Tales of the Vampires: Carpe Noctem

[CowboyGuy]

I'm pretty much over the non-serious tone of this whole Humans love Vampires (no really!) ordeal. To me, it's just messy. And not serious enough.

[wenxina]

I actually think that this one addressed one important question about the whole vamps being in bit. Specifically, the question that asks why there aren't more bodies popping up. It's very possible that vampires like Cyn are actually in the minority, and are actually being dusted by their more complacent counterparts. A vampire like Cyn would ruin the whole celebrity worship thing for the rest of the vamps, so it'd make sense that they be dusted. I also liked how we're reminded of the evil nature of vampires, not just by Cyn, but Ash as well, where she nonchalantly empties her dust buster into the river, before moaning about the fact that she didn't get Cyn to replace the TV before dusting her. It's a selfish notion, since she apparently just dusted her friend, but the only thing she regrets is not getting the TV replaced first.

[AndrewCrossett]

Interesting story, and probably the best attempt yet at making the "tame vamps" storyline plausible... but still doesn't quite succeed.

These are demons, not just hungry bullies. The moment they claw their way out of their graves, the very first thing they do is look for someone to kill and eat. It's hard-wired into them, like Cyn said.

I realize there's a spectrum of vampire personalities, from the demented psychotic butchers to the more subtle ones, like Spike and Harmony.

But I just can't shake the belief that self-gratification through feeding is only half the motive for vampires... it's also the hurting and the killing and the fear.

There should be many, many more vampires like Cyn. Enough to prevent vampires from achieving a reputation as nothing more than exotic prostitutes.

[wenxina]

Feb 27, 2010 10:55:41 GMT -5 AndrewCrossett said:

But I just can't shake the belief that self-gratification through feeding is only half the motive for vampires... it's also the hurting and the killing and the fear.

There should be many, many more vampires like Cyn. Enough to prevent vampires from achieving a reputation as nothing more than exotic prostitutes.

I agree that there are other factors that drive a vampire, but considering the new world order, in which Slayer squads are stationed in many of the bigger cities, not to mention to possibility of sub-squads located in other parts of the world, vampires are probably becoming a lot more wary. More than likely, you're right, there are probably plenty of vampires like Cyn. That said, there's probably a lot more of vampires like Ash. Vampires who aren't above killing their own to further their own pleasure. It's a wave the vampires are riding at the moment. Like any fad, it'll more that likely pass, but while the wave is good, why not milk it for all it's worth? Free food. And while the flavor that fear gives is lacking, there are other perks to being popular. The demon within would be gleefully rubbing its hands together at the thought of mobs hunting down Slayers.
And then, there's nothing really stopping them from scaring the heck out of people who don't want to be fed on... and in the process, kill them and dump them somewhere.

[AndrewCrossett]

In order for vampires to be perceived as they are right now in this story, the vast majority of vampires would have to be going along with it. The questions are: why would vampires so overwhelmingly go against their basic natures (especially with Slayers in full retreat worldwide)... why does Harmony hold any kind of authority over them... and what about the rest of the world, where her show is presumably not a big pop culture phenomenon?

[CowboyGuy]

I don't think the short was bad, I just think overall the way this has been handled has been pretty bad. Predators and Prey should have been a five issue arc focusing solely on this issue, not showing the Scoobies on a world tour. The result still should be that Buffy had to retreat, but what we got wasn't even half-baked. It was almost brought to a simmer.

It feels like there is this huge global pandemic going on in Buffy's world, but it's been on the back-burner for 10 issues. TEN! To me this whole Twilight thing reminds me of Season 7's lag in the middle. "We know how it's gonna end but in the meantime...well.."

[wenxina]

Feb 27, 2010 11:56:05 GMT -5 AndrewCrossett said:

In order for vampires to be perceived as they are right now in this story, the vast majority of vampires would have to be going along with it. The questions are: why would vampires so overwhelmingly go against their basic natures (especially with Slayers in full retreat worldwide)... why does Harmony hold any kind of authority over them... and what about the rest of the world, where her show is presumably not a big pop culture phenomenon?

But chronologically, Slayers only actually went into retreat, AFTER the vampires came in vogue. I think the only reason that Harmony holds any sway over them is because she fingered the zeitgeist, as she puts it. She made it possible for them to enjoy the VIP treatment. Those who wouldn't mind living it large for a while would just go along for the ride.
Those that don't want to, like Cyn, probably end up ashed (yay, more puns!).
The vampire fad is pretty big around the world at the moment. Sadly enough, anything that becomes big in the US kinda gets a popularity bump in many parts of the world. Speaking from experience, since I did grow up on the opposite side of the planet. It still amuses me when people ask me what TV shows or music I grew up with, since the simple answer would be "The same stuff you grew up with, for the most part". And hell, the kids in the Harajuku district were already dressing up in gothic-punk-esque costumes before the Twiligh Saga hit the stratosphere.
Globalization makes it rather easy to predict global trends.
Look up American Idol on Wiki and see just how many countries air it, frequently showing the most current episode only a couple of days behind the live telecast. And let's not forget that reality TV shows are often franchised. The Idol phenomenon is one such example, as is the whole Big Brother thing. We're focused on Harmony at the moment, because although the story was (largely) set in Scotland, and then Tibet, the main audience for these books is American. And so, it allows an injection of topical references, like The Colbert Report, Anderson Cooper, Larry King, etc to further ground the story in our current culture. But that doesn't exclude the possibility that Harmony's show isn't being cloned across the world.
The poor are not exempt from escapism. India, one of the poorest nations in the world produces more movies per year than just about anywhere, Hollywood included. And the target audience? Mostly the poor, who will shell out their hard-earned money to escape for a few hours to a swirl of lavish colors, choreography, and song. Say you threw a new form of escapism in, like becoming a vampire. They would take the bait. Especially since the general populace of the Bufyverse isn't aware of the whole soulless demon bit. Yes, Harmony said they were evil, but on the Colbert Report, which is largely satirical anyway.

If vampires truly had their way, there'd probably be exotic feasting locales, where the rich could take a global tour, savoring the different tastes from around the world. There'd be travel guides about this kinda thing. Or maybe I'm just sick in the head. But considering that middle-aged men travel to the Philippines and Thailand to fuel a sex industry like no other, I don't think it's much of a stretch to imagine that happening.

[CowboyGuy]

People do many things everyday that might kill them. Drugs, drinking, smoking, hell...even trainers at Sea World risk their lives with large animals that could easily kill them.

I guess it's just so hard to buy it, that people would so easily fall into a thrall over vampires if they were real.

But I have the same question as Andrew. I want to know why vampires are worried about PR in a world where Slayers are out and they are in. Spike once mentioned that there was only one girl in all the world that could strike fear into a vampire's heart...a slayer. Well now there are way more than only one slayer. The logic just doesn't add up to me.

[AndrewCrossett]

Obviously, this is far from the first time we've been confronted with a big logic gap in the Buffyverse and told to "just go with it." The difference is the long, long period of time we have to think about it this time. I just can't stop thinking about why the government and police wouldn't look more closely at this phenomenon... a race of demons living among us, feeding on us, and at least sometimes killing us. Not to mention the legions of conspiracy theorists (both crackpot and sane) and bloggers and self-appointed investigators out there, and there should be a very large element of things not adding up here.

Wouldn't parents be objecting to their kids going off and getting bitten in the throat for fun? Wouldn't religious groups have a problem with the glorification of demons?

I know Scott has said these objections probably do exist, but we're not being shown them because they want to emphasize how bad things are for the Slayers PR-wise. Still, I think it would have improved the story a lot to show at least some of the anti-vampire side of things.

Logic problems that we're willing to gloss over in a TV season lasting a few months just don't seem so minor over the course of several years.

[Hallow Thorn]

I hate the 'Vampires are in' storyline but I love the preview.

[jellymoff]

Maybe there's something going on that we don't know about. The government is clearly aware of vampires and demons (the initiative, the US soldiers working for Twilight). We still really haven't been told how the whole vampire thing got out. I can't imagine that Harmony was the sole reason that the public is now aware. It has to have been a series of events, and I would imagine that it took some time to get used to.

Spoilers if you haven't read After the Fall:

SPOILER: Click to show

What I would love is if this actually ties in to After the Fall somehow. All of Los Angeles remembers being in Hell. That would be a pretty good explanation has to how vampires eventually became popular. Angel is known as a hero in LA, and Harmony could have easily taken advantage of that. In a world where everything was crazy, two vampires (Angel and Spike) along with several other creatures like Lorne helped people. This had to have blurred humanity's views about monsters and humans

[wenxina]

@andrew: So you're basically saying that nothing has really changed in terms of the storytelling mechanic, just that because of the scale of time involved, people have more time to pick at it? Isn't that a rather unfair yardstick, since going back on the 7 seasons televised now, people can pick apart many of the more zany moments as well (we have at least a couple of threads that address these things)? If time scale is the only difference, then the argument about logic is moot, since all we're saying is "yes, we're still being asked to go along for the ride, but because there's more time taken now to tell a story, we have more time to think about it and pick at the story".

ETA: UGO also has an interview with Jackie Kessler HERE. Nothing new, but a couple of amusing anecdotes.

[AndrewCrossett]

All I'm saying is, as much as I love season 8, it would be a better season if they'd taken the time and effort to make this vamps issue hang together a bit more logically. Because it just doesn't, and I'm afraid I have to classify it as a flaw. I just can't envision the people of the world reacting to this situation the way that's depicted here, and it's a problem.

"Carpe Noctem" is certainly a step in the right direction, but still not quite enough.

[wenxina]

Feb 27, 2010 23:15:12 GMT -5 AndrewCrossett said:

I just can't envision the people of the world reacting to this situation the way that's depicted here, and it's a problem.

People of which world? The people that inhabit the Buffyverse happen to be a little blinder to things that they don't want to think about. There are times when they verge on really idiotic.
To us, vampires are soulless demon-driven corpses. To them, vampires are the tortured souls that occupy a large chunk of current pop-culture.

[AndrewCrossett]

Here's the best I've been able to do at justifying the vampire situation in terms of story logic:

You could make the argument that our society has always had a strange tendency to glorify and romanticize the people who prey on us, as long as they do so with style and (most importantly) as long as they only hurt people we don't personally know or care about.

This has been the case from the highwaymen of the Middle Ages to the outlaws of the Old West, the gangsters of the 1920's, and the mobsters and gang-bangers of today.

We know those people are killers and criminals who hurt people for a living... but it's usually a theoretical someone else that's being hurt by them. Our attitudes change if we personally become their victims. You're probably not going to enjoy watching "The Sopranos" if your husband was murdered by a Mafia loanshark, and you probably won't have much admiration for "thug culture" if your baby sister was killed in a drive-by. But that only affects you and the people closest to you, because people who don't know you don't care about your loss enough to let it hamper their own entertainment.

So the situation we have here is that a) the vast majority of humans never directly interact with vampires, but know them only through the media; b) of those who do interact with them, the majority encounter a sexy non-killer like Ash; and c) those who do fall victim to the occasional Cyn are simply ground beneath the wheels of the pop-culture myth-making machine.

In order to keep that illusion up with the vampires, however, requires that something like 99% of vampires worldwide are Ashes, allowing the actions of the 1% who are Cyns to be dismissed as accidents or isolated incidents. (I can picture Harmony saying something like, "Hey, human-on-human violence still causes 1,000 times more fatalities than vampire-on-human violence. You're safer with a vampire than you are with a human.")

It's odd to imagine that the vast majority of vampires can suppress their demonic natures enough to keep this charade viable. But evil, like good, is a spectrum rather than a monolith. Just as "good people" run the gamut from the harmlessly unpleasant to the saintly, "evil people" (and demons) can range from functional people lacking any sense of empathy (e.g. Harmony, Ash) to the eagerly destructive (e.g., Cyn, Drusilla, soulless Spike) to the diabolical nihilists who frighten even other evil people (e.g. Angelus).

If we can assume that the former vastly outnumber the latter, then we can assume that the more benign ones are able to keep the more vicious ones in check (like Ash did with Cyn) and maintain the illusion that being with a vampire is an exciting risk rather than a mortal danger.

And given the fact that most vampires are able to rein in their murderous natures (even if for purely self-serving reasons), one has to examine whether the Slayers really are going too far in their mission. In the very beginning, Buffy shared the Watchers' Council view of things: all demons and vampires = evil, so kill them.

But experience taught Buffy to revise that to "Evil demons and soulless vampires = evil." This meant she had to actually think about why she was killing something before she did so, rather than just checking another demon or vampire off the list.

Should that now be revised even further to a policy of "evil is as evil does," and soulless vampires should only be dusted if they're actively hurting people? Should they be judged by their nature or by their actions? Is the lack of a soul a sin to be punished or a handicap to be overcome?

Could Harmony actually be the one in the right here?

[wenxina]

Your final (rhetorical) question is the crux upon which the entire #21 depends on.

But back to vampires suppressing their nature for a minute: Vampires are opportunistic, and they've shown that they will band together if there's a common cause they believe in. Or if they fear being dusted if they don't follow. Angelus had lackeys that did his every bidding, including self-combusting in a sunlight-drenched classroom after delivering his message to Buffy. Harmony may be a spokesperson of sorts, but it doesn't necessarily mean that vampires are heeding the "rules" because she says so. Any vampire who's half-intelligent would understand the implications of Harmony's popularity; as long as they seem good, but misunderstood, they get to party. It's a novel experience for vampires... so while the riding is good, just stick to it.

[Emmie]

I've got a question. Can someone list the scenes in Season 8 where the world is shown to be unilaterally embracing vampires without a hint of controversy? Because I've only seen certain groups of people accepting/embracing vampires. And one of those groups is the media, so yeah I'm afraid they've missed the boat on nuance. But isn't that the point of the media? That they miss the boat.

Seriously, does anyone actually think the Pope in BtVS Season 8 is going "Oh, Harmony Kendall was on MTV and vampires are the coolest!"

Season 8 has been accused of too much telling, not enough show. But all they've ever shown was a limited reflection of the vampires becoming popular. They're pop culture. And society as a whole doesn't subscribe to pop culture. There will always be those who abhor and degrade pop culture. People (or vampires) like Cyn.

This is a believable addition to Season 8 because it's a part of that world, but from the vampire's perspective. Which is again driving home that Season 8 is about the Slayer perspective, not the vampire one. The most important part of the Slayer story was that a Slayer tried to kill Harmony on TV and fell on her own stake. And Slayer's suddenly became the villain and the propaganda of Twilight's forces spread. And I believe that story has in fact been told well, especially in light of the most recent addition of the dying soldier revealing that Twilight lied to him about what Slayers are in order to get him to enlist. The story of "vampires in public" has been misnamed (unfortunate choice of words, Allie) just as Season 8 would be misnamed to be called Twilight. The story isn't about the villain or the vampire. It's about the Slayer. And the actual story plotline here is "Slayers are the Enemy/Spread the Hate/Propaganda fest of Misinformation and Miscommunication."

Anyways, about this Carpe Noctum. Loved it. I loved the ending and the twist. Just because a vampire subscribes to the "no killing people belief" doesn't make her not-dangerous. Rather, she's become more like Angel in that regard. Dangerous to those who would break her own rules or threaten her humans. Fascinating. I'm imagining Ash as a coke addict and Cyn decided to flush her neverending supply of blood down the toilet. And you don't mess with the (nest egg) drugs, baby. You mess with the drugs and you get staked.

*

Regarding newly risen vamps, remember that the newly risen are sired. They're chosen. Yes, in BtVS we mostly saw vamps just popping up from the grave. But that's the Hellmouth. My impression of vampires elsewhere is that they're not created so lazily. So if the sire is enforcing secrecy and even enforcing the rule of not killing because (or simply hiding the kills better so that they're not exposed as killers), I don't have a problem with it. Because as Cyn demonstrated, there are vampires who'd find the deceit game interesting or simply enjoy not having to hunt hard for their meal. After all, Harmony was a pretty lazy vampire when it came to being evil. And there are probably others out there like her. Recall how Spike said Angel turned him into a monster; the sire is incredibly important in forming how evil a vampire becomes.

[AndrewCrossett]

Mar 1, 2010 1:38:20 GMT -5 Emmie said:

I'm imagining Ash as a coke addict and Cyn decided to flush her neverending supply of blood down the toilet. And you don't mess with the (nest egg) drugs, baby. You mess with the drugs and you get staked.

That works if you accept that the "drug" in question is just the blood itself, and not the thrill of the hunt, the joy of the kill, and revelling in the causing of pain. I always assumed those were pretty much the unanimous motives of soulless vampires... certainly the Watchers' Council goes on that assumption. But it may be that assumption is wrong. Maybe like humans, vampires are evolving over time from a more brutal society to a more enlightened one.

The current situation proves that it's possible, at least theoretically, for the vampire-human relationship to be a symbiotic one rather than a parasitic one. If that succeeds in becoming the new status quo, then it's certainly an existential issue for the Slayers. In the new world order, with vampires coexisting with humans, one would assume that even rogues like Cyn need the right to due process of law, rather than being hunted down and killed outright by vigilantes who are answerable to no civil authority.

[cutiepatootie]

Remember in the show, there'd be the lame ass vamps who Buffy would stake right away after a brief fight. But then there'd be the more trickier ones, who genuinely put you on edge. They'd lull you into a false sense of security, then do something so inhuman you couldn't help but be scared.

I think there's more than meets the eye here. I'm hoping that Harmony's planning a coup of sorts against humans. There has to be some higher motive than to be on MTV and live happily ever after. Or someone's working through Harmony, namely Twilight.

[Skytteflickan88]

I finally got around to reading this.

I love Cyn. Up until the stake-panel I thought "Hey, she can kill Harmony! Or at the very least kill lots of people to make they world realize vamps are aren't cuddly." Then POOF. Dream gone.

It's nice to see that not all vamps want to play along. I think this "Vampire's are cool" phase will fade, and people will realize what's going on. Maybe that's something for season 9?