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Mr Malone
I used to be a big fan of OLTL, but with the additions of characters that I absolutely cannot stand namely, The Rappaports, I am totally not into it anymore. My question to you is that since you created the Vega family, what is your take on the current way they are writing them? Cristian has become a liar and thief pratically over night, Antonio is absolutely NOT the same and Carlotta is MIA!!!!! What's your opinion????
Toria64
. Dear Toria64,
I'm afraid I'm not the best person to answer your question about the current way the Vegas are being written because I don't watch One Life and I haven't done so for some time. I stopped because I found the changes being made in the show distressing.
I can tell you that when we created the Vega family and the world of Angel Square in which they lived, our goal (as with our earlier goal in introducing the Gannons) was to restore to One Life the economic and ethnic diversity with which it had begun when Agnes Nixon created it. When I arrived there, Llanview had slipped into a white middle-class comfort zone. It was important to me to bring in a wider and richer canvas. To introduce characters who had to deal with the very real problems that poverty and prejudice can impose in this country.
With the Vegas, I wanted to show the remarkable courage and moral fineness of a woman like Carlotta Vega (a woman we'd never met before outside her duties as Dorian's maid). What would her personal life be like? What sorts of struggles, defeats and triumphs would she undergo in her heroic commitment to raise her two sons to be strong, decent, and loving men? I wanted to show a young man like Christian caught between his conscience, his talent and his goodness (the qualities that made Jessica fall in love with him) on the one hand, and on the other, the dangerous peer pressure there was in Angel Square to join with a gang to bolster a sense of belonging. I wanted to show Antonio's hard-fought battle to overcome the scars of a violent past in order to save his younger brother and his own future.
I don't know what's happened to those three fictional people. But that's how they started out. I loved and admired all three.
Cordially,
Michael Malone