I do wish there was a bit more good faith discussion to talk about the phenomenology of IWTV vampires as vampires and how being a vampire does affect one's conscious understanding of their own world. It's a drastic point of view shift from being human.
Things such as:
Their baseline for the violence needed to survive starts at drinking blood to live, and most beneficially by killing humans. Which they also once were. It can really only go up from there.
Not getting blood in the beneficial way can be likened to an eating disorder based on being hung up on the morality of your own survival.
Escalation to inhuman levels of violence is something that's comprehensible to think of, since it's possible to do to someone else, or yourself, and to some minds it's hardly of any consequence or difference.
Question of what to do with one's immortality when stuck in this necessitation for violence. Occupying all that time. Confronting vampiric existentialism. Doing what one can to not be driven mad or disparaging by it.
In living forever all such violence risks becoming inconsequential to the conscious mind in how you outlive all of its importance. If not because of death taking it, then because time will simply weather it away. For the same reasons most things can end up carrying very little significance. Making one increasingly apathetic or nihilistic.
Because of above, enacting laws with consequence, even of death, naturally leads to some not really caring about them. Making them more useful as a means of power, threat, or as a way of committing suicide, than as something morally binding. If used in moral ways at all.
Those who survive the longest have to necessarily take on being okay with a level of violence that is incomprehensible to human scales. Necessitating that often the most violent, or accepting of violence, tend to become those who withstand the test of time.
Those fitting into this category extends fairly naturally towards walks of those accepting of or that act out other forms of immorality, dehumanization, and antisocial behaviors.
Your community is small and made up of violent killers. Developing paranoia or hostility towards violent killers is self preservation. You are also a violent killer, and take any hostility towards your person as an offense or threat. Without some kind of love, compassion, or trust in the mix, your community would quickly destroy itself.
Because of above vampires enter to greater degrees unfulfilling, pragmatic, or socially contractual relations with others they may dislike, or be indifferent to, and often might resolve interpersonal issues with fake shows of affection or remorse.
If you do happen to find a real relationship, the violence you enact out in order to survive can't ever enter into that relationship, without it becoming abusive. But the lines between those two can blur easily when you consider again how nurtured one has to be into violence to begin with.
Survival instincts look different based on their background for survival. And surviving as a vampire takes on different concerns for safety and endurance. How you survived being human is how you'd think to survive as a vampire, and those who had very little to survive through would lack a level of survival skills necessary to take on this kind of life.
Once you've seen a bunch of how this life is going to be you tend to take on a level of 'this is just how things are'. Since they can't place themselves in time, they can't place themselves properly in a forward progression. Those who last tend to develop a superiority on how to last through this the right way, or make judgments on who will or should be allowed to.
To make a vampire at all you have to actually decide on this last statement that there is anyone deserving of this life, and that it's a life one deserves.
You are stuck always in the bodily age of when you died. General feelings of stuckness are encompassing, as you're bound by your immortality, and often can only survive through those who are in it with you. Anyone and anything you knew in mortal life will be gone one day, and what you're left with are only those of your own kind.
In having such a substantially focused relationship to violence. One has to always make a hyper-conscious effort not to be violent, for the wrong reasons. Or just simply have a good conscience about such things. (some combination of the two)
One's life and culture as a human bleeds into who they are as a vampire. Even in rejecting humanity completely, they carry those ideas and understandings around with them. Including prejudices, ideologies, and sensibilities. Vampires lack a distinctly separate culture from that of humans, and instead live alongside it at perpetual outsiders. Only loosely being effected by it, and able to choose removing oneself entirely if they're white, or otherwise not subject to prejudice based on appearance. Vampiric alienation and loneliness is perhaps fairly common, and at a certain point this outside position lends indifference about the human condition and whats happening in the world.
Due to this, certain cultural shifts might take far longer to ever reach vampires, than it would in our naturally generative, and transformative human society.
Due to this as well though certain human hold ups about things such as homosexuality aren't very present in vampires.
The more vampiric you are the more it puts you into the throes of violence, while falling back into your humanity puts you at face with the qualms of your own morality.
Vampires have to find some way of justifying this existence has true worth to it despite such violence, and what it's done to their life, or simply abandon all sense of such morality, or care. Otherwise this fact of violence, and reminders of it, drive them to the flames or otherwise an all consuming resentment of all this.
The only ways you can die is suicide and being killed.
In trying to bring greater meaning to your violence you end up making a spectacle about it. Which fosters a manner of self importance, and egotism, about being violent. Or equally making it into a performance or ritualism.
BDSM is arguably a great way to contend with the fact you are violent, or can be subject to violence, in a controlled and consensual setting. It can be almost therapeutic, like taking power back from all the violence you can't control.
These sorts of things are interesting to think on when you don't have someone else making it apologia for abuse and egregious acts of violence. Because while they are violent by nature, they don't lack a consciousness about it. They have minds which can actively choose not to be violent, choose different paths to violence, etc. They're able to make decisions, and regret those decisions. And also, just like anyone in community with others, or in respect to themselves, have good reason not to be. They may possess inhuman abilities and understandings, but they don't possess inhuman feelings and are capable of being physically, emotionally, and mentally harmed or harmful.
And actually, given the fact they can take this to vampiric scales, is by scale, worse, not somehow made diminished by fact one can come easily to a conscious idea nothing has any real consequences when confronting one's own immortality. This inconsequentialness is a lacking and false understanding of immortality anyway.
Immortality can equally be about a constant uplifting of the present and future into something better, confronting their own impact on the world and those in it to generate some new way of living as a vampire, as opposed to stagnation, or depravity into cycles, and pits, of unnecessary and avoidable violence. Or just inevitable boredom.
A lot of those within this vampiric culture, don't necessarily foster well a society dedicated toward being as non-violent as possible. (I account for all forms of necessary violence, like self defense, as being non-violent.) Some might even find such an idea they could move in the direction of non-violence to be self hating. But the very fact they can be non-violent, choose that, and separate that for compassion, and love, and righteousness means their consequences and morality do end up mattering necessarily. If there's choice in that there's a way to effect things. An upstanding vampire, who's not just surviving through this, would have to dedicate themselves to consequences and morality as a good in itself, I'd think, to do right by others and themselves. To not give in to evil/violence as their only true condition. And somehow synthesize that information with how they can never be moral by a humanist standard, but those such standards are by nature more moral than their own. They can't fall into vampiric exceptionalism, but do have to accept the fact of themselves as vampires has special other conditions to it.
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thinking again about how underexplored hera & minkowski are as a dynamic, considering how close their relationship is, and i think there is some synergy between minkowski's "i can't think of a decision in my life that wasn't already determined by someone else. but, even then, there was always a choice, and i always made it." and similar sentiments expressed by hera. and this exchange with eiffel in ep 48: "no. this isn't even a choice for me." / "yes, it is. it's a sucky ass choice, but it is a choice." while hera & minkowski were the two people who initially argued to stay...
it's true that all of the main wolf 359 characters have an element of regaining control / autonomy present in their arcs (lovelace's conflict with the dear listeners + choosing to be isabel lovelace, and eiffel's need to take responsibility for himself as a full person and an autonomous actor in order to move forwards), but i think there's something about how hera & minkowski share this fear of losing control. that they must perform perfectly, be better and do more than everyone around them in order to earn the same amount of respect as anyone else, without knowing why they feel so... deficient.
i think a lot of their early conflict stems from this shared insecurity clashing against opposite priorities and relationships to authority - minkowski believes that the way to prove herself as a person is to attach her worth to her job and excel at it, while hera's worth as a person has been tied to her job by external forces and she struggles to be seen as more than that. it's an important job to minkowski, and an important role, but she doesn't initially realize that she's not just arguing with hera as an unruly subordinate, but as a person for whom that is the unwilling totality of her existence. like in let's kill hilbert, where hera says "try to sound a little less patronizing" and she replies "i'm not being patronizing, i'm being critical" - i think that's the primary disconnect in their perspectives.
over time, as minkowski learns to separate herself (and her self worth) more and more from that idealized role of commander, i think those shared insecurities become a point of connection more than discordance. minkowski is sort of a defender by nature, and devoted to the people she cares about, but i think there is still a personal element in some of the ways she most ardently advocates for hera - in the way she demands hera be respected for her efforts, and, notably... minkowski has a lot of personal baggage around being made fun of for how she speaks. i think it's worth considering that in the context of lovelace mocking hera's stutter, and minkowski later turning "count to ten" back on her.
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I’ve gotten a few insistent anons lately demanding I state my thoughts and opinions on the current and past history of Palestine on this blog. (You can tell they don’t follow my more personal side blog, I guess.) On the one hand, I do understand people wanting to know that someone they follow has similar opinions on severely important things like this. But on the other hand, most of the asks have that certain… tone that gives me the feeling that they are more interested in ‘catching’ me in something, than any actual concern over my politics or the actual people involved. They’re worded in a way that is very immature—in a way that leaves very little room for anything other than the exact statements parroted back to them that they expect. Which I can’t do. One, because I can’t read their minds to say exactly what they want me to say. Two, because I’m an entire person with a whole life that they know nothing about—something that comes with all the flaws of being a human person with my own history and education based on where I lived and who I knew. And three, because I don’t want to parrot someone else’s words to appease a random person I don’t know. And the thing is, I’ve had this conversation already with nearly everyone in my life. I’ve gone over it at least a dozen times with friends and family from all walks of life. Some conversations were harder than others. All of them were hard. Partially because what is happening is hard to talk about, and partially because I don’t really know what to say. What do I say that changes anything? What do I say that isn’t speaking over someone who is directly affected? What do I say that won’t be misinterpreted by someone willingly misinterpreting/looking for a fight? What can I say that doesn’t hurt anyone at all? Because someone out there will always be hurt, no matter how carefully I try to word things. And I have tried. I’ve written this post 80+ times for months now. I’ve read other’s words and found parts that spoke to me and for me very well, but then have that certain edge that goes into the harm territory. Some lean into Zionism, some lean into antisemitism. Some are just outright racist, some are full on fascist. And that’s really the entirety of it. I just don’t want people to be hurt anymore. So to answer your questions, anon:
I don’t know what the right thing to say is and no matter how careful I am, it will never be correct enough for you. I am angry and horrified at the harm that has been done over many years to the Palestinian people. None of my words can really summarize that history, or what is happening to them right now. Every single day I learn something new, and every single day it is someone doing irreparable harm to innocent people. I am disgusted by the never ending terrorism and harm done by people who think that killing innocents is a worthy way to get them what they want. And that goes for anyone who does this, including but not limited to the Hamas, the Israeli army, or my very own colonizing country. I am alarmed at how black and white people are treating this, and how no consideration is allowed for those who fall between the cracks or who dont follow their strict narrative. That people forget that Jewish Palestinian people exist when they go on their rants, or what people from every ‘side’ or corner of the world can want the end of the harm. That people have hatred for Jewish and Muslim people with no regards to who they actually are and what they believe. That there are so many who support Palestinian freedom, and then parrot outright fascist talking points. That many come to support their Jewish friends, but then say that Palestinian children deserve to die because _____. So, no. There is nothing I can say that really matters. Because no matter what I say someone out there will twist my words, or misunderstand, or tell me that I’m supporting something I don’t support. Because no matter what I say, I just can’t write the right words on fucking Tumblr to stop the harm from being done.
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Ya know. I spent most of my life with horrible painful soul-crushing social anxiety.
And after about 25 years of continuous hard work, suddenly, people started pointing out - to my utter bafflement - that I had, in fact, achieved my lifelong dream of being charismatic. I'm 29 now; I feel comfortable in most social situations, and it is a very rare person whom I cannot make laugh.
I am, undoubtedly, finally, charismatic.
But do you know what I found?
I found that now that I have an understanding of which social rules serve which functions -- Now that I have an understanding of just how much damage my awkwardness was doing to people, well,
I found that, actually, my awkwardness never really hurt anyone at all. People were just judgmental dicks to me about it.
Now that I have the skill-level to (most of the time) creatively vocalize what is in my head as soon as I think it and without fear, I can confirm once and for all what I had always suspected:
I was worth talking to when I was quiet.
I was worth talking to when I was awkward, and when the words in my head took time and patience to hear, and when most of my jokes didn't land. I was worth talking to the whole time.
So I just... I hope that if you've ever wondered whether you are worth communicating with, the answer is yes. Absolutely yes. Each of us has a soul worth sharing - and if you and I were talking, I would happily wait for you to speak (or communicate in other ways) without condescending, and I would never shame you for that harmless awkwardness that so many people feel the need to violently stomp out.
You are worth talking to. You just are. And you deserve people who will speak to you with kindness, with patience, and with the basic immutable respect owed to all people.
(I talk about this with some frequency, both on tumblr and in real life. At some point, maybe I'll gather all my thoughts on the matter into one post. At some point, I wrote about my personal experience trying to build my social skill. But I felt the need to say at least a little bit tonight after seeing this other lovely post, and I'm glad I did. It will happen again.)
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