I liked overall Cirque du Freak, however, though I was disappointed in the separate vampire ‘races’.

Masquerade will always have a special place in my heart, ever since the TV series Kindred, and I wish we actually would have gotten to our campaign that we had envisioned once in college that never took off. I miss what vampires used to be in horror culture, what Bela Lugosi to Gary Oldman could present, and what Anne Rice still maintained even if there was the classically brooding vampire of Louis to go with the more horrific Lestat. That gave it dimension though, and Lestat is not without emotion entirely of course. Twilight offers nothing like that, and the relationship is borderline abusive in how it is indeed obsessive and controlling on both parts. I long for when the fad is over and we can return to something good.

Vampires hold a special place in the hearts of many people, most of them nerds. (If I were good ol’ Yahtzee Croshaw, I would say, “Vampires join Ninjas, Pirates, and Zombies in the special group of things nerds like and need to shut the fuck up about.”) They are a common element in horror fiction, and that really is their rightful place because of what they represent. In vampires, people find a way to defeat mankind’s oldest fear: death, and in such a way that allows them to be young and powerful forever. But this, as with everything, comes with a price. A vampire can only sustain themselves by feeding on the blood of the race it used to be in life, in cannabalism, another one of humanities nightmares. In order to live forever, we have to become part of the dark, become the thing that goes bump in the night, just one more thing in the dark that symbolizes the end of everything, unavoidable death. That’s why vampires are (or at least were) such common, relevant horror staples: not only do they represent unknown horrible predators that most humans can’t stop, they also represent the fear of assimilation, of loss of control, that if we’re caught, we will not die, but lose control of ourselves, become not ourselves, become like the monsters that attacked and killed us. Some people like Joss Whedon in his landmarked series Buffy the Vampire Slayer portray this assimilation as immediate, that when a person is caught by a vampire and turned, when they rise again there are no more feelings to the person. They knew what the person knew, and knew that they should be feeling certain ways about things on some level, but they no longer have the capacity of feeling or empathy, a moral autism as it were. This seems like cheating to me. I find a better model in the themes of the vampire in the great late Masquerade books from the now defunct Old world of Darkness (I just can’t get into the new stuff. Yes, it’s better from a Gameplay perspective, everything fits together nicer, and I like what they’ve done with the other races, funnily enough, but vampires are just so dry in that settin. So no thanks.). In that setting, the person is still the person, with all the emotions and stuff he started with, but as a vampire. Here the loss of control is a slow, arduous process; the vampire tries to be himself, tries to not become like the old things which have been around for thousands of years, but the world changes. Everything the person knew and loved in life drops away, the world becomes unrecognizable, and people become the same no matter how you look at it. Plus, the older you get and the more horrible things you’re forced to do, you lock yourself away out of fear of death. Thats the wonderful thing about V:tM: you can be an all powerful badass, and there are still things in the night that can destroy you, you don’t know if the world will end tomorrow, and you don’t know what comes after death. See that’s the heart of horror: not blood or monsters, or slashers or magic or hollywood glitz, but just the three little words of “I don’t Know.”

And then the young adult fiction came and ruined all that. All the stuff to do with vampires in the young adult section is lacking, shall we say. They either provide hope to the story by offering a way to reverse vampirism or reincarnate, or become continuity messes dealing with time and space and all manner of things including different breeds of vampires, like Cirque du Freak, or you have things like Twilight, in which only the glamouros side of vampires is presented. Seriously, do vampires have any of the traditional flaws? I don’t think they do. They’re just pretty sparkly people who apparently don’t have anything better to do thanj goi to hiugh school and look at people with limpid eyes. Oh, and going into their love interests rooms at night and watching them for hours on end. I am so amused when the mothers of the fans congregate and say how the books are so lovely and the relationship so good because there is no sex involved. As if that was all a relationship needed to be good. but from what I have seen or heard, this relationship is pretty much a stream of melodrama dealing with sexy biting (“No! I cannot bite you and confine you to this existence! I’d rather die!” “Bite me, my love! I want you to bite me! I should rather die than be parted from you!”) peppered with mormonism, a hint of pedophilia at the end, and sparkies. It isn’t horror, it isn’t even Young Adult fiction, it’s melodrama porn. Worse it’s melodrama porn dealing with obsession and posessiveness on both parties, ehich is the opposite of wholesom. Hell it’s the opposite of love! I read some chapters of Vampire Knight, which is pretty much the Japanese Twilight, and on the whole, I think I liked that better.

So yes, in conclusion, Fuck Twilight. We should all go see good vampire fiction, like Let the Right One In.

Game Trailers – E3 2010 – Comedy