- Location
- Melbourne
Also it depends on the storytelling medium. Speaking of which which is the most powerful vampire in all fiction? Alucard from Helsing Ultimate is up there but I know he's one of the most powerful not most.
I want to suck your blood - Vampires and the vampire concept
- Thread starter Ford Prefect
- Start date
Also it depends on the storytelling medium. Speaking of which which is the most powerful vampire in all fiction? Alucard from Helsing Ultimate is up there but I know he's one of the most powerful not most.
Nerx
Chikin Noodle
- Location
- Sunda Kelapa
I would love to see vampire sciences, maybe they have a cross between a blender, food processor and a cold press juice machine the size of a wood chipper.
Like dump a human inside and take out a box of blood for later consumption, packed and vacuum sealed.
Like dump a human inside and take out a box of blood for later consumption, packed and vacuum sealed.
Xexilf
Oblivion Sempiternum Daemonis
It really depends where you cut of the definition of Vampire.
Theres vampire-ish gods, stuff like type moon from ... well, type moon, shounen-anime-vampires who seem to escalate past any sense of scale of the writers, and mandrakk the anti monitor (or something like that) from dc(? i think) comics, who at one point was multi-universal in power.
It may be more of a question of how powerful someone can be while still playing any kind of role like a normal vampire in a story, and arguably alucard is already past that.
- Location
- Melbourne
Guess Alucard it is then.
- Location
- Melbourne
So back to my point. How would Christian Vampires effect our history? Assume point of divergence is 50 AD.
Nerx
Chikin Noodle
- Location
- Sunda Kelapa
- The crusades would end a lot differenty, are they allowed to partake in heathen blood or does that go against the tenets of the church ?
- They may be more forgiving to witches and wolves since they are of similar background, maybe get them to repent
- Their night evangelism would be an interesting spectacle
- Thanks to eucharist they can partake in bread and wine.
- Location
- Melbourne
In this case nothing else exists. Also heathen blood is acceptable. Blood is blood.
I watched the first three episodes, and found it amusing, but I wasn't sure I wanted to make it a regular part of my schedule.
Nerx
Chikin Noodle
- Location
- Sunda Kelapa
Come to think of it with all the collected riches vampires ought to have better security forces, maybe ex navy seals or PMC's who can be sent into holy ground to plug up the holy people. Why have a Renfield when you can have someone from Treadstone?
I remember watching fright night, the original and the remake. That vampire is clever in circumventing limitations.
I remember watching fright night, the original and the remake. That vampire is clever in circumventing limitations.
- Location
- Melbourne
Vampire Priests would be interested as well. Think Anderson instead of Sliced though.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
What does this thread think of jazz vampires?
- Location
- Melbourne
So anyone interested in talking about what kind of animals vampires can turn into?
Wolves, bats, rats, and armadilloes, are the bare minimum IMO.
Daniel Estacado
ZA WARUDO
Why armadillos? I get everything else, just not that last one.
There was famously an armadillo in Dracula's castle in the 1931 film by Tod Browning and starring Bela Lugosi.
AIUI, No one knows why.
So, my headcanon is that vampires can turn into/control armadilloes along with the standard wolves, bats, and rats.
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Oooh, good choices.
So, hey, I'm reading Vampirella Archives right now. A notable element in these stories are the father-and-son vampire hunters Conrad and Adam Van Helsing.
While not stated, I believe the implication is that they are descendants of Dr. Van Helsing from Dracula.
This is, of course, a very common concept in a lot of vampire fiction and begets a question: when encountered in Dracula, Dr. Van Helsing is A: Elderly, B: Still faithful to his wife despite her being effectively dead to him due to her mental illness, and C: Childless. One therefore must ask; where do these descendants of Van Helsing come from?
Honestly, it'd make more sense for a work's vampire expert to be a descendant of the Harkers, Holmwood, or Dr. Seward; so far as I'm aware, the only work that does this is Marvel's old Dracula comics, wherein Johnathan and Mina's son is part of the Drac Pack, although his name is misspelled; but it also has Van Helsing's granddaughter in it.
While not stated, I believe the implication is that they are descendants of Dr. Van Helsing from Dracula.
This is, of course, a very common concept in a lot of vampire fiction and begets a question: when encountered in Dracula, Dr. Van Helsing is A: Elderly, B: Still faithful to his wife despite her being effectively dead to him due to her mental illness, and C: Childless. One therefore must ask; where do these descendants of Van Helsing come from?
Honestly, it'd make more sense for a work's vampire expert to be a descendant of the Harkers, Holmwood, or Dr. Seward; so far as I'm aware, the only work that does this is Marvel's old Dracula comics, wherein Johnathan and Mina's son is part of the Drac Pack, although his name is misspelled; but it also has Van Helsing's granddaughter in it.
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Shanejayell
Yuri Fan without a Pause
- Pronouns
- He
Did Van Helsing have brothers, sisters, etc etc? Could be same family but not directly descended.
The downsides of Vampire transforming.
The downsides of Vampire transforming.
daedalus725
Kell of Kells, godking of Planet X
- Location
- Daedalus crater, The moon
I mean he could have had kids
His relationship with the rest of the heroic portion of the cast is predicated on them becoming like the children he never had. IE, he is childless.
So, any children of his, he'd have to have after the novel. Now, as a good Catholic, he remains faithful to his wife, even though she's locked up in an asylum somewhere. It's unlikely she's going to be cured, but I suppose she could die and he could remarry. Except he's already an elderly man, and any courtship would take time, so he'd be even older.
Viagra doesn't exist yet, it's not likely he'll be reproducing any time soon.
- Location
- my house
Adoption
- Location
- United States
I like vampires, but I'm generally more into vampire folklore than modern vampire fiction. Like with dragons, elves, dwarves, werewolves, and other popular fantasy creatures at a certain point I reached the "this was a good meal but I'm full now" stage. I've seen too much of these things for them to really be novel to me as literary characters, and I find the folklore and the belief patterns behind it to be more fascinating.
That said I do enjoy such creatures on occasion, when I think the writer has found a fresh perspective on the whole thing. Dracula is a favorite novel of mine, and I think it's for some of the same reasons I like Tolkien and dislike derivative works drawing from both. Both Stoker and Tolkien were people fascinated by folklore and myth, and they poured over those old accounts of strange beliefs and primal fears, then picked and chose, keeping what they liked, discarding what they didn't, mixing in some elements of modern sensibilities, and creating something all their own. Other writers later looked at their work and just copied it with some few tweaks, which is nowhere near as impressive an effort. I find I'm mostly fascinated by authors who put in the legwork, going back to the well of belief and then trying to create something of their own out of the many contradictory traditions they find there.
And in that vein I find there's one aspect the vampires that is ripe for more exploration and rarely gets it: just who's in there, anyway?
In traditional vampire fiction, a vampire is usually controlled by the same personality that animated it in life. That's where much of the angst and drama comes from, as the person who has been transformed into a vampire grapples with his or her compulsion to kill other people and drink their blood. Some more modern takes have instead depicted them as little more than ravening, mindless monsters. Neither approach quite reflects the folklore, and I find that both interesting and frustrating, because there are dark uncharted waters there.
In folktales the creatures are not a talkative bunch. I can count the number of stories I've stumbled across where a vampire talks with a human being, or shows any sign that it remembers its previous life, on one hand. Likewise, you don't see much in the way of vampire communities. Secret vampire societies are a cliché in modern literature, but are entirely non-existent in Slavic tradition. Vampirism in folklore tends to be endemic, not epidemic, to any given society, and a vampire biting or killing someone doesn't necessarily mean they will become a vampire. Folkloric vampires are loners, and while they sometimes kill a number of people, few come back in the end, and they don't all hang out together.
Generally, the old Slavs seem to have believed it was an evil spirit that animated the vampire's corpse. Now, sure, sometimes it was the spirit of the same person, if they had been evil in life. Sometimes it was the spirit of somebody else, or a flat out demonic spirit, in which case they might use the memories of the deceased against the living.
Most often, it seems to be a foreign, hostile spirit of unknown origin. There was, for example, a tradition that a vampire could be created when a black cat jumped over a corpse, presumably hunting for the dead man's soul, since souls were often symbolized as mice in the Slavic tradition. As the old spirit leaves a horrible new one replaces it. Now some modern stuff like Buffy deals with this approach, but what's interesting is you don't often get a strong sense of the personality the possessing spirit has. It's usually just a generic kind of evil, a cackling bloodlust that doesn't give you any sense that this spirit had a history or "life" before it showed up in this person's corpse.
And even in the folklore they don't get into it that much. It's rarely spelled out that the devil or demons are animating vampires, and if that is mentioned it's fleeting and not detailed. For example, there's no tradition in dealing with vampires in the same way there is with demonic exorcisms, where you have to learn the name of the offending demon before you can drive it out. The closest I'm aware of to something like this is a folktale where a defeated vampire is burned on a pyre, only for the body burst and thousands snakes, crows, maggots, rats, etc, crawl out of the body and try to flee the fire. The villagers kill them with shovels and pitchforks and throw each one back onto the fire, as each creature was a little part of the vampire's evil spirit, and that if even one escaped it could find another body and start the cycle all over again. So an acknowledgement that vampires can be created by foreign spirits, but still no word on where the spirit originally came from or who it was to begin with.
And for the vampires that are clearly animated by the spirit of a dead humans they act more like ghosts than people, killing those they knew or loved in life for no clear reason, lingering around the places they used to live, acting out old routines, etc. It's not clear how much of them came back, or what motivates them.
I feel there's a lot of potential for fiction in all this, and it seems like it's rarely tapped into.
That said I do enjoy such creatures on occasion, when I think the writer has found a fresh perspective on the whole thing. Dracula is a favorite novel of mine, and I think it's for some of the same reasons I like Tolkien and dislike derivative works drawing from both. Both Stoker and Tolkien were people fascinated by folklore and myth, and they poured over those old accounts of strange beliefs and primal fears, then picked and chose, keeping what they liked, discarding what they didn't, mixing in some elements of modern sensibilities, and creating something all their own. Other writers later looked at their work and just copied it with some few tweaks, which is nowhere near as impressive an effort. I find I'm mostly fascinated by authors who put in the legwork, going back to the well of belief and then trying to create something of their own out of the many contradictory traditions they find there.
And in that vein I find there's one aspect the vampires that is ripe for more exploration and rarely gets it: just who's in there, anyway?
In traditional vampire fiction, a vampire is usually controlled by the same personality that animated it in life. That's where much of the angst and drama comes from, as the person who has been transformed into a vampire grapples with his or her compulsion to kill other people and drink their blood. Some more modern takes have instead depicted them as little more than ravening, mindless monsters. Neither approach quite reflects the folklore, and I find that both interesting and frustrating, because there are dark uncharted waters there.
In folktales the creatures are not a talkative bunch. I can count the number of stories I've stumbled across where a vampire talks with a human being, or shows any sign that it remembers its previous life, on one hand. Likewise, you don't see much in the way of vampire communities. Secret vampire societies are a cliché in modern literature, but are entirely non-existent in Slavic tradition. Vampirism in folklore tends to be endemic, not epidemic, to any given society, and a vampire biting or killing someone doesn't necessarily mean they will become a vampire. Folkloric vampires are loners, and while they sometimes kill a number of people, few come back in the end, and they don't all hang out together.
Generally, the old Slavs seem to have believed it was an evil spirit that animated the vampire's corpse. Now, sure, sometimes it was the spirit of the same person, if they had been evil in life. Sometimes it was the spirit of somebody else, or a flat out demonic spirit, in which case they might use the memories of the deceased against the living.
Most often, it seems to be a foreign, hostile spirit of unknown origin. There was, for example, a tradition that a vampire could be created when a black cat jumped over a corpse, presumably hunting for the dead man's soul, since souls were often symbolized as mice in the Slavic tradition. As the old spirit leaves a horrible new one replaces it. Now some modern stuff like Buffy deals with this approach, but what's interesting is you don't often get a strong sense of the personality the possessing spirit has. It's usually just a generic kind of evil, a cackling bloodlust that doesn't give you any sense that this spirit had a history or "life" before it showed up in this person's corpse.
And even in the folklore they don't get into it that much. It's rarely spelled out that the devil or demons are animating vampires, and if that is mentioned it's fleeting and not detailed. For example, there's no tradition in dealing with vampires in the same way there is with demonic exorcisms, where you have to learn the name of the offending demon before you can drive it out. The closest I'm aware of to something like this is a folktale where a defeated vampire is burned on a pyre, only for the body burst and thousands snakes, crows, maggots, rats, etc, crawl out of the body and try to flee the fire. The villagers kill them with shovels and pitchforks and throw each one back onto the fire, as each creature was a little part of the vampire's evil spirit, and that if even one escaped it could find another body and start the cycle all over again. So an acknowledgement that vampires can be created by foreign spirits, but still no word on where the spirit originally came from or who it was to begin with.
And for the vampires that are clearly animated by the spirit of a dead humans they act more like ghosts than people, killing those they knew or loved in life for no clear reason, lingering around the places they used to live, acting out old routines, etc. It's not clear how much of them came back, or what motivates them.
I feel there's a lot of potential for fiction in all this, and it seems like it's rarely tapped into.