Vampires, or: In which I am kind of a hypocrite

[sethgray]

So, the so-called Twilight "saga" has been getting quite a lot of bashing over the internet these days. Let me first say, I haven't read them. I don't plan to. I have no use for useless heroines. In fact, if your main female character can even be described as a heroine instead of a hero in her own right, I'm just not interested. I don't have time. There are too many women in my life who are the very epitome of strength to bother with those who are basically wastes as human beings*. Harsh, perhaps, but absolutely true.



That being said, that's not even my main problem with Twilight. Apparently, and again--I haven't read them, vampires in the books sparkle in the sun. Vampires. Sparkle. In the sun. What the fuck? I'm a Buffy fan. I like my vampires evil and monstrous, they should not be in the sun at all, let alone sparkling in it. I am just so filled with derision at the very concept I can't bring myself to crack one of the Twilight books for even a moment. That's not even touching all the disturbing undertones.

I'm also an Anita Blake fan (yes, even of the current books). Most people tend to stop reading after about book six or so, when Anita finally stopped seeing all vampires around her as monsters and started seeing them as people. It was inevitable. You can have monsters or you can have characters, but you can so rarely have both.

I happen to think that Anita Blake does have both. People deride the later books for the amount of sexual content in them, usually with a healthy dose of misogyny or slut-shaming under riding these comments. But really, think about it for a moment--vampires can make your body react in a sexual way completely out of your control. They can make you literally have to have sex or you will die. That's absolutely monstrous. So perhaps a better way of phrasing Anita's epiphany would be she stopped seeing the vampires in black and white. They are still monsters, and make no bones about it. I think the real problem people have with Anita Blake is that there's so much sex at all, regardless of the reason. That's a mind fuck for another day and besides the point here.

My point is, the moment you bring in a vampire as a main character you are presented with the problem of evil. Buffy only ever had one reaction to this problem: neuter the vampire. Angel became ensouled, Spike became chipped. Both of them became incapable of evil at that point. Now, as much as I love the Buffyverse, that is complete horseshit. Vampires are monsters. We like them for precisely that reason. We like it when they scare us, that's the whole point.

A point rapidly becoming lost. Vampires have been undergoing a rehab of sorts, making them a tortured subspecies or some such nonsense. I'm not generally a fan of this. In fact, I tend to think it hurts the vampire archetype overall. And thus, we arrive at the subject of my hypocrisy.

I've been tinkering around with a story about a vampire and a vampire hunter who fall in love. Hardly a revolutionary concept, I'll be the first to admit. There are a few differences, of course (my dark and broody is an outgoing college student, and my feisty blond is a kind of femmy bottom-boy who has zero problem describing himself as such) but over all the main thrust is the same.

There is much angst on the part of the vampire. Not because he's a vampire, but because he loves a mortal. He doesn't want to hurt his lover, an almost impossible impulse on his part. Now, society has conditioned us to expect that the human partner be open and understanding, try to convince him he's not a monster just because of his blood. You know what, that's horseshit too. He is a monster--he's a goddamn vampire. He drinks blood to stay alive.

And that's where I tried to shake up the equation a bit. It's not that my vampire hunter doesn't care that his lover's a vampire. He does care, but he cares because he likes it. He wants some monster in his man. He's had any number of human lovers already, if that's what he wanted that's what he could have. He doesn't want his lover to reject the monster inside, he wants him to embrace it. And the vampire wants to as well, but fears what that will mean for his human. Whether these admittedly subtle differences will be enough to keep me interested and writing it remains to be seen. My follow through is less than stellar to begin with.

So, is it hypocrisy to decry the reluctant vampire stereotype while writing a story where the main character basically is one? Pretty much. He doesn't fit the 'type straight up, but he's pretty close. However, I believe I'm self-aware enough to own the hypocrisy, and make something unique out of it. The real question is making myself actually do it.



*My one and only exception being Christine Daae from Phantom of the Opera. Yes, she's the embodiment of useless, but hey--the music's fantastic and I was too young to know better.

Comments

[dreamynytemare.livejournal.com]

WELL then! This definitely makes me want to read "Dead Boyfriend" all the more. I'll admit, when it came to light that Ira's a vampire and he was out during the day, I cringed a bit and waited for Twilight-ish references to start cropping up. I haven't read the books, but I've seen the movie, and other than some good cinematography and one attractive actor (NOT Edward. I mean, seriously, that hair looks like something died on his head), it was blah. I do NOT understand its popularity.

I really, REALLY like the take on vampires you've chosen for "Dead Boyfriend." You're right about them being monsters - they're monsters because they're something that's more powerful than humans. They're above us on the food chain, and that is terrifying, especially since it takes a lot more than a well-placed knife or a gun to take one down. And if there's one thing humans hate, it's something that they can't control.

[jupiterrhode.livejournal.com]

The sunlight thing is one of the things that bothers me about vampire fiction lately. The actual legends of the vampire don't have them show any bad reaction to it, and people all think it's a new concept to the mythos for them to walk about during the day. I've been doing some research on some Slavic folklore and mythology to craft my vampires, and I really like what I've come up with so far.

I don't get the Twilight thing either. *shrugs*

Thanks for the vote of confidence, I hope you'll like it when more details come to light.

[dreamynytemare.livejournal.com]

Now that you mention it, Carmilla was able to be out in the sun, wasn't she? I can't remember if Dracula was able to... but I've only read the book once, and that was a loooong time ago. Any idea when the whole going out into sun being bad thing started?

[jupiterrhode.livejournal.com]

Can I make a confession? I've never read Dracula. I only made it through the first few sections. It's written as a diary entry, and I can so rarely stomach them.

I'm not sure when the sunlight thing started. Certainly it was entrenched by the 90s, when the Keanu Reeves "Dracula" movie mentioned that they could walk about in sunlight like it was a revelation. And of course, in Buffy they incinerate if exposed to sunlight.

Of the "sunlight=/=vampires" thing, the Anita Blake verse does it best, I think. Vampires just stop being active come daylight, their animating force just leaves. I liked that. And later, more powerful vampires are able to resist the compulsion to die at dawn. That was a sunlight thing I could work with.

[dreamynytemare.livejournal.com]

I had to read Dracula for a class, and I hated it, especially the ending because it's so obvious that Stoker got tired of writing and rushed to be done with it.

Tanya Huff's approach to the "sunlight=/= vampires" thing is similar to Blake's. When the sun comes up, her vampires fall into a hibernation so deep they appear dead, though no one knows it's actually a hibernation state until I want to say the fourth book in her Blood series.

[jupiterrhode.livejournal.com]

Tanya Huff...that name sounds familiar. I wonder if I read one of hers. Was she the one where her vamp was a historical romance writer or something? And the main female had that eye disease? Or am I totally off base?

[dreamynytemare.livejournal.com]

Yup. The vampire is Henry Fitzroy, a bastard son of Henry VIII, and a historical romance author. The main character, Vicki, is losing her eyesight due to a degenerative retina disease.

[jupiterrhode.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I thought so. I remember liking the book I read, but I never picked up the rest of the series for whatever reason. Maybe my library couldn't find them or something. Hmm.