A couple days ago I brought up the subject of vampires in fiction, specifically the hoopla over Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. The idea wasn’t so much to unleash a storm of squee or slam posts, but to talk about vampires, why they’re hot, why they’re not.
Vamps and sex
One of the biggies facing us humans is the dichotomy between sex and violence. The word 'dichotomy' implies a branching: how much of our sexual drive derives out of violence? How do we deal with the atavistic response to violence being sexy, and sex being violent?
Vamps and the Supernatural
It's interesting seeing how writers have been dealing (or not dealing) with the implied supernatural questions raised by the term 'undead.' Writers who just don't want any supernatural elements give us scientific rationales for vamps still breathing, and healing miraculously fast. Others hand-wave the life force, but when someone brandishes a cross the vamp laughs, or attacks anyway. Do postmodern vamps resonate as deeply as the ones who respond to the traditional powers of myth?
Sparkly Vamps
Stephenie Meyer's Twilight and its mondo popularity raises the question of nice vampires, sex, and violence, because this series appears to be the most popular of all the current crop of vampire novels. Is it appealing because readers can get truckloads of sexual tension without crossing over the dangerous boundary into actual sex? Is it because Meyer is excellent at capturing the emotional fraughtness of that teen stage on the borderline of adulthood, when the body says "Okay, I'm done growing, you can mate now!" but the mind and emotions are all, "No way, not ready yet!" ? Except the subject is vampires, so do the readers want to flirt with the idea of dangerous sex after all?
The original discussions over on LiveJournal are here and here
The posts are raw thoughts, but there's good discussion in the threads.
I'm not sure if others will agree but I would definitely disagree that TWILIGHT is appealing because it doesn't cross over the sexual boundary. My friends who've read it and I have discussed this and wish that Meyer would take it to the next level! By the third book (haven't read the fourth one yet), we're just thinking, when is it ever going to happen? But not necessarily in an excited way - just in that we just wish she'd get it over with so it wouldn't be so distracting.