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“Lestat and Louie feel sorry for vampires that sparkle in the sun. They would never hurt immortals who choose to spend eternity going to high school over and over again in a small town — anymore than they would hurt the physically disabled or the mentally challenged. My vampires possess gravitas. They can afford to be merciful.” – Anne Rice, from her Facebook
One thing my wife and I frequently debate about is the state of modern vampires. We never seem to agree on how vampires should be portrayed. To this end she has asked me to write a post on the topic. After considering it for a long time, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that what modern vampire novels (and movies) have lost is the down sides to being a vampire.
I’m not sure when it started, but the idea of Idealistic Immortal Super-humans that feed off animals— because feeding off humans might offend someone—kind of enrages my inner nerd. Come to think of it, it enrages my outer nerd too. In stories like Twilight and True Blood, there’s no real downside to being a Creature of the Night. They’re all incredibly beautiful beings who’s only real problem is the social drama they cause themselves.
It seems like the days of Nosferatu and the ugly vampire have left us behind, and the problem of sunlight has a fix that takes no more time than getting your kids ready for a trip to the beach. True Blood has its special glass, Daybreakers and Lost Boys: The Tribe have their cars with blacked out windows and special cameras. Even stories that project vampires as monsters usually just do it so there’s something for the protagonist to kill on the way to the end of the movie, such as in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dusk till Dawn.
When being a vampire becomes better than being a human with a slight quirk that can be overcome with some minor preparation, you’re not really writing about vampires anymore. At this point just go ahead and tell us you’re making it up and call it something else. Don’t ride the coat tails of a set mythos and sponge off something so many people love.
Stephanie Meyer admits that she didn’t do any research into the vampire genre before she wrote Twilight . (4:10ish of this Youtube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_17kgVcHzy8 ) She then later tells Time that she didn’t want to be held down by the constraints of what everyone else thought Vampires were. This appalls me. I spent a week researching what other people had already written on the state of vampires in modern fiction for a couple weeks before even starting to write this short blog post.
The downsides of being a vampire have change drastically. When I was introduced to vampires in my adolescence through things like Vampire the Masquerade and Ravenloft, you knew every vampire was a monster that saw you as food. Any vampire hunter in a survival horror story would smell of garlic and brandish holy symbols as weapons as often as he would stakes. Now, though, if a Vampire couldn’t see it’s reflection it wouldn’t know how to keep its hair properly gelled.
Modern vampire tales leave us with shallow characters who’s only real downside is what happens in their head. If you want to write a strong character you have to give them strong weaknesses. What made myself and countless others who obsess about this genre fall so deeply in love with it is that the characters in these stories, no matter how they looked on the outside, were deeply flawed. The monsters that they were showed through their thin guise of humanity. Humans, as flawed as we are, can relate to this type of character more than images of perfection. The only real drawback to being a “modern vampire” that I can see is having to put up with starry-eyed Twilight fans who think vampires should sparkle.
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David Sherrer is an avid Vampire the Masquerade fan and spends his time running role playing games, playing role playing games, and writing stories for role playing games. That is when he’s not busy loving on his wife, Lydia, or petting his cat, Gizmo.
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Thank you, David, for your post! What do you all think about modern vampire stories? Are they better than traditional vampire stories, or worse? What do you feel has changed in the genre and is it good or bad?
Thanks for your input, and see you all next week!
(Enjoy the vampire kitties….)
I think that the greatest downside or danger to being a vampire wouldn’t be the sunlight, but the inevitable breakdown of the psyche. A fledgling would still retain most if not all of their human reasoning and priorities, which might include but would not be limited to the need to drink human blood. However, they would become easily calloused to the idea very quickly and that leads to the issues of serial crimes fueled by vampirisim, killing is is just no longer just one more victim, it starts to take on a mercy of its own. No longer able to tell the difference between right and wrong even on the lowest levels of socially accepted moralities a vampire will fail at the masqueraded. Maybe physically superior and long lived, but eventually there will be a fatal mistake, every vampire will eventually become too much the predator and seal their own doom as the object of a hunt. That is their greatest weakness that is rarely considered in any story, regardless of how deep you dig into ancient lore (of which I approve).
Very poignant comment, thank you Dane! It’s true that the mental toll is less often focused on in vampire stories, probably because it is a darker and less glamorous side of vampirisim.