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Vampires, Werewolves, and Elves as Evil Beings

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WyldCard4:
Vampires, Werewolves, and Elves as Evil Beings

These traditional monsters have been glamorized by our culture and I am planning on writing truly evil versions of these being, any idea on divorcing them from the sympathy that our culture provides?

This is what I have so far.

Vampires are dead and vile, they concern themselves with dark pleasures, and they rape and murder and steal at whim and lack the slightest empathy or remorse.
They kill and hurt each other to keep their own inline and have cultures darker than any human one.

Werewolves I have more trouble with. They are hard not to make sympathetic if they are cursed with that state and are barely Werewolves if they are not, I have the idea that they are the personification of the wild that we try to tame, monsters who seek to tear down our every wall and tear us down to the state of beasts but I fear that too many would see that as a blessing despite what I attempt to convey.

Elves are the darkest Fae who are dark and cruel and alien.

They seek to torture our children to make them like themselves and torture men for unknown reasons.

They are the easiest as they are often depicted as cruel but are still depicted as far to bright for my tastes, any ideas for making these things dark again?

Josh:
Terry Pratchett did a good job of turning elves evil, making them vicious, malicious creatures that take people over through their glamor and basically bring wreck and ruin to the world. Lords and Ladies is a good book of his with that as the storyline.

Vampires and werewolves...I've seen them being evil baddies plenty of times, more in the traditional sense. I guess the modern stories, especially the paranormal romantic type have been casting them in tortured hero type of molds, or sympathetic outcasts, but you should find plenty of source material in folklore and myth that shows their bestial sides.

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:

--- Quote from: WyldCard4 on January 29, 2008, 07:24:02 AM ---They are the easiest as they are often depicted as cruel but are still depicted as far to bright for my tastes, any ideas for making these things dark again?

--- End quote ---

What purpose do they serve in the story ?

I'm not particularly drawn to making beings evil for evil's sake, because it's harder to give them consistent motivations and have them make sense within the history of their world if that's all they do, and because it's a trivial way of getting cheap sympathy for whoever opposes them.  So I may well not be the right person to answer this question, but anyways; it would be easier for me to suggest how to make them dark if I knew why they were dark in the first place.

Tolkien's elves, unlike much of the subsequent fantasy versions of elves by people who have only read Tolkien and Tolkien imitators, are very much Miltonic angels; can't go wrong going back to "Paradise Lost".

JamiSings:

--- Quote from: WyldCard4 on January 29, 2008, 07:24:02 AM ---Elves are the darkest Fae who are dark and cruel and alien.

They seek to torture our children to make them like themselves and torture men for unknown reasons.

--- End quote ---

I don't know if this is true even in the original stories. It's suggested that they steal human children because they themselves are sterile and the few children they manage to have are usually very sickly. That's why they often kidnap healthy human children and women who are of breedable age.

There is a book though called At The Bottom Of The Garden you might try reading. She's only got one detail wrong. Marilyn Monroe was NOT the model for Tinkerbell.

http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/tinkerbell.asp

Other then that her facts and research are pretty much spot-on. And she's pretty nice. I e-mailed her about the Tinkerbell thing and she didn't mind that she was corrected.

DragonFire:
There is no need to 'make' these things dark.
Go have a look at the oldest stories and legends about them.
THere's plenty of 'dark' there for you.

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