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meme_of_bilitis2018-08-06 08:49 pm
frogfriend) wrote in meme_of_bilitis2018-08-06 08:49 pm
I have doubts that [a femslash meme] would be very long-lived
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Re: Vampire Femslash
(Anonymous) 2018-08-21 02:05 am (UTC)(link)Vampire relationships like "parent/child" (e.g. vampire who turned someone else into a vampire, not a relative in the human sense) or "sibling" (vampires who were made vampires by the same vampire) are frequently sexually charged, and in a lot of het dynamics, the sexuality can even be somewhat mandatory. "Oh, but she's my daughter/sister" only seems to crop up as an excuse when it's gay. Sometimes the same canon that has canonical "parent/child" or "sibling" het romantic/sexual relationships between vampires will get very "my son/sister/brother/daughter" in an ultra distancing and platonic way for their gay vampire "families." I mean, of the many criticisms of Twilight, including the age gap, no one seemed to find it terrible that Edward was technically Bella's maker/sire in the end--or that I think he had planned to have his vampire "dad" do it, so they still would have been "siblings"? If I'm remembering Twilight right. Bella got turned because of Edward's venom when he gave her a C-section with his teeth, if memory serves. Plenty of people laughed at the dental cesarean, or were squicked at the weird bonding ritual between Jacob and their kid, but not that Edward was her "father" in a vampire sense. Yet in say, Being Human US, people objected to any implication that the "father/son" dynamic between Aidan and Henry might be sexual (in the midst of a giant AIDS allegory for fuck's sake!) and object to stuff like Darla/Drucilla for their relationship.
(Which, now that I think about it...Darla turned Angel, Angel turned Drucilla. So it's like vampire granddaughter/grandmother? Except Darla died and came back as a human and was turned again on AtS, and I don't actually remember who turned her the second time because I was more of a Buffy fan than an Angel fan, I guess if Angel did it that's "sisters." Sisters AND grandmother/granddaughter, now that's enmeshed!)
I think in a weird way there's sometimes a sort of queer-coding about how a lot of vampires are written (which I know is a term a lot of people on various memes hate! I do not mean that straight vampire characters aren't straight, but that the writers appropriate tropes and stereotypes about gay people to spice their characters up, which I will get into). One of the oldest pieces of vampire lit is the original Carmilla, and the idea of vampires as lesbian predators is an old one. It ties in a lot with the "evil vampire/lesbian full of sin forces or seduces innocent straight girl into dark and unnatural lifestyle." And of course if the predatory lesbian can be slain or driven away, the innocent girl will be "normal" again and marry a man, even if she always carries a shard of longing in her heart for pleasures no man can give her. (Several stories focus on slow, reversible turnings, such as the original Dracula novel, or the movie Lost Boys. Even though those are heterosexual examples, they're full of the implication of dark and forbidden sexuality.) In more modern depictions, vampires have their own cliques and subculture. They are sometimes oppressed by society. If given free rein, they like to create bars and congregate in them--bars that are inherently horrific since they either serve unethically-harvested blood or allow access to enslaved humans. (A dramatic example would be the opening of the blood bar in Buffy's Wishverse, but there are many, many examples of vampires congregating in or owning bars.) If not bars, it will be clubs or some other form of "night life,"--appropriate for vampires, of course, but very compatible with stereotypes about gay spaces and where gay people congregate. (Good example of this: Fangtasia in True Blood.) Several stories also have AIDS crisis narratives about bloodborne pathogens decimating the vampire community. Being Human US did it, as did later seasons of True Blood, and probably a lot more things I don't remember/didn't watch because I don't really like the AIDS crisis being used for cheap hetero angst.
And part of this bundle of "vampires as a sort of predatory underground queer community" tropes is the idea of found families and mentors. Real LGBT people might have found families within the community because their own families kicked them out or disowned them. This was so common in the past that mentorship and financial support from older adults was essential to the survival of LGBT teens and young adults. Vampires similarly have a new family structure, not only because their human family might have rejected a vampire, but since they're immortal, their human family is likely dead. So there's a similar narrative of being outcast or alienated or having no home/family to return to, except for these new people who are like you, and forging new relationships with them that are like family but not, that can matter so much more than your original family but, um, strictly speaking are not incest. So in some ways these bonds are "family," but also, odds are good you're fucking them.
I think not only are those dynamics sometimes made out to be "incestuous" to sort of tell that story yet shy away from anything actually gay (since it stops being a barrier when it's het!) but also I have seen a pattern of people claiming "incest" to mean any pairing they don't like, especially if it's gay (see, antis claiming Sheith is "incest" even though they're not related and met as adults and are only like six or seven years apart or something) and also using incest as a shield to call gay relationships "unnatural" or "disgusting" while being able to plausibly deny homophobia. Like the Youtube comments on that When Marnie Was There trailer are full of outrage that anyone could think Anna was gay, because that particular relationship would be incest with her grandmother and therefore disgusting and unnatural--but they often slip and say that Anna being gay (not specifying with whom) would be disgusting and unnatural. Or how I feel even a lot of canons pull a certain "gotcha" when they establish a powerful connection between two women, then reveal that the connection is blood relation, as if to say, "You're disgusting if you imagined anything else! It would be especially disgusting if these two were to kiss--because it's incest, of course, not that I'm against gay people or anything!"
My tl;dr point here is, vampire "sisters" or "mother/daughter" stuff is usually not incest, and it's usually neck-deep in homophobic tropes when people try to claim it's the same as incest between regular related people. Mind, I like fictional incest anyway, and I'm not knocking vampire fiction when I point out all the gay stereotypes it's laced with. Playing with those stereotypes can be fun if it isn't being used in a malicious way, and it's just kind of entrenched in vampire mythology at this point. There are probably cases where the relationship is both a vampire lineage one and actual relatedness. Suren and "Mother" in Being Human US would be one, as well as Lestat and his mother (which was weirdly sexual!) as well as any canon where vampires reproduce "normally" and have children rather than turning people, Poppy Z. Brite's "Lost Souls" being an explicitly incestuous (M/M) example of that. But people who tell you vampire sisters are skeevy to ship because they have the same vampire maker...they're wrong, for all the reasons!
Also, True Blood has a canon "mother/daughter" vampire ship with Pam/Tara. I had issues with how that was done in other ways, but it was refreshing that while Bill + Jessica stayed familial, a f/f maker/babyvamp relationship was allowed to be sexual and not a lot of "oh that's my daughter/mom that would be weird." Many adaptations of Dracula also sort of treat the relationship of Dracula's three wives as "sisters" in that they were all turned by the same dude, and yet without incest taboos, since Dracula is husband and sire anyway and at that point it seems silly to be like oh noo, not my vampire sister!
Re: Vampire Femslash
(Anonymous) 2018-08-21 05:17 am (UTC)(link)Re: Vampire Femslash
(Anonymous) 2018-08-21 10:48 am (UTC)(link)Re: Vampire Femslash
(Anonymous) 2018-08-21 09:39 pm (UTC)(link)