I hate Twilight no sparkling
@Kitty9: “This is a thread for people’s ideas of vampires. @trollhunterthethird and I were just having a bit of a brainstorm.” Absolutely, and I was enjoying the brainstorm. I thought the route it was going down was getting a little implausible, and thought I’d offer my perspective on why… but of course you’re under zero obligation to agree.
@wet_noodles, I think people have zeroed in on “sparkling” because it’s a pretty distinctive aspect of Steph Meyers’ work. And Twilight is, er, polarizing.
It was great to see your second post, @wet_noodles I say go for it.
I definitely don’t think that a game appealing to the ‘teenage female market’, even assuming that it does so, is at all a bad idea. I think deliberately targetting them is an absolutely marvellous idea.
There’s been a number of vampire games on casual portals that seem to do well.
I think that there are a number of misconceptions about vampires. There is no one tried and true type of vampire, that avoids the sun, doesn’t like holy-symbols and needs destroyed by a stake through the heart. Dracula, for instance, walks about in the sun and is killed with a bowie knife.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vampire_traits_in_folklore_and_fiction makes for great reading.
I think that my number one problem with relationships between humans and vampires is the extremely large age gap. How do you even start relating to each other? Now I do think picking on school children is a very smart, predatory thing to do. They’re more easily manipulated, easier to influence, easier flattered by the attention of an attractive vampire, easier to get hold of, more willing to take risks, more willing to listen to the whole angsty no one understands you like I do thing.
I think an exploration into vampire psychology would be interesting and from what you’ve written I’m sure you’ll write an interesting game.
@FairyGodfeather @wet_noodles I apologize if I offended either of you. I’m not saying I disliked it because the vampires seemed gay; I’m saying that is how a lot of people who dislike Twilight describe them due to, of course, the sparkling that’s commonly associated with flamboyant homosexuality. I disliked the sparkling because I thought it was ridiculous and wasn’t what a vampire is supposed to be. I try to stay away from using the word “gay” strictly as an insult, but that doesn’t mean that other people whose opinions I have heard and read do the same. I think there’s nothing inherently insulting about the word “gay,” and it only becomes an insult when people are saying it maliciously and aimed at associating whatever or whoever their target is with the overly flamboyant, “flaming,” if you will, gays that are generally looked down upon by people who dislike them for it. As for why the sparkles seem gay… I’m sure you don’t live under a rock seeing how you have Internet (maybe I’m wrong and you just have a really good rock!), so you’ve probably seen pictures of gay parades- you don’t even have to look: those pictures find you no matter what- whether you’ve wanted to or not and you know exactly why sparkles are associated with gay men- because normally sparkles and glitter go with girls. It’s the same way that, sorry if this is offensive, an utter lack of any makeup or cosmetics on a female makes her look like a lesbian to some people even if she is straight.
Don’t get me wrong, I love sparkles and glitter and whatnot- I love making wizards use flashy spells and all that- but they don’t belong with vampires.
I will say that the only time I have anything against a gay person simply because they are gay is when every single aspect of their personality revolves around being some strange kind of deviant and that the only side to their personality is the side that wants the entire world to know that they are gay and proud of it. I have actually met some people like that, but I’ve also met gay people who are perfectly normal, well-rounded personalities!
EDIT: @FairyGodfeather I just saw your newest post, and I totally agree with the whole age thing and how they should interact with teenagers in general! Relationships between humans and vampires, especially when the teenager isn’t even of legal age, are just weird.
Maybe sparkly is just the wrong word for it?
Is vampire disco ball the right word or words in this case
I like the old school vamps for sure.
And for the people who haven’t seen twilight the reason why they sparkel is because they have dimond hard skin.
Diamond hard skin wouldn’t be soft or supple, it would be brutally rigid and not particularly fun to kiss or otherwise get intimate with…
@P_Tigras Unless you like them being brutally rigid… Although such rigor mortis-esque states do not help diffuse the accusations of necrophilia surrounding vampire romance.
In Derek Landy’s Skulduggery Pleasant series he has a scene when a vampire who died when he was 19 falls for the 17 year old female lead at first she likes him then he gets a bit obsessed with her and due to his cheesy talk she is reminded that although he looks young and hot inside he is still an old man and is creeped out by him.
I haven’t read the entire thread but here’s a couple of ideas:
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Vampires are created through the result of a magical pact. People who make this pact are required to drink a certain amount of human blood every day to renew this contract but are gran supernatural powers. But once the contract is broken, it can never be made again. I think this brings in a more concrete motivation for vampires.
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Vampires are just regular people with a mental disorder. Would certainly make a great medical or crime drama.
@Drazen Jokes about liking it hard and brutal aside, a normal erection has nothing on a phallis as hard as diamond. He’d “drill” a real hole right through to her intestines, unless her insides were also diamond hard, and then he’d most likely shatter. Finally if her insides are diamond hard, and he isn’t, then he’d probably feel like he was trying to screw himself into a hole in a concrete wall. Good luck with that.
@hahaha01357 I used to know a gal who believed she was a real life vampire. She also most definitely had a mental disorder. There are some really strange people in this world…
@Nocturnal_Stillness Hah! That’s more like it! When a 100 year old vampire tries to pick up a minor whose great-grandfather is younger than he is, that’s exactly how it should go the overwhelming majority of the time…
I can’t recommend the Skulduggery Pleasant series enough. It’s amazing.
@P_Tigras Actually not the euphemism I was going for.
@Nocturnal_Stillness the books are amazing, the writer made the perfect mordern ‘mage’ theme.
I’m more than twice the age of the target audience but the writing style and world draws me in anyway. I’m looking forward to the next book.
which magic would you train in? It’d be necromancy for me putting my magic into a katana 
@Nocturnal_Stillness I’d go for elemental, mainly because I just would love to be flashy with my magic powers. The books also got me in my Bentley obession, but onto the point.
I would think that any non-Twillight induced fangirl would kinda find dating a 100 year old vampire to be complicated, as the huge age gap would not only put me in my jimmies, but be age kind of . . . weird. But the way I imagine vampires classify how old they are is by refering to a death date, and how long they have been alive, e.g " I died in 1678 at the age of 40"
My vampires are different! My vampires act like old people pretending to be young people. (At least the older ones do.) You know, dressing what they think is fashionable, saying all the phrases they think are groovy hip cool excellent bodacious wizard nowadays. Just imagine someone’s grandfather, trying to be a teenager, and remember that the grandfather is still younger than a vampire who probably had their own teenage years during the previous century.
I have one vampire that blends in, in so much as they do absolutely nothing to attract attention to themselves and don’t deal with people. They still don’t like all this new-fangled technology and have problems keeping up with it, preferring to do things like they were done before. I have a second vampire who was just recently changed, so no problems there, and I think it circumvents the usual huge age gap problem with vampires. The other two are about as blatant as you can get.
One thinks that he blends in, but the reason he hangs out with high school girls is they’re the only ones who actually fall for his whole thing. Most older women try to whack him with their handbags since he’s creepy and there’s definitely something off about him.
While the last vampire absolutely revels in her vampness and is the self proclaimed Vampire Queen, and if she needs anything done with technology, or to deal with the modern world, she just finds someone to do it for her and not to bore her with the specifics. She has kept up to date with fashion, since that sort of thing interests her. The majority of stuff not so much.
@FairyGodFeather
Hey! Old people aren’t vampires!
@FairyGodfeather In the VtM campaigns I’ve played back in the day that’s how my friends and I tried depicting vampires in a sense, or at least in regards to them trying to remain relevant with the times. One of the Storytellers for VtM gave a good analogy that they’re all in one way or another aging hipsters (not hipsters as they’re known today in the sense a sub-culture of young people trying to go against the flow of what’s seen as “mainstream”), in that they’re stuck in their time period, they may try to dress to the current era, but certain fashion and social trends and etiquette they’re still caught up in. Another analogy would that an elder vampire would be about his ‘hip’ to the current times an elderly senator or politician, i.e. they may know a thing or to but are otherwise awkwardly dated especially during attempts to fit in. Which would often lead several to fall back more highbrow social venues of the modern times, because so long as they utilize their old fashion sensibilities amongst the highbrow or social elite circles, they don’t come off as odd or strange but rather can play it off as being refined and having a strict up-bringing.
But then again the lexicon of their time can unconsciously during conversation. Like one vampire I played in VtM was a well-read woman from Germany, who in the modern era came to America, but at the time she was turned into a vampire the year was 1918 at the tail end of World War I; which the common lexicon was quite a bit different. I often took phrases and words that famous people from the time were quoted as utilizing. Like for instance around that time sound was just being introduced to being utilized with movies, and Charlie Chaplin was quoted as criticizing the up coming trend saying, “Moving pictures need sound as much as Beethoven’s symphonies need lyrics.”, and obviously ‘moving pictures’ is what ‘movies’ were called at that time, the moniker was simply shortened over time. In any case, that’s what I had my vampire character call movies, too, “moving pictures”, if not films. Because it was just the norm for her lexicon at the time. And you can often see this same thing among the elderly using dated words from a lexicon from another time in casual conversation, it’s just an unconscious thing.