@rallamajoop / rallamajoop.tumblr.com
NC-17, 4220 words (this part), 23,072 words (so far)
"Hm." A floorboard creaks under Heisenberg's feet as he moves further into the room. "So that's a 'no' to sleeping well? Bad dreams?" "What?" The question sets off alarm bells in Ethan's head, but why should it mean anything? Heisenberg probably heard him get up in the middle of the night, that's all. "That's really none of your business." "Oh, I think it might be," Heisenberg drawls, "if it was me you were dreaming about."
I was wondering if you had ever played Vampyr? Or had any other vampire video games you liked besides Witcher?
Vampyr, no ‒ had a brief look at part of a playthrough ages back, but it didn't really look like my thing. As for other vampire video games... may I point you to my Resident Evil Village tag? I'm not here for the vampires in that one nearly as much as a lot of the rest of the fandom is, but it counts.
Presumably Balder's Gate 3 counts too, because yes, I absolutely played the thing to romance Astarion. Lots of fun, but it just didn't get me in the fannish urges the same way. I've watched plenty of other vampire canons (see esp: What We Do In The Shadows, the various work of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, Dracula, and lately The Lost Boys), but "does it have vampires" is way down the list of what I look for in a video game generally.
big fan of finding a fellow xxxholic fan on this webbed site. hello!!
Hello yourself! Honestly, xxxHolic fandom is many years behind me at this point, but it was still a period of many fond memories ‒ and the fact I've still got both old and new readers leaving me new comments on The Telling of One Billion Ghost Stories warms my heart. <3
PG, 790 words
"So you're the guy who thinks he's got a shot with Star," says the punk, thoughtfully, as though he's speaking to himself. He settles himself over Michael's body, straddling his hips, before leaning down on his elbows. "Why don't you tell me your name?" Michael should ask him what he's doing in his room, how he found this house at all. Sure, he left his window open a crack when he went to bed last night, but he's on the second floor. No-one should be able to get in here. Instead, he finds himself replying: "Michael."
In honour of Halloween (and because apparently I can't resist doing a ficlet anthology series for every new fandom lately): have another little bite-sized, lucid-nightmare of a David/Michael* ficlet!
Oh, and feel free to boop this account at will for as long as that lasts. *g*
* Could even be taken to imply David/Michael/Star, if you'd prefer, but David's motives are, as usual, somewhat opaque ‒ especially to Michael.
In news unrelated to my ongoing gay vampire relapse, just sent the latest chapter of Follow Me Home off to my beta tonight. Not sure how soon she'll get the chance to look it over for me, but in the meantime, have a quick preview of a little moment with Mia, that I suspect is going to get a bit lost in the full chapter once it goes up.
*
He finds Mia downstairs on the couch with Rose and a story book ‒ the normal kind, filled with kid-friendly colourful pictures. Miranda’s book of extra-grim fairy tales hasn’t been seen since the night she was shot, and he’d call that good riddance if he wasn’t pretty sure it’s around the house somewhere. He’s still not sure what happened to it.
"Hey," Mia greets him. "Sleep okay?" Rose burbles at him and holds out her arms to her papa for good-morning hugs.
From the time of Carmilla all the way up to the works of Anne Rice (a universe that seems to get only less subtle as the years go on), gay vampires have been a thing basically as long as anyone was writing about vampires. Lesbian vampires have been a genre all their own for decades. Bram Stoker, author of the most famous vampire novel ever written, was gay himself. So why vampires specifically?
I’ve seen people attempt to answer this one before, and there are all sorts of contributing factors I could point to here, from the genres’ beginnings with Lord Byron (infamous bisexual disaster fuckboy), to modern discourse about why queer folks so often find themselves identifying with the monsters and outcasts of fiction. Few other monsters besides vampires can so easily pass for ‘normal’, or are nearly so well known for their snappy dress sense and ‘unnatural cravings’ for human flesh. And that’s without even getting into all those skeezy outdated stereotypes casting queer people as predators, or the idea that even one ‘gay experience’ could somehow ‘convert’ you into being one yourself.
But to my mind, there’s just one really important thing that makes vampires so gay, and it’s the same thing that makes them sexy in the first place: plausible deniability.
You see, a vampire’s bite is simultaneously a) ridiculously sexual, and b) not even a little bit sexual at all.
PG, 270 words
"You like me, Michael?" Unhurriedly, David starts to close the distance between them, one step at a time. Thrown, Michael hesitates, like he can't quite remember why liking David might not be something he'd usually admit, even to himself. David's used to having that effect on people.
Teeny little Lost Boys ficlet, not quite a drabble, but one of those images that didn't feel like it needed to be any longer.
A friend who follows sculpting groups on Facebook linked me to this amazing sculpt of half-vampire!Michael from The Lost Boys, and since I hadn't seen them on tumblr, I had to share them.
No, those are not actual shots from the movie or official production props, just the work of one incredible sculptor ‒ complete with earring and realistic hair. All these come from over on Facebook, where you can find even more pics, in progress work, and even videos of the piece. He seems to have made two copies, but they've both already sold (and if they went for anything less than some thousands of dollars, they went way too cheap).
I especially like his take on the vampire teeth ‒ still with those movie-accurate elongated incisors, but with far more prominent sharpened canines too, which fixes the slightly buck-toothed look you got in some shots. Earring apparently bought from Etsy, if it catches your eye.
NC-17 7100 words (this part), 24,084 words (overall)
"Michael, Michael," David croons, drawing Michael back, flush against his own body, "What am I going to do with you?" The question sends a frisson of heat through Michael. "Anything you want," he breathes. "Anything, Michael?" David's other hand lands on Michael's bare stomach, trailing significantly downwards. Michael shivers.
As promised, the final bonus chapter to the sequel to that fic I wrote for Yuletide last year, being several thousand words of filthy vampire smut. Both the final word count and the time it took me wound up considerably longer than expected, which is probably no coincidence ‒ but it is now going up just in time for me to notice that The Lost Boys has been nominated for Yuletide again this year, which pleases me on multiple fronts.
I do have another couple of short ficbits for this fandom in the works right now too, beyond that we shall see.
So, I have this post in the works tackling that all-important question: just why are there so many gay vampire stories? But in writing it, what was supposed to be a brief tangent about a couple of little-known m/m vampire stories from all the way back in the late 1800s era… started expanding into something not-so-brief, as such tangents are prone to do.
But what the hell, the internet tells me it's queer history month: clearly the only solution is to give those stories their own post, where my tangent can spin out as far as it likes!
Now, if you know anything about Victorian vampire literature or the lesbian vampire genre, you’ve probably already heard about Carmilla, by Sheridan le Fanu (1872), the world’s very first (known) lesbian vampire story. To this day, it's easily the second best-known and widely adapted tale in all the Victorian vampire canon (after Dracula, obviously) – and it probably deserves to be too.
But this is not a post about Carmilla, because Carmilla is not the only gay-vampire-story written way back in the Victorian era. It's not even the least subtle gay-vampire-tale.
There are (at least) two others, both featuring male/male vampire/human pairings. And whether or not they ‘deserve’ to be remembered in the same breath as Carmilla, they’re both fascinating works in their own rights: Manor, by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1884) – one of the world’s first gay activists – and A True Story of a Vampire, by Count Eric Stenbock (1894).
You can read both online. A True Story of a Vampire is long out of copyright and can be found on Gutenberg (Carmilla is too, if you're interested), and many other places. Manor has been translated into English only much more recently, but you can still get hold of it in pdf form, or buy it in ebook format. But if what you really want are some summaries, and/or whole lot of extra context and analysis to go with the stories themselves, I've got you covered below.
Hi! I saw your analysis posts about the Lords of RE8, and I am absolutely in love! The early concept of the Duke as the fifth Lord always fascinated me, especially since I wonder what "motif" there could have been in term of horror for him. I mean, the other lords all answer obvious archetypes and that ever since their concept art (vampire, werewolf, Frankenstein, ghost). I wonder what would have been the plans with the Duke and his early, more zombified-like version... What d'you think?
Well, as I've said before, I don't think there's much to suggest the Duke was ever meant to be "the fifth lord" in the sense of having his own domain or a big boss battle, or however else you're thinking here. He doesn't appear alongside the other lords in any of the early concepts for Ethan's trial, and all the lords' iconography is big on square corners and blocks in a way that really wouldn't work with a fifth entry. All we've even got to go on to tell us he was ever meant to be a lord at all is a single line attached to one piece of concept art (below). I don't even see him as looking all that much more zombified there ‒ it's just a sketchy art style.
My guess, FWIW, would be the Duke was always going to be Ethan's ally/shopkeeper, but with some late-game reveal that he was a (deposed? former?) member of the lords as an explanation for his implied powers and connection to the village. But the Duke doesn't need to be explained for the story to work, which may be why the 'fifth lord' idea was ultimately dropped.
If you really want to dig into fairy tale archtypes though, there's an obvious one that already corresponds to the Duke, with his horse and carriage ‒ and that's the old, wandering fortuneteller. Typically this would be a Romani woman (although I don't imagine she'd be called 'Romani' in any authentic fairytale), and our hero would more likely be trading money or favours for advice rather than treasure for weapon upgrades, but the Duke fits the bill otherwise.
NC-17 3075 words (this part), 18,850 words (so far)
So here Ethan is, on the far side of 35, standing in his own bathroom at 3AM in the morning, having a sexuality crisis over a houseguest whose hobbies include sewing industrial machinery onto human corpses, what the fuck. Is it not enough that Ethan’s a reanimated mould-zombie, now he’s got to deal with being a gay mould-zombie too? God, this is so fucking surreal. Of course, ‘surreal’ is basically Ethan’s life in a nutshell these days.
NC-17 2440 words (this part), 15,780 words (so far)
With his finger on the trigger for yet another cannon shot, Ethan hesitates. What is he doing out here, wasting time and ammunition on Heisenberg while Miranda's still out there? Is this right? Did this... even happen? For a long, strange moment, everything seems to be happening far away. Like a ghost floating outside his own body, Ethan watches his machine gun strafe across Heisenberg's monstrous torso, chipping great plates of hardened steel free in a shower of sparks. One by one, the loosened plates peel away to reveal the chiselled planes of Heisenberg's muscular chest, still flushed and warm from Ethan's shower, shapes faintly swimming in the steam. Oh shit, thinks Ethan, as it all comes back to him in a rush.
Please bear with us as this tale takes a brief sojourn into the surreal while Ethan works through a few things. And by 'surreal' what I naturally mean is 'monsterfucker territory'.
Alternate Universe, PG, 6,500 words
"You can call me 'Frank'," the man says, sitting down again. "Uh-huh." Jensen assumes that's an alias. "You planning to be?" "As much as I can be, when I don't know if you're on board yet." 'Frank' leans back, crossing one leg over another. "But so you know, Adam, you're worth the trouble. Very much so. We made sure of that long before we made contact. In case it comes up: we met online, this is our first real 'date'. I suggested the venue, obviously."
The AU where Pritchard works for a Juggernaut-like hacktavist collective, and Jensen may be in the process of discovering some new kinks he really didn't sign up for.
NC-17, 860 words (this part), 13,900 words (total)
"Jesus Christ," Ethan mutters, because seriously, hasn't he been through enough today? "Are you making that face on purpose?" "Only face I've got!" Heisenberg's voice is still recognisable in this form, despite a strange mechanical distortion. "What's wrong, Winters? Is this doing it for you?" His lips don't move as he speaks. They don't look capable of doing much more than gagging; it's probably a miracle he can speak at all. Maybe nothing else that face is doing is voluntary—maybe Ethan really is staring down the barrel of the world's least ambiguous Freudian tell—but Heisenberg's single eye winks at him.
In which Ethan Winters, wannabe monster-fucker, finally meets the other Heisenberg: one last little epilogue to (ahem) finish this monster off. Epilogue itself is actually pretty PG, but given the rest of this fic, the overall rating felt more relevant to put up top.
Was hoping to have new fic to share by this weekend, but my beta's been a bit flat out and now has a backlog. So in lieu of having anything actually finished, have some quick updates on what's in the works:
tl;dr: Fic is happening, it's just getting as far as posting it that seems to be the sticking point lately. Watch this space!
R, 2365 words
The first thing Jensen says on opening his front door is, "Oh, not you." "What's the matter, Jensen?" Francis Pritchard gives him a lop-sided grin. "Not happy to see me?" His eyes flick significantly downwards to the tell-tale tent in the front of Jensen's sweatpants. "Oh, you're hilarious," Jensen tells him, but he steps aside to let Pritchard in. What else is he going to do? "Seriously, out of everyone Sarif could've sent down here, how'd you draw the short straw?" Pritchard pushes past him without so much as a by-your-leave. "You'd rather he sent a whole team to deal with your little... problem? He needed someone he could trust to be discreet."
I know I marked this series complete with the last chapter, but then I had to admit that the expanded version of that very first chapter I was working on probably isn't ever going to be finished enough to post separately, but is still long enough to be worth sharing. So, have an even longer version of The One Where Jensen's Pheromone Augs Find A Creative Way To Malfunction as a bonus chapter.
