many people want characters in fiction to speak and act like they’ve had 20 hours of intensive therapy. Could NOT be me I want these bitches fucked up insane
That would have been an incredible episode of Batman: The Animated Series, though. Joker gets out of Arkham, having convinced the psychs he's rehabilitated by speaking in fluent Therapy. Bats spends the entire episode losing his mind, because he KNOWS it's an act because NO ONE TALKS LIKE THAT and Joker reacts with total calm and understanding when he finds Batman in his pantry at 2AM. "You're violating a boundary right now, but I realize this behavior is caused by a history of trauma. Can we talk about how your inability to trust negatively affects those around you?" Meanwhile steam is just coming out of Batman's ears
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