Sex and death and vampires
Jun. 28th, 2006 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazelkTaking some thoughts for a walk.
Why Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Why not Buffy the monster killer or the werewolf waster or the demon hunter (non-rogue)? Buffy the cyborg crusher, the alien annihilator, the terminator of trolls? What is it about vampires?
When you kiss me I want to die
It began as a show about teenagers. Adolescents in that liminal state between child and adulthood with sexuality the key to moving from one to the other. Vampires in this context are those who literally did get kissed and died, trapped in a form of evil anorexia, perpetual Peter Pan figures beating at the windows, not welcome in the house.
See, this is what I hate about vampires. Sex and death and love and pain, it’s all the same damm thing to you..
Biologically speaking, the connection between sex and death is not confined to the young. Reproduction is a risky business for living things. Quite overtly in some cases, female mammals risk death with every birth, male mantises risk getting their heads bitten off with every mating. Even when there’s no issue involved sex can still mean death– female Drosophila kept with spermless males still die like flies and faster than virgins as a side effect of the ‘cocktail’ of libido-dampening substances males transfer to reduce subsequent female infidelity. With vampires the acts of procreation and murder are even more directly linked.
Aggression is a natural human tendency. Though you and me come by it another way.
In flies, mantii and mammals the linking of sex and death is, in evolutionary terms, a product of sexual conflict. Males and females have different optimal strategies with respect to maximising the number of offspring they can produce and each gets caught in the other’s crossfire. With vampires, however, it seems unlikely that evolution has much to do with anything. Evolution in the Darwinian sense would require not only that some vamps be fitter or more productive than others but also that those productive qualities be heritable.
What we once were informs all that we have become.
In the Jossverse there’s no indication that the demonic qualities that get transferred when a vampire is sired vary according to the vamp doing the siring. The pure demon appears to function solely as a mindless source of one-size-fits-all bloodlust. The traits that vary, that make one vamp an Angelus and another a Harmony are, as Darla says, entirely human derived. So those aspects that are heritable do not vary and those that vary are not heritable, at least not from vamp to vamp.
So if there were a socio-biology of vampires it might lead to very different strategies to those claimed to apply to humans (insert disclaimer about said claims being complete bollocks). As siring has no effect on the number of vamps that share the sire’s traits successful individuals should avoid it as an unnecessary complication and follow the Harmony route of recruiting unrelated individuals to mould into their evil clones. A good theory but in practise nature seems to trump nurture. Pretty well every vamp on the series is primarily driven by the concerns that beset them when last human. For Darla survival, for Angelus proving his father wrong, for Spike finding love, for Harmony finding hair-care. Angelus had probably the best idea when he turned Dru and began manipulating her character while she was still alive. Drusilla was truly his socio-biologic masterpiece.
I knew the only thing better than killing a slayer would be f-
Freud notoriously linked sex and death as the twin drives of the psyche. Which is not to say that Freud was right. His original idea of the death instinct was rather Buddhist a craving for peace, or respite from stimulation. Which can happen after sex but because sex is deathly is death necessarily sexy? Vampires, from Dracula onwards present the cod Freudian case.
I just wonder if you'll like it as much as she did.
So on an orgasmic scale from 1-10 how does that final swan dive rate? It doesn’t seem quite the right metric to use, if anything the resemblance is with Freud’s original conception of the death instinct but even that misses the mark. Freud and vampires both, completely focussed on the start and end points, never taking account of what goes on in the soft chewy centre. Cradle to grave, the newborn craving life and (erotic) satisfaction, the old man waiting for death, that look of peace that final gasp, completion. In between, however, we sometimes learn to set aside those solipsistic concerns. Buffy dies not for herself but for mother love and apple pie (where that pie is the world). Here endeth the lesson.
Why Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Why not Buffy the monster killer or the werewolf waster or the demon hunter (non-rogue)? Buffy the cyborg crusher, the alien annihilator, the terminator of trolls? What is it about vampires?
When you kiss me I want to die
It began as a show about teenagers. Adolescents in that liminal state between child and adulthood with sexuality the key to moving from one to the other. Vampires in this context are those who literally did get kissed and died, trapped in a form of evil anorexia, perpetual Peter Pan figures beating at the windows, not welcome in the house.
See, this is what I hate about vampires. Sex and death and love and pain, it’s all the same damm thing to you..
Biologically speaking, the connection between sex and death is not confined to the young. Reproduction is a risky business for living things. Quite overtly in some cases, female mammals risk death with every birth, male mantises risk getting their heads bitten off with every mating. Even when there’s no issue involved sex can still mean death– female Drosophila kept with spermless males still die like flies and faster than virgins as a side effect of the ‘cocktail’ of libido-dampening substances males transfer to reduce subsequent female infidelity. With vampires the acts of procreation and murder are even more directly linked.
Aggression is a natural human tendency. Though you and me come by it another way.
In flies, mantii and mammals the linking of sex and death is, in evolutionary terms, a product of sexual conflict. Males and females have different optimal strategies with respect to maximising the number of offspring they can produce and each gets caught in the other’s crossfire. With vampires, however, it seems unlikely that evolution has much to do with anything. Evolution in the Darwinian sense would require not only that some vamps be fitter or more productive than others but also that those productive qualities be heritable.
What we once were informs all that we have become.
In the Jossverse there’s no indication that the demonic qualities that get transferred when a vampire is sired vary according to the vamp doing the siring. The pure demon appears to function solely as a mindless source of one-size-fits-all bloodlust. The traits that vary, that make one vamp an Angelus and another a Harmony are, as Darla says, entirely human derived. So those aspects that are heritable do not vary and those that vary are not heritable, at least not from vamp to vamp.
So if there were a socio-biology of vampires it might lead to very different strategies to those claimed to apply to humans (insert disclaimer about said claims being complete bollocks). As siring has no effect on the number of vamps that share the sire’s traits successful individuals should avoid it as an unnecessary complication and follow the Harmony route of recruiting unrelated individuals to mould into their evil clones. A good theory but in practise nature seems to trump nurture. Pretty well every vamp on the series is primarily driven by the concerns that beset them when last human. For Darla survival, for Angelus proving his father wrong, for Spike finding love, for Harmony finding hair-care. Angelus had probably the best idea when he turned Dru and began manipulating her character while she was still alive. Drusilla was truly his socio-biologic masterpiece.
I knew the only thing better than killing a slayer would be f-
Freud notoriously linked sex and death as the twin drives of the psyche. Which is not to say that Freud was right. His original idea of the death instinct was rather Buddhist a craving for peace, or respite from stimulation. Which can happen after sex but because sex is deathly is death necessarily sexy? Vampires, from Dracula onwards present the cod Freudian case.
I just wonder if you'll like it as much as she did.
So on an orgasmic scale from 1-10 how does that final swan dive rate? It doesn’t seem quite the right metric to use, if anything the resemblance is with Freud’s original conception of the death instinct but even that misses the mark. Freud and vampires both, completely focussed on the start and end points, never taking account of what goes on in the soft chewy centre. Cradle to grave, the newborn craving life and (erotic) satisfaction, the old man waiting for death, that look of peace that final gasp, completion. In between, however, we sometimes learn to set aside those solipsistic concerns. Buffy dies not for herself but for mother love and apple pie (where that pie is the world). Here endeth the lesson.
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no subject
Date: 2006-06-28 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-29 09:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-28 06:54 pm (UTC)Well, it would appear that being sired by a vampire with a soul results in maladaptive qualities being "inherited"...
This was great! I especially enjoyed the information about drysophila (confirms my long-held suspicion that God is, indeed, male - oh, and have I also shared with you my recently developed theory that religions are His sock-puppets?). The quotes are fantastic and the little scientific discourses really witty. Time for a Science of the Jossverse along the lines of Science of the Discworld?
no subject
Date: 2006-06-29 09:36 am (UTC)I was involved in some of the work on the Dros story a few years back, it is nifty. Also if God is male that would explain his fondness for insects. Flies are quite the gentlemen comapred with some of the other bugs.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-02 03:08 pm (UTC)