Yesterday’s discussion about YA and the readers who decry non-Twilight bloodsuckers as “not a real vampire” got me to thinking.
Paranormal romances have had a large following for awhile, as has the rest of the Urban Fantasy genre. With a few notable exceptions, Urban Fantasy hasn’t really ever been my thing. I don’t care about the Zombie Apocalypse and I find absolutely not one thing sexy about men who turn into dogs or are demon-posessed undead. The general schtick of Urban Fantasy involves putting the “real world” up against fantastical elements, thus giving a bit of a twist to what are otherwise straightforward romances and detective stories.
The thing that turned me off Urban Fantasy was the Real Vampire. When Bram Stoker dusted off the John Polidori novella The Vampyre, the sensual animus of Dracula entered the Victorian consciousness and dug in for good. Vampires are a part of the fabric of modern mythos, introduced to many of us in our childhoods. We know vampires in much the same way we know Santa Claus.
In the Christianity-themed fiction world we have a similar issue in that those who are raised in Christianity intrinsically know “Bible Stories” just as we know vampires sleep in coffins.*
Epic Fantasy, the genre of Tolkein, Martin and Rothfuss, has dragons.
I see Fan Fiction as a cheat and I feel the same way about using intrinsic folklores as story themes. Writers who are looking for an easy hook make heavy use of the things Everybody Knows. Readers looking for a book that takes less of a challenge seek those books out in droves. It’s a marriage of convenience for all concerned.
Now obviously not every Zombie story, vampire novel and fictionalized account of the lives of Bible personages is trite and basic. Writers looking to flex their creative muscles have long been able to take those Known Folklores and turn them into marvelous stories of the human heart in conflict with itself. Betsy Phillips’ Frank; Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula and Marjorie Holmes’ Two From Galilee are all instances of authors taking the basic ingredient and writing it out to the next level.
The frothing over happens when those who expect basic elements to remain basic run up against the acid pen of a writer who wants to remake the dragon in her own image. In a conversation last night with a friend I mentioned that while I loved Seraphina it took me awhile to get used to Hartman’s take on dragons. I never expected my beloved fire breathers shifting shape into human form. That’s not a REAL DRAGON!
I’m willing to make my peace with the easy reading experiences that are chockablock in genre fiction. By the same token I think it’s fair to ask that we all make our peace with the fact that writers can and do remake those known elements. I’d go so far as to say that every time I’ve encountered that, the book has been better for it.
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*I need to make it perfectly clear that as a devout Mennonite Christian I believe the the Bible to be truth and not invented fictions.
You know how “what everybody knows” changes all the time. People used to know a whole different set of things about vampires before the 19th century; then the template changed. Sometimes the change is gradual, caused by changes in society or science or whatever (think of what everyone knows about witches) but sometimes it’s abrupt, spurred by a single event or artistic act (think of what everybody used to know about zombies, and how Night of the Living Dead changed them into something else).
And so it goes. But I am laughing my head off about this: it took me awhile to get used to Hartman’s take on dragons. I never expected my beloved fire breathers shifting shape into human form. That’s not a REAL DRAGON! because you missed the paradigm shift! Tolkien’s dragons are pretty traditional, but the wrinkle of them being able to shift to human form was introduced by Ursula K. LeGuin, in her Earthsea stories. I haven’t read Seraphina though you have convinced me to put it on my list. But I bet most readers have already met shapeshifting dragons.
I wrote this entry when I was more than half asleep. I’m still not sure of the wisdom of that “write no matter what” bull. Because when I do write no matter what we get things like this. My thesis statement is nowhere to be seen. It’s just rambling.
What I was trying to get at is sort of what you are saying here, and what others are saying below you. Folklore is necessarily changeable. So what is a Real Vampire in 1899 is a far cry from the Real Vampire of 1999. I still cannot and will not go for “sparkly”. There’s a necessary cultural mutation and then there’s just dumbfoolery. Our cultural attitudes toward sexuality are different than they were in Stoker’s time so our Vampires / sexual anima are going to be different. But the disengenuousness of Meyer in disguising her Mormon Angels as “vampires” disgusts me. Her “vampires” have more in likeness with Moroni than with the folklore Vampire.
But as with much basic writing it’s easier to use cultural shorthand–’oh, he’s a vampire’– than it is to actually describe this new being.
Also, I know it’s been forever since I read Earthsea but I sure don’t remember that. And I’m angry with myself because that’s a thing I would remember.
I can’t remember whether the dragons change shape in any of the original trilogy of novels, so maybe you didn’t forget. But they do change shape in stories set in the same world that LeGuin wrote at that time. And in more recent stories/novellae (Tales of Earthsea and novels (Tehanu, the Other Wind) set in Earthsea, that ability is important and the relationship between humans and dragons (and between humanity and dragonkind) becomes a central issue. I don’t know whether you’ve read any of the more recent stuff, but I find some of it very good indeed.
Whew. I feel better. I didn’t even finish the original trilogy, so if the weredragons were later on then yeah. I missed it.
I’m hitting reboot….please wait while I remake the dragon…..remaking in process.
What got me when I was reading the first Temeraire book was that dragons could talk. I mean, talk conversationally and act like normal people.No telepathy, and even being able to speak French. It felt odd to have them so mundane in a serious book. But say give a dragon a railgun, and I’d be all over that. People have their own internal likes and myths they hold, and there is no telling what might rub us the wrong way.
I think also that changes that tend to domesticate things or make them more mundane can get people too. A lot of paranormal romance just add beastly traits to make an alpha male more alpha. There’s very little sense of strangeness, just reducing the ability to change into a dragon into something like owning a ferrari or having a great sixpack.
There are a lot of books lately where dragons are humanish. Daniel Abraham’s books (King’s Blood; Dagger and the Coin); the aforementioned Seraphina. I’m making my peace with it.
I still maintain that the “serpent” in the Garden Of Eden is a dragon. Which makes sense on all kinds of levels.
How much a writer can deviate from the generally accepted lore greatly depends on just how good of a writer they are. I find as a reader, I can accept a pretty large departure from established lore IF it “just feels right” in the story.
That said, I can’t imagine the talent that would be required to make me accept sparkling vampires who feed only on animals which somehow makes them “vegetarian” (because apparently animals are considered vegetation if you’re a vampire???).
A masterful writer can make me accept their take on lore without even thinking about it. A good writer’s changes will give me pause, but I’ll get over it and enjoy the story. A poor writer is better just to stick to what’s already established.
I’m finding, though, that while what you say is essentially true that there is really a growing problem with _readers_. I’m getting really irritated with myself because I’m being judgemental, but the evidence is indisputable.
It’s what I was trying to get at in the post on YA fiction on Monday, too. There are a lot of really great writers out there who are remaking the mythos in well-done stories. But there are a whole lot of readers who do not know how to read. I don’t know where the blame lies for this. Is it our school system? The internet? But there are people who “love reading” but have no reading comprehension and little ability to tell the difference between a story they don’t like and a story that isn’t good.
The “I LOVE to read” people who only read pulp romances or Christian fiction or mysteries or fantasies…people who don’t read broadly…they’re really becoming a peeve of mine.
Or the other category of bad readers, who love reading and think everything they read is good, because they can’t distinguish one book from another. A book is just something to run their eyes over so they’ll have something to do, and if they retain anything more about any given work than “I have read that” it’s shocking.
Oh, tell it! Better yet, check out the reviews on most Christian fiction where EVERY BOOK is rated 5-stars.
There’s something to this, but I’m not sure it’s the readers. Publishers and bookstores shape reader’s tastes by what they offer, and what I notice is that a lot of people are unable to read broadly in their genre because the books aren’t there. I might respond in length back at my own blog later, because you are right in that there seems to be a lot of mediocre world-making.