vampires! blahh!
Oct. 25th, 2009 03:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacToday's newspaper feature sections proved to have not one, but two articles on the current cultural ubiquity of vampires. This must be because it's Halloween week, but still, really. One of them quoted Bram Stoker's great-grand-nephew, who clearly must have inherited expertise on vampires, right?
Years ago - this was long before Buffy, even - our Mythopoeic group discussed vampire fiction. Even then, the vampire-as-sympathetic-hero was gaining ground from the traditional loathsome villain, but it did occur to me that vampire fiction was something I tended to enjoy, almost regardless of how good it was.
I wouldn't say that today. Vampires have been driven into the ground, as it were. I'll still re-read or re-watch the old stuff, but as for new vampires, I'm just tired of them. And zombies, which were only ever good for inspiring "Zombie Jamboree" anyway.
One thing that's struck me is the gradual decaying of vampire characteristics. There's a certain slate of traits traditionally associated with vampires - the garlic, the stakes and crosses, the mirrors, and so on - and authors writing now get to pick and choose which ones apply to their vampires, and how they apply them. The big divide comes at the species level: are vampires dead humans who have been "turned", or are they a separate species? The former is more common, but Suzy McKee Charnas, whose vampires are essentially suave, six-foot-tall, talking mosquitoes, and George R.R. Martin are among those choosing the latter.
In Martin, certain vampires find it useful to falsely claim that they're ex-human, one of many places Martin plays with the vampire lore he discards. As I noted in the report, "Martin dismisses a lot of the more difficult vampire lore as nonsense, and Joshua turns this to his advantage in his attempt to pass as human: he lives on a steamboat (legendary vampires can’t cross water) amid lots of silver trim and mirrors."
But since then, there's been a lot more decay, easily noted by comparing recent vampires, like those of Buffy which I know best, with Stoker's Dracula, who is the origin of most of these. I'm relying on old memories of Dracula here, so forgive any errors.
1. BTVS vampires are burned and can easily be destroyed by direct sunlight, so they cannot go out by day (except with some ridiculous covers like coats over their heads). Dracula could go out by day just fine. His powers were just weaker then than by night.
2. BTVS vampires are most easily killed by jabbing a stake into their hearts, upon which they instantly devolve into dust. (Presumably because that's what their bodies would have become by now if they hadn't been holding it off by becoming vampires, though that's never made clear.) For Dracula, and I think most traditional vampires, the stake's function is quite different. You have to bury him with a stake thrust through his heart and left there, because if you take it out, the vampire's healing powers are so strong that he'll recover from the wound.
3. Crosses and holy water have supernatural powers to deter BTVS vampires, even if the user is Jewish. Again, not the function of the cross on Dracula at all. Van Helsing waves crosses at Dracula to remind him that in life he was a Christian gentleman, and thus to make him feel guilty about his current choice of occupation.
Items 1 and 2 are forceful reminders that Dracula is nearly unstoppable, which is part of what makes Stoker's book so compelling. More recent bad vampires are more just video game villains: stake 'em and move on. And old-time vampires stank of decay and death. Nobody would find them romantic. I hope.
Years ago - this was long before Buffy, even - our Mythopoeic group discussed vampire fiction. Even then, the vampire-as-sympathetic-hero was gaining ground from the traditional loathsome villain, but it did occur to me that vampire fiction was something I tended to enjoy, almost regardless of how good it was.
I wouldn't say that today. Vampires have been driven into the ground, as it were. I'll still re-read or re-watch the old stuff, but as for new vampires, I'm just tired of them. And zombies, which were only ever good for inspiring "Zombie Jamboree" anyway.
One thing that's struck me is the gradual decaying of vampire characteristics. There's a certain slate of traits traditionally associated with vampires - the garlic, the stakes and crosses, the mirrors, and so on - and authors writing now get to pick and choose which ones apply to their vampires, and how they apply them. The big divide comes at the species level: are vampires dead humans who have been "turned", or are they a separate species? The former is more common, but Suzy McKee Charnas, whose vampires are essentially suave, six-foot-tall, talking mosquitoes, and George R.R. Martin are among those choosing the latter.
In Martin, certain vampires find it useful to falsely claim that they're ex-human, one of many places Martin plays with the vampire lore he discards. As I noted in the report, "Martin dismisses a lot of the more difficult vampire lore as nonsense, and Joshua turns this to his advantage in his attempt to pass as human: he lives on a steamboat (legendary vampires can’t cross water) amid lots of silver trim and mirrors."
But since then, there's been a lot more decay, easily noted by comparing recent vampires, like those of Buffy which I know best, with Stoker's Dracula, who is the origin of most of these. I'm relying on old memories of Dracula here, so forgive any errors.
1. BTVS vampires are burned and can easily be destroyed by direct sunlight, so they cannot go out by day (except with some ridiculous covers like coats over their heads). Dracula could go out by day just fine. His powers were just weaker then than by night.
2. BTVS vampires are most easily killed by jabbing a stake into their hearts, upon which they instantly devolve into dust. (Presumably because that's what their bodies would have become by now if they hadn't been holding it off by becoming vampires, though that's never made clear.) For Dracula, and I think most traditional vampires, the stake's function is quite different. You have to bury him with a stake thrust through his heart and left there, because if you take it out, the vampire's healing powers are so strong that he'll recover from the wound.
3. Crosses and holy water have supernatural powers to deter BTVS vampires, even if the user is Jewish. Again, not the function of the cross on Dracula at all. Van Helsing waves crosses at Dracula to remind him that in life he was a Christian gentleman, and thus to make him feel guilty about his current choice of occupation.
Items 1 and 2 are forceful reminders that Dracula is nearly unstoppable, which is part of what makes Stoker's book so compelling. More recent bad vampires are more just video game villains: stake 'em and move on. And old-time vampires stank of decay and death. Nobody would find them romantic. I hope.
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no subject
Date: 2009-10-25 11:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-26 12:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-26 01:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-26 12:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-26 12:49 am (UTC)I recall a few years back when Robin McKinley's "Sunshine" was nominated (and subsequently won) the Mythopoeic Award, when I picked it up and saw it was about vampires, I didn't expect to like it. I promised myself I'd give it a good chance and stop reading after 50 pages if I didn't like it. I ended up finding it quite engaging, though I don't know if it ended up on my personal short list.
Actually my favorite portrayal of a vampire in recent fiction was in one of the "Kitty" books by Carrie Vaughn. There was a vampire matriarch who had outlived generations of non-vampire descendants (I guess she'd had children before becoming a vampire) and, if I recall correctly, just wanted her great-great (etc.) granddaughter to go to college and have a normal life. But she was a minor character--if you'd told me it was a book about vampires I probably wouldn't have read it. Werewolves like Kitty haven't been overdone to the same extent.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-26 02:49 pm (UTC)I don't know about romance, but the sexual connotations are pretty obvious.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-26 04:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-26 08:58 am (UTC)For one thing, there seems to have been a whole blunting of the fact that the condition was considered a curse. Now, it seems to be all about the "cool powers" they have -- whicn unfortunately calls for drinking blood -- but surely we can get around that by having the "good" vampires drink the blood of animals.
Bah. What is horrific about that? Especially when coupled with the apparent immortality of the condition?
Lost is the whole sense that drinking human blood was necessary to recapture the semblance of "real" life, that the cursed one has basically exchanged his or her soul in order to perpetually remain locked outside of heaven and hell, trapped in this world they knew in life.
At least, that's the way I see it. But who wants to write stories about that? Where's the fun in being that creature?
Happy Halloween. ;-)
no subject
Date: 2009-10-26 02:46 pm (UTC)