Showing posts with label vampire politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vampire politics. Show all posts

Thursday, March 27, 2014

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.
.
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

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Historical Apologism – Apologize For No One


A stroll down Memory Lane.
Introduction

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.


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.
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.

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.
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.

Circa 1912
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.

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.


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.

Naomi Wolf
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. 

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

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.

 Triton & Sebatian - king-triton Photo

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.


King Triton - little-mermaid-ariels-beginning Photo
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.





Image links in order of appearance:














Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Bloodsucker Am I



I don’t mind being called a bloodsucker. It’s not insulting; it’s descriptive: I am a bloodsucker. Literally. Calling me a bloodsucker would be like saying it to a flea – it’s just a simple reference to their feeding habits for good or ill. And I can’t even spread disease like a flea: I win!

Flea


Now see – it is an insult to call a mainstream person a bloodsucker. When you say that to me, it’s literal. Call a mainstream person a bloodsucker, and you’re implying that they’re exploitative or a selfish drain on society.

Although, I suppose you could try applying that one to me.

Real Bloodsuckers


I can’t help but notice that the people who get called ‘bloodsuckers’ in mainstream society tend to be people like politicians, lawyers, and people collecting for charity. And don’t forget that delightful quasi-mythological ‘welfare queens.’ We also tend to say things like ‘they’re draining me dry,’ usually in reference to money.

I’ve said before that my people in particular would actually be the perfect libertarian bad guys: we’re literally charity bloodsuckers! We have this enormous, complicated social network whereby we solicit semi-regular donations from those more independent than us, and we are really and truly asking for blood and living moment by moment on the altruism of others. And that’s fresh blood, right from the source, and much more than just the bloodiness equivalent of the spare change a libertarian wouldn’t give to a guy on the street (and, unfortunately, sometimes we have to steal it). I am honored to be a libertarian’s bogeyman, and promoting the evil altruist agenda.

I don't like you either, Ayn Rand.

But lo! We’re also a group that’s evaded federal government detection (kind of – they don’t know we’re anything other than regular citizens anyway – I guess that’s good enough for a libertarian fantasy). Sure, we have a socialist, underground society with high taxes from our citizens, where people live under frequent surveillance by a government capable of lie detection – but we never force anyone to join! Such is our respect for freedom of choice. Conundrum!

Fantasy Racism

Whenever Vampires are portrayed as a persecuted minority in fiction, one of the most common racial epithets for them is ‘bloodsucker.’ Without going into whether you should really be using Vampires as a metaphor for oppressed minorities or not, I want to say that I find it interesting that it’s almost always ‘bloodsucker’ that makes the list. Or leech.

Eyes on the 'evil' setting.
You know, say I wanted to insult one of the many Vampires that deserved it, like, say, Edward Cullen. He deserves it more than most because the books and most of the characters present him as reformed or at least fundamentally good-natured when he is nothing of the sort. Maybe I’d give him one of those brutal Richard Dawkins polysyllabic numbers that truly did him justice: ‘you unrelenting obsessive abusive control-freak; you mass-murdering megalomaniacal monstrosity; you stalking sexist sadistic kleptocratic conservative criminal irrational racist wannabe-genocidal bully!’

I guess that’s kind of long to yell during a riot, so how about just ‘murderer?’ That’s a pretty good insult, in that it could not possibly be interpreted in a positive or neutral way, and any person with even the most basic level of human decency shouldn’t want to hear it. That’s a pretty good reason not to like someone like Edward. Saying ‘also you drink blood!’ sounds like a case of misguided priorities.

File:Elizabeth Bathory Portrait.jpg

Erzsébet Báthory: front-running candidate for the most prolific female serial killer in history. Also, she drank blood.

Are writers trying to say that people in real life wouldn’t actually be prejudiced against Vampires for any substantive reason; that they’d just be grossed out by the blood drinking? They’re not entirely wrong. God knows, we’ve had that happen in our community, and it’s such a small population cross-section. Even some of our hosts have been like that, but then there are thousands who haven’t been. A little nuance would be nice. Particularly when you’re dealing with a group of people that have actually done bad shit.

Seriously, if you’ve killed people: who cares whether or not you wasted their blood afterwards? I still can’t get over Stephenie Meyer saying she couldn’t watch Interview with a Vampire because: ‘gross.’ Not: ‘I hated watching people die,’ but: ‘people dying is icky.’
Interview With The Vampire
Geez, Lestat, couldn't you just slaughter her politely? Or use a napkin?

Another thing I see a lot in speculative fiction is Vampires or aliens or Atlanteans making up similar racial epithets for humans, which also sound unintentionally ridiculous. ‘Air-breather,’ ‘solid,’ ‘ugly/large bags of mostly water.’ Yes – they are actually saying ‘You inhale air and that’s terrible somehow.’

I can’t wait for a gelatinous alien to insult humans by saying: ‘you have bones!’ I bet it never occurred to anyone to be ashamed of that. ‘Bone people!’

I’ve spent half my life trying to help stop this from developing in my community and crushing it fiercely when it does, but now I’m wondering about what kind of equally ridiculous things we could call humans. ‘Round-teeth!’ ‘Bread-eaters!’ Uh: ‘solar panels?’

Some Vampires insult humans by calling them ‘mortal.’ One of the fundamental beliefs in my own vampire culture is that aging is a disease, and we’re the only people who currently have any acquired immunity. Calling a human ‘mortal’ would be on par with insulting someone by calling them a ‘cancer patient.’

Most of the rest of these epithets sound like a frigging Cosmo article title: ‘How Having Bones Can Hurt Your Figure.’

Taking a completely benign biological trait and making it something to be ashamed of, without even giving a reason why – yeah, that’s pretty much the standard for a lot of insults. People don’t say ‘you’re ugly and that’s bad;’ they just call you ‘ugly.’ Same thing goes for most racial insults. I guess that’s a strength of speculative fiction – take an issue like racism outside of its preferred real world context and you can see how absolutely absurd it is.

Morals versus Insults


Plenty of people think bloodsucking is inherently wrong, even if you do it safely and consensually. They’ll point out that you have to hurt someone one way or another, since you still have to break the skin. And it isn’t as if humans have pints and pints of blood to spare without any health consequences.

And it’s not like establishing a hosting relationship doesn’t have many indirect personal consequences for both parties that make the whole process more complicated than a simple exchange of blood. And nearly everyone in our community chose to be vampires, and therefore consciously said, after years of thinking it over, that yes: they were willing to make themselves difficult burdens on an ever-expanding number of people for the rest of their indefinite lifespans.

And I can actually respect that position well enough, because at least it’s a real moral argument. I’m a professional sire. I’m a professional recruiter. I’ve lived well past the maximum natural human lifespan. This position more or less flies in the face of everything I do and the entire basis of my continued existence on Earth.

But at least it’s an argument and they’re not just calling me icky.





Images in order of appearance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_bat.
http://hardinmd.lib.uiowa.edu/fleabites.html.
http://www.bradwestness.com/ayn-rand-was-a-not-a-republican,1629/.
http://www.breakingdawnmovie.org/images/2010/07/Edward-Cullen-bad-vamp-2.jpg. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_B%C3%A1thory
http://staticmass.net/the-emporium/interview-with-the-vampire-movie-1994/.
http://vampirelegends.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/vampires-online-and-bats/. 

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Friendly Woods Vampire


wigenweb.org. 

My biggest problem with Louis is the same problem I have with all Vampires who fail at ethical vampirism: why don’t you just live in the woods? You can’t resist human blood long enough to be in the same room with someone? You have no business living among humans, then, and you are putting countless lives at risk just to try to test your own goddamn willpower.

The woods are full of game, guy, and you can live off animal blood. This was the 1790s in New Orleans; you didn’t even have the problems with hunting regulations we do today, and the fur traders hadn’t yet run animal populations into the ground. You – woods, now! Or the mountains, or some other uninhabited region – it’s 1791, and there’s lots of it.

Yeah, sunlight problem: get some of your slaves to build you a woods hut, within a one-night’s journey. Yeah, yeah, the killing is symptomatic of the loss of humanity inherent in the Vampirism and all that. How do you know which direction the correlation or causation runs (do you even know which it is)? Has anybody ever even tried ‘separation as redemption’? Test it: if I’m wrong, the test results would reflect it, and at least you know that you tried.

Louis still had enough ‘humanity’ (whatever the fuck hell that means) to try the animal blood route for a little while, and avoid some murder – he could have made the escape then. Maybe ‘loss of humanity’ (there’s that word again) is a gradual process. Maybe it’s like a progressive illness: stop it at the right time, and you avoid the worst of the symptoms, or even make a full recovery. Just test the damn thing: this was after the Scientific Revolution, and they had the scientific method.

If you’re in the woods sucking down animals, you might be able to retrain your body to rely on them. Then you could return to civilization. Say you end up killing an explorer or a traveler – that’s terrible, yes, but compare that death against all the people you would have killed had you stayed in the city for some damned reason.

http://www.twilighthooked.com. 
Yes, the woods suck. I’m a former frontier girl; you don’t have to tell me that. Bring books. And candles. Yes, Lestat would harass you because he has nothing better to do. And he would continue slaughtering innocent people also, apparently, because he has nothing better to do. How about getting a nice cage for him in your woods hut, so you’ll have company?

Really, he’ll have to talk to you eventually, no matter how much he hates you for imprisoning him and ruining his life and stopping his serial genocide. People go crazy in solitary confinement, so I’ll bet you’ll have a better relationship than ever as you both try to stave off desperate, crushing loneliness. And you guys don’t seem to really talk to or interact with anyone else anyway (killing doesn’t count), so would this even be that much of a break from your routine?
http://www.finalgirlproject.com.
So, you’ll be able to test whether isolation from humans improves your self-control. With favorable results, maybe eventually you could find someone new to sire yourself, someone you can train in the whole non-murder way of life. Or maybe you can turn Lestat around.

It’s the Enlightenment: sentence him to hours of reading philosopher tracts. It’s a start. Jeremy Bentham would be best, but you could always go with Rousseau. If you can get your hands on them. Not Hobbes, though. Never Hobbes. If Lestat can’t read them, which I suspect, then read them at him – long-term prisoners will eventually listen to anything to stave off another few hours of staring at blank walls. If nothing else, at least you’ll benignly torture him.

 Hey, compare that plan to the one that failed, which as far as I could see was: eat up your finite supply of livestock and then, um – eat Lestat?
therottingzombie.blogspot.com
You’re a slave master: you couldn’t get a few slaves to bleed into a bucket for you? Lestat’s method of murdering them really isn’t very sustainable: slaves were expensive, and he was draining your fortune literally and figuratively (which makes his ‘gold digger sire’ thing even stupider). How were you going to even keep your plantation up and running if he keeps killing the slaves?

Why not just try getting them all to bleed for you, in another room, and then drink it after they leave? They’re slaves – asking them to bleed for you is probably the least awful thing you’ve ever done to them. Maybe they’d be less likely to revolt that way, you know, compared to when Lestat was killing them.
reviews-of-movies-i-watched.blogspot.com

Honestly, the mass consumption method of vampirism works just as well as economically: getting large numbers of people to give small amounts of blood/money is a much better recipe for wealth and health than getting small numbers of people to give large amounts of blood/money. Ask Bill Gates!

Yeah, some businesses can get by on tiny niche markets or a few wealthy and devoted customers (Business jargon: whales. Hey, blue whales have 15,000 pints of blood), but in your case, your customers are really frigging cash-strapped. Yeah, Lestat will never see your point, but he’s never run a business before. You could always try locking him in the attic.

Or, if you must, just kill him. That’s a tough threshold to establish, but given that his successful escape means more deaths, if you can’t efficiently contain him it’s not worth the risk.

I’m against the death penalty, and even in vampire society - which is more or less built on crime - we don’t execute our criminals. We do everything we can to rehabilitate them. But I don’t deny that these are special circumstances. Louis really should at least test the containment strategy first, while preparing himself to do what might be necessary. That’s some fan-fiction I want to see.

Lestat is a telephone telepath, or as I like to say, a ‘telephony’ – but they never really established whether he could read other Vampires. Even though we meet another telephony that can. I’m assuming he can’t, otherwise, you’d think Claudia wouldn’t have been able to kill him the way she did.  You know, right there in the room next to him, while smirking about him going along with her evil plan, immediately after making up with him, thus giving him the perfect opportunity to be suspicious of her intentions.  I hope Claudia knew about Lestat’s hypothetical mind reading limitations, for the sake of her reputation as a villain. She already didn't know how good a regenerator he is.

You’d think that if his mind-reading was voluntary – which it seemed to be with the planter’s wife – he would have read her mind at some point during that scene to, you know, confirm she wasn’t doing exactly what she was doing. Or, I don’t know, maybe read her mind at some point while she was pissed off at him for the same reasons. Okay, we’ll give Lestat and Claudia the benefit of the doubt, and say he can’t read Vampires’ minds. 

hotflick.net

I don’t about you, but if feeding off of dead people could kill me, I probably wouldn’t bite into a stiff, motionless body without at least checking the pulse, no matter how warm it was. Especially not after someone who I had threatened moments earlier, who had every reason to take revenge, gave it to me as a ‘peace offering.' Goddammit, Lestat.