A Visitor's Guide to Mystic Falls - By Red Page 0,47
last few decades. The modern world makes it hard to believe in noble, shining-armor heroes the way we might have, once upon a time. Things are too complicated and messy and there are too many compromises to be made. That shining armor tarnishes quickly.
But a fallen hero, a savior with a dark side, is something we can understand and relate to. Even Buffy, who seemed at first to be the brightest and bubbliest of vampire killers, was more like a vampire’s mirror image than its foe by the time her show concluded: she’d come back from the dead—quite literally risen from the grave, like the title of one of Dracula’s better-known movies—and her superhuman strength was revealed to have come from the same demonic forces as that of the monsters she killed.
These days, if you throw a stone at popular culture, you can hit a vampire who kills other vampires without even trying. In Japanese anime there’s the quiet schoolgirl Saya
of Blood: the Last Vampire, the enigmatic wanderer D of Vampire Hunter D, or the cruel gangster Alucard of Hellsing. In America there are the charismatic, tortured title characters of the Blade films and TV shows such as Angel and Moonlight, to name just a few. Even Pete Wentz 130
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of the rock band Fall Out Boy played one for one of the band’s videos.
And there’s Damon Salvatore, too.
Damon’s not the only vampire of The Vampire Diaries to kill other vampires, but his killings aren’t split-second decisions of defense in the way Stefan’s killing of Vicki was or the sheer bloodthirstiness of Logan. For his own crafty and self-serving reasons, Damon throws in with the vampire hunters of Mystic Falls and becomes a vampire hunter himself, attending meetings of their secret council and engaging with their social world.
Damon is a vampire who kills other vampires, but his approach to the whole business of undead homicide is rather different than that of earlier, similar figures in fiction. What may have once seemed like the ultimate hypocrisy—hunting and killing those who are most like yourself—becomes a total lack of hypocrisy: why should Damon treat vampires with any more regard than he treats humans? As he’s said himself, he’ll kill anyone, at any time, in any place. Whether that person is a human or a vampire doesn’t seem to enter into his consideration at all.
The creepy thing about classifying Damon as a vampire hunter when everything he does is for his own agenda, his own ends, is that it’s hard to argue why the selfishness of his motives is in itself an argument against calling him by that title.
The idea of vampires who kill other vampires has always been a complicated one, even if it’s become decidedly more so in recent years. Our modern understanding of the 6882 Visitor's Guide to Mystic Falls[FIN].indd 131
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idea originated in southeastern Europe, where folklore included the figure of the dhampir. A dhampir is sometimes said to be the son of a vampire, a half-vampire, or even just a child unlucky enough to be born on a Saturday. The name literally translates as “drinking with teeth,” and the difference between a dhampir and a vampire is one largely of semantics.
The one definitive trait a dhampir possesses, in addition to the usual vampire attributes, is that a dhampir is very, very good at killing vampires. In Bulgarian folklore, the same terms are used interchangeably to describe vampire offspring and vampire hunters. Part of the appeal of the dhampir figure seems to come from the idea of the vampire’s evil containing (quite literally) the seed of its own destruction.
But with a few rare exceptions in modern pop culture, the idea of vampires having children has largely been discarded in favor of the idea of the full vampire who takes up a stake against its brethren. They are the heroes who are not inherently good, for whom virtue and bravery do not come easily.
They fight against their own wicked natures as much as against any exterior enemy.
Unless, of course, they’re Damon Salvatore, in which case they kill other vampires with the same self-serving reasoning