Magnetic Darkness

But we all, again as a society, accept at some point that it's secretly not real. It's a fiction for children that we all say is real but actually isn't. Count von Count is a real vampire, and at the same time he cannot be a vampire, because he's on a show for children that is only pretend real. We all want him to be real, but we all know at a certain point that he isn't.

He is the Camarilla's long con, their best psyop. He is the only vampire allowed to publicly breach the Masquerade every day, because by doing so, he is making the Masquerade that much more believable. People who claim that vampires are real have to deal with others saying "What, like the Count on Sesame Street? Suuuuee, buddy, vampires are real...and they count things..."

with queer readings, what tends to frustrate me is the refusal to pick up on the homophobia inherent to the queer subtext in a lot of vampire classics. being unable to separate that a dynamic is like personally fun and sexy to you vs what the actual text is doing is… well not going to have any major repercussions but it will annoy me. I don’t really subscribe to the representation framework— I don’t think minority characters should have to represent anything— but like the way people will genuinely point to Carmilla as a positive example of queerness in classic fiction is insane to me! or like Dracula’s preying on Jonathan isn’t sexualized because yay bisexuality (lol!) it’s just another facet of how the character is meant to be perceived as a deviant, corrupting foreigner

the other problem with forced positive readings is that it often means people will just refuse to talk about the inherent predatory angle of these dynamics. and there is of course always the clean splitting of sexual violence vs positive romance. so a good and positive queer reading means that the romance must be wholly uncomplicated and only about repressed desire which means that there can be no elements of sexual violence or predation— no matter how textually explicit that may be

Just a reminder that Two-Spirit identities are closed cultural practices. Non-Natives cannot be 2S.

(Mummy isn't on here though bc thats not real to me)

i don't know how well this'll work since im combining some 5th and 20th stuff but! here it is if you wanna give it a spin or something ☆

Let the new Nosferatu scratch their head two nights in and a chunk of hair falls out. They look in the mirror three nights later and realize how much thinner their skin has gotten, and they touch their jaw carefully, and a strip of skin peels away to reveal the jaw underneath.

Let the new Malkavian be so so so paranoid because they KNOW whats coming, but by a month in, nothing seems to have happened. And theyre so worried, but theyre hoping against the universe that please, maybe they'll be the exception. Maybe they wont fall to the voices. And then they get home and talk to their friend about their worries, and after a little while, they feel relieved. The friend helps, so they keep talking to them. A few months go by and they are happy that they were worried over nothing, and they never even realize theyve been talking to the walls this whole time.

Let the new Ventrue have to figure out their blood limitation themselves. Their first few nights or weeks, they can drink whatever, but slowly the curse sets in. They drink some blood and immediately puke it up. They drink another type and break out in hives. Another sends them into torpor. But they HAVE to keep going. They have to find what they CAN drink, because until they do, they'll feel nothing but hunger and pain and rage and suffering. And the longer it takes to find it, the worse the wrong ones will be