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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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You know, I have never met a man who likes the Dumas books but was incensed that too much time gets devoted to this Milady character, or how it's bullshit that she's so powerful. Dumas chose to devote many more chapters to Milady. The chapters about her mission to kill the Duke of Buckingham are from her point of view. Dumas published the chapters serially, a lot of his readers were men, and I take it as evidence that he responded as much to popular demand as he did to his own creative urges.

I think I wasn't able to communicate my idea clear enough. You are correct that Dumas wrote her as a competent villain of the selfish, ignoble, scheming kind. And she meets her end in a way that is appropriate for this kind of villain: desperate, groveling, clutching at every straw until her head is struck down into the mud. However, this puts the modern writers in a bind: they need a "strong female character" and Milady as she has been written doesn't work as one:

  • if she meets her end on the bank of the Lys, she's no longer a suitable self-insert for female viewers
  • if she ultimately escapes her punishment, this will anger male viewers

The writers chose the easiest way out: Milady now competes with men in the male sphere: she's a dashing rogue now, someone who, even after sending Constance to her death, has the possibility of a redemption arc. No longer are underhanded tactics implicitly coded as feminine. Could the writers have come up with a different Milady, one that could attract female viewership, not alienate male viewership and at the same time not be an ahistorical girlboss? In theory, yes, but no one has time for this kind of tightrope walking in practice.

Or they could... y'know... follow the book. A pox on directors who think that they should make significant deviations from the source material when adapting books for the screen.