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A little story about how I came to love something I feared. Namely creatures of the night.
Do you remember your first fear as a kid? I remember mine. Vampires. Yes, you read that right. I was absolutely, insanely, irrationally afraid of vampires when I was a kid. I don't remember when the fear began. I watched the Count on Sesame Street with no problems, but by the time I was five, I had developed this horrible phobia. I've come to believe that my real fear was that of blood, and since vampires bite people and make blood appear, then maybe my brain mistranslated an unconscious fear to a conscious one.
And now a story. When I was in kindergarten and attended my first Halloween party, I was very excited (or so I am told). My mother had purchased an extremely expensive mermaid costume for the occasion and had even had a special batch of cupcakes made at a local bakery for me to take for the other students. However, all would not go so perfectly. The boy who sat next to me in class had dressed up as a Count Dracula-esque vampire with the painted-on widow's peak and fake blood and plastic fangs. Apparently I refused to sit next to him, and the teacher physically picked me up and forced me to sit there. The next part of the story I do actually remember. I was nervous for the first hour of class because the kid kept inching closer and closer to me. He then proceeded to grab my arm and bite me on my shoulder. His plastic fangs came out and his teeth broke my skin. I was screaming and trying to pull away, which only ripped the bite wound open further. The teacher finally managed to get him off me while I ran my little legs off into the teachers' lounge and hid in a cabinet, bleeding all over the place. When I refused to leave that hiding spot, the teacher called my mom to come and get me. Instead of spending the day enjoying my first Halloween party, I got screamed at by my mother for ruining my very expensive costume by getting blood all over it and making her waste money on cupcakes that I didn't even get to try. To make matters worse, I was even more afraid of vampires. I couldn't even watch that Scooby Doo episode with vampires in it (I couldn't watch the Egyptian Museum one either... don't remember why, but mom says I used to hide behind a chair when it would come on).
Cut to almost five years later, I'm about ten years old, and I see Interview with the Vampire for the first time. Holy hell. Hot homosexual vampires! My young mind was intrigued (granted, I had just found out what homosexuals were thanks to Sailor Moon, and I found that I really, really, really liked the idea of two men being a couple- Zoicite/Kunzite forever!). Plus, Louis was a sad vampire. He felt bad for what he had to do to survive, so he was an insta-woobie (and he is the only time I've ever thought Brad Pitt was attractive), but Lestat... Oh, Lestat was just tops. My snarky, loud-mouthed little bossy-britches vampire. Funnily enough, he was the only time I've ever found Tom Cruise handsome too. The story tells us that he's an antagonist and a sort-of villain, but everything that he says has a ring of truth to it. His arguments make sense, even to a ten year old. Why would vampires burn in hell when they are only doing what they were put on earth to do? Why would God allow them to exist in that universe if they weren't part of some plan? Maybe vampires weren't so bad if they could love, even if that love was demented and weird and existed between two gorgeous men while I watched.
Many horror movies and books later, I was hooked by crook and by fang. I read everything I could find about vampires, from histories to novels to pick-your-own-adventure books, but somehow BtVS passed me by. I didn't want to watch anything about a skinny blonde girl named Buffy. By S4, however, my teenaged self did want to watch everything about a skinny blonde boy named Spike. Something Blue is the first BtVS episode I saw. Came in the middle of the episode (right at the "Spike and I are getting married!" hug), and I watched the rest and then watched a late night repeat of the episode on my local affiliate channel. Then I got on the internet and Google'd like there was no tomorrow. Who was Spike? Who are all these other characters? Why was no one I knew watching such a funny show? I spent the next few days reading every script I could find for the first three seasons (I was disappointed that some of the scripts didn't translate on screen the way I had them run in my head, and there are occasions where I have to check to make sure I'm not misremembering episodes because of it). I did however find someone who taped all the episodes, and I got caught up pretty quickly. Despite what SMG told JM, the show might as well have been "the Spike Show" after a while because his storylines were just vastly more entertaining, though I did grow to like some of the non-Spike arcs (some of my favourite eps are non-Spike ones). But vampires! Vampires! Vampires with chips! Vampires with souls! Vampires with bad fashion sense! BtVS had 'em!
By my senior year in high school, I wrote a fifty page research paper for Honours English entitled, "Bite Me! An Exploration of the Proliferation of the Vampire in Popular Culture from the Victorian Era to Today." I got an A, but my English teacher pulled me aside and looked at me very seriously and said, "I've been teaching for forty years. I have never ever had to read the words "necrophilia" or "necrosadism" in a paper before nor have I ever had to read anything about homosexuality... I think you should see the school counselor." Mom threatened to rain all holy hell down upon the school, so I didn't have to talk to the guidance guy. :D
In college, I realized that BtVS ruined me for other types of vampires. I like Whedon's fucked up mythology even though it at times makes no sense and contradicts itself because he was spending more time trying to use vampires as a metaphor for AIDS or Evil or Illness or Adolescence instead of actually realizing that vampires could potentially give CPR. It's not that they don't have breath 'cause they talk and smoke, and since their lungs are dead, they are taking in oxygen and not releasing CO2. Vampires should be walking oxygen tanks, Whedon! I digress. I can't seem to find any other vampires that intrigue me now. I like all the ones I came across before BtVS, but none after. I sorta like the ones on True Blood and the ones on the British Being Human. They are very entertaining character-wise, but I'm not sure I like how the vampires work. Tried watching Moonlight and the Vampire Diaries, but couldn't get into them. Harry Potter has vampires, but they only really come into play in fanfiction. I keep waiting for my next new vampire "thing" to appear, but with the current over-saturation of the "market" I have been sorely disappointed. Suddenly, everything was vampires! Tweenaged cheerleaders suddenly want vampires boyfriends, and I became terribly ashamed of my obsession because it got to the point where if I told anyone that I studied vampiric lore that people would assume that I was a Twilight fan. *shudders in revulsion*
So now it's 2011, and vampires evolved from a fear to an obsession to a love for a select few and a subject for academic research. I came to love something that I feared to conquer said fear without realizing it. It's the same thing that happened with horror movies; they still give me nightmares after watching them but I can't stop myself from finding the latest gory flick or newest gimmick. And maybe it was watching a lot of crime shows and medical examination shows that got me over my fear of blood (might have also been because I became a woman and fainting at the sight of blood would become inconvenient every month). I think I'm waiting for the current swarm of popular vampirism of vampires to go back to the coffin. I can't wait until we come out of this not-goth-Neo-Gothic Era so I can have my vampires back. Lord Byron is rolling over in his grave, assuming that he's not totally moldered yet to nothing.
By the way, I had the scars in my shoulder from my bite-wound until I was like twelve, and then I had them derm-abrasioned off. Thank God. I take comfort in the fact that that kid grew up to be a permanent resident of one of my state's fine correctional institutions. He was always a right psychopath.
ETA: You know you are Southern when you talk while you're typing and accidentally spell "conquer" as "concur." Damn accent is in my brain!!!!
Do you remember your first fear as a kid? I remember mine. Vampires. Yes, you read that right. I was absolutely, insanely, irrationally afraid of vampires when I was a kid. I don't remember when the fear began. I watched the Count on Sesame Street with no problems, but by the time I was five, I had developed this horrible phobia. I've come to believe that my real fear was that of blood, and since vampires bite people and make blood appear, then maybe my brain mistranslated an unconscious fear to a conscious one.
And now a story. When I was in kindergarten and attended my first Halloween party, I was very excited (or so I am told). My mother had purchased an extremely expensive mermaid costume for the occasion and had even had a special batch of cupcakes made at a local bakery for me to take for the other students. However, all would not go so perfectly. The boy who sat next to me in class had dressed up as a Count Dracula-esque vampire with the painted-on widow's peak and fake blood and plastic fangs. Apparently I refused to sit next to him, and the teacher physically picked me up and forced me to sit there. The next part of the story I do actually remember. I was nervous for the first hour of class because the kid kept inching closer and closer to me. He then proceeded to grab my arm and bite me on my shoulder. His plastic fangs came out and his teeth broke my skin. I was screaming and trying to pull away, which only ripped the bite wound open further. The teacher finally managed to get him off me while I ran my little legs off into the teachers' lounge and hid in a cabinet, bleeding all over the place. When I refused to leave that hiding spot, the teacher called my mom to come and get me. Instead of spending the day enjoying my first Halloween party, I got screamed at by my mother for ruining my very expensive costume by getting blood all over it and making her waste money on cupcakes that I didn't even get to try. To make matters worse, I was even more afraid of vampires. I couldn't even watch that Scooby Doo episode with vampires in it (I couldn't watch the Egyptian Museum one either... don't remember why, but mom says I used to hide behind a chair when it would come on).
Cut to almost five years later, I'm about ten years old, and I see Interview with the Vampire for the first time. Holy hell. Hot homosexual vampires! My young mind was intrigued (granted, I had just found out what homosexuals were thanks to Sailor Moon, and I found that I really, really, really liked the idea of two men being a couple- Zoicite/Kunzite forever!). Plus, Louis was a sad vampire. He felt bad for what he had to do to survive, so he was an insta-woobie (and he is the only time I've ever thought Brad Pitt was attractive), but Lestat... Oh, Lestat was just tops. My snarky, loud-mouthed little bossy-britches vampire. Funnily enough, he was the only time I've ever found Tom Cruise handsome too. The story tells us that he's an antagonist and a sort-of villain, but everything that he says has a ring of truth to it. His arguments make sense, even to a ten year old. Why would vampires burn in hell when they are only doing what they were put on earth to do? Why would God allow them to exist in that universe if they weren't part of some plan? Maybe vampires weren't so bad if they could love, even if that love was demented and weird and existed between two gorgeous men while I watched.
Many horror movies and books later, I was hooked by crook and by fang. I read everything I could find about vampires, from histories to novels to pick-your-own-adventure books, but somehow BtVS passed me by. I didn't want to watch anything about a skinny blonde girl named Buffy. By S4, however, my teenaged self did want to watch everything about a skinny blonde boy named Spike. Something Blue is the first BtVS episode I saw. Came in the middle of the episode (right at the "Spike and I are getting married!" hug), and I watched the rest and then watched a late night repeat of the episode on my local affiliate channel. Then I got on the internet and Google'd like there was no tomorrow. Who was Spike? Who are all these other characters? Why was no one I knew watching such a funny show? I spent the next few days reading every script I could find for the first three seasons (I was disappointed that some of the scripts didn't translate on screen the way I had them run in my head, and there are occasions where I have to check to make sure I'm not misremembering episodes because of it). I did however find someone who taped all the episodes, and I got caught up pretty quickly. Despite what SMG told JM, the show might as well have been "the Spike Show" after a while because his storylines were just vastly more entertaining, though I did grow to like some of the non-Spike arcs (some of my favourite eps are non-Spike ones). But vampires! Vampires! Vampires with chips! Vampires with souls! Vampires with bad fashion sense! BtVS had 'em!
By my senior year in high school, I wrote a fifty page research paper for Honours English entitled, "Bite Me! An Exploration of the Proliferation of the Vampire in Popular Culture from the Victorian Era to Today." I got an A, but my English teacher pulled me aside and looked at me very seriously and said, "I've been teaching for forty years. I have never ever had to read the words "necrophilia" or "necrosadism" in a paper before nor have I ever had to read anything about homosexuality... I think you should see the school counselor." Mom threatened to rain all holy hell down upon the school, so I didn't have to talk to the guidance guy. :D
In college, I realized that BtVS ruined me for other types of vampires. I like Whedon's fucked up mythology even though it at times makes no sense and contradicts itself because he was spending more time trying to use vampires as a metaphor for AIDS or Evil or Illness or Adolescence instead of actually realizing that vampires could potentially give CPR. It's not that they don't have breath 'cause they talk and smoke, and since their lungs are dead, they are taking in oxygen and not releasing CO2. Vampires should be walking oxygen tanks, Whedon! I digress. I can't seem to find any other vampires that intrigue me now. I like all the ones I came across before BtVS, but none after. I sorta like the ones on True Blood and the ones on the British Being Human. They are very entertaining character-wise, but I'm not sure I like how the vampires work. Tried watching Moonlight and the Vampire Diaries, but couldn't get into them. Harry Potter has vampires, but they only really come into play in fanfiction. I keep waiting for my next new vampire "thing" to appear, but with the current over-saturation of the "market" I have been sorely disappointed. Suddenly, everything was vampires! Tweenaged cheerleaders suddenly want vampires boyfriends, and I became terribly ashamed of my obsession because it got to the point where if I told anyone that I studied vampiric lore that people would assume that I was a Twilight fan. *shudders in revulsion*
So now it's 2011, and vampires evolved from a fear to an obsession to a love for a select few and a subject for academic research. I came to love something that I feared to conquer said fear without realizing it. It's the same thing that happened with horror movies; they still give me nightmares after watching them but I can't stop myself from finding the latest gory flick or newest gimmick. And maybe it was watching a lot of crime shows and medical examination shows that got me over my fear of blood (might have also been because I became a woman and fainting at the sight of blood would become inconvenient every month). I think I'm waiting for the current swarm of popular vampirism of vampires to go back to the coffin. I can't wait until we come out of this not-goth-Neo-Gothic Era so I can have my vampires back. Lord Byron is rolling over in his grave, assuming that he's not totally moldered yet to nothing.
By the way, I had the scars in my shoulder from my bite-wound until I was like twelve, and then I had them derm-abrasioned off. Thank God. I take comfort in the fact that that kid grew up to be a permanent resident of one of my state's fine correctional institutions. He was always a right psychopath.
ETA: You know you are Southern when you talk while you're typing and accidentally spell "conquer" as "concur." Damn accent is in my brain!!!!
