The Worst Fang Club

Would you rather be a wolf or a vampire?

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(Stock photo by Getty Images.)

Dear Reader (Excluding those of you who insist on the Dear Reader gag),

Greetings from Chicago. I’m writing from Iwan Ries & Co., which plausibly claims to be the oldest tobacco shop in America. I can’t believe I’ve never been here before. It traces its origins to 1857, but it’s been in its current location only since 1968. That’s kind of a bummer, because I’d like to think that if some vampire, chased out of town by legendary vampire hunter Abraham Lincoln, came back to the City of Big Shoulders, he could swing by his old cigar shop.

Fun fact: When I googled “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” to get a link, I noticed that the first question in the “People Also Ask” feature is “How historically accurate is Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter?”

Anyway, I have vampires on my mind because I’ve been bothered by the long overdue national conversation on the topic of vampires vs. werewolves introduced by Herschel Walker.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    “ But what bothered me about the conversation is that pretty much everyone I talked to said they’d rather be a vampire than a werewolf, and I think this is a symptom of cultural and moral decline.”

    Yes! Hahahaha!

    “ In his excellent book, Wild Problems, Russ Roberts—borrowing from a book by L.A. Paul, Transformative Experience—makes an interesting point about vampires.”

    That was exactly where my mind went, too.

    “ Like Bart Simpson selling his soul to Milhouse for five bucks, becoming a vampire seems like a deal.”

    I almost snorted the bagel I was eating when I read that.

    “ This tweet by Christian philosopher Megan Fritts has haunted me since I first saw it. ”

    A sign of the apocalypse to be sure. Those kids these days!

    Haha this was one of my favorite G-Files of 2022. Some of the best are when Jonah is in, “I don’t care” mode (similar to “having drinks with Mike Gallagher mode”) and doesn’t hold anything back.

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    KAM

    "I think this is a symptom of cultural and moral decline."

    I thought this was humorous hyperbole. Then I read the rest. Now I agree.

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    Mister D

    As someone who has been podcasting about horror films, this is right up my alley. But it invites the question: Which vampires? Which werewolves?

    Mythology - both traditional and contemporary - varies wildly for both vampiric creatures and lycanthopes. Vampires lose their souls in some stories, but not in others. Werewolves are sometimes unfortunates living under a curse, but in others predatory creatures who embrace their animal side.

    I think it fair to say that the Universal films Dracula and The Wolf Man established the template for these stories in contemporary American society. What is interesting is that they are thematically opposites - Dracula is about the terror of the other, the foreigner invading the homeland and taking our women, while the Wolf Man is about the terror of the self, about the loss of control of our own urges.

    So which would I prefer to be? Can I keep my soul as a vampire? If not, am I really still me? And in that case, is there even really a question? The loss of control terrifies me (go ahead, have a field day with that), but that can go with vampires as much as werewolves. Many vampire tales use blood drinking as a metaphor for addiction, one to which all blood suckers must eventually succumb. Most werewolf stories still allow the cursed (if indeed they are cursed) some measure of control by chaining themselves up at night so as not to harm anyone. They are not obligated to feed on humans as many vampires are (though many vampires are able to make due on a diet of animal blood or a fresh pint from the Red Cross).

    For all that, I choose to withhold my final answer until these details can be provided.

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    Emilyasbenson

    Absolutely agree on the V. vs W. debate.

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  6. MathewA

    First, I'm glad to see The Dispatch starting to focus on the important questions. Werewolf's vs Vampires.

    As I'm now in my mid 40's and have perpetual back pain the allure of fantasy fixes grows stronger. What would I trade to not hurt all the time anymore.

    How often would I need to eat, could I get by on animal blood. If only human blood could I chose the victims. What if I only went after child abusers and gang bangers, would it be ok then?


    On a different topic I don't believe age differences matter that much after a certain age. I've know multiple people that married with considerable age differences (20ish years) that worked out that fine. Age and maturity are not the same thing (although they are correlated with at least some people)

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    Rdpulfer

    As someone who prefers fur to fang, I applaud Jonah's correct assumption why werewolves are better.

    That being said, there's no reason to assume becoming a vampire will necessarily make you evil. You could wind up part of a sparkly clan of benevolent vampires like the Cullens, or even the melancholy, nominally good vampire like Barnabas Collins (at least in the later seasons of Dark Shadows). All that being said, you still have to drink blood, rendering you a parasite no matter what your stance on morality happens to be.

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    Dexember

    I've been Team Werewolf for a long time.

    But I've read a LOT of White Wolf's fiction series: Vampire: the Masquerade and Werewolf: the Apocalypse, so my opinion has been shaped by those novels and games since I was a kid.

    In that dark world, most werewolves are good guys (able to shift at will) who do battle against undead creatures such as vampires. And the best of the vampire books really delve into the monstrous nature of being a vampire, all of which really led me to be team werewolf:

    Vampires that live long enough will either lose touch with ALL humanity or wish for death. You can not watch all connections you make wither to dust, over and over again, without looking upon life very differently than a human does. Isaac Asimov wrote about this type of thinking in his short stories as well. The vampire's mind goes past narcissism and cruelty and becomes something much colder and alien as the centuries turn to millennia.

    And Jonah's description of a vampire as a rapist is very apropos. What is drinking another's blood against their will but a metaphor of rape? Bram Stoker's (very boring) novel was endless pages of the characters bemoaning the potential loss of "purity" of the victims (with many characters very constantly reassuring that the victim was still good and not at fault).

    And finally, there some vampires who attempted to retain their religions, their humanity, and their soul. Some were those vampires that had been turned, not by choice, but bitten and left to fend for themselves. They were constantly at war with themselves to only drink enough to survive, never kill. To even find those who were fully willing to give their blood. But like all good tragedies that are metaphors for addiction, they all either failed or died untimely "final" deaths.

    May I recommend any of the books by the pseudonymous Gherbod Fleming (taken from a Medieval writer who was also using the name as a pseudonym [yay, for my literature courses in Chaucer!]).

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    Baldwindan

    When I was coming of age in the 90s, my choices mattered and it was imprinted on me that I would have a future, but the quality of it was what I needed to determine. There weren't a whole lot of us Cold War Y folk (76-82) and there was an entire social apparatus of schools and universities and employers focused on us because we were the nadir of a birth rate dip. Yet in the background, the administrators and politicians were talking about the huge baby boom following us (Millenials) and how to prepare to build all the additional schools to contain them.

    Now I talk to Millenials and Zoomers, and the constant refrain I hear from them is that none of their choices matter, and that they have no future. There's so much competition that they all feel lost. Doesn't matter if they were valedictorian of their school, because there's hundreds of thousands of others. Only the rarest of intersectional identities gets any hope--the rest all fall into this formless mass where there's too many people chasing too few opportunities. Maybe Malthus's ideas survive in a metaphorical sense as seen through Turchin's analysis: we've bred too many elites for too few opportunities. While the material world provides plenty and in materialist terms we have it good, in social and philosophical terms we are in an apocalypse where the young realize that statistically nothing any of them as individuals do matters, they're likely not going to succeed in whatever they hope to do because there's too many other people wanting to do the same thing, and therefore it's a grim utopia.

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    Grunt08

    Re: The Experience Machine & Megan Fritts' class

    I suspect that typical teaching of Nozick hasn't fully accounted for what we've learned from a few decades of video games.

    If you base the EM on a movie like "The Matrix," you're envisioning a kind of bland, boring hedonism where you imagine things and just get the nice juicy steak or the woman in the red dress without doing anything to earn anything. A more sophisticated EM would recognize our need to face challenges and fail and attain rewards for success after enduring failure. It wouldn't *just* give you everything you wanted, it would facilitate your feeling like you earned it. It would give you what they call a "gameplay loop" instead of just handing you things you wanted.

    That's probably what those students imagine the EM would be, and in a world where a typical person's career and life's work produce comparatively little pride in usefulness, significance, craftsmanship or artistry...why would they get more satisfaction from a month of perfectly produced boring PowerPoint decks than from beating "Dark Souls"?

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    1. Pohl

      In fairness to the Matrix, the machines designed it to function as the familiar rat race. That worked for nearly everyone. Real life as underground outlaws simply proved too much for those who’d rather eat steak in ignorant bliss, so they chose to return to oblivion. It makes sense for unhappy people, who can be found everywhere. That’s the sad part about the EM anecdote.

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