Are Vampires As Heroes Overrated?

[Cap'n Gravelock]

With the popularity of vampires in various media like Twilight, Underworld, Vampire Diaries and many, many others, are heroic vampires becoming overrated?

Do you think it's still possible to create a story about, or at least with, a heroic vampire that's not cliched and still interesting in its own right?

[Cheesegear]

Do you think it's still possible to create a story about, or at least with, a heroic vampire that's not cliched and still interesting in its own right?

Angel's good.

[Rockphed]

Angel's good.

And Spike ends up being more helpful than Angel, even though he is a pretty messed up creature.

[Tvtyrant]

With the popularity of vampires in various media like Twilight, Underworld, Vampire Diaries and many, many others, are heroic vampires becoming overrated?

Do you think it's still possible to create a story about, or at least with, a heroic vampire that's not cliched and still interesting in its own right?

I don't think any of those have been taken very seriously by critics, so now I don't think they are overrated. If anything they haven't been explored enough!

Things that still need to be explored: Vampire Astronauts, Vampire out of work hack writers, Vampire midlife crises, Vampire Wizards, Vampire Wizard Schools, Vampire Wizard School Parodies, Vampire Wizard School Revitalizations, etc.

Heck, there hasn't even been a vampire movie where a zombie apocalypse occurs and the vampires run around trying to save as many humans as they can because otherwise they are going to starve to death.

[Lord Raziere]

I have never seen any of those, so I'd either repeat the cliches because history, or do whatever I want and as a result be original.

but I remember that all that vampires really need to be good guys is to allow them the cliche of drinking animal blood. so lets be realistic from there. then they don't need to drink human blood, and thus the habits they form would depend entirely upon the setting. in a medieval fantasy they'd be whatever goes out and hunts animals the most, so you'd get a hunter/archer/trapper vampire who dwells in the wilderness, living in a hunting lodge just going out at night and sniping an animal to drink their blood.

in more modern fantasy, it gets trickier. sure you can probably suck blood from a steak, but you have to go out and buy it. and since vampires can't go out during the day, that leads to them working odd hours and night shifts and going to stores that are open 24/7. and of course a vampire probably has a family and thus has to explain why they suddenly have these night-shift habits, and must decline any and all invitations to any social event that takes place during the day, lest they die. they must have curtains on all their windows and that block the sun entirely, lest they die. they must take all their meals in private, lest they get found out. if religion has any power over you, you got to avoid all churches, which probably isn't all that bad unless your family is religious.

but overall, a vampires set of habits would ruin a lot of their social life. they'd probably be one of those night-shift convenience store workers who just sit around waiting for what few customers come in at late hours who then go home and and order all meat dishes online then spend their day in their coffin and if they wake up, can't go out, so they'd turn to watching TV, videogames or spending their day online, until they get hungry suck some blood from their meat, then go back to their distraction, unless they can find some nightclub as so often is the cliche, but if someone is obeying the normal diurnal routine before going vampire they wouldn't know what to do at those, wouldn't go to those often and would get out of practice of being social from being a vampire and wouldn't know how to act at a nightclub.

so I doubt a modern vampire- or at least a young one- would be anything like a mysterious or debonair figure of the night. they'd be closer to a pasty nerd seemingly living up to the cliche of hating the sun as much as they can. So anyone online could be a vampire! because those would probably be the only source of social interaction they would have during the day.

assuming they're adults. If they're high school students, they're basically screwed unless they find a safe place to live that isn't their parents house within 12 hours or less.

and all of that is assuming the vampire can drink animal blood. if they can only sustain themselves on HUMAN blood then......ho boy. good luck finding a human who will allow you to drink their blood within 12 hours at a time when most people are asleep.

[comicshorse]

Heck, there hasn't even been a vampire movie where a zombie apocalypse occurs and the vampires run around trying to save as many humans as they can because otherwise they are going to starve to death.

There is a webcomic about it though :smallsmile: 'Last Blood', not very good though IMHO

[Khedrac]

The simple answer is "Yes, I am sure that a good author could create a work with a good vampire protagonist that isn't cliched (other than the use of a vampire)."

Certainly vampires have been over-used in recent years, but I strongly suspect part of that is because too many authors are not as creative as they think they are.

[Kitten Champion]

Certainly vampires have been over-used in recent years, but I strongly suspect part of that is because too many authors are not as creative as they think they are.

A lot of it's just marketing. It's a lot easier for publishers to approach the market with something familiar when introducing a new writer than bringing in some wholly original creation no one has a frame of reference for, particularly as selling books is a very Search Engine Optimization-based thing. You liked that book about vampires? Here are dozens more as suggested by the algorithm.

Amazon's a lot of the reason for book trends of the last twenty or so years.

[Morty]

I kind of feel this thread is a few years too late. The popularity of Twilight is past its prime, and so are vampires in popculture in general.

[Fyraltari]

<snip>

The main obstacle you draw to vampire social life is the sun. However "step into the sun and die" is not an universal trait of vampire (that the sun is weakening or not enjoyable is however) so it again depends on how the author wants his vampire to works. Vampires can makegood anti-heroes (they're so conflicted about their need for blood) or vilain protagonists though.

There's a definite risk of running into clichés but that is tue of everything. In the end if the question is "can a good author..." then the answer is yes. Because that's what make an author good, doing something that's been done before without making it look like a cliché.

[Traab]

I think you confuse over done with over rated. But in either case, meh. Yes and no. See, its the nature of hollywood to drive anything that is popular into the ground. Just take the marvel universe and its dc counterpart as an example. "Hey Avengers did well, lets now do ALL OF THE COMICS" But with vampires, it never really got super popular. It was popular enough to do a few extra things after twilight, but never enough to flood us with clones and remakes and reimaginings of vamps. So its kinda in that sweet spot where they havent ruined the subject for the enxt generation until the next set of remakes come out, but present enough to be noticed.

[Doorhandle]

I don't think any of those have been taken very seriously by critics, so now I don't think they are overrated. If anything they haven't been explored enough!

Things that still need to be explored: Vampire Astronauts, Vampire out of work hack writers, Vampire midlife crises, Vampire Wizards, Vampire Wizard Schools, Vampire Wizard School Parodies, Vampire Wizard School Revitalizations, etc.

Heck, there hasn't even been a vampire movie where a zombie apocalypse occurs and the vampires run around trying to save as many humans as they can because otherwise they are going to starve to death.

There was a comic for that last one though. (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheExtinctionParade)

I would say vampires are pretty played out overall, but that may just be a personal dislike. Plus, most of the vampire heros are too, well, heroic: it would be nice to go back to more of them being villainous protagonists, or at least net-neutral .

[Lord Raziere]

I kind of feel this thread is a few years too late. The popularity of Twilight is past its prime, and so are vampires in popculture in general.

Ah, but see, thats the time when its best to start making what you want with it. the pop-culture trends are fickle and often get the new idea fumbled because they're new. now that you got examples of people making stories from it, you can look at it and see what you want to do with it and make it better on its own merits, and sure its past its prime, but thats a good thing, because that means no one cares enough to backlash against the idea just because its a vampire anymore, whereas during the craze it'd be more likely to be polarizing. after all, people are still making stories about old mythological gods. an idea is never too old to be respun anew in a different way.

[2D8HP]

.....
Do you think it's still possible to create a story about, or at least with, a heroic vampire that's not cliched and still interesting in its own right?


Well, the plot of Daybreakers (https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0433362/plotsummary) sounds interesting to me at least.

[dps]

Angel's good.

I agree, but that's a character that was created over 20 years ago.

As someone else posted, I'm sure a good writer can still create a good story with a vampire as the hero, but the heroic vampire has been completely overdone in recent years and become a cliché.

[brian 333]

What are vampires?

They are parodies of bloodsucking European nobles and landowners who hold people as chattle through the limiting of economic opportunity, creating a peasant class which, while technically free, are in a practical sense enslaved to the land owner who can use or even kill them with no fear of reprisal.

Back in the day, speaking ill of one's lord could end in a free trip to the barber who gave permanent haircuts. Creating a fiction about a vampire who did all the same stuff was less likely to result in such treatment.

So, generations later, kids seeking to freak out their parents adopted the imagined styles and mannerisms of Renaissance decadence then grew up to write novels about bad guys who are good at heart in this imagined setting. This is not new; look at the dime novels of Jessie James and Billy The Kid. Go back farther and you find Robin Hood. You can go back as far as Herculese, who twice murdered his wife and children, but was really a good guy cursed by Hera. And on and on.

If you want to create more of something currently flooding the market, go right ahead. That is the time-honored road to mediocrity, where Hollywood has been mired for most of my life. In fact, there really hasn't been a new story for a few thousand years: just retellings of old ones. This is why we have Tropes in the first place. Even Shakespear's plays comment on this fact.

But genius comes from creating something 'new' to the current generation. Game Of Thrones exhibits this by turning Heroic Fantasy on its side. The plots of the show could have been written by copying down the events of King Henry VIII's reign, or those of any other number of European monarchies. There is nothing new in GoT. But in our time Heroic Fantasy has pitted one small hero against unstoppable might, and the hero wins by some unforseen but glaring defect in the villain's carefully crafted master plan.

Martin's genius was to turn the heroes into scheming courtiers and turn the really heroic figures into crow food. To our generation this was a new innovation, though Russian literature is plagued with such anti-heroic fantasy. (Do the good guys always lose in Russian literature?) He broke the mold, and now everyone wants to kill off PoV characters.

So, the real question is, do you want your work to blend into the current mix? Or do you want to stand out?


Idea for a story: tell it as if you are doing a good vampire story, with a human as half of couple, (gay? Female vamp, male 'lover'? Maybe straight so people don't confuse the message.) Anyway, make the vampire a decietful, manipulative, mean, murderous bastard who lures the human into his world through lies and little by little the human begins to see through the deception. By the time the human discovers the truth it's too late; the vampire kills the human and begins stalking his next lover/victim. Make the closing sceen where the human meets the vampire the same as the original opening scene, but with a different human to show the pattern repeating.

[Traab]

Im not sure where the parodies of bloodsucking nobles thing comes from, as "vampires" have existed in various forms since mesopotamia. Yes the count dracula style handsome stranger version is more recent, but even then they came from mashing together a ton of regional myths into one big one.

[Lord Raziere]

on the other hand, if you really want heroic undead, revenants could be something worth looking into: no bloodsucking, no weakness to the light, no necromancer required, just someone driven by a desire or purpose so strong it can overcome even death. heroism seems like exactly the kind of burning desire or purpose that could make someone do that.

[Tvtyrant]

Evidently I was wrong, there are multiple comics about vampires staving off zombies.

[GloatingSwine]

Blatantly stolen:



OK, here's an idle thought (and a question) for you ...

A couple of weeks ago at the British Eastercon I found myself on a panel discussion about vampires. (Hey, I've been trying to get the hell away from being Mr Singularity Guy for years now; what's your problem?)

Anyway, there I was sitting with Freda Warrington and Jim Butcher, and our moderator opens up by asking, "what makes vampires sexy?"

And I suddenly realized I had come to the right place for an argument. Because ...

Vampires are not sexy. At least, not in the real world.

Desmodus rotundis isn't sexy. (Except insofar as small furry rodents that carry rabies aren't as un-sexy as some other obligate haemophages.) Bed bugs are really not sexy. But if you want maximally not-sexy, it's hard to top Placobdelloides jaegerskioeldi, the Hippo Arse Leech.

The Hippo Arse Leech is a leech; it sucks blood. Like most leeches, its mouth parts aren't really up to drilling through the armour-tough skin of a hippopotamus, so it seeks out an exposed surface with a much more porous barrier separating it from the juicy red stuff: the lining of the hippo rectum. When arse leeches find somewhere to feed, in due course happy fun times ensue—for hermaphrodite values of happy fun times that involve traumatic insemination. Once pregnant, the leeches allow themselves to be expelled by the hippo (it's noteworthy that hippopotami spin their tails when they defecate, to sling the crap as far away as possible—possibly because the leeches itch—we're into self-propelled-hemorrhoids-with-teeth territory here), whereupon in the due fullness of time they find another hippo, force their way through it's arse crack, and find somewhere to chow down. Oh, did I mention that this delightful critter nurtures its young? Yep, the mother feeds her brood until they're mature enough to find a hippo of their own. (Guess what she feeds them with.)

Here 's a video by Mark Siddall, professor of invertebrate zoology at the American Natural History Museum, a noted expert on leeches, describing how he discovered P. Jaegerskioeldi, just in case you think I'm making this up.

By the end of my description Jim and Freda were both ... well, I wish I'd thought to photograph their faces for posterity. So were the audience. And that's when I got to the money shot: the thing about fictional vampires is, vampires are only sexy when they're anthropomorphic.

Let's leave aside the whole living dead angle (a callback to ancient burial traditions in northern climes, where the decay of corpses might be retarded by cold weather: and when a family sickened and died one after the other, from contagious diseases such as tuberculosis, on opening the family crypt an undecaying rosy-cheeked corpse might be found with blood trickling from its mouth). Let's look solely at the vampire motif in modern fiction, where sexy vampires are used as a metaphor for the forbidden lover. Do we see anything approximating a realistic portrayal of actual blood-drinking organisms? Do we hell! Blood isn't actually very nutritious, so haemophagous parasites tend to be small, specialized, and horrifyingly adapted: biological syringes with a guidance system and a digestive tract attached. If we expanded a real one to human size it'd be a thing of horror, fit to give Ridley Scott or H. R. Giger nightmares. But I digress: the thing is, we know what real bloodsucking fiends look like, and do we find them in our fiction? We do not.

So here we have a seeming paradox: a class of organism that is represented in fictionalized, supernatural form in a manner that is pretty much the antithesis of their real world presentation. There's an entire sub-genre in which we are expected to temporarily pretend that the smouldering sexy vampire lover isn't actually a hippo arse leech squirming and eager to dig it's jaws into your rectal mucosa. And now I am shaking my head and wondering, thoughtfully, if I can see any other parasitic life-cycles that are amenable to converting into supernatural fictional tropes? (Your first example being, of course, my use of angler fish sex as a model for unicorns ...)



Anyway, how about a squeamish and paralysingly nerdy vampire investment banker made an offer he can't refuse by a secret paranormal intelligence agency? (The Rhesus Chart/The Nightmare Stacks, books 5 and 7 of the Laundry Files).

[Ibrinar]

I don't think any of those have been taken very seriously by critics, so now I don't think they are overrated. If anything they haven't been explored enough!

Things that still need to be explored: Vampire Astronauts, Vampire out of work hack writers, Vampire midlife crises, Vampire Wizards, Vampire Wizard Schools, Vampire Wizard School Parodies, Vampire Wizard School Revitalizations, etc.

Heck, there hasn't even been a vampire movie where a zombie apocalypse occurs and the vampires run around trying to save as many humans as they can because otherwise they are going to starve to death.

I think I remember a book where the vampires where trying to help the humans in a zombie apocalypse, but I can't remamber the name...

[Tvtyrant]

Blatantly stolen:






Anyway, how about a squeamish and paralysingly nerdy vampire investment banker made an offer he can't refuse by a secret paranormal intelligence agency? (The Rhesus Chart/The Nightmare Stacks, books 5 and 7 of the Laundry Files).

Huh. I always thought Vampires were a reference to stalkers and abusers, who always seem to find their target. Their interest is very personal, and seem to be safe, even desirable, until you are along with them.

[GloatingSwine]

Huh. I always thought Vampires were a reference to stalkers and abusers, who always seem to find their target. Their interest is very personal, and seem to be safe, even desirable, until you are along with them.

That's kinda come later. Earlier representations of vampires were more monstrous.

[Fyraltari]

Originally vampires were "just" legends (that may have come to be to explain epidemicsand abnormaly preserved corpses), dead that come to their loved ones in their dreams and draws them to death by making them weaker and weaker. Even more basically they are, like all undead figures (ghosts, banshees, etc) just the good old fear of death given form by human imagination.



The vampire as fictionnal character iss quite recent ; people used to believe in vampires. In fact people still do.
Just look at this 18th century case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petar_Blagojevich).

[Giggling Ghast]

"You see, I was once a badass vampire. But love, and a pesky curse, de-fanged me. And now I'm just a big fluffy puppy with bad teeth."

[The Glyphstone]

Non-European cultures have some pretty freaky vampire variants as well, like the Filipino manananggal/penggalalan.

[comicshorse]

Well, the plot of Daybreakers (https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0433362/plotsummary) sounds interesting to me at least.

If you haven't seen it its worth a look. The first third about the functioning of the Vampire world is fascinating, the middle third is ok and at the end it turns into a rather dull bloodbath

[Cap'n Gravelock]

Non-European cultures have some pretty freaky vampire variants as well, like the Filipino manananggal/penggalalan.

I actually live there although the penanggalan is Malaysian and is kinda freakier considering it's just a head...

[tomandtish]

"You see, I was once a badass vampire. But love, and a pesky curse, de-fanged me. And now I'm just a big fluffy puppy with bad teeth."

"No, not the hair! Never the hair!"

[Giggling Ghast]

"No, not the hair! Never the hair!"

“But there must be some way I can show my appreciation ...?”

“No, helping those in my need’s my job. And working up a load of sexual tension and prancing away like a magnificent poof is truly thanks enough.”

[chainer1216]

Yes, they can be done well and somewhat fresh BUT right now vamps are overdone, prolific even.

I read a lot of urban fantasy nowadays and it seems like having vampires is a prerequisite to be published anymore.

[Mightymosy]

With the popularity of vampires in various media like Twilight, Underworld, Vampire Diaries and many, many others, are heroic vampires becoming overrated?

Do you think it's still possible to create a story about, or at least with, a heroic vampire that's not cliched and still interesting in its own right?
1. YEEEES!!!

2. Maybe, but I'm not interested in the slightest.

3. Actually it's not just vampires. The whole "kinda evil" protagonist stick has been overdone. It's okay for a change of pace, but in general I want the protagonists to be good people. To set a standard, you know?
Hell we even have not one, but multiple series with serial killers as "protagonist" these days. One is with a teen girl who falls in love with a teen serial killer. Can I say SICK WORLD loud enough?
Really don't enjoy that media anymore, but everyone and their dog seems to like it - sometimes I think I'm the only person who doesn't watch Game of Thrones. Then, luckily, my girlfriend doesn't either :-)

[Cap'n Gravelock]

1. YEEEES!!!

2. Maybe, but I'm not interested in the slightest.

3. Actually it's not just vampires. The whole "kinda evil" protagonist stick has been overdone. It's okay for a change of pace, but in general I want the protagonists to be good people. To set a standard, you know?
Hell we even have not one, but multiple series with serial killers as "protagonist" these days. One is with a teen girl who falls in love with a teen serial killer. Can I say SICK WORLD loud enough?
Really don't enjoy that media anymore, but everyone and their dog seems to like it - sometimes I think I'm the only person who doesn't watch Game of Thrones. Then, luckily, my girlfriend doesn't either :-)

You gotta point there. Sick World, indeed. I men 50 Shades of Grey is actually quite awful if taken realistically.

However, what I am trying to ask is about an undead guy like Daniel Fortesque who's raised against their will.

[Leewei]

Sethra Lavode is always fun when she show up in the Vlad Taltos chronicles. Her vampirism pretty much always is just something mentioned in passing - never any kind of plot point.

[S@tanicoaldo]

Vampire hunter D is very good.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51MHXQGDC9L._SY445_.jpg

I guess it's just like any other thing, you just have to know where to look for.

[Scarlet Knight]

I think it depends on how weak or strong the vampire is.

Is he a combo superhero who can move like the Flash, climb walls and lift cars like Spiderman, turn into a bat or mist AND go out in the sun?

Now how will that story be different than someone as slow as Bela Lugosi, who can't go out in the sun, fears crosses, can't cross running water, runs from garlic, and who's main power is mind control?

In the former the villians had better all be pumped up into comic level power. In the latter, the vampire curse is the villian.

[Giggling Ghast]

On this related note, might I bring up that there’s a new RPG coming out this June starring a vampire hero? It’s called Vampyr and it’s set in London during the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918.

It’s coming out for all platforms: PS4, Xbox One and PC. I think it looks quite good.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TdTcv3uUi1o