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lmx_v3point3 at 01:01pm on 06/04/2011 under author: laurell k hamilton, fandom: angel, fandom: anita blake, fandom: buffy the vampire slayer, fandom: twilight, joss whedon, meta, type: were/vamp/supernatural
lmx_v3point3 at 01:01pm on 06/04/2011 under author: laurell k hamilton, fandom: angel, fandom: anita blake, fandom: buffy the vampire slayer, fandom: twilight, joss whedon, meta, type: were/vamp/supernaturalContext: I read Laurell K. Hamilton (LKH), and have enjoyed the Twilight novels. This is not a guilty pleasure, this is a real pleasure. The films made from those books are a travesty and break a lot of the meta I outline below. I have not read or watched Dracula (which is a personal travesty and I'm aware of that), but have watched Buffy and Angel as a teenager, Interview with a Vampire, The Lost Boys and assorted fun additions which tend not to follow the meta below (Van Helsing, Underworld, Ultraviolet). True Blood has never appealed, for the reasons mentioned briefly below, please feel free to reeducate me. There will be spoilers for some or all of these below.
Firstly I should make some gross generalisations. In terms of protagonists, it is almost always vampire man and human woman. Vampire woman tends to be either mindless or excessively violent, human man tends to be visibly weaker and often very self-centred. Vampire woman slashed with vampire woman gives you porn. Vampire man slashed with vampire man gives you harlequin novels (romance, good wine and familiar sex). Even slashed vampire man will often have a female human counterpart. (LKH likes this dynamic a lot)
There are two sides to the dynamic between vampire man and human woman. The first is forbidden (safe) love. I will discuss this duallity further below in connection with the 'edge of danger' and the idea of a lover 'losing control'.
Forbidden love is part of breaking social barriers, which is a very popular theme at the moment and really always has been. Additionally there is this concept that the vampire cannot love the human primarily due to the perceived risk of 'losing control' - Buffy and Angel took this to the extreme and has this as a physical/psychological change in Angel. As a result, the male (agressive) side of the relationship is rendered 'safe'. I have some meta as to why the slash phenomena in female fic writers emerged based on the same principles.
This I think is the primary reason for the development of the current haze of vampire fans. It's the same kind of eruption as the slash phenomena. Twilight especially has a very innocent and hence very romantic perception of vampires (see romance, below) - there is very little blood, and ABSOLUTELY NO SEX in the Twilight books, despite the production of the baby. There is however huge amounts of suicidal thoughts, which also fits with the current Emo phase the world is going through. Twilight is 100% this side of vampires and 0% of the other side. Even the bad guys are already in established relationships.
Safe love is expressed in excessive romance, and especially when considering the age of the vampire this is often the stylised kind of romance out of novels, old fashioned expressions of love and old fashioned principles. The kind of people who like 'safe' love like old-fashioned romance. They like to be appreciated. To be given flowers. To be woo-ed, and to not have it linked in any way to sex. It's very very asexual, and that makes the other side of the mirror an interesting contrast.
The other side of vampires - the one generally considered the 'bad' or 'evil' side of vampires, but which is much more sexually appealing than the former especially for the older or more mature audience - is the free flowing violence and decadent lifestyle. Mature audiences *like* linking violence with sex. They don't want to be woo-ed, they want to be thrown to the floor and for bad, bad things to happen to them. They want strong alcohol, rich foods and the risk of blood.
There is also the concept of the power brought by age and the wisdom - some of this is stylised as mind control, some as the sexual experience of drawing blood (leading to the idea of taking blood as being like sex or rape depending on the concent and whether mind control is used)
Buffy split the two sides strongly into 'good' and 'evil' for the first three or four seasons and then Angel had great fun tearing the barrier to pieces as Angel turns into the 'morally grey' character even as Spike is playing the white knight and dying in bright white glory. Laurell K Hamilton brings in the idea of ancient laws which have to be followed and how close the vampires can come to breaking those before they can be punished. The Lost Boys was the film all the Twilight (film) fans should be watching for many many reasons.
And then there's the image - I'll let you picture it - of both men and women dressed in corsets, leather and lace, knee high boots with their hair long and down, all getting involved in some hedonistic, moralless careless sex. So yeah, that covers the Gothic image and the porn, and generally the male audience.
Vampires - LMX does the meta thing
Firstly I should make some gross generalisations. In terms of protagonists, it is almost always vampire man and human woman. Vampire woman tends to be either mindless or excessively violent, human man tends to be visibly weaker and often very self-centred. Vampire woman slashed with vampire woman gives you porn. Vampire man slashed with vampire man gives you harlequin novels (romance, good wine and familiar sex). Even slashed vampire man will often have a female human counterpart. (LKH likes this dynamic a lot)
There are two sides to the dynamic between vampire man and human woman. The first is forbidden (safe) love. I will discuss this duallity further below in connection with the 'edge of danger' and the idea of a lover 'losing control'.
Forbidden love is part of breaking social barriers, which is a very popular theme at the moment and really always has been. Additionally there is this concept that the vampire cannot love the human primarily due to the perceived risk of 'losing control' - Buffy and Angel took this to the extreme and has this as a physical/psychological change in Angel. As a result, the male (agressive) side of the relationship is rendered 'safe'. I have some meta as to why the slash phenomena in female fic writers emerged based on the same principles.
This I think is the primary reason for the development of the current haze of vampire fans. It's the same kind of eruption as the slash phenomena. Twilight especially has a very innocent and hence very romantic perception of vampires (see romance, below) - there is very little blood, and ABSOLUTELY NO SEX in the Twilight books, despite the production of the baby. There is however huge amounts of suicidal thoughts, which also fits with the current Emo phase the world is going through. Twilight is 100% this side of vampires and 0% of the other side. Even the bad guys are already in established relationships.
Safe love is expressed in excessive romance, and especially when considering the age of the vampire this is often the stylised kind of romance out of novels, old fashioned expressions of love and old fashioned principles. The kind of people who like 'safe' love like old-fashioned romance. They like to be appreciated. To be given flowers. To be woo-ed, and to not have it linked in any way to sex. It's very very asexual, and that makes the other side of the mirror an interesting contrast.
The other side of vampires - the one generally considered the 'bad' or 'evil' side of vampires, but which is much more sexually appealing than the former especially for the older or more mature audience - is the free flowing violence and decadent lifestyle. Mature audiences *like* linking violence with sex. They don't want to be woo-ed, they want to be thrown to the floor and for bad, bad things to happen to them. They want strong alcohol, rich foods and the risk of blood.
There is also the concept of the power brought by age and the wisdom - some of this is stylised as mind control, some as the sexual experience of drawing blood (leading to the idea of taking blood as being like sex or rape depending on the concent and whether mind control is used)
Buffy split the two sides strongly into 'good' and 'evil' for the first three or four seasons and then Angel had great fun tearing the barrier to pieces as Angel turns into the 'morally grey' character even as Spike is playing the white knight and dying in bright white glory. Laurell K Hamilton brings in the idea of ancient laws which have to be followed and how close the vampires can come to breaking those before they can be punished. The Lost Boys was the film all the Twilight (film) fans should be watching for many many reasons.
And then there's the image - I'll let you picture it - of both men and women dressed in corsets, leather and lace, knee high boots with their hair long and down, all getting involved in some hedonistic, moralless careless sex. So yeah, that covers the Gothic image and the porn, and generally the male audience.
(no subject)
/creepy Gollum voice
Okay, life has been downright unreasonable, and has interrupted me a bunch of times while trying to comment properly, with the articulation of stuff and such. So I will just leave this comment now, damnit, and come back later with Thoughts as this post deserves.
:)
(no subject)
(no subject)
Okay, so, thanks for this. I think it really did help me get a handle on the specific appeal of vampires; I guess the romance/sex allegory is fairly unsurprising as a huge draw. Thanks for spelling that out for me, because I've never been interested enough in vampire stuff to read/watch it enough to spot those meta-patterns, if that makes sense? I mean, the sexual aspect is hard to miss, but the allegory you have to be paying attention for. This will probably help me out a lot in terms of viewing intelligence the next time a vampire thing crosses my path.
So, if I'm understanding this right, the split between romance and sex that vampires embody (and I understand that most works fall along a scale) is an interesting one, and makes even more sense of their appeal. Vampires divide the two in their very nature, and take on one aspect, while (it seems) retaining the tantalising possibility of the other.
Which makes reading/watching them a "safe" yet titilating experience regardless of whether it's the physical or the emotional/mental intimacy that someone is wanting to avoid. Safe because the romance/sex is vicarious, and titilating because the aspect that is perceived as risky or frightening (and I know as many people for whom romantic intimacy is far more confronting than sexual intimacy as the other way around) is always teased – it doesn't even have to be overt, because it's in the nature of vampires themselves. What a vampire can't do, then, is hold romance and sex in a healthy unity, which is something that our culture seems to struggle with a lot too.
So, that's my initial (delayed) understanding from what you wrote, and you've helped it make a lot more sense to me. Did I miss anything or get it wrong? I ask not just because it's good communication protocol especially when you're not in familiar territory, but also because the flat-out, ugly, predator side of vampires is a minor squick for me. Not so much that I can't watch this stuff, but enough to filter my perception of the story and them through it. So if that's coloured my understanding of what you said, I'd like to know :)
(no subject)
I think the authors/writers for the various vampire media use the negative ways vampires and their like are immediately viewed - as you mentioned - to do some of the storytelling for them in a couple of ways. It allows them to very easily guide the audience into a 'switch' in perception - where the character that your instinct encourages you to think of as 'bad' or 'evil' is actually the hero or romantic interest - which can be very neatly done in all genres but has been recently rather overdone in that it has become expected and some lazy storytelling has resulted (I am tempted to cite Twilight here).
I think this general technique in storytelling has come about (not that I'm suggesting that it's in any way new or innovative, just highly prolific at the moment) as a result of people trying to redefine the world as one in which there is no prejudice - not that I'm in any way saying this is wrong, just that some storytellers tend to slap it in place to avoid having to actually tell someone they're writing a story about prejudice. (And sometimes to cover up the fact that there's a fair amount of prejudice in the story anyway and they want at least one counter example).
That reply to your comment went a bit sideways, sorry. I agree with everything you said, and you said it much more concisely and eloquently than I did. Hehe! :D
What I think we agree it comes down to is that vampire stories are a substitute for our own (and the population as a whole's) intimacy and sexuality issues.
(no subject)
Linking the idea of a 'safe' lover and the idea that as soon as that intimacy barrier is broken the man has the potential of becoming 'unsafe' or out of control, dangerous. I guess this would clarify why the classic vampire stories are all male vampire with female human. The 'vampire' side of the man is actually his sexuality, and intimacy is a temptation that leads to danger. Crosses are the thing that ward the vampire off, but only work when the wielder has strong belief in their own faith...
I am now feeling dense, went hunting for some better meta than my own and came up short, 99.9% Twilight discussion. Picked up a couple of things that might interest you though. :D
http://julieclawson.com/2008/08/17/vampires-myth-and-christianity/
http://utu.academia.edu/LydiaKokkola/Papers/444697/Virtuous_Vampires_and_Voluptuous_Vamps_Romance_conventions_reconsidered_in_Stephenie_Meyers_Twilight_Series