OK, vampires are really bothering me nowadays. I hate how in movies and books and such really old vampires from the 1500s or 1700s always act like these sexy suave 30 year old swingers who like to get it on with young women.

It really doesn't make sense; if a vampire hundreds of years old he or she should act like a really old person even while looking young. Their vocabulary and diction should be noticably different from contemporary vocabulary and diction. If there's a friendly aristocractic vampire from the 1700s sulking around your neighborhood he should talk like he's Henry James or something.

Language is one thing...what about thought and logical processes? I wouldn't be totally surprised if a vampire from the 1500s still had a lot of "magical thinking" or still tended to approach problems with medieval thought processes, or even still actively engaged in 1500s religious practices. If someone from the 1500s suddenly appeared in your neighborhood today you'd probably think that person was just an alzheimer-stricken hopelessly senile delusional person because his way of interacting with things would be so different from how "normal" people today do it.

So, I'm really annoyed by the idea that there's some handsome vampire from hundreds of years ago who is allowed to get romantically involved with a young female and that's not considered as creepy as if some 80 year old perv was doing the same thing. Moreover, vampires should at least run around talking like H. P. Lovecraft or Heny James or something and they probably don't like using computers.

Put yourself in the vampire from the 1500's shoes. Now, youre in modern times and youre a predator, hunting people for sustenance. Youre certainly capable of just gacking someone off the street, but that's no fun. Instead, you want to make the prey come to you. How do you do that emulating some crochety old man or with what would seem a fake accent and language? If you want the prey to come to you, you become something that modern humans relate to.

You're assuming that vampires are more able to change themselves than real people. If that's an assumption about vampires then you get a pass, otherwise they're just as incapable of changing as real people. Sure, an old vampire has had a lot more time than most people, but for most of that they're not really in contact with modern humans.


I'd say that vampires would be more likely to just attack people. After a few hundred years picking up dates is going to be boring.

another thing is, do the grumpy old timer thing come from the effects of aging, or just giving up?

it could very well be that as vampires dont age the same way as normal humans do, this could also affect their minds ability to take in new info.

it could also be psychological in that when humans feel the wear and tear of age, one know there is no real point in adapting, one is living on borrowed time anyways.

still, there are some (and they are increasing in numbers) old people that can keep up with the times quite nicely, thanks to modern medicine and healthy living.

still, some old clan head that drinks his blood out of wine glasses can probably afford to let age show, especially if he has the economic, political or innate clout to back it up.

I'd recommend True Blood, for a rather realistic depiction of romance between a Confederate officer turned vampire and a young telepathic waitress who works at a bar&grill in rural Louisiana. Odd, somewhat quaint, mode of speech, check. Socially awkward, check. Incredibly awkward romance, check. Passionate bloody sex, check. It is also one of the few television series with the boldness to have a major season-long plotline hinge on a drug-induced priapism.


A huge amount of leeway can be given due the fact that the humans around them treat them as if they were their apparent age, and they'll react to the way that they are treated. If you treat a guy like he's twenty something, then he'll act like he's twenty something, up to a point. The problem lies in defining this point. Too many vampire story writers are lazy and don't take into consideration the differences between today and when the vampire was growing up. In some cases, such as Buffy, this is intentional artistic license and it works better than a more realistic depiction would. Other times, it is just bad writing.
Of course, the fact that it is bad writing doesn't matter so much because they're usually catering to teen power and romance fantasies and excessive psychosocial depth would just get in the way.

I would think that one of the requirements of reaching a great age as a vampire would be a mind that can endure to a great age. If you use the model of vampires as 'socially engaged' vampires (rather than asocial monsters, for example), then only a vampire with a mind capable of changing with the times would live to see old age.

Of course, any such vampire is much more likely to be like Ted Bundy than any teeny-bopper romance vampire...

Five Reasons Why You'll Hate the Movie Twilight.

"Why is it acceptable for a 200 year old vampire to make out with a teenager, but when I post to a teenage girl's MySpace page, I'm called 'creepy'?"

I prefer the cracked article on what they could have learned from the Lost Boys - which seems basically true. If you are incapable of death, but also largely incapable of proper human interaction, it seems there would be a realm of psychological diseases which you would accumulate. Dare-devil behavior, extreme arrogance, manipulation, brutality, etc. Lost Boys may be one of the most realistic vampire movies I've seen in that regard - the vampires are authentically mentally deranged because of their change, presumably resulting from their alienation from society at large, even though they've all probably been alive for less than 40 or so years.

I also have to wonder if vampires have very poor memory. If you lived for 400 years, but can only remember the last five, keeping up with the times is easy because nothing is ingrained. And ultimately seeing as you still have a limited amount of brain space, the only way you could properly store 400 years of experience would be losing other valuable stuff. You might remember it vaguely, but you can't remember what you did at 200 any more than you can what you did at 10.

Does anybody -know- how many memories a human brain could hold if it didn't suffer from age-related diseases and degeneration? I know a 104-year old woman who is remarkably clear-minded, despite her physical frailty. Why not clear-minded after 200 years? 300?

Peter

The question of how many memories the human mind can hold is an incorrect one, because it implies that the human mind stores memories discretely. It does not. Memories are bits and pieces, jumbled together with giant holes that are filled in as necessary. This is one of the reasons why eyewitness testimony tends to be incredibly unreliable.

While it is unlikely that an ancient being would remember what ( or who) he had for breakfast on the Morning of February, 23 198 BC, it is fairly certain that he's at least have recollections of important events of that time, and the people in his life, even if those recollections are not particularly accurate.

"Martin Luther, deep down inside, really was a funk soul brotha."

Somehow, we need to make a movie in which Martin Luther, immortal due to drinking from the Holy Grail, fights both vampires and corrupt Catholic officials in modern day New York. The title role must be played by Samuel L. Jackson.

I have no clue on why women think Vampires are sexy. I mean come on, they are two legged mosquitoes. They see humans as FOOD! It would be like a guy romancing a cow (the four legged type) and then eating it. Pretty creepy...

Two words. Dependancy issues.

I wish I could remember the name of the author, but some years back she argued in a cool little book that both men and women have fantasies about and enjoy adventures about defeating monsters. Men dream about taming/conquering the monster 'out there', and women dream about taming/conquering the monster in the man.

Vampire-mania among girls fits this model perfectly.

Peter

Having played a great deal of V:tM in the past, I think that line discribes a very large chunk of our groups vamps. On the average, even the ones who could pull off interacting with people well were actually just faking it. We showed very little fear of guns, several jumps from very high buildings ("so what if I break my legs, I'll just heal and get up."), an extreme desire to protect out own hunting grounds and gain power, etc. The (in game) FBI actually thought we were a serial killer cult at one point.

The characters also, though still working together for their common good, did a lot of inner party and inner group (at varies levels) in-fighting and back stabbing. Two of us actually staked a third player's char, wrapped him up in plastic, walked out several hundred meters into the gulf, and buried him. He actually laughed about it and made a different style character that didn't clash so much.

The problem is, most people don't take the time to think about how their characters would react differently from them. Instead, they view the character as a proto-them with cool powers. The same thing happens in most books about vamps.

I always liked "Near Dark" as a vampire movie that never actually said vampire anywhere. The bar scene is priceless and the child vampire who is really old is pretty unnerving at times in the things he says and does.

Video was awesome, and that line was the second best line in there. The best (IMO) was the line about how the Twilight fans are all geeky girls who grew up on Harry Potter and have now gone through puberty. Hilarious.

My favorite part was the Progressive Rock vs. Bela Lugosi segment.

Zomg it's so true, Anne Rice would be richer had she made her vampires not so damn bisexual. And used teenagers as characters.

Can we market cyberpunk to teenage girls? Come on, let's make mass-market paperback cyberpunk novels!

Wait, that's one thing I don't get about Twilight. Supposedly this shit is based off books... what kind of fucking modern teenager reads? Have they started writting books in chat-talk? How do they understand the 2+ syllable words? Or is this like a "the book series is popular because we SAY it is, and now that is a self-fulfilling prophecy" sort of thing?

While we're on it, is anybody else convinced that J.K. Rowling had all her novels after the 2nd one ghost written?

No, it is actually a popular book series. And yeah, teens read, even today. Heck, they probably read more than in the recent past, thanks to the internet. And chat abbreviation are just a form of stenography. Court reporters read real books, too.

But the reason that it is popular, and one has to remember this when reading it or watching the movie, is that it is essentially a Mary Sue fic with the female lead in the role of Author Avatar living out her teenage fantasies. It is fairly easy to see where the author's ideals impinge on the world at the expense of realism and sanity, just by looking at plot synopsis, but this is something that it's target audience can overlook.

ones one start hunting for marry sue's, the world becomes a very bleak place...

but then i would say the same is valid for the "art" or dissecting any work to look for a deeper meaning...

I worked in a public library for 6+ years. Modern teenagers do read. And those that read regularly, read quite often.

In other words it's a romance novel that just happens to be supernatural. Not particularly shocking that young men looking for horror are going to be disappointed as they're not the target audience.

Authors whose ideals impinge on the world at the expense of realism and sanity are the ones that sell in airport bookstores. Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan character is one of the most popular, financially successful wish-fulfillment character ever created.

Clancy :: rich, tubby, Catholic, stockbroker, rejected from military service due to bad eyesight
Jack Ryan :: rich, virile, Catholic, stockbroker, a former Marine turned spy turned President of these United States

It's almost the very nature of genre fiction that the protagonist be a wish-fulfillment character. You have to reach into literary fiction to break away from that. But then again, genre fiction has never been about deep character development but rather plot, elements of setting, and explicit detail.

EDIT

Trust me, I teach art to kids from kindergarten to eighth grade and boy do kids read. I've seen sixth graders read novels like Twilight, which was all my six graders talked about, to students reading novels the size of War and Peace. Kids love to read fiction and many...more than I can count read Fantasy and Science Fiction novels.

Yes, Twilight is a teenage girl's dream, chick flick, but all of the students I know who have seen it read the entire series of books first. If you're curious if students/kids love to read, remember the Harry Potter book craze?

Roflcopter!

Obviously not seen Oh John Ringo, No! huh?

You can even get a "Oh John Ringo, No!" t-shirt

i guess as always its more a "issue" of what they read, then that they dont read enough (of what the gown up generation(s) consider correct, character building, reading material)...

Why? Why did you show me this? THIS IS TERRIBLE!

The given quotes are making my mouth drop.

I don't really like any of John Ringo's stuff before that series came out. But after reading the first one, you JUST*CAN'T*STOP*!!!*

One of those things that Epic Fail so hard it warps the space time continuum to end up at Epic Win. I have had serious thoughts about making a SR PC or NPC based off Mike, but then the other players (& GM if I ever get to play) would spend the whole game staring at me in horrified fascination (or at least until I could no longer keep up the total Id front).

Who wants to make a character based on Mike when there's Epic Cottontail? She's got a poison fingernails for chrissakes!

POISON FINGERNAILS

True dat! I think I'll make up a character for all the really interesting characters from the books...

And I'm trying to figure out how to cut your post down to siggy it.

I get poison fingernails when I pick my nose in the morning while I have a cold and I pull (with an acute sensation of something being dislodged from inside my head) something resembling that giant hand-shaped gold nugget they have on display at the Golden Nugget casino in Las Vegas.

I've been sigged! I feel like I've finally been accepted!

I think I'll put another quote in my sig:

.

Hell, there's a lot of good quotes in there, most of them probably not safe for most forums