I never got very far into the Vampire Diaries but the whole time I just felt so so bad for Bonnie, the one black girl in a town with like 75 confederate re-enactment based holidays. Like even without the vampires, RUN GIRL.
@@LifesNeverHumDrum Jenny Nicholson taught me all about this despite me never seeing the show. Her Bonnie segment made it clear how badly they treated her. Just the difference between both her + Caroline's actress having real-life music careers too, while only Caroline got to perform music on the show made it so clear to me me. May all the Bonnies everywhere get to shine unobstructed.
My wife asked me this a few months ago, and I thought the answer was pretty obvious: because the vampires in the North were all hunted and killed by Abraham Lincoln.
Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter has a surprisingly thoughtful take on this idea. The Confederate leadership were vampires and they wanted to keep the slave trade going so they could have an everlasting supply of people to eat. It's not a perfect parallel, but slavery and the vampire myth are both based on stripping people of their agency and identities to become commodities and fuel for the powerful's gain.
The only major issue that story has, in my opinion, is the glorification of the North and Lincoln as heroic figures fighting strictly for moral reasons rather than economic and political. While the North and Lincoln found slavery distasteful, they still didn't particularly care for the well-being of black people and Lincoln even wrote about how he wanted to maintain white supremacy (as he, supposedly, believed racial superiority was inevitable, so he preferred to be on the winning side). This element was sort of touched on, but very weakly, and it's presented as if it was resolved. However, at the end of the day, it should've opened the door to Civil War era supernatural fiction starring black heroes and abolitionists. I admire the movie for how transgressive it is on vampire fiction and media overall, especially today when pro Confederate sentiment seems to be getting stronger.
I'm really happy Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter did that. About halfway through this video, I realized that I actually quite like the idea of a Confederate vampire (with some strings attached): I think a Confederate vampire can very effectively underscore that plantation owners were a class of people whose existence relied on exploiting other people that they saw as their intrinsic inferiors; the comparison to Dracula-style vampires, who need to drink blood from comparatively under-powered humans (whom vampires in a lot of fiction regard as livestock) in order to survive, is very apt, I think.
💯 Interview with a Vampire the mc is a plantation owner and he preys on the slaves of neighboring plantations. The material needs are met as well as a population to feed upon.
My problem with Abe the vampire hunter is that the text basically blames the Confederacy on vampirism. So - rather than slavery being an economic institution that very normal, very nice white people maintained because it was profitable and the status quo - slavery becomes the work of a secret cadre of evil monsters. And we can all agree that evil monsters are bad and need to be destroyed. But - as this video shows - there are still a lot of (white) people who want to believe in the gentility and spirit of the Confederacy. All ALVH does is flip the binary so that soldiers who would be shown as uncomplicated heroes are reinterpreted as uncomplicated villains. Which completely avoids the actual historical discussion we need to have about the Confederacy: That they were ordinary people. Not heroes, not villains, not especially special in any way. Ordinary people who owned ordinary people as a way of life. THAT is the discussion that no one wants to have.
@@kevinprzy4539nothing except being Americans ass with pitchforks, and burning the White House. A lot of stuff happens, American education just only teaches American history
That`s because he`s Canadian and you can`t get much more Yankee than Canadians despite many Southern plantations being based on British Northwestern ones in Logan`s native Alberta.
Part of why Anne Rice hits so different is because she's literally writing gothic horror. Her vampires are monsters. Complex characters but still monsters. The 2000s pop vampire era is def bringing the Anne Rice angst but seem to drop the strict horror element and lay right into teen romance. They are usually edgy enough for the angst factor, but the Edward style vamp is still supposed to be read as a hero, not a monster. Really loses the thread of what a character like Louis is supposed to be imo. Vampirism is inherently exploitative - and I'm glad that the new show didn't want to touch the slave owner stuff for obvious reasons, but still had him wrestle with the morality of his exploitative career as a human.
THIS! It's gothic horror, not romance! I grew up before Twilight, & my teenage vampire obsession was with Bram Stoker's Dracula. PROPER vampires! So I liked the Interview With A Vampire movie; it had that same inhuman, monster-ish, truly dangerous edge to the vampires, the way they lose their humanity. The rpg Vampire: The Masquerade also had that element, but I hate Buffy, & everything I've seen & heard about Twilight makes me mad. I've read a couple of short gothic horror stories set in the pre-Civil-War South, & I think it just works as a gothic, spooky, eerie setting somehow- kinda the decayed "aristocracy", & the landscape in places like Louisiana. That's my non-American perspective tho.
Also, honestly? There's stuff to explore *with* writing a vampire (or godlike/immortal being in general) that doesn't need to portray them as complete monsters/make them racist or Confederate, but that *can* explore the nature of *humanity itself* as needing to eat once-living plants and/or animals to survive, the need to change views and opinions over time (and not, say, hold what one believed as progressive in 1500 as just fine now), how to balance power differences or whether they are so inherently imbalanced one must forever remain a distant, celibate hermit, etc... It's like, there's SOOOO much stuff to explore for both angst and food for thought without having to have a super long-lived character or one that inherently has to survive off others be a racist or unrepentant murderer etc and it's like... for people to just make them intentional enslavers or kidnappers etc is bad enough, and to fetishize that and glorify that is so much worse. I just want a vampire that struggles as much with feeding as most of us humans that are SOMEWHAT aware of things like animal suffering and planetary collapse and the impacts of what we do eat on our health etc... do with eating without guilt.
And then there's the Sandman adaptation that brings it up and deals with it by having the inhuman character tell the human character that humans should be respected. Every piece of fiction that put this sort of behaviour on the inhuman characters to make a point fails at making the point and is objectively garbage. White Wolf Studios understood this and explicitly put a section in their Vampire: The Masquerade Core Book that while a lot of vampires flocked to and exploited various atrocities, none of them engineered it. WW2 was fully on the human Hitler and his cronies, etc.
@@nielsjensen4185 Sandman is very different, he most certainly does not at first -- as hes captured _by humans_ , however the reasons why he gains respect for humans is because he serves them- hes not a vampire, hes the King of Dreams. This is why Its simply different. As someone who loves Anne Rice id say its really went written and the show well executed, not garbage at all.
Weaponized incompetence strikes again! (And it's also just. So weird. "I don't care about this issue so bad that I'm going to actively keep fighting in this hellish hellish war! It's definitely not because I'm fighting for a terrorist state that will do terrible things to me if I desert... no, I'm just gonna be noble and wade into atrocity after atrocity. Because of my indifference!")
@@MrJibbajabbawocky more that they were wilfully or otherwise ignorant of the evil happening to people. Which is far more applicable today. I can't believe that ANYONE during that time, poor or wealthy enough to own slaves, was not aware of slavery as a practice. They may not have known the extent of the abuse, but they would have seen human beings being sold in markets, and anyone that doesn't immediately realize that's evil is themselves evil. So the argument that they didn't know is incorrect. They were absolutely aware, whether they fought against it or not is the issue. Today, it's all too easy to ignore the abuse black people go through daily.
Seriously, we have to get rid of the idea that people can be divided in "good" and "evil". People can do good to some people and evil to others. We can do evil and not even recognize it as such. Its better to call out peoples behaviours, help them recognize whats wrong and also help them change the behaviours for the better.
I find it fascinating that, from what I understand, Anne Rice made her vampires confederate slave owners to show that they're inhumane and don't care about humanity, and then everyone else after just took the idea of vampires during that era and just made them confederate propaganda. Very great video! as a non-american who knew nothing about the civil war and just likes vampires, I found it very informative and easy to understand!
@@PrincessNinja007 OOMG you've got to be kidding me.. ITS FICTION! Ance Rice was telling the story ffs, the characters are NOT REAL. Although Anne Rice and TVD are better character's then Fucking Twilight.
There’s a whole he sees then slaves humanity in them after being turned bit in interview. I always wanted Louis to be subtly racist, like just more suspicious, very some of my best friends are black type. I always imagined that he makes a real concerted effort every time a person of a different ethnicity is around. In my head he’s trying but he isn’t there yet and never will be. I think that Bill in True Blood has a very casually racist vibe to him. Every interaction he has with Tara or Lafayette has a tone from him. He saw her with that guy who was torturing her and ignored it. I don’t think he would have if it was a white person he knew.
How does a film titled “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” handle this better than all of these other media? The confederate slaveholding vampire does work on the level of “this dude was a vampire even before he was turned into one” metaphor but so few of these media want to confront this.
I think Jasper being an empath would be an incredible form of divine punishment. Imagine being involved in the deadliest war in American history and all that raw pain surrounding you. Then all the pain and suffering from the people you helped to suppress during the horrors of Reconstruction and you have to feel every bit of that suffering. If they had framed it as an ordinary man who stood by and did nothing to stop or uphold the cruelty around him then made unable to die and forced to feel all that pain he was apathetic to, that would actually be a really interesting character and story. But alas we didn't get that.
Honestly like this perspective a lot and who knows maybe at some point we’ll get a spin off. I do think out of all the examples in this video Jasper is by far the most complex and interesting characters to explore in this context, but it’s also worth noting he plays the most minor roll out of all the examples too so his story isn’t the focus for the primary narrative of twilight.
... Holy shit you're right. If someone wanted to make a Civil War era soldier who is sympathetic, there's so many options to explore besides this problematic one. A former slave who escaped that horror and fought back against a very personal tragedy, a volunteer from another country who sympathized with the slaves, a southerner who remained loyal to the Union for any number of reasons and might well have wound up fighting their relatives. So many options to explore!
remember at the end of the day A vampire had little to do with consuming animal flesh .The disease came about because of how the soldiers were all involved in colonialism then they went back to their wives and ate with and slept with her .No different to aids and hiv and all the negative emotions of that discovery .To shift blame onto Homophobics is a deflection .Those men spread disease (vamprism)because they were sleeping with other men and all of this nostalgia is romanticising it.They r worded the enslaved also so presumably until the cosmetic and medical industry caught up , you could very well have vampires running rampant for 3 centuries which is why they became more hideous ,vile and unhuman .
What's most sad about this to me is that slave owners are a fairly good analogy for vampires if you wanted to actually dig into it. They use the lifeblood of others to survive. But it's hard to examine that when you want to make your vampires good guys instead of the vicios and morally depraved creatures that were in the early stories.
@@GreenicegodThe tragedy angle mostly comes from when vampirism became popularly understood as an (often unwillingly) contracted affliction by bite victims who all maintain autonomy, rather than a demon/monster that just so happens to look human, hypnotizing people into being slave/blood bank fusions.
@@MilkyWayGrump Or the Vampire the Masquerade take that the tragedy is that you almost certainly turn from an unwilling victim into a monster that just happens to look human, because being an immortal, blood-drinking creature ingrained in a culture run by people who have lived for thousands of years will inevitably destroy your moral core.
The thing that gets me about Jasper in particular is because the Mexican-American war happened not too long before the American Civil War, and would have made far more sense given that he was turned by a Mexican trio of vampires. Literally nothing would have changed about his backstory, except you know, not a Confederate soldier.
Wait, this is a really great point! Meyers seems to have truly taken the path of (unfortunately) least resistance at the expense of interesting storylines and genuine consideration for the struggles of others.
@Tosin Akin Thank you, and yeah. Looking back on Twilight through a critical lense really makes you realize just how surprisingly low effort it feels, especially in terms of Meyer doing any research or development of characters.
Funny enough part of the reason for the Mexican-American war was because the Americans residing in Texas wanted to keep their slaves and that was against mexican law (in paper any person had their right to be free just by standing in mexican soil, but the mexican government made many concessions so american slave-owners could keep them a 'little' cof30yearscof longer). So... Yeah
My church had a class on helping people escape abusive relationships, and there is one line that really stuck with my from the whole thing: "The abuser's story will ALWAYS be better than the truth." When it's people we know, we always want to believe that it all is just a misunderstanding or an accident. That we don't live among monsters. The Lost Cause rhetoric is the same thing on a cultural level. It is painful to realize exactly how depraved your ancestors and your country was, so instead people continue to believe the cultural abuser. The Lie is much prettier than the truth. There will be people who believe it as long as we let them.
If you don't mind my asking, what kind of church do you attend? That sounds like one of the most practical and useful classes I've ever heard of taking place at a church. Besides AA meetings and similar such support groups.
@@LillyTheLonelySock we are technically non-denominational, but we have ties with the evangelical free and the baptist church groups. I think the fact that we are located in the city instead of the suburbs also plays a big part on our awareness and involvement in issues like that.
@@MattieAMiller Okay, good to know. I didn't mean to offend or anything. I just know that some religions and churches strongly urge married people to stay together and work things out, so I was impressed by what you said.
This class sounds amazing. We need a lot more of that in the world. Bonus points if they teach that romantic relationship aren’t the only place this plays out. Abusive parent/guardians, teachers, and bosses can have the same dynamics and the survivors there need a lot of help too.
As a Romanian, the idea of vampires spawns from our folklore of moroi (basically twilight vamps) and strigoi (basically dracula monster esc) and they were always propsed to be the rich or royalty, thoes in power essentially. Even in its base structure, vamparism has always been about lableing thoes with unequal amounts of power as "blood suckers" of the rest of the population. I assume the usa took this historical meaning, and like it does to most things, took its meaning non seriously but also in a positive sense, essentially trying to make the far right vampires seem "romantic" or "powerful". Classic propaganda taken from actual history and distorted. Dracula was always supposed to be depicted as a dying disgusting foul wealthy man, that barley even looks like a man, he meerly has power in money and mystery, but powerless in everything else.
Women will get obsessed over anything, look at all the serial killers who have fanclubs full of women dreaming about them. Vampires are almost always made to be sexy, charismatic and dangerous/violent. Thus they appeal to young girls and women. I don't think it's so much "right-wing propaganda", but more just fanfic
@pjmisley dude don't bring your stunted American politics here. Your "republicans" and "democrats" are in the same party benefiting the rich and keeping everyone else poor.
What’s crazy is that they didn’t need to be Confederate Soldiers they could have just been Soldiers from any other era on any sides. Having Confederate Soldiers in these stories as vampires kinda symbolizes this “Long Live the South” message. It’s was disappointing to see Jasper to not only feel any regret or remorse for being in the Confederacy but to be proud of it. These Pro-Confederate written color blind authors don’t see the problem these characters could represent to racism.
Right? Since Gone with the Wind was so normalized despite its pro confederate rhetoric, a majority of white audiences, specifically women, were entranced by it. The film tries to make the audience feel bad for Scarlet and what she lost from the war aka her wealth, power, and home provided by slavery. White female authors wanted to replicate the Southern romance between Scarlet and Rhett, but with a vampiric twist and a 200 y/o former confederate male protagonist 🤷🏽♀️
I was going to say that having a character be a vampire who fought for the Confederacy and had to learn in really sharp and painful ways that they were deeply deeply DEEPLY wrong would be a GREAT setup for angst and internal conflict! But then I realized that honestly that sounds really exhausting and I am full up on stories about how haaaaaaaard it is to not think other people are subhuman anymore. Maybe other people would love it, but not me.
@@ealusaid It could be a good arc for a side character. Particularly in a vampire story that was very much about reckoning with history in general, having some dude in the background undergoing that kind of radical transformation could make a good way to say, "Yeah, this kind of change happens and it's possible, but THE STORY IS NOT ABOUT YOU AND YOU SHOULD REMEMBER THAT." Make the dude, say, a foil for a vampire villain who remains proudly colonialist.
And it could be done _so_ much better! Vampires are creatures that maintain their inhuman power at the expense of human life. If you can't think of a way to turn that into an allegory for slavery, or the persistence of vampires' lifestyles into the 21st century (despite black lives now theoretically mattering) as commentary on how racism has persisted through the centuries, I'm not sure you should be writing vampires at all.
It’s also really weird to me that Jasper served in the confederacy because he has the power of physical empathy. Like, would not the suffering of slaves immobilize him or drive him to fight for the union? ESPECIALLY after reading Midnight Sun where we see not only can he effect the emotions of others, but other peoples emotions physically effect him 🧐🧐
Jasper joined the confederacy before he was turned by Maria, and he didn't have his abilities until after he was turned. Just because he was part of the Confederate Army, it does not necessarily mean he was for slavery. Many fought on both sides because it was expected of men back in those times to fight in wars during war time; if they were of age and physically able. It is what a boy did to prove himself as a man. It's like how not all German soldiers during WWII agreed with H*tlers ideology. War is not black and white. There are so many nuances, circumstances, and grey areas when it comes to war that to assume everyone fights on a certain side for only one reason and no other is closed-minded and naive. Also, Jasper's job in the Confederate army was to escort women and children out of battle zones to safety, which was hardly a position that advocated for violence. Keep in mind that Jasper was born and raised in Texas, so the South is all he had known at the time, and he was only seventeen. And due to how expensive slaves were to own, his family was unlikely to have owned any. Slave owners made up the minority of the population, as most could not afford to own slaves. Jasper also seemed to take no issue with Maria, who was a Latina woman. I don't get why people lose their sh*t over the Civil War backstory. The same people that complain about Confederate soldiers also have complained about Union soldiers.
@Twix I read Twilight 20 times over. I know Jasper was extremely empathetic when human. Your comment suggested that it was odd that Jasper would be a Confederate Soldier if he was so empathetic. He could only feel the emotions of those in his presence. Your comment also suggested that you think all Confederate soldiers joined in the fight because they were for slavery, which isn't true.
@Twix Either you're playing dumb or you never learned basic reading comprehension. It must suck to only see one side to things and to not at least try to understand why people choose to do certain things, regardless of how much you disagree with their choices.
“My black friend keeps asking my vampire boyfriend if he owned slaves 🙄🙄 God she’s so embarrassing!!” Is such an absolutely buck wild tone to take about something so serious. I feel like if there was a possibility my sexy boyfriend was like….a slaveowner, I’d want to know ASAP!! ???? I think the parallel between vampirism and slavery is theoretically interesting (as other comments have mentioned) but only in a more thoughtful piece of media because it runs into a bit of a snag when your vampires are cool and sexy and #damaged while also being proxies for *gestures broadly at the history of American exploitation, slavery, and colonialism*
Honestly, the whole thing would hit differently if the "vegetarian" vampire types were positioned opposing not only eating people, but exploiting people in general. The whole point of the angst and guilt ridden whiteboy vampire who hates having to feed on people would be far better made (if far more tricky to execute) if the issue were parallelled with, say, the white guilt of the abolotionists. The whole "you don't get a cookie for not eating/enslaving people as that is the bare f*cking minimum" theme could be super effective if done right
"Oh my god Tara, you can't just ask a vampire if he owned slaves! 🙄" "I did own slaves, actually. Also, I was a Confederate." "Well, I'm sure he is SUPER contrite about the whole thing. We all had mistakes in our past, right?" "There was the one who cleaned our house, one who cleaned out the stables. Good times. Anyways, still need someone to bring pie to the next Descendants of the Confederacy meeting, babe?"
If vampires were real they would 100% take advantage of racism and fight for the confederacy to own slaves to get free blood from said slaves only seen this idea explored really in a few works of fiction one being a manga called blasters knuckles give it a read it's good..... Mostly
Yeah - I didn't make it that far into True Blood because of the very heavy handed metaphor of vampires being gay people. Glad I didn't, because gay people also being southern apologia would have just been too much.
@@kevinhengehold4387 In the paraphrased words of Jenny Nicolson, "In this world, vampires are metaphorically gay and (Tara) is metaphorically homophobic."
Dominic Noble’s review of Interview With the Vampire has him say something along the lines of “Fortunately, his vampirism made him realize that there was no real difference between black people and white people and they’re all human; *unfortunately,* this comes with Louis no longer having respect for *any* humans”. And I still think that’s a really interesting way to handle this whole subject, honestly. I was a Twilight kid when the books were cool, but being European I had basically no historical context for the Confederacy, aside from “US south?” and “Fought in the civil war”. It came as a shock when I found out more about them later and realized during the Twilight Renaissance a few years back that none of this was ever addressed at any point.
Wanna know why? Because she is bad at research. In Eclipse Jasper explains his backstory which is at the Battle of Galveston he was escorting civilians from the city and then was taken my Maria. Well the Battle of Galveston in 1963 happened on New Years day, and was the Union held city vs the Confederates bombing them from the port. 3 months earlier in the Battle of Galveston Harbor (1862) in Oct it was the Confederacy held city vs the Union taking the harbor. So mixed both of those together. While Jasper never mentions its literally New Years Eve or thats its the dead of winter, he states his side held the city. Which would have to mean he was a union soldier not a confederate. But Meyers wanted the "Southern Gentlemen" trope and so she just went with Texas=Confederacy even though about a 4th to half of the Texas military went AWOL after the vote to join the confederacy and joined up with the Union to fight the confederacy. So she could have still had him be from Texas just have him be a union soldier who rebelled against the state army.
@@nataliebland3078 Yeah, I think it was just lazy research. She probably googled searching for civil war battles in Texas and didn't bother to see which side had what and figured the confederates must have been the ones occupying the city. Or got it confused with the Galveston Harbor battle that lead to the Union holding the city but that happened in 1862 (Jasper was turned in 63 so that can't be it) [to be fair to her it was Oct 1862 and the other battle was Jan 1 1863 so it would have been like 3 months difference.]
I just started this show damn, they're doing such a good job on season 1 I defo see her as the voice of reason, seems like somewhere along the like they fucked up :/
@@tcrijwanachoudhury I didn't finish the series, made it through season 2 maybe; but what struck me was they really dove into the elements the books only touched on, and had that complex conversation. Later they leaned into the horror and Sookie's romantic entanglements too much and stopped saying much of anything.
Fun Fact: In the book, Lafayette would have died at the end of season 1. If anyone remembers the death scare at the end of season 1, the start of season 2, when everyone thought he died in that car... that was how he died in the book, and the show initially planned it that way in script, too. But the actor had gotten so beloved by the audience that they couldn't kill him and wrote another character to kill off instead. From season 2 on, everything about Lafayette is from the show writers. He was definitely a favorite on the show, too.
Tara is my favorite character on that show, and it's weird to me she isn't high on everyone's list. She's amazing and almost no one ever gives her credit for it.
Sookie sitting there GLARING at her for asking if he owned slaves...like, girl, how was that NOT the question immediately at the front of your mind when you found out he was a Confederate soldier? Tara is just saying what you all *should* have been thinking.
@@morley364 Because she either didn't care, didn't see that much of a problem with it, or didn't want to know that so she could continue liking him without feeling guilty/having to question if he's a good person or not since she mostly already made her mind up. She's super attracted to him and Tara bringing that up is morally inconvenient for her. Not to mention, her 'wonderful/kind' gran is clearly a confederate sympathizer who's proud of her lineage, so that might've impacted Sookie's view of the whole thing. Anyway, none of the above are good and Sookie sucks so badly.
@@TreeDwellingShrimp Definitely! When it's more offensive to ask if someone owned slaves than it is to own slaves...you might have a problem with your morals
Tara: Did you owned any slaves? Me a white woman (who has not seen the show): Fair question, you go girl. She was meant to come across antagonistic. Me: what???
I watched the show and it seemed like a totally fair question to me. I never understood why it was supposed to be seen as antagonist and why Sookie reacted like she shouldn't ask that. Girl, I know you like this vampire, but you really don't want to know the answer to that? You should be asking questions! Your best friend is black and you don't know if this guy is still super racist.
Well... Yes, even though it is a perfectly fair and logical question, it is very antagonistic. What the hell am I saying? Look at this perspective: I'm a Slav, the ethnicity the word "slave" comes from and considered subhuman by the nazis and neonazis. My ancestors, some 80%-90% living at that time were killed by the nazis because they fought against them as resistance members or Czechoslovak soldiers in allied armies. I grew up among my surviving family members who fought against the nazis, in the mountains, in the cities, gun in hand. I grew up meeting old Germans who fought for the nazis, some (few) are still alive to this day. However when I talked to a German old enough to serve the 3rd Reich, I wouldn't just ask "did you kill any Slavs?" Such a question would be antagonistic. Fair, logical, but antagonistic.
I've never considered this question, but it immediately makes sense. Treating humans as property is no different than treating them as food. In each instance, your very livelihood is dependent on the blood and sweat of others.
See, that's why I think there'd be some interesting possibilities for commentary with Confederate vampire characters, but all these shows immediately throw those possibilities in the trash by either dismissing/outright ignoring the whole slavery bit. At least with Anne Rice, you can see those possibilities being acknowledged and touched on.
Exactly my thoughts. Vampires have long been associated with the gentry in Europe, so if you’re transplanting them to the United States, making them Confederates makes a lot of sense, if it’s a considered decision.
Except that perspective does not work as there were rules of conduct concerning how slavery was to be practiced; rules that have existed for thousands of years in each and every culture that has had some form of slavery. In the American South, there was a social expectation on masters to treat their slaves well as this is reflected in the Christian faith in Ephesians 6:9, which applies many of the same ground rules slaves were expected to follow onto their masters (I.e. slaves treat their masters with respect and masters treat their slaves with respect). Treating them with cruelty or exacting abuses upon them was frowned upon as this was seen as a violation of those social expectations just as we frown upon child abuse. The only issue was this wasn’t solidly grounded in the legal system, but that has more to do with the original nature slavery found itself in during the 18th century more than anything else (i.e. the law could not govern the frontier territories) and, in turn, left much of it up to the individual master. Even so, the social expectations were usually reinforced by the majority of masters as the majority were small-time plantation farmers with a small number of slaves working under them. This meant there was a tightly-knit community within the plantation environment that often obfuscated many of the major cruelties seen on large plantations (I.e. plantations with 100 or more slaves). Most of the cruelties witnessed took place on large plantations where there was a need to have overseers paid to help discipline and manage the slaves on the plantations, which is where many of the stories about cruelties come from. In most cases, the overwhelming majority of slave owners (masters) did not commit any such cruelties against the slaves under their charge. They were “property” in the sense that they were legally owned by someone, but this does not mean a master could do whatever he wanted with them without it reflecting upon his own character. In southern society, the kinder you were to the slaves under your charge - the more you treated your slaves with respect and humility - the greater the chances were that you would be seen as virtuous.
It literally never occured to me, that Tara was supposed to look antagonistic when confronting Bill there. I thought it was supposed to show, that many people (including the Stackhouses) are ignorant about the past and that Bill is able to handle it... I always just saw it as an understandable reaction from Tara. I will watch this scene with more intent the next time around. :)
@@CarpeNoctem1864 I mean, even if she knew the answer, that would still not make it unreasonable to bring it up and let him speak for himself. But I still haven't rewatched, so I might be missing the point of the Jason context you brought up.
@@CarpeNoctem1864 She is an aggressive character, sure, but that's makes it difficult to determine, if she was depicted here as unreasonably aggressive or just as herself. I always just saw it as Tara being Tara and being in the right.
Speaking as someone who dug into their ancestry and discovered that I have an ancester who was a slave owner...it's really telling to me that Ben Affleck would pay to have that information suppressed. He could have pulled an Anderson Cooper and disavowed his ancester, but he'd rather hide the information than make a stand. Really gross, but not surprising.
I know he should do that… but as a non famous person I also wonder if I could buy this service. I already spend my time disavowing my living relatives so burying the rest of the family trash within the internet sounds great.
@@M-WG Geneaologists are real people you can hire! A lot of public libraries also help you do genealogical work yourself as well. Though if you also wanna get video of you looking good while you do it, that gets a little more expensive.
kind of, he didn't free the slaves due to morality even though he painted it like that, read a verified and historically accurate book with no bias and you'll see he used "freeing slaves" as just a front for something else, what he was trying to do wasn't morally correct but a morally correct thing happened as a result of it, that doesn't make him a hero imo. @@andyggjhjkl
@@oldstump1628but what about when that country as a whole and for a fact only under 20% of white people saw all people of color as human? It brings sense
@oldstump1628 I'd say even today, half the country is cartoonishly evil. And I'm not even talking politics. People just go out of their way to be horrible to eachother, and every time there's a big political issue, call for violence are common. If any group is morally lower than even the common modern man, they ARE cartoonishly evil.
Twilight specifically has always annoyed me for these reasons. It was at the height of its popularity when my family was moving my grandfather into a care facility and cleaning out his and my grandma's house. He was from Ohio originally, and his parents were older when they had him. He was also a bit of a hoarder from a long line of hoarders. Therefore the house was full of stuff, including tons of old letters that dated from as far back as the 1890's. What really struck me reading through a lot of those old letters is that there was A LOT of disgust towards the confederacy / former confederacy. Like lots of stuff about how they were traitors, could not be trusted, etc. It was all over the place in those letters, I remember there was even a children's book along those lines my grandfather had kept. Esme was from the approximate area in Ohio my grandfather grew up, and she was born around the time a lot of those letters were written. And it therefore bothered me that she seemed so okay with Jasper. Like her parents and grandparents might have been involved in that conflict, might have been killed by Confederates. Certainly there would be people in her town who'd known people lost in that war, certainly people would have talked about it. Wouldn't Jasper's presence disturb her? Why would she treat him as a son? It's just interesting reading through those letters. The people who actually lived through those times and the generation that lived directly after them had no reason to sugarcoat what the Confederacy was. Reading through those letters, I really got a sense of how much lost cause propaganda and bullshit has managed to infect American culture in the last 150 years. Because if you drive through that same area of Ohio now, you will see the occasional Confederate flag. It's honestly deeply depressing how successful lost cause propaganda has been.
Sadly, for a lot of people, it seems like if they didn't live through it, they don't care about it- it's so irrelevant it's almost like it didn't happen. This is partly me being a grumpy history nerd (& a total hypocrite, cos there are a LOT of subjects I'm really ignorant about), but people are amazingly good at not even _considering_ the past & how it affects us today. So yeah, it's really easy for people to straight-up deny history, or revise it & make people believe your revised version, like the "lost cause" narrative. Australia has a pretty poor record too- rewriting our national story to one of glorious white explorers & settlers, & skipping or denying literal wars & genocide against Indigenous Australians. That's really interesting about the old letters, & what some people actually thought of the Confederacy a lot closer in time to the Civil War! Imagine if sources like that were used in education! (It'd be nice to learn about your family too). For me, that's one of the big fails in historical fiction- totally missing the _very_ different ways that people thought in other eras & cultures, & making them think like modern Westerners- or like our stereotypes of that era, without checking if they're accurate. Like, were there _really_ loads of poor Confederate soldiers who had no clue what they were fighting for, & no clue that slavery was even involved? Did they genuinely believe it was purely about state rights? Were they somehow _not_ actually racist or in favour of slavery? Where's the proof?... It may exist; I don't know that much US history, but it sounds very lost-cause-y & I'm not going to just accept it unquestioningly.
Of course they’d complain about how south man was bad. They fought them. It’s the same reason why southerner despise Yankees, except it’s far more pronounced as Yankees are a persistent problem. Namely, they move to the south, complain about how we’re all evil, and then try to dictate to us how to live. The north’s hatred of the south was not truly justified, but the south’s disdain for the north is constantly proved time and again.
@@MatthewChenault I... I'm sorry, did you just say hating the South cos of SLAVERY was "not truly justified"?... Why can't people admit that their country & their ancestors did awful things? I'm a white Aussie, & I can admit that my country & my ancestors did shit things, AND that I still benefit from it today- it doesn't mean I hate myself or my ancestors; it just means I can admit their & my faults, & try to do better, like learning the history I wasn't taught at school, cos instead of the "lost cause", we had the "glorious white explorers" narrative, covering up what was done to Indigenous people- but ofc you guys have that too, on top of slavery...
@@beth7935, that’s presuming they solely fought for slavery and nothing else. The south was ultimately right to leave the union as they were being wronged by that union on multiple levels. Why the north hated the south stems from them “dissolving the union” and not remaining loyal to a government, not over any institution. The “slavery” argument is more of a post-war argumentation proposed by the abolitionists as a means of giving the north a “noble cause” to fight behind rather than their more direct reasoning: their disdain for the south for daring to “rebel” (leave of their own volition) against the federal government.
Imagine how interesting it would be to have a Vampire that was from Africa having witnessed everything from the birth of civilization, to the rise of Hannibal and Carthage, the golden age of Ethiopia, to slavery, liberation, colonization, and civil rights. There's a genuine gold mine of potential storytelling.
Yeah, welcome to Vampire the Masquerade, there are plenty of such opportunities. Though such ancient bloodsuckers tend to have godlike powers and it might ruin local balance of power, or impression of having street-level story for players, so it require some careful implementation.
@@Big_Sloppa I mean, personally with VtM, a major part for it to me is the idea that your characters aren't the biggest monster on the block, there will always be someone stronger than you, an exceptionally strong even fourth or fifth generation vampire doesn't actually disrupt that.
I would read about an African vampire working on a russian propaganda botfarm and then recalling the slavery and liberation and quiting modern plantation.
Yeah, that's like half a dozen of the Anne Rice vampire series. Only they're 'Egyptian gods' so it gets Ptolemy-era whitewashed. You know, from Carthage but will never, ever be observed in the narrative to "be African".
Here's an interesting question for True Blood: Did anyone sue the vampires that hold slaves? The main argument against reparations for slavery is that "it was a long time ago", which carry even less water when the slave holders are still alive.
no, the argument against reparations isn't just "a long time ago" it's the fact that people that had nothing to do with slavery (ie the millions of Americans be they white or non white hispanic) will have their tax money used on something that doesn't help their community when they or their ancestors had nothing to do with chattel slavery, there's over 120 million Americans that their ancestors didn't arrive until the 1920's, that's not exactly fair.
Fun detail: In the vampire horror action "Near Dark", Kathryn Bigelow had the fact that the "father" of the vampire murder family (and several of his "children") were Confederates as a sign of them having been evil _before_ they became vampires. Which is why they don't get redeemed at the end.
The way that True Blood and The Vampire Diaries appropriated the language of civil rights from POC and LGBTQIA+ communities was always bizarre to me, mainly because it was always straight white men who usually acted morally outraged when humans came for them, despite their tendency to gleefully murder innocent people and, also, that a large subset of them used to own slaves in the American South. Interestingly, these and other shows rarely call out vampires for what they are: parasites that just eat and hide. The Netflix series Castelvania seems to be one of the few that actually does this, and forces vampires to ask questions they should be asking themselves: what's the point of living forever? Loved this video btw :)))
I felt the same about True Blood. I was confused when I started watching it because at first it seemed like vampires were queer analogs. But then it’s revealed that they really are very shady, manipulative and predatory and I wondered if vampires were meant to represent how conservatives saw queer people. I gave up without finishing the first season, so I never really figured out what it was about, but it’s always stuck with me as really odd.
@@thrawncaedusl717 I think you can retroactively argue that point, but Trueblood was never a clever show imo. There were times it came close, like with Godric or when Edgington and Lilith seemed to have these grand villainous plans, but those stories died before they went anywhere
@@animeotaku307 agreed. Also Lisa’s speech to Dracula, where she convinces him to teach her how to make the world better with science and medicine. Ironically, being benevolent is the most logical way to live an immortal life. Sure it’s fun to be hedonistic…but all the time? Forever? That sounds absolutely awful
@@WiiMan1133 Their hedonism wasn't sustainable either. Even if the human farming did happen, how did they expect to keep the population up to be able to continue feeding despite their clear want to gorge, gorge, gorge?
2 they where using it to blend in, as was seen during the handmaiden seen, it was Katherine's reply to a guy asking her who the black woman was, easier to explain it away as a servant than a free person, free person's would have been lynched, as for the 3rd point, the story doesn't pain the confederacy in any light other than it's the side Virginia was in during the civil war, Damon joins his state milita to get away from his father. And then while on leave he at a family gathering during on flashback mocks his dad's understanding of the conflict, can't remember the exact words but his dad goes on about how the south is winning and Damon replays with I wouldn't call throwing young men away as wining the 2 then starts arguing. But that's part of the cast picking Virginia as the backdrop for the show, I'm guessing filming in New York was ether to expensive or they felt it was over done already, also the director's keeps talking about how beautiful the Virginian background/nature is during early seasons, can be seen when you watch the bonus feature of directors talking about what's going on in the episodes and giving some more personal information on what the actor was doing that day of filming.
I do like that they made Damon and Stefan grow with the years I mean Damon hated being a solider but he was so scared of his dad that he couldn’t say no
To your 2 and 3rd point- this is all stuff added by Julie and Kevin, the Salvatore lived in Italy during the Renaissance and no one has salves (in fact there’s an entire plot of Damon and Elena and co freeing slaves in the books version of hell but that’s a whole other tangent). It’s all very very unneeded and added for what I’m assuming is Julie Plec’s idealism of what the civil war era south was while ignoring the very racist and horror of the reality of that time period. This is my biggest issue of the book to show adaptation is the added racism and then never ever addressing it again in the show and having their black female protagonist be participating in celebrations of that era. All of it is a big yikes, and I say this as someone who adores the early seasons of tvd. I’d love to know your thoughts on how the show The Originals handles similar issues with Marcel and his childhood before Klaus took him in.
Rice's choice of the south as ground zero for her series is obvious when you consider that she was seeking to revamp the Vampire genre for a new world audience. The Old World Vampire stories, epitomized in Bram Stoker's Dracula, had certain traits that made it iconic: 1. An ancient reclusive aristocrat in a castle and sprawling estate. 2. Servants and peasants whose feudal fealty made them expendable and powerless - the perfect prey for the serial killer that is a Vampire. 3. A place with people predisposed to superstition - after all Dracula is born of Bram Stoker imagining what it would be like if all the rumors about the infamous Vlad the Impaler were actually true. Put that all together and what do you get: *an upperclass wealthy man who moonlights as supernatural killer.* Growing up in the flush of the 'Golden Age' of the Serial killer, Anne Rice saw the parallels between the Vampire and the names from the 6 o'clock news that gripped the nation with horror. And like any good writer she sought to capitalize on this. But how do you do so, when the Vampire is (at the time)as firmly tethered to the Old World as knights to Europe and Ninja to Japan? Simple: you identify the iconic vampire elements listed above, namely a rural place prone to superstition, with lots of poor helpless and a powerful aristocrat. The slave south was the perfect fit. New Orleans in particular is the *one place* where African traditions commingled with religious superstition to create a unique occult vibe. That this mosaic was born of slavery was even better, for slavery by design is a predatory practice. The many toiling for the few, with no rights to their labor, time, freedom, food, even their own children. What more the very blood in their veins? Louis de Pointe du Lac was born. Everything that followed - Twilight, the Vampire Diaries, True Blood - was just pale and shameless imitation, like the dozens of bootleg magic school stories that sprouted in Harry Potter's wake. And like the counterfeits they are, all these stories miss the point of Anne Rice's slave owning, slave eating Vampire: *telling an audience gripped with fear of serial killers tales about an ancient unstoppable murderer from the voodoo infested south.*
As an Anne Rice avid fan since my teens, I started reading your comment with the prompt feeling that I was gonna see misinformation and God.. I was wrong. You did an AMAZING explanation. And if you read more books of Anne Rice you will see that the first vampire's on her books come from Egypt. I'd like to point out that her vampire's are very disturbed and Louis is BY FAR the most aware or how wrong and fucked up everything they do is, and YET he had slaves because he is the owner of a plantation and it was the norm at the time. I would love to point out that Anne Rice have a Witch series too, and you can see black characters' portraits with fidelity to their cultural backgrounds. You have one family of white witches, and you have black witches that come from an African background with religious traditions of their countries (I don't remember if she specified countries). At one point, the black witches and the white witches are aware of each other, and they keep their distance (for multiple reasons, but let's just say... one of them didn't know what they were doing...) You also see the witches finding out about the Vampire's at the 90's if I'm not mistaken... Anne was a wonderful writer, she lived in Louisiana and was raised in Catholicism, what further explains her choice for this kind of folklore. But sometimes she took things a bit too far for my taste (like in Memnoch)
Your breakdown is very interesting, but also I feel like Anne rice isn't that interested in the plight of the slaves she depicted Louis owning. It's actually very interesting bc for all he rejects his vampiric urges and his supposed monstrosity bc of them, he never looks back on his slave owning as something as evil as drinking blood
I recently did some research on Les Misérables, and discovered that it was very popular in America at the time of the civil war...but it was abridged in the South, removing any reference to slavery (prison labor is kinda an important inciting incident), and publishers defended the decision by saying that what Hugo was commenting on had nothing to do with "race-based slavery". (spoiler: it had a LOT to do with that!)
Wait... if it had nothing to do with race-based slavery, then why did they take it out? I mean, I know that excuses for bigotry frequently don't make logical sense, but that one ESPECIALLY doesn't make logical sense.
@@ealusaid It's probably like how people want books with gay characters banned for being ''inappropriate for children" but claim it's not homophobia. The loopholes people find to excuse their own prejudice are rarely logically consistent. "We're banning this for criticizing slavery, but banning it has nothing to do with *Black* slavery, of course!"
@@ealusaid bc reading a thought out book that clearly states slavery=bad might lead some confederate dingbats to think critically. It's a long shot but that's the fear lol.
God, if we ever get to a point of removing racism from American slavery, we know we're in a bad time for propaganda, when racism primarily was the basis of the defense of slavey and proceses in the plotting in western colonialism.
@@ealusaid They cant deny it, because from the Confederate letters directly from them, they said the civil war was a spiritual one that was a fear of and percieved entitlement of owning black people. They would conspire that if they lost, it would doom the white man, and that their rationality was that black people were a race they needed to punish and break in, as the "white man's burden." Its why I hate the bad argument that "all cultures had slavery" when it wasnt politically the same everywhere. Similar stuff to the undertalked about enslavement of indigenous Americans as well. They were very conscious of how they wanted race to essentialize slavery for their framework.Thus the demonization of both groups via race, was supposed to rationalize slavery for them (that was really for mostly profit that they thought was a goldmine to keep.)
What's funny too is that if you want to set your story in that time period making your vampire a "slave-owner killing" badass is literally the easiest way to add some "good guy" points considering all of them are, in some way or another, the "good" guys. But nah, let's just add some racist history that we are never going to do anything with, especially since you can't consider vampirism a "punishment" considering they all seem to be relatively enjoying their lives.
Just once it would be fun for them to be like "Uh. Did you fight for the-?" "OH HEAVENS NO. Traitorous scumbags. I marched my way to Sherman's army and burned Georgia and those parasites to the gawdum ground."
One of the best ways I’ve seen the vampiric “punishment” play out is the use of vampiric decay, especially in a non-Christian context. The idea that all vampires start off looking and acting mostly human, but eventually they all decay into soulless, inhuman monsters. The final form could even feed on vampires, since they are so starved of sensation and memories of humanity that they’ll even eat the already-dead vampires. Vampires might enjoy their recent conversion and centuries following if they can stay on top of things, but the demonic future always hangs over them as a sort of worse “death”.
@@Patrick-jd1ku Vampire: the Masquerade has this exact trope. It started out as a TTRPG in the same "vein" as Dungeons and Dragons, though it also has videogames, visual novels, and apparently a tv show in the woodworks. If you are a fan of rpgs and Critical Role, I recommend watching VtM: Los Angeles by Night and the ongoing VtM: New York by Night.
It would be so cool if there was a story about a vampire who aided abolition during the Antebellum period. It would create an interesting contrast between an undead creature of the night (something demonic) assisting in the emancipation of slaves (an unequivocally good thing), and human preachers/slave owners (normal) espousing how slavery is “God’s plan” (i.e. using religion as reasoning for evil). You could really twist good and evil, faith and impiety, abominations and God’s supposed chosen around in that way by making the “virtuous” the damned and the damned the virtuous solely by their actions done on Earth, not the state of their souls. People never want to actually dissect how a vampire that was turned during a time of overt intolerance and prejudice for certain groups might, I don’t know, follow them throughout their immortal existence? I guess authors figure that once you’re a vampire, all humans become food, but on the other hand, I’ve seen a handful of interpretations people have made of Dracula where he never let his hatred of the Turks die. He still hated them and would liked to have seen them burn, though maybe that’s just a case of his personality being a vengeful one. There just seems to be a black hole where discussion of the implications of long-lived former humans, their perspectives, their perception of the passage of time and the changing of values around them, should be in the public imagination of vampires. To the creatively bankrupt, Vampires apparently are progressive, blandly traditional in a way that doesn’t overtly offend anyone, or apolitical and see people only as food without any greater reason given as to WHY they think that way or what processes led them to feeling that way.
Never heard of this channel before - used to be quite far right, now reformed. Love finding new content creators that cover stuff like this! Will be binging a bunch of your content at work today.
@@cult_of_odin Buddy, direct descendants of slave owners poured loads of money into propaganda campaigns, even having history books stamped with the phrase "unjust to the confederacy" on them. Who is doing the indoctrination, here?
A month ago, I watched the twilight movies for the first time with my friend, and I was honestly so shocked at the reveal of Jasper’s background as a confederate soldier. I’m pretty sure, if I’m not mistaken, that there was another confederate soldier vampire introduced as a background character in one of the last films, so it’s obviously not a coincidence within the franchise which makes the whole situation even worse. On top of that, I was also was unsettled by the colonialist undertones behind the relationship between the vampires and werewolves in the movies. The vampires (essentially white colonialists) invade the land of the werewolves (Native Americans) and tried to deprive them of their land ownership and natural resources, and treat them in derogatory ways in all of the movies. I think what disturbed me most was how tone deaf these inclusions were, and how obviously disconnected they are from actual historical events. So, placing the vampire characters in a sympathetic position is honestly very messed up :(
Adding to those colonial undertones: after the movie craze thousands of tourists flooded the actual Quileute reservation with no regard for the Natives living there. They were walking all over sacred sites. I remember GMA doing on a story on it.
@@xoyouaremysunshinexo As a poc I wish yall would realize that its important that advocacy doesn't equal handicapping actual indigenous voices. The quileute tribe was relatively unknown and underfunded up until twilight and with the help of the sagas notoriety the government granted them several acres of additional land owed to them not to mention tourism that helped to fund their tribe move out of a tsunami zone. Members of the tribe been having this conversation 15 years ago
When I was a kid my mom took us to monticello and mount vernon. She had seen the slave quarters before they eventually mowed them down. She took us to where they had been and described them to us. She made us aware of slavery and how disgusting it was. Then she told us about the trail of tears. Something that affected me personally as we had family that had died. It was a very interesting and thought provoking trip.
The slave quarters are the most historically important parts of those old plantations! It's what makes them historically important. Otherwise they were just big old houses.
You should visit the graves of the 600 Thousand plus who died fighting the war, if you are looking for thought provoking insight. All those young men dead who never had the chance at life.
@@williamthomas1 I have sir. I had family die in that war as well. Some of them butchered and burnt alive for running the underground railroad. I have zero sympathy for the losses the south experienced during the civilwar for those that fought for the south. As far as I am concerned they had it coming.
@@williamthomas1 Do you also have sympathy for N*zi's? Or Stalin's men? Or all the other absolutely horrific regimes people voluntarily lost their lives under? I couldn't care less if it was brother against brother. If one brother wanted to protect slavery then he had it coming. End of. I have sympathy for the other brother who had to find out his kin was a pos and kill him.
the way you explain the inclusion of louis being a slave owner and that being a factor in why lestat targets him made so much sense to me. after watching the show, watching the movie, and now reading the original book, why anne rice decided louis should be a plantation owner has been a question that has like. plagued me. because up until now i just couldn't understand it. it's no question that both louis and lestat are bad people, and the story is very much influenced by louis's perspective and how he views things. i think it's a super interesting idea that lestat targeted louis because he was a slave owner and had no issue with seeing other humans as lesser than. something that lestat believes since one needs to strip humans of their humanity in order to kill them for selfish purposes. the issue that louis faces is exactly what you said, louis now needs to confront that slaves are humans and he doesn't want to take human life. it's interesting that becoming a vampire was the only way that he would see that. you hit the nail right on the head and this has me thinking of this book and aspect of it in a whole new light, thank you so much! this video is awesome
That was such a great point I'd never thought about. You're right, its a real deep cut that the only way Louis could see slaves as people is to become a monster. I wonder if that was foreshadowing that he'd succumb and eat humans. Maybe that wasn't intentional foreshadowing but it works really well
From my perspective as a Roman historian / philologist, I have a different interpretation of the “brother v. brother,” framing of the Civil War. This trope is common in Latin literature in discussing the prevalent and traumatic civil wars that plagued the late Republican era. Many viewed these violent periods as traumatic repetitions of the original fratricide of Remus at the hand of Romulus that led to the founding of the city. I don’t see it as minimizing the trauma, but rather integrating collective trauma at the individual level. It’s particularly telling that the trauma of enslaved persons is left out of this narrative processing 😬
Yeah, that claim seemed very strange to me. The whole point of saying something is "brother vs brother" is to talk about how horrific it is. In most conflicts, families tend to stick together.
First off, amazing video as always! But, while you're technically correct, I would argue the Civil War wasn't the last war fought on US soil - Wounded Knee happened in 1890. The genocide of Native people wasn't an "official" war but, as far as I'm concerned, it was one of the longest bloodiest wars in human history.
It was made of up of several small wars from the colonials and tribes as far as I know, and Columbus pretty much just wanting to exploit their tolerance for their cohabitance to just enslave or gradually kill them off. Its then the really racist people claim that the native Americans, are "Indian givers" claiming they were the ones that started all the wars because "they gave land and took it back", when it was the colonials that broke their agreements and used racism to excuse themselves.
@@GeteMachine yes, there were official wars between the colonizers - then governments - and Native people, for sure. I'm Eastern Cherokee and we had an official war with the colonizers before the death marches started. But the savagery inflicted on Native people was... warlike consistently until Wounded Knee. After that they switched to residential schools, enforced poverty, outlawing culture, and repeated land seizures. Aka: the wars never REALLY stopped, they just used lies, erasure, and starvation instead of bullets. Indian giver is such a bullshit phrase, because history has proven who the liars and thieves are, and it sure as hell wasn't us. It's literally projection, ain't it?
Twilight has always bugged me. Edward is controlling to Bella, and most of the characters have no personality. Bella has no life goals after meeting Edward, only to marry him. She acts stupidly when they break up.
YESS after rewatching True Blood over the summer this thought has been lingering in my mind. I also hate how everyone thought Tara was wrong for bringing it up 🙄 Tara deserved better than that and her ending
I dropped the show back when it was still going because of how badly they were doing Tara. She was always in Sookie’s shadow and used and abused by everyone except Lafayette.
Funnily enough, the only Confederate vampire I could think of before starting this video was Lance Henriksen as Jesse in 'Near Dark' (awesome underrated movie btw). The extent of his backstory was "I fought for the South. We lost", without a hint of romanticism because the point of that movie is that being a vampire would be miserable.
I was about to mention Near Dark (1987! I would have thought it was from the 90's) as well, he says it while spitting up bullets and threatening the human characters (iirc) and absolutely not the hero. I wonder if that movie inspired the later characters?
I just watched Near Dark yesterday and immediately revisited this video to see if anyone thought this same thing! That movie was incredible when it came to showing the misery of being a vampire
If I wanted to make an excuse, I would say it’s because Antebellum slavers are an American analogue for parasitic European nobility, a la Count Dracula. I will say, however, that this is a very weak excuse, considering that all of the examples of confederate vampires I can think of (Interview with the Vampire, Twilight, True Blood, Vampire Diaries, etc.) are meant to be sympathetic.
Yeah, to echo Hbomberguy's Lovecraft video: there's a reason why Christian Grey, the BDSM mundane AU version of a vampire character, was just a billionaire. It's the closest mundane parallel to vampirism we have.
Confederate vampires are the antagonists in Abraham Lincoln vampire Hunter. In fact, vampires in that book serve as a metaphor for the parasitic and predatory nature of slavery.
I think you are 100% right. This is what happens when we try to reclaim monsters without looking at why they are monstrous. The point of a vampire was that they stole the life from others for their own pleasure. European lords with serfs becoming American slavers just makes sense. However, somewhere along the line, this desire was no longer viewed as evil, leading writers and culture in general to sympathize with the monsters without thinking through what exactly they are tacitly endorsing.
Yeah, you can pretty much say vampirism is just shorthand for slavery being about a select exalted few literally feeding on the live blood, vitality and energy of the entire population. But, as you point out, all these confederate vampires are not only meant to be sympathetic, they're the (romantic) lead of the story. And often going against even older, usually European vampires -- without noting that they're one and the same breed of evil.
Ok finished the vid and all jokes aside I really love your content. As a bi black dude who was also a ton of ‘nerdy’ stuff growing up I love seeing another black person who was cut from the same cloth discussing these things with a lens I hadn’t considered. Like when I watch true blood I was in my teens, and during that time I really hadn’t even considered how they were framing the topic of slavery. As someone who hasn’t watched it in a long time, I had forgotten it was even a thing. Having you speak on these trends really opens my eyes to them (I never made the confederate vampire link) and allows me to better analyze the media I view in a critical fashion. And on top of that I think you’re just really funny, vids are super entertaining on top of being informative.
@@Princess_Weekes this is exactly why I love your commentary so much! You speak to this feeling of "am I crazy‽ Am I in a bizarro Twilight Zone world‽". Love your humor and thoughtful commentary. Please keep it up!
Another thing I can't help but notice is that there's a huge connection between the Civil War and ghost stories in Southern culture. Not only did ghost stories rise in prominence after the Civil War due to all the casualties, but the infamous Klan outfit was explicitly designed to look like a ghost costume, to evoke dead Confederate soldiers. The narrative of the Civil War, especially in the American South, has always invoked undead soldiers as a way of justifying itself. And I think the switch from "Confederate ghosts" to "Confederate vampires" is a modern take that carries all of the same flaws and biases that it did when the Klan told the story.
Well, considering everywhere outside of Richmond was littered in the bones of the dead that had been left out in the open for years… then you might have an understanding of where those ghost stories come from. The big example I can think of is Cold Harbor National Battlefield Park, which is northeast of Richmond. The battlefield is (allegedly) haunted, which seems to be attributed to the brutality of the fighting there, the two-week stalemate that mimicked trench warfare during the Great War, and the fact everyone around there was stumbling upon the skeletal remains of the men from the Battle of Gaines’ Mill, which was fought nearly two years prior on much of the same ground as Cold Harbor. The National Cemetery has two trenches for the mass graves of nearly 1,000 union soldiers recovered from the battlefield through two search expeditions conducted in the post-war years (it’s where the iconic “burial team” photograph comes from). So, when strange occurrences began being reported there, it’s not hard to connect the dots to get a ghost story from there, particularly that of the “phantom fog.”
The invocation of ghost stories recalls the horrors of war to remember the tragedies that took place there. It was the living memory of those men who survived and witnessed the massive piles of corpses and the skeletons lying all over the place that would live on in some form; the ghost story being one of them. It’s also not exclusive to the south as Gettysburg has a rich ghost story scene as the result of the sheer level of carnage that took place there and warped the living memory of all who lived in the town or the soldiers who clashed there and recalled those terrible days. It’s simply an expression of the horrors they faced; the living on of the trauma of those horrific days; the legacy of the reaper that is war. There’s no need for any other explanation.
@@MatthewChenault While not quite exclusive to the South, the South still used the trope of "undead Confederate soldiers" as the face of America's largest hate movement - it's a very prominent symbol with very prominent meaning.
This video was so good and academic. As a black person AND vamphile (is this a word?) I’ve definitely recognized and acknowledged the depictions of historical backstories of iconic vampires AND the erasure of black voices within the vampiric power structure has always bothered me although, like many others in the comments, I couldn’t articulate it. I love LA Banks’ series but I read it years and years ago and didn’t see it as problematic then. Perhaps I need to read it again 😳
Interestingly enough, my (Mexican/Native) dad taught me about how the prison system has become a legal extension of the chattel slavery system using Gone With the Wind.
Stupid laws were created that it was essentially understood didn't apply to white people, for the sole purpose of being able to arrest black people and throw them on a chain gang. Thats essentially what "sun down towns" were. Essentially made all these laws about things you can't do after sundown. Like very benign crap, but again, only enforced against black people. Many of these laws can still be found on the books in many states, they are just not enforced anymore.
I was saying ‘and also Firefly’ to myself the whole beginning! This essay has hit so many points I have noticed over the years with this, right up to those GoT writers trying to do a Confederacy show. This motiff of the lost cause ideology has become an analogy for white male patriarchy feeling threatened. Replacement theory symbols for Red Pill Rebels.
When I first heard about a potential show examining what modern day America would look like if the confederates won I was curious. With the right writers/showrunners it could be an interesting indictment of how things might be similar (America never truly abolished slavery after all) and explore the various ways that abolitionists continued to fight ... Then I saw that it was the GOT dudes pitching it and my brain stalled thinking of all the terrible things they could do with all their GOT glory 🤞 all their original ideas are equally terrible and they fade into irrelevancy 🤞
I wouldn't really call firefly into this . I know, it is the looser of a civil war that were the heroes, and part of the inspiration was the battle of Gettysburg.. BUT: just because the south calls the war for slavery a fight for independence, foes not mean every war for independence was shady.. The world has known many civil wars, and in most of them there was no "right" side...just a winner. .
I always liked how Louis was handled, and it ends with the plantation being destroyed and abandoned. Always seemed pretty clear that the point was to show that he was actually more monstrous before being turned.
This is still one of my favorite video essays out there covering this weird trend in Vampire fiction. That being said, I would absolutely kill for a video essay unpacking all the messed up sh*t in True Blood specifically, especially when it comes to the disproportionate amount of violence and torture that characters of color had to endure, the odd framing of positive masculinity (in the form of Werewolf Love Interest beating the crap out of some other guy with the confederate flag hanging behind him), the bizarre handling of the show's first gay couple (featuring a black man and a latino man) whose lives are brutally devastated by a Sad White Woman -- and whose ghost then gets babied and forgiven into reaching heaven??? Not to mention just... Tara in general. All of that. Oh, Tara.
Why do you idiots watch so much media that you obviously don’t actually care for? Art isn’t there to agree or disagree with. Did the show make you feel something? If yes that’s a good thing. Not everything is supposed to be a happy fairytale. Sometimes shit sucks.
I started True Blood a few weeks ago because I had just finished Interview with a Vampire and wanted to watch another vampire show with adult protagonists. I could barely get through two episodes. I understand there was overt social commentary about racism and segregation with the whole vamp/human conflict, but the way Tara was written and portrayed put such a horrible taste in my mouth. And there was so much horrible sex for no reason!!! I may try again but I’m not sure how much more I can take
1) There is a bot around so please do not respond to any impostures. 2) OMG, I thought ... what if they made Damon and Stefan's story take place during the Civil War because it's seen as a war between "brothers" >.< Jesus.
I've been thinking about this subject for a very long time. As a lover of vampire fiction, it always baffled me how so many pieces of media just casually had confederate vampires. I always just kind of had a vague sense that gothic vampire fiction often depicted their vampires as aristocrats to highlight class antagonism and that the American equivalent of the wicked aristocrat was the slave owner but that never really satisfied me. Thank you for this!
Honestly, American vampire 'mythos' always just feels a bit odd to me, as half the vampires are only as old as some (admittedly few, but still) living people at the time of writing. It makes far more sense in terms of the vampiric vibe to have immigrant vampires who fled aristocratic society when they got chased out with pitchforks, puritan pilgrim vampires who used the insecurity of life in the "new world" to feed indiscriminately without being noticed, vampires who lived through the founding of America but didn't bother to travel over until there were easier, quicker means of transport and a more heavily populated feeding ground etc. As for tragic vampires, pretty much any backstory works better than "thought slavery was worth defending less than 150 years ago; still doesn't really regret that part". Antebellum vampires is the kind of thing that was creative as a one off, but wholly uninspired for a trend.
Honestly I would be super interested in reading about Mexican or even South American vampires fighting against invading European vampire armies. That is super fascinating to me, alternative history through the eyes of Native American vampires. Someone write this book!
I think authors might not want to do that one in the current climate. A well done depiction of a Aztec vampire would be a truly horrific monster give their history of brutally subduing the surrounding kingdoms and demanding the heirs of non-Aztec noble houses as blood sacrifices. After all, the Spanish conquest was more of an assisted civil war than an outsider invasion. While a story of an ancient Aztec vampire would be interesting, if I were a writer I would be worried about being considered racist for depicting an ancient Aztec blood-lord in a realistic way.
World of Darkness has this rattling around in the setting with Huitzilopochtli as a vampire sleeping under Mexico City and influencing things. Honestly, WoD, I’m general, is killer for this sort of thing. For example, They had a sourcebook entirely about the holocaust dead that they made with survivors and Jewish historians with the specific intention to refuse to glorify nazis and one of their signature clan characters is an utterly badass former slave who escaped and helped on the Underground Railroad and is now one of the most powerful members of his clan.
There's stories of Native American werewolves confronting European werewolves. Don't know the names but the stories are over 20 years old. My uncle read them.
Have you ever herd of the Vampire the Masquerade? It's a table top game series that often reads like a series of novels. In it, the yung(ish) European vampires escaped Europe for South America to get away from their oppressive elders and formed their own organization, taking elements from the local cultures.
excuse you Count Dracula is out here driving and Uber and hosting Airbnb, and he has to do that while doing a disguise switcheroo like he's in a 90s comedy. What a loser
Watching this video I kept thinking about morality in immortality. In the show The Good Place, Eleanor notice that Michael (an immortal being) doesn't have conscience because there's no point of having regrets if you have eternity to do things differently (and usually not bare any of the consequences of said actions). It really helped me understand why mythological gods are usually such assholes. And that could be a point in exploring vampire stories. How vampires lose their humanity over time, and the way their concept of morality changes.
I think Anne Rice's Interview With a Vampire does explore this pretty well thematically. A lot of the text of the book is Louis waxing on the evolution of his struggles with his morality in conscience, contrasted with Lestat who doesn't seem to be tortured by moral questions and just gives himself over to pragmatism and impulse.
@@inbach you should, sincerely they're a bunch of horrible people (or well vampires) just ignore the weird Christian era where Anne Rice tried redeem lestat
I think that was the general idea behind the "Humanity Switch" in TVD. Can't remember who said it, but one of the vampires mentioned that the "switch" was a lie that new vampires told themselves to help them adjust to their new, monstrous life with enhanced emotions, and that as centuries pass they completely loose the ability to "turn off" their emotions. Your example with mythological gods is also why Klaus was branded as "The Great Evil" until The Originals (where his immortal life finally found a purpose). For a thousand years he was on top of the food chain. The only think able to kill him was thought to be extinct, the dagger used to neutralize an Original couldn't work on him, and werewolf venom had no effect on him. Up until modern day, the only possible consequence for his actions was getting Mickael's attention, so he barely ever cared about the damages he would cause. It's only when his mortal daughter came to be that he genuinely started to worry about consequences.
I think the fact that the wealthy whites of the antebellum South painted themselves as an American aristocracy was a part of why Anne Rice made her vampire protagonist an slaveowning southenern... I'm ok with that angle because, like Princess said, the morallity of vampires never gets lighter than grey, but is really a missed oportunity in most supernatural romance novels, this people shouldn't feel bad because they lost the war, they should feel bad because they were fighting for the evil side even before they were turned into human-eating monsters... man, "self-loathing vampire sadboys don't hate themselves enough" what a hot-take I just wrote
The Originals, which is a part of TVD, actually has a main character in the main cast who's a former slave-turned-vampire (who's also the son of his owner, which is a whole other thing). It's kind of strange now that I think about it more. The fact that Marcellus is habitually disrespected and dehumanized by others is something that Klaus (the big bad evil hybrid who does all the atrocities, but he's handsome and has mommy and daddy issues so it's ok) relates to. Klaus has been abused before, and he sees something of himself in Marcel when he sees the kid try to fight back against his oppressors. He ends up emancipating the kid (, adopting him as his own son, and Marcel ends up asking to become a vampire like the rest of the Originals who raised him. It's even weirder when Klaus meets him and asks for his name, and the enslaved kid says his mother 'wouldn't name him' until he was 10 because she was concerned he'd die. But then she died first, leaving him an enslaved person without a name. Klaus *gives* him the name "Marcellus," since it has this meaning of strength and resilience, or something like that. It's uncomfortably romanticized and feels very White Savior. Despite everything we know about Klaus and the Originals, who are unafraid of violence, they have been alive long enough to have some discomfort with the concept of slavery. They treat people like objects, but they're also weirdly self aware, which makes it hard to explain. Goddamn, TO was a fever dream...
I agree - I liked the show but this White Saviour line was something I picked up on too. I liked seeing Marcel making something of himself when he ruled over New Orleans, I just feel like some extreme fans ruin things cause they’re so hot for Klaus and will excuse anything he does (i.e when Klaus came back to New Orleans and thought he was entitled to the city)
The Originals has a ton of problems. For example they’re essentially meant to Vikings before Vampires so that means they’d essentially be Scandinavian and should have either Norwegian or Danish accents but instead have the generic British accents for some odd reason. Not to mention their religion is hardly mentioned as they should be worshipping Old Gods like Odin and their views on certain religions like Christianity is hardly talked about or mentioned. As for slavery the Vikings had tons of slaves so yeah their views on it should atleats be addressed or why exactly did Marcel stand out even though they been alive for centuries witnessing the brutal acts?
Yeah Klaus is one of my fave tvdu characters but I feel like him and Elijah always held Marcel's past over his head like he should’ve been grateful Klaus "saved" him. And when Marcel went on to be king of NOLA Klaus couldn’t stand it although I think that has more to do with Klaus abadoment issues and superiority complex. Although I do feel TO was an improvement compared to TVD when it came to black characters and historical racism it still dropped the ball a lot especially with it being set in NOLA. A city known to have voodoo and hoodoo roots for the show to hardly have any black witches or magic users. Which I think AHS coven handled better imo.
I'm so grateful to my mom for putting so much effort into teaching me history. I remember her sitting us down for lessons, and she had two books; one a newer, sanitized, 'kid-friendly' version about the Trail of Tears, and the other an older book and not at all 'friendly' edition. She read us excerpts from both, really driving home the fact that no, there was no 'giving their land up' or 'moving away'. She made sure that we knew the facts and were aware of what it really was. She did her best to lay out all the reasons on every side, and how most of those reasons didn't justify anything, even if it explained why it happened. Sure, all her ancestors (except the native ones) were fleeing discrimination and/or death, but early americans as a whole bought their independence and lives through theft and murder. And the very, very least we can do is acknowledge the truth, and never ever romanticize it. I don't think any of the confederate stuff should be scrubbed away or hidden from sight, because it needs to be there and be acknowledged for what it was, which includes the evidence of their delusions of grandeur. But the romantization of that lifestyle is just weird and, worse, deeply disrespectful
YES! What's with the trope of a vampire being part of the Confederacy? Very rarely would we see a vampire of the same age from the North, but we'll see plenty of older ones from outside the Americas come over.
Amazing timing because I just started True Blood last night and was wondering why this is a thing?? They really wanted us to think TARA was out of line for asking Bill if he had slaves!
A well done breakdown. As a fan of vampires in general, I remember being annoyed at the positive rep for the confederacy, but it hadn't really sunk in just how many popular vampires were confederates. I had chalked the individual cases up to the creators being indoctrinated.
Its worse when the backstory she gave him would have made him a UNION soldier not a confederate one but she didn't do her research right. She says he was turned in 1863 at the battle of galveston (which happened on Jan 1, 1863) and it was the union who held the city. So he would have had to be union to escort civilians from the city.
When thinking of this topic, I also thought of the Character 'Stormfront' from the Boys, who also had conditional eternal youth and immortality like a vampire, and participated in a major war. Only in her case, instead of being a vampire from the American civil war, she was an experiment made by the Nazis in WW2. However in 'The Boys' instead of making her sympathetic, they double down that her being so unrepentant and proud of her past makes her absolutely vile. I think it's very normal to have held a view in the past that you look back on now and feel a little cringe or shame about. For some people it's a high school phase you feel a little embarrassed over. For more extreme cases, some were raised in cults, or Alt right circles and have since tried to get out. Paradigm shifts over the course of our lives are healthy. As years go by, we reflect, ideas change, opinions change, we become new people. For all these confederate vampires, what puts me off the most is that, after all this time, after witnessing everything that's happened since the civil war until today, gaining the ability to travel, meet new people, talk and share ideas, they're still making excuses? Some even still feel proud? Total yikes that they're not further interrogated about their participation in the institution of slavery.
Weirdly enough I usually took that as a reflection of the author more than anything else. Lost Cause Mythology runs *deep* in a lot of southern states. What started out as propaganda became so widespread and so ingrained and too taboo to challenge resulted in them actually believing their own lies a few generations later, and the broader US just shrugging about it in order to not piss them off. Like most of US history, unless you're actively digging into it, most people go along with the myth rather than the reality.
You mentioned that some people were born into cults or alt right circles, that utilize their experience therein as a way of justifying their discomfort (as if condemning the ideologies they grew up with makes them seem deserving of the abusive system they tried to flee from) with correcting past beliefs. This made me think of The novel “Educated” by Tara Westover. It is a hauntingly clear example of how gaslit these antagonistic groups’ youth are. Like, that book is Tara’s life story and the fact that she survived those events and then wrote on it to increase the public’s awareness of a very real, very modern problem of indoctrination, and it’s not even that widely known anymore, is scary.
This was amazing. I'm a white guy, from the North, and these questions have haunted me as well. I always assumed that Confederate vampires made sense because Evil + Evil = Scary. But, you're totally right; it never plays out like that. Fortunately, I wasn't given much in the way of Lost Cause mythology, so those narratives always seemed kinda off even though I didn't have the vocabulary to say HOW. Love your work!
@@stevejames9531 Pfft, get bent. I couldn't hate myself if I tried. With any luck, though, I might accomplish some "anti-white social engineering". I don't pretend to understand all the angles, but if White is supposed to be important enough to cause either self-hate OR pride...I guess I'd like to see it done away with. Nothing as petty as skin color should have so much power.
There are way too many pop culture protagonists that are former Confederates. Way, way too many. Firefly broke me, because while I want to love it, it's so problematic and obvious that it's icky. I'm on the fence about characters that openly and genuinely regret their former allegiance, and I'm seeking out voices that aren't like mine to see how they feel about them.
@Chandller Burse There is a big difference between an enjoyable evil character that is portrayed as evil by the author, and a character who is evil and the author goes out of his way to not address it. A joker who some how ends up being a batman ally and somehow would get nothing changed about him except for how the world around him treats him would leave a sour taste in people's mouths.
Part of what makes Interview with the Vampire so complicated is that it’s written in first person as a long flashback by a murderer who never felt bad for owning people in the first place. Louis is a monster, and since the novel is literally written in his words, it’s difficult to engage with the subject of slavery in a meaningful way without making Louis behave out of character. I read the book for the first time when I was 14, and as someone raised in Colorado in the early 90s, well before the movie was even conceived, I immediately assumed that Louis’s dehumanizing view of slaves was meant to be depicted as such-his “morality” was only ever conditional, and that’s why as the book goes on it’s possible for him to get easier and easier with killing. When it suits him, Louis can forget many things about ethics. Not to suggest Anne Rice isn’t problematic-it’s the only book by her I’ve read, and i know very little about her otherwise, so I don’t know-but there’s plenty in the book to suggest that Louis is just a big old racist who never lost the habit of considering other human bodies his property whenever it was convenient to his needs. Granted it has been a long time since I read it, but it never occurred to me that we were supposed to just accept Louis’s perspectives on the slaves-he’s a slave owner, and therefore his opinion was always sus to anyone with three brain cells. I had more stuff in here about education but Princess made some points that made me reconsider.
Yup, Louis was one of my first experiences with what is known in the literary world as an "unreliable narrator", and he was also an anti-hero. I read the book when I was a little too immature to get that, though, and so didn't quite realize that was what he was, just took his views about other people at face value, accepted that was just how he was and didn't stop to think I'd hate him in real life if I were to ever meet someone like him, and didn't think too deeply about it. Took the whole vampire world Rice had created as this "romantic" place that I wanted to join and totally failed to see that world as the horror it really was if I were to actually encounter such a thing for real. Yeah, I was stupid.
Hey I'm gonna past here a comment I made in reply to another comment. I'd love to talk about your vision, because I had a very different opinion when reading the books. " if you read more books of Anne Rice you will see that the first vampire's on her books come from Egypt. I'd like to point out that her vampire's are very disturbed and Louis is BY FAR the most aware or how wrong and fucked up everything they do is, and YET he had slaves because he is the owner of a plantation and it was the norm at the time. I would love to point out that Anne Rice have a Witch series too, and you can see black characters' portraits with fidelity to their cultural backgrounds. You have one family of white witches, and you have black witches that come from an African background with religious traditions of their countries (I don't remember if she specified countries). At one point, the black witches and the white witches are aware of each other, and they keep their distance (for multiple reasons, but let's just say... one of them didn't know what they were doing...) You also see the witches finding out about the Vampire's at the 90's if I'm not mistaken... Anne was a wonderful writer, she lived in Louisiana and was raised in Catholicism, what further explains her choice for this kind of folklore. But sometimes she took things a bit too far for my taste (like in Memnoch)"
Oh and just to be clear, I'm not saying Louis is a nice guy. If you read The Vampire Lestat - that is basicaly Lestat reading Louis' book and writing a book that basicaly say's "Louis is full of shit, he didn't kill as much people as I because he is a coward" - you see that Louis is very dramatic. Of all of her characters I'd say he is the most boring exactly because he is constantly tormented by the past, and he is the weakest one, after Claudia (the little girl), to the point that the other vampires say he is the most atractive as a partner because he is so "human like".
I loved learning more about this from you (I'm European and only learned very little about American history in school). But we have a similar thing here I think, with how people talk about the Nazi time, for example how the story "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" assumes that a high ranking officer wouldn't indoctrinate his son with his own hateful ideologies.
I remember being like 13 and hating how many confederate vampires there were so i wrote about a group of vampire women who swore to protect a freed man's family because he bravely fought off a sadistic hunter trying to kill them. The vampire women also helped enslaved people kept on the plantations family members of his were sold to escape and one of those vampire women had a tragic romance with one of the man's descendants culminating in her allowing herself to be captured and killed to save him.
That reads like a script for a CW or Netflix original 1-season series. Idk what guns back then could kill a vampire but sure. Maybe they just tie her up and put her out into the sun to get promoted to a California Raisin.
@@MK_ULTRA420 oh i had so many vampire stories and an entire universe of lore. I even insisted on spelling it as "vampyre" because i was again like 13 and thought i was so much better than people whose sum total of engaging in vampire media and folklore was bitching about Twilight. Tbh i still feel cooler than people who don't know any actual old vampire lore. I don't remember how I wrote these vampire ladies were being tortured but i remember giving my vampires weaknesses to diamond and sulfur and fire and i think iron? I dunno, it's been a while since i wrote them and i don't think i have the notebook i used as a story bible anymore I also decided sunlight didn't kill my vampires, only weakened their abilities and blinded them with too much exposure, which had to be healed under the light of the full moon. I still wanted them to be creatures of the night or at least avoiding the sun (i related to that as someone who has an extreme sensitivity to sunlight) but I also hated how everyone acted like vampires have always been destroyed by the sun when that only started popping up in common vampire knowledge after Nosferatu I do remember that the descendant the one vampire woman loved had one of her companions turn him so he could take revenge on his love's killers. He also eventually ended up capturing and taming a hellhound to attack on his command, which, i didn't realize at the time, but could probably be played up as an homage to Robert Johnson's Hellhounds On My Trail song. Maybe even a deliberate one in-universe, since the character could be familiar with the song
I remember how much I enjoyed Gone With the Wind as a tween when I first picked it up. I thought I was anti-racist, but excused the characters and felt they were just telling their honest side of the story that I hadn't considered before. Everything I learned before was that the Civil War successfully abolished slavery forever, and GWTW felt like a "new and fresh" perspective missed in history. The South felt more human. It wasn't until high school APUSH where I learned about the Daughters of the Confederacy and the deliberate or unconscious propaganda of stories like that one. My teacher was a white Southerner with an accent thicker than Bill Clinton's, and he never shied away from the brutal truths of the era. He showed us the failure of the Reconstruction, sharecropping to Jim Crow pipeline, the erection of Civil War statutes just as the Civil Rights movement was kicking off. In the convenient narrative of victimhood and loss - there was never any mention before of just many concessions the South got and how they were able to keep slavery under different names. And then it was obvious there was nothing about the lead-up or aftermath of the war that didn't have to do with the politics of race. I remember one picture of "good" Southern folks casually hanging out at a lynching, the body of the deceased swinging in the background. And that forever changed the way I saw nuance and history. That nuance should show the ugliness in all of our prejudices, not a whitewashing or "both sides had good". I think the endless apoliticization of storytelling and mythos is what leads us to all this backlash to Critical Race Theory and APUSH teaching even the most moderate truths about the American system.
The Daughters of the Confederacy are largely responsible for preserving as much as we know about the war. They are hated not because of any propaganda they pushed. They are hated because they often propagated inconvenient truths about the nature of the south and the general environment of the antebellum and bellum years.
I had the same experience. Literally did a presentation on GWTW, racism, and the confederate statues. I didn't completely try and excuse what happened. But thinking back, I really regret the way I approached things. I didn't really have a teacher to teach me the sheer ugliness of racism during the Civil War or after, though they did shine some light on them, so I had to learn these things through the internet
@@MatthewChenault firstly, i don’t have the money nor time to go see every single one of these confederate statues. Also are you opposing to the idea that I, a black person doesn’t condone the existence of these statues
Props to your teacher then. I always appreciate teachers who go beyond the books. I'm not American but some teachers on my school before went above and beyond to explain to us some American history.
I found one comment on a video about the Vampire Diaries that said Damon Salvatore would have been marginalised and viewed with suspicion in the Confederacy because they would assume from his name that he came from a Catholic background. I get the impression these writers don't do much in the way of historical research which is quite the oversight if you're making a show about immortal beings that have lived for centuries.
In the original book both Damon and Stefan were Italian. I guess the writers didn’t think much of it when they made changes from the book to the tv script
My step-father, a trucker, was someone you could probably classify as a good ol’ boy. Throughout my life, I saw him do nothing but stand up for minorities and women whenever they were being bullied or threatened with violence. But he also was absolutely a Lost Cause fanboy. It was culture when he grew up. I can tell you from so many conversations he genuinely believed in that myth, while being ignorant of reality. He was self taught but an avid reader. We only really started having these conversations at least outside of academia after he passed on. I would’ve liked to address this with him. I would like to believe that he would have come around and regretted. But I have no way to know now.
Also, to add to this, he drove city busses for a while after he married my mom. I don’t say “he had a lot of black friends”, though he might have said that since he was pretty chatty. But I can tell you that he absolutely only came home and shared stories about the awesome black folks he met that day. He didn’t like white churches. Honestly, I don’t think he really liked white people that much. Yet, Confederate Fanboy. 🤷♀️ Thanks for talking about that so well.
I LITERALLY WAS GOING TO DO A PAPER ON THIS FOR MY CULTURAL STUDIES CLASS. Such an odd thing that three vampires in the 2000s/2010s were all confederate soldiers at some point. 💀 WILDT.
i think in this specific case, the ppl running these shows weren't thinking it through per se, but rather just in a cycle or ripping off each other and ann rice. but i think political overtones are actually almost more interesting when they creep in, when they aren't well considered.
Especially Rosalie who ended up as a doctor and mechanic -two distinctively male dominated fields that were inaccessible to her during the era when she was alive. Honestly her and Leah (and maybe Seth sans the Jacob idolization) are my favorite characters.
Similar to this- my sister and I went to rewatch what we remembered as the best Scooby Doo movie, Zombie Island, and were disappointed at the treatment of the confederate zombies being "good guys" who warned the gang about the real villains and tried to protect them. It definitely falls under the romanticized version of the south you discussed, and the ways that supernatural creatures are used to further the "the confederacy lives on" message.
I loved that movie so much as a kid and watched it many many times and I never even noticed that. But what an unnecessary yuck. I mean they literally could have been anyone and they chose that.
It wasn't JUST confederate soldiers (it was all the werecats victims) and they do show them as the bad guys (marching people into the gator filled swamp) they where just the trapped souls there.
I mean, they were human before being confederate 😂 being a confederate soldier doesn't invalidate that they would want to warn living people not to become like them... which is even more poetic.
There's romanticizing the South, but there's also stripping people of their humanity. Both are wholly unrealistic. Being from any side of a war doesn't mean someone's going to want random people to be preyed on by werecats.
After watching this, my black ass still can't wrap my head around making characters confederate soldiers/slave owners without addressing or condemning it. But also I watched half the Dragon Age fandom recently get mad that the Netflix show made it clear the slave owner character was the bad guy. so I guess nothing surprises me anymore.
First, there’s a Dragon Age show on Netflix?! Second, people are mad that a pro-slavery Tevinter Magister is evil? Do they not recall how Tevinter mages were all evil until Maevris and Dorian (not sure if they’re anti-slavery or not, though) came along?
@@animeotaku307 I don't know about Maevris, but Dorian explicitly defends his family owning slaves and slavery in one conversation at Skyhold. One of the times where I really did not like being confined to the dialogue options available.
@@CelynBrum Yeah I remember Dorian was soft on that issue, pointing out that being a slave could be better for someone than being a beggar (Krem mentioned his father being forced to sell himself into slavery due to his business going under, so we know it’s not just elves, though they’re a majority). He also said that he didn’t think about it much until going south. I’m kind of disappointed that there wasn’t more opportunities to get Dorian to change his mind on it. The most is him refusing to drink from the Well of Sorrow because he recognizes the unfortunate implications.
Not to be the um Actually guy but as a northern Kentuckian I feel I must say we never officially seceded from the union and were not part of the confederate states to secede in February of 1861. Originally it planned to remain neutral. But the state was essentially split down the middle between the north and south politics wise. After the Confederacy invaded the southern border of Kentucky from Tennessee to try and claim the pro Confederate territory We officially joined the war on the side of the union and that area admitted into the confederacy was under their control for about three months.
Re: the Salvatores: I can only imagine it was a budgetary thing. Much easier to source Civil War uniforms and locations than trying to recreate Renaissance Italy. Still a bad choice. They could have easily been scions of an industrial family anywhere and anywhen else in the country. Hell, have them be sons of an Italian shipping family based in New York in the mid 1800s.
Sons of an American industrialist who married a beautiful but penniless Italian Contessa! They could shoot the "Italy" scenes in Cheesecake Factory. Boom. Done.
I feel like Interview with the Vampire and Gone with the Wind had a lot to do with it. Louis was a slave plantation owner. And GWTW is a pop-culturally glorified romance riddled with not so subtle confederate apologist themes for the Lost Cause. Plus, the white creators in the vampire genre tend to gloss over these themes whilst arguing, “It was just the times.” I once read a couple books from the Betsy the Vampire Queen series, hoping for a rom-com satire. Every few chapters, the protagonist had to remind the reader that she was a suburban conservative who loved GWTW and Rhett Butler. It really put into perspective the type of authors who dominated the vampire genre in the early 2000’s.
"It was just the times" and yet during "those times" there were quite radical abolitionists. By radical I mean they wanted to end slavery there and then. The more moderate view (much more spread in the North) was to stop it from spreading and let it die a natural death. Industrialisation was slowly making slavery uneconomic. And YET it was still too much for the wealthy elites from the South. They accurately predicted that end of slavery means end of white supermacy - something they were genuely afraid of
If they're going to gloss over the history, why do they alwaya default to using them, and not the union soldiers for protagonists. They apologize for the Confederates more so than Nazis. Odd. Yet Confederates predate them.
@@CrowTR0bot Julie Plec is the co-creator, executive producer, showrunner, and sometimes director of The Vampire Diaries. But her full-time job seems to be aggravating the show's fan base.
This may be an aside but the fact that Harriet Tubman isn’t listed alongside civil war generals as an incredible strategist ON TOP OF everything else says a lot. I know it’s a smaller part of a larger issue but I’ve had to go back and completely re-learn Civil War history.
Indeed. Even before the war John Brown referred to Harriet Tubman as General Tubman, due to her invaluable logistical skills (people and resources alike). Logistics may not sound impressive to most people, but in warfare the great strategists are the ones who focus more on their supply lines, support networks and intelligence gathering (the last one which you probably already know was something Tubman excelled at while in service of the Union army during the Civil War) than on battle strategy.
I don’t remember how you came up on my timeline, like what channel I watch that made the algorithm choose your video but I’m for once thanking the algorithm. This is such an interesting topic and I’ve asked that question myself
What I found bizarre when I bought the book season 1 of TB was based on was that "did you own slaves" was STILL ASKED, but not by Tara, she wasn't there. It was just asked as a casual curious question by either Sookie or her grandma, can't remember which. It really reads like Tara was added to that talk just to have _someone_ being disturbed by the elephant in the room.
As an avid Anne Rice fan, as someone who read the Stackhouse novels in middle school.. thank you for addressing this topic that is so often missed or ignored by the target audience of romanticized vampirism. This is a very interesting and important discussion to have. Thank you for bringing this conversation to the table, so that it may no longer be so easy to miss/ignore.
Hey! Can I ask you what was your favorite book by her? It's very rare for me to be able to talk about Anne Rice so I'd love to talk about her books! I really liked her Witching Hour book and The Tale or the Body Thief! I really like David Talbot as a character.
"The movie that a 15 yr old girl hated so much she made a UA-cam channel dedicated to hating it" Your doing God's work, young lady. Don't let anyone tell you different
I'm a latin-american who had little knowledge about confederacy, thank you for taking the time to explain it. Racism and slavery is barely talked about in schools here so a lot of these topics get loss in translation, or are straight up avoided. I'm glad i stumble into your channel! ❤
see this is why Abraham Lincoln: Vampire hunter is one of the greatest films of all time. The confederate vampires in that film are portrayed as the vile, blood sucking villans they truly are.
I often go to where confederate soldiers lie in state. I can safely say that they were not monsters nor vile people. If anything, modern man is the vile monster; the beast of its own making; the incompassionate creature that can only see himself and nothing else.
@@Imxel21, an eighteen year old kid who needed to have his leg amputated and died from gangrene is a “monster?” No, I believe you are more likely to be the monster for calling them “evil” for not supporting what you want. You call them “evil monsters.” I call them “the innocent.”
@@MatthewChenault The thing they didn't support was ending slavery. That's not some petty disagreement, it's a matter of human rights. A matter the confederacy was on the wrong side of. So no, there were no 'innocent' confederates. The confederacy stood for nothing but taking away the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness from people who deserved them as much as any other. There wasn't a single good man who fought for the confederacy, only traitors.
Thank you for making this video! I remember walking out of the theater after seeing one of the Twilight movies and asking my mom, "So are we all supposed to ignore the fact that Jasper literally fought to keep slaves? And we're supposed to root for him?" And I was a child when that came out!!! So many people were involved in the project and no one thought better of it?
This is one of my new favorite channels!!! I'm a big fan of film commentaries, and the nuances and perspectives you give are consistantly brilliant and thought provoking.
I had forgotten just how dirty they did Tara. I grew in Maryland where we took field trips to Fredrick Douglas's house and other historical black places, so it kills me to find out kids going to my HS now have never been taught about the Civil War as anything other than a states rights heavy viewpoint.
When I first watched True Blood as a European Teenager, the civil war storyline really flew over my head. Fast forward to recently, when I re-watched it years later and I was SHOCKED. Especially the way Bill talks about his involvement in the Civil war reminds me of the klischée about how German people tend to talk about their families involvement in the second world war: "they didn't know" "they didn't have a choice". Which always addresses how authorities can force you to do things you don't want to do, but never how a fascist government like that was even possible (of course it's always other people who wanted that) and how people still internalized lots of fascist and racist ideology and were willfully blind. There is this really interesting contrast where people nowadays show a lot of understanding for people then being forced to be soldiers etc, while at the same time claiming that they themselves would never have fought for Germany in WWII. Anyways, back to True Blood, I want justice for Tara! I really, really loved her character but they really wrote her worse with every new season. I love how confident and honest she is, how invested she is in protecting the people she loves, and that she doesn't let anyone treat her or her friends badly - well, except for Jason and her mother and that she calls out the lies she sees. Looking back, especially her love for Jason is already really terribly written. But in the beginning, her trauma, her secretly really warm heart etc. come across really well! I LOVED that she didn't just accept Bill as this sad southern gentleman vampire and asks difficult questions. But watching True Blood now, I really notice how little the writers truly knew about racism and the Confederacy. And this is what leads to the fall of Tara's character arc. Over the course of the series, she gets painted more and more as this aggressive, unreasonable woman who can't deal with her trauma properly and is unfair towards the vampires. At certain points, you really question why Tara and Sookie are still friends and Sookie is painted as this really good Samaritan friend for still helping Tara. Who REALLY goes through hell during the course of the show. I hope that in the future, there will be similar characters to Tara who are written from a point of empathy and understanding and don't judge her for standing up for herself. Whose justified anger isn't treated as unreasonable, but understandable.
While I agree with most of what you've said about Tara, I disagree about Tara's crush on Jason being terribly written. Tara wasn't attracted to Jason because of his physical appearance like other women were. She was attracted to him because she remembers that he protected her as a little girl from Lettie Mae whenever she was drunk and abusive. He's probably one of the few people in her life to do that (and he also does it again in season 3 when he stops Franklin from raping and killing Tara). She recognized Jason was capable of being kind and willing to protect others, which is why she had a childhood crush on him. However, that doesn't mean she let that crush prevent her from seeing Jason's flaws or calling out Jason when he was acting like an asshole. When Jason behaved the way he did after Gran died, she had no problem expressing her anger with him and throwing him out of the house. Likewise, she had no issue calling out Jason for how stupid he was acting when he was on V, and refused his proposal for them to get together while he was high out of his mind. Part of her character development was recognizing that Jason wasn't into her the same way she was into him, as well as realizing Jason had flaws he needed to work through that she couldn't fix for him, and moving on past that.
i just scrolled back through your videos and you've been uploading for FOURTEEN YEARS? more like Princess Decades. you are one of the OGs of this platform, and i have so much respect for you
As a wee adolescent, I remember wondering briefly about this when faced with Jasper _and_ Damon on my screen at the same time. This was such a perfect breakdown of all the reasons. In my head, I blamed Gone with the Wind and Anne Rice (without even knowing that her works didn't do what the more recent depictions of Civil War-era vamps do until this video), but this def opened me up to getting what else went into it. Since trends seem to be cyclical, I figure we're in for some form of vampire hype within the next decade to some degree so I hope that this too common (three too many already lol) trope dies before the next cycle. Also, I hope you blast your patreon and mention it whenever and however you want. You would absolutely _not_ be "e-beggin." The content you provide, the research and in-depth analysis, the hours and hours I'm sure that go into this--your patreon is well worth heading to and well worth promoting. I hope your transition into fulltime content creation for yourself is smooth and lucrative as hell.
Wonderful essay! I'm from Europe and anyone please correct me if I'm wrong... but I also wonder if this trope is conveniently being used for aesthetic reasons. The plantation owners seem to have been the closest anyone could get to being American royalty. In media that would mean they get to use beautiful houses with a pretty countryside and lavish outfits. Combine that with the air of mystery that sort of hangs over the deep south and it's going to look great on film. You get a period drama without addressing where the wealth came from. And I think many people are fine with the fact that they are keeping the Civil War era without a single mention of what it was really about. If they did, the whole thing would fall apart. Anyway, I wish you all a Happy New Year!
@@tessahartman7870 If you think about the atrocities and other crimes monarchs and other royals did to their citizens to colonized and enslaved people, i'd say plantation owners are on par with royalty, there is no need to whitewash royalty
I really appreciate hearing your take on all this. I'm writing my own Gothic series and it includes a few characters who were alive to remember the Civil War. Even though it was a bit different in my own timeline, you've given me a lot to think about. I really don't want to play into Lost Cause stuff by glossing over real suffering, no matter how good my intentions are. Thank you. ❤
I never got very far into the Vampire Diaries but the whole time I just felt so so bad for Bonnie, the one black girl in a town with like 75 confederate re-enactment based holidays. Like even without the vampires, RUN GIRL.
In so many ways, Bonnie deserved better.
It has a Get Out type beat
a sundown town?
Apparently the cast and directors were awful to her too.
@@LifesNeverHumDrum Jenny Nicholson taught me all about this despite me never seeing the show. Her Bonnie segment made it clear how badly they treated her. Just the difference between both her + Caroline's actress having real-life music careers too, while only Caroline got to perform music on the show made it so clear to me me. May all the Bonnies everywhere get to shine unobstructed.
My wife asked me this a few months ago, and I thought the answer was pretty obvious: because the vampires in the North were all hunted and killed by Abraham Lincoln.
That's absurd, he couldn't have killed all of them. That's why there are so many confederate vampires, they joined the south.
That is the best answer of them all
There’s a whole book and movie about it!
Nice
You a fool
Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter has a surprisingly thoughtful take on this idea. The Confederate leadership were vampires and they wanted to keep the slave trade going so they could have an everlasting supply of people to eat. It's not a perfect parallel, but slavery and the vampire myth are both based on stripping people of their agency and identities to become commodities and fuel for the powerful's gain.
The only major issue that story has, in my opinion, is the glorification of the North and Lincoln as heroic figures fighting strictly for moral reasons rather than economic and political. While the North and Lincoln found slavery distasteful, they still didn't particularly care for the well-being of black people and Lincoln even wrote about how he wanted to maintain white supremacy (as he, supposedly, believed racial superiority was inevitable, so he preferred to be on the winning side).
This element was sort of touched on, but very weakly, and it's presented as if it was resolved. However, at the end of the day, it should've opened the door to Civil War era supernatural fiction starring black heroes and abolitionists. I admire the movie for how transgressive it is on vampire fiction and media overall, especially today when pro Confederate sentiment seems to be getting stronger.
I'm really happy Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter did that. About halfway through this video, I realized that I actually quite like the idea of a Confederate vampire (with some strings attached): I think a Confederate vampire can very effectively underscore that plantation owners were a class of people whose existence relied on exploiting other people that they saw as their intrinsic inferiors; the comparison to Dracula-style vampires, who need to drink blood from comparatively under-powered humans (whom vampires in a lot of fiction regard as livestock) in order to survive, is very apt, I think.
Honestly considering how the cotton plantation system operated. An allegory to a vampiric meat market is inspired.
💯 Interview with a Vampire the mc is a plantation owner and he preys on the slaves of neighboring plantations. The material needs are met as well as a population to feed upon.
My problem with Abe the vampire hunter is that the text basically blames the Confederacy on vampirism. So - rather than slavery being an economic institution that very normal, very nice white people maintained because it was profitable and the status quo - slavery becomes the work of a secret cadre of evil monsters.
And we can all agree that evil monsters are bad and need to be destroyed. But - as this video shows - there are still a lot of (white) people who want to believe in the gentility and spirit of the Confederacy. All ALVH does is flip the binary so that soldiers who would be shown as uncomplicated heroes are reinterpreted as uncomplicated villains. Which completely avoids the actual historical discussion we need to have about the Confederacy: That they were ordinary people. Not heroes, not villains, not especially special in any way. Ordinary people who owned ordinary people as a way of life. THAT is the discussion that no one wants to have.
Shout out to Wolverine for fighting for the North. Not a vampire, but just an old Canadian with a heart of gold.
32:21 you know it
well yeah nothing happens in Canada, good or bad
Very true.
wolverine
@@kevinprzy4539nothing except being Americans ass with pitchforks, and burning the White House.
A lot of stuff happens, American education just only teaches American history
I think Logan from the X-men series is the only immortal fictional character I’ve seen who fought for the Union in the Civil War.
Conclusion: Logan > vampires.
And he's Canadian.
Aiden from the American Being Human also did.
Canadian too!
That`s because he`s Canadian and you can`t get much more Yankee than Canadians despite many Southern plantations being based on British Northwestern ones in Logan`s native Alberta.
Part of why Anne Rice hits so different is because she's literally writing gothic horror. Her vampires are monsters. Complex characters but still monsters. The 2000s pop vampire era is def bringing the Anne Rice angst but seem to drop the strict horror element and lay right into teen romance. They are usually edgy enough for the angst factor, but the Edward style vamp is still supposed to be read as a hero, not a monster. Really loses the thread of what a character like Louis is supposed to be imo. Vampirism is inherently exploitative - and I'm glad that the new show didn't want to touch the slave owner stuff for obvious reasons, but still had him wrestle with the morality of his exploitative career as a human.
💯
THIS! It's gothic horror, not romance! I grew up before Twilight, & my teenage vampire obsession was with Bram Stoker's Dracula. PROPER vampires! So I liked the Interview With A Vampire movie; it had that same inhuman, monster-ish, truly dangerous edge to the vampires, the way they lose their humanity. The rpg Vampire: The Masquerade also had that element, but I hate Buffy, & everything I've seen & heard about Twilight makes me mad. I've read a couple of short gothic horror stories set in the pre-Civil-War South, & I think it just works as a gothic, spooky, eerie setting somehow- kinda the decayed "aristocracy", & the landscape in places like Louisiana. That's my non-American perspective tho.
Also, honestly? There's stuff to explore *with* writing a vampire (or godlike/immortal being in general) that doesn't need to portray them as complete monsters/make them racist or Confederate, but that *can* explore the nature of *humanity itself* as needing to eat once-living plants and/or animals to survive, the need to change views and opinions over time (and not, say, hold what one believed as progressive in 1500 as just fine now), how to balance power differences or whether they are so inherently imbalanced one must forever remain a distant, celibate hermit, etc...
It's like, there's SOOOO much stuff to explore for both angst and food for thought without having to have a super long-lived character or one that inherently has to survive off others be a racist or unrepentant murderer etc and it's like... for people to just make them intentional enslavers or kidnappers etc is bad enough, and to fetishize that and glorify that is so much worse.
I just want a vampire that struggles as much with feeding as most of us humans that are SOMEWHAT aware of things like animal suffering and planetary collapse and the impacts of what we do eat on our health etc... do with eating without guilt.
And then there's the Sandman adaptation that brings it up and deals with it by having the inhuman character tell the human character that humans should be respected. Every piece of fiction that put this sort of behaviour on the inhuman characters to make a point fails at making the point and is objectively garbage.
White Wolf Studios understood this and explicitly put a section in their Vampire: The Masquerade Core Book that while a lot of vampires flocked to and exploited various atrocities, none of them engineered it. WW2 was fully on the human Hitler and his cronies, etc.
@@nielsjensen4185 Sandman is very different, he most certainly does not at first -- as hes captured _by humans_ , however the reasons why he gains respect for humans is because he serves them- hes not a vampire, hes the King of Dreams.
This is why Its simply different.
As someone who loves Anne Rice id say its really went written and the show well executed, not garbage at all.
It’s kind of funny how the most prominent defenses for the Confederacy can essentially be boiled down to “they’re not evil, they’re just stupid.”
"They weren't evil, they were just OK with evil happening to other people"
Weaponized incompetence strikes again! (And it's also just. So weird. "I don't care about this issue so bad that I'm going to actively keep fighting in this hellish hellish war! It's definitely not because I'm fighting for a terrorist state that will do terrible things to me if I desert... no, I'm just gonna be noble and wade into atrocity after atrocity. Because of my indifference!")
@@MrJibbajabbawocky more that they were wilfully or otherwise ignorant of the evil happening to people. Which is far more applicable today. I can't believe that ANYONE during that time, poor or wealthy enough to own slaves, was not aware of slavery as a practice. They may not have known the extent of the abuse, but they would have seen human beings being sold in markets, and anyone that doesn't immediately realize that's evil is themselves evil. So the argument that they didn't know is incorrect. They were absolutely aware, whether they fought against it or not is the issue.
Today, it's all too easy to ignore the abuse black people go through daily.
why assume malice on every count when incompetence will do - an old saying, not sure who said it
Seriously, we have to get rid of the idea that people can be divided in "good" and "evil". People can do good to some people and evil to others. We can do evil and not even recognize it as such. Its better to call out peoples behaviours, help them recognize whats wrong and also help them change the behaviours for the better.
I find it fascinating that, from what I understand, Anne Rice made her vampires confederate slave owners to show that they're inhumane and don't care about humanity, and then everyone else after just took the idea of vampires during that era and just made them confederate propaganda. Very great video! as a non-american who knew nothing about the civil war and just likes vampires, I found it very informative and easy to understand!
But Louise from Interview with a Vampire was a slave owner and held onto his humanity. Lestat was not southern.
@@ShieldMaiden452I mean he was the one telling the story, he's gonna make himself one of the good ones
@@PrincessNinja007 OOMG you've got to be kidding me.. ITS FICTION! Ance Rice was telling the story ffs, the characters are NOT REAL. Although Anne Rice and TVD are better character's then Fucking Twilight.
There’s a whole he sees then slaves humanity in them after being turned bit in interview. I always wanted Louis to be subtly racist, like just more suspicious, very some of my best friends are black type. I always imagined that he makes a real concerted effort every time a person of a different ethnicity is around. In my head he’s trying but he isn’t there yet and never will be.
I think that Bill in True Blood has a very casually racist vibe to him. Every interaction he has with Tara or Lafayette has a tone from him. He saw her with that guy who was torturing her and ignored it. I don’t think he would have if it was a white person he knew.
@@jeanetteblankenship6107 he and Louis didn't seem to mind eating Creole women, who were black and Spanish decent.
How does a film titled “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” handle this better than all of these other media? The confederate slaveholding vampire does work on the level of “this dude was a vampire even before he was turned into one” metaphor but so few of these media want to confront this.
I see you are a person of culture with that profile pic
Ye
That movie is amazing.
I think Jasper being an empath would be an incredible form of divine punishment. Imagine being involved in the deadliest war in American history and all that raw pain surrounding you. Then all the pain and suffering from the people you helped to suppress during the horrors of Reconstruction and you have to feel every bit of that suffering. If they had framed it as an ordinary man who stood by and did nothing to stop or uphold the cruelty around him then made unable to die and forced to feel all that pain he was apathetic to, that would actually be a really interesting character and story. But alas we didn't get that.
That would have given Jasper SO much depth omg. Especially since he also feels the fear and pain of his victims as a vampire.
Honestly like this perspective a lot and who knows maybe at some point we’ll get a spin off. I do think out of all the examples in this video Jasper is by far the most complex and interesting characters to explore in this context, but it’s also worth noting he plays the most minor roll out of all the examples too so his story isn’t the focus for the primary narrative of twilight.
Please write that fanfic, and link it in the comments.
Excellent post. I throughly enjoyed it. Thank you
Too bad Stephanie Meyer didn’t have the depth despite having a great story in her hands
... Holy shit you're right. If someone wanted to make a Civil War era soldier who is sympathetic, there's so many options to explore besides this problematic one. A former slave who escaped that horror and fought back against a very personal tragedy, a volunteer from another country who sympathized with the slaves, a southerner who remained loyal to the Union for any number of reasons and might well have wound up fighting their relatives. So many options to explore!
remember at the end of the day A vampire had little to do with consuming animal flesh .The disease came about because of how the soldiers were all involved in colonialism then they went back to their wives and ate with and slept with her .No different to aids and hiv and all the negative emotions of that discovery .To shift blame onto Homophobics is a deflection .Those men spread disease (vamprism)because they were sleeping with other men and all of this nostalgia is romanticising it.They r worded the enslaved also so presumably until the cosmetic and medical industry caught up , you could very well have vampires running rampant for 3 centuries which is why they became more hideous ,vile and unhuman .
What's most sad about this to me is that slave owners are a fairly good analogy for vampires if you wanted to actually dig into it. They use the lifeblood of others to survive. But it's hard to examine that when you want to make your vampires good guys instead of the vicios and morally depraved creatures that were in the early stories.
I was thinking exactly this! Most of the problems come when you want to make the bloodsucking parasites sypathetic and tragic rather than horrifying.
Considering that the modern vampire is literally an analogy to old feudal aristocrats, yea that tracks.
@@GreenicegodThe tragedy angle mostly comes from when vampirism became popularly understood as an (often unwillingly) contracted affliction by bite victims who all maintain autonomy, rather than a demon/monster that just so happens to look human, hypnotizing people into being slave/blood bank fusions.
Like Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter!! The book, not the movie
@@MilkyWayGrump Or the Vampire the Masquerade take that the tragedy is that you almost certainly turn from an unwilling victim into a monster that just happens to look human, because being an immortal, blood-drinking creature ingrained in a culture run by people who have lived for thousands of years will inevitably destroy your moral core.
The thing that gets me about Jasper in particular is because the Mexican-American war happened not too long before the American Civil War, and would have made far more sense given that he was turned by a Mexican trio of vampires. Literally nothing would have changed about his backstory, except you know, not a Confederate soldier.
Wait, this is a really great point! Meyers seems to have truly taken the path of (unfortunately) least resistance at the expense of interesting storylines and genuine consideration for the struggles of others.
@Tosin Akin Thank you, and yeah. Looking back on Twilight through a critical lense really makes you realize just how surprisingly low effort it feels, especially in terms of Meyer doing any research or development of characters.
Funny enough part of the reason for the Mexican-American war was because the Americans residing in Texas wanted to keep their slaves and that was against mexican law (in paper any person had their right to be free just by standing in mexican soil, but the mexican government made many concessions so american slave-owners could keep them a 'little' cof30yearscof longer).
So... Yeah
@Lupo98 fair point
@@darkmelodies2694 yeah... But I still agree with you that it would actually be a better plot point
My church had a class on helping people escape abusive relationships, and there is one line that really stuck with my from the whole thing: "The abuser's story will ALWAYS be better than the truth." When it's people we know, we always want to believe that it all is just a misunderstanding or an accident. That we don't live among monsters.
The Lost Cause rhetoric is the same thing on a cultural level. It is painful to realize exactly how depraved your ancestors and your country was, so instead people continue to believe the cultural abuser. The Lie is much prettier than the truth. There will be people who believe it as long as we let them.
This is it, right here
If you don't mind my asking, what kind of church do you attend? That sounds like one of the most practical and useful classes I've ever heard of taking place at a church. Besides AA meetings and similar such support groups.
@@LillyTheLonelySock we are technically non-denominational, but we have ties with the evangelical free and the baptist church groups. I think the fact that we are located in the city instead of the suburbs also plays a big part on our awareness and involvement in issues like that.
@@MattieAMiller Okay, good to know. I didn't mean to offend or anything. I just know that some religions and churches strongly urge married people to stay together and work things out, so I was impressed by what you said.
This class sounds amazing. We need a lot more of that in the world. Bonus points if they teach that romantic relationship aren’t the only place this plays out. Abusive parent/guardians, teachers, and bosses can have the same dynamics and the survivors there need a lot of help too.
As a Romanian, the idea of vampires spawns from our folklore of moroi (basically twilight vamps) and strigoi (basically dracula monster esc) and they were always propsed to be the rich or royalty, thoes in power essentially. Even in its base structure, vamparism has always been about lableing thoes with unequal amounts of power as "blood suckers" of the rest of the population. I assume the usa took this historical meaning, and like it does to most things, took its meaning non seriously but also in a positive sense, essentially trying to make the far right vampires seem "romantic" or "powerful". Classic propaganda taken from actual history and distorted. Dracula was always supposed to be depicted as a dying disgusting foul wealthy man, that barley even looks like a man, he meerly has power in money and mystery, but powerless in everything else.
Women will get obsessed over anything, look at all the serial killers who have fanclubs full of women dreaming about them. Vampires are almost always made to be sexy, charismatic and dangerous/violent. Thus they appeal to young girls and women. I don't think it's so much "right-wing propaganda", but more just fanfic
How does far right associate with confederacy vampires? More like Democrat confederacy vamps
@eMe933 Vlad Tepes is an inspiration for Dracula. Dracula in the folklore, is exactly what I said.
@pjmisley dude don't bring your stunted American politics here. Your "republicans" and "democrats" are in the same party benefiting the rich and keeping everyone else poor.
@eMe933 what? Not my fault you don't know history and pretended like you do lmao
What’s crazy is that they didn’t need to be Confederate Soldiers they could have just been Soldiers from any other era on any sides. Having Confederate Soldiers in these stories as vampires kinda symbolizes this “Long Live the South” message. It’s was disappointing to see Jasper to not only feel any regret or remorse for being in the Confederacy but to be proud of it. These Pro-Confederate written color blind authors don’t see the problem these characters could represent to racism.
Right? Since Gone with the Wind was so normalized despite its pro confederate rhetoric, a majority of white audiences, specifically women, were entranced by it. The film tries to make the audience feel bad for Scarlet and what she lost from the war aka her wealth, power, and home provided by slavery. White female authors wanted to replicate the Southern romance between Scarlet and Rhett, but with a vampiric twist and a 200 y/o former confederate male protagonist 🤷🏽♀️
I was going to say that having a character be a vampire who fought for the Confederacy and had to learn in really sharp and painful ways that they were deeply deeply DEEPLY wrong would be a GREAT setup for angst and internal conflict! But then I realized that honestly that sounds really exhausting and I am full up on stories about how haaaaaaaard it is to not think other people are subhuman anymore. Maybe other people would love it, but not me.
@@ealusaid It could be a good arc for a side character. Particularly in a vampire story that was very much about reckoning with history in general, having some dude in the background undergoing that kind of radical transformation could make a good way to say, "Yeah, this kind of change happens and it's possible, but THE STORY IS NOT ABOUT YOU AND YOU SHOULD REMEMBER THAT." Make the dude, say, a foil for a vampire villain who remains proudly colonialist.
Right, why are there no revolutionary soldiers? That's one war most people don't mind seeing romanticized!
And it could be done _so_ much better! Vampires are creatures that maintain their inhuman power at the expense of human life. If you can't think of a way to turn that into an allegory for slavery, or the persistence of vampires' lifestyles into the 21st century (despite black lives now theoretically mattering) as commentary on how racism has persisted through the centuries, I'm not sure you should be writing vampires at all.
It’s also really weird to me that Jasper served in the confederacy because he has the power of physical empathy. Like, would not the suffering of slaves immobilize him or drive him to fight for the union? ESPECIALLY after reading Midnight Sun where we see not only can he effect the emotions of others, but other peoples emotions physically effect him 🧐🧐
Jasper joined the confederacy before he was turned by Maria, and he didn't have his abilities until after he was turned. Just because he was part of the Confederate Army, it does not necessarily mean he was for slavery. Many fought on both sides because it was expected of men back in those times to fight in wars during war time; if they were of age and physically able. It is what a boy did to prove himself as a man. It's like how not all German soldiers during WWII agreed with H*tlers ideology. War is not black and white. There are so many nuances, circumstances, and grey areas when it comes to war that to assume everyone fights on a certain side for only one reason and no other is closed-minded and naive. Also, Jasper's job in the Confederate army was to escort women and children out of battle zones to safety, which was hardly a position that advocated for violence. Keep in mind that Jasper was born and raised in Texas, so the South is all he had known at the time, and he was only seventeen. And due to how expensive slaves were to own, his family was unlikely to have owned any. Slave owners made up the minority of the population, as most could not afford to own slaves. Jasper also seemed to take no issue with Maria, who was a Latina woman. I don't get why people lose their sh*t over the Civil War backstory. The same people that complain about Confederate soldiers also have complained about Union soldiers.
@Twix I read Twilight 20 times over. I know Jasper was extremely empathetic when human. Your comment suggested that it was odd that Jasper would be a Confederate Soldier if he was so empathetic. He could only feel the emotions of those in his presence. Your comment also suggested that you think all Confederate soldiers joined in the fight because they were for slavery, which isn't true.
@@rationalcynic8416 either you didn’t watch the video or you are a lost cause sympathizer 😂
@@Twix_loves_domo omg u are not even reading what he wrote.? wtf are u not comprehending..
@Twix Either you're playing dumb or you never learned basic reading comprehension. It must suck to only see one side to things and to not at least try to understand why people choose to do certain things, regardless of how much you disagree with their choices.
“My black friend keeps asking my vampire boyfriend if he owned slaves 🙄🙄 God she’s so embarrassing!!” Is such an absolutely buck wild tone to take about something so serious. I feel like if there was a possibility my sexy boyfriend was like….a slaveowner, I’d want to know ASAP!! ????
I think the parallel between vampirism and slavery is theoretically interesting (as other comments have mentioned) but only in a more thoughtful piece of media because it runs into a bit of a snag when your vampires are cool and sexy and #damaged while also being proxies for *gestures broadly at the history of American exploitation, slavery, and colonialism*
Honestly, the whole thing would hit differently if the "vegetarian" vampire types were positioned opposing not only eating people, but exploiting people in general. The whole point of the angst and guilt ridden whiteboy vampire who hates having to feed on people would be far better made (if far more tricky to execute) if the issue were parallelled with, say, the white guilt of the abolotionists. The whole "you don't get a cookie for not eating/enslaving people as that is the bare f*cking minimum" theme could be super effective if done right
"Oh my god Tara, you can't just ask a vampire if he owned slaves! 🙄"
"I did own slaves, actually. Also, I was a Confederate."
"Well, I'm sure he is SUPER contrite about the whole thing. We all had mistakes in our past, right?"
"There was the one who cleaned our house, one who cleaned out the stables. Good times. Anyways, still need someone to bring pie to the next Descendants of the Confederacy meeting, babe?"
If vampires were real they would 100% take advantage of racism and fight for the confederacy to own slaves to get free blood from said slaves only seen this idea explored really in a few works of fiction one being a manga called blasters knuckles give it a read it's good..... Mostly
Yeah - I didn't make it that far into True Blood because of the very heavy handed metaphor of vampires being gay people. Glad I didn't, because gay people also being southern apologia would have just been too much.
@@kevinhengehold4387 In the paraphrased words of Jenny Nicolson, "In this world, vampires are metaphorically gay and (Tara) is metaphorically homophobic."
Dominic Noble’s review of Interview With the Vampire has him say something along the lines of “Fortunately, his vampirism made him realize that there was no real difference between black people and white people and they’re all human; *unfortunately,* this comes with Louis no longer having respect for *any* humans”. And I still think that’s a really interesting way to handle this whole subject, honestly.
I was a Twilight kid when the books were cool, but being European I had basically no historical context for the Confederacy, aside from “US south?” and “Fought in the civil war”. It came as a shock when I found out more about them later and realized during the Twilight Renaissance a few years back that none of this was ever addressed at any point.
Wanna know why? Because she is bad at research. In Eclipse Jasper explains his backstory which is at the Battle of Galveston he was escorting civilians from the city and then was taken my Maria. Well the Battle of Galveston in 1963 happened on New Years day, and was the Union held city vs the Confederates bombing them from the port. 3 months earlier in the Battle of Galveston Harbor (1862) in Oct it was the Confederacy held city vs the Union taking the harbor.
So mixed both of those together. While Jasper never mentions its literally New Years Eve or thats its the dead of winter, he states his side held the city. Which would have to mean he was a union soldier not a confederate. But Meyers wanted the "Southern Gentlemen" trope and so she just went with Texas=Confederacy even though about a 4th to half of the Texas military went AWOL after the vote to join the confederacy and joined up with the Union to fight the confederacy. So she could have still had him be from Texas just have him be a union soldier who rebelled against the state army.
@@TheLastSane1that would have made for a more interesting character, as well, and it would have involved very little effort
@@nataliebland3078 Yeah, I think it was just lazy research. She probably googled searching for civil war battles in Texas and didn't bother to see which side had what and figured the confederates must have been the ones occupying the city. Or got it confused with the Galveston Harbor battle that lead to the Union holding the city but that happened in 1862 (Jasper was turned in 63 so that can't be it) [to be fair to her it was Oct 1862 and the other battle was Jan 1 1863 so it would have been like 3 months difference.]
Tara was truly the voice of reason in True Blood. The way the show sidelined her (and Lafayette) was criminal!
I just started this show damn, they're doing such a good job on season 1 I defo see her as the voice of reason, seems like somewhere along the like they fucked up :/
Not just sidelined - straight up tortured. Over and over. Just repulsive on the writers part.
@@tcrijwanachoudhury I didn't finish the series, made it through season 2 maybe; but what struck me was they really dove into the elements the books only touched on, and had that complex conversation. Later they leaned into the horror and Sookie's romantic entanglements too much and stopped saying much of anything.
@@maurinet2291 really? :/ shame on HBO really, honestly youd expect that kind of frivolity from CW
Fun Fact: In the book, Lafayette would have died at the end of season 1. If anyone remembers the death scare at the end of season 1, the start of season 2, when everyone thought he died in that car... that was how he died in the book, and the show initially planned it that way in script, too. But the actor had gotten so beloved by the audience that they couldn't kill him and wrote another character to kill off instead. From season 2 on, everything about Lafayette is from the show writers. He was definitely a favorite on the show, too.
I always loved Tara and could never understand how some of my friends quite literally despised her. Now 10 years later it all makes sense.
Tara is my favorite character on that show, and it's weird to me she isn't high on everyone's list. She's amazing and almost no one ever gives her credit for it.
same!!
Sookie sitting there GLARING at her for asking if he owned slaves...like, girl, how was that NOT the question immediately at the front of your mind when you found out he was a Confederate soldier? Tara is just saying what you all *should* have been thinking.
@@morley364 Because she either didn't care, didn't see that much of a problem with it, or didn't want to know that so she could continue liking him without feeling guilty/having to question if he's a good person or not since she mostly already made her mind up. She's super attracted to him and Tara bringing that up is morally inconvenient for her. Not to mention, her 'wonderful/kind' gran is clearly a confederate sympathizer who's proud of her lineage, so that might've impacted Sookie's view of the whole thing. Anyway, none of the above are good and Sookie sucks so badly.
@@TreeDwellingShrimp Definitely! When it's more offensive to ask if someone owned slaves than it is to own slaves...you might have a problem with your morals
Tara: Did you owned any slaves?
Me a white woman (who has not seen the show): Fair question, you go girl.
She was meant to come across antagonistic.
Me: what???
It is so wild!
That clip was wild. I’ve never seen the show so pure surprise. Those are Tara’s friends?? Bc a real friend would have told off everyone in that room
I have never seen Trueblood and I sat there agape when they made it seem like asking if you enslaved people was some outrageous thing to ask
I watched the show and it seemed like a totally fair question to me.
I never understood why it was supposed to be seen as antagonist and why Sookie reacted like she shouldn't ask that. Girl, I know you like this vampire, but you really don't want to know the answer to that? You should be asking questions! Your best friend is black and you don't know if this guy is still super racist.
Well... Yes, even though it is a perfectly fair and logical question, it is very antagonistic. What the hell am I saying? Look at this perspective: I'm a Slav, the ethnicity the word "slave" comes from and considered subhuman by the nazis and neonazis. My ancestors, some 80%-90% living at that time were killed by the nazis because they fought against them as resistance members or Czechoslovak soldiers in allied armies. I grew up among my surviving family members who fought against the nazis, in the mountains, in the cities, gun in hand. I grew up meeting old Germans who fought for the nazis, some (few) are still alive to this day. However when I talked to a German old enough to serve the 3rd Reich, I wouldn't just ask "did you kill any Slavs?" Such a question would be antagonistic. Fair, logical, but antagonistic.
I've never considered this question, but it immediately makes sense. Treating humans as property is no different than treating them as food. In each instance, your very livelihood is dependent on the blood and sweat of others.
See, that's why I think there'd be some interesting possibilities for commentary with Confederate vampire characters, but all these shows immediately throw those possibilities in the trash by either dismissing/outright ignoring the whole slavery bit. At least with Anne Rice, you can see those possibilities being acknowledged and touched on.
Exactly my thoughts. Vampires have long been associated with the gentry in Europe, so if you’re transplanting them to the United States, making them Confederates makes a lot of sense, if it’s a considered decision.
Makes sense, Jasper never really understood why the Cullens don’t eat humans he just did it for Alice
Of course Lestat liked him... Louis was already a vampire.
Except that perspective does not work as there were rules of conduct concerning how slavery was to be practiced; rules that have existed for thousands of years in each and every culture that has had some form of slavery.
In the American South, there was a social expectation on masters to treat their slaves well as this is reflected in the Christian faith in Ephesians 6:9, which applies many of the same ground rules slaves were expected to follow onto their masters (I.e. slaves treat their masters with respect and masters treat their slaves with respect). Treating them with cruelty or exacting abuses upon them was frowned upon as this was seen as a violation of those social expectations just as we frown upon child abuse.
The only issue was this wasn’t solidly grounded in the legal system, but that has more to do with the original nature slavery found itself in during the 18th century more than anything else (i.e. the law could not govern the frontier territories) and, in turn, left much of it up to the individual master.
Even so, the social expectations were usually reinforced by the majority of masters as the majority were small-time plantation farmers with a small number of slaves working under them. This meant there was a tightly-knit community within the plantation environment that often obfuscated many of the major cruelties seen on large plantations (I.e. plantations with 100 or more slaves). Most of the cruelties witnessed took place on large plantations where there was a need to have overseers paid to help discipline and manage the slaves on the plantations, which is where many of the stories about cruelties come from.
In most cases, the overwhelming majority of slave owners (masters) did not commit any such cruelties against the slaves under their charge. They were “property” in the sense that they were legally owned by someone, but this does not mean a master could do whatever he wanted with them without it reflecting upon his own character.
In southern society, the kinder you were to the slaves under your charge - the more you treated your slaves with respect and humility - the greater the chances were that you would be seen as virtuous.
It literally never occured to me, that Tara was supposed to look antagonistic when confronting Bill there. I thought it was supposed to show, that many people (including the Stackhouses) are ignorant about the past and that Bill is able to handle it...
I always just saw it as an understandable reaction from Tara. I will watch this scene with more intent the next time around. :)
Tara already knew the answer, she was just stirring the pot IMO, especially because Jason had already been reprimanded and she was gone over him
@@CarpeNoctem1864 I mean, even if she knew the answer, that would still not make it unreasonable to bring it up and let him speak for himself. But I still haven't rewatched, so I might be missing the point of the Jason context you brought up.
@Alresu Tara I feel meant well, being protective of her friend. But she also had a long history of being unnecessarily combative.
@@CarpeNoctem1864 She is an aggressive character, sure, but that's makes it difficult to determine, if she was depicted here as unreasonably aggressive or just as herself. I always just saw it as Tara being Tara and being in the right.
Literally I was like "Yeah girl get his ass"
Speaking as someone who dug into their ancestry and discovered that I have an ancester who was a slave owner...it's really telling to me that Ben Affleck would pay to have that information suppressed. He could have pulled an Anderson Cooper and disavowed his ancester, but he'd rather hide the information than make a stand. Really gross, but not surprising.
Also: Justice for Tara!!!
I know he should do that… but as a non famous person I also wonder if I could buy this service. I already spend my time disavowing my living relatives so burying the rest of the family trash within the internet sounds great.
@@M-WG Geneaologists are real people you can hire! A lot of public libraries also help you do genealogical work yourself as well. Though if you also wanna get video of you looking good while you do it, that gets a little more expensive.
@@ealusaid I want to re-bury the confederates my living racist relatives dug up. Can genealogists reverse their work?
@@M-WG Sadly no, the only thing you can bury them in is infamy.
I can't believe Abraham Lincoln Vampire hunter portrays confederate vampires more responsibly than most other vampire media.
It’s incredibly irresponsible to paint half a country as cartoonishly evil while making a tyrant your hero.
@@oldstump1628 but they were cartoonishly evil, and he was a hero.
kind of, he didn't free the slaves due to morality even though he painted it like that, read a verified and historically accurate book with no bias and you'll see he used "freeing slaves" as just a front for something else, what he was trying to do wasn't morally correct but a morally correct thing happened as a result of it, that doesn't make him a hero imo. @@andyggjhjkl
@@oldstump1628but what about when that country as a whole and for a fact only under 20% of white people saw all people of color as human? It brings sense
@oldstump1628 I'd say even today, half the country is cartoonishly evil. And I'm not even talking politics. People just go out of their way to be horrible to eachother, and every time there's a big political issue, call for violence are common. If any group is morally lower than even the common modern man, they ARE cartoonishly evil.
Twilight specifically has always annoyed me for these reasons. It was at the height of its popularity when my family was moving my grandfather into a care facility and cleaning out his and my grandma's house. He was from Ohio originally, and his parents were older when they had him. He was also a bit of a hoarder from a long line of hoarders. Therefore the house was full of stuff, including tons of old letters that dated from as far back as the 1890's.
What really struck me reading through a lot of those old letters is that there was A LOT of disgust towards the confederacy / former confederacy. Like lots of stuff about how they were traitors, could not be trusted, etc. It was all over the place in those letters, I remember there was even a children's book along those lines my grandfather had kept.
Esme was from the approximate area in Ohio my grandfather grew up, and she was born around the time a lot of those letters were written. And it therefore bothered me that she seemed so okay with Jasper. Like her parents and grandparents might have been involved in that conflict, might have been killed by Confederates. Certainly there would be people in her town who'd known people lost in that war, certainly people would have talked about it. Wouldn't Jasper's presence disturb her? Why would she treat him as a son?
It's just interesting reading through those letters. The people who actually lived through those times and the generation that lived directly after them had no reason to sugarcoat what the Confederacy was.
Reading through those letters, I really got a sense of how much lost cause propaganda and bullshit has managed to infect American culture in the last 150 years. Because if you drive through that same area of Ohio now, you will see the occasional Confederate flag. It's honestly deeply depressing how successful lost cause propaganda has been.
Sadly, for a lot of people, it seems like if they didn't live through it, they don't care about it- it's so irrelevant it's almost like it didn't happen. This is partly me being a grumpy history nerd (& a total hypocrite, cos there are a LOT of subjects I'm really ignorant about), but people are amazingly good at not even _considering_ the past & how it affects us today. So yeah, it's really easy for people to straight-up deny history, or revise it & make people believe your revised version, like the "lost cause" narrative. Australia has a pretty poor record too- rewriting our national story to one of glorious white explorers & settlers, & skipping or denying literal wars & genocide against Indigenous Australians.
That's really interesting about the old letters, & what some people actually thought of the Confederacy a lot closer in time to the Civil War! Imagine if sources like that were used in education! (It'd be nice to learn about your family too). For me, that's one of the big fails in historical fiction- totally missing the _very_ different ways that people thought in other eras & cultures, & making them think like modern Westerners- or like our stereotypes of that era, without checking if they're accurate.
Like, were there _really_ loads of poor Confederate soldiers who had no clue what they were fighting for, & no clue that slavery was even involved? Did they genuinely believe it was purely about state rights? Were they somehow _not_ actually racist or in favour of slavery? Where's the proof?... It may exist; I don't know that much US history, but it sounds very lost-cause-y & I'm not going to just accept it unquestioningly.
Of course they’d complain about how south man was bad. They fought them.
It’s the same reason why southerner despise Yankees, except it’s far more pronounced as Yankees are a persistent problem. Namely, they move to the south, complain about how we’re all evil, and then try to dictate to us how to live.
The north’s hatred of the south was not truly justified, but the south’s disdain for the north is constantly proved time and again.
@@MatthewChenault I... I'm sorry, did you just say hating the South cos of SLAVERY was "not truly justified"?...
Why can't people admit that their country & their ancestors did awful things? I'm a white Aussie, & I can admit that my country & my ancestors did shit things, AND that I still benefit from it today- it doesn't mean I hate myself or my ancestors; it just means I can admit their & my faults, & try to do better, like learning the history I wasn't taught at school, cos instead of the "lost cause", we had the "glorious white explorers" narrative, covering up what was done to Indigenous people- but ofc you guys have that too, on top of slavery...
@@beth7935, that’s presuming they solely fought for slavery and nothing else. The south was ultimately right to leave the union as they were being wronged by that union on multiple levels.
Why the north hated the south stems from them “dissolving the union” and not remaining loyal to a government, not over any institution. The “slavery” argument is more of a post-war argumentation proposed by the abolitionists as a means of giving the north a “noble cause” to fight behind rather than their more direct reasoning: their disdain for the south for daring to “rebel” (leave of their own volition) against the federal government.
Propaganda from the other side has been very strong too. It’s narrow minded to only believe one side.
Imagine how interesting it would be to have a Vampire that was from Africa having witnessed everything from the birth of civilization, to the rise of Hannibal and Carthage, the golden age of Ethiopia, to slavery, liberation, colonization, and civil rights. There's a genuine gold mine of potential storytelling.
Yeah, welcome to Vampire the Masquerade, there are plenty of such opportunities. Though such ancient bloodsuckers tend to have godlike powers and it might ruin local balance of power, or impression of having street-level story for players, so it require some careful implementation.
@@Big_Sloppa I mean, personally with VtM, a major part for it to me is the idea that your characters aren't the biggest monster on the block, there will always be someone stronger than you, an exceptionally strong even fourth or fifth generation vampire doesn't actually disrupt that.
I would read about an African vampire working on a russian propaganda botfarm and then recalling the slavery and liberation and quiting modern plantation.
It would never be handled with the proper writing it deserves.
Yeah, that's like half a dozen of the Anne Rice vampire series. Only they're 'Egyptian gods' so it gets Ptolemy-era whitewashed. You know, from Carthage but will never, ever be observed in the narrative to "be African".
Here's an interesting question for True Blood: Did anyone sue the vampires that hold slaves? The main argument against reparations for slavery is that "it was a long time ago", which carry even less water when the slave holders are still alive.
ooooo now that’s a fascinating premise
Suing a vampire would sound so funny if Hollywood never romantised them. Imagine someone trying to sue Nosferatu or Dracula lol
I want someone to write this lol
no, the argument against reparations isn't just "a long time ago" it's the fact that people that had nothing to do with slavery (ie the millions of Americans be they white or non white hispanic) will have their tax money used on something that doesn't help their community when they or their ancestors had nothing to do with chattel slavery, there's over 120 million Americans that their ancestors didn't arrive until the 1920's, that's not exactly fair.
Good question.
Fun detail: In the vampire horror action "Near Dark", Kathryn Bigelow had the fact that the "father" of the vampire murder family (and several of his "children") were Confederates as a sign of them having been evil _before_ they became vampires. Which is why they don't get redeemed at the end.
👍🏿
Near Dark, yay!
It was definitely used as a way to make them seem scarier and more monstreous, love that movie!
The way that True Blood and The Vampire Diaries appropriated the language of civil rights from POC and LGBTQIA+ communities was always bizarre to me, mainly because it was always straight white men who usually acted morally outraged when humans came for them, despite their tendency to gleefully murder innocent people and, also, that a large subset of them used to own slaves in the American South.
Interestingly, these and other shows rarely call out vampires for what they are: parasites that just eat and hide. The Netflix series Castelvania seems to be one of the few that actually does this, and forces vampires to ask questions they should be asking themselves: what's the point of living forever?
Loved this video btw :)))
I felt the same about True Blood. I was confused when I started watching it because at first it seemed like vampires were queer analogs. But then it’s revealed that they really are very shady, manipulative and predatory and I wondered if vampires were meant to represent how conservatives saw queer people. I gave up without finishing the first season, so I never really figured out what it was about, but it’s always stuck with me as really odd.
Dracula’s speech to Godbrand was so on-point.
@@thrawncaedusl717 I think you can retroactively argue that point, but Trueblood was never a clever show imo. There were times it came close, like with Godric or when Edgington and Lilith seemed to have these grand villainous plans, but those stories died before they went anywhere
@@animeotaku307 agreed. Also Lisa’s speech to Dracula, where she convinces him to teach her how to make the world better with science and medicine. Ironically, being benevolent is the most logical way to live an immortal life. Sure it’s fun to be hedonistic…but all the time? Forever? That sounds absolutely awful
@@WiiMan1133 Their hedonism wasn't sustainable either. Even if the human farming did happen, how did they expect to keep the population up to be able to continue feeding despite their clear want to gorge, gorge, gorge?
I still have FEELINGS about The Vampire Diaries. They are:
1. Bonnie
Emily is definitely called her servant once or twice - but later she reveals she was indebted to kath, and that’s why she was “bound” to her.
2 they where using it to blend in, as was seen during the handmaiden seen, it was Katherine's reply to a guy asking her who the black woman was, easier to explain it away as a servant than a free person, free person's would have been lynched, as for the 3rd point, the story doesn't pain the confederacy in any light other than it's the side Virginia was in during the civil war, Damon joins his state milita to get away from his father. And then while on leave he at a family gathering during on flashback mocks his dad's understanding of the conflict, can't remember the exact words but his dad goes on about how the south is winning and Damon replays with I wouldn't call throwing young men away as wining the 2 then starts arguing. But that's part of the cast picking Virginia as the backdrop for the show, I'm guessing filming in New York was ether to expensive or they felt it was over done already, also the director's keeps talking about how beautiful the Virginian background/nature is during early seasons, can be seen when you watch the bonus feature of directors talking about what's going on in the episodes and giving some more personal information on what the actor was doing that day of filming.
I do like that they made Damon and Stefan grow with the years I mean Damon hated being a solider but he was so scared of his dad that he couldn’t say no
I liked that Harper (one of the tomb vampires) was a union soldier
To your 2 and 3rd point- this is all stuff added by Julie and Kevin, the Salvatore lived in Italy during the Renaissance and no one has salves (in fact there’s an entire plot of Damon and Elena and co freeing slaves in the books version of hell but that’s a whole other tangent). It’s all very very unneeded and added for what I’m assuming is Julie Plec’s idealism of what the civil war era south was while ignoring the very racist and horror of the reality of that time period.
This is my biggest issue of the book to show adaptation is the added racism and then never ever addressing it again in the show and having their black female protagonist be participating in celebrations of that era. All of it is a big yikes, and I say this as someone who adores the early seasons of tvd.
I’d love to know your thoughts on how the show The Originals handles similar issues with Marcel and his childhood before Klaus took him in.
Rice's choice of the south as ground zero for her series is obvious when you consider that she was seeking to revamp the Vampire genre for a new world audience.
The Old World Vampire stories, epitomized in Bram Stoker's Dracula, had certain traits that made it iconic:
1. An ancient reclusive aristocrat in a castle and sprawling estate.
2. Servants and peasants whose feudal fealty made them expendable and powerless - the perfect prey for the serial killer that is a Vampire.
3. A place with people predisposed to superstition - after all Dracula is born of Bram Stoker imagining what it would be like if all the rumors about the infamous Vlad the Impaler were actually true.
Put that all together and what do you get: *an upperclass wealthy man who moonlights as supernatural killer.*
Growing up in the flush of the 'Golden Age' of the Serial killer, Anne Rice saw the parallels between the Vampire and the names from the 6 o'clock news that gripped the nation with horror.
And like any good writer she sought to capitalize on this. But how do you do so, when the Vampire is (at the time)as firmly tethered to the Old World as knights to Europe and Ninja to Japan?
Simple: you identify the iconic vampire elements listed above, namely a rural place prone to superstition, with lots of poor helpless and a powerful aristocrat.
The slave south was the perfect fit.
New Orleans in particular is the *one place* where African traditions commingled with religious superstition to create a unique occult vibe.
That this mosaic was born of slavery was even better, for slavery by design is a predatory practice. The many toiling for the few, with no rights to their labor, time, freedom, food, even their own children. What more the very blood in their veins?
Louis de Pointe du Lac was born.
Everything that followed - Twilight, the Vampire Diaries, True Blood - was just pale and shameless imitation, like the dozens of bootleg magic school stories that sprouted in Harry Potter's wake.
And like the counterfeits they are, all these stories miss the point of Anne Rice's slave owning, slave eating Vampire: *telling an audience gripped with fear of serial killers tales about an ancient unstoppable murderer from the voodoo infested south.*
Oh my gosh you explained this way better than I could ever attempt, mind if I can save this for convenient referential purposes?
@xxChainingHeartsxx kind words! Please, feel free to save it ;)
As an Anne Rice avid fan since my teens, I started reading your comment with the prompt feeling that I was gonna see misinformation and God.. I was wrong.
You did an AMAZING explanation. And if you read more books of Anne Rice you will see that the first vampire's on her books come from Egypt. I'd like to point out that her vampire's are very disturbed and Louis is BY FAR the most aware or how wrong and fucked up everything they do is, and YET he had slaves because he is the owner of a plantation and it was the norm at the time.
I would love to point out that Anne Rice have a Witch series too, and you can see black characters' portraits with fidelity to their cultural backgrounds. You have one family of white witches, and you have black witches that come from an African background with religious traditions of their countries (I don't remember if she specified countries).
At one point, the black witches and the white witches are aware of each other, and they keep their distance (for multiple reasons, but let's just say... one of them didn't know what they were doing...)
You also see the witches finding out about the Vampire's at the 90's if I'm not mistaken...
Anne was a wonderful writer, she lived in Louisiana and was raised in Catholicism, what further explains her choice for this kind of folklore. But sometimes she took things a bit too far for my taste (like in Memnoch)
Your breakdown is very interesting, but also I feel like Anne rice isn't that interested in the plight of the slaves she depicted Louis owning. It's actually very interesting bc for all he rejects his vampiric urges and his supposed monstrosity bc of them, he never looks back on his slave owning as something as evil as drinking blood
@@anylove370
Flawed characters do not equal flawed authorship.
I recently did some research on Les Misérables, and discovered that it was very popular in America at the time of the civil war...but it was abridged in the South, removing any reference to slavery (prison labor is kinda an important inciting incident), and publishers defended the decision by saying that what Hugo was commenting on had nothing to do with "race-based slavery". (spoiler: it had a LOT to do with that!)
Wait... if it had nothing to do with race-based slavery, then why did they take it out? I mean, I know that excuses for bigotry frequently don't make logical sense, but that one ESPECIALLY doesn't make logical sense.
@@ealusaid It's probably like how people want books with gay characters banned for being ''inappropriate for children" but claim it's not homophobia. The loopholes people find to excuse their own prejudice are rarely logically consistent. "We're banning this for criticizing slavery, but banning it has nothing to do with *Black* slavery, of course!"
@@ealusaid bc reading a thought out book that clearly states slavery=bad might lead some confederate dingbats to think critically. It's a long shot but that's the fear lol.
God, if we ever get to a point of removing racism from American slavery, we know we're in a bad time for propaganda, when racism primarily was the basis of the defense of slavey and proceses in the plotting in western colonialism.
@@ealusaid They cant deny it, because from the Confederate letters directly from them, they said the civil war was a spiritual one that was a fear of and percieved entitlement of owning black people. They would conspire that if they lost, it would doom the white man, and that their rationality was that black people were a race they needed to punish and break in, as the "white man's burden." Its why I hate the bad argument that "all cultures had slavery" when it wasnt politically the same everywhere.
Similar stuff to the undertalked about enslavement of indigenous Americans as well. They were very conscious of how they wanted race to essentialize slavery for their framework.Thus the demonization of both groups via race, was supposed to rationalize slavery for them (that was really for mostly profit that they thought was a goldmine to keep.)
What's funny too is that if you want to set your story in that time period making your vampire a "slave-owner killing" badass is literally the easiest way to add some "good guy" points considering all of them are, in some way or another, the "good" guys. But nah, let's just add some racist history that we are never going to do anything with, especially since you can't consider vampirism a "punishment" considering they all seem to be relatively enjoying their lives.
Just once it would be fun for them to be like "Uh. Did you fight for the-?" "OH HEAVENS NO. Traitorous scumbags. I marched my way to Sherman's army and burned Georgia and those parasites to the gawdum ground."
One of the best ways I’ve seen the vampiric “punishment” play out is the use of vampiric decay, especially in a non-Christian context. The idea that all vampires start off looking and acting mostly human, but eventually they all decay into soulless, inhuman monsters. The final form could even feed on vampires, since they are so starved of sensation and memories of humanity that they’ll even eat the already-dead vampires. Vampires might enjoy their recent conversion and centuries following if they can stay on top of things, but the demonic future always hangs over them as a sort of worse “death”.
@@lindenshepherd6085 is this referencing a specific story/series? Sounds interesting.
@@Patrick-jd1ku Vampire: the Masquerade has this exact trope. It started out as a TTRPG in the same "vein" as Dungeons and Dragons, though it also has videogames, visual novels, and apparently a tv show in the woodworks. If you are a fan of rpgs and Critical Role, I recommend watching VtM: Los Angeles by Night and the ongoing VtM: New York by Night.
It would be so cool if there was a story about a vampire who aided abolition during the Antebellum period. It would create an interesting contrast between an undead creature of the night (something demonic) assisting in the emancipation of slaves (an unequivocally good thing), and human preachers/slave owners (normal) espousing how slavery is “God’s plan” (i.e. using religion as reasoning for evil). You could really twist good and evil, faith and impiety, abominations and God’s supposed chosen around in that way by making the “virtuous” the damned and the damned the virtuous solely by their actions done on Earth, not the state of their souls.
People never want to actually dissect how a vampire that was turned during a time of overt intolerance and prejudice for certain groups might, I don’t know, follow them throughout their immortal existence? I guess authors figure that once you’re a vampire, all humans become food, but on the other hand, I’ve seen a handful of interpretations people have made of Dracula where he never let his hatred of the Turks die. He still hated them and would liked to have seen them burn, though maybe that’s just a case of his personality being a vengeful one.
There just seems to be a black hole where discussion of the implications of long-lived former humans, their perspectives, their perception of the passage of time and the changing of values around them, should be in the public imagination of vampires. To the creatively bankrupt, Vampires apparently are progressive, blandly traditional in a way that doesn’t overtly offend anyone, or apolitical and see people only as food without any greater reason given as to WHY they think that way or what processes led them to feeling that way.
Never heard of this channel before - used to be quite far right, now reformed. Love finding new content creators that cover stuff like this! Will be binging a bunch of your content at work today.
You spelled "indoctrinated" wrong.
@@cult_of_odin Buddy, direct descendants of slave owners poured loads of money into propaganda campaigns, even having history books stamped with the phrase "unjust to the confederacy" on them. Who is doing the indoctrination, here?
A month ago, I watched the twilight movies for the first time with my friend, and I was honestly so shocked at the reveal of Jasper’s background as a confederate soldier. I’m pretty sure, if I’m not mistaken, that there was another confederate soldier vampire introduced as a background character in one of the last films, so it’s obviously not a coincidence within the franchise which makes the whole situation even worse.
On top of that, I was also was unsettled by the colonialist undertones behind the relationship between the vampires and werewolves in the movies. The vampires (essentially white colonialists) invade the land of the werewolves (Native Americans) and tried to deprive them of their land ownership and natural resources, and treat them in derogatory ways in all of the movies. I think what disturbed me most was how tone deaf these inclusions were, and how obviously disconnected they are from actual historical events. So, placing the vampire characters in a sympathetic position is honestly very messed up :(
Adding to those colonial undertones: after the movie craze thousands of tourists flooded the actual Quileute reservation with no regard for the Natives living there. They were walking all over sacred sites. I remember GMA doing on a story on it.
@@xoyouaremysunshinexo Oh god, That’s awful! I had no idea. That just makes it even worse. Thanks for letting me know.
With the writer being Mormon, it didn't surprise me but still nonetheless I hate her work.
@@xoyouaremysunshinexo As a poc I wish yall would realize that its important that advocacy doesn't equal handicapping actual indigenous voices. The quileute tribe was relatively unknown and underfunded up until twilight and with the help of the sagas notoriety the government granted them several acres of additional land owed to them not to mention tourism that helped to fund their tribe move out of a tsunami zone. Members of the tribe been having this conversation 15 years ago
Put on top of that that Jacob was played by a white guy...
When I was a kid my mom took us to monticello and mount vernon. She had seen the slave quarters before they eventually mowed them down. She took us to where they had been and described them to us. She made us aware of slavery and how disgusting it was. Then she told us about the trail of tears. Something that affected me personally as we had family that had died. It was a very interesting and thought provoking trip.
The slave quarters are the most historically important parts of those old plantations! It's what makes them historically important. Otherwise they were just big old houses.
You should visit the graves of the 600 Thousand plus who died fighting the war, if you are looking for thought provoking insight. All those young men dead who never had the chance at life.
@@williamthomas1 I have sir. I had family die in that war as well. Some of them butchered and burnt alive for running the underground railroad. I have zero sympathy for the losses the south experienced during the civilwar for those that fought for the south. As far as I am concerned they had it coming.
@@williamthomas1 Do you also have sympathy for N*zi's? Or Stalin's men? Or all the other absolutely horrific regimes people voluntarily lost their lives under? I couldn't care less if it was brother against brother. If one brother wanted to protect slavery then he had it coming. End of. I have sympathy for the other brother who had to find out his kin was a pos and kill him.
@@katharineeavan9705 I imagine you didn't try out for the debate team.
the way you explain the inclusion of louis being a slave owner and that being a factor in why lestat targets him made so much sense to me. after watching the show, watching the movie, and now reading the original book, why anne rice decided louis should be a plantation owner has been a question that has like. plagued me. because up until now i just couldn't understand it. it's no question that both louis and lestat are bad people, and the story is very much influenced by louis's perspective and how he views things. i think it's a super interesting idea that lestat targeted louis because he was a slave owner and had no issue with seeing other humans as lesser than. something that lestat believes since one needs to strip humans of their humanity in order to kill them for selfish purposes. the issue that louis faces is exactly what you said, louis now needs to confront that slaves are humans and he doesn't want to take human life. it's interesting that becoming a vampire was the only way that he would see that. you hit the nail right on the head and this has me thinking of this book and aspect of it in a whole new light, thank you so much! this video is awesome
That was such a great point I'd never thought about. You're right, its a real deep cut that the only way Louis could see slaves as people is to become a monster. I wonder if that was foreshadowing that he'd succumb and eat humans. Maybe that wasn't intentional foreshadowing but it works really well
@@dismurrart6648 Agreed
From my perspective as a Roman historian / philologist, I have a different interpretation of the “brother v. brother,” framing of the Civil War. This trope is common in Latin literature in discussing the prevalent and traumatic civil wars that plagued the late Republican era. Many viewed these violent periods as traumatic repetitions of the original fratricide of Remus at the hand of Romulus that led to the founding of the city. I don’t see it as minimizing the trauma, but rather integrating collective trauma at the individual level. It’s particularly telling that the trauma of enslaved persons is left out of this narrative processing 😬
Because no one gave a fuck about the slavery issue when there were jackboots coming and burning down churches filled with noncombatants.
I don’t think Roman mythology even works for this instance cause they enslaved the shit out of us
Yeah, that claim seemed very strange to me. The whole point of saying something is "brother vs brother" is to talk about how horrific it is. In most conflicts, families tend to stick together.
First off, amazing video as always! But, while you're technically correct, I would argue the Civil War wasn't the last war fought on US soil - Wounded Knee happened in 1890. The genocide of Native people wasn't an "official" war but, as far as I'm concerned, it was one of the longest bloodiest wars in human history.
Thank you for this reminder!
It was made of up of several small wars from the colonials and tribes as far as I know, and Columbus pretty much just wanting to exploit their tolerance for their cohabitance to just enslave or gradually kill them off. Its then the really racist people claim that the native Americans, are "Indian givers" claiming they were the ones that started all the wars because "they gave land and took it back", when it was the colonials that broke their agreements and used racism to excuse themselves.
@@GeteMachine yes, there were official wars between the colonizers - then governments - and Native people, for sure. I'm Eastern Cherokee and we had an official war with the colonizers before the death marches started. But the savagery inflicted on Native people was... warlike consistently until Wounded Knee. After that they switched to residential schools, enforced poverty, outlawing culture, and repeated land seizures. Aka: the wars never REALLY stopped, they just used lies, erasure, and starvation instead of bullets.
Indian giver is such a bullshit phrase, because history has proven who the liars and thieves are, and it sure as hell wasn't us. It's literally projection, ain't it?
It shows the hypocrisy of the Union while they fought to end slavery they were still massacring indigenous out west.
A penchant for not “official” wars that this country’s prosecuted has continued, unfortunately.
People thought I was a hater when I said quite a few parts of Twilight made me uncomfortable, including a Confederate vampire being a good guy.
For me, it was the South American vampires.
And ?
Twilight has always bugged me. Edward is controlling to Bella, and most of the characters have no personality. Bella has no life goals after meeting Edward, only to marry him. She acts stupidly when they break up.
The fucking grooming between Jacob and Renesme💀 people LOVE to defend that one
Classic Hater move!
*thinking critically about problematic content.*
YESS after rewatching True Blood over the summer this thought has been lingering in my mind. I also hate how everyone thought Tara was wrong for bringing it up 🙄 Tara deserved better than that and her ending
I dropped the show back when it was still going because of how badly they were doing Tara. She was always in Sookie’s shadow and used and abused by everyone except Lafayette.
Don't get me started on Tara, I will always be mad about it.
All the black characters, especially Tara, deserved better.
Yeah, she had a point and a right to ask about that.
I stopped watching the show after what they did to Tara and Sookie's passivity to it all.
Funnily enough, the only Confederate vampire I could think of before starting this video was Lance Henriksen as Jesse in 'Near Dark' (awesome underrated movie btw).
The extent of his backstory was "I fought for the South. We lost", without a hint of romanticism because the point of that movie is that being a vampire would be miserable.
I was about to mention Near Dark (1987! I would have thought it was from the 90's) as well, he says it while spitting up bullets and threatening the human characters (iirc) and absolutely not the hero. I wonder if that movie inspired the later characters?
Yes, thank you! Jesse was exactly where my mind goes when I think Confederate vampire.
I just watched Near Dark yesterday and immediately revisited this video to see if anyone thought this same thing! That movie was incredible when it came to showing the misery of being a vampire
If I wanted to make an excuse, I would say it’s because Antebellum slavers are an American analogue for parasitic European nobility, a la Count Dracula.
I will say, however, that this is a very weak excuse, considering that all of the examples of confederate vampires I can think of (Interview with the Vampire, Twilight, True Blood, Vampire Diaries, etc.) are meant to be sympathetic.
Yeah, to echo Hbomberguy's Lovecraft video: there's a reason why Christian Grey, the BDSM mundane AU version of a vampire character, was just a billionaire. It's the closest mundane parallel to vampirism we have.
Confederate vampires are the antagonists in Abraham Lincoln vampire Hunter. In fact, vampires in that book serve as a metaphor for the parasitic and predatory nature of slavery.
@@erraticonteuse I believe Dan Olsen said something similar in his 50 Shades of Grey reviews.
I think you are 100% right. This is what happens when we try to reclaim monsters without looking at why they are monstrous. The point of a vampire was that they stole the life from others for their own pleasure. European lords with serfs becoming American slavers just makes sense. However, somewhere along the line, this desire was no longer viewed as evil, leading writers and culture in general to sympathize with the monsters without thinking through what exactly they are tacitly endorsing.
Yeah, you can pretty much say vampirism is just shorthand for slavery being about a select exalted few literally feeding on the live blood, vitality and energy of the entire population. But, as you point out, all these confederate vampires are not only meant to be sympathetic, they're the (romantic) lead of the story. And often going against even older, usually European vampires -- without noting that they're one and the same breed of evil.
Ok finished the vid and all jokes aside I really love your content. As a bi black dude who was also a ton of ‘nerdy’ stuff growing up I love seeing another black person who was cut from the same cloth discussing these things with a lens I hadn’t considered. Like when I watch true blood I was in my teens, and during that time I really hadn’t even considered how they were framing the topic of slavery. As someone who hasn’t watched it in a long time, I had forgotten it was even a thing.
Having you speak on these trends really opens my eyes to them (I never made the confederate vampire link) and allows me to better analyze the media I view in a critical fashion. And on top of that I think you’re just really funny, vids are super entertaining on top of being informative.
@@Princess_Weekes this is exactly why I love your commentary so much! You speak to this feeling of "am I crazy‽ Am I in a bizarro Twilight Zone world‽". Love your humor and thoughtful commentary. Please keep it up!
Wholeheartedly agree with everything that's been said. Thank you
Another thing I can't help but notice is that there's a huge connection between the Civil War and ghost stories in Southern culture. Not only did ghost stories rise in prominence after the Civil War due to all the casualties, but the infamous Klan outfit was explicitly designed to look like a ghost costume, to evoke dead Confederate soldiers. The narrative of the Civil War, especially in the American South, has always invoked undead soldiers as a way of justifying itself. And I think the switch from "Confederate ghosts" to "Confederate vampires" is a modern take that carries all of the same flaws and biases that it did when the Klan told the story.
You could almost say the South has a few skeletons in its closet.
@@ealusaid that closet needs to lead to narnia with the amount of skeletons in there
Well, considering everywhere outside of Richmond was littered in the bones of the dead that had been left out in the open for years… then you might have an understanding of where those ghost stories come from.
The big example I can think of is Cold Harbor National Battlefield Park, which is northeast of Richmond. The battlefield is (allegedly) haunted, which seems to be attributed to the brutality of the fighting there, the two-week stalemate that mimicked trench warfare during the Great War, and the fact everyone around there was stumbling upon the skeletal remains of the men from the Battle of Gaines’ Mill, which was fought nearly two years prior on much of the same ground as Cold Harbor.
The National Cemetery has two trenches for the mass graves of nearly 1,000 union soldiers recovered from the battlefield through two search expeditions conducted in the post-war years (it’s where the iconic “burial team” photograph comes from).
So, when strange occurrences began being reported there, it’s not hard to connect the dots to get a ghost story from there, particularly that of the “phantom fog.”
The invocation of ghost stories recalls the horrors of war to remember the tragedies that took place there. It was the living memory of those men who survived and witnessed the massive piles of corpses and the skeletons lying all over the place that would live on in some form; the ghost story being one of them.
It’s also not exclusive to the south as Gettysburg has a rich ghost story scene as the result of the sheer level of carnage that took place there and warped the living memory of all who lived in the town or the soldiers who clashed there and recalled those terrible days.
It’s simply an expression of the horrors they faced; the living on of the trauma of those horrific days; the legacy of the reaper that is war.
There’s no need for any other explanation.
@@MatthewChenault While not quite exclusive to the South, the South still used the trope of "undead Confederate soldiers" as the face of America's largest hate movement - it's a very prominent symbol with very prominent meaning.
This video was so good and academic. As a black person AND vamphile (is this a word?) I’ve definitely recognized and acknowledged the depictions of historical backstories of iconic vampires AND the erasure of black voices within the vampiric power structure has always bothered me although, like many others in the comments, I couldn’t articulate it.
I love LA Banks’ series but I read it years and years ago and didn’t see it as problematic then. Perhaps I need to read it again 😳
Interestingly enough, my (Mexican/Native) dad taught me about how the prison system has become a legal extension of the chattel slavery system using Gone With the Wind.
Stupid laws were created that it was essentially understood didn't apply to white people, for the sole purpose of being able to arrest black people and throw them on a chain gang. Thats essentially what "sun down towns" were. Essentially made all these laws about things you can't do after sundown. Like very benign crap, but again, only enforced against black people.
Many of these laws can still be found on the books in many states, they are just not enforced anymore.
I was saying ‘and also Firefly’ to myself the whole beginning! This essay has hit so many points I have noticed over the years with this, right up to those GoT writers trying to do a Confederacy show. This motiff of the lost cause ideology has become an analogy for white male patriarchy feeling threatened. Replacement theory symbols for Red Pill Rebels.
Yes they said the show cost too much to make and they don't have enough viewers. Fox is really bad about that
When I first heard about a potential show examining what modern day America would look like if the confederates won I was curious. With the right writers/showrunners it could be an interesting indictment of how things might be similar (America never truly abolished slavery after all) and explore the various ways that abolitionists continued to fight ... Then I saw that it was the GOT dudes pitching it and my brain stalled thinking of all the terrible things they could do with all their GOT glory 🤞 all their original ideas are equally terrible and they fade into irrelevancy 🤞
Wow. I will continue thinking about this
I wouldn't really call firefly into this .
I know, it is the looser of a civil war that were the heroes, and part of the inspiration was the battle of Gettysburg..
BUT: just because the south calls the war for slavery a fight for independence, foes not mean every war for independence was shady..
The world has known many civil wars, and in most of them there was no "right" side...just a winner. .
I believe Spike Lee already has been there and done that.
I always liked how Louis was handled, and it ends with the plantation being destroyed and abandoned. Always seemed pretty clear that the point was to show that he was actually more monstrous before being turned.
This is still one of my favorite video essays out there covering this weird trend in Vampire fiction. That being said, I would absolutely kill for a video essay unpacking all the messed up sh*t in True Blood specifically, especially when it comes to the disproportionate amount of violence and torture that characters of color had to endure, the odd framing of positive masculinity (in the form of Werewolf Love Interest beating the crap out of some other guy with the confederate flag hanging behind him), the bizarre handling of the show's first gay couple (featuring a black man and a latino man) whose lives are brutally devastated by a Sad White Woman -- and whose ghost then gets babied and forgiven into reaching heaven??? Not to mention just... Tara in general. All of that. Oh, Tara.
Why do you idiots watch so much media that you obviously don’t actually care for?
Art isn’t there to agree or disagree with.
Did the show make you feel something?
If yes that’s a good thing.
Not everything is supposed to be a happy fairytale.
Sometimes shit sucks.
i love true blood but yes, it's very important to discuss these topics. very well said
Them turning Tara into a vampire after all the shit she went through, at the hands of vampires, made me give up on the series
I started True Blood a few weeks ago because I had just finished Interview with a Vampire and wanted to watch another vampire show with adult protagonists. I could barely get through two episodes. I understand there was overt social commentary about racism and segregation with the whole vamp/human conflict, but the way Tara was written and portrayed put such a horrible taste in my mouth. And there was so much horrible sex for no reason!!! I may try again but I’m not sure how much more I can take
@@formlessdivinity I'll be the last one to encourage you to try again lol, those sex scenes were downright cringe
1) There is a bot around so please do not respond to any impostures.
2) OMG, I thought ... what if they made Damon and Stefan's story take place during the Civil War because it's seen as a war between "brothers" >.< Jesus.
I've been thinking about this subject for a very long time. As a lover of vampire fiction, it always baffled me how so many pieces of media just casually had confederate vampires. I always just kind of had a vague sense that gothic vampire fiction often depicted their vampires as aristocrats to highlight class antagonism and that the American equivalent of the wicked aristocrat was the slave owner but that never really satisfied me. Thank you for this!
Honestly, American vampire 'mythos' always just feels a bit odd to me, as half the vampires are only as old as some (admittedly few, but still) living people at the time of writing. It makes far more sense in terms of the vampiric vibe to have immigrant vampires who fled aristocratic society when they got chased out with pitchforks, puritan pilgrim vampires who used the insecurity of life in the "new world" to feed indiscriminately without being noticed, vampires who lived through the founding of America but didn't bother to travel over until there were easier, quicker means of transport and a more heavily populated feeding ground etc. As for tragic vampires, pretty much any backstory works better than "thought slavery was worth defending less than 150 years ago; still doesn't really regret that part".
Antebellum vampires is the kind of thing that was creative as a one off, but wholly uninspired for a trend.
Honestly I would be super interested in reading about Mexican or even South American vampires fighting against invading European vampire armies. That is super fascinating to me, alternative history through the eyes of Native American vampires. Someone write this book!
I think authors might not want to do that one in the current climate. A well done depiction of a Aztec vampire would be a truly horrific monster give their history of brutally subduing the surrounding kingdoms and demanding the heirs of non-Aztec noble houses as blood sacrifices. After all, the Spanish conquest was more of an assisted civil war than an outsider invasion. While a story of an ancient Aztec vampire would be interesting, if I were a writer I would be worried about being considered racist for depicting an ancient Aztec blood-lord in a realistic way.
World of Darkness has this rattling around in the setting with Huitzilopochtli as a vampire sleeping under Mexico City and influencing things.
Honestly, WoD, I’m general, is killer for this sort of thing.
For example, They had a sourcebook entirely about the holocaust dead that they made with survivors and Jewish historians with the specific intention to refuse to glorify nazis and one of their signature clan characters is an utterly badass former slave who escaped and helped on the Underground Railroad and is now one of the most powerful members of his clan.
There's stories of Native American werewolves confronting European werewolves. Don't know the names but the stories are over 20 years old. My uncle read them.
American vampire has an arc of American and native vampires fighting the European vampires
Have you ever herd of the Vampire the Masquerade? It's a table top game series that often reads like a series of novels. In it, the yung(ish) European vampires escaped Europe for South America to get away from their oppressive elders and formed their own organization, taking elements from the local cultures.
I thought it was because that the "southern gentleman " is as close as an idle aristocrat America can get. Aint no vampire with a job
excuse you Count Dracula is out here driving and Uber and hosting Airbnb, and he has to do that while doing a disguise switcheroo like he's in a 90s comedy. What a loser
Watching this video I kept thinking about morality in immortality. In the show The Good Place, Eleanor notice that Michael (an immortal being) doesn't have conscience because there's no point of having regrets if you have eternity to do things differently (and usually not bare any of the consequences of said actions). It really helped me understand why mythological gods are usually such assholes.
And that could be a point in exploring vampire stories. How vampires lose their humanity over time, and the way their concept of morality changes.
I think Anne Rice's Interview With a Vampire does explore this pretty well thematically. A lot of the text of the book is Louis waxing on the evolution of his struggles with his morality in conscience, contrasted with Lestat who doesn't seem to be tortured by moral questions and just gives himself over to pragmatism and impulse.
@@thegnome73 I was WAY too young when I read it (probably 3rd grade?), so I can't remember any of it. I should read it again sometime
@@inbach you should, sincerely they're a bunch of horrible people (or well vampires) just ignore the weird Christian era where Anne Rice tried redeem lestat
Idk, I think that's just "sour grapes" coping for the fact we can't ever be immortal.
I think that was the general idea behind the "Humanity Switch" in TVD. Can't remember who said it, but one of the vampires mentioned that the "switch" was a lie that new vampires told themselves to help them adjust to their new, monstrous life with enhanced emotions, and that as centuries pass they completely loose the ability to "turn off" their emotions.
Your example with mythological gods is also why Klaus was branded as "The Great Evil" until The Originals (where his immortal life finally found a purpose). For a thousand years he was on top of the food chain. The only think able to kill him was thought to be extinct, the dagger used to neutralize an Original couldn't work on him, and werewolf venom had no effect on him. Up until modern day, the only possible consequence for his actions was getting Mickael's attention, so he barely ever cared about the damages he would cause. It's only when his mortal daughter came to be that he genuinely started to worry about consequences.
I think the fact that the wealthy whites of the antebellum South painted themselves as an American aristocracy was a part of why Anne Rice made her vampire protagonist an slaveowning southenern... I'm ok with that angle because, like Princess said, the morallity of vampires never gets lighter than grey, but is really a missed oportunity in most supernatural romance novels, this people shouldn't feel bad because they lost the war, they should feel bad because they were fighting for the evil side even before they were turned into human-eating monsters... man, "self-loathing vampire sadboys don't hate themselves enough" what a hot-take I just wrote
The Originals, which is a part of TVD, actually has a main character in the main cast who's a former slave-turned-vampire (who's also the son of his owner, which is a whole other thing). It's kind of strange now that I think about it more. The fact that Marcellus is habitually disrespected and dehumanized by others is something that Klaus (the big bad evil hybrid who does all the atrocities, but he's handsome and has mommy and daddy issues so it's ok) relates to. Klaus has been abused before, and he sees something of himself in Marcel when he sees the kid try to fight back against his oppressors. He ends up emancipating the kid (, adopting him as his own son, and Marcel ends up asking to become a vampire like the rest of the Originals who raised him.
It's even weirder when Klaus meets him and asks for his name, and the enslaved kid says his mother 'wouldn't name him' until he was 10 because she was concerned he'd die. But then she died first, leaving him an enslaved person without a name. Klaus *gives* him the name "Marcellus," since it has this meaning of strength and resilience, or something like that. It's uncomfortably romanticized and feels very White Savior.
Despite everything we know about Klaus and the Originals, who are unafraid of violence, they have been alive long enough to have some discomfort with the concept of slavery. They treat people like objects, but they're also weirdly self aware, which makes it hard to explain. Goddamn, TO was a fever dream...
I agree - I liked the show but this White Saviour line was something I picked up on too.
I liked seeing Marcel making something of himself when he ruled over New Orleans, I just feel like some extreme fans ruin things cause they’re so hot for Klaus and will excuse anything he does (i.e when Klaus came back to New Orleans and thought he was entitled to the city)
The Originals has a ton of problems. For example they’re essentially meant to Vikings before Vampires so that means they’d essentially be Scandinavian and should have either Norwegian or Danish accents but instead have the generic British accents for some odd reason.
Not to mention their religion is hardly mentioned as they should be worshipping Old Gods like Odin and their views on certain religions like Christianity is hardly talked about or mentioned.
As for slavery the Vikings had tons of slaves so yeah their views on it should atleats be addressed or why exactly did Marcel stand out even though they been alive for centuries witnessing the brutal acts?
Yeah Klaus is one of my fave tvdu characters but I feel like him and Elijah always held Marcel's past over his head like he should’ve been grateful Klaus "saved" him. And when Marcel went on to be king of NOLA Klaus couldn’t stand it although I think that has more to do with Klaus abadoment issues and superiority complex.
Although I do feel TO was an improvement compared to TVD when it came to black characters and historical racism it still dropped the ball a lot especially with it being set in NOLA. A city known to have voodoo and hoodoo roots for the show to hardly have any black witches or magic users. Which I think AHS coven handled better imo.
I'm so grateful to my mom for putting so much effort into teaching me history. I remember her sitting us down for lessons, and she had two books; one a newer, sanitized, 'kid-friendly' version about the Trail of Tears, and the other an older book and not at all 'friendly' edition. She read us excerpts from both, really driving home the fact that no, there was no 'giving their land up' or 'moving away'. She made sure that we knew the facts and were aware of what it really was. She did her best to lay out all the reasons on every side, and how most of those reasons didn't justify anything, even if it explained why it happened. Sure, all her ancestors (except the native ones) were fleeing discrimination and/or death, but early americans as a whole bought their independence and lives through theft and murder. And the very, very least we can do is acknowledge the truth, and never ever romanticize it. I don't think any of the confederate stuff should be scrubbed away or hidden from sight, because it needs to be there and be acknowledged for what it was, which includes the evidence of their delusions of grandeur. But the romantization of that lifestyle is just weird and, worse, deeply disrespectful
It’s unfortunate she was an idiot and wrong on most everything
YES! What's with the trope of a vampire being part of the Confederacy? Very rarely would we see a vampire of the same age from the North, but we'll see plenty of older ones from outside the Americas come over.
It's because Southern Gothic as a genre is all morose with decrepit houses. Good to put a vampire or two
Yeah, I always thought it was weird and I'm glad its being addresses in this video
Amazing timing because I just started True Blood last night and was wondering why this is a thing?? They really wanted us to think TARA was out of line for asking Bill if he had slaves!
A well done breakdown. As a fan of vampires in general, I remember being annoyed at the positive rep for the confederacy, but it hadn't really sunk in just how many popular vampires were confederates. I had chalked the individual cases up to the creators being indoctrinated.
I always hated Jasper being a uniformed man, bc I’m Chilean I had NO IDEA that he was a confederate and what it meant. Thanks for explaining ✨
Its worse when the backstory she gave him would have made him a UNION soldier not a confederate one but she didn't do her research right. She says he was turned in 1863 at the battle of galveston (which happened on Jan 1, 1863) and it was the union who held the city. So he would have had to be union to escort civilians from the city.
It really is a shame that THE only piece of media ive seen that includes a chilean MAPUCHE character also has...that
When thinking of this topic, I also thought of the Character 'Stormfront' from the Boys, who also had conditional eternal youth and immortality like a vampire, and participated in a major war. Only in her case, instead of being a vampire from the American civil war, she was an experiment made by the Nazis in WW2. However in 'The Boys' instead of making her sympathetic, they double down that her being so unrepentant and proud of her past makes her absolutely vile.
I think it's very normal to have held a view in the past that you look back on now and feel a little cringe or shame about. For some people it's a high school phase you feel a little embarrassed over. For more extreme cases, some were raised in cults, or Alt right circles and have since tried to get out. Paradigm shifts over the course of our lives are healthy. As years go by, we reflect, ideas change, opinions change, we become new people.
For all these confederate vampires, what puts me off the most is that, after all this time, after witnessing everything that's happened since the civil war until today, gaining the ability to travel, meet new people, talk and share ideas, they're still making excuses? Some even still feel proud? Total yikes that they're not further interrogated about their participation in the institution of slavery.
Weirdly enough I usually took that as a reflection of the author more than anything else. Lost Cause Mythology runs *deep* in a lot of southern states. What started out as propaganda became so widespread and so ingrained and too taboo to challenge resulted in them actually believing their own lies a few generations later, and the broader US just shrugging about it in order to not piss them off. Like most of US history, unless you're actively digging into it, most people go along with the myth rather than the reality.
You mentioned that some people were born into cults or alt right circles, that utilize their experience therein as a way of justifying their discomfort (as if condemning the ideologies they grew up with makes them seem deserving of the abusive system they tried to flee from) with correcting past beliefs. This made me think of The novel “Educated” by Tara Westover. It is a hauntingly clear example of how gaslit these antagonistic groups’ youth are. Like, that book is Tara’s life story and the fact that she survived those events and then wrote on it to increase the public’s awareness of a very real, very modern problem of indoctrination, and it’s not even that widely known anymore, is scary.
Stormfront looked like a vampire to tbh 😒😒 and I DONT mean that as a compliment
@@theredphoenix5545 I thought she was pretty
This was amazing. I'm a white guy, from the North, and these questions have haunted me as well. I always assumed that Confederate vampires made sense because Evil + Evil = Scary. But, you're totally right; it never plays out like that. Fortunately, I wasn't given much in the way of Lost Cause mythology, so those narratives always seemed kinda off even though I didn't have the vocabulary to say HOW. Love your work!
anti white social engineering your being played the fool taught to hate yourself
@@stevejames9531 Pfft, get bent. I couldn't hate myself if I tried. With any luck, though, I might accomplish some "anti-white social engineering". I don't pretend to understand all the angles, but if White is supposed to be important enough to cause either self-hate OR pride...I guess I'd like to see it done away with. Nothing as petty as skin color should have so much power.
There are way too many pop culture protagonists that are former Confederates. Way, way too many. Firefly broke me, because while I want to love it, it's so problematic and obvious that it's icky.
I'm on the fence about characters that openly and genuinely regret their former allegiance, and I'm seeking out voices that aren't like mine to see how they feel about them.
@Chandller Burse There is a big difference between an enjoyable evil character that is portrayed as evil by the author, and a character who is evil and the author goes out of his way to not address it. A joker who some how ends up being a batman ally and somehow would get nothing changed about him except for how the world around him treats him would leave a sour taste in people's mouths.
Part of what makes Interview with the Vampire so complicated is that it’s written in first person as a long flashback by a murderer who never felt bad for owning people in the first place. Louis is a monster, and since the novel is literally written in his words, it’s difficult to engage with the subject of slavery in a meaningful way without making Louis behave out of character. I read the book for the first time when I was 14, and as someone raised in Colorado in the early 90s, well before the movie was even conceived, I immediately assumed that Louis’s dehumanizing view of slaves was meant to be depicted as such-his “morality” was only ever conditional, and that’s why as the book goes on it’s possible for him to get easier and easier with killing. When it suits him, Louis can forget many things about ethics. Not to suggest Anne Rice isn’t problematic-it’s the only book by her I’ve read, and i know very little about her otherwise, so I don’t know-but there’s plenty in the book to suggest that Louis is just a big old racist who never lost the habit of considering other human bodies his property whenever it was convenient to his needs. Granted it has been a long time since I read it, but it never occurred to me that we were supposed to just accept Louis’s perspectives on the slaves-he’s a slave owner, and therefore his opinion was always sus to anyone with three brain cells. I had more stuff in here about education but Princess made some points that made me reconsider.
"Always sus to anyone with three braincells" is a fantastic sentence I will now adopt into my vocabulary.
Yup, Louis was one of my first experiences with what is known in the literary world as an "unreliable narrator", and he was also an anti-hero. I read the book when I was a little too immature to get that, though, and so didn't quite realize that was what he was, just took his views about other people at face value, accepted that was just how he was and didn't stop to think I'd hate him in real life if I were to ever meet someone like him, and didn't think too deeply about it. Took the whole vampire world Rice had created as this "romantic" place that I wanted to join and totally failed to see that world as the horror it really was if I were to actually encounter such a thing for real. Yeah, I was stupid.
Hey I'm gonna past here a comment I made in reply to another comment. I'd love to talk about your vision, because I had a very different opinion when reading the books.
" if you read more books of Anne Rice you will see that the first vampire's on her books come from Egypt. I'd like to point out that her vampire's are very disturbed and Louis is BY FAR the most aware or how wrong and fucked up everything they do is, and YET he had slaves because he is the owner of a plantation and it was the norm at the time.
I would love to point out that Anne Rice have a Witch series too, and you can see black characters' portraits with fidelity to their cultural backgrounds. You have one family of white witches, and you have black witches that come from an African background with religious traditions of their countries (I don't remember if she specified countries).
At one point, the black witches and the white witches are aware of each other, and they keep their distance (for multiple reasons, but let's just say... one of them didn't know what they were doing...)
You also see the witches finding out about the Vampire's at the 90's if I'm not mistaken...
Anne was a wonderful writer, she lived in Louisiana and was raised in Catholicism, what further explains her choice for this kind of folklore. But sometimes she took things a bit too far for my taste (like in Memnoch)"
Oh and just to be clear, I'm not saying Louis is a nice guy.
If you read The Vampire Lestat - that is basicaly Lestat reading Louis' book and writing a book that basicaly say's "Louis is full of shit, he didn't kill as much people as I because he is a coward" - you see that Louis is very dramatic.
Of all of her characters I'd say he is the most boring exactly because he is constantly tormented by the past, and he is the weakest one, after Claudia (the little girl), to the point that the other vampires say he is the most atractive as a partner because he is so "human like".
the books that follow iwtv become worse and worse so yes anne rice is problematic and just in the race department
I loved learning more about this from you (I'm European and only learned very little about American history in school). But we have a similar thing here I think, with how people talk about the Nazi time, for example how the story "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" assumes that a high ranking officer wouldn't indoctrinate his son with his own hateful ideologies.
I remember being like 13 and hating how many confederate vampires there were so i wrote about a group of vampire women who swore to protect a freed man's family because he bravely fought off a sadistic hunter trying to kill them. The vampire women also helped enslaved people kept on the plantations family members of his were sold to escape and one of those vampire women had a tragic romance with one of the man's descendants culminating in her allowing herself to be captured and killed to save him.
That reads like a script for a CW or Netflix original 1-season series. Idk what guns back then could kill a vampire but sure. Maybe they just tie her up and put her out into the sun to get promoted to a California Raisin.
@@MK_ULTRA420 oh i had so many vampire stories and an entire universe of lore. I even insisted on spelling it as "vampyre" because i was again like 13 and thought i was so much better than people whose sum total of engaging in vampire media and folklore was bitching about Twilight. Tbh i still feel cooler than people who don't know any actual old vampire lore.
I don't remember how I wrote these vampire ladies were being tortured but i remember giving my vampires weaknesses to diamond and sulfur and fire and i think iron? I dunno, it's been a while since i wrote them and i don't think i have the notebook i used as a story bible anymore
I also decided sunlight didn't kill my vampires, only weakened their abilities and blinded them with too much exposure, which had to be healed under the light of the full moon. I still wanted them to be creatures of the night or at least avoiding the sun (i related to that as someone who has an extreme sensitivity to sunlight) but I also hated how everyone acted like vampires have always been destroyed by the sun when that only started popping up in common vampire knowledge after Nosferatu
I do remember that the descendant the one vampire woman loved had one of her companions turn him so he could take revenge on his love's killers. He also eventually ended up capturing and taming a hellhound to attack on his command, which, i didn't realize at the time, but could probably be played up as an homage to Robert Johnson's Hellhounds On My Trail song. Maybe even a deliberate one in-universe, since the character could be familiar with the song
I’d totally watch that show.
I want to read or watch that!!
That’s pretty cool storyline ngl
I remember how much I enjoyed Gone With the Wind as a tween when I first picked it up. I thought I was anti-racist, but excused the characters and felt they were just telling their honest side of the story that I hadn't considered before. Everything I learned before was that the Civil War successfully abolished slavery forever, and GWTW felt like a "new and fresh" perspective missed in history. The South felt more human.
It wasn't until high school APUSH where I learned about the Daughters of the Confederacy and the deliberate or unconscious propaganda of stories like that one. My teacher was a white Southerner with an accent thicker than Bill Clinton's, and he never shied away from the brutal truths of the era. He showed us the failure of the Reconstruction, sharecropping to Jim Crow pipeline, the erection of Civil War statutes just as the Civil Rights movement was kicking off. In the convenient narrative of victimhood and loss - there was never any mention before of just many concessions the South got and how they were able to keep slavery under different names. And then it was obvious there was nothing about the lead-up or aftermath of the war that didn't have to do with the politics of race. I remember one picture of "good" Southern folks casually hanging out at a lynching, the body of the deceased swinging in the background. And that forever changed the way I saw nuance and history. That nuance should show the ugliness in all of our prejudices, not a whitewashing or "both sides had good". I think the endless apoliticization of storytelling and mythos is what leads us to all this backlash to Critical Race Theory and APUSH teaching even the most moderate truths about the American system.
The Daughters of the Confederacy are largely responsible for preserving as much as we know about the war.
They are hated not because of any propaganda they pushed. They are hated because they often propagated inconvenient truths about the nature of the south and the general environment of the antebellum and bellum years.
I had the same experience. Literally did a presentation on GWTW, racism, and the confederate statues. I didn't completely try and excuse what happened. But thinking back, I really regret the way I approached things. I didn't really have a teacher to teach me the sheer ugliness of racism during the Civil War or after, though they did shine some light on them, so I had to learn these things through the internet
@@strawbeare, have you actually seen the monuments you criticize? How about visit where the men they honor lie?
@@MatthewChenault firstly, i don’t have the money nor time to go see every single one of these confederate statues. Also are you opposing to the idea that I, a black person doesn’t condone the existence of these statues
Props to your teacher then. I always appreciate teachers who go beyond the books. I'm not American but some teachers on my school before went above and beyond to explain to us some American history.
I found one comment on a video about the Vampire Diaries that said Damon Salvatore would have been marginalised and viewed with suspicion in the Confederacy because they would assume from his name that he came from a Catholic background. I get the impression these writers don't do much in the way of historical research which is quite the oversight if you're making a show about immortal beings that have lived for centuries.
yep his name does not sound waspy. He would definitely face suspension since he was apart of the southern upper class.
In the original book both Damon and Stefan were Italian. I guess the writers didn’t think much of it when they made changes from the book to the tv script
My step-father, a trucker, was someone you could probably classify as a good ol’ boy. Throughout my life, I saw him do nothing but stand up for minorities and women whenever they were being bullied or threatened with violence. But he also was absolutely a Lost Cause fanboy. It was culture when he grew up. I can tell you from so many conversations he genuinely believed in that myth, while being ignorant of reality. He was self taught but an avid reader.
We only really started having these conversations at least outside of academia after he passed on.
I would’ve liked to address this with him. I would like to believe that he would have come around and regretted. But I have no way to know now.
Also, to add to this, he drove city busses for a while after he married my mom. I don’t say “he had a lot of black friends”, though he might have said that since he was pretty chatty. But I can tell you that he absolutely only came home and shared stories about the awesome black folks he met that day. He didn’t like white churches. Honestly, I don’t think he really liked white people that much.
Yet, Confederate Fanboy. 🤷♀️
Thanks for talking about that so well.
Fascinating and insightful.
I LITERALLY WAS GOING TO DO A PAPER ON THIS FOR MY CULTURAL STUDIES CLASS. Such an odd thing that three vampires in the 2000s/2010s were all confederate soldiers at some point. 💀 WILDT.
It was a parasite of the southern gothic genre
i think in this specific case, the ppl running these shows weren't thinking it through per se, but rather just in a cycle or ripping off each other and ann rice. but i think political overtones are actually almost more interesting when they creep in, when they aren't well considered.
Please talk about Firefly. That aspect of the show was wild to me.
A Rosalie and Emmet book would have been dope to be honest. They were the most interesting couple to me.
Rosalie fell for Emmet because he reminded her of her friend’s baby. I’m not even kidding.
Typical Stephanie Meyer😅
@@fleacythesheepgirl Yoooo I forgot about that shit🤣🤣Stephanie Meyers she needed some help low key bruuuh🥲🤏Just a little bit.
@@fleacythesheepgirl just crazy
@@fleacythesheepgirl what… 😃
Especially Rosalie who ended up as a doctor and mechanic -two distinctively male dominated fields that were inaccessible to her during the era when she was alive. Honestly her and Leah (and maybe Seth sans the Jacob idolization) are my favorite characters.
Similar to this- my sister and I went to rewatch what we remembered as the best Scooby Doo movie, Zombie Island, and were disappointed at the treatment of the confederate zombies being "good guys" who warned the gang about the real villains and tried to protect them. It definitely falls under the romanticized version of the south you discussed, and the ways that supernatural creatures are used to further the "the confederacy lives on" message.
I loved that movie so much as a kid and watched it many many times and I never even noticed that. But what an unnecessary yuck. I mean they literally could have been anyone and they chose that.
It wasn't JUST confederate soldiers (it was all the werecats victims) and they do show them as the bad guys (marching people into the gator filled swamp) they where just the trapped souls there.
I mean, they were human before being confederate 😂 being a confederate soldier doesn't invalidate that they would want to warn living people not to become like them... which is even more poetic.
There's romanticizing the South, but there's also stripping people of their humanity. Both are wholly unrealistic. Being from any side of a war doesn't mean someone's going to want random people to be preyed on by werecats.
After watching this, my black ass still can't wrap my head around making characters confederate soldiers/slave owners without addressing or condemning it. But also I watched half the Dragon Age fandom recently get mad that the Netflix show made it clear the slave owner character was the bad guy. so I guess nothing surprises me anymore.
First, there’s a Dragon Age show on Netflix?!
Second, people are mad that a pro-slavery Tevinter Magister is evil? Do they not recall how Tevinter mages were all evil until Maevris and Dorian (not sure if they’re anti-slavery or not, though) came along?
@@animeotaku307 It's because the Magister was hot and angsty so people were like "I can fix him".
@@sofer2230 Of course they would. 🙄
@@animeotaku307 I don't know about Maevris, but Dorian explicitly defends his family owning slaves and slavery in one conversation at Skyhold. One of the times where I really did not like being confined to the dialogue options available.
@@CelynBrum Yeah I remember Dorian was soft on that issue, pointing out that being a slave could be better for someone than being a beggar (Krem mentioned his father being forced to sell himself into slavery due to his business going under, so we know it’s not just elves, though they’re a majority). He also said that he didn’t think about it much until going south.
I’m kind of disappointed that there wasn’t more opportunities to get Dorian to change his mind on it. The most is him refusing to drink from the Well of Sorrow because he recognizes the unfortunate implications.
Not to be the um Actually guy but as a northern Kentuckian I feel I must say we never officially seceded from the union and were not part of the confederate states to secede in February of 1861. Originally it planned to remain neutral. But the state was essentially split down the middle between the north and south politics wise. After the Confederacy invaded the southern border of Kentucky from Tennessee to try and claim the pro Confederate territory We officially joined the war on the side of the union and that area admitted into the confederacy was under their control for about three months.
I can appreciate the nuance! :)
Um, actually people are my favorite. I like to learn.
Tell that to like 90% of the population here lmao. Pretty sure I know people here that were even taught it was the "war of northern aggression."
And this is important for a video about vampires???
@@tananario It's just neat
Re: the Salvatores: I can only imagine it was a budgetary thing. Much easier to source Civil War uniforms and locations than trying to recreate Renaissance Italy. Still a bad choice. They could have easily been scions of an industrial family anywhere and anywhen else in the country. Hell, have them be sons of an Italian shipping family based in New York in the mid 1800s.
Sons of an American industrialist who married a beautiful but penniless Italian Contessa! They could shoot the "Italy" scenes in Cheesecake Factory. Boom. Done.
@@ealusaid Please! Let's be serious! Only an Olive Garden has the correct ambiance.
@@MrJibbajabbawocky HOW COULD I HAVE FORGOTTEN OLIVE GARDEN??? You're so right, my bad.
@@ealusaid lol
Could of been rich Italian immigrants that are against slavery
“The civil war was about states rights!”
STATES RIGHTS TO DO WHAT?!?
This is literally what I always say lmao
Starting to think Donald Trump and his supporters who glorify the confederacy might be vampires lol
@@HagiaFantasia Bernie Sanders: Vampire Hunter
@@HagiaFantasiaI was wondering why his skin looked weird, it’s fake.
I feel like Interview with the Vampire and Gone with the Wind had a lot to do with it. Louis was a slave plantation owner. And GWTW is a pop-culturally glorified romance riddled with not so subtle confederate apologist themes for the Lost Cause. Plus, the white creators in the vampire genre tend to gloss over these themes whilst arguing, “It was just the times.” I once read a couple books from the Betsy the Vampire Queen series, hoping for a rom-com satire. Every few chapters, the protagonist had to remind the reader that she was a suburban conservative who loved GWTW and Rhett Butler. It really put into perspective the type of authors who dominated the vampire genre in the early 2000’s.
Have you watch the English yet?
@@Murdermagictricks No, what’s The English? Is it a vampire show?
Also stuff like Cold Mountain. The Notebook. Etc. Lots of romance lit, plus all the southern gothic stuff like Anne Rice
"It was just the times" and yet during "those times" there were quite radical abolitionists. By radical I mean they wanted to end slavery there and then. The more moderate view (much more spread in the North) was to stop it from spreading and let it die a natural death. Industrialisation was slowly making slavery uneconomic. And YET it was still too much for the wealthy elites from the South. They accurately predicted that end of slavery means end of white supermacy - something they were genuely afraid of
If they're going to gloss over the history, why do they alwaya default to using them, and not the union soldiers for protagonists. They apologize for the Confederates more so than Nazis. Odd. Yet Confederates predate them.
I've never felt more connected with a stranger than when I heard that aggravated sigh before you said, "Julie Plec". I felt that in my soul. 🤣
Same 😭
Speaking as someone who reads a fair bit...who's Julie Plec?
@@CrowTR0bot Julie Plec is the co-creator, executive producer, showrunner, and sometimes director of The Vampire Diaries. But her full-time job seems to be aggravating the show's fan base.
@@jennyrengood9875 LMAO that last sentence.
This may be an aside but the fact that Harriet Tubman isn’t listed alongside civil war generals as an incredible strategist ON TOP OF everything else says a lot.
I know it’s a smaller part of a larger issue but I’ve had to go back and completely re-learn Civil War history.
Indeed. Even before the war John Brown referred to Harriet Tubman as General Tubman, due to her invaluable logistical skills (people and resources alike).
Logistics may not sound impressive to most people, but in warfare the great strategists are the ones who focus more on their supply lines, support networks and intelligence gathering (the last one which you probably already know was something Tubman excelled at while in service of the Union army during the Civil War) than on battle strategy.
I don’t remember how you came up on my timeline, like what channel I watch that made the algorithm choose your video but I’m for once thanking the algorithm. This is such an interesting topic and I’ve asked that question myself
What I found bizarre when I bought the book season 1 of TB was based on was that "did you own slaves" was STILL ASKED, but not by Tara, she wasn't there. It was just asked as a casual curious question by either Sookie or her grandma, can't remember which. It really reads like Tara was added to that talk just to have _someone_ being disturbed by the elephant in the room.
If you have read the books though you would know that Tara is a huge bitch in the later books anyway, so this doesn't really change anything
True Blood did Tara dirty at almost every opportunity
As an avid Anne Rice fan, as someone who read the Stackhouse novels in middle school.. thank you for addressing this topic that is so often missed or ignored by the target audience of romanticized vampirism. This is a very interesting and important discussion to have. Thank you for bringing this conversation to the table, so that it may no longer be so easy to miss/ignore.
Hey! Can I ask you what was your favorite book by her? It's very rare for me to be able to talk about Anne Rice so I'd love to talk about her books!
I really liked her Witching Hour book and The Tale or the Body Thief! I really like David Talbot as a character.
"The movie that a 15 yr old girl hated so much she made a UA-cam channel dedicated to hating it" Your doing God's work, young lady. Don't let anyone tell you different
went from ur true blood video 11 years ago to this... wow the internet really is a time capsule.. im glad you kept making content
I'm a latin-american who had little knowledge about confederacy, thank you for taking the time to explain it. Racism and slavery is barely talked about in schools here so a lot of these topics get loss in translation, or are straight up avoided. I'm glad i stumble into your channel! ❤
A lot of Confederates went to Latin America.
Its not really taught in schools in US either. A lot of white washing, glossing, and monuments in school
see this is why Abraham Lincoln: Vampire hunter is one of the greatest films of all time. The confederate vampires in that film are portrayed as the vile, blood sucking villans they truly are.
I often go to where confederate soldiers lie in state.
I can safely say that they were not monsters nor vile people. If anything, modern man is the vile monster; the beast of its own making; the incompassionate creature that can only see himself and nothing else.
@@MatthewChenaultno they’re monsters and you’re sub human for defending them
@@Imxel21, an eighteen year old kid who needed to have his leg amputated and died from gangrene is a “monster?”
No, I believe you are more likely to be the monster for calling them “evil” for not supporting what you want.
You call them “evil monsters.”
I call them “the innocent.”
@@MatthewChenault The thing they didn't support was ending slavery. That's not some petty disagreement, it's a matter of human rights. A matter the confederacy was on the wrong side of. So no, there were no 'innocent' confederates.
The confederacy stood for nothing but taking away the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness from people who deserved them as much as any other. There wasn't a single good man who fought for the confederacy, only traitors.
@@carlterwedow5000 Beautifully put.
Thank you for making this video! I remember walking out of the theater after seeing one of the Twilight movies and asking my mom, "So are we all supposed to ignore the fact that Jasper literally fought to keep slaves? And we're supposed to root for him?" And I was a child when that came out!!! So many people were involved in the project and no one thought better of it?
Considering that it was written by a Mormon white woman from the Midwest I was absolutely not surprised
This is one of my new favorite channels!!! I'm a big fan of film commentaries, and the nuances and perspectives you give are consistantly brilliant and thought provoking.
I had forgotten just how dirty they did Tara. I grew in Maryland where we took field trips to Fredrick Douglas's house and other historical black places, so it kills me to find out kids going to my HS now have never been taught about the Civil War as anything other than a states rights heavy viewpoint.
I remember once Paulo Coelho stated that vampires stand for the inability to change while the world changes around you.
When I first watched True Blood as a European Teenager, the civil war storyline really flew over my head. Fast forward to recently, when I re-watched it years later and I was SHOCKED. Especially the way Bill talks about his involvement in the Civil war reminds me of the klischée about how German people tend to talk about their families involvement in the second world war: "they didn't know" "they didn't have a choice". Which always addresses how authorities can force you to do things you don't want to do, but never how a fascist government like that was even possible (of course it's always other people who wanted that) and how people still internalized lots of fascist and racist ideology and were willfully blind. There is this really interesting contrast where people nowadays show a lot of understanding for people then being forced to be soldiers etc, while at the same time claiming that they themselves would never have fought for Germany in WWII.
Anyways, back to True Blood, I want justice for Tara! I really, really loved her character but they really wrote her worse with every new season. I love how confident and honest she is, how invested she is in protecting the people she loves, and that she doesn't let anyone treat her or her friends badly - well, except for Jason and her mother and that she calls out the lies she sees. Looking back, especially her love for Jason is already really terribly written. But in the beginning, her trauma, her secretly really warm heart etc. come across really well! I LOVED that she didn't just accept Bill as this sad southern gentleman vampire and asks difficult questions. But watching True Blood now, I really notice how little the writers truly knew about racism and the Confederacy. And this is what leads to the fall of Tara's character arc. Over the course of the series, she gets painted more and more as this aggressive, unreasonable woman who can't deal with her trauma properly and is unfair towards the vampires. At certain points, you really question why Tara and Sookie are still friends and Sookie is painted as this really good Samaritan friend for still helping Tara. Who REALLY goes through hell during the course of the show. I hope that in the future, there will be similar characters to Tara who are written from a point of empathy and understanding and don't judge her for standing up for herself. Whose justified anger isn't treated as unreasonable, but understandable.
While I agree with most of what you've said about Tara, I disagree about Tara's crush on Jason being terribly written.
Tara wasn't attracted to Jason because of his physical appearance like other women were. She was attracted to him because she remembers that he protected her as a little girl from Lettie Mae whenever she was drunk and abusive. He's probably one of the few people in her life to do that (and he also does it again in season 3 when he stops Franklin from raping and killing Tara). She recognized Jason was capable of being kind and willing to protect others, which is why she had a childhood crush on him.
However, that doesn't mean she let that crush prevent her from seeing Jason's flaws or calling out Jason when he was acting like an asshole. When Jason behaved the way he did after Gran died, she had no problem expressing her anger with him and throwing him out of the house. Likewise, she had no issue calling out Jason for how stupid he was acting when he was on V, and refused his proposal for them to get together while he was high out of his mind.
Part of her character development was recognizing that Jason wasn't into her the same way she was into him, as well as realizing Jason had flaws he needed to work through that she couldn't fix for him, and moving on past that.
i just scrolled back through your videos and you've been uploading for FOURTEEN YEARS? more like Princess Decades. you are one of the OGs of this platform, and i have so much respect for you
As a wee adolescent, I remember wondering briefly about this when faced with Jasper _and_ Damon on my screen at the same time. This was such a perfect breakdown of all the reasons. In my head, I blamed Gone with the Wind and Anne Rice (without even knowing that her works didn't do what the more recent depictions of Civil War-era vamps do until this video), but this def opened me up to getting what else went into it. Since trends seem to be cyclical, I figure we're in for some form of vampire hype within the next decade to some degree so I hope that this too common (three too many already lol) trope dies before the next cycle.
Also, I hope you blast your patreon and mention it whenever and however you want. You would absolutely _not_ be "e-beggin." The content you provide, the research and in-depth analysis, the hours and hours I'm sure that go into this--your patreon is well worth heading to and well worth promoting. I hope your transition into fulltime content creation for yourself is smooth and lucrative as hell.
I want to point out that Aiden from Being Human (US) fought for the Union. Maybe people would have watched the show if he fought for the South 😞
Wonderful essay! I'm from Europe and anyone please correct me if I'm wrong... but I also wonder if this trope is conveniently being used for aesthetic reasons. The plantation owners seem to have been the closest anyone could get to being American royalty. In media that would mean they get to use beautiful houses with a pretty countryside and lavish outfits. Combine that with the air of mystery that sort of hangs over the deep south and it's going to look great on film. You get a period drama without addressing where the wealth came from. And I think many people are fine with the fact that they are keeping the Civil War era without a single mention of what it was really about. If they did, the whole thing would fall apart.
Anyway, I wish you all a Happy New Year!
Absolutely, plantation owners, especially if you think about the found fathers are absolutely the American equivalent of Royalty
@@tessahartman7870 If you think about the atrocities and other crimes monarchs and other royals did to their citizens to colonized and enslaved people, i'd say plantation owners are on par with royalty, there is no need to whitewash royalty
I really appreciate hearing your take on all this. I'm writing my own Gothic series and it includes a few characters who were alive to remember the Civil War. Even though it was a bit different in my own timeline, you've given me a lot to think about. I really don't want to play into Lost Cause stuff by glossing over real suffering, no matter how good my intentions are. Thank you. ❤