IDK about you, but if I became a vampire, got 150 years old without visibly aging and recovered from severe wounds without medical assistance I would probably consider myself ‘immortal’.
Some of us are a little more skeptical than to believe in immortality after a measly 150 years.
“You know Ted back there-“
“OOG OOG”
“-has been going strong since pre-history. He goes so far back, he can actually drink a chimp. But mostly, he spends his time hypnotizing himself with his basin and masturbating. Which was why I suggested shoes.”
There’s a villain in the DC universe who is actually an immortal caveman. But he uses his immortality to learn the languages and customs of the area and era he is in.
I mean he does a fuckton more than that…
There’s another immortal caveman who whenever he dies, he comes back to life with a new superpower
Sounds like “The Man From Earth”
In “The Addiction” there’s this old vampire named “Pana”. He’s pretty weird. Talks about the nature of suffering.
Says he can actually diet. Takes longer for a vampire to lose weight tho.
I don’t really get that movie. It’s a metaphor for addiction, obviously, but are people being transformed into vampires as a metaphor for humanity’s infinite propensity for greed and its self perpetuating cycle of violence? Is it a literal metaphor for drug addiction, where people are hollowed out? Is it meant to portray the desire for continued existence as, itself, an addiction? Never took philosophy, so I’m probably missing context.
I think they refer to addiction to a specific kind of action or mode of existence.
I can’t think if a name for it but it’s what nazis, atrocity-doers, vampires and mass murderers are doing.
A total indulgence in domination. A total taking from the world. A total divorce from humanity. To lean totally into that and be transformed.
Apparently it’s empowering, ecstatic and awful.
Yeah I don’t get the philosophical details either. But it’s a solid vibe.
Sunshine has a metaphorical role in it too, I think. There’s a scene, towards the end, in the hospital. The vampire is exposed to bright daylight. And there’s a crucifix on the wall iirc. Something there.
That is… difficult to conceptualize. And made even more difficult to interpret when the party is consumed. Not a bad movie in the least, but a difficult one.
Those ones tend to stake themselves eventually, or get obsessed with seeing sunlight “for real though”. They’re not in it for the long haul.
I played a lot of Vampire the Masquerade in the 90s and liked their origin idea about Vampires.
Basically Cain from the bible is the 1st and only truly immortal, having been cursed to walk the earth forever by god
so every person who is made a vampire is one generation away, most players in the game are at the edge. basically 12 generations away from Cain. The 2nd generation are all dead or beyond isolation. The 3rd generation are the powers that be that control the world and are at war with eachother and have the defining characteristics that all the vampires sired under them have the potential to have
but the old vampires will usually go into torpor for hundreds of years and only influence the world through dreams or proxies
What We Do In The Shadows has a funny answer to this question.
It always felt unbelievable when an ancient vampire was super “with it”. At best they’d be too shitty and un-self aware that their ego would remain basically intact over millennia, otherwise any immortal is facing an eternity of future shock, derealization, and complete dissociation.
The only way to really face eternity would to have such a disordered personality that the very idea of other people held no particular meaning.
Ann Rice’s vampires would generally go insane after 300-400 years. The one’s that didn’t, kinda still did, went catatonic.
I can’t now recall which of her books I read, but as a budding creepy kid at the time it was with a mounting despair. No, this is a cool book, it must be! Why am I bored? When does it get good?
I mean, I don’t know if I’d still be interested in women after being a vampire that long, but I’d like to think so.
Go to a country with lax sex laws (or at least enforcement), set up a bordello and feed on the workers while they sleep off their necessary highs for doing sex work for a horrible human (vampire) being.
Plus, under the rules I’m fixating on mentally, drinking the blood of someone who is high will get the vampire high, and after hundreds of years plus immortality, I’m gonna get high at some point lol.
(Rules referenced: Old World of Darkness, VTM, etc)
Considering how sex is, emotionally, such a life affirming and intimacy driven act, I’d expect someone like an ancient vampire to crave a great deal of it but never really get the itch scratched.
Imagine it. You’ve lived so long that humans have stopped seeming real. The older you get, the faster time seems to go. You’ve long since forgotten the ones you once truly loved. New humans are so culturally different and apparently short lived that they barely even register as people anymore.
Ancient vampires would be starved for intimacy or any genuine connection. They’d fuck skillfully and often perhaps, but without passion or connection.
I was thinking about that exact same thing today.
The material world’s purpose is to get you out of your head. To force you to stop dreaming all the time and face something better.
Wealth and technology are ways around that of course. With wealth and technology we create an air-conditioned dream womb.
Want a story where vampires just drop dead after exactly two million years
It would have to be an artificial limit. Which would mean that vampires are artificial. A biotech thing with a death timer build into the cellular whatever.
In Farmer’s “Riverworld” they used a dark matter artificial soul. That would be a way in.
The original one probably doesn’t know, but I’d consider myself functionally immortal for as long as there are other vampires who didn’t age for a couple hundred years more than I did.
As the original one, however, I’d never stop checking for new signs of aging. Well, at least until I’ve had enough of life altogether.
The way we know a million other things. We are told by a trusted expert.
How can one become an expert on living forever without first living forever?
The book said so.
