Vampires were, I suppose, a horror tale in the beginning, and then when Bram Stoker created Dracula they became a symbol for seduction and sex. But they were still scary.

But, so the critics say, beginning with Buffy the Vampire Slayer² we’ve had a slow pussification of vampires. They are no longer ravenous beasts who view humans as nothing more than a slow moving meal, who use their overwhelming sexual charisma as a mere tool to entice humans into their arms (and fangs).

I understand that to a degree, especially in light of Twilight³, but I respectfully disagree. Vampires were made to evolve along this path.

Zombies, werewolves, and vampires are the holy trinity of supernatural horror. Zombies are mindless horror, and any expansion of zombies beyond that is likely to be seen by connoisseurs as no longer being zombies. Werewolves are generally seen as a Jekyll/Hyde scenario with the werewolf half being uncontrollable so any shift away from that changes the definition of werewolf. But vampires are at their basest level undead creatures of the night who drink blood for sustenance. You can make a harrowing tale based around the premise of that creature, or you can tell a story of addiction, or a story of human empathy, or a story about the power of free will over base desires.

Basically, there’s much more wiggle room for what’s acceptable for a vampire story by virtue of their base properties. There’s nothing inherently primal and horrifying about vampires, it just so happens that those were the tales told most frequently until recent history.

So, when people make fun of Bill Compton of True Blood for being a “wet blanket” or some similar term because he desires to live as human a life as is possible as a vampire they’re missing the point. Vampires are homogeneous but not in the way everyone thinks. They’re not universally unfeeling unsympathetic sociopaths. Even looking at their source material can show you that.

Humans are not all the same. And vampires are made from humans. Some, when given eternal life and superhuman power, will forget their humanity and become a darker creature something akin to what we imagine as the prototypical vampire; others may shrink at the very thought of being a creature they previously imagined as an affront to God and may very well consider suicide; and many more will see their new powers not as an excuse to behave inhumanely but as a curse they must reject to retain their humanity.

The other supernatural beasts we’re familiar with don’t have this breadth. Zombies become mindless seekers of brains⁴, and werewolves become a creature who is a regular human most of the time but transforms to an uncontrollable monster during a full moon. Vampires don’t follow either of these paths and so they have a much broader palette from which their personalities can be painted.

So Bill Compton being a self-hating vampire isn’t a failing of True Blood, but rather it’s a sign that people are willing to be more complex with vampires in stories. Much like the wise stoic Native American, and the Magic Negro faded away with time replaced by more natural characters, the monstrous vampire stereotype has found itself a mere permutation in a panoply of perspectives⁵. And this isn’t a bad thing.

But with this in mind, we have to accept that a global shift from one persona to another in vampires would be a weakening of the whole. If everyone began to write all vampires as effeminate waifs afraid of human contact, that would be a terrible fate for vampire lore. But if those original sexual seductive monsters are not supplanted but supported by these new unexplored aspects of vampirism, I can hardly see that as a bad thing, for vampires or for storytelling.

1. I should probably be less lazy and find links to the numerous “Vampires are being made lame” articles and blog posts and essays I’ve read over the last few months, but seeing as you’re reading this endnote that clearly didn’t happen
2. Again, maybe there were pussy vampires before then, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire comes to mind though I don’t know enough of the details of that novel to include it as a canonical example pussy vampires
3. which has vampires that twinkle rather than smolder when doused with sunlight
4. Well, not really. The brains thing is sort of a stereotype that everyone knows but for which there’s remarkably little backing in pop culture instances of zombies.
5. Sometimes, I think I like alliteration too much

Of course, I wouldn’t title this post “The Death Spiral Continues” if I were extolling the wonders of a show. I merely take the time to discuss Chuck to contrast it with the increasingly dreaful show that follows it Monday nights on NBC. This week’s episode of Heroes continued to disappoint and downright offend as Parkman’s inexplicable prophetic painting continues to repeat a story that was overplayed and poorly executed when they did it the first five times. And when Rebel gives them useful intel, Matt and Peter finally start thinking and they double up on the mind powers to help them get past security. A smart idea and they got a couple good scenes out of it. Of course, why they wouldn’t at least cover the security camera in the room — leaving the others wondering who it could be — is one of many questions that are aroused by the idiotic behaviour in this episode.

Indeed, while in “Building 26″, Matt and Peter get ahold of video surveillance and Matt’s first plan is to leverage that information to get Daphne back. “One life at a time” he says, as though that makes sense. If your plan is to chip away at the problem until it’s been fixed and then suddenly you’re given material capable of destroying the very foundation of the bricks you’re chipping at, a change in stratagem might be in order. And then, when Peter escapes with that information, instead of bringing the information immediately to all the news outlets and uploading it to Youtube and posting to dailykos under the username LoveIsTheAnswer about the abuses of the Executive Branch and how horrifying the rounding up of these superpowered-Americans is for the freedoms of all Americans, he calls up his totally trustworthy brother who’s never betrayed him before and makes a deal to exchange all the incriminating evidence he has for Matt and Daphne. Even Nathan is astounded! It’s the stupidest deal ever. If you release the information to the public, Matt and Daphne would be ultimately freed, along with everyone else they’d illegally imprisoned. That’s what TNC would call “stepping over dollars to snatch up nickels.”

Oh but the stupid is strong with this episode. That’s just one of three equally stupid and repetitive stories. Claire is protecting Aquaman and, while he’s less annoying than West from last year, the story comes across virtually identical. They’re on the run and the guy saves her with his power somehow. Meanwhile, they discover that they’re not alone, that they have someone to share this part of themselves with. It’s just boring and Claire’s ongoing self-assuredness in the face of her obvious inadequacies is exasperating. And Sylar rediscovers his dad. Turns out his dad sold him to his uncle. Who knew?! The scene where Sylar relives that memory was played as though it were new astonishing information when it’s been known for at least a couple episodes now. The closest thing the scene has to a twist is when Sylar’s dad kills Sylar’s mom via some good old fashioned head-slicing telekenesis. Which, much like last week’s reveal of Mohinder’s pseudo-complicity, doesn’t make sense. Sylar obtained his telekinesis through his real power, the ability to understand complex systems intuitively and “fix” them, so to give telekinetic powers to his dad makes negative sense.

I’m feeling more and more angry with Heroes each new episode. I truly want the show to be good. I don’t like abandoning shows, especially not shows with sci-fi and comic book trappings, but Heroes is not entertaining for me anymore. Other shows are much better. Chuck, for example. Watch them instead.

Most recently the hate has been pushed onto Hiro, and here’s why. The show sucks. It has nothing to do with Hiro, or his current journey. At least not in particular. What’s wrong with Hiro, is what’s wrong with Heroes.

Abuse of Awesomeness

During season one, one of the recurring characters was played by Richard Roundtree. AKA Motherfucking Shaft. So obviously he was playing a badass with awesome powers. Wait, what?

Shit. Well, he’s in a coma but he can wake up and reveal his awesome superpowers and kick all sorts of ass. Wait, what?

Fuck. Well, he’s dead — and it appears the only thing his death accomplished was to get Peter laid — but Hiro is all about the time travel, so Shaft can still show up in the past and be even more awesome because we didn’t see it coming!! Wait, what?

Oh, come on! You bring the guy back so that he can tell Peter that Love Is The Answer?! And what was his power anyways? Talking to the future? That’s a retarded power, and I don’t even think it was him doing it so it’s especially crappy.

And then, following their atrocious treatment of Shaft — not to mention the purposeless character Charles Deveaux’s very existence — they pump up the awesomeness by casting Bruce Boxleitner for a recurring role during season three. Except that he’s in two fucking scenes in total and they were pretty close to useless in the long run. My point is they’ve got a huge problem with follow-through. And not just with their stunt casting. Everybody remembers that most unheinous moment early on in season one of Heroes where time stops for Peter Petrelli and Ninja Hiro From The Future shows up to deliver him a message.

Future Hiro was fucking sweet! He spoke English without the accent; he carried around a katana; and the slimming lines on that leather trench coat really worked for him. He came from five years in the future but now three years later — possibly four given the sporadic time jumps the show does — he’s still a dweeb who talks in broken English and wears the office clothes for the job he hasn’t been to in years at this point. When Lost showed Jack depressed, addicted, and bearded up three years in the future, they followed the fuck through.

Discontinuity

Retcons are a staple of the comic-book world from which Heroes steals its ideas draws inspiration, but in the comic world, retcons typically come about because of universe altering events or because the story is being reimagined for a new generation. But changing the dynamics of the foundations of your characters doesn’t make a lot of sense.

In the series premiere, Angela Petrelli is arrested for shoplifting socks because she “wants to feel alive.” Presumably because the six months she’s lived without the love of her life, Arthur Petrelli, have left her feeling alone and empty; without her better half. No wait, she poisoned him and was planning on killing him even further just to make sure he was dead before her son walked in mid-homicide. It’s these emotional discontinuities that really kill Heroes.

Does Peter ever think about Simone Deveaux? Or the Irish chick he erased from existence? Does Hiro think about Charlie? Do any of these characters think about the consequences of their actions, or the pains in their past? I don’t see any of that in the performances or in the writing.

The characters perform as the plot requires. Their emotions exist to serve the plot. Their powers shift to drive the plot. Everything about the show is hollow and meaningless. You can change the pronouns of the last four sentences to refer to Hiro and the statements would stand, but the show, and how it treats its characters is the real problem.

Of course, dark stories come in different shapes and sizes. The Dark Knight was a much grimmer and darker look into both Batman and Joker’s psyches, and it delved into their interdependence on each other. That’s good dark. In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the characters endure a crushing war which drastically changed many of the characters and it explored the complex relationship between politics and religion and science. That’s good dark. Oldboy is the story of a man imprisoned for 15 years for reasons unknown who is given a week to discover why; Oldboy examines solitude, the influence others have on you, the monsters inside everyone, and many other disturbing and difficult questions. That is good dark.

But there’s a very bad trend, which seems most pronounced among sequels and spin-off shows, with a very different, and lazy, technique of telling darker stories: the deal with the devil. In Stargate Atlantis, the Atlantis expedition will on occasion tentatively join forces with the Wraith, the enemy du jour of the Pegasus Galaxy. On Star Trek Voyager, the crew reluctantly joins forces with the Borg to stop a common enemy more powerful than both.

The deal with the devil isn’t necessarily bad, but it needs to make sense. Team Atlantis wouldn’t join forces with the Wraith, or at least they shouldn’t because it doesn’t make sense; the Wraith are not a morally ambiguous group, they were designed to be essentially pure evil. The Atlantis team, and similarly the crew of Voyager, are bastions of sanctimonious self-righteousness and to have them coordinate with these evil groups reeks of story superseding character.

The point of dark stories is not to be cool. It’s not to be dangerous. It’s certainly not to tell dark stories. As always, it’s all about the characters. If your characters have inner demons requiring exploration of inseemly qualities, or they aren’t portrayed as a paragon of propriety, then their story can naturally progress toward those darker stories and possibly come back from it a stronger person and a richer character. But TV shows, and obviously movies as well, shouldn’t use it as a crutch to sustain their weak plots by sacrificing their characters, and viewers shouldn’t accept it.

Is a recent interview with Joss Whedon, Joss claimed that he had heard no complaints about Buffy’s foray into homosexuality, or perhaps simply bisexuality, or perhaps even simplest sexual experimentation.

Really Joss?

I’ve got a few complaints. First of all, it didn’t flow naturally. I’m working off of old memories now, but I don’t remember that cut to Buffy sprawled out covered in sheets next to a fellow slayer making a heck of a lot of sense. It works in that we all know that Buffy gets horny when she slays. But if that were the case, then why did her experimentation not happen when slaying with Faith years ago?

Another argument I’ve had with myself is that Buffy, in that universe, was still basically the age of a college student and that’s a time ripe with experimentation. But it’s not that age that induces experimentation, but the maturity and independence of that time. And Buffy has had to be incredibly mature for years. Her times for experimentation are over. One of my biggest complaints with Season 7 of Buffy was that Buffy still acted like a petulant child a lot of the time. She should have been more mature, because she was more mature. The same applies here.

Overall, I just don’t think the situation was handled very well. I’m sure they could have done a lesbian storyline with Buffy smartly, but to me there were simply too many things that didn’t add up or make sense in the greater scheme. I’m not alone either. There were quite a few people who didn’t like the direction the story took on forums, some of them being quite hyperbolic about the whole thing, but most citing their issues with the story in reasonable terms. It didn’t ruin Buffy for me, it didn’t ruin the comic for me, it didn’t even ruin the storyline for me, but to say there were no complaints is a little presumptuous.

I don’t know much of Howard’s other work, but I do know that his portrayal of Jim Rhodes in Iron Man was one of the weaker aspects of the film. It wasn’t a bad portrayal by any count, but it wasn’t great and it certainly wasn’t the best interpretation of the character. So as much as I want to yell at the studio and Favreau for holding out on cash or some other reason, I have to believe that they had similar misgivings about his performance and decided to go in a different direction.

One particularly moronic guy on the Ain’t it Cool News talkback said “Empire would have been great with a replacement Han, eh?” Let’s replace 1) Empire with Dark Knight 2) would have with was 3) Han with Rachel Dawes. And then replace that question mark with a fucking period. It depends on the fucking situation moron! And I think that in this instance it might have been worth it. Obviously we’ll see, it’s always a gamble, but I’ve seen a decent amount of Cheadle’s work so I’m pretty hopeful about the whole situation.

One of the first mistakes I made was over-scheduling the various panels of interest without taking into account the other events that go on at comic-con: most especially the exhibit hall. The exhibit hall is where you go to see all the booths set up by various exhibitors. If you want to see the latest collectible busts of Hellboy, you can head over to the Sideshow Collectibles booth; if you want to buy 30 Rock t-shirts and Dwight Schrute bobble heads, you head over to the NBC booth; and a quick stroll through Artists’ Alley gives you a broad look at a large range of artistic abilities and sensibilities. I went to the exhibit hall every day of comic-con for at least an hour, usually more, and even though I’d walked the length of it numerous times I saw something new every time I walked the aisles. You could quite easily go to comic-con and simply explore all the exhibit halls have to offer for the duration.

But even exploring briefly in between panels results in a multitude of choices, and all of them tantalizing. Here’s the problem. I went to comic-con vaguely aware of the exhibit hall, but I had my mind set on seeing the panels. That said, I went there with 500 USD in my wallet planning to spend every penny and maybe more, but as I strolled the exhibit hall aisles I realized that didn’t have any room to bring this stuff back with me.

In my zeal to bring every awesome shirt I had to prove my geekiness to other geeks, I packed a duffel bag packed nearly to the brim for a four day trip. I could probably shove it full of any trade paperbacks I purchased on the floor, but comics are much more fragile and would likely get crumpled along the way. No bag and board would solve this problem.

Then let’s factor in other purchases like posters, and movie props, and statues, and even original artwork. They’re all too big or to fragile to withstand being shoved in with my clothes for a plane flight, especially when your bag gets remanded to airline security for a random security check where the word “gentle” is not in their vocabulary (but that’s a story for another time).

So I ended up not buying all that much. Oh I still spent hundreds of dollars buying trade paperbacks, but I couldn’t pick up any of the comic-con exclusive versions of comics I like or posters or prints. That said, I did pick up a great print of art by Mike Sosnowski called The Culprit for my niece because I thought she’d like it, but by the time I got my bag back from airport security, the print was horribly crumpled and I would have been better off ordering it from his website.

So if there’s anything you do in preparation for comic-con, you should plan for the swag. Bring an extra piece of luggage for your gifts that you can bring as carry-on to ensure its safety on the flight, or be willing to swallow the costs and ship your purchases to yourself in well packed boxes. Whatever option you choose, one proferred here or one of your own devising, just be aware of the problem before you go or it could put an unnecessary restraint on the reckless spending inherent in an event such as this.

If this comic doesn’t tickle your funny bone, or at least two other smaller bones in your body or of those in your possession, well clearly it was not meant to be.

I’ve only given the two big days, Friday and Saturday, a cursory glance, but from what I’ve seen I’ve got a huge challenge prioritizing the various panels and events that I’ll be going to. Already I’ve run into a few painful decisions because of the sheer quantity of events. It’s rare that I run into situations such as these with a multitude of temptations. With the advent of PVR and bittorent, my TV watching habits have become much more open. Where I once stopped watching one show because a better one was on at the same time, now I simply watch the lesser of the two later on. I’ve gotten so used to the asynchronous nature of my media consumption that this schedule was quite a blow to me.

Now I need to go figure out what makes the cut. Wish me luck.

This is just another example of overspecialization our society encourages. If you like mostly rock music then you are a Rock Fan. Or maybe you’re a Post-Rock Fan. Or a Neo-Post-Punk-Rock Fan. The hyphenates only grow.

I’m not advocating the abandonment of categorization, in fact my recently started project is very much about deep and robust categorization of data. I simply believe that the fundamentalism many people employ when creating these categorizations is unnecessary.

It’s because of this fundamentalism that people simply decide that to enjoy a particular type of media, you must enjoy only that type and anything else is a “guilty pleasure.” It’s another form of the No True Scotsman logical fallacy; no true fan of Punk Rock could unironically enjoy The Backstreet Boys.

There’s a problem with this kind of mentality because it leads to division. As the breadth of information our world can offer is expanded by the Internet and mass media, we become inundated by more and more types of information and we need deeper hierarchies of data to be able to think about it coherently. But this doesn’t mean we need to apply such strict boundaries on what we take in, or prefer to, to simplify ourselves for the rest of the world.

In the end, everything we are is a part of who we are. Liking high-brow humour does not exclude you from enjoying low-brow humour, nor does enjoying scripted dramatic TV shows exclude you from enjoying Reality TV (though hopefully, having intelligence excludes you from the latter).

I can understand the mentality behind telling people that certain things you enjoy are guilty pleasures because it not only tells them that you like something, but it also tells them something about the thing you like; it’s a sort of implied metadata. But this particular snippet of metadata is grossly overused in our culture, exactly because we seem to have devolved into a world exclusive esoteric niches.

As this post has hopefully exemplified, I’m not a man of extremes; having a broad swath of interests, some overlapping, some seemingly contradictory is a good thing. But guilty pleasures sound ugly to me. It degrades you for saying that you should be above this but you aren’t, it degrades your audience by establishing false pretenses with them, and ultimately it degrades the thing you like. Liking something in spite of its origins or your initial perception is not a cardinal sin, nor should it be, so don’t act like it is.

But all told, this week was pretty awesome. Of course, the real meat of this awesome sandwich was Y’s last issue and Lost’s premiere. As much as it sucks to see a long-term story you’ve come to look forward to go away, all stories need to end. That’s why Y was such a bittersweet experience. The final issue was more of an epilogue, recapping sixty years of the new world of inordinately few males. It highlighted the greatest hits of Yorick’s remaining life. There are some reasonably shocking moments, but all in all the story ends with a conscientious, relaxed whimper.

Lost goes in a different direction. The show blasts out of the gate and lays on the awesome in heaping dollops. From the flashforwards to the freighter people to the splitting of the losties, everything follows from the finale of last year and sets up the rest of the season. I say it sets up the rest of the season, but from what I’ve heard this season moves very fast, so many of the threads introduced over the course of this episode may be mostly resolved within the next few episodes, naturally leaving more unraveled threads to play with.

And yes, I purposefully used the word awesome way too many times in this post. I’ve always been bad at describing my opinions on recent events. I typically need some level of hindsight before I can articulate well enough to get my point across, so I’ve decided to avoid that quagmire entirely by using a simplistic adjective to demonstrate my general state. I feel that this may be yet another awesome step in my progress to developing my writing ability through accepting of existing un-awesome limitations. So… this week was pretty freaking awesome.