The only ones deemed worthy of guarding the Emerald Malkia, the queen mother serpent from which all Legacies draw strength.” To me, that’s a prose poem. This is a show for people who enjoy watching fabulous women of a certain age in cheap blonde wigs swan around one of those stucco mansions where they film porn, purring expository gibberish like, “For a thousand years, our family has been the most powerful among Legacies. In the world of First Kill, vampire immortality apparently manifests as visible Botox. Juliette must live up to the expectations of her overbearing mother and godmother, who look like the villainous realtors in a Hallmark Christmas movie. It means that the family literally gains its powers from worshipping an actual magic snake they keep in a trunk. Does this imply that Eve was a vampire? No. Furthermore, their bloodline is matrilineal. Juliette was born a vampire instead of made one, because she’s part of a long line of legacy vampires dating back to … the snake in the Garden of Eden. All vampire stories introduce their own sets of vampire rules, and in First Kill, each layer of their world is stupider than the last. Wondering whether or not Twilight exists in this show’s universe is a perfect example of the best thing about this show: the world-building. In fact, as sort of a warning of cringe to come, the theme song features the spectacularly bad rhyme, “All of your friends, they’d try to kill us / but only because they’d be jealous / that our love is deeper than Edward and Bella’s.” The fact that both of them have the power to kill the other makes their dynamic hew closer to Buffy and Spike than the metaphorical Mormon soaking technique of Bella and Edward (although there’s also plenty of chaste staring-into-each-other’s-eyes and hand-holding). Like a good chunk of their time onscreen together is steamy hookups set to uncanny valley Netflix Bangers™️. Both of them have been preparing to make their titular first kill, and have chosen the other as a target, but instead of going in for the final blow … they end up making out a lot. But theirs is a forbidden love not because they’re gay (both characters are out to their families and peers at the start of the series without friction or conflict), but because Juliette comes from a long line of legacy vampires and Cal comes from a line of monster hunters. It follows Sarah Catherine Hook as goody-two-shoes Juliette and Imani Lewis as new girl Calliope, two high-schoolers with an instant, intense attraction to each other. It’s based on one of her short stories, although it has the overall feel of one of those shows that was optioned off a Wattpad post. The show is a supernatural romance created by Victoria Schwab, a fantasy novelist with a prolific output of numerous book series with names like Monsters of Vanity and Shades of Magic. It was called First Kill, and it was beautiful. And in 2022, Netflix created a series that catered to the kids of today, who I guess see themselves in overly sincere gay vampires raised on Tumblr porn and bad YA. There was the cool, aesthetic angst of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet for elder millennials, and Lion King II: Simba’s Pride for younger ones. In the teen revolution of the late 1950s and early 1960s, that meant West Side Story, with its racial tensions and dueling street-toughs. We lay our scene in yet another loose Romeo & Juliet adaptation for horned-up youths of a different era. Two households, both alike in utter indignity.
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