Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 6915839" data-attributes="member: 6683613">In a fantasy setting with loads of different species of creature, there's plenty of room for both characters that are evil for nuanced individualistic reasons and characters that are supernatural embodiments of pure evil. It's not as though running vampires as unearthly things in human skin means we can't also run villains who are driven by human motives and struggling with human anxieties... we just run them as humans. Or dwarves, or goblins, or stone giants, or whatever. There are so many different options if you want a creature with a soul, and making vampires into just another one of them seems like a waste. In my mind, the realization that the being you're speaking with in truth is utterly alien and unsympathetic, that all its charm is just cold manipulation, that it is going to drink your lifeblood with no more emotion than you would drink a Diet Coke, all that contributes to the horror that the vampire presents. It's a glimpse into the abyss. And it doesn't really work if you know that in the same setting, just a few cities over, there's another vampire who is not acting and really is basically just a human with an unusual addiction. Cheapens the brand.Is this supposed to be an example of how you prefer characters with "different shades"? If you don't think intense religious faith can be a ripe field for many-shaded character development, I fear it may be you who is being inflexible here. I could throw a dart in a library of literary classics and be fairly assured to hit a book that explores the nature of piety and goodness in some manner or another. *throws dart* Oh look, it's Les Misérables. *throws dart* Yup, Moby Dick. *throws dart* All-Star Superm -- wait, how did that get there? ...eh, still works.</blockquote>

Verification