Honestly after what they’ve done to Gabrielle and Magnus, I don’t want to see any new characters from TVC in this show ever again.
@auroraandromeda Happy to explain how it’s different!
In the books, Magnus never raped Lestat. He stalked him, kidnapped him, and made him a vampire in an extremely scary and horrifying sequence of events, but it did not include sexual assault. The show’s take on it not only adds an SA that was completely unnecessary, as the whole event was traumatic enough as portrayed in the book without that, but it also completely flattens and in my opinion misinterprets Magnus as a character.
Magnus is not just some random creepy obsessed fan who happens to be a vampire. When he was mortal, he was an alchemist who kept company with a several thousand year old vampire named Rhoshamandes (a fledgling of Akasha herself) and his coven of beautiful fledglings, including his favorite and lover, Benedict. Rhoshamandes was fond of Magnus as he considered him clever and brilliant, but he refused to give Magnus the Dark Gift of immortality because his vanity would not allow it. He only ever made or allowed the young and beautiful to be made vampires in his domain, and Magnus was already old and described as an unattractive person who had physical disabilities or bodily differences. It’s for this reason he was rejected as a candidate for transformation and being brought into the Blood. Magnus, however, did not take no for an answer, and through Benedict’s carelessness he managed to find where Benedict rested while vulnerable in the daytime, chained him, and stole his blood from him in order to transform himself into a vampire. Rhoshamandes was fond enough of Magnus that he did not even try to attempt revenge for this transgressive affront and instead blamed his beloved Benedict for his carelessness, and they left Magnus alone to live out his newfound immortality in peace.
The Dark Gift made Magnus immortal, but whatever magic it worked on him could not restore his youth or make him beautiful. There is irony in this, as alchemy involved the ideas of transforming common metals into gold, curing disease, and attaining immortality. Magnus made himself immortal, but even with the power of the Blood he could not make himself young and beautiful or “transform himself into gold.” Over the course of roughly 300 years, he collects a fortune and goes mad and decides to end it all, but he wants an heir before he destroys himself. If he cannot transform and “perfect” himself, then he can at least live on through the legacy of a perfect heir.
Enter Lestat, the Wolfkiller. So much is made of Lestat’s appearance at this point in the book, not because Magnus desires him sexually but because Lestat embodies the physical ideal that Magnus wanted to be himself but could not be. And if his physical perfection isn’t enough, the fact that he is the “brave Wolfkiller” who would do something equally as daring and legendary as Magnus himself capturing and stealing blood from a vampire makes Lestat completely the perfect heir. He is a symbol, the alchemization of Magnus’ imperfection into perfection. He is a son to be lived vicariously through, which is why Magnus can gleefully throw himself into the fire once the transformation is complete. Lestat is completely violated, he never gives his consent, and this transformation is completely horrific enough on its own.
The point of Magnus’ motivations and choice of Lestat as his heir is driven home later in the Prince Lestat trilogy, where Magnus eventually reappears as an embodied ghost. The stronger ghosts that materialize later in the series have developed the ability to present themselves physically however they desire—to a certain degree and with a few glitches here and there—and Magnus presents himself in such a way that vampires who knew him back when he was a vampire don’t recognize him at all at first. He presents himself as a physically typical, handsome middle-aged man with blond-ish hair and gray eyes and “a generous mouth” (a very specific feature Lestat earlier described himself as possessing). The fact that this is the appearance that Magnus chooses for himself later on as ghost when he is able to do so makes it clear that in choosing Lestat, he was choosing an idealized “self” to pass his gifts and his wealth to since he would not be able to achieve such a transformation himself in that lifetime.
Bearing all of that in mind, I’ve been very disappointed with the show’s decision to add in sexual assaults that did not happen in the books (beginning with Claudia in s1) as well as with the framing of these alterations and additions to the plot as “necessary” in order to “toughen a character up” or to “explain why a character is the way they are.” To me it is extremely lazy, as there are plenty of ways to flesh out and connect characters that don’t involve adding sexual assaults that were never present in the source material (and God knows there’s already enough of that in this source material as is!). There are other traumas and horrors that do not include sexual assault, and it feels trivializing of those traumas and horrors to treat them as though they are not enough on their own to explain a character’s psyche, motivations, or actions. Furthermore, in this particular case, I feel that they have completely misinterpreted and flattened Magnus as a character. The book’s depiction of him could already have used a good helping of nuance given the conflation of his physical appearance with monstrosity and the theme of equating physical beauty and desirability with perfection, but rather than treat the character with any nuance at all, the show has instead doubled down on the depiction of him as nothing more than an obsessed monstrous creep by making him a rapist and giving us nothing at all of the character’s symbolism in the book. To butcher one character this way would be egregious enough, but this on top of what they’ve already done to Gabrielle is what makes me hope they never touch any of the other characters that haven’t been cast or who we haven’t been introduced to yet.
