nadjalover69 - Tumblr blog

nadjalover69 · 30 days ago

Text

on the guide, writing women in wwdits, and that ending

I firmly believe the Guide is the one of the most wasted, underutilized, and massacred characters in the show, and the series finale only confirms this. So let's talk about why!

The Guide is interesting as a character study in regression; when we first see her, despite being a lackey for the Vampiric Council, she is quite powerful and assertive. She has no issue telling off our main Vamily (insert Colin Robinson smile to camera here) and we see her in S3 repeatedly fixing the messes everyone causes at the Council all while bemoaning her position. Sure, she is a joke to our main vampires at best, and a nuisance at worst, but she does have power and clout and a voice.

Then when S4 roles around, we finally get some legitimate backstory for her. She used to be a "messy" vampire, and her current uptight personality is essentially a dramatic 360 after suppressing all of her raunchiest memories and being forced into eternal servitude. This is interesting! Even more interesting is how she changes in response to learning this about herself - we see her reject Guillermo despite her passion because she isn't that person anymore ..... and become entirely wrapped up in serving Nadja.

While she is technically the butt of the joke for the whole Vamily, she becomes most clearly Nadja's kicked dog. She vies for Nadja's attention, friendship, and approval. We see her constantly trailing Nadja and helping her with the nightclub in various ways. And of course, we see how Nadja derides her, dismisses her, and on occasion, throws her a pathetic bone (such as 'gifting' her the vial box during the Wraith Union episode). By this point, we as the audience KNOW the Guide is quite powerful and capable in her own right; and yet, here she is, nipping at Nadja's heels like a lost puppy and desperately trying to be included.

In many ways, the Guide is set up very directly as a foil for Guillermo, with Nadja as her master (MISTRESS NADJA!!!). Both Guillermo and the Guide are powerful and unique in their own right, both more intelligent than the other vampires in many cases, and yet, both are seeking acceptance from those same vampires who treat them like dirt. It is good writing! And a good way to establish that despite Guillermo's dreams of becoming a vampire, it will not guarantee him the love and acceptance he is seeking from Nandor and the rest.

And then the writers almost completely abandon it. We get very little commiseration between Guillermo and the Guide post her rejection of him, and instead as Guillermo becomes more clearly loved and accepted and PROTECTED by the Vamily, the Guide is shoved in his place as the butt of many "not you" jokes. There is no clear purpose given for this beyond that the writers find it funny; after all, the Guide herself is no longer the uptight pencil pusher we meet her as, so the Vamily's repeated rejection of her just feels like a cheap gag - one that gets less and less funny as time goes on, since the Guide IS often included in Vamily hijinks. Clearly she is ALLOWED to be around them, so the hate directed to her feels forced for a cheap laugh rather than having some legitimate purpose.

And then all of this culminates in Morrigan Manor, right? An excellent episode that shows the Guide's true personality (she is fun! she is clever! she listens to the interests of the Vamily and cares about them!) as well as how hurt she is to be rejected by them (rejected by Nadja specifically - we will come back to that). She doesn't imprison Guillermo and draws a direct connection between the way she is treated and the way they treat him ...... but while Guillermo has spent the season in cahoots with Nadja/Colin/Laszlo, who have hidden his secret to protect him and have proved they care about him, the Guide gets none of that. She gets false closure via a handpicked clip that turns out to be another joke at her expense! And for no good reason! She has now spent three seasons proving she wants to be and can be a good friend to them, that as a vampire she is powerful and useful to them, her personal interests (painting and maintaining archives) are things the other vampires also show interest in ....... and yet!

I've seen arguments that the Vamily are "selective" about their friendships, that friendship is the most meaningful thing for vampires, that the Guide *wanting* to be their friend is why they won't let her, but I'm sorry, no. All of the vampires make plenty of friends, if not with other vampires than with humans throughout the seasons. One of the longest running arcs in the show is that of Sean with Laszlo, and we see how both Nandor and Nadja accommodate that friendship without real question or pushback. Even in Pine Barrens, the problem Nandor has is not that Laszlo likes Sean better, it is that Laszlo has been neglecting Nandor. Nandor just wants to be INCLUDED in guy time; he tries to connect with Sean himself and has no real issue with the guy!

The Guide isn't accepted into the Vamily, despite actively helping them for four seasons, because the writers think it is funnier for her to be the new Guillermo - except without ANY character arc or importance. She is the cheap gag they can trot out whenever necessary, and the series finale really leans hard into that by both making her a parody of a Trump supporter for a quick laugh (a joke that by and large just wasn't funny and felt extremely out of place in the series - even beyond the optics of making that kind of joke, it felt lazy and was only aiming for a shock value laugh) and making her body into a commodity for the Monster to lust over. She is stripped of much of her agency and anger for no real purpose. The only shining moment for her this season, her rejection of Nandor, feels like a breath of fresh air that is immediately forgotten about in favor of making her into the woman who gets shit on and ignored for laughs.

The Guide could have been used for anything. Anything! She is older than some of the Vamily, has a very fun hinted at backstory, has different powers and a disposition to the rest of the main cast - and is played by KRISTEN SCHAAL, a veritable comedy icon at this point. And yet, she is shoved to the background, only brought out into the forefront for a cheap joke at her expense - a joke that stopped being funny seasons ago.

All of which has to do with the show's inability to write women.

Nadja, a main character for god's sake, by the end of the show is turned into a dumb angry woman caricature - her arc, of trying to find her own voice and purpose amidst a household of narcissistic men, is cast aside in favor of cheap jokes about not 'getting' humans, despite spending five previous seasons being shown as extremely competent with humans. Her and Laszlo's strife this season feels like it is solely in service to Laszlo's arc surrounding his desire for creation/fatherhood while doing nothing to further Nadja's own arc of self actualization. (Side note: I know a lot of people disliked them fighting this season and said it came out of nowhere, but that isn't true; as far back as the Bloody Mary episode, we see Laszlo trying to 'protect' Nadja and her being exasperated with him - the problem this season is that it doesn't feel like Nadja gets any real agency in Laszlo's concern for her. Every time she tries to put up a boundary, he steamrolls over it with grand declarations of his love. It sucks!) Post the Nightclub arc, Nadja's character loses steam and she exists solely to further other character's arcs, while her own goals and dreams and plans are abandoned. Dolly's entire existence was about trying to help Nadja find purpose, something Nadja nor the viewers ever get closure on!

The WWDITS writer's room is seemingly allergic to writing women beyond making them jokes or commodities for men. Despite multiple seemingly self aware meta jokes in series about Nadja hating other women because she is a woman, about the men in the house being misogynistic and obnoxious, the writer's over and over entrench these annoying and backwards and LAZY tropes, all while giving characters like Colin Robinson and Laszlo legitimate arcs and serious moments of personhood and reflection that are not immediately cheapened by a joke. Laszlo has not one but TWO seasons dedicated to working through his daddy issues by becoming a father himself, something that in my humble opinion (while not done perfectly) was clearly given some thought and care that we never really see with Nadja post S3.

So it is no surprise that the Guide is just completely wasted, though it is a shame. An easy to write arc would have been exploring a possible attraction between the Guide and Nadja (once again, a fun foil to Guillermo and Nandor!!) especially because it is clear that the Guide does have feelings for Nadja. In the clipshow in Morrigan Manor, despite all of the Vamily being cruel to her, the only clips are of Nadja. The Guide is eager to run away with Nadja (sorry, Sally!) and she spends all of S4 doing Nadja's bidding for seemingly just her approval. (But of course, the show is allergic to portraying anything gay unless it is a joke, and doubly so for anything even remotely sapphic).

Hell, S6 could have been an arc between the Guide and Nadja becoming legitimate friends and working together to help Guillermo at Cannon; after all, the Guide has spent years working in an 'office' like environment, and Nadja has experience with humans. We saw that they worked fine together during the nightclub era - post Morrigan Manor why not show them growing together and finding a purpose outside of the Council and outside of the Vamily, something that both the Guide and Nadja would benefit from as characters? Why not a female comedy duo, since we always get the men paired together for hijinks?

But that would require treating Nadja and the Guide as characters worthy of arcs, which the writers clearly did not want to do. That would require treating women as people with interiority, which the writers clearly do not.

I give so many props to Natasia for working with bare minimum in later seasons, and clearly trying to give Nadja a sense of self and purpose even when the writers were actively working against it. And I give props to Kristen for making the Guide into a fan favorite despite everything the writers did to make her into a nothing burger. It is a shame and tragedy that even in 2024 on a long running comedy show, the idea of women being funny enough to carry their own stories and arcs is clearly still too farfetched to be brought to reality.

124 notes · View notes