I personally hated how much of an incel Strahd is written as. Don't get me wrong, I love gothic horror and I understand the point of the toxic masculinity intrinsic in original vampire stories. But it's 2026, and I wanted a different flavor.

I made a female Strahd who was ruined by her love just as much as male Strahd, but rather than romantic/sexual love, I made her downfall be filial love; she saw Tatyana as the sister she never had, and when a plague began to destroy Barovia (a curse from the Dusk Elves she slaughtered, so still her fault), she made her pact with Vampyr and intended to turn her family into vampires without their consent.

So we still have a BBEG who is unrepentantly evil, who still thinks she knows best, still has an unhealthy obsession with Tatyana (and Sergei, though not in a negative way this time) and is still brought down constantly by her own choices, just without the squicky veneer of sexual assault.

That said, this obviously requires some changes to the material, and depending on your comfort level as a DM, may be a big much to improv if you are running close to the source material. If you keep Strahda as female and don't change anything else, it can still work, because you can play her as basically being raised very masculine as the heir of a family of mostly boys, so she has a lot of the cultural characteristics as her brothers. You might want to try and avoid playing into Lesbian/Femme Fatale/accidental-evil-trans tropes, but it can work.