I agree with everything you said about Gabrielle and the way she presents in the show etc etc etc but I also want to add that canonically, IN THE BOOKS, she keeps her hair long around Lestat because he prefers it like that. She's really presenting identically to how she did in the books, the only thing "missing" is the panic attack she gets after her hair grows back immediately but that wouldn't make sense in the show so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I agree that her presentation is a lot closer to the books than a lot of people either realize or want to admit. She keeps her hair long for a good portion of the book series, often in braids, but she definitely feminizes herself for Lestat, especially in the later books.
In the books, Gabrielle wearing long hair and sometimes even gowns for Lestat's benefit later on always spoke to me as evidence that she'd found freedom from gender in being a vampire. She was beyond gender, so what cloth she put on her body and her hair length were small concessions to make now and then, not genuine sacrifices to her identity. Again, these were just my own thoughts about the subject.
I think you're also right that her panic about her hair growing back wouldn't make as much sense in the show. She was freaking out about a lot of aspects of being a vampire early on (like being in the church) that would seem out of place with the way they're telling Gabriella's story. I do think in the books, the hair is significant, but I always saw it as less a need to express herself as masculine and more a fear of her very new powers (it was her second night as a vampire) combined with the fear that even in monstrosity, she'd still be confined to her role as a woman. But again, these are my own interpretations, and I definitely understand why people see different meaning in that moment than I do.
Thanks for stopping by! I really do enjoy discussing Gabriella and all the changes made to her character. It might not be to everyone's taste, but I find the show version of her fascinating, nuanced, and really complex, and I think a lot of people are writing off those things in order to see her as a moustache twirling sex bomb. It's sad to me.
And I think there's more of a connection to the Gabrielle in the books and Gabriella in the show than most people do too. There are changes they made early on that have caused really interesting ripple effects amongst all the characters, but she's the only one who gets kinda relegated to "completely different character" while others get to be discussed in tandem with their book counterparts with genuine analysis and interest.
