One wonders if vampires are an oppressed minority in America and an established part of the elite in Britain... how did the American revolution take off without Washington and the rest finding themselves exsanguinated at some point...
For that matter, does anyone outside the Anglosphere have supernatural populations? Vampires and werewolves are hardly native to British folklore; you'd expect in an undead arms race, the Hapsburg and Ottoman monarchies would have the edge.
(Perhaps our American vampires are actually Francophone in origin, the former ruling elite of Haiti who fled to Louisiana, willing to take their chances in America than risk the wraith of the vengeful Loa unleashed by the revolt against their rule... Obviously they're not so much part of the Confederacy as trying to take advantage of the chaos to create a new kingdom of the undead along the Mississipi.)
(Louisiana, of course, is named for Louis XIV, the Moon King, the first werewolf to sit on the French throne...)
(Ahem. May have gotten distracted.)
One could theoretically do something with vampires as the old aristocracy and as a sympathetic power – a sort of Luddite allegory, where you put vampires as still powerful, but a personal power at least. They still have to meet with you to enthral you, they still need to touch their victims. They're sensual, hedonistic, and with their centuries of knowledge are the peak of individual human skill. They're feudal, not nationalists; they have individual relationships and alliances, they don't rely on impersonal organisations like the state or the nation or economic class. Set them against the assembly line, the nature of mass production, with the shadow of the impersonal slaughter of the First World War hanging over the story, and they might start to look a bit more sympathetic.
But then, I guess, you'd just have the elves from Lord of the Rings, so never mind.
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Date: 2014-03-17 08:04 am (UTC)For that matter, does anyone outside the Anglosphere have supernatural populations? Vampires and werewolves are hardly native to British folklore; you'd expect in an undead arms race, the Hapsburg and Ottoman monarchies would have the edge.
(Perhaps our American vampires are actually Francophone in origin, the former ruling elite of Haiti who fled to Louisiana, willing to take their chances in America than risk the wraith of the vengeful Loa unleashed by the revolt against their rule... Obviously they're not so much part of the Confederacy as trying to take advantage of the chaos to create a new kingdom of the undead along the Mississipi.)
(Louisiana, of course, is named for Louis XIV, the Moon King, the first werewolf to sit on the French throne...)
(Ahem. May have gotten distracted.)
One could theoretically do something with vampires as the old aristocracy and as a sympathetic power – a sort of Luddite allegory, where you put vampires as still powerful, but a personal power at least. They still have to meet with you to enthral you, they still need to touch their victims. They're sensual, hedonistic, and with their centuries of knowledge are the peak of individual human skill. They're feudal, not nationalists; they have individual relationships and alliances, they don't rely on impersonal organisations like the state or the nation or economic class. Set them against the assembly line, the nature of mass production, with the shadow of the impersonal slaughter of the First World War hanging over the story, and they might start to look a bit more sympathetic.
But then, I guess, you'd just have the elves from Lord of the Rings, so never mind.