- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Let me rephrase then: we didn't infiltrate cow society in order to hide among them so that we can eat them.
I want to suck your blood - Vampires and the vampire concept
- Thread starter Ford Prefect
- Start date
Let me rephrase then: we didn't infiltrate cow society in order to hide among them so that we can eat them.
That's a hilarious way to put it, but we kind of did, really! We exploited the natural social behaviour of cows in order to be able to walk around amongst them without getting gored and trampled. They see their farmers to a large extent as being a part of the herd; just like dogs see their owners as being part of the pack. Domestication has made the whole operation easier (and much safer) over time.
Like I understand what you're getting at here, but as I said a post ago; a better example of what you mean would be a tiger with deer. Or a fox in a henhouse, if you wanted to emphasize the absolutely wanton and needless carnage done purely out of lust for blood that vampires can embody.
One take, Dance in the Vampire Bund's vampires, aside from nobles and some very old ones, are superhuman but not unbeatable, below Werewolves... who're smaller in number and work as mercenaries for the Vampire Kingdom.
Vampires are kinda the top dog, but a lot of it has to do with their money and resources and plotting- and it had the interesting twist that vampires are naturally plotters and a bit self-destructive, with a lot dying young against each other because of their ambition causing them to plot for power.
On the flipside, I'm not a fan of when vampires are *too* predatory and leave body counts all the time. It harms their ability to blend in (especially if they work in a group), and there's just too many logical ways to get blood without killing.
I do like the 'bite as a means of control,' stuff in the original Dracula and a number of others, so it's sinister without 'let's go to where there's been a dozen disappearances in a month'. And/or bites gradually weakening the victims beyond what you'd expect from bloodloss.
xa na xa
A.E.I.O.U. - Antarticae est imperare orbi universo
- Location
- σ Octantis
It's great!
@Admiral Skippy , @Ford Prefect have you seen Jim Jarmush's Only Lovers Left Alive?
It shares with AGWHA and Let The Right One having classical vampires in a very contemporary and mundane settings (Detroit, Stockholm, Tehran) yet making them very personal and with unique characters:
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Continuing on the subject of vampire "power levels", I do feel that the best vampire stories are the ones where the vampire isn't that much more powerful than humans, that it is eminently possible for them to be defeated...if the heroes can manage to get their act together and be smart about it. This is also why it's significant that Vampires have so many weaknesses; they're more powerful than us because we let them be more powerful than us.
Again, corruption and disease*.
*Granted there are plenty of diseases we can't do anything about ATM, but that's never stopped us trying.
You're also thinking too big; the corruption represented by the vampire is personal, not societal.
What's odd to me is the way it always plays out, with the werewolves being (pardon the pun) the underdogs, which feels wrong to me for some reason.
Again, corruption and disease*.
*Granted there are plenty of diseases we can't do anything about ATM, but that's never stopped us trying.
Eh, you're getting a bit political there.
You're also thinking too big; the corruption represented by the vampire is personal, not societal.
What's forced about it is the conflict, not the association; I believe according to folklore, one of the ways to become a vampire is to die as a werewolf.
What's odd to me is the way it always plays out, with the werewolves being (pardon the pun) the underdogs, which feels wrong to me for some reason.
Eh, this has always struck me as odd, actually. If your vampire fiction is going to focus on the predator-prey relationship, it strikes me as weird for the vampires to be contemptuous of said prey; I mean, predation is hard, which is why a lot of hunter-gatherer societies (and quite a few agricultural ones, actually) actively revered their primary prey animals. Especially the ones that are dangerous, which humans are to vampires.
Jace911
Spider-Dork
- Location
- The Gold-Bricking State
Which folklore? There are about a billion lol
That's true.
It's actually weird, given that, as I understand it, the vampire legend* is relatively recent and localized compared to say, ghosts or werewolves, how much lore there is.
*Referring specifically to the critter who is both undead and drinks blood, and has a beef with crosses and sunlight; there are actually tons of anthrophagous undead and just as many blood-drinkers around the world, but calling them all vampires strikes me as even more disingenuous than referring to every big reptile as a dragon.
- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It's hard for humans; not so much for vampires.
I'm speaking in general. Lions have a hard time hunting, wolves have a hard time hunting, sharks have a hard time hunting.
Being a predatory carnivore is energy-intensive and has a relatively high failure rate. That's before one takes into account the possibility of the prey animal turning the tables and injuring the predator.
If you remove all that, we're not really talking about a predator anymore, we're talking more of a parasite.
Jace911
Spider-Dork
- Location
- The Gold-Bricking State
I think there's also an element of classism to it, going back to Dracula and the use of vampires as a metaphor of bloodsucking nobles. I honestly am not much of a scholar on classic vampire literature though so take that with salt.
Ah, I just figured out why vampire-as-aristocrat feels wrong to me.
Aristocrats aren't predators, they're parasites. Well, I mean they can be predators, but the baseline of aristocracy* is parasitic.
*Well, dysfunctional aristocracy; functional aristocracy would be more symbiotic, but obviously that's not what we're talking about here, and I'm not sure was really a thing all that often.
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- Location
- Luton Airport
- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
None of them are supernatural monsters, however. I don't really have much sympathy to the idea that vampires really play by the rules of other hunters.
Ruthven was more of a perfect murderer: if he wanted to kill someone he did it and no one could ever really pin it on him. The Vampyre is admittedly somewhat unusual compared to the other members of the 'Big Three' in that Lord Ruthven actually wins.
Jace911
Spider-Dork
- Location
- The Gold-Bricking State
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Which I think ties back to the "vampires as metaphors for sexual predators". Which is also why I'm somewhat weirded out by the endless cavalcade of Sexy Vampire stories, which seem to be actively missing the point. I mean I guess you can downgrade vampires into merely being symbolic of corruptive promiscuity, which in turn can be dismissed as excessively puritan views towards sexuality, but still.
Ooh, this thread could give me an excuse to pull out my notes from my Gothic theory course.
*blink* If they don't hunt, than how are they hunters?
Beg pardon? That was my point, was it not, that aristocrats generally are parasites?>implying aristocrats aren't parasitic
I suppose you're referring to my footnote that they're not supposed to be? Despite my expressing doubt that non-parasitic aristocracy was ever a thing?
- Location
- UK
As usual, the Laundry series puts its own twist on a common mythical creature in The Rhesus Chart.
In it, vampires are basically a form of demon, which covers anything below "eldritch abomination" that can interact with us from another universe. Their universe has gone through heat death, so they can only get energy from younger universes like ours. They do this by making a connection with a person, providing them with the tools to get the energy, and feed on them if they refuse to get the energy for them. So a person who is bound to a vampire will get the teeth, the immortality and the strength. They also get the aversion to sunlight for a reason I'm not clear on. When they suck blood, this forms a connection between the victim and the vampire, which the vampire then uses to take energy from that person. The result is similar to CJD, but much faster.
The characters who get bound to vampires at the beginning of the book don't realise that they're actually killing people when they drink blood, and they're pretty horrified when they find out. This is part of why vampire hosts are so uncommon in the Laundry setting - many of them simply kill themselves when they realise what they've become. Other times, vampires will kill other vampires on sight because if there get to be too many of them, the world's occult intelligence services will notice them and it'll become impossible for vampires to operate.
Another thing about them is that the vampire protects the host from Krantzberg Syndrome - the eating away at the brain by microscopic demons when someone tries to perform magic in their mind. As such, vampire hosts can become powerful sorcerers, not limited by the few decades that human sorcerers get before having to give it up.
In it, vampires are basically a form of demon, which covers anything below "eldritch abomination" that can interact with us from another universe. Their universe has gone through heat death, so they can only get energy from younger universes like ours. They do this by making a connection with a person, providing them with the tools to get the energy, and feed on them if they refuse to get the energy for them. So a person who is bound to a vampire will get the teeth, the immortality and the strength. They also get the aversion to sunlight for a reason I'm not clear on. When they suck blood, this forms a connection between the victim and the vampire, which the vampire then uses to take energy from that person. The result is similar to CJD, but much faster.
The characters who get bound to vampires at the beginning of the book don't realise that they're actually killing people when they drink blood, and they're pretty horrified when they find out. This is part of why vampire hosts are so uncommon in the Laundry setting - many of them simply kill themselves when they realise what they've become. Other times, vampires will kill other vampires on sight because if there get to be too many of them, the world's occult intelligence services will notice them and it'll become impossible for vampires to operate.
Another thing about them is that the vampire protects the host from Krantzberg Syndrome - the eating away at the brain by microscopic demons when someone tries to perform magic in their mind. As such, vampire hosts can become powerful sorcerers, not limited by the few decades that human sorcerers get before having to give it up.
One vampire is strong enough at magic to be able to stalemate an Eater of Souls, which are infamously powerful demons.
Jace911
Spider-Dork
- Location
- The Gold-Bricking State
I mixed "vampire" and "aristocrat" up in your post, my bad.
- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The relationship of vampires to the sexual is a complicated thing to navigate. I think there's a few different elements to it, actually:
1. Early vampire fiction was usually written in line with Victorian sexual mores and have accrued themes of destructive sexuality.
2. There is something kind of inherently sexual about the while biting business.
3. Lestat happened.
The first part is pretty easy to deal with, sex negativism isn't that difficult to exclude so long as you're thinking about it (the presence of sex negativism in horror is usually just because people aren't thinking about it). However eating people is characteristic of most vampires and the whole embrace aspect will always be a little sexy unless you go out of your way to make it gruesome. Tokyo Ghoul's obligate eaters are kind of gross, for example. On top of that, more modern fiction, even outside of the vampire romance subgenre, has really gotten into the ideas of vampires as sexual creatures. There's a whole entry about it in Vampire: The Masquerade, even.1
From my perspective sexual relationships between vampires and humans should be viewed not so much as a taboo to be heroically broken in a romance novel, but actually somewhat disgusting. It's having sex with your food.
*blink* If they don't hunt, than how are they hunters?
I said 'don't play by the same rules' not 'they don't hunt at all.'
Please do.
1 Then again, there's an entry about this in every World of Darkness sourcebook lol
What's also interesting to note about the vampire's destructive sexuality, especially in Dracula, is that a part of its destructiveness is that it inverts traditionally established roles and makes them permeable.
For instance, early on in the novel, Jonathan Harker is feminised through his passivity while Dracula's brides are the sexually aggressive and active pursuers - they've usurped masculine roles, but first tempted him with a feminine body.
What's even more confusing about vampire sexuality in the sense of biting is that in Dracula is that Harker is lured in by the vampire brides' "soft red lips" initially before they reveal their fangs. I remember the whole passage about this initial temptation being really seeped in erotic subtext, before the holy shit moment happens and they reveal their fangs.
In my notes on this, I paraphrased the reading pretty literally because the book is literally bashing you over the head with what that means: "the mouth is the primary site of erotic experience. It lures with red softness then delivers hard bone. Van Helsing and the group work to separate this confusion because it asks frightening questions: are we male or female, do we have penetrators or orifices?"
Jace911
Spider-Dork
- Location
- The Gold-Bricking State
I'm not a big fan of biting/embracing with sexual undertones, partially because I just don't really touch on sex in my writing and partially because I just don't get the supposed allure of biting someone on the neck and drinking their blood. I know a lot of vampire fiction talks about how it's a euphoric experience for the victim but I find that somewhat distasteful too and a bit at cross-purposes with the aforementioned themes of corruption and exploitation. Being bitten by a vampire shouldn't be like a drug high, it should feel like you're being drained of your life because that is what's happening. A person's reaction to being a vampire's late night snack should be a mix of primal terror and uncomprehending horror, not an orgasm.
As for games or works where the protagonist is a vampire, it should absolutely be a euphoric experience from their perspective--and then they see what it's doing to their victim, who is either hospitalized from blood loss or dies. "How can something so bad feel so good?" is such a human theme to grapple with, especially when the "bad" in this case isn't eventual cancer from smoking or withdrawal from a long term drug addiction but an immediate and visceral effect on a human being.
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- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I mostly think that a vampire biting people should just be, like, a bite. To some extent you don't need to overplay it as being something else, it's literally teeth tearing into your throat.
Jace911
Spider-Dork
- Location
- The Gold-Bricking State
I mean yeah you could just keep it simple, but it's too tempting not to use in some subtext.
Byzantium had vampires without fangs actually. Their method of draining blood was elongated fingernails, as the two main vampires are women.