I have rarely seen vampire lore adress this. You’d expect a twohundred-year old to be terminally bored, for instance, by normal small talk.
Or maybe, they are total cynical psychopaths and love to perfect the hunt and the kill.
But two hundred years is a long time. Can you be interested in perfecting the hunt for two hundred years? How long before a vampire would rather die then go out again, find some lost looking victim, again, tell her she has the most beautiful eyes you’ve ever seen, again, and steer the conversation so that you can safely ask her to step outside for a moment because it sure is hot in here and you’d like to see how she looks in the moonlight? For the 1267’th time in your life? Even the Rolling Stones start to refuse playing “Satisfaction” after thirty years.
OAnother example. Our two hundred year old vampire might start confusing his girlfriends, because after you’ve dated ten teenagers who were trying to save your soul, they sort of start to blend together, wouldn’t they?
And how on earth would a vampire have enough restraint, when overhearing talk about some current issue, to start blurting out stories of how he overheard Al Capone/General Custers/Moliere wonder the same thing, and he told them how it would go, but did they listen? No, of course not.
This was part of what tortured Angel; the horrible things being done by vampires today are exactly the same horrible things they were doing two hundred years ago, and he was one of the ones doing them.
I believe in the Anne Rice series, they got around the ennui by burying themselves and essentially fasting for decades or centuries, which had something of a cleansing effect on the old psyche.
Plus, they’re nuts.
There are similarities with the mind-set of the elves in Middle Earth. Some of the ones we see in LOTR are old beyond reckoning (at least thousands, possibly tens of thousands of years old). We don’t know because there were big, long hiatuses where nobody had invented the calendar yet and they just existed in a blissful lotus-eating paradise. Thank god for orcs.
I’m no more bored with things at 60 than I was fifty years ago. Three’s always something new to explore, and there’s no reason to think the vampires would get bored.
Yes, there are new things to explore, but many social interactions are essentially unchanging. Ever had a bored feeling when reading yet another abortion/NiceGuy/guncontrol/shouldIleavethisBadBoybutwe’resoinLove thread?
Now multiply that by fifty and imagine still having to read those threads. Every day. Even when you’ve laid buried for fifty years, when you rise again, it is the same old topics again.
Somehow the questions eems less relevant for Elves, as they usually just deal with other Elves, and everyone is centuries old.
But vampires have to live among humans and pretend to be one of them. Just think of yourself having to live between schoolkids, all day. Having to agree that Elvis/Johnny Depp/Robby Williams/JustinBieber is just dreamy. And that parents are mean. For ever.
Yeah, the various children-appearing characters in vampire stories, The Highlander and science-fiction are generally pretty fucked up, although I do remember one SF story about an immortal who had survived the rise & fall of humanity five or six times ended the story walking into a movie theater showing Disney movies–“Fun for children of all ages.” There’s also Baby Herman – “I got 40-year-old libido and a two-year-old dinkie.”
There are other issues as well - vampires live long enough that cultural and technological changes might start to affect them. Picture the older vampires as befuddled grandparents trying to work the DVD player. Actually, “Angel” played with that a little - he never did master the cell phone (and his cultural references were sometimes out of date - when he talked about “Lorne Green” none of his younger associates knew what he was talking about.
"Fifty to a hundred years ago a wave of major extinction killed off 90% of the elder vampires. They simply lacked the flexibility to adapt to the changes brought by the 20th century, and one thing or another got them. (Imagine making the mistake of retreating to the dreaming spires of your youth — back in the 16th century — only to get caught in the firebombing of Dresden.) "
Most vampire fiction has vampires socializing almost exclusively with other vampires, and using humans as servants and/or lunch. So making small talk about the latest teen idol wouldn’t really be much of an issue.
In Dracula it appears that the Count is bored with his life in Romania, and this is why he wants to move to London and join the modern world.
As Ethilrist mentioned, Anne Rice’s older vampires would bury themselves and sleep for years. Younger vampires might do this for a few decades to avoid raising too much suspicion among the mortals and to take advantage of compounded interest. Waking up in a new era could also provide a little excitement.
The really old ones might check out centuries. Until she’s awakened in Queen of the Damned, the first vampire has been basically a statue for longer than most of the vampires can remember. In the same book it turns out there is one very, very old vampire who’s unique in never having gone to sleep. She kept herself occupied by traveling around and keeping track of her mortal descendants, who think she’s the family genealogist. IIRC the story she spread around was that it was a tradition in there family for a woman to be chosen in each generation to inherit this role, and she made sure to space her visits out enough that no one realized the new genealogist looked exactly like the last one.
In Whitley Streiber’s The Hunger, the ancient vampire Miriam practices music and experiments with cross-breeding roses. It’s mentioned that she has some special hybrids that she’s produced with hundreds of years of cross breeding. In modern times she does occasionally lose track of quickly changing trends among mortals. There’s a funny scene in the sequel The Last Vampire where she puts on what she thinks is a very chic outfit only to realize later that she looks like a college student wearing something she got from her grandmother’s attic or a thrift store.
The role playing game Vampire The Masquerade addresses this at length.
Most old vampires are technologically inept.
Some vampires have compulsions to dress and speak in a manner centuries old.
Some elder vampires have seen it all, done it all, and had so many experiences that their emotions are worn away and they rarely feel anything anymore.
The comic book series Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children also addressed this. In Confessions Of A Blood Junky, we learn that most vampires are horrendously bored most of the time. Some vampires commit suicide rather than put up with it anymore. I recall one line ‘We hate waiting. We hate bingo because it’s nothing more than organized boredom. You want to get rid of a vampire? Forget garlic and stakes. Yell “G 40! G40!”.’
The movie Shadow of the Vampire, with Willem Dafoe also address this. As a real vampire being filmed to make the silent feature Nosfertu, he takes an oddly philosophical take on what he doesn’t know.
I can’t believe I forgot Shadow Of The Vampire!:smack:
The vampire in question shows a fascination with the movie camera. His rapt watching of a sunrise being projected is my favorite scene. He also says that he’s been around so long, he’s forgotten a massive amount of his own life.
Interesting…one does get the impression that vampires are bored with their infinite lives…Bela Lugosi said something like this: “aahh…to die! There are worse things than death awaiting man”. I guess you do get tired of getting out of your coffin every night, and looking for people to feed off of.
I’m pretty sure Bela was talking about burning in Hell in that scene, and not dealing with ennui. Knowing that your next stop is guaranteed eternal torment probably puts a bit of a spring in your immortal stride.
Vampires, or any sort of quasi-immortal beings, would definitely have to have something to keep them occupied as a long term project, to keep from being overwhelmed with ennui. perhaps the prime example of this might be Star trek’s “Flint” character, a 4,000-year-old man who had has, consciously or otherwise, shaped and inspired human history.
One might also follow the example of Douglas Adams’ Wowbagger The Infinitely Prolonged.
I always figured Vampires would be perfect candidates for slower-than-light space exploration. Just figure out a way to reconstitute powdered blood, let them spend the centuries between stars in torpor, then reanimate them to conduct their survey. Repeat as necessary (or until the ship stops working). Find some vampires with an inherent streak of curiosity and/or scientific backgrounds, and I imagine they’d jump at the chance.
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Count St. Germain has staved off boredom for 4,000 years by traveling the world and saving (and nibbling on) damsels in distress. His former meal ticket/eternal girlfriend Madeline de Montalia staves off boredom by working as a serious archeologist - who has the advantage of knowing someone who speaks and reads languages both ancient and extinct for those tricky written passages no one else has translated yet.
