As a writer (hack, if you will), I know suspension of disbelief is vital if I'm going to take the reader on any kind of a journey. When I wear my "reader" costume, I've been known to put a book/story/what-have-you down when the writer violated that sacred trust.
Okay, so here are the problems my brain cooks up at two in the morning (insomnia, anyone?):
1. Why don't zombies eat each other? They obviously don't care that much about sanitation (just look at them) and are pretty indiscriminate about what they put in their mouths. I'm sure somebody has cooked up the "virus doesn't taste good" or "don't eat their own kind" argument, but that's just lame. In the real world, the whole zombie problem would probably be over in a few hours after the outbreak, just after they devour each other. The National Guard can wait around and pick off remainders.
2. Vampires. The whole "handsome, super strong, nearly invincible" thing. These are the living dead, folks. Only a few notches above aforementioned zombies on the food chain. How/why they became the fodder for paranormal romance (shudders) instead of the thinly-veiled metaphor for venereal disease they once were, I will never know. Look, at a minimum, their breath has to reek. And super-strength? Have you tried to subsist on a diet of blood? I couldn't even play a decent game of tennis when I...er, never mind.
I could go on, but I think I may have revealed a little too much about how my brain works at two AM. I love zombies...I don't want them to eat each other because it's much more fun when they try to eat us. Vampires? Meh. I prefer the nasty, monstrous type. Good old Vlad the Impaler type. You can take Fabio the Bloodsucker and launch his sorry butt into space with all the other debris.
Update: Catherine J. Gardner is our guessing-game victor! Huzzah!
More tomorrow.
14 comments:
Yeah, my mind at 2AM is like this:
"I'm hungry. Is it too late/early for a sandwich? Hey, in Eddie Money's "Take Me Home Tonight", what does he say before the lady sings 'be my little baby?'?"
for some reason my 2am mind was dreaming about breaking a baseball bat over my head and having to find a replacement bat. Don't ask, I don't know either.
I've never had a problem with insomnia and being awake at 2am (except when the boy was a screaming parasite and needed feeding). The Zombie/Vampire points are very valid...but I won't lose sleep over them. Guess we should be thankful that the myths are perpetuated in some form or another to keep the horror people in business.
With zombies, I think they kill and eat the living out of jealousy, out of a longing for what they are no longer and will never be again.
My own fictional vampire creation is plagued by flies. Living dead, indeed.
Barry...all I can say is: thanks for the ear worm. Now I have to go listen to Eddie Money.
Jamie - Better than needing a replacement head, eh?
Alan - I'm glad the screaming parasite days are long gone. *shudders*
Brendan - I wasn't going to give them jealousy, but I like that idea.
I think the zombie question might be extended to vampires, then. Why, after a good meal, is a vampire not in danger of having his or her blood sucked out by another? Too much trouble, maybe... but not if there's no super strength!
The answer to all of these, however, is Superhero Science. You can come up with a reason for anything you want, if try hard enough, that will in the end sound 10x more plausible than the original myth. A friend of mine actually came up with the inner workings of a vampire's (mostly vestigial) stomach to explain why garlic f@$ks them up, because I wanted it to.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, man.
Would zombies eat vampires? And if they did, would they suddenly because all suave and sexy?
Erk, horrible image there.
Ooh, good zombie point. Muses on the point for five seconds and then starts lusting after vampires instead. Vampires are beautiful - get over it. Though they should never sparkle.
My 2 a.m. thoughts, "Sleep, why has thou forsaken me?"
I go back and forth on whose responsibility--reader's or writer's--suspension of disbelief is. I get frustrated with people who agonize over implausibility rather than pay attention to the story ("There's sound in space in Star Wars because there is! Get past it!"), but at the same time, if the story was strong enough, maybe people would be sufficiently caught up in it that they wouldn't have time to consider what does and doesn't make sense.
I don't care if vampires are pretty, as long as they are nasty. Granted, they don't all have to be nasty (I accept that, like humans, there would be a plethora of personalities).
As for zombies, I have had a zombie eat another zombie. It was fun : ) I'm guessing more don't so it for the same reason most humans choose a fresh slice of pizza over an old reheated one.
I'll take vampires over zombies anyday, the vampires could take on the zombies, not that there would be much of a meal for them. If I'm still awake at 2 in the morning I'm usually too angry to be thinking about anything in particular...anything rational anyway.
Nasty, HOT vampires that eat zombies and Barney.
That's what we need.
Or as horror author Ray Garton says "you can put fangs on Fabio but that doesn't make him a vampire." .. how true is that!
Zombies are SOOOO much better than vampires. Retarded pop culture writers Stephanie Meyer and Anne Rice have turned vampires into such fairies!
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