Editing Vampire (section)

==History of the Vampire==
===Ancient Vampires===
In ancient cultures, there weren't any creatures called "vampires" or any word that roughly translates to "vampire"; however, stories were told of demons and spirits that drank blood or ate flesh. Even the devil was directly associated with the eating of flesh and drinking of blood, and the gods and goddesses of some cultures were credited with these activities.

The Persians were one of the first civilizations to have tales of blood-drinking demons: creatures attempting to drink blood from men were depicted on excavated pottery shards. Ancient Babylonia had tales of the mythical Lilitu, synonymous with and giving rise to Lilith (Hebrew לילית) and her daughters the Lilu from Hebrew demonology. Lilitu was considered a demon and was often depicted as subsisting on the blood of babies. However, the Jewish counterparts were said to feast on both men and women, as well as newborns.  The closest this got to the idea of vampires in recent history was that some demons would possess corpses and then use them to drink the blood of people.

===Medieval and European Vampires===
Many of the myths surrounding vampires originated during the medieval period. The 12th century English historians and chroniclers Walter Map and William of Newburgh recorded accounts of revenants, though records in English legends of vampiric beings after this date are scant. These tales are similar to the later folklore widely reported from Eastern Europe in the 18th century and were the basis of the vampire legend that later entered Germany and England, where they were subsequently embellished and popularized.

During the 18th century, there was a frenzy of vampire sightings in Eastern Europe, with frequent stakings and grave diggings to identify and kill the potential revenants; even government officials engaged in the hunting and staking of vampires. This was due to a combination of hysterical accounts from deathbed-bound plague victims and the simple fact that symptoms of what we now know to be corpse decomposition (e.g. bloating, pallid "bluish" skin and leaking of apparent excess blood) wasn't a fully understood thing yet.

Despite being called the Age of Enlightenment, during which most folkloric legends were quelled, the belief in vampires increased dramatically, resulting in a mass hysteria throughout most of Europe.

The panic began with an outbreak of alleged vampire attacks in East Prussia in 1721 and in the Habsburg Monarchy from 1725 to 1734, which spread to other localities. Two famous vampire cases, the first to be officially recorded, involved the corpses of Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paole from Serbia. Plogojowitz was reported to have died at the age of 62, but allegedly returned after his death asking his son for food. When the son refused, he was found dead the following day. Plogojowitz supposedly returned and attacked some neighbours who died from loss of blood.

In the second case, Paole, an ex-soldier turned farmer who allegedly was attacked by a vampire years before, died while haying. After his death, people began to die in the surrounding area and it was widely believed that Paole had returned to prey on the neighbours. Another famous Serbian legend involving vampires concentrates around certain Sava Savanović living in a watermill and killing and drinking blood from millers. The folklore character was later used in a story written by Serbian writer Milovan Glišić and in the Serbian 1973 horror film Leptirica inspired by the story.

The two incidents were well-documented: government officials examined the bodies, wrote case reports, and published books throughout Europe. The hysteria, commonly referred to as the "18th-Century Vampire Controversy", raged for a generation. The problem was exacerbated by rural epidemics of so-claimed vampire attacks, undoubtedly caused by the higher amount of superstition that was present in village communities, with locals digging up bodies and in some cases, staking them.

Although many scholars reported during this period that vampires did not exist, and attributed reports to premature burial or rabies, superstitious belief increased. Dom Augustine Calmet, a well-respected French theologian and scholar, put together a comprehensive treatise in 1746, which was ambiguous concerning the existence of vampires. Calmet amassed reports of vampire incidents; numerous readers, including both a critical Voltaire and supportive demonologists, interpreted the treatise as claiming that vampires existed. In his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire wrote:

"These vampires were corpses, who went out of their graves at night to suck the blood of the living, either at their throats or stomachs, after which they returned to their cemeteries. The persons so sucked waned, grew pale, and fell into consumption; while the sucking corpses grew fat, got rosy, and enjoyed an excellent appetite. It was in Poland, Hungary, Silesia, Moravia, Austria, and Lorraine, that the dead made this good cheer."

The controversy only ceased when Empress Maria Theresa of Austria sent her personal physician, Gerard van Swieten, to investigate the claims of vampiric entities. He concluded that vampires did not exist and the Empress passed laws prohibiting the opening of graves and desecration of bodies, sounding the end of the vampire epidemics. Despite this condemnation, the vampire lived on in artistic works and in local superstition.

Celtic mythology features the Baobhan Sidhe, which resemble the archetypal modern horror vampire, as they are beautiful women who take the blood of men while "dancing" with them (usually in a murderous fashion), but have to return to their burial mounds before the rise of the sun. There is also the Lennan Sidhe, or Barrow Lover, who is the tamer, more good natured, monogamous style of vampire girlfriend, who inspires her pet artist but also drains him, sometimes driving him into an early grave. There's also Abhartach, a dwarf magician and tyrant who, according to legend, rose from the grave after he was killed and demanded the blood of his subjects. He was finally killed using a sword made from a specific type of tree wood.

Romanian mythology also contributes heavily to the modern, sociable, attractive notion of vampires, who seem to usually be gingers, and could sometimes pass unnoticed in human society or even procreate or marry; even female vampires could bear offspring. The children are usually fated to become vampires after death. Romanian vampires come in countless varieties, from evil spirits to owls to vampire babes to actual living witches. Romanian vampires potentially have a shot at becoming alive again -- it involves marrying a foreigner, changing their name and leaving the country, however, which sounds a lot less like "becomes human again" and more "sneaks off to bite people elsewhere." Idk, you tell us.

===American Vampires===
An outbreak of tuberculosis in the 19th century in New England caused a Vampire panic. Tuberculosis, also known as consumption, was understood to be caused when a dead relative began to drain the life of their surviving relatives. Corpses of the dead relatives were dug up and organs ritually removed, such as the heart, and burned to stop the vampire from attacking the local population. These practices were limited to New England and spread by a moral panic and some real panic but a complete lack of understanding of Tuberculosis. Notable figures are Mercy Brown of the Mercy Brown vampire incident of 1892. She and many of her family members died from consumption and the remaining ones, fearing for their lives, exhumed the dead. Mercy's body showed the least amount of decomposition having been stored in a crypt which acted like a freezer, and so gripped with idiot-boomer fear the town removed her heart and liver burned them. This story went national and collectively everyone looked on in horror at what the then-backwoods small townsfolk of New England were doing, and intervened to stop it.

Louisiana has a strong history of vampires within its folklore traditions. Many of these appear around the same time as the New England Vampire Panic and history nerds suspect an origin in tuberculosis. New Orleans being a dummy thick port city saw many travelers who would have easily spread diseases. With a very lax understanding of germ theory and more non-existent ways of containing them outside of ship quarantine, diseases spread fast. Many of the New Orleans/Louisiana vampire myths are heavily tangled New Orleans Voodoo. It is sometimes referred to as Mississippi Valley Voodoo to describe the wider region it is practiced in. It is a cultural form of the Afro-American religions developed by the West and Central African populations of the Louisiana area. Voodoo is one of many incarnations of African-based spiritual folkways, rooted in West African Dahomeyan Vodun. This subculture is an important staple of vampire fiction, with Louisiana being a recurring setting, as well as characters practicing voodoo. Important plants such as garlic may have found their way into vampire myths from voodoo wards. Do not confuse this with etsy witches appropriating plant theory. In the 1980s and 90s emo and goth subcultures split off and a few groups known as “Real vampires” began to form in New Orlands.

===Modern Vampires===
[[Image:M1182225 99060207172 VCVladMain 873x627.jpg|right|thumb|400px|[[Vlad von Carstein]] of [[Warhammer Fantasy Battle]] fame. He'd mutilate the unholy tard out of [[Gay|Tinkerbell]] [[Twilight|Cullen]]. [[Rip and Tear|AND HOW]].]]
In the late 1800s, vampires were still widely regarded to be nasty little weirdos like Count Orlok, creeping around in the night looking freakish and completely the opposite of sexy. Literary examples go back as far as the 1740s, though the works that codified vampire as we'd come to know it wouldn't be codified proper until the 19th century, with the likes of ''Carmilla'', ''Dracula'' and ''The Vampyre''. Carmilla in particular was one of the first notable instances of a lesbian vampire, and actually predated ''Dracula'' by about 27 years. From this root a popular archetype would emerge, primarily in 20th Century film, of the lesbian vampire would who seduce a straight woman, the already-present themes of vampirism-as-sexual-predation amplified by the presence of a then-"taboo" sexuality, and people took notice of the unfortunate implications - [[PROMOTIONS|once most of 'em finished fapping to it, anyway.]]

As for ''Dracula'', the novel by Bram Stoker laid much of the groundwork for modern vampire stories: Dracula was originally a thin elderly man with a hooked nose, pointed ears, thick eyebrows, thick mustache, blue eyes that went flaming red when he was mad, and hairy palms, though his appearance became more youthful as he fed on blood. There were also three female vampires who lived with Dracula in an ambiguous relationship that held both familial and romantic/incestuous overtones, and they tried to seduce people into surrendering to them. This novel also added weather manipulation to the powers of vampires, though it's implied as a product of Dracula studying black magic rather than an inherent vampire ability (in fact, one oft-forgotten aspect of that novel is that Dracula was a practitioner of black magic even before he became a vampire, and that this was in fact the origin of his vampirism).

Though hints of their romantic and sometimes erotic aspects had long begun to manifest around the time of Carmilla, and even well before then, it was Tod Browning's adaptation of the aforementioned ''Dracula'' that elevated the vampire from their typical creepy unattractive status to the suave ladies' man inspired by the film's star Bela Lugosi. The film "rehabilitated" Dracula into an eloquent and charming (if manipulative) fellow, the likes of which would be firmly embedded into the public consciousness along with the traditional weakness to sunlight (which we incidentally owe to 1922's Nosferatu; before this, even Dracula himself could walk in broad daylight, though his powers were weakened, and if he'd shapeshifted he was stuck in that form until noon). 

Lady-types developed a metaphorical hard-on for vampires, and vampires supposedly got literal hard-ons for ladies until 1976, when Anne Rice published the first book in her series, ''The Vampire Chronicles'', which established a more... primal interpretation: Vampires had free will, but all of their needs paled before the all-consuming need for fresh blood to feed upon. This is where we started to see more classical portrayals, the vampire pulling triple-duty as sociopath, glutton, and sophisticate all at once.

Discussion of the vampire mythos and their descent into [[Mary Sue|Suedom/Studom]] cannot be had without careful analysis of the culture at this time. Vampires, up through the 1980s, had always been associated with gothic horror - it's one of many reasons that there was such a resurgence of Victorian-style fashion amongst the Goth crowd, which admittedly a lot of [[/tg/]] finds [[Promotions|impossibly]] [[/d/|hot]]. Goth culture celebrated vampire mythos for this very reason; they were a ''worthy'' bit of admirable folklore, the source of many an interesting BBEG, and an inspiration for a lot of things ''in'' Goth culture. This "classical" archetype is what we would see with most Vampire portrayals throughout movies, comic books, television series, and so on during this time.

Sadly, in the early 1990s, cross-contamination by the "Emo" subculture caused this to bottom out in a parasitic fashion - Emo glutted itself on anything it could encounter and claimed that it belonged rightly to it, and Goth subculture, with its established fashion sense and habits, was a natural target. The prevalence of Emo bullshit caused the bulk of the Goth subculture to retreat back to its Victorian roots, but not before Emos had secured vampires as "their own." Similar fates would happen to other genres: Grunge, Punk, and even the Beat movement would all likewise be absorbed by Emo attempts to claim it, which is why many stereotypes - including Emo fashion, music stylings, and predilection towards poetry - persist to this day.

More relevant, however, is the damage that Emo subculture did to the popular perception of vampires, romanticizing them into individuals for whom the taste for blood was little more than a dietetic quirk. [[Edgy|Identifying with the angst of the undead condition]] to the point of hanging all their pots on that one hook, these teenyboppers would drag the reputation of the vampire down to levels of "[[Grimderp|brooding wangsty limpdick loser]]" as it was increasingly associated with make-up, bad poetry, and incense lit to conceal the smell of pot so the "vampire kid's" parents don't come in and scold them in front of his friends from high school. Emos continue to drink tomato juice from plastic Halloween goblets, dress up like shitty vampires, and whine endlessly about how they supposedly hate life to this very day, whilst everyone else who remembers the good old days just shakes their head in disgust, goes "son, I am disappointed," and walks off, depressed.

...and then there was the ''Vampire: the Masquerade'' LARP scene. Yet even that paled in comparison to the influence of one infamous work... 
<!--VtM LARPers and the like definitely deserve a section here, so if someone with the apropos knowledge could oblige?-->

===Twilight===
{{Skubby}}
Possibly the most notorious example of the "ruination" of vampires in contemporary media can be credited to ''Twilight'', whose vamps are less like undead fiends and more like [[What|mysterious pretty-boys, who sparkle in the sunlight rather than burning to death]].

Now to be fair, some of the hate Twilight gets is unwarranted, as the sexual aspect of Vampires goes back centuries. The idea of vampires being totally amiable chaps whom it's completely safe to hang around might not be anywhere near as old, but it's far from original to Twilight as well. Even the idea of vampires subsisting on nonhuman blood goes back rather far, since fucking everyone's thought to ask that at one point or another. Twilight did many things wrong, but the only one that lies with its actual depiction of Vampirism is the memetic Sunlight Sparkling.

''Twilight'' was a 4-part book series, authored by overly horny Mormon woman Stephanie Meyer, which was marketed at tween girls - completely unremarkable, until you consider that the first book alone had an initial print run of 75,000 copies and that the movies are internationally successful.

To make an unnecessarily long story short, a woman named Bella gets saved from a car crash by Edward, a mysterious pretty boy who [[Edgy|looks all emo and shit.]] After half a book of plodding romantic crap, we learn that he's a vampire (as though the sunken eyes, avoidance of sunlight and pale skin weren't a massive tipoff). But it's okay -- he and his family are [[Mary Sue|vegetarian vampires, they don't drink human blood.]] Oh, and sunlight doesn't kill them, it makes them [[Bullshit|sparkle like Tinkerbell]] on a six-coffee bender. Oh, and he and his family all have superpowers as if they were the vampire Justice League. 
 
Things become even more retarded when her Native American best friend is revealed to be a werewolf, and the least convincing love triangle of all time ensues, inasmuch as it is explicitly stated over the next two books that she'll choose Edward. Meanwhile, various other shit involving the not-Catholic vampire Illuminati among other things happens, most of which is glossed over or covered in the most hamfisted way ever.

This is itself combined with said Mary Sue insisting on being turned into a vampire, only to be told they need to get married for some reason. Stupid, yes. But if you view it as a metaphor for sex and keep in mind that the author is a devout Mormon, it makes a lot more sense - insofar as [[What|a vampire abstinence porno Meyer could get off to without angering Jesus]] could ''make'' sense. Incidentally, said Mormonism is also why we get such peculiar euphemisms as "Holy crow" in the books. No, really.

The last book of the series can be summed up as follows:

''"[[Grimdark|I'm gonna die a horrible death during childbirth, and my kid's gonna look like a god-forsaken hellspawn all because I fucked a vampire.]] Oh wait, hold the phone-- [[Derp|it's ok, he's going to turn me into a vampire too, and mystical vampire magic will heal my spine so I can frolic through the forest in heels and a cocktail dress]], while my werewolf ex-boyfriend [[/d/|tries to fuck my baby hellspawn daughter.]]"''

[[Tl;dr]] Stupid biatch can't decide for 4 episodes if she's a necrophile or a zoophile, and can't close her mouth as well. End of story.

On top of all of this are the accusations of encouraging toxic relationships, domestic violence, racism, and stalking, and catering to the ''Mormon'' ideal of the nuclear family and male dominance through female submission in the most base sense of the concept (arson, murder, and jaywalking for those who don’t believe their culture’s differences are inherently superior to Mormon culture)... all written with the expect kind of incompetence that coalesced it into a truly marvel-worthy abomination, and then marketed to teenage and young adult girls.

Now at this point, vampires still had the whole "aura of promiscuity" thing going for them - Pinelight took to its [[Derp|logical conclusion]], and in doing so created the spitting image of the fucked-up, universally-mocked, emotionally-abusive teen heartthrobs that naive or similarly fucked-up teenagers would find sold to them. With this, vampires reached an absolute state of immense glittery [[fag]]gotry that caused every [[Vampire Counts]] player in WHFB, every old-school Goth, and everyone who gives a damn about literary or cultural verisimilitude to cry [[Fist of the North Star|manly tears of pain and rage]] as they declared vampires Ruined Forever™.

...well, we say "forever", and yet here we are.

===The /tg/ Invasion===
/tg/ at large became aware of Twilight shortly after the release of the first book, when random (presumably) teenyboppers and/or [[Internet Troll|neckbeards]] began popping up on threads squeeing about seeing this awesome new series with its SoKewl vampires and asking for advice on how to stat them out as characters — or worse, suggesting that they were superior to [[Von Carstein|'proper' vampires]] and should totally replace our icky night crawlers as a superior breed. These questions and "suggestions" were met with [[RAGE|reasonable counterpoints]], which became more eloquent after some few elegan/tg/entlemen actually [[Heresy|read the book]].

This rapidly expanded into a [[Storm of Chaos|multiple-year-long discussion]] when the real-life popularity of the books (and later the movies) grew so great that it became impossible to avoid, and Edward Cullen became the poster boy and ('''''especially''''') punching bag for vampires everywhere. /tg/ did what they did, raging day in and day out against the "dying" of the scary and badass monsters-of-the-night that vampires originally were - joined (somewhat surprisingly) by the rest of popular culture.

A pleasant byproduct of this backlash was the surge of more and more media that not only took the piss out of these overidealized sparkly wangsters, but eventually [[/tg/ gets shit done|went fully in the opposite direction and made vampires actually frightening and dangerous again]]. Believe it or not, this was partly spurred by ''Edward Cullen himself'' - the actor who played Ed, Robert Pattinson, mentioned in interviews long after the fact that after reading the books he immediately made Ed for the creepy antisocial loser he was, and [[Troll|played his part to its logical conclusion.]]

The wellspring of righteous fury on the subject has long since run dry, aside from a brief revival in 2020, and even then it no longer has the cultural relevance to even halfway justify any further sustained vitriol - less of the [[RIP AND TEAR|frothing, passionate]] [[RAGE|hatred of old]] that became well-ingrained into pop culture itself, and more of the apathetic "yeah, fuck that series" disdain that comes with hindsight and the passage of time.

Even after you filter for the usual population of folks who blow up at the slightest provocation, the Twilight invasions remain one of the most epic RAGE inducing eras of /tg/ history. And yet, for all that, the image of an all-powerful badass creature of the night that can be both repulsively monstrous and charmingly human retains its appeal, showing that sometimes, just sometimes... there's nothing wrong with just liking things. Even with the usual fleet of derivative hacks, a good idea is a good idea, and there's a reason the public is willing to remember them more often.

As a small side note, an occasional /tg/ sentiment is that there's possibly a better story hidden under all that [[Magical realm|Mormon schlicking material]] -- the vampire mechanics are not that bad, if you're not going to have them burn up in the sun, and the vague plotline of the first book ("'Vegetarian' vampires come into conflict with wandering criminal vampires") sounds like something that could make a fairly good [[Vampire: The Masquerade|Vampire]] or [[Hunter: The Vigil|Hunter]] campaign.