I recall a short story I read once. The guy made a point that it wasn’t the cross that had power, it was the crucifixion. A plain cross had no more power than a plus sign.
But he had a massive tattoo of the full crucifixion on his chest, with incredible details of Jesus’ suffering rendered as life-like as possible, so he could kill vampires whenever they got close enough to him to feed. Basically hugging them to death.
I don’t like heights, or falling. Even if there were a bungee cord or trampoline involved so that I was reasonably sure I wasn’t going to die, I’d still be screaming.
That just raises another debate about whether The Federation is a Utopia.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine spent lot of time debunking the idea.
Though I admit Gene Rodenberry’s original vision of Star Trek and The Federation was that of a utopia
It’s a Utopia if you’re a Socialist 
To Ralph Offenhouse it’s probably a Communist Nightmare.
But yeah the thesis of latter season DS9 is definitely about the complexities of “Paradise”.
The Federation is a root beer- flavored utopia.
It makes sense that Christian iconography would repel vampires. After all, isn’t the promise of Christianity eternal life. Vampirism provides a sexier path to the same destination. It isn’t protection as much as it’s taking out the competition.
And yet both Christianity and vampirism share an interest in drinking blood.
I think this falls into the thread topic of “everyone gets this wrong.”
Yes, it was really just a Rodenberryst fantasy utopia, while Gene was around. Not socialist, hell no real socioideological underpinnings, especially in the early TNG seasons it was just all about emphasizing as hard as he could that whatever it was, it meant whatever the Reagan Era was not.
You should lead a conference where the two groups unite to focus on common ground.
It’s insidious!
To quote an old short story:
“Comrade, Comrade,” the vampire said, shaking his head sadly as he plucked the crucifix from his fingers. “And I thought you’d be a good Communist to the end!”
Reminds me of the Harry Turtledove story where Jesus is a vampire and the Vatican has him in their basement.
Very interesting. Never heard of that one or the idea.
Under St Peter’s is the title.
OTTOMH, In Vampire The Masquerade there were 13 clans of vampires. The book about the Malkavians (Madness is their curse and their power. They were inspired by V from V For Vendetta) includes Rasputin among the famous Malkavians. He can be seen getting communion at midnight masses. He claims the host transubstantiates to the blood of Christ in his mouth.
Sorry to be that guy, but did you mean the body of Christ? The host is His body and the wine is His blood. But, of course, Dracula never drank… wine.
Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation is that the host contains the body and blood of Christ, so if you only take the host, you are receiving both.
See wikipedia: Concomitance (doctrine) - Wikipedia
The doctrine states that since Christ is indivisible, no one part of Christ’s substance can be divided.[1] Thus, Christ’s body can not be separated from his blood which means that Christ’s full presence is in each element fully.
I found a PDF of the book in question on this computer’s hard drive. Since this is my old, spare computer I had trouble copying the text. I finally just saved it as a gif and uploaded it to Imgur. NOTE- This is one paragraph from roughly a hundred pages. It should fall well within the bounds of fair use.
The movie title The Last Samurai is plural not singular, and also doesn’t refer to white guy Tom Cruise as being the titular Last Samurai.
That last line is pretty funny. Thanks for posting it.
