mad_docs_of_lit (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mad_docs_of_lit) wrote2010-12-12 11:20 pm
mad_docs_of_lit) wrote2010-12-12 11:20 pm
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Thoughts on Lump
Well, I've been trying to gather and assemble my thoughts on Lump for a week now but time and the general state of my brain have not been kind! However, I am finally sitting down for a little while and putting pen to paper, so here goes.
These days, the vampire has often taken the Anne Rice ideal and run madly with it, until the "sexy immortal" part often overshadows the "monster" part. The blood-drinking becomes yet another angle for the character to express their ancient emo ways. Sometimes I enjoy this interpretation, but I find the monster more intriguing.
So, when I started Lump, I set out to explore the monster. I went back to the old beliefs and read up as much as I could on them. The bloated bodies, ruddy faces, the moaning. The roots in blood-drinking demons. I tried not to take from anything more recent than Dracula, and tried to mostly stick to mythologies older than that--the superstition-driven folklore now assumed to be inspired by misunderstandings about decomposition.
My initial story idea was much different than what happens. One of my favorite themes is subverting what we expect of "good" and "evil", and in my original idea, Kurt was going to rescue the vampire he finds in the woods, take it home with it, and slowly the lines between them would become blurred--without Kurt becoming a vampire himself. He was going to hold the thing captive and become more and more obsessed with it, perhaps in a overreaction or perversion of the creature's own natural hypnotic/seductive abilities.
Obviously, that's not what ended up being written. I can't remember where the story idea diverged. Probably when I was talking over the earliest part and earliest draft with Die and realized that Kurt would have to be pretty bonkers from the outset to take the creature home, influenced or not, with the semi-realistic grounding I'd sort of given the story.
One of the themes most noted in Dracula seems to be the theme of seduction, and while I think that's gotten a bit overdone in the modern mythos, I've certainly included elements of that here. In fact the more I wrote the more the story started to become a battle for the heart of Kurt--taking something of the fairytale "The Snow Queen" and mixing it into this new vampire myth. I started to think of the story of Kay, very simplified, of course--where we usually see the story "The Snow Queen" from Gerda's point of view, as she goes through her quest to save her beloved friend, this is more a story of the boy with the sliver of mirror in his heart. Does he ever really realize all his friend has done for him? Probably not.
These days, the vampire has often taken the Anne Rice ideal and run madly with it, until the "sexy immortal" part often overshadows the "monster" part. The blood-drinking becomes yet another angle for the character to express their ancient emo ways. Sometimes I enjoy this interpretation, but I find the monster more intriguing.
So, when I started Lump, I set out to explore the monster. I went back to the old beliefs and read up as much as I could on them. The bloated bodies, ruddy faces, the moaning. The roots in blood-drinking demons. I tried not to take from anything more recent than Dracula, and tried to mostly stick to mythologies older than that--the superstition-driven folklore now assumed to be inspired by misunderstandings about decomposition.
My initial story idea was much different than what happens. One of my favorite themes is subverting what we expect of "good" and "evil", and in my original idea, Kurt was going to rescue the vampire he finds in the woods, take it home with it, and slowly the lines between them would become blurred--without Kurt becoming a vampire himself. He was going to hold the thing captive and become more and more obsessed with it, perhaps in a overreaction or perversion of the creature's own natural hypnotic/seductive abilities.
Obviously, that's not what ended up being written. I can't remember where the story idea diverged. Probably when I was talking over the earliest part and earliest draft with Die and realized that Kurt would have to be pretty bonkers from the outset to take the creature home, influenced or not, with the semi-realistic grounding I'd sort of given the story.
One of the themes most noted in Dracula seems to be the theme of seduction, and while I think that's gotten a bit overdone in the modern mythos, I've certainly included elements of that here. In fact the more I wrote the more the story started to become a battle for the heart of Kurt--taking something of the fairytale "The Snow Queen" and mixing it into this new vampire myth. I started to think of the story of Kay, very simplified, of course--where we usually see the story "The Snow Queen" from Gerda's point of view, as she goes through her quest to save her beloved friend, this is more a story of the boy with the sliver of mirror in his heart. Does he ever really realize all his friend has done for him? Probably not.