Showing posts with label siring. Show all posts
Showing posts with label siring. Show all posts
Sunday, August 4, 2013
Twenty-Six For a Year, Immortal Forever
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| 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.
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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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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?
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| Jeanne Calment, 20 |
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.
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| 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.
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| 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!
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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.
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| I am not Peter Pan. |
Images Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki.
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Historical Apologism – Apologize For No One
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| A stroll down Memory Lane. |
Can we judge historical people by the standards of our times?
It’s a popular topic of discussion amongst high school and
college students the world over. I know, because I get into conversations like
that all the damn time.
In the vampire community, it’s a hot-button political issue that has never been resolved.
For me, it’s even a relationship problem.
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I was born during the Reconstruction after the Civil War. I
was born into a family of abolitionists who supported the Radical Republicans –
who, among other things, had representatives who supported racial equality a
century before we actually achieved it in this country.
My parents weren’t exactly perfect on race relations. I
still cringe whenever I think of things they said about the Native Americans,
especially my father. And I know that if someone more liberal had ever called
them out on it, they probably would have said something like: ‘I refer only to
the wild Indians – there live some civilized Indians’ – yeah, that’s not much
better.
But if I can think of one group my parents taught me to
hate, absolutely hate with no caveat or qualification – it would be the
Southerners. Especially my father. My mother was fresh off the boat from Norway;
when I was born, she’d been living in Wisconsin for less than five years. My
father was a born and bred Norwegian American whose own father was killed in
action in the Civil War. Seeing as how my father was born in 1851, he was still a child by today’s
standards. Goddammit: he was a child one way or another.
I grew up being told that the South was an evil society who wanted to own people like us Northern folk owned livestock, and that those traitors to our country deserved far worse than what our overly lenient government dished out to them. My father tended to call them ‘rebel bastards.’
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| Young adults in any era. |
I grew up being told that the South was an evil society who wanted to own people like us Northern folk owned livestock, and that those traitors to our country deserved far worse than what our overly lenient government dished out to them. My father tended to call them ‘rebel bastards.’
I was twenty years old when I first fell in with the vampire
community and met Cathy. She confessed that she’d been a slave-owner. An
English one, mind – she didn’t come to America until after the Civil War. But
she was a slave-owner.
And yes, this was when she was a vampire. She was indeed
using the slaves for as much blood as they could give and still survive.
She didn’t kill any of them. And she did eventually set them
free. To her credit, she never tried to use that to rationalize what she did.
Also to her credit, she did disclose early on. And when I
met her, she was a huge supporter of racial equality, labor rights, women’s
rights, temperance – the very model of a modern major Progressive Era progressive,
even for a progressive of the era.
That’s what I kept telling myself, as I obsessed about it over and over again and tried to square it in my head.
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That’s what I kept telling myself, as I obsessed about it over and over again and tried to square it in my head.
It wouldn’t have affected my decision to be sired, I can
tell you that much. I might have asked to be switched, so Charles could sire me
instead (I was just friends with both of them at the time, and there wouldn’t
have been a conflict of interest).
He’s done his own share of unethical things, but most of
them fall into the category of: ‘he was poor and desperate and starving to
death, and while no society on Earth ever legalized what he did, most juries
would be lenient.’ At this point in my life, I’m not much better.
Charles didn’t do much socially sanctioned evil. Not even in
Byzantium. During the Enlightenment, he was a liberal on the Jeremy Bentham level and more.
As for Cathy – yeah.
Given my own attempts at being the very model of a modern major Progressive Era progressive, I tried to tell myself that ‘those were the times.’ Yep. I was going through a huge period of self-education at the time, and that probably only made it worse.
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| Jeremy Bentham: a product of his time. |
Given my own attempts at being the very model of a modern major Progressive Era progressive, I tried to tell myself that ‘those were the times.’ Yep. I was going through a huge period of self-education at the time, and that probably only made it worse.
Shockingly, Cathy didn’t actually agree
with me, and was somewhat disturbed by my opinion, as she is by any modern
person who makes the same argument. I just dismissed that as her being extra
redemptive: not, you know, correct.
Yes, what she did was horrible – but should I really be
putting early 1900s standards on 1700s people? I mean: here we were living in a time
of great social and technological progress beyond what the people of the 18th
century could even have comprehended. I mean, look at us – we’re on the verge
of getting the vote, we’re showing the Robber Barons who’s boss, we’re
conquering the vile specter of drunkenness – we’ll be in a utopia before we
know it, and any point in history is going to pale in comparison.
Of course our standards would be better – that’s what
supposed to happen. History is, of course, the process by which we get better and better
morals and learn from the mistakes of the past, and should we blame the people
who couldn’t have known better and managed to suffer them for us?
Yep, that was pretty much what I convinced myself, well into
my forties.
Then people started saying the same things about the
Progressive Era.
I still remember the day in the 1960s when I got into an
argument with a then-modern feminist about the Suffragette Movement and the
bastards that tried to stop us.
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| Circa 1912 |
Her: Oh, Lyddie. You can’t judge those guys by modern
standards. You shouldn’t hate them for what they did – you should understand
that they did what they did because it made sense in their time.
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Another anti-suffrage cartoon, showcasing the conservative position on the issue. |
Bear in mind, anyone who calls me ‘Lydia’ or some variant is
a member of the vampire community, human or non, because that’s only my
Masquerade name and has never been my legal one. She did indeed knowingly say
this to someone from the Suffragette Movement. In fact, here’s what happened
next:
Me: Yeah? I sure hated ‘em then.
Her: Well, I guess that’s okay; you’re actually from those
times.
Me: But I can’t hate ‘em now?
Her: No.
Me: So when was I supposed to stop hating them? 1920, when
we got the vote? 1930s? 1940s? Does this shit have a half-life?
Apparently, yes.
In my culture, we call this phenomenon ‘historical apologism.’
That’s okay. Nowadays, people do the exact same thing to the
1960s. Sometimes.
Sometimes the 60s were those crazy liberal times when
everyone was all crazy and liberal. Sometimes they were those terrible times in
that primitive conservative dystopia where no one was crazy or liberal. Other
times, they were those nobler conservative times when everything was as it
should be: ten years of conservative nostalgia.
I know, that used to be the 1950s. It still is, mostly, but
now it seems that the 1960s are making that transition. Just in time for the
1950s to fade out of living memory. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
As far as living memory goes, people who were children in the 1950s certainly don't count.
Trigger Warning
I expected this phenomenon to level off at some point during
my lifetime. Not a chance. I at least figured the 1980s were untouchable. No
one’s going to say that the 1980s were a time before liberalism, when, among
other things, professors who sexually harassed their students couldn’t be held
accountable for their actions.
Then someone said that to Naomi Wolf. About her own
experiences being harassed by a college professor in the 1980s, I might add.
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| Naomi Wolf: historical figure from an earlier age. Who is currently living. |
What amazes me the most is that those people were probably
under the impression they were being sensitive and enlightened.
Oh, but don’t worry. It’s happening to the 1990s too. Yes.
The 1990s. Any conversation about the homophobia in movies in the 1990s, and
some people will be falling all over themselves to talk about how you can’t
blame people from the 1990s – everyone was homophobic back then!
Yes. Gay marriage was a hot-button issue in the 1990s and a
major topic of national discussion, but somehow, if someone was homophobic in
the 1990s, it was the decade’s fault and not theirs.
I can’t wait to see what won’t be someone’s fault two decades
from now. I can’t wait to see someone defend Bush and Cheney. I mean, geez:
that was five whole years ago – it’s totally a separate era completely out of
the bounds of contemporary moral judgment, right?
Well, I fully expect and predict that it will be in twenty
years.
God knows, Bush may beat us to it.
Image links in order of appearance:
http://www.likecool.com/Looking_Into_the_Past--Projects--Gear.html.
http://willcountyhistoricalsociety.org/civil_war.html.
http://whynoteight.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/pioneer-day/.
http://www.nwhm.org/online-exhibits/progressiveera/peace.html.
http://utilitarianphilosophy.com/jeremybentham.eng.html.
http://www.radford.edu/rbarris/Women%20and%20art/amerwom05/suffrageart.html.
http://www.radford.edu/rbarris/Women%20and%20art/amerwom05/suffrageart.html.
http://www.jewishjournal.com/hollywoodjew/item/mad_men_comes_out.
http://www.nndb.com/people/454/000117103/.
http://terrenoire.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-is-this-man-smiling.html.
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Image links in order of appearance:
http://www.likecool.com/Looking_Into_the_Past--Projects--Gear.html.
http://willcountyhistoricalsociety.org/civil_war.html.
http://whynoteight.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/pioneer-day/.
http://www.nwhm.org/online-exhibits/progressiveera/peace.html.
http://utilitarianphilosophy.com/jeremybentham.eng.html.
http://www.radford.edu/rbarris/Women%20and%20art/amerwom05/suffrageart.html.
http://www.radford.edu/rbarris/Women%20and%20art/amerwom05/suffrageart.html.
http://www.jewishjournal.com/hollywoodjew/item/mad_men_comes_out.
http://www.nndb.com/people/454/000117103/.
http://terrenoire.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-is-this-man-smiling.html.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Lestat's Evil Overlord List
Lestat
has become something of a villainous icon for us pop culture types, especially
as a sire. Not an icon for abusive siring – that honor goes to Lucien LaCroix
from Forever Knight.
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| lucienlacroix.com (That man spent nearly eight hundred years making his initiate’s life miserable at the exclusion of almost all else. Yeah, he needs to get his priorities straight, but he had a goal, and he succeeded, dammit!) |
Lestat is more of an icon for
staggeringly irresponsible siring.
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| http://images2.fanpop.com |
1.
Choose your initiate after having observed him
at a distance for what appears to be one occasion.
2.
In fact, choose a guy who tries gambling away
his own fortune, gets into fights, and nearly gets himself killed several times
in a matter of hours. Especially if you’re a gold digging sire and looking for
stable financial support.
3.
After killing two people in front of him, nearly
killing him (really, I can think of several non-vampiric ways Louis should have died in
the harbor scene, including blood loss, infection, stroke, drowning, injury from the water's surface tension from the fall, hell, all of the above), and breaking and entering into his home while he’s in bed
sick – proposition him!
4.
Only tell him the benefits of vampirism, and
none of the costs, and trust that he figured those out in context.
5.
Give him one day to think about it.
6.
Later that day, give him his last chance to back
out after it’s already too late.
7.
Now tell him about the consequences, and give
him very little other useful information except for how to kill Vampires,
especially you.
8.
Take him and try systematically and repeatedly
breaking down the psychological and physical barriers that stop people from
killing each other, whether you need to or not.
9.
After he successfully stops killing, mock him,
and make it clear that not only does he have to keep killing, but he also has
to keep doing it with you, the guy
who’s responsible for all this in the first place. Offer him absolutely no way
out. Maybe unconvincingly argue he can’t kill you.
10. Act
surprised when he destroys everything he owns the next time he kills someone,
and fail to understand why he did it.
11. The
next time he almost kills someone under very horrific circumstances,
immortalize both the victim and the event so he has a permanent reminder of his
resentment for you, what he is, and what he’s done.
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| http://media.tumblr.com. |
13. Act
very surprised when they both kill you.
Now, if Lestat was a
six-thousand-year-old evil overlord with hordes of underlings and he behaved
this way, I’d have a problem with it. Near as I can tell, though, he’s a bum
who goes from bad relationship to bad relationship while being a social
parasite and crashing someplace every time the lifestyle nearly kills him. So
it works, and it’s clear that Lestat’s reckless irresponsibility makes perfect
sense for the character.
Naturally, he’s the character that
a lot of the audience seems to like and identify with, compared to Louis.
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