I wouldn't be calling them "wolf" - I'd be calling them "werewolf", because they still have similarities to werewolves. They change at the full moon, they turn into animals, they kill people. Makes as much sense as calling the things in Twilight vampires.
I meant the wolf part of werewolf, not that you would just be calling them wolves. The wolf part is absolutely meaningless to the new example and is not analogic to Twilight vampires.
But a fairly common trait of vampires is that they despise the sunlight. It either kills them outright, or renders them catatonic, or removes their supernatural powers, or whatever.
Of all the vampire folktales I've heard very few of them mention anything about the sunlight. They mostly take place at night, but that's because night is scary, you'd expect monsters to come out at night even if they could come out during the day. Especially if they're shambling corpses.
Only because he is labeled as such. If we didn't have an author telling us that he was a vampire, I doubt if anyone would call him that. If we were just presented with his assorted attributes, without a label, I doubt if anyone would race to call him a vampire.
Sure, he drinks blood and he's got fangs... But that's really where the similarities end, isn't it?
He has eternal life. He's undead. Pale skin. Byronic (which thanks to Dracula means vampire ALWAYS apparently).
But yeah, even if was only has fangs, drinks blood that's pretty much all you need for someone to call him a vampire these days.
Is that how it works? Or do things define the cultures?
You're confusing two definitions of the word culture. I meant "a group of people who share ideas, beliefs, traditions"
not "the ideas, beliefs, traditions shared by a group of people." You're right, a culture is defined by its beliefs, but the people within that culture define its beliefs.
In Dracula, the author states that he is a vampire. The author told us what to believe. People of the time would not have associated that description with a vampire. Now, years later, we accept that definition. The thing defined the culture.
In Frankenstein, nobody claims anyone is a vampire. So we don't make that association.
He may have told us what to believe, but if people didn't find it credible they wouldn't believe it. If I wrote a fanfiction based on Frankenstein and claim Viktor is a vampire, it'd probably be called out as bullshit unless I can prove it from the original text. If I write a story about a vampire but he sparkles and can go out into the sun, and refuses to drink human blood I'll have people calling me out for making a shitty interpretation of vampires.
Audiences aren't as passive as we believe. They make judgments, agree or disagree with the author.
Words are labels for thoughts, concepts, and things. A particular series of grunts and whistles doesn't have any meaning in and of itself. But the only reason that "bicycle" actually means "that thing with pedals and two wheels" is because everyone has agreed on that. If I personally decide to start "car" instead of "bicycle" nobody is going to know what I'm talking about.
Bold is exactly what I said in different words.
The meaning isn't going to suddenly change because I use a different word.
Yes, the meaning of words shifts over time. "Moron" used to be a medical diagnosis, now it's a simple insult.
But that's due to a slow shift in the connotation, not because somebody wakes up one morning and declares that a purring furry thing with four legs is a cactus.
Someone has to be the first person to initiate the change in meaing. If other people hear it, like it, then they're going to adopt it. If one day you write an article explaining that bicycles are in fact cars, and people who read it find it well reasoned, then they might start calling bicycles cars. It won't be immediate, but it can be faster than you think.
Regardless, no one thinks that the
baseline defintion of vampire is "sparkles in the sunlight" because of twilight. Twilight is a modification of that concept and it's a modification many people find acceptable.
Author
Topic: Obsession with "New Age" Vampires? (Read 7787 times)