I just realized something

[ellenel13.livejournal.com]

Everyone, I just realized that LKH started the sparkling thing long before SMeyer did. The one instance that jumps out it my mind the most is that part in the first Merry book were Merry's ex-fiancee started to slowly *unveil* the sparkle and she realized that he was playing it up to make her feel ugly or whatever. Then in the same book, or the next one I can't remember, Sholto started babbling about how he first saw to fairies doing it and they were glowing. And I'm pretty sure there was some stuff about Frost sparkling. By the way, did Frost die in one of the books, or did I hallucinate that?

 Anyway, to make this post seem less pointless (my college semester ended and I have nothing to do for the next two weeks) I want to take about how LKH (and a lot of the authors in the the vampire genre) seem to be treating vapirism and werewolves as themes in fiction. When I first started reading this this particular sub-genre of fantasy, I noticed that most authors used vampires and werewolves as a symbol of alienation from humanity. Vampires are unable to go out during the day so they can't join other humans. Vampires are also forced to see humans as food, so even in the books were they aren't described as soulless demons, vampires slowly begin to lose their sense os kinship with other human beings. Also, vampires live for much longer than humans, which means that they become afraid of making attachment with humans because they know that they will only lose them.

Werewolves, on the other hand, represent people whose animal instincts completely take over and a complete loss of rationality. One of my teachers once said that the wolf in most werewolves was actually the Id. (lol Freud) The cases with werewolves are particularly sad because werewolves usually retain their humanity and instead of willingly separating themselves from people, werewolves are often rejected and forced away from other human beings. Back when AB books didn't totally suck, this was evident in the way that Richard desperately wanted to keep his sense of humanity while Jean Claude only wanted to find people who loved him (I think that's what Jean-Calude wanted) because Jean-Claude simply sees himself above humanity.
I was thinking that the reason LKH books have lost all sense of depth is that vampires and wereanimals are no longer a metaphor for anything other than LKH sex fantasies and resolution of personal issues with love and abandonment. Richard is only her punching bag to resolve her issues with her ex, so his desire to still be human is constantly beat down not because the text has shown that he's being stubborn and irrational, but because LKH wants to take out her rage against her ex. It would be one thing if the plot and development had shown that Richard's angst was totally unwarranted, but that not the case. By the way, that scene in NiC where Anita basically rapes Richard? Made about a thousand times worse when you realized that Antia is LKH and Richard is her ex. I can't recall whether Richard said no outright, but either way it now feels like LKHAnita was showing Richard that he as just a prude and that he secretly wants her and that he will be miserable forever without her.

Ultimately, I think Richad remains a more complex character than both Jean-Claude and Anita. By now, Jean Claude is little more than French vampire out to fulfill LKHAnita's every whim.
Sorry, this got kind of long.

Um, I have no idea why there are to LJcuts. They both lead to the same stuff.

Comments

[vlredreign.livejournal.com]

Sholto mentions the glowing Sidhe in the first book.

I think Anne Rice started that whole vampire glowing thing, though. Perhaps not, but that's the first time I saw it.

BTW, Lestat would kick Jean Claude's ass. And I like Jean Claude! lol

Richard isn't complex. He's a mess. LKH threw him under the bus because he was the only character that wouldn't take shit from Anita.

[ellenel13.livejournal.com]

I don't think Richard is complex either. I think he's more complex than Anita and Jean-Claude and mostly because of the eerie crap about LKH's ex.

[ladyniko.livejournal.com]

Richard became the evil whiner ex-b/f from hell when she dumped Hubby #1.

[matrixrefugee.livejournal.com]

True, but faeries can sparkle all they want: it's in our collective consciousness to think of faeries as sparkly pixies, ala Tinkerbell. Now vampires, on the other hand...

[mystoflare.livejournal.com]

Yes, vampires should not sparkle.
The Twitards really scare me when they squeal fangirlishly over Edward Cullen's sparkly penis in Breaking Dawn. I'm sorry, but if I saw a seemingly-normal guy with a sparkle penis, I'd wonder if he harbors some new weird type of herpes or something.
...Hey, maybe LKH is a closet Twibrat? Can't you imagine the next Merry book having Merry boink a pretty hot Adonis (oh, gods, PLEASE don't have Merry shagging an actual, if fictional, Adonis, that would be in even worse taste than Gillian Key shagging the Phantom of the Opera!), with a sparkly penis hard as stone?

[easol.livejournal.com]

Merry will introduce Brian, formerly the God Of Mining and Sparkly Little Pebbles, whose skin is as white and sparkly as a marble countertop, whose abs are like little sensuous boulders, and whose peenie is a shimmering stalactite except it's bigger and penis-shaped and repeatedly gives Merry shrieking orgasms.

Cue weird metaphors about having sex with the stony earth or something, plus descriptions of sparkling like quartz and being really really hard.

[pandorasblog]

OH MY GOD. You mean Meyer actually talks about Edward's penis?

And to think those books are touted as being the wholesome side of teen horror because of the whole abstinence thing... I've only read the first one and heard confused stuff about scary pregnancies re: the rest...

[saintslady.livejournal.com]

"By the way, did Frost die in one of the books, or did I hallucinate that?"

No...but in "Lick of Frost" he becomes "The White Stag" kinda like a sacrificial king.....

[firesongvx.livejournal.com]

Heh, why does that not surprise me? I haven't read all of the Merry books yet, but I'm slowly truding through them now...and Frost has become my favorite character so far because he's the only one that doesn't just automatically race to Merry's beck and call.

It figures he would get screwed in the figurative sense as well as the literal one. :P

[firesongvx.livejournal.com]

I completely agree that these books suck so hard now because the core issues (such as the vampire/werewolf/human conflicts that you mentioned) have been abandoned in favor of pointless, squicky sex fantasies. The bizarre sex shit wasn't so bad in the older books because it actually had a POINT. I'm thinking of when Raina & co. were forcing Stephen (the pretty, sexually abused werewolf that actually had a personality, remember him? lol) to do those creepy porn films. I *think* that was in the Lunatic Cafe...but I'm not sure, the early series tends to run together for me because I always read them so fast. Anyway, stuff like that actually worked because it was furthering the development of the characters in some way. Now? No. Just, no.

I also agree about Richard. He's not much of a character *now*, but he's still more multidimensional than Anita or Jean-Claude. Which is ridiculously ironic, because LKH has only been trying to *destroy* his character. XD

It's just really depressing that LKH had so many complex, interesting issues set up for this series...and never followed through with any of them. The vampire children? Valentina and...oh, hell, I can't remember the boy's name! Think it started with a B, though...anyway, *they* were creepy as all hell. She could have taken that so many places, exploring the warped nature of a creature who is stuck in a child's body for eternity. Instead, they just sort of vanished from the series.

...which might have actually been a *good* thing, as I really didn't want to read some hard-core pedophile sex scene. -_-

Anyway, I will stop rambling now, but you get the idea! There was a lot of great stuff set up for LKH's characters to delve into, but we're never going to see anything more than endless supernatural porn. And it's *bad*, unimaginative supernatural porn at that. :(

[pandorasblog]

The bizarre sex shit wasn't so bad in the older books because it actually had a POINT. I'm thinking of when Raina & co. were forcing Stephen (the pretty, sexually abused werewolf that actually had a personality, remember him? lol) to do those creepy porn films [...] stuff like that actually worked because it was furthering the development of the characters in some way.

Yeah, in the old days the books were about how it'd work to have out werewolves and vampires in society, and how their individual societies would mesh with the mainstream. That seemed, when I first picked the series up in 2003 (which I know was already long after they were first published, but anyway) to be a pretty original take on vampire/werewolf stuff. I really liked how she used the darker, seamier side of those societies to play out a classic noir fiction theme: how the strong prey on the vulnerable, as with the porn thing you mention.

It's so frustrating when you see how, as the OP stated, it's now all about LKH's sexual side. I remember when a power grab by one clan of vampires actually meant something, and had consequences on everything from preternatural legal rights to Anita's animating work, but now all those interesting, world-building things that were once central to the series have become peripheral or vanished.

When I read through a stack of books I plan to clear out of my shelves, I really want to go back and re-read the early Anita stuff just to see how big a contrast there is, and remember why I ever obsessed over this series.

[leggomylegolas.livejournal.com]

They don't act very much like vampires and werewolves. Does she ever really have Jean Claude drink blood "on screen" (as she would put it)? I can't really remember. It certainly doesn't seem to happen too much. Oh wait, they all "feed off sex". How often does her harem of furry walking dongs actually change into wolves and cheetas and what all else?

You could take three scenes out and change some words around and no one would even know it was about werewolves and vampires.

[firesongvx.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's very true.

The last time that *I* can remember Jean-Claude seriously digging in and drinking blood in the true, hard-core feeding sense (and not just as some lame, kinky foreplay)is when Anita let him bite her wrist because he was dying.

...and I kind of think that was as far back as Bloody Bones.

As for the shapeshifters, they change to that halfway form for furry sex more often than to feed. Ick.

[ukoku.livejournal.com]

Semi-Related Opinion Question: Are there books that treat vampires as a species separate from humans, rather than humans-turned-vampires? How do people feel about that?

I ask because I wonder if the loss-of-depth in LKH's Alternate History is due to the treatment of vampires in that world: They're becoming "mainstream", if you will, and so they're no longer so tragic and alienated. Weres, in turn, are treated as having a managable disease, or maybe a psychological problem: in other words, deal with it. It does take away a lot of the romanticism, but I do think it's particularly realistic.

However, the Richard stuff is all Tru Dat.

By the way, that scene in NiC where Anita basically rapes Richard? Made about a thousand times worse when you realized that Antia is LKH and Richard is her ex.

I am now horrified, thank you.

[duchym.livejournal.com]

Try a science fiction book called Blindsight by Peter Watts. Vampires are a separate species from humans.

[easol.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'd be creeped out if I were Gary Hamilton.

Try Fevre Dream, which has vampires as a different but similar species. One really creepy Gollumesque dude even tries to become a vampire (cannibalism, serving the head evil vamp) only to be told that guess what, you can't.

[pandorasblog]

There's Fledgling by Octavia Butler. It's not without its problematic areas (child-bodied vampire + sex used to further relationship with blood donor will put some people off and did give me pause regardless of authorial intent), but it does play interestingly with the idea of parallel evolution. The Ina, the vampire race of the stories, have been around since prehistory, and, for reasons that escape me because I read the book a year ago, they gradually fell in with humans and began bonding symbiotically with them. Humans who are fed on don't turn into vampires in those books; rather there's a psychological dependence which I think includes some kind of physical addiction.

Again, I'm fuzzy on the details, but it was an interesting departure from the usual vampire books because removing the will they/won't they drama over whether a human gets turned (which, now I think about it, dominates a high percentage of vampire fiction) allows the drama to be about the central character's quest for her lost memories of the attack that killed her family, and there's inter-Ina tensions and exploration of their culture. It's a fairly short novel and I felt like there was a lot that could've been expanded on, but it's worth picking up.

[firesongvx.livejournal.com]

I LOVE the idea of vampires as a completely separate species from humans! That has been one of my favorite ideas for years, it's actually the basis for one of my writing projects.

In my universe, there are basically three "breeds" of vampires. The original strain, which is an alien species from a different planet altogether. Another type is an evolution-in-progress, a developing subspecies whose growth has been accelerated by the move to Earth. And then, of course, there are the Changed humans. I like to play with the issues that emerge when people gradually transist into a hardcore predatory species. It's quite fun.

So, yeah, I'm all over the idea of vampires not being decendants of humans at all! :)

[ellenel13.livejournal.com]

It's the whole you're a prude who'll never be happy without me and you really want me anyway but you're too insecure thing that makes it immature as well as downright creepy.

[slayra.livejournal.com]

I think those young adult books by Melissa de la Cruz treat vampires as a separate species. Actually if you disregard the usual teen interactions between characters, her concept of vampirism is pretty original... a bit far-fetched, but original. Nothing like Meyer's sparkling vampires. Ugh. O__O

[naeko.livejournal.com]

Technically, they're humans-turned-vampires, but David Wellington (http://www.brokentype.com/davidwellington/) writes some really amazing vampire (and zombie and werewolf) books! They're not angsty, bitchy, woe-is-me-I-CANNOT-LOOOOOOVE-ANYMORRRRRE! vampires. They're brutal, unfeeling, selfish, violent creatures who literally only see humans as food.

His first vampire book is 13 Bullets and the vampires are MUCH scarier than anything LKH has come up with (though Seraphina burrowing into Anita's head and Anita basically going, "Are you my mommy?" is up there in scary). They feed by basically going up to a human, ripping a limb off and then opening their mouths to catch the spray, or sucking on the torn stump.

I really, REALLY adore his books! His zombie books are amazing as well, and his werewolf books have been really hard to find (I last read they should have been out in Feb. :/), but you can read all his stories on his website for free if you can't find the hard copies.

[hyena-frog.livejournal.com]

The Leandros Bros. series (Nightlife, Moonshine, Madhouse, and Deathwish are currently out) describes vampires as "born, not made". :)

[quizzicalsphinx.livejournal.com]

In The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas, it's explicitly stated--by the vampire himself, no less--that vampires are a completely different species that only resembles humans in order to attract prey.

I adore the concept, and Charnas makes it completely believable in the context of her world, even though vampires in my own writing are still the changed-human sort. Weirdly enough, someone recommended Charnas to me when they noticed that my vampires and Charnas's greatly resembled each other, (which is like the backhanded complement of the writing world: "Oh wow, your work-in-progress is great! Hey, you should read this other, previously published book! It's just like yours!" ::headdesk::)

[shalotts-lady.livejournal.com]

hmmm, sounds like another sparklepyer we know? vampire baby that eats it way out of its mothers womb and then ages with the speed of light after birth?

Also, doesnt LKM kinda touch on this idea of a separately evolving species in Circus of the Dammned with Mr. Oliver or is he just super old?

[mystoflare.livejournal.com]

Wasn't Oliver some kind of pre-human, like a vampiric homo erectus? I recall he was (by Anita's estimate) in the realm of 1 million years old or something, and supposedly pre-dated humans as a species. Of course, this is before canon's shot dead, and Anita kills him off because she can't shag a vampire shorter than her, who looks like a Neanderthal :P