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Hungry Vampires and Vampires That Just Want to Live

These days, the vampiric need for blood tends to be portrayed as an uncontrollable and all-consuming hunger. On a genre level, the vampiric hunger just seems to keep on getting worse.

Writers seem to keep topping each other and making the hunger increasingly severe.  I fully predict that eventually someone is going to write a Vampire story where our protagonist has to be hooked up to a constant feed of blood and has all these Renfields constantly grabbing more people off the street to keep it going.

Here are a lot of other common threads:

- Vampires have no satiety, or almost none. They crave blood constantly. They see a person, and their bodies basically react thusly: ‘hey, someone brought blood!’ They need a tremendous amount of willpower just to avoid killing everyone around them all the time. Why any Vampires that aren’t completely and utterly evil even bother living in society at all is anyone’s guess, but they do, and they rack up enormous body counts simply by existing.

- They crave blood regardless of all utility. They’re like reverse bloody Kantians (I must have blood regardless of utility). Twilight and Being Human take the cake, here: their Vampires don’t even need blood to live at all. In Being Human it’s basically an addiction that they have because…um, they’re Vampires and Vampires are supposed to drink blood?

In Twilight, Vampires are technically immune to starvation, according to the Illustrated Guide. Blood makes them stronger, I guess – even though they’re already strong enough to juggle minivans, so it seems redundant. Blood also makes them less hungry – kind of, temporarily – but they’re hungry most of the time anyway. Really, these guys should just take one for the team and accept that they’ll be hungry forever and live in the woods.

If real predators were that hungry all the time, they’d end up wasting most of the energy they ingested just trying to get more food in a loop that wouldn’t favor long-term survival.


Many Vampires are creatures conceived in the mindset that says all predators are just trying to hurt us all the time and aren’t actually acting in their own self-interest by trying to frigging eat. It’s the same mindset that produces stories where predators seek out one particular target at all costs and pass up plenty of other viable food sources along the way and paints predators as having more in common with serial killers than hungry animals. Vampire fiction often tries to have it both ways.

- Vampires’ desire for blood is constant, but their need is not desperate. I don’t usually see Vampires that are on the verge of death if they don’t get blood right that minute. You’d never know it, given how hungry they are, but we’re definitely supposed to think that it’s the human in danger and not them. The writers severely downplay the conflict that’s actually associated with feeding on people. In the aftermath of the murder, the Vampires mourn the death of their victims or don’t, but there’s rarely any sense that they narrowly avoided dying themselves.

Twilight helped popularize that whole idea that if you get so much as a bloody paper cut around a Vampire you’re screwed. I’ve seen that in plenty of other places too, but it’s a pretty iconic scene in New Moon.

Jasper, is that how you reacted when one of your high school classmates misused the stapler?

Still, though, the Cullens have got their wilderness animals to binge on, and even then, they can take long breaks in between feedings. Edward and his family certainly don’t go ‘camping’ all that often. There are huge sections of the books where their actual consumption of blood doesn’t come up at all. They may crave it all the time for some reason, but they’ll survive with relatively infrequent feeding periods. As we’ve established, they don’t even frigging need the blood at all, and their need to feed never puts them in any real danger.

My condition is exactly the opposite.

Get a nosebleed around me; I’ll get you a tissue. Cut yourself with a knife, and I know first-aid. Get a paper-cut around me – I honestly probably wouldn’t even notice, because my nose isn’t any better than a normal person’s and most people don’t bleed as much as Bella did after getting a frigging paper-cut. Paper is not razor wire, and I don’t have any razor wire at my house anyway.

Yes, that is the correct reaction.

I’m not Louis either. I can easily take one pint from someone at a time, and no more. I know my mouth capacity. I know how many swallows I need to get to a pint. My fangs are not poisonous, and my bite is neither lethal nor infectious (infecting someone with my vampirism is pretty hard to do unintentionally). I can stop when I get to sixteen ounces, withdraw, and start cleaning the wound. No problem.

I just need to do it every day, or I’ll die.

If I fed Tuesday, but not Wednesday – well, every Thursday henceforth is going to be cancelled forever. I could drink from eight different people on Tuesday, and it wouldn’t matter – I’d still need blood Wednesday. Hell, I could drain a person dry on Tuesday if I was an evil idiot monster with an unlimited stomach capacity, and it wouldn’t matter. My body wouldn’t use the excess, and it has no way of storing it for later. You wake up the next day, and the stopwatch resets. I also can't use animal blood as a substitute and hospital blood is completely out of the question. I need a fresh, human, near-constant supply.

For Hungry Vampires, their lives are basically battles of wills between their urges and their sense of moral and physical restraint.

My life is a lot more like a survival narrative. This is what I need. What do I have? What do I need to do every day to get what I need? What are my obstacles? When can I rest?

Yeah. My type of vampire doesn’t get days off, but we at least get to take breaks.

With many Hungry Vampires, it’s unpredictable. Today may be another good day for you where nothing happens and you can forget about having to clean up after yourself that last time you fucking killed someone. Or it may be the day you kill some people or infect them against their will and have to deal with the consequences.

With me, it’s a daily grind. That’s not random. The only unknown is how I’m ultimately going to get blood today.

You can plan ahead, at least a little. But you have to be ready to change plans and reschedule at the drop of the hat.

My people have tried to respond to this by building an enormous social network around our need, or at least trying to. It’s by no means a stable network, but I thank each and every one of our hosts every day for what they do for us. Having said that, just plain running that network and maintaining it is a full-time job.

Hungry Vampires don’t do much in the way of planning when it comes to their condition. Their lives are all about picking up the pieces when their passions inevitably overpower them.

Their experience is one huge cycle of hunger, euphoria, and guilt.

Vampires of all stripes and types are not necessarily philosophers or even philosophy nerds, but they do tend to be the cause of philosophy in others.

Hungry Vampires? They bring out everyone’s inner Puritanical Ascetic. Your natural desires are evil! There is absolutely no way to fulfill them in a way that is safe and mutually beneficial for others. You will either spend life in a state of perpetual deprivation where you are constantly relying on nothing but your noble willpower to save you and other people, or you are a shameful, ruined monster whose only joys lies in your continual destruction of sapient life which will ultimately prove unfulfilling and get you killed. Enjoy your dystopia!

The only difference between this and the worldview of a shocking number of both modern and historical people is scale. I can see why so many social conservative types like many modern Vampire stories.

My people bring out everyone’s Consequentialist Utilitarian, including our own. Is it ethical to give one person an indefinite lifespan if it means that an indefinite number of people will get hurt? Hurt, but not killed – so the math balances out?

Sadly, even consensually and safely getting blood from hosts isn’t completely morally unambiguous. There are emotional consequences for getting involved with a paranoid, shady society of criminals. Our hosts have to live almost as much of a double life as we do, with all that that implies. We’ll never be able to get around the fact that even when we help our hosts financially, socially, or otherwise, there’s always that background motivation of: ‘see, this way, they’ll be less likely to leave us.’

And that’s not even the worst of it. No matter how much time and energy we invest in finding hosts, we never seem to have enough. Our blood requirement is that persistent. When we inevitably come up short, we resort to parasitic vampirism, either on an individual level or a societal one. In our slang, it’s called ‘red-lighting.’ Our victims don’t die, but they do get hurt. On a relatively good day, you can incapacitate someone relatively peacefully and seamlessly remove a pint of their blood, followed by a smooth memory erasure. It may still be an act of violence, but at least the suffering level is low.

On a bad day, you have to chase them down and maybe beat them up first. On a really bad day, you might not even be able to successfully incapacitate them, and they’ll feel everything that happens until you can wipe their memories. The rule is that you minimize harm as much as possible, but there’s no way of minimizing it all the way.

But at the end of the day, they’re still alive. And I’m still alive. The thousands of people we’ve sired all get to live. Is it worth it?

It’s hard to be objective about utilitarian dilemmas when they involve you personally. How can you give an objective answer to the trolley problem when you’re the one that might get run over? But I’ve been on the other side of this issue, too. I’m a sire. Every time we add someone new to the community, we ask that question again.

Alternatives?

I’ve sired ten people, but I’ve rejected way more people than that.

Plenty of people in our culture think that not siring people is tantamount to killing them, since they’ll all die of aging eventually. Plenty of other people think we should stop siring people altogether, since it would ease the pressure off the hosts. They disagree about how the math works out, thinking that the current system causes too much suffering.

I do think siring is saving someone’s life. Ultimately, give me a utilitarian moral dilemma, I say: take the third option. Try to save every person involved in the trolley problem. In this case, the third option is ‘find an artificial blood substitute.’ Sadly, none of the ones that medical science has come up with yet have worked, and scientifically researching vampires is a huge hot-button issue in our society. Taking a third option is turning into a long-term goal, whether I like it or not. So at present, I’m still stuck with the same moral dilemma and I haven’t figured out a way to cheat.
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I’m still here. I still think about this question, but in practice it doesn’t really matter what solid opinion I’ve formed if I’m living my answer every day.


Image Sources in order of appearance:

Flickr user celesteh: http://www.flickr.com/photos/celesteh/102616364/sizes/o/

Flickr user rcrhee: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rcrhee/10864891045/sizes/m/

http://images2.fanpop.com/images/answers/43000/43618_1252760153049_400_310.jpg.

http://s.mcstatic.com/thumb/7707125/28846117/4/flash_player/0/1/interview_with_the_vampire_the_vampire_chronicles_1994_releasing_louis.jpg?v=4

http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_l6m0zkEeqO1qa4ey1o1_1280.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI6WLSGT7Y3ET7ADQ&Expires=1396011196&Signature=jXHwPFcL9fRL%2FhckCvOQd01Z1zA%3D#_=_

http://images4.fanpop.com/image/polls/252000/252138_1293840783196_full.jpg

http://theteenphilosopher.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/split-track.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Immortality.JPG

1271977774new-moon-paper-cut.jpg

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What is This Thing You Call Boredom?

One of the standard objections to mass immortality is that if we lived a long time, we’d be bored.

Obviously, I have plenty of objections to that:

1. “So – boredom is a fate worse than death?”

Flickr user Julie Edgley

2. “Seriously – you'd really rather die than be bored? Wouldn't that disqualify you from half of all jobs? Hey, if you don't want to live forever, it can only mean that someday you want to die.”

(Trigger warning for suicide)

3. “People don’t get bored because they’ve just been alive way too long, and they'd better kill themselves so they can cross 'death' off their bucket list. They get bored because they're dissatisfied with their lives at present, and it's time for a change. They usually get new jobs, meet new people or move. They don't off themselves.”

4. “Suicidal people aren't tired of living. They're hopelessly depressed and looking for some way out. They can't imagine their lives getting better or they don't want to live through it until it does. I sincerely hope that if you ever meet a suicidal person and they just say that they're bored and that they've somehow 'seen it all,' you don't take them seriously.”

5. “So – you're okay with people that have indefinite lifespans offing themselves? Really? You wouldn't get a suicidal immortal person help, because their suicide is obviously just a natural consequence of their immortal ennui? What if it wasn't? What if the immortal was suicidal for all the reasons people are actually suicidal – how would you even know? You'd be a suicide enabler?”

6. “What difference does it make if the suicidal person is 213 years old instead of 13 or 81 or 31 years old? Would you pull a double standard and say suicidal tendencies are okay past a certain age? If so – what age? Can we vote?”

7. “Well – if we live long enough, maybe we'll be able to put people in living stasis if they just get tired of living anyway, and then they can be revived and be immortal again. That's a way better deal than we have now.”

Source: Wikimedia, Tomas Castelazo

But I have to say, as a 143-year-old, my initial emotional reaction is as follows:

“What is this thing you call boredom?”

Really. If we’re talking about sustained, prolonged periods of boredom where you just don’t have a clue about what to do with yourself, everything you can think of sucks, you're tired of absolutely everything – yeah, I've never felt that.

I've had boring jobs before, sure. At those times, I was always thinking about the way to get a better job. Shockingly, I never blamed it on my supposed immortal ennui – I blamed it on the job. Being bored to death is a bad joke and a dead metaphor, not a career path.

Flickr user XPeria2Day

It's also difficult to be bored when you're always with people. Seeing as how lots of modern conversation topics didn't exist when I was younger, I sure as hell haven't heard them all. And if meeting new people could ever get boring, most people would get bored of it way before age eighty.

I've also never spent one day alone.

Some of my younger friends will talk about days they slept in when they were single or their parents were away, and they just hung around the house or apartment alone and bored out of their minds. That's literally never happened to me.

I grew up with six siblings, and we sure didn't have separate rooms. Most of my early jobs – well, suffice to say, I didn't get days off, and if I did, I spent them with family. During those years, my family barely saw each other, and we wanted something to remember us by.

Vampire life – you definitely don't get days off. Spending an entire day without some form of contact with another person would literally be a death sentence for me. And I'm alive!

That is one thing about my own version of vampire life: it is a surefire cure for boredom. How do you be bored when life never gives you any time to be?

Really though – I thought the Internet was supposed to be a mass cure for boredom. You're bored? Have you read all of this Indie author's books? Have you read all the blogs on this subject? Or the most highly recommended fanfics? Have you read every new science journal that is freely available to the public now? Have you tried this new game? You know everything there is to know about the Byzantine Empire and you couldn't read more? You've watched every video on Youtube?

You couldn't possibly have seen every cat video yet, come on.

I grew up on the frontier. I'm pretty sure the worst boredom of my life was in my preteen years, before the family moved to Chicago. I couldn't have made my hundred teens that boring if I tried.

Somehow though, immortal ennui is practically the default theme in vampire and immortal fiction, and that's with folks that are way older than I am and should know full well how lucky they are to be here.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Better yet, for some mysterious reason, it's still usually the good Vampires in fiction who want mortality, and the evil ones pointing out the obvious.

Hey, even if you're a stereotypical reactionary conservative who thinks that all social and technological progress is just leading us further and further from the promised land of your youth – don't you still want to live a long time, just to see if the world goes back? It's happened before.

There's an oft-repeated saying about immortality: millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy day.

That seems like a pretty good test to me: have you ever had a moment where you didn't know what to do with yourself on a rainy day?

Me neither.

So we're fine.

Flickr user epSos.de

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Twenty-Six For a Year, Immortal Forever

Youth and Time

All my life, I’ve been getting into some variation of the following conversation:

Generally Well-Meaning Host or Recruit: “How old were you when you were sired?”

Me: “Oh, I was twenty-six.”

Generally Well-Meaning Host or Recruit: “And you’ve been twenty-six ever since.”

Me: “No. I was twenty-six for one year. And then I turned twenty-seven! Next month, I turn 143.

That’s what I’ve said to everyone who asked me that question this month. Yeah, it comes up a lot.

I was born on September 22, 1870. I’m not the same person I was in 1896.

This shows up all the time in immortal fiction. Nothing wrong with asking an immortal when it happened – the only thing I take issue with is the assumption that ‘twenty-six’ is was pretty much when my life and my personal development ended.

Some immortal fiction has that same conversation almost word for word. Tuck Everlasting, Let the Right One In, and Twilight all come to mind. Except the immortals almost always respond differently than I did.

And almost all of those protagonists were ‘turned’ as frigging children. I always hope that’s just for pathos and not wish fulfillment. Some days I don’t feel like giving the writers the benefit of the doubt.

Jessie Tuck says he’ll be seventeen until the end of the world. Eli says xe’s been twelve for a long time. Edward Cullen says he’s been seventeen for a while.

Seventeen for a while? Whose fault is that?

Guys – you’ve gotten older since this conversation started. You can’t stop chronological aging, and it will never be the same thing as physical aging.

My people don’t turn into vampires overnight. In most Vampire fiction, it happens in a few minutes, or at least a few nights. For us, it takes one and a half to three years between the infection and your full transition. Hell, it took me a full three years.

We’re not entirely sure when the aging process stops during the transition, so really: my age at my ‘time of siring’ was twenty-six to twenty-nine. God knows: you age so fucking much between the ages of twenty-six and twenty-nine.

And it doesn’t matter, because I’m still 142. But the idea is that I can somehow be over a hundred years old and only twenty-six at the same time.

Ah, but did I officially stop ‘aging’ when I was twenty-seven? Twenty-eight and three point five months? Really – what is my number?

I still remember what happened with my initiate Adam. He was getting nervous about his impending thirtieth birthday and tried getting me to sire him a few months early so he’d be sired at twenty-nine. I’d already spent the requisite five years evaluating him, so I did it – a few months weren’t going to make any difference to me. They apparently meant a world of difference to him, though.

Logan's Run came out the year the youngest Baby Boomers turned thirty. Clever.

Yeah, the Baby Boomer youth obsession hit him pretty hard. Trusting people over thirty was one thing, but being over thirty? I was quite a bit over thirty myself at the time, so you can imagine the depth of my sympathy for his plight.

To this day, he still insists he was just kidding. And to this day, after a round of chuckles, I still insist that I believe him. Yeah, we’re both liars.

Sigh. You know, as a sire, I was supposed to teach him to be a good liar, too. I failed.

Dorian Gray: the Poor Man's Immortality

I’ve said this to every one of my initiates before and after: “Babe – I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you will turn thirty. Vampirism only cures physical aging. We already have a cure for chronological aging – it’s death! The only alternative to getting old is dying young. And our business is saving lives, not validating absurd societal prejudices.”

People who actually care about things like chronological age don’t care how young you look or how healthy you are, not usually. If they did, they wouldn’t go by chronological age at all – they’d go by your appearance, health, and abilities. They sure as hell wouldn’t care about the difference between twenty-nine and thirty.

I know these people. I know that back when I was in my eighties, a lot of them would start getting real uncomfortable around me. I mean – I was older than their grandmother. Who cares if I look like I’m still a twenty-something?

Jeanne Calment, 20

I don’t have these problems so much anymore, though. I’m 142! They have no basis of comparison between this and what I’m ‘supposed to’ look like. There’s no accepted and highly stereotyped social role for a 142-year-old. I’m free from their expectations and judgments!

Yep. The Immortal Ageism Paradox. When I was eighty, I was a granny in disguise. Now that I’m sixty-two years older, I’m young again!

Other thresholders go through the same thing. 123: yeah, that’s pretty much a twenty-something, right?

It's actually considered a major threshold when you hit 123 in vampire culture (at least today). Jeanne Calment (RIP) was deceased at 122 and holds the record for the oldest verified human lifespan. If you're a 'thresholder,' you're older than the oldest human who ever lived. Naturally, that threshold is subject to change, with improved medical advances. I look forward to the day when the threshold is two hundred or more.

Jeanne Calment, 121

At 142, I’m not treated like a forty-something. But in my privileged position, I get to see how the ageists of the world treat them.

Jeanne Calment, 40

Aging and gaining life experience aren’t the same thing – you can stop your aging process in your twenties and it wouldn’t change your ability to accumulate life experience. Aging is the accumulation of damage, not wisdom. And maturation is kids turning into adults physically and psychologically – you can be mature and inexperienced.

Life experience happens just over the course of your being alive – twenty-somethings aren’t ‘twenty-something-shaped’ because their bodies are too healthy; they’re ‘twenty-somethings’ because they haven’t had enough years to be anything else (literally and metaphorically). Except for all those twenty-somethings who are wise beyond their years, of course.

People need to recognize aging and maturation for what they are. And they need to recognize chronological aging for what it is – the earth has made this many revolutions around the sun since you were born. Congratulations!

It is not a statement of a person’s worth, life experience, or even an exact measurement of the amount of damage they’ve accumulated, really. People can be healthier than their years, and visa versa.

This crap goes away in an immortal society. I figure it’s a relief for a lot of human members of the vampire nation. I mean, they turn forty, their American friends give them cards that say crap like: ‘you’re over the hill and its so fucking funny that we’ll laugh at you at make jokes about failing memory, weight gain (because that’s also so fucking funny), and other stereotypes that we’ve decided you’d love to hear about!’

Come to us and you can celebrate your birthday in a place where the forty-somethings are impossibly young, the people under three hundred are hip, and the people over three hundred are revered and respected.

There’s no double standard here – ask most vampires, and they’ll tell you that humans never get old. They all die far too young.

But obviously this stuff can’t go completely mainstream until we discover the cure for aging in humans. In the meantime, all we can do is try to fight this nonsense through education, cultural change, and as much mockery as possible.

I am not Peter Pan.

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Historical Apologism – Apologize For No One

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King Triton is an Oppressive Dictator and an Abusive Father

I want to say, with no irony whatsoever, that I like King Triton. He’s a rare grayish character in Disney’s black and white moral landscape. He goes through an actual, definable character arc during the Little Mermaid (I choose to ignore all supplemental material and sequels, and everything else that didn’t exist in 1989 and wouldn’t exist now if the film hadn’t been so financially successful). Kenneth Mars did an awesome voice performance with him. And Triton kinda looks like God on the Sistine Chapel, except a merman. He’s awesome.

Clearly Triton was actually drawn by Zombie Michelangelo.

And it’s nice to see fairly well rounded, active senior citizens as characters.

Disney’s fixation on monarchy is fascinating. I guess kings and queens are less threatening than other types of autocrats. Imagine a delightful family film with Emperor Triton. Or Chancellor Triton. Or President (for life) Triton. Frightening.

Ah, but I cast my suspicions on the notion of benevolent dictatorship, of which there are preciously few examples throughout history. Let’s look at what we see from Triton in the film:

Triton's Dictator CV

1. Triton rules by the threat of force.

Think of all the terror monarchs of history accomplished without godlike magical powers. Really – imagine Henry VIII as Poseidon. But I think the fact that he’s a magic king kinda makes the situation worse.

We see no actual limits to the triton and its mighty omnipotent power. We do see Triton using the triton to terrorize his citizens, especially his own goddamn daughter. After finding out she’s an anthropologist and saved a human from drowning, he destroys her life’s work with the triton in all of a few seconds.

He also used it to turn her into a human at the end, after the Character Development happened. Ursula takes the triton and uses it to alter the frigging tides and weather. The triton is like several X-Men rolled into one. That thing is a frigging weapon of mass destruction. And the king named himself after it. Well at least he’s self-aware. King Warhead.

2. Triton imposes strict limits on his people’s behavior.

No merfolk are allowed to go to the surface. Or the land. Think about that: imagine if going to the seaside was illegal. Or for that matter, moving to Europe. Most of the frigging biomes on Earth are illegal for merfolk, as is the frigging air. That’s some Soviet shit, right there.

And Disney thought Scar was their fascist dictator.

Also, apparently taking an interest in human culture is forbidden for the merfolk. I mean, Triton destroys Ariel’s museum after being mildly provoked – and this was his daughter. Ariel’s also suspiciously the only citizen who seems to have done this. Imagine what he’d do to someone who wasn’t Royal Blood.

3. He spreads noxious invective against foreigners out of proportion to all utility.


Classic dictator technique right there – what better to promote the insularity of your people than having a common enemy? Wag the dog and make him bark. And look at the way Triton does it – he goes on rants about humans who are all evil, harpoon-wielding face-eaters. In other words, it’s not ‘I hate humans,’ so much as ‘humans hate us.’ It’s spreading the meme that merfolk are the persecuted ones. And it reinforces the need for Triton to act as their noble defender, and makes it all the easier to frame his actions as noble defense.

That’s great – citizens are that much less likely to venture outward if they’re in fear. They might reach out to someone their group despises who seems harmless, but someone their group despises because of how harmful they are?

Triton seems to believe all of this himself, since he goes off on these rants even when it’s extremely inappropriate and undermines his credibility (and it’s in front of his own daughter). But the results would be the same either way.

Humans in this case encompass absolutely everyone outside his kingdom – there’s nowhere for merfolk to go where they won’t find the evil humans. They’re stuck there. And damned if Triton doesn’t want to keep it that way, out of hate completely disproportionate to the actual risk posed by humans.

And again, the event that prompted Ariel to resort to Ursula’s shadiness in the first place: Triton angrily threatened her before destroying her life’s work. He did it because she saved a human’s life.

She saved Eric’s life, and in such a way that it did not in any way affect the Masquerade or lead to merfolk being discovered. Actually, Triton didn’t even ask about that; he just got angry she saved a guy’s life. This isn’t maintaining the Masquerade; this is blind hatred.

Here’s the thing about Masquerades: continually killing people to keep them going is not only evil; it’s useless. If the Masquerade is so fragile that one witness can destroy it, it’s going to fail anyway. Fuck, if it depends on all citizens maintaining perfect behavior (not going to the surface) forever and you can’t control their behavior on every level, as Triton cannot – it’ll definitely fail.

You’re prolonging the inevitable instead of preparing for it, like you should. This isn’t a political conspiracy where a tiny number of people just need to keep a few military secrets behind bars while going about their days legally until their dealings end and they’re cloaked by history (and those often fail, too); this is people hiding their entire existence from a world that just keeps getting more and more tech-savvy – with no end in sight. Imagine the merfolk trying to hide today, now that we have footage of giant squids in the deep sea.

Triton: you're next!

Now, unlike vampires, the merfolk actually have the option of living excluded from humans, so maybe it’s more complicated here. But humans are a seafaring race even in your time, Triton, and it’s only the mid-nineteenth century. It won’t last forever.

You’ll have to face them sooner or later, and killing them is just going to set them up to be your enemy down the line, faster than you can say ‘self-fulfilling prophecy.’

My people figured this out around this same year - we started openly reaching out to humans in the mid to late nineteenth century, and forming the vampire community. Our elders were more or less under the impression that the Masquerade was in imminent danger of ending, and we may as well try to find some allies as a start (and increase our own population). Their timing was off (our Masquerade is kinda still going on, depending on your definition), but I'd say they succeeded, since we're in a much better situation now than we were even when I was first sired. But it was easier for our elders, since they were just frightened survivalists and not angry human-hating bigots.



4. Triton prioritizes family problems over running his kingdom.

Ariel goes missing, and he has literally his entire kingdom looking for her, at the expense of whatever the hell else everyone was supposed to be doing – not that we have any idea what they were supposed to be doing. Most of what we see Triton doing is focusing on Ariel. I guess Atlantica mostly runs itself.

That’s monarchy for you. It should be noted that this usually doesn’t equate to devoted, nurturing parents deeply invested in their children’s future so much as obsessive parents trying to protect what they consider ‘theirs.’ Triton sending out his manservant Sebastian to stalk Ariel was the least of their problems.

As for Triton's other daughters - even the film frames them as possessions. They're nothing but a long list of names beginning with 'A.' I think the blonde one Andrina had two lines, and the others had even less. They had little to no bearing on the plot. You could edit out all of them, and not only would it not change a thing, the film would make more sense.





All I could do was stare at the screen wondering how the hell merfolk reproduce, since Triton appears to have six daughters of about the same age, and one who's only slightly younger. Are they actually close in age and the unmentioned Queen Triton just had one after the other and timed their conceptions? Was Triton polyamorous? Are merfolk prone to multiple simultaneous births? Are any of them adopted?

(That's what I was wondering in 1989, anyway. The prequels are good for something: at least they confirmed that the sisters are merely close in age. We even learn about the Queen. She looked exactly like Ariel, for one.)

It's great that Triton's other daughters are adults, since he spends all of his time focusing on his youngest.

This was bad enough in the beginning of the story. Ursula knew well enough that this was the flaw to go for, Triton’s Achilles heel. And it worked.




I know we’re supposed to be touched when Triton lets himself get turned into a sea polyp in Ariel’s stead. Even if it meant letting the triton fall into Ursula’s diabolical hands, we’re still supposed to be touched. So I guess if some world leaders gave a rogue nation the nuclear codes because they were threatening their families – they’d be doing the right thing and it would represent a serious, complicated moral dilemma?


5. Triton has slave labor.

Dolphins are not horses!

During the concert scene, we see Triton’s chariot pulled by dolphins. He can’t just swim there himself? I know that’s just the film’s ‘water is air’ problem, but that’s fourth wall knowledge, right there. If you look for an explanation within the context of the film, it looks like conspicuous exploitation to me. What does he pay them with? How does he pay or otherwise compensate Sebastian? He squeezes Sebastian into his fist at one point, after being mildly provoked – not exactly the mark of a benign boss.

6. Merfolk scientific and social progress is in the gutter, and there’s a strong sentiment of enforced ignorance.

Ariel asks during her fantastic ‘Part of Your World’ number – ‘what’s a fire and why does it burn.’ Merfolk society has less scientific knowledge than hunter-gatherers (even if fire is an exception because it’s a land-based phenomenon, that only proves that being ocean-dwellers has stifled scientific progress. Humans know about volcanoes despite never having truly visited them). Merfolk appear to have no industry and no technology. And it seems they also have no written language.

Yeah, we see Ariel sign her name, when Ursula whips out that magic contract during their amazing ‘Poor Unfortunate Souls’ number. But plenty of otherwise illiterate people can sign their names. Illiteracy used to be a lot more common, and I’ve run into quite a few people who can write their names and nothing else.



Ursula’s contract may have been English, but it wasn’t anything that required much of a reading level. Yeah, it’s English – a human language, and not a merfolk one. Assuming Ariel actually read it – it’s not like she needed to in order to make her decision. She also has plenty of books in her museum, but doesn’t appear to have read any of them. She’s ‘ready to know what the people know,’ she says, as she flips through books there’s no evidence that she can read.

We can interpret all of that as convenience on the part of the animators, but I like it better when I can find an in-universe explanation for things. It’s more fun than just laughing at the plot holes and the limitations of the film medium.

I never understood why Eric didn’t offer Ariel some writing utensils up on the surface. Or for that matter, why Ariel didn’t try to get her hands on them. She briefly tries to communicate using sign language, but after that, they communicate through inference. It would have been nice if they had thrown us a few scenes of Ariel trying to write and failing. But as it stands, the plot makes a hell of a lot more sense if we just assume Ariel is illiterate. Along with the rest of merfolk society – if your royals are uneducated, what hope is there for the rest of you?

7. Merfolk culture mainly consists of propaganda promoting the royal family.

The concert that opens the underwater portion of the film that Ariel misses? It’s Triton’s daughters introducing themselves and singing about how great Triton is. Ariel misses her cue to perform, and Triton looks like he’s going to explode. Hey man – the Show Must Go On. His reaction makes more sense of the concert is a reflection of his ego, which it clearly is. There doesn’t seem to be much more to merfolk culture.



8. Ursula seems to be kind of a magical version of a black marketeer.

That’s what happens in most dictatorships; you get a black market. The dictatorial government won’t provide for your needs, so you go to the criminals. Naturally, the criminals are unregulated and screw you over, but really, the dictator was screwing you the fuck over by not providing for you in the first place. Indeed, black markets under authoritarian regimes can actually be liberalizing forces for economic and even political freedom - look at the Soviet Union.

Hey, Ursula almost looks like a libertarian hero, here. And like many libertarian heroes, she's a frustrated despot. Rock on, Ursula. The mighty Triton is always all right as long as you're the one wielding it, right?

Like many dictators, Triton undermines his own power in the process – Ursula seems to get a lot of her magic goods in her deals with merfolk, so Triton is just sitting there letting her consolidate her power. Which she could only do if he left his people no other alternative but to go to her, and since the merfolk economy appears to be mainly magical, with magic the province of only a few elites capable of understanding it, you can appreciate their plight.

Geez – Triton can turn merfolk into humans. We find out that Ursula helped her clients by making them, among other things, more conventionally attractive – they couldn’t have gone to Triton? We don’t actually see any limits to the power of the triton. Any reason they didn’t go to him, and preferred to risk their lives by making a shady deal with an unscrupulous sorceress instead of doing what should have been legally and logistically better and gone to their king? Methinks Triton is a mite stingy with what magic he’ll give the masses. Let ‘em eat cake, right Triton?

9. Ursula manages to enslave dozens of Triton’s citizens and he doesn’t interfere.





Ursula frigging lines the entrance to her evil lair with polyps of the people she’s permanently enslaved with her (which I actually always found a bit irresponsible. Why aren’t they in an evil storage closet, Ursula? Don’t you think lining your lair with monuments to your own shadiness might put off new clients? Let’s not get overconfident, dear.) This has been presumably going on for years. And the one time Triton interferes is when she threatens to do it to his daughter. His is a Daddy State, run by a deadbeat Dad.

Wacky Paranoid Speculations

1. Triton actually is an emperor who ousted the other sea kings:
How much of the ocean does Triton control, anyway? He gets called the ‘sea king’ sometimes, but then Ursula takes his place and claims to be ruling the whole ocean. You mean the Atlantic Ocean? Oh. So what about all the others? Triton says to Ariel ‘as long as you live under my ocean, you obey my rules.’

2. King Triton created merfolk:
Triton turns Ariel into a human at the end of the film. So – he can turn merfolk into humans? I’ll bet he can do the opposite. Merfolk are pretty strange, biologically. They appear to have most of the organ systems of fish and humans, and yet almost none of the weaknesses that their human half should have underwater (they can breathe, see, and not have their bones and organs crushed by heavy pressure – incredible). That’s not evolution; right there – that’s magic. Magic which exists in the story, and which King Triton appears to control.

Merfolk are also excellent singers with a musical culture – I’m trying to think of something that seems less appropriate for an underwater society, and I can’t. Now, vampire culture is musical, too – we’re voice mimics, and with a shit ton of training, you can get a good vocal range. But, you know, we’re terrestrial. And the voice mimicry is related to our batty echolocation. Merfolk don’t do echolocation like dolphins – they appear to talk and sing like humans and they can somehow do it underwater. Could it be because they were originally human, at least as a species?

We’ve established that Triton is paranoid and horribly racist against humans, yet well-intentioned and with the capacity for altruism. That can actually be a frigging scary combination, even in the real world without all the magic. Imagine giving someone like that nigh-omnipotent power.

Could he have turned a bunch of people into merfolk, taken them to the ocean as a protective measure, at least in his own mind (and erased their memories, we assume)? Triton does seem much older than almost all the merfolk we see. It certainly would explain his rise to power.

Conclusion

So this is more or less why I liked The Little Mermaid, beyond the great songs, animation, and voice performances. I see it as the story of a liberal adventurous young girl who escaped her abusive family and by extension her backward, racist, xenophobic, oppressive police state in favor of a liberalizing European monarchy and freedom, and by extension brought both cultures together.

I get the distinct impression that this isn’t what the writers intended.

Yeah, I think Triton and her sisters were supposed to represent a loving family and a genuine sacrifice for her. But hey, Eric: irresistible.

Well, that’s the way Ursula framed it anyway – always listen to the villain. Even when the villain doesn’t believe what she says, and is transparently using it to manipulate the protagonist, as with Ursula’s rant in her Poor Unfortunate Souls number.

Well, as much as the prospect of a girl marrying some guy she barely knows frigging bothers me, it doesn’t sink the movie for me. The protagonist is still in a better place than she was before, shit got done, and even if she and Eric had an amiable breakup she’d be better off in his kingdom than her father’s.

And they brought both cultures together. Just think of the economic possibilities of being a seafaring nation and knowing a bunch of merfolk.




Plus, this way, maybe her father won’t suddenly realize the implications of the power he wields with the triton and take over the world, or something.

And now maybe her father’s learned a lesson and will go on to be a less alternately deadly and negligent monarch and father. Really though, I’d be more comfortable if Ariel and Prince Eric stole the triton.





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