If the characterization and popularity of the Stephanie Meyer vampire is to be trusted, then women really, really like the "monster with a heart of gold" as their vampire (and have liked it since the Gothic Romance of the 19th century and before). This vampire is "dangerous" in a few ways - from being a murderous predator, to being physically powerful, to representing the mysterious possibilities of supernatural sexual encounters - and yet is also sensitive and caring and not really "threatening" even though he's "dangerous". The good boy and the bad boy rolled into one, it seems.
(As a side note, I'll say that my inclination is to try to avoid stereotyping and essentializing the tastes of women... though the reason for that inclination is more to do with my education in the liberalized West than with any objective Truth (or lack thereof) about women. We're sort of trained in the Humanities to avoid totalizing the ideas of certain groups to avoid perpetuating stereotypes about them. And yet, would it really be shocking to discover that women - as a class of persons - liked similar things? Especially in representations of men as objects of possible romantic/sexual interest? It's almost as if the entire project of the Humanities and gender scholarship has been to dismantle - or at least deny - what everyone kinda knows as common sense.)
This presentation of the vampire bears striking resemblances to dangerous anti-heroes through the history of the romance genre. The heroine in such romances, particularly Gothic romances, is both attracted and repulsed by a sexy villain whom she has the opportunity to tame with her womanly wiles.
This brings up two important questions, though, about the Stephanie Meyers vampire. 1) Why is the most powerful vampire image a romance instead of a horror? and 2) Is the vampire today really just an incidental palimpsest to the archetypical romance? The answer to number 1 for the paper I'm writing lies in the gendering of audiences that I highlight as the major difference between film/book vampires and game/comic vampires. Women as consumers have more control over film and literature, so those media will tend to cater to the collective (or at least most common) desires of women.
The answer to number 2 could very well be "yes", but I'm going to make an effort to argue otherwise. The vampire is a powerful image at the moment and I'd be disappointed to discover that its just coincidental to renewed Gothic romance fascination (though there is that as well). So since I want to avoid a "yes" here, some questions I'll have to ask myself are:
* How is the vampire materially different from a generic romance anti-hero?
* Could vampirism be extracted from the story without changing it?
* If the vampires were, say, zombies instead, would the story change?
* How is the story about vampires instead of about romance?
If it turns out that vampires are just a convenient kludge for spinning a tame bit of erotica, then I'm going to be pissed off haha.
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Next up: The Video Game Vampire and audience perspective
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