frycekz

One of this very elaborated ideas in modern vampire fiction is that vampires are hurt by silver. I guess bunch of random bullshit weakness (that include right angles and counting) weren't enough. And when you read about it a little more, it goes veeeery wide and deep. Did you know that vampires don't have reflections because back in the day mirrors were made with silver? Or that it used to not to be possible to photograph them because cameras used these silver mirrors, but now it's fine. The reason is either because people noticed antiseptic properties, or they considered it holy, or both. So anyway, it's kind of bullshit. Explicit vampire-silver connection came about only in 20th century after silver bullet myth was conflated in american popculture with more common ways of slaying like decapitation and wooden stakes. And yeah, vampire and werewolves (and witches) do overlap a lot in folklore, but neither of them really got silver kryptonite treatment either (silvers does appear as generic ward-of-evil material, often paired with gold and probably less often than iron). And it's not really why I care about it either, many usual popculture vampire tropes only appear in 20th century, including some famous like direct sunlight killing them. Vampires don't even exist. What irks me, is how much post hoc pseudohistory explanations get attached to it and repeated as fact. It kind of shows how easy it is to construct whole elaborate narrative and accept it, before even checking if something you are trying to explain exists at all. And I do see also this cultural component to this. Eastern European folk culture and it's vivid undeath stories that lay at source of modern vampire fiction gets overshadowed by it. It's not wrong that vampire mythos expands, but it's not right to expand it backwards in time, confuse in-universe fantasy lore with actual historical beliefs, replacing them with made up explanations only because... you just didn't bother to even check.

One of the worst part of christmas season is that you hear the word "elf" a lot BUT it's never cool hot fantasy elf, just more of this north pole bullshit

Do you ever play a video game and think to yourself: "damm, it would look a lot better if it looked a little bit worse?"