You might be a vampire if:

[Student of Trinity]

Well, not necessarily a vampire, exactly. This isn’t really about sucking blood at all, nor is it specifically about Twilight. But if you have enough of the following qualities, then you might be a fictional character like Edward from Twilight: an over-the-top all-round awesome secondary protagonist who initiates the ordinary young main protagonist into an extraordinary world. Score one point for each trait that you have, plus extra bonus points as described.

 

The extra points are there, in part, to make it easier to assign points. If a character seems pretty darn good in some way, but maybe not totally over the top, you shouldn’t have to hum and haw too much. Just give them the main point in that category, but not the extra one. In some cases it is possible for a character to get the extra point but not the main point, but this should be rare.

 

You might be a vampire if:

 

1. You’ve got a backstory. Explaining how you got where you are today needs an extended flashback. It’s quite a story in itself.


Extra point if: You are famous (at least within your special world).


 

2. You’ve got experience. Apart from your backstory highlights, you’ve been in the trenches for years, fighting things of which no normal person dreams. You know all the ropes.
 You've tied some of the knots.

Extra point if: You are already an acknowledged leader at the beginning of the story.


 

3. You are a fighting machine. This particular aspect of experience and education gets its own points, because what else is there to talk about but Fight Club?


Extra point if: Your extraordinary combat ability is an actual plot issue, not just chrome on you.


 

4. You wear the One Ring in your navel. Or something. You have some special superpower that can save the world, maybe not all by itself, but as a vital part in a small package. This is one point that even the ‘ordinary’ main protagonist who is still in high school can usually pick up, in the kind of story to which all this is typically relevant.

Extra point if: Your special power is already fully useful at the beginning of the story.

 

5. You are gorgeous. The fact that you’re so physically attractive is made much of in the story.


Extra point if: You dress really well. Regrettably, this is to be judged in such a way that you are much more likely to win this point if you are also gorgeous, and much less likely if you are not. Conceivably, however, your superlative style might be what lifts you over the gorgeous threshold.

 

6. You are highly educated. Being widely traveled can count towards this. Being a very good student in high school does not, but being an astonishing prodigy might.


Extra point if: You speak multiple languages fluently.


 

7. You are rich. Material resources are not a significant limitation for you.


Extra point if: You own some especially impressive big-ticket item (a cool car, for example).


 

8. You transcend morality. You get all the coolness of being bad while somehow not counting as evil, because traditional moral categories don’t apply to you, because you have to break some eggs to fight demons, or the Fenris Wolf ate your homework, or something.


Extra point if: Underneath all that, you’re a Care Bear.


 

9. You are a talented artist or skilled technician. You have a cherry on top.


Extra point if: You are specifically an expert pianist. This is just stupid, I know. But it just seems as though every doggone vampire can play the piano.


 

10. You are a master of all trades. You have seven or more of the above 9 basic points.


Extra point if: You have seven or more of the above extra points. You are covered in cherries.

(Note that this tenth category does mess up the statistics a bit. It provides three ways of scoring 18, and only two ways to get 17. But every score from 0 to 20 is still achievable, and the tenth category serves a purpose. Vampirism is about having it all, so we need a bit of nonlinearity to emphasize this.)

 

Evaluation

0-5 Points: You are not a vampire.

6-9 Points: You are probably not a vampire.

10-15 Points: You might well be a vampire.

16-20 Points: You are a vampire.

 

This list is subject to correction, but only in a certain way. It’s my list; if you really don’t like it, make your own. Please don’t say that the list is bad because its criteria have nothing to do with whether a character is great or strong or likable or whatever. The list criteria are not supposed to be about those things. This is the vampire list. Literary greatness is a different one. And, just to say it again: 'vampire' is just a cute label. It's not really about literally being a vampire at all. It's about the things on the list, except insofar as it really shouldn't be, because:

 

The list may still in principle be improved, however. I have in mind a kind of archetype, that I label ‘vampire’ because I think it’s instantiated at least to some degree in Twilight’s Edward. I’m trying to characterize this hypothetical Platonic form. I’m hypothesizing that this vampire character archetype is a coherent concept, and that it is frequently realized to a significant degree in current YA fiction. But I’m not sure I’ve really seen the archetype clearly. If someone else can get a sharper vision of the Platonic realm and convince me that I’ve missed something or gotten something wrong, I’ll be delighted. If it seems to me that whatever you’ve seen is just not my archetype at all, though, but some other one instead, then I’ll blow you off. Feel free to make your own list.

 

One of the trickier parts of my concept is that it conflates two different ways of being extraordinary. There’s having an extraordinary number of unusual features, each of which is in themselves merely in the high end of the normal range. And there’s having features that are total outliers from the human range — world-beating talents or unique supernatural powers. These are different cases, but I nonetheless feel that these two kinds of things go together, because these ‘vampire’ characters tend to figure in sci-fi or fantasy stories where special powers are plot requirements. One key point of the ‘vampire’ archetype that I’m hypothesizing is that, for these characters, the superpowers are not flukes. These characters are to the manor born.

 

Anyone can have a cool car, but this guy’s immortal; and not just any old immortal, but the good kind, that comes with having a cool car. That’s what vampires are all about. It's what's different from the basic dude-has-a-destiny motif, which goes back to King Arthur or something. It's that destiny is highly accessorized, at least for these characters.

 

A potentially falsifying test of my hypothesis would be to collect a representative sample of recognizable fictional characters and see whether there was any clustering of vampires — a clump of characters around the high end of the vampire scale. Insofar as the list categories are not all obviously strongly correlated by definition, then clustering would show they were correlated by contemporary writing. Clustering would mean that, in effect, the Zeitgeist of contemporary fiction was not separately deciding about whether characters would be rich or gorgeous or whatever, but was at least some of the time buying the vampire bundle as a whole (and then maybe haggling over a few options). In concrete terms, that is what it would mean for my vampire archetype to be a real thing. Admittedly there's still some fuzziness here, but gimme a break. Life is fuzzy. Art is verisimilitudinously fuzzy.

 

My second hypothesis, if the hypothesis of vampires being a thing were to pan out, would be that male leads in current YA fiction are much more likely to be vampires (in this sense) than female leads are. “Hitherto ordinary teenage girl (with an undeveloped superpower) meets vampire” is the pattern I tried to present in my previous thread.

 

For what it’s worth, the female and male protagonists of my own book currently both score 17. They lack looks and pianos. I may mock vampires, but I don’t actually object to them in escapist fiction. The only thing that bothers me is a strong gender imbalance among vampiric main characters.

[Triumph]

destiny is highly accessorized

 

This quote deserves to win something.

[Cairo Jim]

Well, not necessarily a vampire, exactly. This isn’t really about sucking blood at all, nor is it specifically about Twilight. But if you have enough of the following qualities, then you might be a fictional character like Edward from Twilight: an over-the-top all-round awesome secondary protagonist who initiates the ordinary young main protagonist into an extraordinary world. Score one point for each trait that you have, plus extra bonus points as described.

 

 

You shouldn't have to worry about that guy. Why? This guy is more than likely to come after him.

 

 

[Dikiyoba]

Student of Trinity, are we really going to do this again?

 

Dikiyoba is in before this thread turns into A Pattern all over again.

[Mistah Q]

If I were a vampire I would prey upon mellitus diabetics. They would tend to have two conditions - ketoacidosis and hyperglycaemia - which would both serve to sweeten the blood.

 

Yummy yummy.

[Edgwyn]

Just to familiarize myself with the genre I went through the list on wikipedia and determined that I have read not enough of the authors to form anything approaching a statistically valid sample, especially if I restrict myself to the last 20 years. My three teenage children have also only read a tiny fraction of the genre (though theirs is from the more modern end), but even together we have touched only a tiny portion of what is available.

 

SoT, for your thesis are you looking at the sum total of YA fiction or just the sub-genre defined as YA Paranormal Romance? If it is the later, than I am sure that you will get the results that you seem to want.

[Alorael at Large]

If I were a vampire I would prey upon mellitus diabetics. They would tend to have two conditions - ketoacidosis and hyperglycaemia - which would both serve to sweeten the blood.

 

Yummy yummy.

When trying to deal with the angst of being a creature of the knight, a damnéd soul for all eternity, it's best to find prey with a high blood alcohol content.

 

—Alorael, who thinks this scale has more to do with Mary Sue than vampires. But for that use it's not half bad.

[Slawbug]

This is basically a continuation of the other thread's topic, with some landscape shifted. It seems like you kind of wanted to pick and choose what to respond to, and sidestep mountains of salient criticism.

 

Of course that's your call if you want to do that, and sometimes maybe it's wise; but this happens again and again and again -- every time, it seems like -- and it makes it hard to believe that you're going to engage in actual, good faith, two-way conversation here. I'd like to request that you respond to the criticism from the other topic before we go any further. Just acknowledging it in some way would be an improvement.

[Randomizer]

I see this more as a focus group to determine what features should be enhanced in the main characters to improve the novel (series). While the more vocal members are older than the target audience, they also are widely read so they can advise on what they liked when they were that age and compare to other literature.

 

Follow up topics will discuss plot and feature development.

[Necris Omega]

Maybe it's just me being reactionary to what I see as a overt meltdown of one of the more classical monsters, but I always had a soft spot for the inhuman/ugly vampires. You're a bloodsucking apex predator/virus utterly divorced from the passage of time and the perception it brings - act like it dangnabit!

 

I'm more a WoD PnP vampire time than a literary vampire type, particularly given where it's gone.

[adc.]

I got 3, ain't a vampire. Good. Because...

I'm a

 

Witcher

 

[Kelandon]

It seems like you kind of wanted to pick and choose what to respond to, and sidestep mountains of salient criticism.

The most salient criticism that I can remember is that SoT's notion of "extraordinary" was something quite peculiar to him that no one else had access to, and, because he didn't define it, it seemed as though he was failing to engage in conversation in any meaningful way. If I'm not mistaken, the first post of this topic is an attempt to address that.

 

Oddly, the first female character that came to mind who fits a lot of the categories listed is Kitiara uth Matar. She really fits some of these traits (gorgeous, morally ambiguous, good fighter) and misses some others.

 

But... it's hard not to see the list as a random list of traits, not as describing an archetype in any meaningful way. Kitiara is an instantiation of what I think of as the Angelina Jolie archetype, which shares a number of traits with the list above. I feel reasonably confident that "beautiful and deadly" is an archetype in the modern Comemedia dell'arte, but I'm not convinced that the first post describes anything that is. Other than Edward, who else does this list describe well?

 

If Alo is right, and this list is more Mary Sue than anything else, it would make sense that such characters are predominantly male if the authors of the stories were mostly male.

[Randomizer]

Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayers fits most of the points except maybe playing a musical instrument from what I remember. For a female character there is Amanda from The Highlander and Raven TV series.

[Slawbug]

Kel: The first post of this topic explicitly states that it's not an attempt to refine the whole "great character" thing that was under discussion in the other thread:

 

Please don’t say that the list is bad because its criteria have nothing to do with whether a character is great or strong or likable or whatever. The list criteria are not supposed to be about those things. This is the vampire list. Literary greatness is a different one.

 

But I do think it would be courteous to at least acknowledge or respond in some way to the more general criticism itself, seeing as it wasn't concerned just with the one thread:

 

 

 

"So I had this idea here's my justification."

"I think your idea is wrong."

"Okay, lemme change my justification."

"I think your idea is wrong."

"Okay, lemme change my justification."

"I think your idea is wrong."

"I still have this idea, but I'm just gonna stop providing new justifications or responding to your criticism now."

"I still think it's wrong, and now I'm annoyed."

"Stop being so adversarial! I'm not trying to debate or anything!"

To be a bit adversarial myself, I'll say that your posts often come off as "I like the sound of my own voice; let's hear more of that...". Just sayin.

But no one here is rejecting your ideas outright. What is being rejected, is your refusal to engage in a dialogue about them... (big snip) It seems to me that you want to share your wealth of intuitions, observations, and insights — but are reluctant to examine them; and feel slighted that other people might dare to do so.

hahahahahahaha dude you can't make weird provocative statements and then keep people from disagreeing with you by tacking a this-isn't-a-debate disclaimer on to them. that's not how human interaction works

 

 

 

Randomizer: Once again, I think your Buffy assessment owes a lot to the imagination. I'd score Angel as follows:

Definitely: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8

Maybe: 1a, 4, 5a

 

That puts Angel squarely in SoT's "You are probably not a vampire" category regardless of the maybes. Of course, there is the disclaimer that this "vampire" list is not actually about vampires per se, but some other, amorphous, hard-to-describe category that SoT never actually defines except with the list itself. Given that disclaimer, it's hard to argue with the list; though given that disclaimer, I'm not sure how the list is supposed to be useful either. It's a Cosmo quiz, as far as I can tell.

[Kelandon]

Kel: The first post of this topic explicitly states that it's not an attempt to refine the whole "great character" thing that was under discussion in the other thread:

That may have been what you wanted to talk about in the other thread, but that wasn't what SoT was trying to discuss. Look back to the first post of that thread. Look at the first post this thread. They're consistent. Greatness has never been the issue.

 

Er, having just re-read the first post of the other thread, I notice something else. The disparaging reference to Star Wars seems misplaced. The first time we meet Leia, she grabs a gun and starts blasting her way out. Despite needing rescue, she is by no means a passive nobody. She fits quite a number of the points above, too, which again suggests to me that they're not a particularly good list of anything.

[Callie]

 

Randomizer: Once again, I think your Buffy assessment owes a lot to the imagination. I'd score Angel as follows:

Definitely: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8

Maybe: 1a, 4, 5a

 

1a is a yes because he's well known enough that prospective watchers write theses about him. He wears a designer coat and is frequently shirtless for no reason (Buffy gazes at him doing t'ai chi), so 5a is a yes as well. He's well-versed in lore and well-traveled: the US, most of Europe, Sri Lanka, China, and likely many places in between. He's shown reading La Nausée in its original language during season three and speaks fluent Tamil in one episode of Angel, so he gets 6a and 6b. He lives in a mansion (exterior shots are a Frank Lloyd Wright construction) and later in an upper class hotel. Granted, both buildings are abandoned somehow, so 7 is probably a no. Angel is a gifted artist, as demonstrated by the portraits he leaves on Buffy's pillow, so he gets 9a. Randomizer did not mention Angel, but on that show he gets 4 because of the Shanshu prophecy and 7b because of his awesome convertible. He gets 10 accordingly. He scores a 15 overall, or possibly 16.

 

Spike, on the other hand, is a definite no.

[Dikiyoba]

1a is a yes because he's well known enough that prospective watchers write theses about him.

Doesn't 1a mean famous *within the fictional universe*, not real life?

 

Dikiyoba.

[Callie]

Doesn't 1a mean famous *within the fictional universe*, not real life?

 

Dikiyoba.

Yes: there is an organization in the Buffy universe called the Watcher's Council who's purpose is to supposedly guide vampire slayers. I didn't know whether "watcher" should be capitalized or not, sorry for the ambiguity.

[Cairo Jim]

I've never got into the Vampire genre other than the Blade Trilogy. Is it really worth it? Does anyone know of something decent?

 

Edit: If you do suggest something. please don't let it be Twilight.

[Edgwyn]

Trying to use the list of characteristics on a few series that I have been reading lately:

 

David Webber:

 

Honor Harrington: Despite everything, not even close to being a vampire

Beginning of series: 1, 2, 2a, 3, 3a, 6; Later in series 1, 1a, 2, 2a, 3, 3a, 6, 7, 7a, 9

 

War God: None, there are several female mentors in the series despite a male dominated society. A female character does fall in love with and later marry the male protagonist, but they did not have the mentor relationship.

 

Safehold:

Merlin: 1, 2, 2a, 3, 3a, 4, 4a, 5, 6, 6a, 7, 7a, 9, 10. So Merlin might well be a vampire. Merlin's protege is male and there is not a romantic relationship between the two.

 

David Drake's Lord of the Isles series and RCN series: No vampire to be found.

 

Percy Jackson series: still no vampire.

 

I guess that it is fairly hard to find the vampire outside of the young adult paranormal romance genre. Complaining about gender roles in romance novels seems like a waste of electrons to me.

[Slawbug]

I forgot about the thesis! Yes, that seals the deal on 1a, agreed.

 

He's well-versed in lore and well-traveled: the US, most of Europe, Sri Lanka, China, and likely many places in between. He's shown reading La Nausée in its original language during season three and speaks fluent Tamil in one episode of Angel, so he gets 6a and 6b.

I'll concede the well-traveled, but it seems problematic to award him two points here when his well-versedness is not emphasized, and he is out-well-versed by multiple other characters; if you looked at the cast of either show and identified the characters whose education, language ability, or knowledge of lore were more emphasized, Angel would never come up, so consistently is he outshone by Giles, Wesley, Fred, and a parade of recurring characters from Jenny Calendar on.

 

He lives in a mansion (exterior shots are a Frank Lloyd Wright construction) and later in an upper class hotel. Granted, both buildings are abandoned somehow, so 7 is probably a no.

Yeah, there are a lot of indications that he has limited financial resources until the later seasons of Angel.

 

Angel is a gifted artist, as demonstrated by the portraits he leaves on Buffy's pillow, so he gets 9a.

Were those actually "gifted" portraits? That seemed like a one-off to me, not a character attribute; again, there are other characters much of whose artistic abilities is made. But not Angel's.

 

Randomizer did not mention Angel, but on that show he gets 4 because of the Shanshu prophecy and 7b because of his awesome convertible. He gets 10 accordingly.

The Shanshu prophecy shows up at the end of 4 of his 8 televised seasons, halfway through, and it doesn't qualify for 4 at all until it's expanded, at least a season beyond that (maybe more, I forget). Thus, for at least 5 years (maybe more) after he first appears onscreen, he unequivocally does not qualify for 4.

 

In general I find it problematic to include stuff that appears on Angel but not Buffy due to the original description, which highlights the vampire's role as a "secondary protagonist" whose vampirism relates to his function regarding the primary protagonist. That part fits perfectly on Buffy, but not at all on Angel. Moreover, a lot of these items seem to relate to the sort of perceptive aura of vampirism that surrounds such a character. If we see them for 3-5 years in another light and then we see that a rich guy cuts their company a big check and their two partners buy a swank convertible for their own use -- that's where that car came from -- I have a hard time assigning that cred to the vampire under discussion.

[Alorael at Large]

You know, the term "vampire" here is completely unhelpful. SoT actually gave a clear definition of what he's actually talking about in the first post, and vampire seems like a tongue-in-cheek Twilightism. The characteristics are really describing "an over-the-top all-round awesome secondary protagonist who initiates the ordinary young main protagonist into an extraordinary world." Let's talk about super-special mentors, not vampires. Nothing SoT says is about romance between the mentor and the primary protagonist, although of course it's an option.

 

My hunch, and it's just a hunch, is that SoT is onto a bit of a larger common thread in YA fantasy. There's a protagonist, who's young but special. The protagonist meets or is found by a mentor, who is special. Perhaps in the same way, perhaps the mentor recognizes a much greater talent, or perhaps the mentor is simply able to recognize this specialness that he or she lacks. Mentors are often cool characters. Maybe SoT's arbitrary point values are wrong, but the cool mentor archetype seems pretty obvious to me. Gandalf's a kind of prototype, lacking coolness but steeped in awesomeness. It's just a modernization of the Gandalf, really. But I don't know enough YA lit, and I do think YA is likely to be where this comes through most, to really opine.

 

The fact that Buffy/Angel work messily with this probably speaks more to those shows' very complicated approach to characters and roles. The characters changed over time; their relationships changed, and the initial premise of Buffy is all about playing with standard archetypes.

 

—Alorael, who also thinks hostility to SoT's literary analysis and predilections in a past topic are clouding things here. This thread is not that one. This hypothesis is not that one and should stand or fall on its own merits.

[Slawbug]

—Alorael, who also thinks hostility to SoT's literary analysis and predilections in a past topic are clouding things here. This thread is not that one. This hypothesis is not that one and should stand or fall on its own merits.

This is a fair point. However, it has one big problem: the hostility to one-way conversations comes from a pattern over multiple threads, not any single thread. As the title of the last thread ironically stated, it's a pattern. The only reason this issue has come up here, is because one party left all the responses to him hanging, in the previous thread. Since the same circumstances that led to past problems are now recurring, I think it's pretty reasonable to bring it back up.

 

The easiest way to dispel this cloud would be to give the issues that were voiced in the last thread (but stem from the pattern in general) the courtesy of a response, rather than trying to sweep them under the rug.

[adc.]

I've never got into the Vampire genre other than the Blade Trilogy. Is it really worth it? Does anyone know of something decent?

 

How about Dawnguard? Vampire hunters or something, in the old fort near Riften, might consider joining up myself.

[Callie]

I'll concede the well-traveled, but it seems problematic to award him two points here when his well-versedness is not emphasized, and he is out-well-versed by multiple other characters; if you looked at the cast of either show and identified the characters whose education, language ability, or knowledge of lore were more emphasized, Angel would never come up, so consistently is he outshone by Giles, Wesley, Fred, and a parade of recurring characters from Jenny Calendar on.

In general I find it problematic to include stuff that appears on Angel but not Buffy due to the original description, which highlights the vampire's role as a "secondary protagonist" whose vampirism relates to his function regarding the primary protagonist.

Yeah, that's definitely true. He's not as well-versed as other characters, although there are a few times early on that his lore is useful.

 

Were those actually "gifted" portraits? That seemed like a one-off to me, not a character attribute; again, there are other characters much of whose artistic abilities is made. But not Angel's.

On Buffy his portraits are not discussed to great detail, but on Angel the other characters admire his portrait of Cordelia and whatnot. I don't think that counts for the very reason you stated: he's a primary protagonist on that show.

 

On another note, why does the cursor skip around whenever I use italics or boldface? Is there something wrong with my browser?

[Dintiradan]

My hunch, and it's just a hunch, is that SoT is onto a bit of a larger common thread in YA fantasy. There's a protagonist, who's young but special. The protagonist meets or is found by a mentor, who is special. Perhaps in the same way, perhaps the mentor recognizes a much greater talent, or perhaps the mentor is simply able to recognize this specialness that he or she lacks. Mentors are often cool characters. Maybe SoT's arbitrary point values are wrong, but the cool mentor archetype seems pretty obvious to me. Gandalf's a kind of prototype, lacking coolness but steeped in awesomeness. It's just a modernization of the Gandalf, really. But I don't know enough YA lit, and I do think YA is likely to be where this comes through most, to really opine.

Actually, my thought is that these YA novels are not so much a take on LotR (and high fantasy in general) as they are a modern take on fairy tales (or low fantasy or whatever). The protagonist is never the most interesting character in a fairy tale, it's the fairy world (or whatever) and those who introduce the protagonist to it that get all the attention. It doesn't have to be an entirely separate dimension, or even a secret cabal of vampires or a school of magic. Anytime the protagonist is inducted into some secret society, or some lesser known subculture, or whatever, there's a good chance the mentor fits this pattern.

 

(I should point out I'm talking about the popular conception of fairy tales, and not necessarily as they were originally written. Also, like in the previous thread, this is spur of the moment spitballing, and I'm open to any counterexamples and counterexplanations.)

[Kelandon]

Alo may be right, here. That list seems like a mixture of coolness, on the one hand, and mentorship in superpowers, on the other. Coolness might be the James Dean/the Fonz/Travolta in Grease archetype. (Or maybe we're really talking about James Bond.) Mentorship might be Gandalf/Professor X/etc. The point of this list is to be both Gandalf and the Fonz.

 

But seeing it this way makes me wonder if the gender dynamics here aren't just a product of the gender dynamics of each component. What does coolness look like for women? Is there a female equivalent of James Bond (or whatever)? I don't know enough pop culture off the top of my head to have a good answer, though — again — Angelina Jolie comes to mind.

 

There are probably different dynamics on the mentorship side.

[Randomizer]

April Dancer in The Girl from U.N.C.L.E a spin off of The Man from U.N.C.L.E which was a parody of James Bond, but no where above a 6. Cathy Gale, Emma Peel and Tara King were the partners of John Steed in the British TV series The Avengers had different points, but none at the desired level and while mentored by Steed aren't more than 5 to 6 points. I never watched Honey West which at least was the title character.

[Cairo Jim]

Finding a female equivalent maybe on the hard side. Having a hero or a mentor is much easier to make as a muscular figure bathed in suave masculinity than it is to write for a female character. On top of that, a female character would be more complex as a personality, a male figure can just point a gun and blow things up.

[Lilith]

My hunch, and it's just a hunch, is that SoT is onto a bit of a larger common thread in YA fantasy. There's a protagonist, who's young but special. The protagonist meets or is found by a mentor, who is special. Perhaps in the same way, perhaps the mentor recognizes a much greater talent, or perhaps the mentor is simply able to recognize this specialness that he or she lacks. Mentors are often cool characters. Maybe SoT's arbitrary point values are wrong, but the cool mentor archetype seems pretty obvious to me. Gandalf's a kind of prototype, lacking coolness but steeped in awesomeness. It's just a modernization of the Gandalf, really. But I don't know enough YA lit, and I do think YA is likely to be where this comes through most, to really opine.

 

this puts an interesting spin on the plays-a-musical-instrument list item, since music is one area where a kid could actually experience a one-on-one mentorship like that in real life. are YA vampire romance novels really just meant to appeal to every girl who's ever had a crush on her music teacher? the world wonders

 

edit: it would help explain why pianos in particular, since the piano by its nature is an instrument geared toward learning by one-on-one instruction

[Edgwyn]

I believe (without data) that the concept of a mentor is fairly common in adult fantasy and SF and not unheard of in other adult literature. In a previous post I tried scoring a couple of over-the-top characters (David Weber's Honor Harrington and Merlin) and did not come up with a "vampire". I would score Gandalf and Professor X as 12s based on SoT's criteria, and I would probably put Angel closer to a 12 than a 15 for that matter. I think (again, no actual data) that criteria 5, 8, and 9 (oxford comma) are relatively rare in most fantasy or SF sub-genres.

 

Lilith may be right about the crush on the music teacher, although I choose to think of it as a way of demonstrating that the immoral/evil character is actually sensitive (or SoT's term "Care Bear") since some folks associate art and music with sensitivity. Too bad that I do not have any literary talent, I could write trashy YA romance with a gorgeous brooding engineer as the super human mentor that the protagonist falls in love with.

[Alorael at Large]

Except that mentor archetype is older than girls as fantasy heroines. I think the gender is probably mostly just artifacts: it used to be boys with men as mentors, then girls could have men as mentors too. We'll get women as mentors as our culture glacially progresses through the confusing era of non-explicit but still heavily implicit sexism. And the coolness is also much newer as a concept than the wise and powerful mentor. We'll get more vampire-mentors and more women mentors and more vampire-women-mentors with time.

 

—Alorael, who sees perfectly good examples above of the implicit sexism problem. And even when the author doesn't internalize it, he or she might realize it's there and write with it in mind for the audience. But why can't there be female mentors who point guns at things and blow them up? Masculinity's pretty much out, but they can still be smooth, wise-cracking, strong, morally ambiguous, and deadly. No different, really. Even, one day, with impressive scars and artistic smudges of dirt and blood instead of perfect makeup at all times.

[Kelandon]

The point of this list is to be both Gandalf Moiraine and the Fonz Joan Jett.

I would read that story.

[Triumph]

Kel is quoting himself and editing his own quote. That's just weird.

[Cairo Jim]

Kel posting quotes quoting himself seems to be the "it" thing.

[Kelandon]

Also, to everyone, I'd like to quote myself (a favorite pastime of mine)

After a decade, I finally have a posting gimmick.

[Edgwyn]

Alorael, I do not deny the existence of sexism in various aspects of the human endeavor. However, my objection to the hypothesis from the first thread that has now appeared again in this one is that these vampire stories represent the bulk of YA fantasy or SF. There are plenty of examples of modern YA or Adult fantasy books (I even provided a couple of examples) where the mentor is female. I believe that we have taken a sub-genre (YA paranormal romance) that is marketed to teen girls with the emphasis on romance and taken that un-representative sample as evidence to prove the hypothesis.

 

My hypothesis is that modern mainstream F/SF (which used to be/is marketed towards teen boys) is actually more accepting of females in protagonist and mentor roles than the various sub-genres of romance that are marketed to teen girls and women.

 

That said, despite the objections that some of us on this forum have to Twilight, Ms. Meyer obviously gave her audience (a subset of teen girls) exactly what they wanted. Ultimately, while I object to certain of the themes in Twilight, just like I object to some of the themes in romance novels, the reality is that there is plenty of good fantasy and SF out there that does not fall into the Twilight pattern.

[nikki.]

Kelandon. Never change. You have reached perfection, and I lay my SW account at your feet. Do with it what you will.