Vampires vs. Elves
Saturday, 12 June 2010 20:12![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lea_hazelI don't know when the idea first occurred to me, but it's been brewing for a while. I'm pretty sure I first arrived at it through comparing the traditional rivalries between elves/dwarves and vampires/werewolves. It's kind of hard to compare dwarves and werewolves -- there are a few points where you could stretch a similarity, but it doesn't go that deep, IMO. Elves and vampires, on the other hand....
Elves are the higher beings of high or epic fantasy. Where they exist, they are stronger, more long-lived, wiser and -- most importantly -- more magical. Usually their critical flaw is some combination of hubris, arrogance and refusal to keep with the times. Diana Wynne Jones wrote in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland that elves are somehow "less gross and substantial" than humans, and that sentence stuck in my mind as being a central part of their appeal. Even though they have bodies and not just spirits, they're somehow more ethereal than any other fantasy species.
And, of course, they're beautiful. Beauty is almost always an integral part of how elves are constructed, and not just any beauty; elvish beauty has very, very specific parameters. An elf that is not tall, slender and very pale is probably a parody of some sort, and they almost universally have either blonde or pitch black hair. It's not just because this makes them instantly recognizable as the proud but highly magical people whose help the humans will invariably need. In fantasy environments with no elves, the similarly-functioning higher species often fit the same physical profile. Hell, Star Trek's Vulcans are basically space elves.
Why would people associate tall, thin, pale people with wisdom and powerful magic?
Unlike elves, vampires aren't usually meant to be the oldest, wisest or most important beings in the world they occupy. Maybe it's because of their proliferation in urban fantasy, a genre (ostensibly) more cynical and unforgiving than epic fantasy. Yet, like Tolkien's elves they are immortal unless killed, and usually hundreds of years old. But vampires are still the rock stars of their environments; they have glamor powers, both in the sense of mind control and in the sense of their appeal to readers and reader proxies.
So, while elven princes are old-fashioned royalty, vampires are modern royalty: rich, young and sexy. Well, except when they're counts, which puts them back in the former category; then they'll still be rich, young and sexy. And, you know, again with the alabaster skin, usually (again) contrasted with either black hair, for drama, or golden hair, for the deceptively angelic look. Interesting exceptions notwithstanding.
Vampires also look down on humans, except more in an "eating them" kind of way, whereas elves are usually just snobs. Although, if you assume that they derive from mythological fair folk, they did get up to all sorts of baby-stealing and other nasty tricks. So, perhaps vampires and elves both move on a spectrum ranging from awesome-terrifying-unrelatable to like-humans-but-better.
The more relatable vampires and elves aren't just more attractive, they are also attracted to main characters and sundry in direct correlation. Half-elves are probably the most common hybrids in epic fantasy. Liaisons between humans and vampires have more of a range of outcomes, although they tend to have less of an emphasis on procreation, what with the whole "technically dead" thing. It also substitutes one source of relationship angst (you will invariably outlive me) with another (I can live as long as you, but at the price of starting a family).
A lot of readers understandably roll their eyes at why a powerful immortal being who is several hundred (or thousand!) years old would want to make it with some squishy, smelly, incorrigibly organic meat-person who is fifty times younger than them and probably can't pronounce their original name. I guess the reasoning is a metaphysical expansion of the reasoning behind more mundane May-December relationships: the complementation of energy and refinement. Immortal beings are sometimes conceived as being partially or wholly creatively sterile. They require the point of view of someone who was born into the world they currently live in, maybe even for practical reasons.
Really, the only thing left to do is make vampire-elves. And then have them fight werewolf-dwarves. Awesome.
Elves are the higher beings of high or epic fantasy. Where they exist, they are stronger, more long-lived, wiser and -- most importantly -- more magical. Usually their critical flaw is some combination of hubris, arrogance and refusal to keep with the times. Diana Wynne Jones wrote in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland that elves are somehow "less gross and substantial" than humans, and that sentence stuck in my mind as being a central part of their appeal. Even though they have bodies and not just spirits, they're somehow more ethereal than any other fantasy species.
And, of course, they're beautiful. Beauty is almost always an integral part of how elves are constructed, and not just any beauty; elvish beauty has very, very specific parameters. An elf that is not tall, slender and very pale is probably a parody of some sort, and they almost universally have either blonde or pitch black hair. It's not just because this makes them instantly recognizable as the proud but highly magical people whose help the humans will invariably need. In fantasy environments with no elves, the similarly-functioning higher species often fit the same physical profile. Hell, Star Trek's Vulcans are basically space elves.
Why would people associate tall, thin, pale people with wisdom and powerful magic?
Unlike elves, vampires aren't usually meant to be the oldest, wisest or most important beings in the world they occupy. Maybe it's because of their proliferation in urban fantasy, a genre (ostensibly) more cynical and unforgiving than epic fantasy. Yet, like Tolkien's elves they are immortal unless killed, and usually hundreds of years old. But vampires are still the rock stars of their environments; they have glamor powers, both in the sense of mind control and in the sense of their appeal to readers and reader proxies.
So, while elven princes are old-fashioned royalty, vampires are modern royalty: rich, young and sexy. Well, except when they're counts, which puts them back in the former category; then they'll still be rich, young and sexy. And, you know, again with the alabaster skin, usually (again) contrasted with either black hair, for drama, or golden hair, for the deceptively angelic look. Interesting exceptions notwithstanding.
Vampires also look down on humans, except more in an "eating them" kind of way, whereas elves are usually just snobs. Although, if you assume that they derive from mythological fair folk, they did get up to all sorts of baby-stealing and other nasty tricks. So, perhaps vampires and elves both move on a spectrum ranging from awesome-terrifying-unrelatable to like-humans-but-better.
The more relatable vampires and elves aren't just more attractive, they are also attracted to main characters and sundry in direct correlation. Half-elves are probably the most common hybrids in epic fantasy. Liaisons between humans and vampires have more of a range of outcomes, although they tend to have less of an emphasis on procreation, what with the whole "technically dead" thing. It also substitutes one source of relationship angst (you will invariably outlive me) with another (I can live as long as you, but at the price of starting a family).
A lot of readers understandably roll their eyes at why a powerful immortal being who is several hundred (or thousand!) years old would want to make it with some squishy, smelly, incorrigibly organic meat-person who is fifty times younger than them and probably can't pronounce their original name. I guess the reasoning is a metaphysical expansion of the reasoning behind more mundane May-December relationships: the complementation of energy and refinement. Immortal beings are sometimes conceived as being partially or wholly creatively sterile. They require the point of view of someone who was born into the world they currently live in, maybe even for practical reasons.
Really, the only thing left to do is make vampire-elves. And then have them fight werewolf-dwarves. Awesome.
