They can be. If you tackle this from a speculative fiction POV, a secret society of immortals quickly ends up with a hyper-privileged class of 1000 year old aristocrats - succeeding at capitalism is a generational, dynastic project for mortals, but if you've got centuries to plot and hoard, it becomes feasible for the individual. Not to mention that the vampiric condition can be seen as inherently parasitic. Antifa Vampire Hunter Academy should absolutely be a thing.
But you can spin this in a number of ways. Folk superstition about vampires being a thing people actually believed in coincide heavily with the prevalence of typhus. An undead relative slowly sapping the life force from entire families or villages became a widespread explanation for the slow death by the "wasting disease" in lots of rural communities, both in the Balkans, in the UK and in the US. Then, the first gothic vamire stories were about the threat of lesbianism, or how the evil, backwards, cruel, queer-coded slav destroys noble British society by making England's prudent daughters horny and spreading disease. And nowadays, you have stuff like True Blood or Bit, where queer vampires are a good thing and it's the vampire hunters that are the nazis.
Oh definitely, horror is a broad genre with a lot of different takes and by and large I think we're just meming here with how reductive we're being, but you make excellent points about how modern vampire stories have reclaimed queerness from a genre that can definitely be read as homophobic.
Similarly I'm reminded of works like Lovecraft Country and Winter Tide that foreground Lovecraft's racism and attempt to reclaim them by turning the narrative to the horror of being persecuted for being a marginalized group, by centering the narrative from the Pov of what would traditionally be the villains in Lovecraft's work.
Edit: Like imo personally my favorite horror is when the monster is actually capitalism, racism or patriarchy- like in Get Out, because of course we're all :LIB: here
Similarly I’m reminded of works like Lovecraft Country and Winter Tide that foreground Lovecraft’s racism and attempt to reclaim them by turning the narrative to the horror of being persecuted for being a marginalized group, by centering the narrative from the Pov of what would traditionally be the villains in Lovecraft’s work.
I've thought for a while that this would be a great approach to Lovecraft. Something like The Shadow over Innsmouth, but written by an immigrant who's also a marine biologist and describes Dagon as a dude that just wants to vibe under the waves. I love the whole Cthulhu mythos, but there's something so ridiculously stuck up about it, like cmon dude, are you seriously scared of soap bubbles? It's just ripe to be deconstructed a bit.
Counterpoint: Vampire stories are about putting rich aristocrats back six feet under where they belong.
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The only good vampire stories are the ones where you kill them, not fuck them. :volcel-judge:
They can be. If you tackle this from a speculative fiction POV, a secret society of immortals quickly ends up with a hyper-privileged class of 1000 year old aristocrats - succeeding at capitalism is a generational, dynastic project for mortals, but if you've got centuries to plot and hoard, it becomes feasible for the individual. Not to mention that the vampiric condition can be seen as inherently parasitic. Antifa Vampire Hunter Academy should absolutely be a thing.
But you can spin this in a number of ways. Folk superstition about vampires being a thing people actually believed in coincide heavily with the prevalence of typhus. An undead relative slowly sapping the life force from entire families or villages became a widespread explanation for the slow death by the "wasting disease" in lots of rural communities, both in the Balkans, in the UK and in the US. Then, the first gothic vamire stories were about the threat of lesbianism, or how the evil, backwards, cruel, queer-coded slav destroys noble British society by making England's prudent daughters horny and spreading disease. And nowadays, you have stuff like True Blood or Bit, where queer vampires are a good thing and it's the vampire hunters that are the nazis.
Oh definitely, horror is a broad genre with a lot of different takes and by and large I think we're just meming here with how reductive we're being, but you make excellent points about how modern vampire stories have reclaimed queerness from a genre that can definitely be read as homophobic.
Similarly I'm reminded of works like Lovecraft Country and Winter Tide that foreground Lovecraft's racism and attempt to reclaim them by turning the narrative to the horror of being persecuted for being a marginalized group, by centering the narrative from the Pov of what would traditionally be the villains in Lovecraft's work.
Edit: Like imo personally my favorite horror is when the monster is actually capitalism, racism or patriarchy- like in Get Out, because of course we're all :LIB: here
I've thought for a while that this would be a great approach to Lovecraft. Something like The Shadow over Innsmouth, but written by an immigrant who's also a marine biologist and describes Dagon as a dude that just wants to vibe under the waves. I love the whole Cthulhu mythos, but there's something so ridiculously stuck up about it, like cmon dude, are you seriously scared of soap bubbles? It's just ripe to be deconstructed a bit.