domicile of the man-eating cape

((ETA: Until i can find conclusive evidence that Thomas has shagged with another guy, I'm baleeting that reference. The analogy still stands, though, with regard to perception - Thomas is a pretty boy ergo mistaken for gay, and that's another can of worms.))

The short answer: 99% of the time, authors are doin it rong. (Mostly because they're approaching from a privileged position and cannot see that they're doin it rong - and 'privileged' does not mean 'bad person' kaythanksbai. Nor does it mean 'possessed of a life that is always easy'.)

Of course that's just an extension of Sturgeon's Law, but anyhow. Let me break it down -

People do this with vampires a HELL of a lot and it never, ever, ever works that I've seen. Whedon tried it and failed; if Butcher was going for that, he failed; Hamilton failed. True Blood fails. Rice was not trying for that, so she gets spared my disdain for now. XD

Why does it fall apart so hard? Well - it's inevitably a minority of vampires depicted as being 'good guys'. If you are setting up your vampires as metaphorical gay guys or black guys or another marginalized group that society casts a lot of aspersion on...uh, yeah, we can see where this connection is going to become A Problem, right?

Mention of Angel, Thomas or say Jean-Claude doesn't change the fact that there's a huge flaw in the design. In the case of Angel and Thomas, there's a lot of faffing around about 'true nature' and it tends to come down on the side of 'these guys are monsters suppressing their natural BLAGRGHARBRBL urges and if you remove the stopgap you see their "true" selves' and oh, guys, NO. No, no, no, NO, no, NO. Jean doesn't come out any better - some of that is Hamilton's obvious stupidity abut French folks, but some of it is her issues about queer men.

Plus, she murders any chance she ever had at setting up that metaphor with Anita's wanky little 'oh people SAY vampires are just like us BUT I KNOW BETTER'. Hamilton's issues with her own ethnic background are ENORMOUS, however, and for her to fail@metaphor is therefore pretty much inevitable.

Charlaine Harris explicitly sets up the vampire thing as metaphor, more so than the Fanboy Duo above (and god are they fanboys, with all the good and bad that can entail), and hers dies for the same reason. The 'suppressed true nature' thing and all. Even a lot fo the 'good' vampires are morally shady, and I remember a rather disturbing scene in which Bill, just having been rescued from creepy torturers, just flips the hell out of Sookie and makes with the non-consensual nom and goes farther than that and - yeah. Can we see where using these guys as an explicit metaphor and then doing that is a problem? Plus there's a while whack of other issues lurking under the surface.

The things with Bill and Thomas come across as especially disingenuous (I almost said specious, but that has a connotation of sin-of-commission to me and I really don't think that Jim and Charlaine realize what they're doing - they are not BAD people but they ARE both het, cis, and white-euro, and if you fit into those categories then you aren't the subject of the BS directed at LGBTTQI, transgender/transexual, and having-of-melanin folk) because Harris draws explicit parallels between vampires and gay guys, and Thomas 'reads' as gay (which the hairdresser thing amps up a lot - this is another can of worms I won't get into). Now, considering what befalls both of them, the fact that they freak the motherfuck out is, to me, understandable. Torturing people does things that are very, very bad, okay? It's physical abuse specifically directed at causing mental harm (and inevitably administered by raving cocks, but we'll get into that later). Let me put it to you blunt-like: anyone can freak the fuck out under duress. Both Thomas and Bill freak out under duress, BUT since Thomas reads as a gay guy (some of this is because of an image he constructs, some of it is because he's a pretty well-dressed man et cetera) and since Bill is an explicit stand-in for queer guys...

...The depiction of them as breaking down becomes yet another implication that queer or not-uber-masculine men are 'less than real men': weaker in spirit and body, less morally sound, more easily moved to giving in to 'animal instinct' or whatever.

Again, it should be obvious where this is going to be A Problem. Again, I don't know if Butcher was going metaphorical or no, but the thing is - because vampire-as-metaphor is so common, it can pop into writing and interpretation whether the author realizes it or not.

Hamilton's fail in this is both more overt and less so. While she doesn't set up quite as obvious a metaphor as Harris and so on, she does have that 'inner nature' issue, a lot of morally sketchy vampires (this is sometimes depicted quite hypocritically; Anita gets away with a lot that other characters are condemned for, but she's a blatant Author's Darling and borderline idealized SI, so yeah) and a lot of her morally sketchy characters? They're queer. She has an especial problem with the Asshole/Crazy Lesbian failtrope (and seems to have a problem with lesbians full-stop - seriously, when every queer woman in your books is a jerk it kind of says something about your views, whether you mean it to or not - Hamilton probably doesn't even realize there's a big problem though; again this is a sin of omission and not comission), and any sex that isn't mostly-vanilla missionary with a man and woman seems to be depicted as morally suspect. Basically it's like 'gay sex is wrong but hot, BDSM is wrong but hot' etc. While Hamilton's making some effort at eliminating the durfurdehur about queer women, it feels like a token one at best.

I'm not even going to address the problems and issues that the character of Narcissus brings up. or the stupidity about how and why black people cannot become vampires in the Blakeverse.

Hell, all the authors I'm on about don't have the greatest record when it comes to REGULAR other-type folks in their work, never mind symbolic. Butcher for example - Joseph Listens-to-Wind is suitably badass and quite awesome, but he's also something of a Magical Native Guy (literally), and it's hard to tell whether the character is acting the trope in a tongue in cheek way or what. The Asian Paladin guy functioned as a Mr. Miyagi type, and he also died, which is annoying. The Red and Black Court vampires would be much, much hinkier if not for the presence of the third contingent (which doesn't totally alleviate things) - the Black court especially, since they really do fall into the same stereotypes that happened in Dracula about Eastern Europe and about its people. It's a subtrope of orientalism and the whole 'mysterious shadowy east'. The Reds seem to have a particular association with the Romance-language region, which bounces more off deep-rooted Puritanical notions about how Those Europeans Can Be. White Court has the problem of being associated with pr0n and queer sex and - yeah, it comes off looking like Hamilton's issues with non-vanilla. I doubt this was intended, but because of how society is - especially how the midwest is perceived to be - it starts to look funny.

Whedon really makes me facepalm hard since he's so active online and since he touts himself as this amazing feminist and equalitarian. Yet - he fucked up hard with the Dead Lesbian cliche and refused to cop to it. He is very obviously something of a weeaboo. He depicted a California with very few Latin@ folks in it at all, which is nonsense, and I can remember two black people, Kendra and Trick. Both of them cark it. Firefly is suspiciously free of Asian folks, and Shepherd Book flies dangerously close to the Magical Black Guy archetype. And the less said about Dollhouse the better. Whedon, if I can hear you getting an anime-boy nosebleed from here, you need to dial it the fuck back.

Hamilton's internalized prejudices about her own background (she and Anita have the same ancestry) and her issues with stereotype show up bigtime - the were-rats are Latin@. Yeah. I'll - leave it there.

Harris I am less familiar with, but other people whose opinions I trust have demanded to know what the chuffing fuck, so yeah.

Now, i am NOT saying these authors are horrible people or that no one may attempt this metaphor ever djkbdfsgghjdfg. I -am- saying that these authors are well-meaning but quite privileged folks who happen to have grown up in this society and picked up the same nonsense as we all do growing up in this society.

I'll stop this here and continue my ramble later, and talk some about Kazuya Minekura, who I think doesn't miss the boat as badly because of her execution of the trope, and the fact that the youkai are not METAPHORICAL, but literal. The prejudice is specifically anti-youkai, and that makes a lot of difference, but I gotta go to work so I'll address that later.