Human Again

I wanted to be really clever at the start of this to somehow make what I’m going to say next be exciting and interesting, because it’ll sound cliche. But I don’t think it is, and neither should you. Since I am not a clever man, I'll stop introducing this and state my opinion.

I hate what the Twilight series has done to vampires.

I know I’m late to the hate-Twilight party, but I've noticed a disturbing trend in general that Twilight highlights perfectly. What I have against the Twilight vampire has nothing to do with their sparkle, immunity to wooden stakes/crucifixes/garlic, or surviving off animal blood (Buffy was doing that WAY before). It’s alright to take some creative liberties with the vampire myth.

No, my problem is that human heroine Bella wants to be a vampire. 

You could make the argument that she only wants to be a vampire because she wants to be with Edward, but you'd be wrong. At the end of the third movie, Edward confronts her and she claims that she wants to be a vampire not for his sake, but because it’s what she wants. So let us assume that she’s being honest there and really wants to be a vampire for the sake of being a vampire.

Here are cool traits of being a vampire:

1) Beautifully sparkle in the sun

2) Never die and never grow old (for a sensible person, this should be in the con list)
3) Super strength and super speed

4) Some superpower you get that is unique for you when you become a vampire

Here are the cons of being a vampire:

1) UNQUENCHABLE DESIRE TO FEAST ON HUMAN FLESH

2) Questionable if you even have a soul

Now, call me old fashioned, but I think it’s odd that you would potentially forfeit your soul for the things that I just mentioned, but since that’s a debatable point in the books, I’ll leave it alone. I find it simply wrong to willingly crave to feast on humans. 

Bella craves the power of the vampire even though it comes with the huge temptation of devouring human flesh. To me, that sounds like tyranny. No virtuous person craves power for its own sake, rarely do they even crave power. Even the main vampires in Twilight find human life valuable and avoid feasting on humans, but they admit that this puts them in a position where their immortality is only a half-life at best. Several of them even regret the fact that they are vampires because they hate the fact that they have this desire.

That being said, my main problem with Bella’s decision is not her desire for power at the cost of her soul/humanity. At the end of the third film, Bella says she wants to be a vampire because she never fit with humans. That’s all that is really said, so I think I’ll rephrase it to make it more clear.

"Gee Edward, I want to become a blood craving, potentially soul-deprived being because I don’t feel like I fit in with human beings, though I am, by nature, a human being. I'd rather have the taste of human flesh in my mouth for all eternity because, sometimes, I feel judged and like an outcast."

How come the heroine of this series is someone who is turning her back on her own kind? Even though the other humans they show in this series are nothing but kind to her and, which is more than can be said about people that I meet, trying to be inclusive and understanding, poor Bella does not fit in. Evidently, it would be better to FEEL included, even if it comes with the desire to devour your former friends and family.

No...wait....that's terrible. Probably even evil.

Maybe I'm just inhuman for feeling this way, but I cannot find myself rooting for their being another vampire in the world. That's the disturbing trend that I've noticed in films; people cheering for the not-human side. Don't believe me? Let me list off some other films them.

Lets start slow with another vampire flick: the Underworld series. The first film has you cheering for the werewolves because they were oppressed (keep in mind both werewolves and vampires devour humans), the second has you cheering for the vampire and her vampire/werewolf lover (unclear if they feast on human flesh, but I'm going with yes), the third/prequel has you cheering for werewolves yet also humans as both are treated wrongly by vampires, and the fourth has you cheering against the werewolves and humans because both of those are trying to exterminate the vampires. They also imprisoned the vampire heroine and her child, so I guess that was bad too. 

Though I might be able to argue that trying to bring about the extinction of vampires is a bad thing (emphasis on might), it makes sense to me that humans hate vampires, same with werewolves, because they've been enslaved by vampires for so long. But at the end of the fourth film, you find out that werewolves have secretly usurped the vampire and are secretly ruling the humans, so it becomes vampires and humans vs werewolves, which is kind of fine I guess. I'm a huge fan of learning to work together, but let's be real and admit that humans picking a side is basically, as they say at the start of the series, them choosing who they would rather be food for.

So if you find yourself rooting either for vampires or werewolves, you're rooting for humans to lose, unless you neglect to notice the fact that both sides need to live by drinking human blood.

I've begun to realize that I'm all for people learning to cooperate, but I mean that just as I said it. Cooperation is not being alright with your people being abused nor wanting to abuse other people. Cooperation does not mean that your race is the best and has a right to rule nor does it mean that you should hate what you were born into.

Let's assume that you can be born a vampire and that it isn't just a cursed human, what it originally was viewed as. Cooperation would mean that vampires aren't trying to eat humans, humans aren't trying to enslave vampires, but both are working together and using their own special and unique talents to benefit each other (like how humans can be around blood without risk of getting into a feeding frenzy). That makes sense and seems good to me.

But lets get back to the movies.

The next film on my list I haven't seen, so I might be wrong in my interpretation of it: Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Now, from what I can gather, the film basically is about how mankind created its own worst enemy through cruelty and narrow-mindedness. The protagonist of the film is sensitive to the monkey's rights and tries to stand up for him, and that I'm fine with. But humans start to deny the monkey his rights, and then he revolts by making other monkey's super-smart  You get to some giant battle on a bridge with the monkeys fighting the humans (going off the trailers here), and I'm unclear if you're supposed to be rooting for the monkeys. I think you're supposed to be on the monkey's side as they were oppressed, but since this is a prequel, if you're rooting for the monkeys, aren't you simultaneously rooting for what's going to be happening in the classic film Planet of the Apes? To make that a bit more clear, if you want the monkeys to win, does that mean you're ignoring the fact that they're going to use that win to enslave humanity and strip us of our intelligence as an act of vengeance?

But again, I haven't seen the film. Maybe the part where the monkeys are ransacking the bridge and slaughtering humans is supposed to be taken as a kind of scene right out of a horror film. But from what I got from the trailers, I'm pretty sure you're supposed to be on the monkeys' side.

Last, and my personal favorite offender on this list, is Avatar, the one with the blue people not the awesome cartoon series on Nickelodeon (which you should check out if you haven't already). When I first brought this up with people, I was gently reminded that humans were doing bad things in this film, and you should be rooting for the blue people because they're being unjustly persecuted, and I think this is a fair point. That's not my problem with the film. My problem with the film is the ending.

In the movie, people are able to become an alien species by implanting their thoughts into a brain-dead  artificially created alien body, and they switch back and forth from their alien form and their human form. In the final battle in the scene, the hero gets forced out of his alien body and trapped in his crippled body as his home is attacked, putting him in a dire situation. There is this really touching scene where the hero's Na'vi lover saves him, and, as she carries his crippled frame out of the wreckage of the base, I think "Aww, look, she sees that he's a tiny crippled human and loves him anyways. Yay! Love conquers all!"

Oh, except that this feeling is completely discredited at the end of the film when you have the guy permanently leaving his human body behind so he can live in the artificially created shell forever. Turns out being a Na'vi is better than being human.

Now, I get that being crippled sucks, and good for him that he gets to walk again, but I wonder if leaving behind your humanity is worth that. I'm pretty loyal to being human, so I'm going with a no here, but I'd be interested in what people would have to say about this. It just seems to me that being human is means more than our physical aptitudes and mental prowess, and I don't know if I'd be comfortable giving up my humanity. I think I would feel like being a Na'vi would be like living a lie, knowing that I'm human deep down.

But then I also thought that maybe this was similar to Beauty and the Beast, where it is great that Belle loves the Beast when he is a beast, but it's a nice touch to let the Beast become human again. However, one MAJOR difference between this two is that the Beast was originally human; being a beast was a curse forced upon him. The Beast was trying to get BACK to his human roots, not avoid them. He and his castle gave up super strength, durability, and seeming immortality just to become human again. From that perspective, being the Na'vi would be the curse, and he should be trying to get his humanity back.

Yet when I watch these films, I feel like my view is the freakish one. I feel like I should want to have the immortality of the vampire, the weird ponytail of the Na'vi, or the strength of a gorilla, but I don't want any of that because I like being human. 

I said at the start I hate what Twilight has done to vampires, but I'll be specific here. I hate that Twilight makes people value vampires over their own humanity. It might be old fashioned, but I think humans have a lot to offer the world, and are worth more than just being nutrients to vampires or being vampire candidates.