I am not replying to a specific person because I fold in the face of argument but

[beccaelizabeth]

I saw someone asserting that x vampire killer can't really be considered a *killer* because in any verse with vampires vampires aren't considered to be people

and a, way to be confidently wrong

but b, if you think really, really hard about it, you might be able to see an angle where that is indeed
the problem.



You cannot say anything about every story with vampires
but
in stories where vampire means a thinking person you can communicate with, someone that passes both the Turing and the Harkness tests, it is *really fucking creepy* to decide killing them doesn't count.

And actually frequently missing the point! The vampire killers I stick with are the ones that worry that they are through their actions becoming monstrous, or that they believe they are monsters but that they must act this way to protect others from becoming monsters, or in other ways are self aware that the substantive difference between them and the vampires is diet. And sometimes not even that.

If the killer writes off vampires as if they don't count? Well the killer has a problem. If the *story* writes them off then the story isn't one I stick around for.

Imagine Buffy the Vampire Slayer if she never once had a bad feel about staking a vampire. We wouldn't have made it through the first season. If she wasn't all tangled up about Angel what kind of story would they be? Other people having that oh no my friend is trying to kill me how can I hurt them moment is key to the first double *episode*. Slayer is a killer and killing vampires counts.

Which is why I like the kind of AUs where vampires get rights and food and so forth.
... yet I did not watch the series where they get the artificial blood.
... so that's not consistent.



BtVS tells us "you're not looking at your friend. You're looking at the thing that killed him."
but it shows us quite the opposite, in ways that drive the story, how tangly complicated these people are after the violence that changed them.

And when Ethan says effectively the same thing about Fyarl!Giles
"It killed Ripper and now it's trying to get me!"
Ethan gets sent to torture prison about it
and Giles gets restored to his fully human self
as Angel has been and Spike could be
so it is just maybe possible that the story considered Ethan to be
Wrong
in a villain way
for saying it.



A lot of horror stories set up targets to be knocked down
but the great ones make you question the nature of fear and anger and how society constructs the Other
the 'acceptable' targets

the horror becomes being someone who sees the world in such terms
and acts violently.


There's horror in asking which bits we can lose and still be a person
or what a soul even is if we can act like all this with one.


There's horror in having to ask over and over again what you would do to survive,
or when if ever it is right to kill.


Collapsing it down to
vampires don't count
... well there's horror in that for sure, but not in the fiction.

Comments

[baronjanus]

I agree very much with the whole thing about vampires, and obviously for reasons you understand about discounting and dehumanizing people

Though I never did think of "simply lying about the fyarl" as part of that; I didn't think Ethan was suggesting transformation, just that he lied ("this unknown stranger from outta nowhere killed Giles elsewhere and his body isn't currently here, or perhaps eaten")

But that aside! Because I do agree that this was, for many years, the main difference between vampire stories (identity and sapience remains) and zombie stories (definitely an empty corpse), although in more recent years even zombies are allowed sometimes to have personality and redemption arcs, though rarely.

There's a whole genre in "we thought aliens/robots/creatures were Not Counted and killed them by the millions, therefore we are the horror"

In fiction, also in reality, obviously, but let's put that one aside