The Fridge-Women of the Land of Tomorrow

If you've not heard of Women in Refrigerators, you should probably femaliarise with it, and the concept in general.

Is it an important (pop-)cultural observation? Yes, I think it is.

The general gist of this thing is that women are often sabotaged out of the 'actual character' column into being plot points for members of the member-gender, with specific reference to page 15 (I think) of Green Lantern vol.3 #54.

The site and the term are fifteen years old at this stage (and the comic just turned twenty), but it isn't really an out of date concept. The general undermining of female protagonists is an ongoing trend in media.

Samus Aran, bad-arse cosmic-bounty-hunter of Metroid (and its related sequels), has found the time in recent games to run about in her space-underwear and go uncharacteristically wobbly-kneed due to the pressures of the dangers that surround her and the presence of boys who can talk her through it.

This is the very same character whose reputation is based on repeatedly striding (arguably under prepared) into space-pirate planets and dying worlds in order to get business done. There are few characters who are depicted as being as calm under pressure in literally world-shatteringly dangerous situations as Samus Aran.

This was a strange direction to be approved by Nintendo after the unparalleled Metroid Prime Trilogy.

I don't really know what to say about all of this.

It's a shame.

That's what I can say.

It's a shame that I find comparatively few examples where female characters are afforded the same level of story arc epicocity and complexity as is given over to male characters. Even if female characters are being better written these days, and given better stories than they were previously, how many female characters get an Emerald Twilight, Return of the Dark Knight, or a Death and Rebirth of Superman?

I'm tired of falling back on Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Willow, who is the most interesting, hardworking, brave, intelligent character on that show (and would be on many others), and has the most interesting story arcs and trials to overcome.

And, while she is 'saved' by Xander in season six (after her own Woman in a Refrigerator moment), it is through The Power of Friendship and not through promises of marriage and babies like the end of The Fifth Element.

There are just a ton of questions I want answered.

Why do fantastic games with female protagonists like The Longest Journey and Syberia dwell in obscurity?

Why can't Princess Peach rescue herself from Bowser's Castle? I think it's called escaping. Where is that game?

Why isn't there a fantasy-kingdom-management game starring Princess Peach? She can't spend all her time getting captured and rescued?

Why don't they remake The Guardian Legend? Arguably, one of the most incredibly well designed games ever made, with or without a female protagonist.

While I'm glad that Scarlet Witch is being added to the roster in The Avengers: Age of Ultron, why don't She-Hulk, Mockingbird, any of the Spider-Women, Moondragon, Crystal, Firebird, Firestar, Echo, Wasp, Captain Marvel, Hellcat, Tigra, Madame Masque, the Kate Bishop Hawkeye, Terminatrix, or any of the other female Avengers get a look in?

Why isn't there a She-Hulk TV series that is a cross between a superhero show and a courtroom procedural show? Did I mention that She-Hulk is both a superhero and a highly skilled lawyer who frequently represents superheroes in court? Imagine looking at the superhero phenomenon from a legal perspective. Where is that show? I would absolutely watch that show.

Where is the Barbara Gordon film trilogy? From Batgirl to Oracle and the Birds of Prey. Protege to team leader in three films. A character who finally escapes the obsessive, unhealthy, and violent world of both her real father and symbolically adoptive father by being paralysed from the waist down, only to decide that they're both doing it wrong.

Where is the Hawkwoman film franchise that looks at the complex history of her origins as a militaristic police officer on her fascist home-world of Thanagar, to a superhero in exile on an unfamiliar Earth? What happens when both sides call her traitor after war breaks out between the two worlds she has called home?

Why don't they promote Katma Tui, Arisia Rrab, Boodikka, or any of the other female members of the Green Lantern Corps to the title lead of at least one of the five ongoing Green Lantern comics?

Why isn't there a cinematic sequel to Willow (the film, not the character) that focusses on the adventures of Elora Danan?

Why can't they revive Magnum, P.I. with Thomas Magnum's daughter, Lily Catherine Hue (who would be in her early thirties), as the eponymous star of the new show?

Why isn't Shadowcat (Kitty Pryde) the focal character of the X-Men film franchise instead of continually being sidelined so that other characters can play her roles in stories?

Why is Cutthroat Island the last pirate movie with a female lead that I can name? Female pirates were a thing. A real thing. An awesome real thing.

Why is DC Comics' Harlequin treated as a sex object instead of as a cautionary tale about successful women (she was a criminal psychiatrist at the top of her field) who become trapped in abusive relationships?

Holding up the infrequent example is not parity, but nor do numbers create equality. 

Where did all the good time go?

I'm not going to talk about how to write well. I don't think I am the person to come to for that sort of thing. Not on account of my inability to string words together in a pleasing fashion, but because I'm yet  to present much evidence that it is something that I can do. If it's what you're looking for, there are lots of books on the subject by a great many people whose opinions on the matter are backed by the weight of this evidence.

Before quality though comes productivity. This is the first step. A blank page may hold infinite possibilities, but a full page holds the first step to not wasting them. I can talk about productivity. I have productively written for a number of years now. I can sit down and write a 2,000 to 5,000 word story outline in an hour. I do a lot of different types of writing, and I do it with both stealth and ease. If you're looking for stealth, then you are going to need to invest in a quiet keyboard, or a pen. Pens are quiet. If you're interested in ease, then keep reading.

Words aren't always in the habit of being there when we want them. This isn't really about the words though. It isn't about writers block either. That's just a name that we use. Despite all appearances, writing is like drawing, playing the cello, or anything else we need to train ourselves to do with ease. For the most part we tend to assume that however many years of school and university have prepared us for this, but think about the time we would put aside for 2,000 words, or 1,500. Where do we now find the time in our lives for 85,000 words? In reality you are more likely to need to find the time for whatever the actual number of words it is going to take you to write 85,000 good words. Words that carry with them everything that you need of them.

This isn't something that I figured out. It is something I researched. It is something the authors that I respect discovered through necessity, because for them it was part of the trade. A skill that needed mastering in order that bills be paid. Tom Wolfe, Philip K. Dick, Agatha Christie, Edmond Hamilton, Ray Bradbury, Steven Moffet, and so many others relied on their ability to continue to write whenever it was needed of them.

My first step in understanding this process was the work of Philip K. Dick, whose prolific output and commitment to the concepts behind each of his works is, to my mind, without peer. Dick wrote when he was sleep deprived, discontent, depressed, detached, and, most importantly, when he made the time. Dick wrote a lot of material that he was not happy with (the majority of which was not published), but if you were to say that only 1 in 5 of Dick's published stories is worth reading, that would still be 10 novels and 20 short stories.

Apart from a (very bad) novel I nearly finished instead of attending class when I was in my late teens, I spent nearly a decade staring at screens and pages instead of actually writing, because I wanted each moment that I found for my writing to be of a certain quality and to ring of an increasingly specific literary timbre, and I proudly prioritised certain stories and themes based on arbitrary bias, often relying on writing only 'when it came to me'. My work suffered as a result, because there was never enough of it.

With but a single exception, no story I had ever started had reached more than 7,000 words, and by early 2010 I had just over 100 stories with nearly a dozen drafts each, none of which were near completion. Then at a time when I only had one guaranteed hour a day to myself I went from having no real literary focus to having the first 20,000 words of a novel in a fortnight. I had most of my characters, and a plot that didn't have too many holes to be patched. It wasn't a new story. I had been sitting on parts of it for a half dozen years or so.

In the months preceding this point I had made the decision to just write anything. I would grab lunch, and probably a coffee, and sit down and write anything. 'The Sandwich Diaries' became a constant friend during this period, as did frustrated letters, vignettes from my childhood, film reviews, and snippets of fiction. I wrote when I was tired, I wrote when I couldn't think clearly, I wrote when I hadn't slept for days, and I wrote when I really didn't feel like it. For 45 minutes a day, 5 days a week, I wrote anything I could.

I should be clear at this point that I am not advocating any sort of punishing regime that is likely to destroy your passion for writing, but instead it is about training yourself to continue to operate creatively when you have nothing left. You will no longer be restricted to 'when it comes to you'. You can be the commander of your own writing. They're your words.

It is important to understand that productivity and focus are not the same thing, and they both require different skills and approaches. I had trained myself to make the most of a period of focus. Over the months that followed, the number of stories that I had on the shelf (it was a digital shelf) expanded to over 200, but the average girth of each was equivalent to my previous front runner.

I'm writing this as much now for myself as I am for anyone else, because it is something of which I need reminding. I took a year away from the two stories that I have that exceed 50,000 words, because 'I didn't have the time'. The time was there, but I didn't make it. I made the time for other writing, but The Book, if there had to be only one, was put aside. But, now it is back, and the dance begins again.

The Days Ahead

To some degree, I find myself thinking about the work of William Gibson more frequently due to the work that I do and the way that I live. Not that I am a writer like he is, though I do and have written web copy, which is a kind of corporate, wired up sort of writing that lives in the worlds hewn with his own, but the vast majority of my professional life has been as a freelance ICT professional. Not that I ever call it that. That doesn't happen. There are other words that are often more specific. The technology bases covered are diverse and far reaching. I often think of the work that I have done, and the work that I do, and there is a relationship to the organisms that populate cyberpunk. I'm one of those. That's what I think.

I've had the speak wheeled at me in a variety of fashions, I've lied to printers to make them distribute ink in the manner for which they were originally designed, trawled through archaic data on dying systems at the behest of its owners, and coded towards functional artificial intelligence. That's not all of it, but it is some of it. I may not be the neuromancer, but I'm playing in the same parks. This is the world I live in. I'm pretty sure I've eaten synth-spaghetti, and probably slept on it. In reality it is the world we all live in, though your eating habits are your own.

The synth-spaghetti stained days of keyboard-for-hire are a part of something else. The journeyman years. They have a function. They built who I am, and the way that I learn.

These are important days.

The Prophets of Cyberspace: A Rough Guide to Cyberpunk v1.0.3

originally posted on 2010-04-26-0223
at Ray-guns and Spandex
migrated to Sci-Fi Snot Rash

In the late seventies a new flavour of science fiction began to take shape. It's earliest visible family characteristics had first appeared in both 'new age' sci-fi and the authors of the beat generation. In the intervening time it had slowely formed a new definition for itself through the works of J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick, until reaching a point in the early eighties when the cultural obsession with excess and mass media provided the perfect literary genesis pool for the emerging counter culture prophets of cyberpunk.

Abandoning galaxy spanning empires and laser toting aliens in favour of more familiar settings. Abandoned territories and near future cities became neon wombs breeding cybernetic street gangs, corporate warriors, and digital pop-stars. Cyberpunk takes us into worlds not that far beyond the horizon. Deeply entrenched in the mundane with elements just alien enough that they might be happening in another city, in another country somewhere, instead of on the other side of tomorrow. In the three decades since its first oredictions we can clearly see that the anticipation of the popularity of reality television and the total pervasion of the internet happened somewhere between Bruce Sterling's The Artificial Kid and William Gibson's Cyber Space Trilogy.

With much of the origianlly fictitious elements of cyberpunk having become parts of our everyday lives it comes as no surprise that many other brands of modern science fiction carry these same elements that were at one stage the calling cards of cyberpunk without fully submersing themselves into the stream. The Matrix is more thematically in sync with post-apocalyptic or machine war SF than it is with cyberpunk. Link all mimics of any punk movement, they wear the colours, but run in different circles.

It was never just a collection of hacker stories set in glass walled mega-cities and the suburban wastelands that surrounded them. It's a voice and an ethos defined by the very culture that birthed, where the corporate world has adopted the methods and tactics of the street, wrapped in a setting that is thrown at us. Chapters barely clock in at a page, and read more like scenes from a film. And the pacing of the books are measured in frames per second, with the charging mbps of the prose consisting predominantly of artificial street speak, and stream of consciousness.

If you are interested in running deep in the pure flavour, books like Snow Crash and Blood Music deliver in spades, but if you are a sci-fi film junkie, Cypher, New Rose Hotel, and Natural City are uncut, and measured from the source.

For me and my money, nothing sits closer to the heart of cyberpunk than the literary link hopping of Mirrorshades, Burning Chrome and the erroneously named Rewired: The Post Cyberpunk Collection. Short story compilations straight from the aforementioned neon womb in portions that have been coded and optimised for the short attention span generation that shared its childhood.

The Call of the Octo-Hoff

It seems now that I have once again begun with great optimism to gather ballerinas at my creative maw without that due heed paid to those lessons of days I've already past. The Octo-Hoff lurks, and I must embrace him. I must know my own bounds, and I must find my hands a way to work within them. This is the only true forward facing course of prudence.

What shadows leech anew into our surrounds as we falter unbidden into our own selfish false fantasies? What given thief have we allowed to prey upon us in these wretched hollows we dig as our dreams? Without the strength of will to see through the arduous birth, they feed in lieu of nourish. Worse, these parasites are hewn of our own hands. Wicked are we.

We imagine ourselves too capable in the face of these sudden creative outpourings. Surely we can create with speed ever increasing, should the need arise. Were we but challenged, surely we would meet such challenge with both aptitude and grace.

Are our talents not liquid? Capable without the merest of hesitations of becoming unto any form with which they are presented? Is that not the nature of the art? Do we not engage The Great Tradition for this very purpose? Do we slosh wildly against the sides of the trough, or find new accomplishment in the artistry of adherence to its herring curves?

What obnoxiously flavoured panacea have we attempted to have wrought in order to bestow upon our own selves the sole governance of the name of that herring? Are the fish our's to name?

Woe is the one who turns their back to face upon the Octo-Hoff, for he is betentacled!

Space pirates are the best flavour of pirate

As a child I was more than a little obsessed with Captain Harlock. To a certain extent, this never really subsided. He is on a list with other heroes that I imported from space to be included into my own personal pantheon for cosmic idolatry. My introduction was through a VHS, which I still own, of 1978's Space Pirate Captain Harlock, which was kind of awesome. Well, actually it still is awesome. People get down on it in a negative way, because that is the cool thing to do, but the English translation was bad-arse. The opening theme song was this fantastic astro-funk hero anthem called 'Take to the Skies' by Earth's own Mark Mercury. When we all get up to space, this is what it is going to sound like. I heard a cover in a bar a few years ago and just about lost my testicles, which I didn't notice until I tried to talk to one of the band members and instead of the usually appealing, dulcet tones that emerge from my mouth I sort of squeaked at him.

Out there, somewhere in the pop-culture oceans, circling Japan is the most recent Captain Harlock mutant to emerge from the juices. A movie that has the same name as the 1978 cartoon series, which is bound to get confusing. It's called Space Pirate Captain Harlock, and it's all in the third dimension.

I referred to this new film as a mutation of the Captain Harlock gene. Did you catch that? Did you wonder why? Well, Leiji Matsumoto, the man behind the pirate, has taken the captain out on a number of occasions, but observes continuity the same way that Robin Thicke observes monogamy, in that it appears to be something that other people are getting all worked up about, but the basic concept remains elusive. Nearly every outing has seen the character rebooted, except it isn't really a reboot; it's just how it works. This is how mythology worked. The stories didn't all fit together, but the characters stayed pretty much the way they were. If you're ever seen any of the Harlock stories, you'd understand why I drew the parallel. Harlock is a demigod of our future mythology. His fables are both epic and applicable, and are primarily about responsibility. There are times when we must take responsibility just because no one else will. Harlock is tragic, compassionate, and idealistic, and is more often than not depicted as making difficult decisions when there is no good answer.

I would like to see this movie. It's on my list. I've tried finding out if it is a thing that might happen sometime in the foreseeable future, but I've been fairly unsuccessful. By 'fairly' I do actually mean 'completely'. There has been no success on that front. This feels quite the shame to me. Harlock represents a certain brand of idealism for me. Something I idolised as a child, and perhaps to a certain extent still do. I think a lot about the world we live in, and the role that I should play, and I am often surprised at how often I fall back on the lessons learnt at the feet of the Captain when determining what I should be doing.

Packaged for your easy consumption

As I was trying to convince you to watch Dredd recently, I made it pretty clear that there is something to be had in a particular generation of science fiction films. Films like Predator, Total Recall, RoboCop, and Escape from New York, and a pile of others are entertainment first and foremost, but they don't fail to deliver on the philosophical nutrients that one generally associates with science fiction. This is the history of sci-fi. It's a fucking infiltrator. They suck you in with the sex, and the violence, and the spaceships, and the test-tube spandex-monkeys with the ray-guns and cybernetic breasts, and all of a sudden you're engaging in something that makes you think, "well, shit. Society, man". It's a fantastic fucking con.

Traditionally, science fiction has been a pretty full on cock-fiesta. For nearly its entire history it's been predominantly made for boys, by other boys, and as a result it's full of boy stuff, and I'm not presenting this as some kind of breakthrough or anything of that variety. The conscious effort made to actively market this stuff at the testicle-club is a well documented practice within the industry. This isn't to say that girls don't get down with science fiction, or that they don't make it. I know tons of girls who roll deep in the flavour, and Mary Shelley invented modern science fiction. That's a lady name, for the time being. It's just that there hasn't really been a conscious effort to market it at women until recently.

It's just, I guess where I'm at on the whole marketing of sci-fi agenda is that it is a good thing. I mean pure science fiction is kind of like pure engineering or pure mathematics in that it is interesting, and it really does have its place, but I really like to see really clever applied mathematics and engineering. They're much more awesome. So, you watch a science fiction film that is actually a horror movie, or a drama, or a romance, or a war movie, or whatever else is the flavour of the month and you're getting something else. Well, sometimes you are, but other times it's just a setting in which the stuff happens.

I talked about Dredd being a siege movie, and it is. It's claustrophobic, it's desperate, it's got all that good siege movie stuff that makes them fun to watch. You really get to watch the scales tip, which you should in a siege movie. You know that bit where it is the bad guys who start to get desperate, and their capacity for unreasonable destruction gets way out of hand? It's got that. It's got more though, but you don't have to engage with that if it's not your scene. But it's there if it is. I really gyrate for this sort of thing. It's hard-wired into my pleasure centres.

I like that Predator and Alien are both your pretty straight forward cabin movies. One is set in a jungle and the other is set in a space truck. One has elite combat-veterans with big-guns and the other has space-truckers. It's basically the opposite of a siege movie. Everyone is trapped, and they're all going to die, and it's a lot of fun. There is more to it though, if you want it. It's optional. There's an invisible check-box.

The problem is that they don't do this as much as they should. Quite often I find my frontal lobe being repeatedly beaten with 'the concept' by heavy handed science fiction, or I am watching something that is the cinematic equivalent of that vapid chasm of an heir to some great creative legacy. The kind of film that writes cheques against its thematic DNA without the slightest understanding of what it's getting itself in to. AVP. Either of them. Minority Report. That first Judge Dredd they made back in '95. Bayformers. Most probably the as yet incorporeal American live-action adaptation of Akira.

Dredd isn't unique in being an exception to this trend, but the vast majority of the Twentieth Century history of the genre is more or less about flying something clever so far under the radar that eight year olds will read it, and get the philosophy for free in the box, and for the most part it's like they're not even trying anymore.  

Cry, little sister: a brief geneaology of vampire fiction

Some time ago I was talking about the evolution of our popular concepts of vampires. Since then, no one is yet to stop me and say, "Hey, you there! What about The Lost Boys?" This is a valid point, even though I had to make it myself. In response I could just go back and add a section to the original post about the film and it's impact on the contemporary pop-c blood-sucker, or I could knock out fifteen hundred words on the subject, and seeing as you're here now anyway.

I freely admit that there are a great many gaps in the previous brief history I gave, but it wasn't so much about vampires as it was about being brief, and illustrating a point about the nature of mythology and storytelling. In reality Dracula was far less groundbreaking in the popular idea of the vampire as I made it out to be. I'm not trying to suggest that Bram Stoker's book isn't important or original, but only that there is a whole preamble leading up to it that I didn't really go into. For my money, Stoker's book is more interesting in terms of structure and the importance of suggestion over blunt illustration.

When talking about the popular ideas of vampires it is easy to go back to Poe (Ligeia), or Polidori (The Vampyre) or even Coleridge (Christabel), which are all influential works. You could even go all the way back to the folklore and it's roots in mental illness, illegitimate births, disease and class wars. There is a whole other discussion lurking in those murky waters, which for for the most part amounts to disputing the "accepted authorities on the subject". Anyway, we're looking for the first real off shoots that would lead to creatures (and characters) like the ones with which we are familiar.

In 1847 two books were published which are hands down the most relevant books to what I am talking about. Two books that are the common ancestors of the modern vampire. The first is Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood by Malcolm Rymer, which had been serialised over the three years previous, and the second is Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.

Varney is the first literary work to really introduce the sympathetic vampire. You know the one. Tragic romantic who bemoans his existence while being slave to his needs. I know it sounds familiar. Wuthering Heights isn't quite so clear cut, but it runs a little something like this: Varney was the first sympathetic vampire, but Heathcliff is the true template for the character type. He wasn't the first, but he is the archetype of the alluring yet obsessive tragic romantic who is ultimately the major destructive force in both his own life, and the lives of those around him. Between these two characters you are presented with the clear and specific origin of modern vampires, and the the archetype that they would be molded to for the next one hundred and sixty-five years.

As the nineteenth century rolled on, vampires grew in popularity and began to appear more often in fiction. While stories like Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla in 1872 contributied to this in fits and starts, the biggest impact didn't come until Dracula was published in 1897.

I'm going to skip some other stuff here, most of which can be summed up by suggesting that you watch a lot of vampire movies starting from Nosferatu, moving through the Universal Studios vampire movies in the thirties and forties, Hammer Studio films with Christoper Lee in the late fifties and sixties and finally ending with the increasingly sexualised films of the sixties and seventies.

The late sixties and early seventies were also important for the vampires of the poppy-c, because two major audiences who wouldn't necessarily be going to see the increasingly violent and sexualised vampire films were exposed to the creatures. During the late sixties, the (up until that point) fairly straight forward soap opera, Dark Shadows introduced a vampire to its cast of characters in an attempt to boost ratings. Then only a couple of years later the Comics Code Authority, who had established a number of bizarre and inconsistent rules and guidelines around the content of comics in the US, eased up on those regarding horror comics making room for Blade and The Tomb of Dracula. 

Vampires were growing in popularity, and they were changing to accommodate their diverse audience. Enter Interview with the Vampire. Anne Rice took a single aspect of Stoker's Dracula, namely that of the 'lonely immortal', and made it the main focus of her book. Most of the characters are cribbed pretty heavily from a great many sources starting with recent depictions and going back past Varney. This acts as a method to reference the changing concepts of vampires, and allows her to explore this from the point of view of the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac who she uses to explore not only the feelings he has about himself, but also other vampires who represent a wide variety of the other archetypes established over the centuries. I'm not sure that this was the first really in depth look a the vampire's point of view, but it is definitely the most prominent exploration of the different tropes of vampire stories in a single work.

Moving into the eighties vampires were still monsters, but distinctly human monsters. Monsters that were capable of sympathy and humanity. Monsters who could be heroes. They were increasingly varied in the way they were depicted, and vampirism was depicted much more as something that came with both strengths and weaknesses. Increasingly it was becoming something that people could relate to as stories began to illustrate more and more the parallels between vampirism and the ills of society, which is how we get to the inspiration for this post.

The Lost Boys came out in 1987 and went straight for the jugular on all of these topics as they related to youth and youth culture. It uses vampires to talk about drugs, popularity, peer pressure, teenage delusions of invulnerability, dissociation from family and 'mainstream society' and concepts of constructed families and gang mentalities. I often recommend this film, but will freely admit that I still see it through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia. I still think it is important to imbibe, because you can see bits and pieces of it in nearly every vampire film, book, comic or TV series that has come out since. 1992's Buffy the Vampire Slayer film is so consistent in tone and theme that it bares a closer resemblance to The Lost Boys than it does to the series that followed.

It could be argued that after The Lost Boys vampires went through a strange metamorphosis where they became less important to the actual plot and were employed more as seasoning. Buffy the Vampire Slayer isn't really about vampires, and they weren't even really necessary to the plot. Something that Joss Whedon illustrated himself by more or less removing them as a substantial element of the series after season three. The Blade films are superhero movies in false fangs. The Twilight Saga is teen romance/drama fiction with vampires subbing in for the cool kids. Even in The Southern Vampire Mysteries (True Blood) which seemed to set out to explore the concept of racism and religion through vampires ends up getting sidetracked repeatedly from its mission statement. As much as I belly ache from time to time about this stuff I'm not really opposed to this treatment of the subject matter as long as it isn't blatant trend whoring. Vampires may attract people to these stories, but they make their own fans for different reasons.

This trend is also coupled with another trend to defang vampires by removing a great many of their more supernatural powers. These days you don't see a whole lot of the animal transformation, turning into mist, flying or the handful of other powers traditionally associated with vampires. In a similar trend many of their weaknesses have also been removed over the years. A lot this started in the films I mentioned earlier. Some have argued that this has balanced them out over all, but they have ended up much less psychologically frightening. I assume that wrapped up in all of this there is something about making them easier to write, and therefore relate to, when they are less supernatural. They seem a lot more like superheroes now. Edward and Angel would probably have a much harder time relating to human teenage girls if they could change forms at will on top of everything else.

This is the most defining aspect of the modern vampire. Where classically vampires were viewed fully as something else that could take a human form while existing on the fringe of society, and the romantic vampires that followed were tragic creatures of obsession clinging desperately to elements of their human lives ultimately acting as a destructive force, the most recent of modern vampires are far less exotic monstrous whose yardstick for tragedy seems in desperate need of adjustment.

There is a load of stuff I haven't covered here, a lot of which I probably don't know about. There is also a load of stuff that went a long way to establishing "The Rules", especially in comics and film, that I just rushed through. Really-really, I think that if you like some of the modern vampire stories there is a lot to get from some of the books and films that brought us to this point. I also think that some of y'all should read a couple of the earlier works I mentioned regardless of your interest in vampires, especially Wuthering Heights, Carmilla and Dracula.

The title? Well, I got that from here.

"RE" THIS!: Episode 1 - The Great Tradition

Contrary to things I may have said or are yet to say I'm not totally against reboots, relaunches and re-imaginings. It is a thing that happens. Not sometimes either. It is a constant thing happening and moving and changing and trending. Some people get traumatically bent out of shape about this. There little fanboy rage gets all up in their nasty little fists and they start screaming about how someone (original creator) or another (IP holder) has just jossed their entire fanfic catalogue. To such folk I shout, "Welcome to the history of storytelling". It is part of the Great Tradition.

I don't think that there is a single myth that hasn't been reworked, transposed, recast, updated, exaggerated, expanded, combined, retconned, appropriated, romanised, stolen, assimilated, reinterpreted or misinterpreted. This is just how we roll as a species. Everyone agrees that Heracles got him some labours that numbered twelve, but if you get your research on (not Wikipedia) there is a much longer list of labours apparently accomplished under the "Twelve Labours" (c)(TM) brand. This is because everyone town wanted a piece of the action. They wanted to point at a rusting '89 Magna and say "Heracles pushed that car to the side of the road when it ran out of petrol by himself, and Iolas had all his kids in it. Including the three fat ones."

This isn't a behaviour that has been confined to the ancient world either. Let's do an easy one.

Once upon a time there was a man named Vlad Tepes who was Prince of Wallachia. He earned a bit of a reputation for being an impaler. Same say this made him a horrible tyrant, others suggest he just liked knowing that people he didn't trust stayed where he left them.

During his lifetime he had a disagreement with some folk (mainly of the Ottoman Empire). Folk to whom he later lost. It was also these folk who we rely on for our account of his cruelty. Considering that the tales of hiss cruelty continued to grow for nearly a century after his death from these same sources is it fair to suppose that they were not entirely accurate? I think so. It is also important to note that during his lifetime and in the centuries that followed the people of his own country saw him as a hero.

A couple of centuries roll on and we get to the closing years of the 19th C. when an Irishman knocks out a novel about the vampire count of Transylvania, Dracula. This book combines the figures of Vlad Tepes (Vlad III) and Vlad Dracul (Vlad II) into a single character, who is actually a vampire hell bent on becoming a London real-estate mogul.

Twenty-five years later Team Germany bust out the classic Nosferatu starring Max Schrek. Dracula is called Orlok and he travels to Germany instead of England. The Author's estate tried to have all prints of the film destroyed, but their lack of thoroughness is our boon. As the twentieth century continued Dracula would be retold and the character reused hundreds of times, amounting to dozens of reinterpretations of both the historical figures and fictional characters.

That's not all folks. If you call now Bram Stoker's Dracula is a hydra of the Great Tradition. He adopted a traditional European mythological creature, and changed its "rules" just enough to suit his tale, thus creating the basis for the modern vampire.

Popular culture over the next one-hundred plus years would jump in to adjust and reconfigure the concept of a vampire to suit trends and limitations in special effects. Enter Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire (not the film, the book) that recasts vampires as lonely lovelorn creatures of the night. Then Buffy comes along and they start dating teenagers. By the time Stephanie Meyer throws her hat into the ring what is there left to do, but make them sparkle in the sunshine.

I've been guilty in the past of complaining about the "death of the classical vampire", but in all fairness Anne Rice, Joss Whedon and Stephanie Meyer are only participating in the Great Tradition. My definition was an arbitrary line drawn by myself (and others), where a better term would be 'pre-Varney vampires'. I do think it is important to make distinctions, because although they are all vampires, Edward Cullen (MeyerPire or Glampire) is a very different creature to Angel, or Lestat, or Orlok, or Dracula, or Varney. I think there is room for all.