7. the True Monstrosity of Monsters

U. MELISSA ANYIWO 7. THE TRUE MONSTROSITY OF MONSTERS Uncovering the Solution to Otherness in True Blood and Blade: Trinity Our unending obsession with vampires reflects deeply embedded fixations with youth, fame, and wealth, while at the same time unpacking the nature of monstrosity and marginalization in the modern world. The contemporary romantic vampires of the Twilight Saga, Vampire Diaries, and innumerable other examples, present an image of sexy, sympathetic outsiders. Offered as defanged moral beings, these contemporary monsters are now seen as ‘decent’ enough to be deserving of human rights and equality. Vampires throughout popular culture thus, have become the group we are supposed to sympathize with and seemingly accept despite their genetic flaws, reflecting our contemporary attempts at social equality. But what if vampires really are monsters trying to take over the world? What if fear and prejudice are actually the right responses to have? This chapter explores two vampire universes as examples of the hidden truth revealed in both True Blood, Season 5 (Alan Ball, 2012) and Blade: Trinity (David S. Goyer, 2004), that whether hidden or out of the closet, vampires are merely code switching vicious monsters out to destroy and consume humanity and are, therefore, deserving of annihilation. This argument, from two very different narratives, highlights the ugly heart of race theory in the modern world; the insurmountable truth at the heart of the problems with ending prejudice. What if, as these shows suggest, marginalized groups are indeed excluded because of their own inherent dangerously inhuman characteristics rather than the prejudice of the majority? What if, like the American Vampire League (True Blood) and the House of Erebus (Blade), social justice organizations support those who are merely playing at being human in order to the lull the populous into a false sense of security before reverting to their natural monstrous state and destroying the moral order? What if abstinence and assimilation are the only true paths to acceptance and ‘normality’? What does this mean for creating a truly equalitarian society? When a society excuses the murder of a black child or the torture of a gay U. M. Anyiwo (Ed.), Race in the Vampire Narrative, 91–107. © 2015 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. U. M. ANYIWO teenager, it can do so in the knowledge that, despite all evidence to the contrary, these groups are indeed fundamentally different and perhaps deserving of tolerance only if they abstain. Such a reading of the mainstream vampire narrative offers a very different (and perhaps more cynical) perspective of a figure that has been romanticized as the epitome of egalitarianism and tolerance in contemporary analysis, while acknowledging that the gaze of the viewer is impacted by their own social position, allowing them to see imagined worlds as reflections of their own worldviews. SYMPATHIZING THE VAMPIRE the vampire functions as a convenient catch-all figuration for social otherness…The threatening other – whether sexually, racially, religiously, economically or ideologically – invariably is figured as a type of vampire that generally seduces, often converts, and always drains us. (Weinstock, 2012, pp. 94–5) The vampires we meet in the worlds of True Blood and Blade represent examples of the modern vampire, who with few exceptions is a variation of the template created by Anne Rice in 1976. As Atara Stein argued in 2004, “Rice’s humanization of her vampires is the key to their popularity… people can find any number of ways to identify with these mythic creatures, who are, after all mortals writ larger than life, mirrors of…angst, isolation, and outsiderhood” (p. 106). What the humanization of the vampire has accomplished is a figure on which we can expel all of our own angst at the world, a being that reflects those elements of life that we as mere mortals wish we could experience. As adults functioning in a world of rules, as morally evolved creatures, we must suppress our desires or as Manuela Dunn-Mascetti (1992) argued as this latest vampire craze began to take hold: we seem to be obsessed by that which we cannot possess, because we long to attain the impossible, because we fulfil our desires, fears, and expectations – the vacuum in our lives, with what they represent. One could even go so far as to argue that a vampire is a perfectly polished mirror on which we project all our dreams and fancies, sexual and intellectual, and the projection endows this strange creature with an attraction we find impossible to resist. (p. 42) Thus the vampire functions in a multiplicity of ways depending on the cultural positioning of its creation; the ways a particular generation views itself, but in all iterations it mirrors our desires and concerns, while reflecting 92.

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