#is this influenced by the book i'm reading that has some vivid descriptions of birth? yes

[therealjammy]

I have so many projects going on, so many life things going on... but sometime tonight or tomorrow, another dark, bloody, erotic horror work with Lady D and her daughters will be gracing your screens (emphasis on the erotic horror)

[strahdapologist]

hi 😳 thoughts on 5e in comparison to older modules / i, strahd (since it is also referenced by 5e), and tracy hickman saying vampires were originally an allegory for abuse

hey sexy 😳 long post coming up lol this will mostly be about how people interpret strahd and why my url is the way it is

so i'm a tracy hickman hater first and a human being second, i do not believe in mor.mon rights and i think we need to keep in mind that his experience as a mormon has undoubtedly colored his interpretation of vampires. so we're going to start with the author lol especially since he was directly involved with the creation of 5e curse of strahd, as well as earlier revamps.

i admit i feel strongly about american christians and their cultish derivatives, however there are a lot of issues within those religious communities including unnecessary superstition. lest we forget, though it's a trash book series, christians tried to ban harry potter for promoting witchcraft and in a similar vein american christians are not the greatest appreciators of vampire literature. with all that in mind, i don't think tracy hickman can divorce his faith from his interpretation of dracula and other medias that he was inspired by for curse of strahd. i'm not pulling his dedication to his faith out of my ass, he actually provides some quotes on his personal website here.

so tracy hickman has also stated on his personal blog that vampires are “users and abusers”, but this is not actually a popular interpretation of vampires from that time period. there’s a really good phd on the vampire motif from that century that hickman lists as his most influention from curse of strahd, which i have not been able to finish reading yet, but the abstract says it all tbh

“ [this work] seeks to demonstrate that there is no set vampire canon, and no singular vampire figure. The ultimate aim of this thesis is to challenge received notions about the vampire, to chart its transformations, and thereby to attend to the complexity of a motif being constantly reworked in new historical and cultural contexts.”

it is 229 pages but it is a lovely breakdown of the 19th century vampire and what actually influenced its mythos, if anyone is interested. hickman reducing vampires to “users and abusers” is just straight up untrue, and also erases the queer origins of 19th century vampires while completely ignoring the cultural context of the 19th century wherein stoker and polidori were living. both “dracula” and “the vampyre” were also shaped by stoker’s and polidori’s personal lives and experiences, which hickman elects to ignore and misinterpret.

this phd, as well as other studies on vampire literature, illustrate that vampires were allegories for many things, notably disease (tuberculosis, consumption, other 19th century threats):

Some vampires are harbingers of plagues, wars, and famine. Barber asserts that this is a result of the commonly found blood on the lips of exhumed corpses: “The pneumonic form of the plague causes the victim to expel blood from the mouth...The observer does not realize that the blood comes from the lungs but instead sees it as evidence that the body has been sucking blood from the living.”72 Dracula summons rats, the bearers of the Bubonic plague. Stoker’s Irish mother recounted to him the horror of the Potato Famine, detailing emaciated, wasted bodies: “Famine, followed by fever, struck in the year prior to [Charlotte Stoker’s] birth, 1817; famine, caused by the failure of the potato and oat crops, recurred even more fiercely in 1822, when she was four...[she] left behind a vivid account of the horrors of a cholera epidemic in 1832, when she was fourteen.” 73 These descriptions undoubtedly inspired Stoker when he wrote his own stories of living corpses, as did the descriptions of the victims of the Potato Famine of 1845-52, an event that decimated Ireland and would have influenced both pre-eminent Irish vampire writers of the nineteenth century

but also the other (people of other faiths, notably jewish, and migrants that threatened to change victorian england):

It is perhaps because the vampire emerges from such a culturally ambiguous space that the figure is often designated by writers as a foreign menace, as is the case with the Eastern European Count Dracula and Austro- Hungarian Carmilla. The vampire motif is regularly cast as a foreign “other,” to use Said’s terminology in Orientalism (1978). Said asserts that “Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’).”21 Peter J. Kitson defines the Gothic as “a mode that disdains generic purity and embraces hybridity,”22 and compares this to Romantic Orientalism, both of which he claims “manifest a shared concern with representing the alien and the other to European cultures, yet...both may be used as a means of representing the dark, irrational, and monstrous at the heart of British society.”23

another popular interpretation of vampire symbolism, is that of the upper class bleeding lower classes dry:

The pedigrees of both Carmilla and Dracula are discussed in detail in their respective texts, both coming from a long line of influential and noble families. The classic Marxist interpretation of the vampire is that the creature is a metaphor for an aristocracy that literally drains the blood of the working classes. According to Marx: “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”75 This is just one of the many different constructions of the figure of the vampire in the nineteenth century.

considering the context of the french revolution as well as the napoleonic wars, vampires as an allegory for conflict and imperialism is also a valid interpretation:

The Romantics attacked the colonial expansion of their country and its involvement in slave-trade and looked at the Orient as an exotic paradise free of Colonialism. Rather than cherishing the freedom in that idyllic landscape, the Romantics entered as invaders. It seems, then, that they internalized Colonialism and favoured their ethnicity and class which they supposed as "superior" and could not look at the Orient with a detached eye. This dilemma, resisting Colonialism and being complicit with it, is at the core of the Romantic texts which will be treated in this study. On the other hand, the Romantics, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Byron, in particular, were deeply concerned with integrating Gothic elements into their writings. Thus, they flavoured them with supernatural evidence, vampiric incidents and larger-than-life heroes. These Gothic elements, as this paper will attempt to demonstrate, were mainly used to pass secret encoded radical messages meant to criticize their government and propagate liberated ideas. Nevertheless, in creating such settings and heroes, the poets fell into another dilemma showing them at once supporters and critics.

as a dissertation from a student at the university of rio de janeiro states:

By looking at the evolution of the literary vampire through the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we are able to notice that each of its incarnations dramatically differs from the previous one, and as vampires are reinvented, they engage in a coherent dialog with issues pertaining to their times, in a way that they never lose their relevance. [...] the vampire may potentially function as a powerful allegory as it becomes a mirror of the very humanity on which its life depends.

i have not found a single academic source that says vampires are an allegory for use and abuse OUTSIDE of ones referencing twilight lol. tracy is talking out of his ass and i have to wonder why he interprets things in such a gross way and writes so many of the characters in ravenloft to be so gross and predatory as if that’s fun for players.

on and this post doesn’t even touch upon pre-19th century vampire lore which features mostly women and anxieties surrounding childbirth, which tracy has also elected to ignore.

but don’t worry i didn’t forget the biphobia in curse of strahd :)

not only has tracy (AND CHRIS PERKINS DON’T WORRY I DIDN’T FORGET ABOUT THAT MAN) decided to amp up the abuse allegory, the ableism, the racism and the violence against women, they decided to make strahd bisexual. diversity win! the predatory abuser is bisexual :) and a depraved one at that. people might write this off as clumsy representation, but let’s be real for a second here, mormons are not lgbt friendly, mormons are not vampire friendly, what better way to turn curse of strahd into a cautionary tale against all things anti christian, than to make strahd a bisexual. who is depraved. i just think it’s funny that he’s bisexual now who wants to fuck everything and anything that moves and that one goal of his is to find another consort, damn where have i seen that harmful stereotype before...

in previous modules, it was never a goal of strahd’s to expand on his collection of consorts - the number of which has continued to expand over editions, from one to four now that he is bisexual. funny how his bisexuality basically serves to increase his depravity and predatory impulses towards not only ireena but all player characters. i shouldn’t need to remind anyone that that is such a harmful stereotype of bisexuals.

another harmful bisexual stereotype is the inability to create any meaningful interpersonal relationships, which as it stands in 5e he is unable to do. his connections to his consorts, and “brides” is superficial at best and it’s clear that he goes from one bride, or consort, to the other, quickly discarding one once he is bored of them (ie. poor escher).

considering the queer origins of the 19th century vampire (polidori and stoker were lgbt, don’t let anyone tell you they just had some close roommates or friends), this is especially offensive and feels intentional on behalf of tracy.

so yeah as a current curse of strahd dm, i’ve gutted the module because honestly it needs to be rewritten top to bottom. the racism (do NOT get me started on the vistani), the biphobia, sexism (the insane violence against women) and ableism that are present throughout the module are also incredibly problematic. my own interpretation of strahd is based entirely off p.n. elrod’s who’s honestly a light in the darkness that is badly aged tsr/wotc adventures. “i, strahd” is the source i’m using most for running this mess of a module, and adore patricia’s writing and interpretation not just of strahd but the people around him. she’s also the only ravenloft author who has actually a good take on the vistani that doesn’t reduce them to racist romani stereotypes. vampire of the mists is not canon in 5e, and it’s a mess of a book that has a lot of ableism, consent issues between jander and anna, as well as anti-romani racism.

so anyway :) those are my thoughts and feelings thanks for coming to my ted talk if you need anything else thx bye