In one of Saberhagen’s Dracula books (Maybe The Holmes-Dracula File which picks up after Vlad returns to London after outwitting his pursuers, and is the story of one of the most famous of Holmes’ “missing cases”) Dracula goes to a cricket match and says something like “British sunlight is nothing to a tough old Nosferatu like me.”
I’d say drinking human blood is the defining characteristic of vampires, but Edward & His Sparkly Friends fail on that count as well.
The notion that sunlight is fatal to vampires is relatively new, and actually originated with the movies: the 1922 Nosferatu, to be exact. Earlier vampires were often described as being active primarily at night, but not because sunlight would kill them. They were either nocturnal by nature (like bats and wolves) or at worst suffered some loss of power during the day. In Stoker’s novel Count Dracula goes out in the day one time to make some necessary arrangements for leaving London, although he apprently dislikes direct sunlight enough to wear a big straw hat that “suit not him or the time”. Even in Nosferatu it’s not totally clear that sunlight alone is enough to kill a vampire or if the whole self-sacrifice of a pure-hearted woman is also a necessary element.
After Nosferatu it took a couple more decades for the whole “sunlight kills vampires” thing to catch on (in the famous 1931 Bela Lugosi Dracula there’s nothing about deadly sunlight), but it’s now a major part of the popular conception of vampires. But there’s plenty of precedent in folklore and fiction for vampires that can walk by day…which means Meyers had even less excuse for resorting to this idiotic sparkle business. A perfectly good (and accurate!) explanation for the “myth” that vampires cannot go out in the sun would be “That’s just something humans made up for the movies.”
The idea that vampires might be attracted to the Pacific Northwest due to the lack of sunshine is the only thing approaching a clever idea in Twilight, but Meyers could have kept that part in by saying that her vampires are (like Stoker’s Dracula) weakened/irritated but not killed by direct sunlight. Since Bella spends what seems like the first few chapters of the book whining about how much she misses the sunshine of Arizona and how bad she feels having to live in a cloudy, rainy place, this would have set up a nice contrast between the two main characters.
Instead, she went with the sparkles. :rolleyes:
Right. Meyers’s vampires have no weaknesses at all, other than the temptation to drink human blood. They can overcome even that with a little willpower. Subsiding only on animal blood isn’t even the equivelant of a bread and water diet for them, Edward & His Sparkly Friends are just as powerful as the evil vampires who kill humans. In another thread I described Edward as not a vampire at all, but a superhero with a disgusting diet.
But they already have that great lumber museum! What more did they need 
Not being sarcastic, I love that place.
http://www.northwestplaces.com/trips001/Olyp0001_files/image026.jpg
BTW, this is a pretty good illustration of how Mormonism and Twilight are in cahoots.
If you don’t mind me editing your comment, Lamia:
I borrowed and watched Nosferatu for the first time in protest of sparkly vampires.
No!
There is no downside to being a vampire. You are not hurt by sun. You heal fast. You do not age. You can have sex and children. You have superhuman strength and speed.
Replace ‘vampire’ with ‘superhuman’ and you have the idea.
To have a vampire being inferior in any way would be icky. Why would you want to kiss/have sex with something icky?
{speaking as someone whose daughter is really into Twilight}
An even better one would be that “It’s just a myth that we arranged to have put into movies.”
Hi, my name is Arachne, and I am a recovering Twilight-aholic
(Hi Arachne!)
Serious answer to silly question:
My understanding is that Meyer’s Vampires are not dead so much as petrified - literally walking statues. So, their skin has stone-like qualities, like being cold, hard, and “sparkly” in the same way that certain types of stone is “sparkly” - think of quartz. The reason for this is that the sparkliness turns humans into deer-in-headlights and makes them that much easier to dispatch. I believe that Edward actually says something about how the sparklyness is overkill.
How do they feed, then? I thought that was the major, you know, guilt inducing thing, if you were a vampire with a conscience. Raid blood banks?
Apparently they eat animals.
Uh, no. You have been misinformed on that point.
Not to turn this into a debate over Mormon doctrine, but the closest thing to that in Mormon scripture is the following verse:
Which some mormon teens, 20-something ‘jack mormons’ and 30-something ex-mormons refer to as being “twinkled” into immortality, although the Church refers to it as being ‘translated’.
There are also references to The Lord’s countenance shining, not only in mormonism but also in Greco-roman myths.
One again, my intention is not to turn this into a discussion of mormon doctrine. I spent 10 years active in the church and I don’t recall anything about vampires in all my scriptural study.
But the question remains: when a vampire does finally die, will s/he be converted to Mormanism?
Everyone is converted to Mormonism when they die.
Lots of people (including me) jokingly refer to it as being twinkled, but it doesn’t have anything to do with actual sparkling.
The undead having babies? Awright, that’s stoopider than sparkling.
Can’t wait for other undead to get this treatment.
Until then: http://nobodyscores.loosenutstudio.com/index.php?id=433
Whether they like it or not.
I hate sparkling [del]wiggles[/del] vampires.