Monster Monday :: on vampire sexuality

A year ago, I talked about vampire procreation, but that isn’t all there is to vampire sexuality.  Far from.  So as usual, canon-sorted.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel:

• To a soulless vampire, sex is just part of the fun.  It goes hand-in-hand with blood and killing: they eat, they kill, they bang.  Sometimes more of one of those variables than another, but that’s the basic equation.
• Sex, at least for the Whirlwind, both did and did not acknowledge the family structure that Drusilla (Juliet Landau) set up.  The “official” pairs amongst those four were Darla/Angelus, Dru/Spike, which held to at least the basic seniority involved, but then again, the official pairs were guidelines and not strict rules: “Intimate liaisons also occurred between Angelus and Drusilla, Angelus and Spike, and Darla and Drusilla,” says the Buffy wiki.
• And let’s just look at that for a second.  Both possible slash couples, though not seen liaising, are technically canon.  Angelus/Angel (David Boreanaz) and Spike (James Marsters) can be read as quite hetero-leaning; that they happened to interact sexually was probably more an exception than a rule.  Darla (Julie Benz) and Drusilla are probably hetero-leaning; they aren’t seen interacting sexually with other women, really, though there’s more basis in canon for the nature of their having proper intimacy and not just doing something.  This is to say: while sexuality as a whole is always fluid, vampire sexuality is more openly so, perhaps.  It was network TV, so much of this is implied and not seen, but hey.
• Now, Angel and the “true happiness” issue.  The curse that causes Angel’s soul to disappear being triggered by orgasm in the company of the woman he loved is an interesting metaphor.  It’s not just sex that does it (Angel does have sex later without the soul-losing repercussions) but sex with that person, well.  That this is what does it, and that it’s not fully revealed until after the initial incident, is pretty easy to read as commentary on at least the social connotations of acting on one’s desires.
• Spike has a fair amount of sex.  He’s routinely with Dru when we meet him, he’s eventually with vampire Harmony (Mercedes McNab), he gets with Buffy for a relationship that’s mostly sex without the strings of affection and trust, he probably gets with others intermittently if he can.  At least pre-soul, Spike is one of those who seems to need to have someone to define himself in relation to: he both belongs to Dru and cares for her, he has Harmony, he has Buffy and belongs to her simultaneously.  Angel’s identity is largely defined by his perceived inability to be sexual, and Spike’s identity is largely defined by the ways in which he is sexual.
• Oh, and let’s mention vampire Willow (Alyson Hannigan) and Xander (Nicholas Brendon) also; because this is canonical alternate universing, it’s not worth mentioning in many of these lists, but these guys are a perfect example of: flirtation, killing, all in one.

True Blood:

• SEXY VAMPIRE SEX OHMAHGAH.  That’s people who don’t watch True Blood talking about True Blood.
• But see… not only?  Yes, there is sex.  Many characters, vampire and not, regularly partake of the sex, because it is HBO where you can do that, but, uhm.  I’ve mentioned before that I have never really found it gratuitous, and that still stands.  And it’s not like there isn’t sex in the source material.  Maybe not as much, or as specifically strange, but it is there.  Because hey, you know what?  Sometimes people in life have sex.
• Buffy seems to have a sire/childe relationship imperative: rather, there are plenty of vampires who don’t end up sleeping with those they’re linked to by blood, but the main instances we see of Darla/Angelus and Dru/Spike are blood ties and intimate ties both.  True Blood is… fuzzier on this subject.  Which I talk about all the time, but I’m stating it here for the record too.  I’m just addressing this vampire by vampire.
• Bill (Stephen Moyer).  His sexcapades with Sookie (Anna Paquin) comprise much of the first seasons, which means that SEXY VAMPIRE SEX OHMAHGAH is already a misnomer: Bill is a vampire, Sookie is not, it’s not like this is just a show about vampires banging.  Actually, a reasonable amount of the sex we see is not vampire/vampire at all.  Bill did have a sexual relationship with Lorena (Mariana Klaveno) his maker, which ended when she released him; it is reprised in season three (and while I didn’t even find the head-turned-backward sex gratuitous, it was definitely nosewrinkle-inducing) and it’s definitely not of the good.  Then there’s more vampire/vampire sex when Bill hooks up with Salome (Valentina Cervi) in season five.
• Eric (Alexander Skarsgard).  He gets a fair amount of fangbanger action before he eventually hooks up with Sookie (this in contrast with Bill, who decidedly does not; this could be reflective of the fact that Bill starts as a super-mainstreamer, or reflective of the fact that Bill is kind of a prude).  He is unashamed of this, and it’s definitely not vanilla, nope.  When Eric gets with Sookie, it’s much more “normal” – sure, it’s outside the first time, then it’s in sex Narnia, but it’s still something like missionary.  And then Nora (Lucy Griffiths).  They have two different sex scenes, and this is more vampire/vampire sex, but unlike Lorena/Bill or Bill/Salome, it’s… presumably from a place of if not romantic love in the traditional sense then at least some kind of love.  Eric and Godric’s relationship… well, it’s never fully described, but there’s much speculation.  Also of note is the conversation between Eric and Talbot (Theodore Zouboulidis here credited as Theo Alexander), where they’re about to get to it and Eric comments that it’s been a long time since he’s done this, then corrects upon Talbot’s prompting that he doesn’t mean sex with a man, he means sex with a vampire.  We don’t see Eric getting with men, but he mentions that he has, and it’s unlikely that it’s a complete lie.  So that’s something.
• Pam (Kristin Bauer van Straten).  She’s gotten a fair amount of fangbanger play over time too, usually on the desk in the office; she’s lady-leaning, definitely, though presumably not entirely (“Let bygones be bygones, bi girls be bi girls” and whatnot).  She met Eric in the context of sex, and they were intimate, though they haven’t been in some time.  Pam is completely sex-positive, really.  And while she presumably is entering into a sexual relationship with her progeny Tara (Rutina Wesley), it wasn’t a given fact, it evolved over a bit of time.  The attraction grew like attractions do into what I will say again is the most beautiful phrase in the English language, cellar door be damned: interracial lesbian vampire couple.
• Sophie-Anne (Evan Rachel Wood): vampire/fangbanger time all the way, and “I haven’t enjoyed sex with men since the Eisenhower administration.”  And though she has favorites, she seems iffy on the concept of monogamy.
• Russell (Denis O’Hare), first with Talbot and then with Steve (Michael McMillan).  Definitely gay, which is not made an issue; he forces Sophie-Anne into that marriage of convenience, but there’s no pretense about it.  He seems to be more for vampire/vampire sex, yep.
• Franklin (James Frain) was a d-bag and a rapist and he’s despicable.  But I suspect that would have been true of his personality whether or not he was a vampire.
• Nora.  Reiteration, she has a fair amount of sex with Eric, and it’s vampire/vampire but not of the bad so that’s something.  Also, please allow me to elaborate on why I fully believe that the Nora/Salome kiss came from a place with background: the way I read her, intimacy in one way translates to intimacy in another for Nora.  She and Salome were crazy-close, so naturally they were going to have the sex, even if it was only implied (sigh).  Also, Nora feeds on humans, but she doesn’t strike me as necessarily the fangbanger type too often.  She’s more of a strictly vampire/vampire sex kind of girl.
• Salome.  Based in a story of seductive manipulation, which she then debunked, but either it was a lie in the first place, or she eventually learned that art.  Because wow, wow, all the sexual manipulation from this woman: she was in a relationship with Roman (Christopher Meloni) and presumably had been for a while, they shared a bedroom, she shed a tear (of debatable legitimacy) when he was killed, but do I think for a second that that wasn’t a strategic choice of hers?  Nooope.  Bill was a strategic choice, too, and I still can’t decide how much it turned real.  She was taught to define herself by who she liaises with, at least publicly, but do I think she saw herself as anyone’s strictly speaking?  Nope.  And here’s another reason why Salome/Nora: she looked at Nora like she didn’t look at any of the others, at least if you’re watching with lady-tinted glasses.
• Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll) is never seen having sex with another vampire, actually.  She’s with Hoyt (Jim Parrack), then with Jason (Ryan Kwanten); she feeds on fangbangers of both sexes, but she’s still fairly heterosexual.  She’s actually, I would say, the most heterosexual of all of the vampires on this show.  Even Bill gets innuendo thrown at him and participates in sexy dreams of Sam’s (Sam Trammell).
• Okay so I wrote a lot about these guys and sexuality but that’s because they live in a canon where they’re allowed to have more sexuality to write about.

Twilight:

• Presumably, Rosalie (Nikki Reed) and Emmett (Kellan Lutz) have a healthy sex life, Alice (Ashley Greene) and Jasper (Jackson Rathbone) have a healthy sex life, Esme (Elizabeth Reaser) and Carlisle (Peter Facinelli) have a healthy sex life.  Token “breaking a house” jokes go here.
• But do we know anything about these healthy sex lives other than those jokes?  No, because this is the kind of story where only major characters’ intimacies are really delved into, so we only hear about Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Edward (Robert Pattinson) doing it.
• I’m still shuddertwitching about the birth scene, though.  I haven’t seen Breaking Dawn yet, but I remember reading it and being horrified.  For one thing, half-vampire half-human baby?  How again?  At least there’s magic involved in the vampire/vampire conception on Angel that I’m still not up to yet.  For another thing, this is the actual grossest, and I have the strongest stomach of most everyone I know as long as there aren’t closeups on needles in spines or eyeballs.  But it’s gross psychologically, too, which I’m sure has been said many a time already on the internet.

–your fangirl heroine.

Fictional Friday :: 10 (being a variable count) more x3 cross-canon friendships that should be.

I say 10 is a variable count because a few of these are less “besties for life” and more “completely necessary support groups” containing more than just two characters.  But.

10. Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings, Thor) and April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza, Parks and Recreation)
Please, please, please?  Can this deadpanning snark party of (former) interns please exist?  It would work, but it also wouldn’t be excessive: their snark styles are different enough to complement each other.  Darcy actually musters enthusiasm more regularly, April would never admit to doing such a thing, but I’d like to think they went to summer camp together (probably for something ridiculous and far too enthusiastic to seem in-character) when they were kids and occasionally send messages back and forth via Facebook or something.  Darcy sent inappropriately naughty congratulations to April upon hearing of her wedding, April likes to reply with questions about “that god your boss is hooking up with and all his friends,” it’s one of those friendships (I feel like I talk about these a lot) where it wouldn’t seem that amiable to an observer all the time, but they both know it’s meant with some semblance of love.

9. Dakota McGraw Block (Marley Shelton, Planet Terror) and Bennett Halverson (Summer Glau, Dollhouse) and Tara Knowles (Maggie Siff, Sons of Anarchy)
One of the support group situations, though I imagine this would end much more pleasantly than the other.  This is the the support group that turns into professional friendship for women who have experienced injury to their hand(s)/arms that somehow incapacitate them for a period of time or permanently and also they have things to deal with like potential crushes on badass ladyfriends (Dakota re: Cherry, Bennett re: Caroline) or issues with taking care of children (Dakota, Tara) or relationships that are sometimes adorable and sometimes leading to the bad (Bennett re: everyone, Tara re: …actually everyone too, but mostly Jax) or potential world-ending scenarios (Dakota re: zombies, Bennett re: tech).  They’d get together and talk about their various issues and then realize that hey, it’s nice to have friends who are other badass ladies with doctorates.

8. Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke, Game of Thrones) and Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnam, Sons of Anarchy)
I actually have this whole highly alternate universe (for Dany, mostly) scenario regarding these two, because in order for this to make any sense at all it needs to be put in a present day context.  (I just can’t imagine Jax in fake medieval times.  It just doesn’t work.  Since the motorcycle is so integral to his character, he needs to live in a world where it exists.)  But really, these two have a painful amount of things in common, and with the appropriate excessive timeline modifications, I can see hipster badass college Dany becoming friends (with benefits at first or not, either way) with Jax, probably pre-Sons canon.  Over time, they become epic pen pals (because while Jax keeps those journals for his boys or just in general, I can see him enjoying to have someone to share things – some things, not everything, though hipster badass college Dany is not naive to the world of crime or whatever) and occasionally she pops down to Charming to visit, they have a beer and he kisses her forehead when they say goodbye, they talk about whatever, they help each other out how they can.  Oh, and the rest of the Sons kind of like Dany too: eventually, the dragon queen is basically like everyone’s little sister or daughter.  Chibs especially takes a shine to her (it’s a United Kingdom thing, because even though hipster badass college Dany is in the States now, she’s British by ancestry).

7. Daenerys Targaryen and Snow White (Kristen Stewart, Snow White and the Huntsman)
I may have been sitting on this concept literally since I saw the movie.  But really.  It’s a deposed princesses taking their rightful thrones club.  This is almost a support group too.

6. Jon Snow (Kit Harington, Game of Thrones) and Angel (David Boreanaz, Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel)
This was not my idea.  This was my everything to my everything friend’s idea.  But it is actually a great one.  She had mentioned drawing some sort of picture of it, the details of which I am now spacing, but this would have to be courtesy one of the Powers That Be’s interdimensional portals, because they both need their own contexts, but they still need to hang out.  Many discussions of honor, duty, and the repercussions of sexual activity could be had, they could both make their somewhat endearing awkward faces.

5. Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner, Game of Thrones) and Shilo Wallace (Alexa Vega, Repo! The Genetic Opera)
No, I don’t have a legitimate reason for this.  I can just imagine them getting along pretty well.  Maybe it’s that they are/have been both under varying degrees of house arrest?  This might have to be an interdimensional portal too, because Shilo’s history and personality depend on her context.  Actually, I think it’s just that both of them need friends.  There’s a reason why Sansa (and Dany for that matter) show(s) up on these lists often.

4. Sansa Stark and Ruby (Meghan Ory, Once Upon a Time)
…there is no reason for this either, except wolves.  Also, Sansa would probably benefit from someone with Ruby’s strong protective instinct, but at the same time it’s not smothery protective or protective-with-motives, it’s friendly protective.  Etcetera.

3. Ruby and Jessica Hamby (Deborah Ann Woll, True Blood)
And this?  This is somewhat in answer to Jessica’s actual canonical comment about wanting friends.  I racked my brain for who might suit, and while I couldn’t think of any other vampires who could pal down with Jess, I got the idea that maybe Ruby would get along with her well.  Obviously being a wolf is different, but it requires a lot of the same emotional reconciliation between one’s natures and instincts; also, Jess is generally willing to take other non-vampire supes on a case-by-case basis, so the wolf thing wouldn’t inherently be an issue.  After a while, she’d probably even think it was cool.  Similarly, I imagine Ruby would try to be understanding of the differences that arise from Jess being a vampire, and together they could hang out, go shopping for cute accessories, talk about how absolutely frustrating and absolutely cool it can be to be more than human, etcetera.

2. Pam de Beaufort (Kristin Bauer van Straten, True Blood) and Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens, Deadwood)
Oh, hey, I just thought of this the other night.  This might be a friendship arising from another support group, the “some number of sick assholes murdered some of the prostitutes in my brothel and I discovered this” group maybe.  Which is to say, flashback Pam is the one playing here (I’ll fudge a few decades of timeline to make it work).  It could also be a social club for “blonde madams with fabulous clothes who also mostly like to sleep with women.”  I think I postulated once that Joanie would be kind of an Angelesque redemptive mission vampire, but were that the case here, Pam would keep her from getting too preachy about it.

1. Nora Gainesborough (Lucy Griffiths, True Blood) and Faith Lehane (Eliza Dushku, Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel) and Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson, The Avengers)
This is a much more dangerous support group.  This is the “I have red in my ledger” group, wherein all of these women prooobably need to at least be around someone else who is in a remotely similar situation to them in terms of atoning for things.  I can’t imagine they’d talk a terrible lot about what was actually bothering them (none of them being exactly the type), Nora would probably wrinkle her cute little nose a lot and Faith would sigh and be skeptical about the fact that Nora is a vampire and Natasha would sit there with her arms folded just staring at everyone, but eventually they would start discussing something else unrelated to the reason they’re all there, like battle techniques or cool places they’ve traveled to (this one would mostly be Nora and Tasha, probably), and it would be a strange kind of relaxing for them.  Because no matter what kind of support they do or do not get from their teammates/quasi-families, said teammates/quasi-families cannot ever entirely know the weight of what they carry after the things they’ve done that they need to make up for (not that they’d be allowed to try much).

–your fangirl heroine.

Spoiler Alert Saturday :: my thoughts on Snow White and the Huntsman

Ah, bullet-pointed for convenience, I suppose?

• Yes, all right.  I’m good with this film.  I have no overarching problems with it that don’t stem from overarching problems with the story of Snow White as a whole or fairy tales as a whole.  In fact, I’d say I enjoyed it.  It was dark, it was weird, it was fantastical, it did many things I generally approve of.
• Addressing the cast.  Kristen Stewart: back when all I’d seen her in was Twilight, I was ugh.  Because Twilight isn’t good.  Circa Adventureland, I was meh, because I saw it too many times and couldn’t really think any non-meh thoughts about it.  Circa The Runaways and now this, I’m coming around to yes, all right, if they give her something to do, she can do it pretty well actually.  She seems like a fun enough person in interviews and yes, the way that the media treats her is gǒ se,and I’m sure that if I saw her in something not crummy first, I would not have had to take this time to be able to appreciate her.  Which is my longwinded way of saying: good on you, Kristen Stewart.  Good job, I very much approve of your performance here.
• Also, I was prepared to judge your British accent, because I judge everyone’s fake British accents.  This is not to say I was prepared to hate on it, but I am critical of British accents, and yours gave me nothing to criticize really, so that’s a plus.
• Charlize Theron was doing a really great craycray.  I tried to explain to one of my people the other day that, at least in my opinion, “crazy” and “craycray” are not strictly synonymous.  That is, all things that are craycray are a little bit crazy, but not all crazy is craycray.  Charlize Theron was craycray here, and delightfully so.  She really is a beautiful woman, and she was doing evil pretty well.
• Also, I have always sort of approved of the name “Ravenna,” so that was nice.
• Chris Hemsworth, yes all right.  I have yet to not approve of him, he does what is given him to do very nicely.  And he was given the task of axe-fighting and stuff, which was pretty fierce.
• Also, the filmmakers inadvertently granted me one of my recent wishes in having his voice over the beginning exposition sequence.  They gave me the gift of Chris Hemsworth reading bedtime stories.  Yes.
• Sam Claflin, yes I suppose you were very all right at being what you were.  Which was, y’know, not much.  It’s not your fault that I have this inherent bias against the Prince Charming role.  But that isn’t your fault.
• Also, you are a very lucky man, getting to work with Ian McShane twice in your young career.
• Ian McShane.  Dear sir.  I would like to give you a “congratulations on being epic” plaque.  Because really, this man is fantastic.  My big problem with what he had to do in Pirates was just that they didn’t know what to do with him.  They just sort of stuck him in and didn’t give him enough to work with.  The role of the presumably head dwarf was smaller and probably less important, but he got a little more dimension in there.  Which was fabulous, because I just love it when he gets to do his thing.
• Creepy brother Sam Spruell.  You were all creepy.
• I am forced to fully admit that I have a problem when I’m sitting there through this entire thing just drawing Game of Thrones parallels.  I have been drawing Game of Thrones parallels with everything lately, yes.  But it is a complete issue.  Creepy brother walks in and addresses his sister the evil blonde queen and my immediate thought is “well oh dear, is this going there?”  It didn’t obviously, but I’m sure the internet has taken it there already.  And yeah, when fake-William was walking in the woods with Snow and giving the whole “the throne is rightfully yours, you are your father’s daughter, blah blah blah” speech, I was convulsing a little inside.  In a good way.
• Finally, one observation I have about this movie, not necessarily a negative but a definite observation, is that this film definitely has Prisoner of Azkaban disease: particularly at the first howeverlong, it is full of as many gratuitous nature shots as can be.

–your fangirl heroine.