Vampires and the Zeitgeist

[sartorias]

I always feel a little frustrated when I'm sensing a commonality of some type, but all I'm getting is similarities of image from books/tv/whatever. It always seems to take me far longer to get the simplest clue than anyone around me, as well as to define it

Comments

[frumiousb]

Yes to Aragorn. As a good American child, I also always found Ozma of Oz inherently offensive.

I'd actually also argue that the self-made man is a quite new story-- one that I'd guess arose from two kinds of people: the expats and children of expats who went out to the former colonies, and the children of the new industrialized middle class in the more established countries.

That kind of hero is quite disruptive to established myth. And their role in film and literature is often to tear down established notion and class hierarchies. If this kind of hero is victorious, established custom is often one of the casualties.

I think that fantasy often explicitly turns its face away from that kind of personal empowerment because it is so linked with things like the Industrial revolution, globalization. Things that don't feel quaint or majestic. Sometimes that bothers me very much about the genre-- the feeling that it creates a wilful nostalgia for the Way We Never Were.

Getting back to vampires, they're especially interesting if I start thinking about things in this way. Bloodlines and blood is so priveleged in fantasy-- isn't it interesting that Vampires live on blood on the next block over in horror?