What would you like to see?
POSTED BY: christhecynic
UPDATED: Sunday, June 29, 2003 05:38
VIEWED: 13223
PAGE 4 of 6
I've always had the idea for a movie or show with vampires in it to have the vampires, though not necessarily good guys, be the sympathetic characters. Before someone says that’s been done, there is more to it than that.
The setting would be the contemporary world, I had the vampires living in the woods off a fairly well traveled road. They cause car accidents and then feed off of the occupants. Being a vampire is a genetic condition (contagious via retrovirus), sunlight kills, and wood is poison so shoving it through the heart kills even though otherwise impaling wounds would be healed. Decapitation kills everything. As for garlic, I figured that would just be that they had a very good sense of smell so garlic caused sensory overload.
The start of the movie would be vampires being hunted down and killed. This would be by Nazi like people who were killing them because they saw vampires as a sub human inferior race that had to be killed off for the good of humanity. Then the Vampire leader would go to a Vampire hunter for help, the vampire hunter helps because, although his morals are flexible, genocide goes against them.
I figured that eating people would be not morally wrong because it is how the vampires got their sustenance, and suicide by starvation isn’t generally considered moral high ground. So the vampire hunter doesn’t see what the vampires are, or do, as wrong but he will kill them if he is paid by people who the vampires would kill.
I thought that the situation between vampires and a vampire killer would be an interesting thing, and that the vampires could pay him by sharing with him everything they knew about themselves from a medical standpoint.
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Whoops, sorry about the blank post.
Okay...not a bad idea, vamps as genetics, and not necessarily evil. Sure. However, killing innocent people is wrong no matter why you do it. Maybe your "good vampires" would feed off people but not kill them? Or maybe they would form romantic symbiotic relationships w/ humans where the human would allow them to feed willingly, again, not dying in the process?
I mean, nice guy or not, it's hard to be sympathetic towards someone who is killing you so that they might live.
Quote:
Originally posted by christhecynic:
I figured that eating people would be not morally wrong because it is how the vampires got their sustenance, and suicide by starvation isn’t generally considered moral high ground. So the vampire hunter doesn’t see what the vampires are, or do, as wrong but he will kill them if he is paid by people who the vampires would kill.
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This is long, I'll see if I can distill it later.
You would be surprised at how people can be sympathetic to the nastiest characters. As for morals, I don’t believe in absolute morals, if I did then I would have to convince you that killing innocent people is not wrong. Unless you want to play god, in which case whatever you say is wrong is. So it is good that we don’t have to live in a place of absolute morals, and can just stick with the current case: ours.
Truth be told the only way that anyone lived was to take what someone else had (admittedly this was long ago), which in most cases killed them, if not by direct murder than as a result of the taking. You are here as a result of one of the longest streak of rape murder theft and cannibalism in history, we all are. Now you will never hear me say rape is right, never, but the rest has its time. We should just be happy that that time isn’t now.
To say that killing innocent things is wrong is fine with me, just keep tabs on how much you do it. Every time you eat something, you have killed something innocent, but it gets better because think of all of the things that had to die to get you that. If you’re a vegetarian than a place where crops could be harvested had to be made, cattle grazing land can’t support crops that people can live off of. For each plot, and there are usually multiple for each field to be used so that they don’t work the soil till its dead, but instead rotate, there had to be a holocaust of the animals there. Pesticides, even organic ones, wreak havoc on the animal kingdom (bugs are the food for things that are in turn the food for other things and so on) and when pesticides are not used more crops must be grown to make up for pest damage. If you eat animals than the innocent animals that you kill are more evident. And lets not forget the plants, despite their lack of a central nervous system they can feel something akin to pain.
So it is as you aptly put it only killing innocent people that someone can take issue with killing, right? And I certainly hope you haven’t killed any of them. But for you to be here you’re ancestors had to. Territorial disputes, a lack of plant or animal food, a need for the resources of another to survive, what ever it was there is something you can count on: No matter who you are you are descended from cannibals, and not only did countless innocents have to be killed to get you here, but if even one of those innocents (because these are the ones that had to die) hadn’t been killed you wouldn’t be here.
So I guess you could be right, killing innocents is wrong, I would go the whole way, killing any innocent thing is wrong, but if you want to limit it to people then go for it. But remember that that if you’re ancestors had had that idea you would have never been born, and it’s not like I’m saying they were cold killers, the ones I’m talking about are the kind caring loving family supporting ones, because those are the ones who killed the innocent people that had to die for you to be here.
You may not agree with anything I have said, but if you have an open enough mind you will have read this far anyway. It is my belief that the only absolute moral is that it is wrong to harm another without cause. Killing isn’t wrong on its face, self-defense isn’t wrong. There are situations, very rare admittedly, in which stealing is not wrong. And the same goes true for anything. The best example would be sex, there is nothing wrong with that, but rape is wrong, the reason is that another is harmed (on too many levels to count) without cause.
I’m not going to give examples, you don’t want them (I think) but the evolution of the human species, and all others that I know of, is based on killing of innocents (among other things) and in many instances there was nothing morally wrong.
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Originally posted by Riverside:
Whoops, sorry about the blank post.
Okay...not a bad idea, vamps as genetics, and not necessarily evil. Sure. However, killing innocent people is wrong no matter why you dNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Uh. Okay. No really, sounds a lot like those deep, meaningful, everything is subjective conversations I remember having when I was younger, talking to other bright young people deep into the night. Very interesting mental exercise. However, I no longer believe that everything is subjective, and I also don't believe I have to pay for what my forbearers have done. No genetic guilt for me. Also, I think there is a difference between killing a carrot and a intelligent being capable of grasping the concept of their own demise. However, you are right about how sometimes people identify most with the most evil of characters. I'm not really sure why myself, as it's not my style. I mean, I like the dark, misunderstood type as much as the next chick, but outright evil I've never been able to get behind. My lil' bro says that people choose "baddie" fictional chararacters for role-models because it justifies their desire to do whatever they want, regardless of the cost to others, while still seeing themselves as the "hero" of the story. He may be right. He is a lot smarter than I am. Anyway, I hope you didn't think I was bagging on your movie idea. Just for me, likeable characters make all the difference. Case in point, I loathed Pulp Fiction (and I may be one of the very few in my age bracket who did). Why? Because not one of the characters (IMO) had any redeeming qualities (except the stupid chick...which to me, indicated that nice people are only nice cuz' they're too stupid to be out for themselves like all the "normal" people). And to be honest, my view of humanity is already cynical enough without indulging in such grim fiction that it makes me long for The Bomb to take all us "cockroaches" out.
Keep Flyin'
Serenity - a ship full of characters I can stand firmly with and not feel sullied ;)
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Read the whole thing, I’m sure you’ll disagree, but everything I say is true (except for the sujective parts which are of course subjective, or the parts a preface with what if, or it could be because those are things that could be, and not necessarily are.) so it should give you something to think about. If you see something that isn’t one of those and isn’t true please tell me, cause I probably put it in by mistake.
You didn't understand, not that I blame you, like I said it probably needs to be seriously distilled. I wasn’t saying that you should bear the guilt for what your ancestors did, you shouldn’t, hell if you should then the entire concept of innocence would be gone and there would have been no point in any of what I said.
What I was saying is that if you look at the history of humans, or any other animal (including bird, fish, and reptile) life you will find that not only have innocents been killed repeatedly in large numbers, but also that it wasn’t wrong. Not that it isn’t wrong to kill an innocent in general, but in the specific case it wasn’t. That throws a wrench in a lot of moral argument, we live in a different time though, and I for one am happy for it.
But the other problem, which I didn’t make a big deal of at all is where you draw the line. If a plant can feel pain, and it can to some degree (there is no way to tell how much, we know very little about plants) then is it wrong to hurt it? Most likely you’d say no. So what about a mouse? A cat? A dog? A primate? A dolphin? Those last two are popular examples, because both a dolphin and primate use tools and can be taught to speak English, correctly, in context. (A parrot can too but it hasn’t shown itself to be self cognizant or to have an understanding of death.)
Well from what you said I hope you think it’s ok to kill all of these. Hey it’s not my problem, go for that kind of thought. But then if it’s only innocent people that you think it is wrong to harm, where do you draw the line on people? It’s unlikely you’ll get the chance to try your moral ideas out on aliens or anything. But it was certainly the argument that it was only people that it was wrong to hurt that caused the suppression and repression, not to mention enslavement of the black race, the genocide of the Indians (or Native Americans if you please) my ancestors, and it wasn’t though far off that allowed the Holocaust to happen, or the degradation of the Irish in the United States. Once again, the list goes on. So the real problem of morals come at where you draw the line on what is “an intelligent being capable of grasping the concept of their own demise.”
I hope that all humans fall into this concept for you. But where does it end, if a dolphin can, and studies show it can (studies can only be so accurate without the ability to communicate beyond around fifty words -the teaching of dolphins to speak English was really quite fascinating by the way- although these studies did not involve the talking dolphins), than you have to expand beyond your own species. So where does it stop, if one animal can meet your criteria why not two, or three, or four? And we don’t know what signifies intelligence so you can’t simply say it’s brain is too small, because we do know that brain size has nothing to do with it.
So what if a cow can grasp it’s own demise, does that mean hamburgers are off limits? Well, maybe all animals can (I personally doubt that a cow can, but there is no proof either way) should we be vegetarian? That gets back to what I was saying before, you have to kill lots of animals to get the land, just like you ancestors had to kill other people to get fertile lands and good hunting grounds, there was no working together then, there just weren’t the resources. If you were to share you would starve your tribe, if you didn’t share you doomed others to death. On the other side if you didn’t kill the people who had the lad you might as well kill your tribe yourself, it would hurt them less that way.
But lets stay with being a vegetarian, lets
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Series I would like to see:
Riverworld (Not the thing that was on SCIFI, but based on the book)
Wheel of Time series: with LOTR SFX.
Red Dwarf: (I know its already a series...BUT I NEED MORE!!!!!)
Lastly, I would like to see a series based on the gods of different religions waging war against each other. All gods would walk and live amongst us doing their good deeds for their believers. The catch is that gods could only be killed by humans. So you would have Shiva trying to talk a cardinal into stabbing Jesus or "the devil reborn" as he would be called. Each god would have one human champion who could kill other gods, yet the gods are hidden from each other. So they would have to find each other by searching out miracles and killing the likliest suspect (or convincing/forcing a believer to betray). Killed gods can then be "brainwashed" into following other gods. Which was what happened when the Chritian god got ahold of Baal and renamed him Jesus.
Somehow I feel that this will never make it past a book!
"Societies are supported by human activity, therefore they are constantly threatened by the human facts of self-intrest and stupidity." --Peter Berger
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Tragic Story wrote:
"Riverworld (Not the thing that was on SCIFI, but based on the book)"
Do you mean the Gods of the Riverworld series where suddenly people in history all appeared on a planet naked and bald, and when they died they reappeared? I really liked those books.
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I don't have a specific idea, but I would dearly love to see Joss Whedon and JMS team up on something Sci-Fi. Book, comic, movie, show - whatever. I just can't imagine what wonders those two could come up with and pull off working together.
XenArc
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TragicStory, the gods idea is really interesting. I posted somewhere a similar idea, but they weren't necessarily at war and were simply immortal. Your idea would certainly lend its self to a show better. But the reason, I think, that it wouldn’t make it is because people are just fine with a story about other gods, but not their own.
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