Because there is no Twilight today (sorry!), here is an open thread in which to list all the things that Edward is not worth giving up. "Chocolate" has already been taken.
51
comments:
Trynn
said...
Friends outside the Cullen family Sunlight (without fear of discovery) Broccoli Freedom not to be controlled by another person Self respect SLEEP(which you can probably tell I desperately need)
Bacon Garlic Pasta Eggplant A dish combining all of the above into one delicious whole.
Wait, are we listing things that one would specifically have to give up if one became Edward's vampire mate, or just things in general that Edward isn't better than?
Alcohol, and just generally the ability to get drunk. I know not everyone imbibes, and not everyone likes it, but for me it is a pleasant way to get slightly buzzed with friends or unwind after a particularly taxing day.*
*On a related note, I thought that it was very tragic in Captain America *SPOILER ALERT* when Bucky apparently died** and Cap couldn't even drown his sorrows. There was no escape, no stepping back and dealing with it a little later.
**I'm still a big fan of the "no body, no death". Bucky'll be back.
Your comment made me realize I didn't know what happened, in the Twilight-verse, when a dark-skinned person gets vampirized. Apparently they do in fact keep something resembling their original dark skin and natural hair texture, though it's unclear to me whether their skin gets lightened, darkened, or just made sparkly. My brief google image search on Laurent the Black Twilight Vampire yielded inconclusive results.
Before life was hell without my lover, i was heartbroken to her with another girl but after the spell of prophetharry@ymail.com everything changed. now its like heaven on earth. It's really amazing how my lover changed with this very love spell , he is back with me now Lee White,USA
Twilightverse vampires are cold and hard. I don't know about the rest of you, but I find those total turn-offs. Warm and soft for me, please. I want to cuddle with a human, not a statue.
Yes, I know Bella's such a special snowflake that she gets to be both a vampire and a mother. (And we won't explore the biology of that idea.) But I don't mean just having one's own children, although that's part of it. The sparklies don't seem to have any interactions with children at all. (as far as I know, not having gone so far as to actually read the books.) Whether, as with the pets, they can't trust themselves not to prey on kids, or whether their hide-in-the-dark lifestyle just prevents them from being where children are likely to be, it still sounds dreary to me.
I am afraid of death, but... It seems like the sparklepires give up practically everything. Even things that I'm not sure why they'd need to give up. They've traded most of life for immortality and oodles of money (and I'm not even sure how they got the second one).
Of course, I've never wanted to be any kind of vampire, anyway. Hell, my reaction to the popular White Wolf Vampire game is: oh, great, you want to play high school. (Seriously, it's the one RPG I've no interest in at all. Cliques with fangs! Awesome! No, wait, not awesome... the other thing.)
--Pancakes. --Working in the garden until you're all sweaty and tired, then taking a cool shower and a nap. --Being asked a question about your personal life and not having to think about your cover story. --Caprese salad. --Personal morality that is incompatible with vampirism. For instance a devout Christian or an ethical vegetarian. Do they have a moral crisis or does their personality change so much that they don't care about their previous convictions? Either way they'd be losing something really important to them.
It's interesting that you mention aging: I think that could be both a pro *and* a con. The appeal of an 18-year old body that never deteriorated is pretty clear to see, even without my reading glasses! But it's not clear to me that the Cullens continue to emotionally develop after being turned. Life is about change and the thought of remaining one emotional age forever seems really sad. And for me personally, 18 was an unhappy time made worse by my own inability to cope with unhappy things, so the thought of being permanently 18 sounds awful. Mileage will certainly vary for people who had happier teen years and/or matured more quickly than I did.
Disneyworld. Halva. Donuts. The pleasure of getting stronger after working out. Being able to reconnect with old friends and see how you've both changed.
Why, my hair is "fine" just as it is, so I guess it wouldn't change one bit!
Oh, wait, I think I'm misinterpreting something... *sigh*
As seriously as this can be taken, one of the biggest things vampirization isn't worth giving up is: being around people [i]without having a strong urge to kill them.[/i] Sure, some (claim to) have trained themselves to withstand it - but I wouldn't say it's worth the risk.
What I never understood was that if you want a significant other who's pale, hard, cold, kind of sparkly, human-shaped and unresponsive, why not go the Pygmalion route to begin with? I mean, you wouldn't even need to do the "praying to Venus" part... just a white marble statue seems like it would get most of the job done. It would never age, it would never leave you, it's going to be there for you for eternity, you could stare into its eyes forever if you wanted to, and it could watch you creepily without blinking forever! And if marble is too expensive, just buy a plastic mannequin and slather glitter glue all over it. It's got to be cheaper than buying into the Twilight-verse. Granted, it's unlikely the statue will come with pots of money, or ensure that you're taken care of forever, but...
Life at seventeen - if the vampiring process gives someone an immortal, beautiful, strong body, why not wait until you've lived a full human life before accepting something that will return the body to a previous time?
Not to mention all the additional experience and perspective you'll have going into the process.
Pizza - yes, even the crap stuff that you eat because it's cheap and the place its open late enough for you and your friends to invade.
The tastes of food and drink. The effects of caffeine and alcohol (and, I'm guessing,a lot of other drugs)
Summer sport.
(Also, seems like vampire would be more the Arachne way than the Pygmalion way.)
The satisfaction of making something with your own hands. Haven't read other than Ana's extracts, but the vamps seem very non-creative. I mean, maybe you get bored, but why not tackle a hand-carved or hand-stitched something-or-other that will take 50 years to complete? It's not like you're hurting for time.
Also, rich custard, made with real vanilla, sugar, eggs and heavy cream.
Sun-warmed fresh fruit or tomatoes, eaten right off the plant.
If we're just talking about Edward, and not the whole "never die, never age, have a nearly-impervious body" thing...
Death.
Warm hugs. Warm sex.
The slightest possibility of a date with anyone who does not treat you with either sarcastic condescension or rage, except when he's blaming you for things you cannot help and withholding sex so that he may rush you into a marriage you don't want.
I hate Edward Cullen more than I have ever hated a character in anything ever, so really... everything. Having to spend eternity with Edward Cullen would be my personal hell.
Removing Edward from the equation makes vampirism genuinely tempting. On the one hand, you gain so much time, time in which humanity will no doubt be making wonders in, because that's one of the major things humanity does. Martian colonies. A long list of diseases hunted to extinction. Civil rights advancing to the point that people have trouble wrapping their heads around the idea that the problems we have today were even things. Stuff you can't even imagine yet, coming to fruition as you watch. On the other hand, there's the food thing. There are other losses, of course, but the food's my main sticking point. No more ice cream. No more Girl Scout cookies. No more pretzels, including those pretzel things with peanut butter in them. No more melted cheese. No more crusty, chewy bread. No more big breakfasts at diners that throw in six slices of buttered toast and a pile of hash browns with whatever you order. No more buttery, salty popcorn at the movies. No more apples or oranges or sweet organic carrots. That's a genuinely hard decision, and I'm not sure which way I'd go.
Throw in Edward and of course the answer's easy. He's not worth giving up toothpicks. Or a singular toothpick.
@depizan: I understand the Cullen wealth is due to having a precog who can use her powers on the stock market. I suppose in earlier days they supported themselves with other forms of gambling.
But do you retain the capacity to care about any of that stuff?
Apathy seems to pervade all vampires with the only emotions we really see displayed beyond it being negative. Rage, hate, disdain, a desire to eat humans.
I've been debating whether or not to say this because part of me feels it's completely self evident so saying it is silly, and part of me thinks it might not be.
When I talk about vampirification in this thread and the effects thereof I'm talking about within the bounds of the Twilight Saga.
Other vampires have other limitations and abilities. That would change the considerations.
I have an entire list of food-related items, starting with home-baked bread and continuing through various things such as barbecue ribs, home-made orange sorbetto and egg mayonnaise, but the biggest thing that I can think of is Being Allowed To Move On From High School. If I had to relive high school over and over and over again for centuries just because we can't think to say "I'm not sixteen, I'm actually twenty-four and I look young for my age, look at this here ID of mine", I would be chowing down on idiot teenagers before the day is out. I swear.
Being single. I am really happy that I spent many of my formative years alone, and that I learned to be (reasonably) self-reliant before I learned to rely on another person. And there's a lot of fun you can have when you're single that isn't avaliable when you're coupled! I'm not saying that coupling is bad - I really enjoy that too, and if you fall in love then you're not going to break up just to be single. But if I had immortal lifetimes to live through, I'd prefer that I didn't fall in love at 17.
Is the disdain for humans a vampiric survival instinct or just a coincidence? Because if the former, it damages even the hope that humans might develop a way of using Science! to induce the feeling of enjoying food.
Also the ability to change - and not just personal growth-type change. What if you want body-modification in the future*, or need it to pass in whatever culture you're parasitising on? Can Twilight vampires do that?
*Silly me, of course no vampire would want body-modification. That would make them objectively less beautiful (vomits).
I believe that Edward mentions that he can eat food. I forget whether he mentions anything about the taste, texture or other enjoyment parts of it.
And since he's a vegetarian vampire, I think that he could frequent a restaurant and request a very rare cut of meat and consume that...mostly for the blood, but still - the raw diet is something that would be accepted.
Watching much of the summer Olympics live on location. Community picnics. Getting to the fireworks show before the sun goes down so that you can get the perfect spot. Daytime acts at music festivals. Any popular event that requires being in crowds before the sunset.
Bella has only negative emotions before being vamped. She hates everything that is not Cullen. So there's another piece of evidence that she was always meant to be a vampire.
I can understand why a vampire would be designed to disdain all humans. I mean, I try not to eat things that I perceive to be living, valuable beings. For example, I won't decide to eat octopus today, because the fact that octopi are intelligent enough to be able to open jars in order to get to the tasty shrimp inside the jar and eat it makes me feel sorry for it. I don't like eating food that I can truly empathize with. Or the cross-dressing squid (there's a species of squid that mates in groups, and where males outnumber females 2:1, males will display typically female coloration on the side of their body facing another male, and male coloration on the side of their body facing the female.) I have a little bit of a harder time empathizing with, say, chickens that don't display any current signs of intelligence (because it's been bred out of them), so I have less of a problem eating bits of them. I tend to eat things that I'm pretty sure aren't intelligent, like green beans (despite the bit in HPMOR)... I don't think I'm ever going to admire green beans. I can't imagine killing and eating someone that I really admire as a part of regular sustenance. As a ritual thing, fine- look at the Fore- their society seems to have done fine with it until kuru came along. But regularly?!
Similarly, the lack of wonder chris mentioned might also be a defensive mechanism that prevents Caius from freaking out over things like television. Or bicycles.
I thought it was very good. The kids and husband aren't big fans of eggplant. Which just means more leftovers for me. :)
I cubed the eggplant and bacon and minced the garlic with some green onions. I also chopped up the onion tops and put those in, too. I'm going to have the leftovers for lunch over GF-pasta with some parmesan on top.
By the time I had the leftovers for lunch the eggplant was like tasty sponges that had been soaking up the aromatics from the bacon, garlic, and onion tops all night. It was sooooo good. I hope they have eggplant at the farmers market again this week!
51 comments:
Friends outside the Cullen family
Sunlight (without fear of discovery)
Broccoli
Freedom not to be controlled by another person
Self respect
SLEEP(which you can probably tell I desperately need)
Sunlight, so much. I have a mild form of SAD.
Food, especially fettucine alfredo. I love fettucine alfredo so much.
Sleep, but also dreaming. And even just feeling tired. I think I would miss that feeling, as inconvenient as it is.
Pets. The Cullens don't seem to have any, and I don't know if it's because they might eat them or because they have to travel light or what.
Diversion. I feel amazed that they're never existentially bored, and are sustained through the centuries by the power of love.
Gelato. Icecream. Human connections. Growing up, out, maturing. Sorbet. Curiosity and self-discovery. Autonomy.
Bacon
Garlic
Pasta
Eggplant
A dish combining all of the above into one delicious whole.
Wait, are we listing things that one would specifically have to give up if one became Edward's vampire mate, or just things in general that Edward isn't better than?
Alcohol, and just generally the ability to get drunk. I know not everyone imbibes, and not everyone likes it, but for me it is a pleasant way to get slightly buzzed with friends or unwind after a particularly taxing day.*
*On a related note, I thought that it was very tragic in Captain America *SPOILER ALERT* when Bucky apparently died** and Cap couldn't even drown his sorrows. There was no escape, no stepping back and dealing with it a little later.
**I'm still a big fan of the "no body, no death". Bucky'll be back.
Tacos
Apples
Mint chip ice cream
Family (even Bella's)
A career
Freedom, period
Pets.
Holy crap, I didn't even think of that. They give up an awful lot, don't they.
I don't consider myself edible, but...
May I say my beautiful dark skin and my 'kinky' hair? :)
Oh, and popcorn. Lots and lots of popcorn...*coos and cuddles my over-sized bowl* ^ ^
- going to the beach on a hot day
- pizza
- hopes of most careers
Everything that currently exists in my life, will exist in my future, and has existed in my past.
Guess that means Edward has no chance with me?
Honestly, I'm not sure there's much of anything that Edward stacks up well against. Pimples? Periods? The flu?
Your comment made me realize I didn't know what happened, in the Twilight-verse, when a dark-skinned person gets vampirized. Apparently they do in fact keep something resembling their original dark skin and natural hair texture, though it's unclear to me whether their skin gets lightened, darkened, or just made sparkly. My brief google image search on Laurent the Black Twilight Vampire yielded inconclusive results.
Change. If it is true that sparklepires are locked into their initial age an personality (which I seriously doubt based upon the text.)
The possibility, that maybe, somehow, someday, things might get better and it doesn't have to be this way for all eternity.
Angela and Jessica.
Bella's Truck.
Yeah, I can see No Pain being a plus. No Death, if you're scared by that. No Aging, in the sense of a body that won't ever get weaker.
No Loss of loved ones, since the sparklepires seem pretty indestructible.
But it seems like you're giving up a lot for that. in my opinion.
Before life was hell without my lover, i was heartbroken to her with another girl but after the spell of prophetharry@ymail.com everything changed. now its like heaven on earth. It's really amazing how my lover changed with this very love spell , he is back with me now
Lee White,USA
Twilightverse vampires are cold and hard. I don't know about the rest of you, but I find those total turn-offs. Warm and soft for me, please. I want to cuddle with a human, not a statue.
Yes, the book-canon is that your skin becomes just a little lighter. And, as beauty is objectively defined, your hair becomes 'fine'.
*sighs heavily* -___-
Sunlight.
Ice cream.
Children.
Yes, I know Bella's such a special snowflake that she gets to be both a vampire and a mother. (And we won't explore the biology of that idea.) But I don't mean just having one's own children, although that's part of it. The sparklies don't seem to have any interactions with children at all. (as far as I know, not having gone so far as to actually read the books.) Whether, as with the pets, they can't trust themselves not to prey on kids, or whether their hide-in-the-dark lifestyle just prevents them from being where children are likely to be, it still sounds dreary to me.
I am afraid of death, but... It seems like the sparklepires give up practically everything. Even things that I'm not sure why they'd need to give up. They've traded most of life for immortality and oodles of money (and I'm not even sure how they got the second one).
Of course, I've never wanted to be any kind of vampire, anyway. Hell, my reaction to the popular White Wolf Vampire game is: oh, great, you want to play high school. (Seriously, it's the one RPG I've no interest in at all. Cliques with fangs! Awesome! No, wait, not awesome... the other thing.)
--Pancakes.
--Working in the garden until you're all sweaty and tired, then taking a cool shower and a nap.
--Being asked a question about your personal life and not having to think about your cover story.
--Caprese salad.
--Personal morality that is incompatible with vampirism. For instance a devout Christian or an ethical vegetarian. Do they have a moral crisis or does their personality change so much that they don't care about their previous convictions? Either way they'd be losing something really important to them.
It's interesting that you mention aging: I think that could be both a pro *and* a con. The appeal of an 18-year old body that never deteriorated is pretty clear to see, even without my reading glasses! But it's not clear to me that the Cullens continue to emotionally develop after being turned. Life is about change and the thought of remaining one emotional age forever seems really sad. And for me personally, 18 was an unhappy time made worse by my own inability to cope with unhappy things, so the thought of being permanently 18 sounds awful. Mileage will certainly vary for people who had happier teen years and/or matured more quickly than I did.
Heh. What's too good to give up for Edward? Life.
Disneyworld. Halva. Donuts. The pleasure of getting stronger after working out. Being able to reconnect with old friends and see how you've both changed.
Tic tacs
Why, my hair is "fine" just as it is, so I guess it wouldn't change one bit!
Oh, wait, I think I'm misinterpreting something...
*sigh*
As seriously as this can be taken, one of the biggest things vampirization isn't worth giving up is: being around people [i]without having a strong urge to kill them.[/i] Sure, some (claim to) have trained themselves to withstand it - but I wouldn't say it's worth the risk.
What I never understood was that if you want a significant other who's pale, hard, cold, kind of sparkly, human-shaped and unresponsive, why not go the Pygmalion route to begin with? I mean, you wouldn't even need to do the "praying to Venus" part... just a white marble statue seems like it would get most of the job done. It would never age, it would never leave you, it's going to be there for you for eternity, you could stare into its eyes forever if you wanted to, and it could watch you creepily without blinking forever! And if marble is too expensive, just buy a plastic mannequin and slather glitter glue all over it. It's got to be cheaper than buying into the Twilight-verse. Granted, it's unlikely the statue will come with pots of money, or ensure that you're taken care of forever, but...
Oh, yeah. Plus you can tell it things, and it will also totally fail to give you any useful advice or emotional comfort whatsoever!
An Ovid reference!
Sorry, I've been removed from my roots long enough that I don't even know if any Latin or Greek remains, so I've got to show some connection.
Another plus, the marble statue will never lie to you. Neither will it shower you with abuse.
Life at seventeen - if the vampiring process gives someone an immortal, beautiful, strong body, why not wait until you've lived a full human life before accepting something that will return the body to a previous time?
Not to mention all the additional experience and perspective you'll have going into the process.
Pizza - yes, even the crap stuff that you eat because it's cheap and the place its open late enough for you and your friends to invade.
The tastes of food and drink. The effects of caffeine and alcohol (and, I'm guessing,a lot of other drugs)
Summer sport.
(Also, seems like vampire would be more the Arachne way than the Pygmalion way.)
The satisfaction of making something with your own hands. Haven't read other than Ana's extracts, but the vamps seem very non-creative. I mean, maybe you get bored, but why not tackle a hand-carved or hand-stitched something-or-other that will take 50 years to complete? It's not like you're hurting for time.
Also, rich custard, made with real vanilla, sugar, eggs and heavy cream.
Sun-warmed fresh fruit or tomatoes, eaten right off the plant.
And I second Confusion's cuddles.
If we're just talking about Edward, and not the whole "never die, never age, have a nearly-impervious body" thing...
Death.
Warm hugs. Warm sex.
The slightest possibility of a date with anyone who does not treat you with either sarcastic condescension or rage, except when he's blaming you for things you cannot help and withholding sex so that he may rush you into a marriage you don't want.
Papercuts. Mosquito bites. Splinters. Over-boiled Brussels sprouts.
I hate Edward Cullen more than I have ever hated a character in anything ever, so really... everything. Having to spend eternity with Edward Cullen would be my personal hell.
Removing Edward from the equation makes vampirism genuinely tempting. On the one hand, you gain so much time, time in which humanity will no doubt be making wonders in, because that's one of the major things humanity does. Martian colonies. A long list of diseases hunted to extinction. Civil rights advancing to the point that people have trouble wrapping their heads around the idea that the problems we have today were even things. Stuff you can't even imagine yet, coming to fruition as you watch. On the other hand, there's the food thing. There are other losses, of course, but the food's my main sticking point. No more ice cream. No more Girl Scout cookies. No more pretzels, including those pretzel things with peanut butter in them. No more melted cheese. No more crusty, chewy bread. No more big breakfasts at diners that throw in six slices of buttered toast and a pile of hash browns with whatever you order. No more buttery, salty popcorn at the movies. No more apples or oranges or sweet organic carrots. That's a genuinely hard decision, and I'm not sure which way I'd go.
Throw in Edward and of course the answer's easy. He's not worth giving up toothpicks. Or a singular toothpick.
@depizan: I understand the Cullen wealth is due to having a precog who can use her powers on the stock market. I suppose in earlier days they supported themselves with other forms of gambling.
But do you retain the capacity to care about any of that stuff?
Apathy seems to pervade all vampires with the only emotions we really see displayed beyond it being negative. Rage, hate, disdain, a desire to eat humans.
Wonder seems to die with vampirification.
Now I want a counter-Cullen family that isn't jaded as all get-out. Their favorite comic would be ElfQuest, naturally.
I've been debating whether or not to say this because part of me feels it's completely self evident so saying it is silly, and part of me thinks it might not be.
When I talk about vampirification in this thread and the effects thereof I'm talking about within the bounds of the Twilight Saga.
Other vampires have other limitations and abilities. That would change the considerations.
I have an entire list of food-related items, starting with home-baked bread and continuing through various things such as barbecue ribs, home-made orange sorbetto and egg mayonnaise, but the biggest thing that I can think of is Being Allowed To Move On From High School. If I had to relive high school over and over and over again for centuries just because we can't think to say "I'm not sixteen, I'm actually twenty-four and I look young for my age, look at this here ID of mine", I would be chowing down on idiot teenagers before the day is out. I swear.
Being single. I am really happy that I spent many of my formative years alone, and that I learned to be (reasonably) self-reliant before I learned to rely on another person. And there's a lot of fun you can have when you're single that isn't avaliable when you're coupled! I'm not saying that coupling is bad - I really enjoy that too, and if you fall in love then you're not going to break up just to be single. But if I had immortal lifetimes to live through, I'd prefer that I didn't fall in love at 17.
Is the disdain for humans a vampiric survival instinct or just a coincidence? Because if the former, it damages even the hope that humans might develop a way of using Science! to induce the feeling of enjoying food.
Also the ability to change - and not just personal growth-type change. What if you want body-modification in the future*, or need it to pass in whatever culture you're parasitising on? Can Twilight vampires do that?
*Silly me, of course no vampire would want body-modification. That would make them objectively less beautiful (vomits).
I believe that Edward mentions that he can eat food. I forget whether he mentions anything about the taste, texture or other enjoyment parts of it.
And since he's a vegetarian vampire, I think that he could frequent a restaurant and request a very rare cut of meat and consume that...mostly for the blood, but still - the raw diet is something that would be accepted.
I believe that he does eat in the first book in the cafeteria, but compares it to eating dirt - not actively dangerous, but not pleasant.
Watching much of the summer Olympics live on location. Community picnics. Getting to the fireworks show before the sun goes down so that you can get the perfect spot. Daytime acts at music festivals. Any popular event that requires being in crowds before the sunset.
Bella has only negative emotions before being vamped. She hates everything that is not Cullen. So there's another piece of evidence that she was always meant to be a vampire.
I can understand why a vampire would be designed to disdain all humans. I mean, I try not to eat things that I perceive to be living, valuable beings. For example, I won't decide to eat octopus today, because the fact that octopi are intelligent enough to be able to open jars in order to get to the tasty shrimp inside the jar and eat it makes me feel sorry for it. I don't like eating food that I can truly empathize with. Or the cross-dressing squid (there's a species of squid that mates in groups, and where males outnumber females 2:1, males will display typically female coloration on the side of their body facing another male, and male coloration on the side of their body facing the female.) I have a little bit of a harder time empathizing with, say, chickens that don't display any current signs of intelligence (because it's been bred out of them), so I have less of a problem eating bits of them. I tend to eat things that I'm pretty sure aren't intelligent, like green beans (despite the bit in HPMOR)... I don't think I'm ever going to admire green beans. I can't imagine killing and eating someone that I really admire as a part of regular sustenance. As a ritual thing, fine- look at the Fore- their society seems to have done fine with it until kuru came along. But regularly?!
Similarly, the lack of wonder chris mentioned might also be a defensive mechanism that prevents Caius from freaking out over things like television. Or bicycles.
Thanks to reading the top part of this thread, I'm going to make a garlic/bacon/eggplant stir-fry for dinner. I'll let y'all know how it goes.
So how did it go? And are there leftovers?
(...don't feel like cooking tonight ...)
I thought it was very good. The kids and husband aren't big fans of eggplant. Which just means more leftovers for me. :)
I cubed the eggplant and bacon and minced the garlic with some green onions. I also chopped up the onion tops and put those in, too. I'm going to have the leftovers for lunch over GF-pasta with some parmesan on top.
I don't like eggplant, and that sounds good.
Agreed. Not super-fond of eggplant, but that dish sounds delish.
By the time I had the leftovers for lunch the eggplant was like tasty sponges that had been soaking up the aromatics from the bacon, garlic, and onion tops all night. It was sooooo good. I hope they have eggplant at the farmers market again this week!
Yum.
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