Do you guys like vampires? Because I LOVE vampires. I've always loved vampires, even before TWILIGHT came out and TRUE BLOOD came on HBO. I read DRACULA and INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE while I was in middle school. Watched the movie BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER when I was even younger.
In fact, I've always been fascinated with dark stuff and magic and the supernatural and scary monsters and things that go bump in the night. Halloween was my favorite holiday growing up. My dad used to joke that all the short stories I wrote when I was little always killed someone off. In eighth grade a short story I wrote for history class was deemed too graphic by my teacher and I had to rewrite it (it was a ghost story at an industrial plant in Lowell in the 19th century - I guess she didn't like that the machines killed a little boy).
All this leads up to a moment freshman year of college, early 2008. A friend of mine had just gotten obsessed with this book series called Twilight. This was months before the movie release, when the books were really getting a following in the teenage fan girl subset of our culture. I asked her what it was about, and she told me it was a love story between a human girl and a vampire boy.
Ugh. My first reaction was complete and utter UGH. Because vampires are the soul-sucking undead. They feed on humans and kill them and turn them into scary monsters that can't go out in the daylight which shows you how EVIL THEY REALLY ARE and also it's super gross if you think about it because the vampire is like 100 years old and the human girl is a child.
This is what originally turned me off True Blood and THE VAMPIRE DIARIES as well. I was very anti-human/vampire love story. Vampires are monsters. Sexy monsters, that sensually bite your neck, sure. If you were some other sort of supernatural creature, fine - have fun with vampires. But as a human, you do not fuck (with) monsters.
My feelings about Twilight haven't changed much - mostly because Bella is one of the worst protagonists in modern literature, if not all time. I'm going to ignore Twilight from here on out.
But I finally got on the True Blood train right before season 4, and that is a hell of an entertaining ride (although story-wise, it's not great, but it's really fun to watch). And The Vampire Diaries? Good god is that genre television at its best. Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer made me root for a vampire/human love story (shipping Buffy and Angel foreverrrr). I have embraced the vampire/human love story, and I'm glad. It has given us some wonderful Bill Compton moments (although sometimes he kind of sucks), some glorious Eric Northman moments (season 4 excluded), some crazy awesome Damon Salvatore moments, and some truly touching Stefan Salvatore moments (one of the most mutli-dimensional characters on TV today).
Until recently, vampires were creatures to be feared. Soulless, hateful, no regard for human life. Intelligent, which made them all the scarier. Creepy, steeped in weird mythology and living in dark, dank castles that hadn't seen real human life in centuries. They were an OTHER. Even in Interview with a Vampire, told from a vampire point of view, they were still other, separate, not human.
But now we see them struggle with their humanity, their love of a particular human. They have an instinct to feed, but they have respect for human life. You can start to put yourself in the position of a vampire, feel empathy for a vampire.
It's exciting. Our bad guys used to be Disney villains that wreaked havoc for no other reason than evil. As we, as a society, understand more about the human condition, human psychology, and ourselves, we cut more slack to those we had firmly put in the "other" category simply for being different than us.
More acceptance of vampires, even if its just genre storytelling, is indicative of a society that is more accepting of those we once wrote off as "the bad guy." The humanization of vampires is a symbol of the progress we humans have made towards world unity. Towards world understanding. Towards world peace.
Thank your local vampire aficionado today. We couldn't have done it without them. (Well, us. Me too. Us.)
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