#she's a good actress and it would have imparted how young elizabeth was by our standards to rule when she did

[navree]

haven’t watched it but i think part of the issue surrounding how becoming elizabeth handled thomas seymour’s abuse of elizabeth, from what i’ve seen them do, is honestly age inappropriate casting. alicia seems like a very good actress, but she’s nearly 30, and meant to be playing someone who, at the time of these events, was thirteen to fourteen years old. it looks a lot different to see two adults, one 28 and the other 36, flirting and engaging in each other sexually, than it does when it’s a nearly forty to forty year old man exhibiting that same behavior towards someone whose barely a teenager under his care. 

like, for one, it would have reined in whoever was gunning for there to be sexually explicit scenes between seymour and elizabeth, because legally you just cannot film a child engaging in sex acts, even simulated, for public consumption (for example, it’s part of why they aged up daenerys in GOT and had an adult actress playing her considering her storylines, and toned the sexuality and also sexual violence/threats of sexual violence against arya and sansa wayyyyyy down because they couldn’t age those characters the way they could her), so if nothing else, casting someone around elizabeth’s historical age means we don’t get a sex scene, for whatever reason, and they don’t get to turn an abuse situation into Sexy Dark Dangerous Temptation, even if it would have been only due to legalities. 

and for two, like i said, it literally does change how this whole thing looks and feels to an audience that might not be aware of the history, to have it go from someone who was BARELY FOURTEEN being abused by her de-facto stepfather, to a woman who is well into adulthood flirting with a fellow adult man. it not only changes how the writers appear to have viewed the situation, and how they chose to portray that situation once they got around to actually filming it, but it changes how audiences and viewers would see that situation as well. it validates these ideas that elizabeth was somehow a willing and able participant in her abuse, that she somehow knew what she was doing and was complicit, the way we’d look at an adult woman having an affair with a married man. 

i get it, finding child actors who can take on this kind of role with the amount of talent needed is hard, especially given not only how hit and miss child acting can be but also the subject matter, but was the only option really then to cast a very adult woman when they KNEW they were going to be so sexually explicit and apparently insensitive with seymour’s abuse of elizabeth and her ability to handle it? they found oliver and bella, and alicia is clearly not some big name they were using to draw in prospective viewership, so was it so impossible to just search a bit harder while casting to find, like, a good teenage actress, or did they just really want an excuse to show elizabeth having “consensual sex” with a man who historically literally molested and abused her while she was supposed to be under his care and power and protection?