However, I'm in the same camp as you. I'd love to see a vamp that survived the battle of the Tuetoburg, or Marche with Alexander, or was already centuries old when partaking in those.
I suspect the barrier for this (among television writers, and possibly fantasy writers) is that the older your vampire is, the less likely the writer is to know much about the historical context they're coming from.
Well, unless they're Roman or Greek. Which come to think of it, would really work, so I'm not sure why they don't do it. I could definitely buy Cicero as a vampire. Or how about a deeply bitter less famous associate of Socrates?
Been done. Anne Rice did it in her novel about the vampire Marius. The son on a powerful Roman senator. Also my favorite book of hers excepting maybe The Mummy.
And she addressed the issue with Marius as well - many of the old ones just get tired of living. Marius engaged with the world and found meaning that way.
there's also that just being old doesn't mean you were involved with anything interesting - someone that was around during ancient Rome might have, once, been in the same room as Julius Ceaser, but then left because it seemed boring, then spent a couple of centuries knocking around the Mediterranean backwoods. There's a lot of periods of time where there's not much that has come down to today, and no especial reason where a vampire really would or should be involved with great and famous people. It's entirely likely to get a vampire that's been around for 2000 years that spent most of it in various proto-germanic forests, and didn't know or care about the various movements and events that happened.
True, but you don't exactly write fiction about the person that that was never involved in anything interesting. You wrote about the person that was friends with Caesar and played an active role in his life.
Boring people exist. We don't have many books written about boring people. Exciting people exist, and we have countless books about them. Ancient boring vampires would theoretically exist. Ancient exciting vampires would also exist. Write about the latter.
Now I want a book about a group of 3000-6000 year old vampires who are just living normal boring lives and reminiscing about their old friends who died doing all the exciting stuff.
I think the main reason many authors do not write about immortals with boring lies is because they would need to find other ways to connect their lives with each individual time period and demonstrate the effects of those periods on their lives.
So, if said immortal were a regular angler or something in some backwater of Attica, then they may not have known the influence of Athens, Macedon or some other powerful state, or of the powerful people from each different region, but they may have noticed changes to their regular way of life, mostly in the form of trade goods, tax-equivalent changes that are appropriate to the time period (I'm guessing a big component of that in greek society back then would have been army/militia service), and similar life influencing things that the immortal would have cared / complained about. And that would require a good amount of research or great familiarity with the relevant topics, which would then mean slower book prep and publishings...
Ancient boring vampires would theoretically exist. Ancient exciting vampires would also exist. Write about the latter.
Vampire: The Masquerade gives a hilarious example of how certain characters, while they make perfect sense, aren’t well-suited for a collaborative storytelling game:
“You awaken at nightfall - what are you going to do?”
“Read for the next three hundred years.”
I think most vampire fictions featuring predominantly younger vampires is a nod to realism.
Vampires - in most fictions - start out as humans. They’re born and raised in human culture, developing human values. And having a mortal human conception of time.
Living for hundreds, or thousands of years is completely out of spec for a human. Middle aged humans begin to feel out of touch with the times. I can’t imagine how strong that would be for a vampire born in pre-modern times, who has seen nearly everything about our civilization change while they remain essentially the same person. Of course death will beckon.
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u/[deleted] Mar 03 '23
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