Once more with sparkles
Sep 9th, 2008 by Barb
I think it was Anne Rice who popularized (if she didn’t outright invent) the concept of vampires as cold white marble statues, but the concept has influenced many subsequent vampire stories, and even spread its stony tendrils, via fanfic, into vampire mythoi which don’t use it. Jossverse vampires are in many ways a subversion of the Anne Rice model - they’re pale and they’re room-temperature, but in other respects they’re relentlessly down-to-earth. They can have sex, with all its attendant messiness. They have to shave (cf. Angelus’s various regrettable forays into facial hair through the centuries). If they don’t bathe, they get stinky, and if they eat people food, my bet is they have to dispose of it somehow. Even when they bite their victims, it’s not a couple of neat pinpricks, it’s a big messy ragged wound.
Moreover, while they gain immortality and strength, Jossverse vampires are presented as hideous monsters, who grow more monstrous with age. The loss of one’s soul in the Jossverse is not simply something for the vampire characters to angst about; it turns them into something indisputably evil and unfailingly horrific. Becoming a vampire is never presented as something to be desired in the Jossverse.
Fans, of course, often have other ideas. The vast majority of shippy fanfic dealing with one of the vampire characters emphasizes the marvelous advantages of vampires - erections of infinite duration! No body odor! Perfect, flawless marble-statue musculature! Etc. Traits such as paleness and lack of warmth, which were intended to remind the viewer that this is an animated corpse, become eroticized, and much of the vampire character’s attractiveness arises from their lack of squishy, stinky, human imperfections. (Some of these things are only dubiously canonical; we have, for example, Anya’s word that Spike smells good, and several characters mentioning that unwashed vampires smell bad, though it might be possible to argue that it’s the clothes rather than the vampires smelling in either case.)
On the other end of the spectrum, traits such as game face, or growling, which were intended to be animalistic and horrifying, are likewise eroticized by some writers. And again, these traits are often expanded into areas of dubious canonicity, as witness the myriad stories featuring vampires purring, or having a social structure which models that of a fantasy BDSM club predatory animal.
While I haven’t made any systematic study of this, I am mildly curious as to what extent the writers and readers who tend to go for the marble statue version overlap with the writers and readers who go for the grr!argh! version. I know that the former doesn’t do much for me, whereas I enjoy many but not all of the features of the latter. One of my writerly kinks is the intersection of the fantastic and the mundane. I always want to know that the plumbing is like in the magic castle. If vampires don’t smell, why don’t they? If they do smell, what do they smell like, and why? How many situps a day does it take to maintain those washboard abs, and does pig’s blood really go straight to your hips? So for me, the marble-statue vampire is a useful concept, if only because I take a perverse pleasure in subverting it. But in the end, it’s the growly stuff for me. Purring? Totally canon.
It strikes me that in some ways, this kind of thing is a way for readers and writers to have their Exotic Other cake and eat it too. There may come a time when fetishizing dark skin or epicanthic folds carries as little cultural baggage as fetishing blue eyes or freckles, but that day is not yet. But there’s no Undead American lobby to object to writers rhapsodizing over the perfection of Angel’s cold, marble-hard, chiseled white/ivory/ecru/whatever chest, or the salutary effect of Spike’s growl on Buffy’s [insert euphemism here.] We can safely dehumanize vampires, reduce them to a collection of things that make us tingly in our naughty places, because they’re already inhuman.
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