Jack, Immortality, Vampirism
Sep. 11th, 2024 05:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI relistened Lives of Captain Jack, Mighty and Despair
and it is still a powerful piece that really puts Jack through it
but it frustrates me a bit as well for what it didn't articulate.
It's the one with the vampires, but it loads all the 'facts' about vampires in the very end.
And that's fair, it's in the Whoniverse and they keep referencing Great Ones, there's background knowledge on what a Vampire is here.
It's also what allows the twist ending, where what they've shown you about this one vampire is suddenly not what vampires turn out to be about.
So I get why they did it. Reasonable storytelling decisions. Makes sense, lands a powerful blow at the end.
It's just... I keep seeing on tumblr a post going around that reckons vampires feeding on blood bags from the hospital instead of on people directly is analogous to not wondering where your food is coming from in the real world, or prioritising the aesthetics of consumption over the realities, which sure, it could be, if you want to tell your vampire story that way. Someone bled to put it in that bag, that might have issues you don't know about, the messy story could be a step further away.
But the tumblr thing goes on to say that this is always going to be true because hospitals are always short on blood so effectively any vampire using bagged blood is taking it away from an urgent need accident victim.
Which is bollocks! And I see it reblogged so much more often than I see the rebuttal I liked, which is from a disabled person, pointing out that blood is for people who need it, and vampires need it.
And as a disabled person who has spent a lot of time in vampire fiction having feels about disability and needing other people to live, that is so true. Bagged blood is for people who have regular needs as well as accidental ones. Vampires take it by mouth instead of by vein, is all.
... the entire web of stories that is often about getting your needs met by unethical means is a way of talking about excluded people, or about violence, or about 'nobility' and bloodline power imbalances, or about... whatever the vampire metaphor is today.
But it's ablist to assert that someone who has a need every single day is taking resources away from the ones who only need it by accident.
And there's layers to vampire stories. Always. But that one is pretty central.
The ecology of blood drinking is pretty central to any vampire tale.
So the Captain Jack story... the Queen crash lands with her handmaiden and the emergency blood supply burns. The Queen refuses to feed on her handmaiden but Jack gives her some blood. The blood lets her try and enter his mind, which she thought he would like, but instead he closes the door. It turns into a story about Jack refusing connection, being drawn into it, then helping other people again, only for it to end in more death than he could have imagined.
Solid if miserable story to tell about Jack.
But that one blood meal at the start is, as far as I can remember from this listen, the only time it is mentioned. So what is it this vampire needs? How much? How often? Reduced to an ecosystem of three, how does it matter that she is a vampire?
Because it seems like it doesn't matter until the last twist. And that is... a choice. That says nothing about needing people or how she needs them.
The only element of vampirism that matters to this story is that it is transmissable. She could choose to make another vampire. Two immortals and one mortal, and it is up to the Queen to decide to let her age and die.
Which is a choice that makes sense if you have a broad pop cultural knowledge of vampirism but which this specific story doesn't spend much time explaining. Until the end, after the Queen decides to just do genocide on all vampires in her old bloodline in her handmaiden's memory.
So then it is a story about drawing others into very violent lives, which is relevant to Jack, but again, it makes it a very different story if the immortal Queen can just live without violence for an entire mortal lifetime.
I mean when she brings her handmaiden back dead and cold, there isn't a moment when Jack or the story pauses to wonder if the Queen finally fed on her. That's a beat they skipped past, as far as I can see. Because that middle of the story isn't about vampires, it's about immortality.
Immortality where someone can apparently not need food for a whole lifetime but it is still somehow bad to be like her?
If there is feeding going on in the background it's a different story. If she's feeding on animals it's a different story. But Christmas dinner is roast roots and there's not a hint of blood in it.
It's not an ecosystem of three, it's just three friends who don't have any problems meeting their seperate needs even on a planet so close to death.
Unless it isn't! Maybe the handmaiden is dizzy at the end of her life because she's being fed on. Maybe it's an invisible thread of story. Which would change the meaning.
But I don't think so because the story is really only about Jack.
Until the twist, oops look, it is a vampire story about vampires, so it ends in blood and death.
And the entire moral impact of that is just... dependent on things we don't know, like if she ever could have taken the bloodline back, whatever that meant. Or what the vampires they make are really like. Is Jack right to, with no knowledge beyond 'vampire' and 'time lords fight them', call the Queen a tyrant? Then the Handmaiden is vastly wrong, or is seeking a piece of the domination pie. Is the Queen a weird vampire who was keeping her bloodline weird with her? Supportable, but unknown. Is there any way to stop her brother other than killing literally every vampire? Well the first listen I think I thought there wasn't and that was why she was avoiding it, but this listen I feel more like it was her choice, because she talked about hate.
It all depends on what vampires are, and what vampires need.
If vampires are farmers cultivating planets full of food to sate their endless appetites it is one story, if they can live on sips for lifetimes it is very another, only it doesn't say.
But I think it does say, when the new King turns up and talks about dominating minds and how all the vampires he made will do everything he tells them. Even tear each other apart. Which he is into, because he gets like a minutes to prove he's super turbo evil, so he says the only thing that makes immortality interesting is the violence.
Which isn't true for the Queen or Jack, right? They just spent a really really really long time just on that planet, singing about Christmas.
(BTW, there's a whole other post to be made about Jack and religion, in light of all we learn about the 51st century military, and it is not pretty. What Jack believes about redemption and death and violence could be quite dark, if you click the source together a particular way. Like that one radio or book audio where he reckoned he'd never get absolution because he could never die? Click it together with the Anglican Marines as written most recently in the one with the land mine. Or Jack saying Captain born and bred in the books? What if that isn't an error when he's from, and they're back to inherited rank, growing up in war? Dark stuff.)
So the vampire King says violence is a way to pass immortality, and we can look at Jack's life of heroism and wonder if his motives are entirely pure. But he just spent a thousand years meditating on a monk planet, though he says he's no monk, so, not a good fit there.
But if making people vampires takes their free will away, we have a whole explanation for the Queen not wanting to do that to someone she actually likes. And the story makes sense again, for her part.
But how is it about Jack?
The Queen and Jack not wanting to make other people think like they do. Make other people like them. And, therefore, not making other people immortal.
Thing is with the Torchwood Among Us sets with Mr Colchester coming back, Jack basically says he wouldn't do that to anyone because it sucks being immortal.
And around then the story loses me. Because it does not in fact suck being immortal. It sucks that other people die, and it sucks being depressed.
Owen Harper style undeath tangles up with depression really hard. So does Torchwood as a series, really. And Jack over and over.
I've said to people that find that element of Torchwood too dark that to me it's a story about being that depressed and living anyway, sometimes because they have to, but eventually because they want to. So it's about getting through the dark and finding reasons to want to live.
... the balance is tricky though.
Sometimes it seems like stories about immortality are about telling us we're better off living in fear of death. And that's... well, we're not selling stories to an immortal market, so reassuring us our lives are the right shape is probably meant to be kind.
But I saw a graph the other day about historical child mortality. It is a bunch of numbers relevant to the Scholomance series but never mentioned there. Because it isn't that long ago, historically speaking, where about half of humans never made it to adulthood. And that was terrible and awful then, and we don't have to live with it now. And any set of stories meant to make us embrace the poetic beauty of the fragility of life but doing so in the context of a coin flip chance of ever growing up would be awful. And life expectancy at birth in England used to be forty and now it is eighty! An excellent reality to live in: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/articles/howhaslifeexpectancychangedovertime/2015-09-09
What I'm saying is we can in fact continue to dream bigger and not accept mortality. We've been doing quite well at that for over a century. It's nice.
We still need stories about grief and transience but I am not going arouns the corner that calls them a good thing.
Especially since these stories are so seldom actually *about* ageing to death. Even this audio, where the handmaiden gets old, doesn't have her needing end of life care and dying in bed. She hikes down a mountain and tries to pick flowers too close to the edge. That could have happened at any age. So it's not about ageing and mortality, it's about accidents and violence again.
Like Ianto saying he'll die of old age before Jack, but saying it the week he gets killed.
I'm fine with stories talking about grief of losing people to accidents and war.
I am not fine with stories framing immortality as evil or inferior, in the contexts of accidents and war.
Vampirism in stories is also about not growing old. Only ever going out by violence or accident, like Highlander style immortals too. But for vampires it's more, what would you do to avoid ageing?
Only here, the characters do get older. Jack is a 'silver fox' by his own reckoning, the Queen experiences a lot more time than her brother and he remarks on how different she looks.
But the story doesn't go around the corner to ability. There's transient need of others due to injury, that's the Handmaiden carrying her Queen to safety, or the blood donation from Jack. But there's no long term disability. Jack might experience thousands of years but he's still an action hero.
In the books, the really old ones where Jack is travelling with Rose and the Doctor, it makes it clear what he is afraid of about ageing is becoming disabled and needing to rely on others. And he demonstrates him being a reliable person to help a disabled girl. But so far the stories don't put him through that.
One day the immortal Jack Harkness is going to need other people. This story is not about that day. But it could have been. Stranding himself on a planet xlose to death, imagine if he got old enough he couldn't fight. The Queen could still use him, use his blood. She'd take him along when they travelled to the light. And he'd need her to travel that far, or to fight and win. That's a very different story than the one that got told.
What would vampires do to avoid disability? Give themselves a different set of disabilities.
What will Jack go through because he avoids death? A very very long old age.
Compare and contrast.
But neither came up in this story.
So it is a strong story, but today I am thinking about all the stories it wasn't, and it seems to me it wasn't those stories because it didnt want to talk about age, disability, or need.
Just grief, isolation, and choosing not to use their own power.
But with a really miserable ending.
I want there to be stories about Jack that aren't about horribly extended suffering and miserable endings.
and it is still a powerful piece that really puts Jack through it
but it frustrates me a bit as well for what it didn't articulate.
It's the one with the vampires, but it loads all the 'facts' about vampires in the very end.
And that's fair, it's in the Whoniverse and they keep referencing Great Ones, there's background knowledge on what a Vampire is here.
It's also what allows the twist ending, where what they've shown you about this one vampire is suddenly not what vampires turn out to be about.
So I get why they did it. Reasonable storytelling decisions. Makes sense, lands a powerful blow at the end.
It's just... I keep seeing on tumblr a post going around that reckons vampires feeding on blood bags from the hospital instead of on people directly is analogous to not wondering where your food is coming from in the real world, or prioritising the aesthetics of consumption over the realities, which sure, it could be, if you want to tell your vampire story that way. Someone bled to put it in that bag, that might have issues you don't know about, the messy story could be a step further away.
But the tumblr thing goes on to say that this is always going to be true because hospitals are always short on blood so effectively any vampire using bagged blood is taking it away from an urgent need accident victim.
Which is bollocks! And I see it reblogged so much more often than I see the rebuttal I liked, which is from a disabled person, pointing out that blood is for people who need it, and vampires need it.
And as a disabled person who has spent a lot of time in vampire fiction having feels about disability and needing other people to live, that is so true. Bagged blood is for people who have regular needs as well as accidental ones. Vampires take it by mouth instead of by vein, is all.
... the entire web of stories that is often about getting your needs met by unethical means is a way of talking about excluded people, or about violence, or about 'nobility' and bloodline power imbalances, or about... whatever the vampire metaphor is today.
But it's ablist to assert that someone who has a need every single day is taking resources away from the ones who only need it by accident.
And there's layers to vampire stories. Always. But that one is pretty central.
The ecology of blood drinking is pretty central to any vampire tale.
So the Captain Jack story... the Queen crash lands with her handmaiden and the emergency blood supply burns. The Queen refuses to feed on her handmaiden but Jack gives her some blood. The blood lets her try and enter his mind, which she thought he would like, but instead he closes the door. It turns into a story about Jack refusing connection, being drawn into it, then helping other people again, only for it to end in more death than he could have imagined.
Solid if miserable story to tell about Jack.
But that one blood meal at the start is, as far as I can remember from this listen, the only time it is mentioned. So what is it this vampire needs? How much? How often? Reduced to an ecosystem of three, how does it matter that she is a vampire?
Because it seems like it doesn't matter until the last twist. And that is... a choice. That says nothing about needing people or how she needs them.
The only element of vampirism that matters to this story is that it is transmissable. She could choose to make another vampire. Two immortals and one mortal, and it is up to the Queen to decide to let her age and die.
Which is a choice that makes sense if you have a broad pop cultural knowledge of vampirism but which this specific story doesn't spend much time explaining. Until the end, after the Queen decides to just do genocide on all vampires in her old bloodline in her handmaiden's memory.
So then it is a story about drawing others into very violent lives, which is relevant to Jack, but again, it makes it a very different story if the immortal Queen can just live without violence for an entire mortal lifetime.
I mean when she brings her handmaiden back dead and cold, there isn't a moment when Jack or the story pauses to wonder if the Queen finally fed on her. That's a beat they skipped past, as far as I can see. Because that middle of the story isn't about vampires, it's about immortality.
Immortality where someone can apparently not need food for a whole lifetime but it is still somehow bad to be like her?
If there is feeding going on in the background it's a different story. If she's feeding on animals it's a different story. But Christmas dinner is roast roots and there's not a hint of blood in it.
It's not an ecosystem of three, it's just three friends who don't have any problems meeting their seperate needs even on a planet so close to death.
Unless it isn't! Maybe the handmaiden is dizzy at the end of her life because she's being fed on. Maybe it's an invisible thread of story. Which would change the meaning.
But I don't think so because the story is really only about Jack.
Until the twist, oops look, it is a vampire story about vampires, so it ends in blood and death.
And the entire moral impact of that is just... dependent on things we don't know, like if she ever could have taken the bloodline back, whatever that meant. Or what the vampires they make are really like. Is Jack right to, with no knowledge beyond 'vampire' and 'time lords fight them', call the Queen a tyrant? Then the Handmaiden is vastly wrong, or is seeking a piece of the domination pie. Is the Queen a weird vampire who was keeping her bloodline weird with her? Supportable, but unknown. Is there any way to stop her brother other than killing literally every vampire? Well the first listen I think I thought there wasn't and that was why she was avoiding it, but this listen I feel more like it was her choice, because she talked about hate.
It all depends on what vampires are, and what vampires need.
If vampires are farmers cultivating planets full of food to sate their endless appetites it is one story, if they can live on sips for lifetimes it is very another, only it doesn't say.
But I think it does say, when the new King turns up and talks about dominating minds and how all the vampires he made will do everything he tells them. Even tear each other apart. Which he is into, because he gets like a minutes to prove he's super turbo evil, so he says the only thing that makes immortality interesting is the violence.
Which isn't true for the Queen or Jack, right? They just spent a really really really long time just on that planet, singing about Christmas.
(BTW, there's a whole other post to be made about Jack and religion, in light of all we learn about the 51st century military, and it is not pretty. What Jack believes about redemption and death and violence could be quite dark, if you click the source together a particular way. Like that one radio or book audio where he reckoned he'd never get absolution because he could never die? Click it together with the Anglican Marines as written most recently in the one with the land mine. Or Jack saying Captain born and bred in the books? What if that isn't an error when he's from, and they're back to inherited rank, growing up in war? Dark stuff.)
So the vampire King says violence is a way to pass immortality, and we can look at Jack's life of heroism and wonder if his motives are entirely pure. But he just spent a thousand years meditating on a monk planet, though he says he's no monk, so, not a good fit there.
But if making people vampires takes their free will away, we have a whole explanation for the Queen not wanting to do that to someone she actually likes. And the story makes sense again, for her part.
But how is it about Jack?
The Queen and Jack not wanting to make other people think like they do. Make other people like them. And, therefore, not making other people immortal.
Thing is with the Torchwood Among Us sets with Mr Colchester coming back, Jack basically says he wouldn't do that to anyone because it sucks being immortal.
And around then the story loses me. Because it does not in fact suck being immortal. It sucks that other people die, and it sucks being depressed.
Owen Harper style undeath tangles up with depression really hard. So does Torchwood as a series, really. And Jack over and over.
I've said to people that find that element of Torchwood too dark that to me it's a story about being that depressed and living anyway, sometimes because they have to, but eventually because they want to. So it's about getting through the dark and finding reasons to want to live.
... the balance is tricky though.
Sometimes it seems like stories about immortality are about telling us we're better off living in fear of death. And that's... well, we're not selling stories to an immortal market, so reassuring us our lives are the right shape is probably meant to be kind.
But I saw a graph the other day about historical child mortality. It is a bunch of numbers relevant to the Scholomance series but never mentioned there. Because it isn't that long ago, historically speaking, where about half of humans never made it to adulthood. And that was terrible and awful then, and we don't have to live with it now. And any set of stories meant to make us embrace the poetic beauty of the fragility of life but doing so in the context of a coin flip chance of ever growing up would be awful. And life expectancy at birth in England used to be forty and now it is eighty! An excellent reality to live in: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/articles/howhaslifeexpectancychangedovertime/2015-09-09
What I'm saying is we can in fact continue to dream bigger and not accept mortality. We've been doing quite well at that for over a century. It's nice.
We still need stories about grief and transience but I am not going arouns the corner that calls them a good thing.
Especially since these stories are so seldom actually *about* ageing to death. Even this audio, where the handmaiden gets old, doesn't have her needing end of life care and dying in bed. She hikes down a mountain and tries to pick flowers too close to the edge. That could have happened at any age. So it's not about ageing and mortality, it's about accidents and violence again.
Like Ianto saying he'll die of old age before Jack, but saying it the week he gets killed.
I'm fine with stories talking about grief of losing people to accidents and war.
I am not fine with stories framing immortality as evil or inferior, in the contexts of accidents and war.
Vampirism in stories is also about not growing old. Only ever going out by violence or accident, like Highlander style immortals too. But for vampires it's more, what would you do to avoid ageing?
Only here, the characters do get older. Jack is a 'silver fox' by his own reckoning, the Queen experiences a lot more time than her brother and he remarks on how different she looks.
But the story doesn't go around the corner to ability. There's transient need of others due to injury, that's the Handmaiden carrying her Queen to safety, or the blood donation from Jack. But there's no long term disability. Jack might experience thousands of years but he's still an action hero.
In the books, the really old ones where Jack is travelling with Rose and the Doctor, it makes it clear what he is afraid of about ageing is becoming disabled and needing to rely on others. And he demonstrates him being a reliable person to help a disabled girl. But so far the stories don't put him through that.
One day the immortal Jack Harkness is going to need other people. This story is not about that day. But it could have been. Stranding himself on a planet xlose to death, imagine if he got old enough he couldn't fight. The Queen could still use him, use his blood. She'd take him along when they travelled to the light. And he'd need her to travel that far, or to fight and win. That's a very different story than the one that got told.
What would vampires do to avoid disability? Give themselves a different set of disabilities.
What will Jack go through because he avoids death? A very very long old age.
Compare and contrast.
But neither came up in this story.
So it is a strong story, but today I am thinking about all the stories it wasn't, and it seems to me it wasn't those stories because it didnt want to talk about age, disability, or need.
Just grief, isolation, and choosing not to use their own power.
But with a really miserable ending.
I want there to be stories about Jack that aren't about horribly extended suffering and miserable endings.
no subject
Date: 2024-09-11 10:29 am (UTC)What I actually always wonder about is, vampires usually have a whole thing about not eating dead blood. Rice vamps in particular have all this "you gotta listen to the heart and stop drinking before it stops beating or it's Very Bad". How the hell does that work with bagged blood? With *microwaved* blood?