https://twitter.com/iwtv_updates/status/1948742102709370953?t=dd1YBlOkRLLxIfS9TCkdKA&s=19 here is rumoroud Baby Jenks! Do you think she's getting aged up? I can see this actress playing teen with appropriate styling and suspension of disbelief.
Also I have already seen people not liking her being white, which is actually I agree with, especially since she 99% will parallel Claudia in Lestat's mind
!! Thank you for sharing, anon, and I don't think she's getting aged up actually, no. She looks really young in the face to me, and I hope this doesn't sound weird, but given Baby Jenks is 14 and has very recently been pregnant when she's turned / was literally dying in the process of becoming Not Pregnant when she becomes a vampire, I think that her potentially being more mature in certain parts of her body works for the role.
In terms of her being white , I feel the need to clarify that she is in the book and - I hope people don't read this the wrong way either, but I actually kind of think she should be in the show too? If they keep Baby Jenks to her tiny little arc in QOTD (and this is about to be potentially very spoilery, so just a heads up!), raceswapping her could have a lot of pretty ugly connotations. I don't know if you or the people who are unhappy about her being white have read the books, but Baby Jenks is a 14 year old, pregnant drug addict when she's turned. The leader of the Fang Gang, Killer - now likely confirmed to be Bruce, Claudia's rapist - has a penchant for 14-year-old girls in the books (hence the speculation that they've been the same character all along), and he finds Baby Jenks dying in the streets from a back alley abortion and he takes her and he turns her.
Her being Black in that context has a pretty insidious racial stereotype attached already, given the criminalisation of Black girls both broadly and specifically, but it also racialises Killer/Bruce's crime. He's a pedophile, there's no doubt about that in either the book or the show I don't think, but to make him a predator specifically to young Black girls would open a door narratively that I don't think the show's prepared to step through, given it's not the story it's trying to tell.
On top of that, Baby Jenks never meets Lestat or Louis in the books. Lestat's moved by the story of her (and I'm going to circle back to that in a second), but Akasha burns her alive while Baby Jenks is on her way to Lestat's concert. Lestat's inability to reconcile that senseless brutality - because it is senseless, Akasha has no reason to burn this girl alive, and she does so from a distance - is a part of what anchors Lestat to himself during that arc, and to have another Black girl's body senselessly burnt to remind a white man of his humanity I think has really ugly connoatations.
And look, with that comes the reality too that the root of Claudia and Baby Jenks' similarities comes through their burning, but also through the fact that they are the two characters who kill their parents. It's really, really important that Lestat can never do that. He can never kill the mother and father who neglected, abused and assaulted him, no matter how much he wanted to, and I love that about him, just as I love the fact that both Claudia and Baby Jenks can, and do.
To have both of those characters be young Black girls (and again, they're both young white girls in the books), I think has potentially a pretty racist subtext too. You're positioning the three characters who fantasise about parricide as connected, and yet the white man can't do it, while - if Baby Jenks was to also be Black - the two Black girls would be the ones 'monstrous' enough to do it. It would feel really loaded to me as a viewer, and I don't know, maybe others would find that an easier pill to swallow, but I think tying both that power and that specific sort of crime to girlhood itself rather than Black girlhood changes the conversation than if it was only Black girls capable of murdering their parent.
I actually re-read the Baby Jenks chapter of QOTD last night too, and I was thinking a lot about how the show's done quite a bit already to bring their version of Claudia more into line with her, and the parallels are loud and they're there, but in a lot of ways, Baby Jenks as she exists is a midway point between Claudia and Lestat's experiences. She's the point in the Venn diagram where their history meets. She had loveless loving parents who exploited and abused her, and she was a child thrown to the wolves, and - in the show's context - she was likely raped by her maker, and she killed her mother, even as she loved her, and she was burned alive for the act of being born at all.
Baby Jenks isn't just a parallel to the show's version of Claudia, I think in a lot of ways she's a meeting point for that versiion of Claudia and Lestat. She's both their experiences, and neither of theirs, she's her own person, and she never gets to be, because she's killed at the first taste of freedom just as Claudia was at the trial, just as Lestat was by Magnus.
Her being a girl, like Claudia, and white, like Lestat, makes sense to me, and I think it both avoids some of the ugly potential racial stereotypes, but also lets Claudia remain Lestat and Louis' daughter. There are parallels with their stories, yes, but Baby Jenks isn't a stand-in for Claudia. She's just a girl and a vampire who was trying to go to his concert, and Lestat never knows her, he just hears her story at a point, and cares enough about it to write it down in QOTD (and again, I never thought this little story would make it into the show at all, but I love that it is, especially after re-reading it), and I can't wait to see how the show depicts it (and inevitably have my heart broken).
