Carbonated Reading for the Masses

Alright, I’m going to talk about a most disturbing trend for a moment, well, as least it’s disturbing to me. Now the term “franchise” and more specifically “franchise characters” are relatively new terms but they are an old concept. James Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking series and Mark Twain’s characters, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn takes you further back as characters showing up in multiple books, and Dumas’s d’Artagnan, just to give you a few suggestions to show you this idea isn’t new.

Bringing this blog more into the now perspective, I’ve never read the Ender series, written by Orson Scott Card, because of conflicting views on religion, and I am sure there’s a plethora of crime mystery novels out there with the same character throughout it that I haven’t touched because I don’t normally read that genre. However, it seems like an author can only publish one character and several books, like they were a literary television series. And to me they aren’t a good literary television series, they started off great, but they need to end; all stories have an ending, even the Neverending Story had an ending. But like most businesses, you must milk the product for as much money as it is worth. A good case in point is the Harry Potter series when it comes to milking the money out, then again, it did end. (Knock on formica) Roger Zelazny’s Amber series had distinct abrupt finishes, even though there was the Corwin Chronicles and the Merlin Chronicles and short stories in between to fill in the gaps they seemed, to me at least, a satisfying end. Then you have another extreme with Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker trilogy that contained six books and one short story, totally ambiguous, all over the map, and followed virtually no rules. I forgave it because I thought they were a really fun read. But nothing can forgive this:

I blame Louie, the schmuck in Interview with the Vampire. He was sad and morose and reluctant and practically a fucking sage at the end of that book. Vampires are not supposed to be touchy feely happy “I wanna do you” type creatures. They are monsters. The were “created” straight from folklore as the ultimate boogyman that cannot die, capable of insurmountable evil, chaos, and fear. They are leeches on mortal society, preying on their victims in their pursuit of blood, their only sustenance; vampires are NOT the perfect boyfriend for moody emo teenage girls! You live for hundreds of years there’s a good chance that you don’t care about love and sex anymore, they are just looking for a food source to harvest. They are manipulative monsters out for their own gain in control, plain and simple, they are not Robert Pattison! And by the way, Robert Pattison has the same acting ability as Ryan Phillipe or Michael Cera, they do one style and they do it badly. C’mon guys, some emotion please?! Romantic, dark fantasies, indeed…

So this finally brings me to Laurel K. Hamilton. Ah, Ms. Hamilton, reliving her past lovers in her writings and pursuing her dark fantasies as she kills them off in gruesome ways when they break up with her in real life, please dear, lets not be so fucking obvious with your bitterness when a man, or woman, grows tired of you, it happens and it’s human nature to wander and find a hot piece of ass. If the offer is there, they are going to take it sweetheart, which brings me to my next point, why is vampire porn mainstream literature; and I use the term “literature” loosely here. I understand that this series has fallen to the ways of the romance novel, but, darling, you write about a hunter who hunts vampires who had a vampire lover. Okay, so it’s Buffy. Ms. Hamilton, your first two or three books were decent, the rest is just bad porn. It makes me sick to my stomach that you, and others like your work, are professionally published and I am not. It really spells out the integrity of certain agents and publishing houses.

And while I named Buffy, I’ll leave on more point. Yes Angel was moody and supplied a good amount of angst, but it was a quick to answer concept in that multiverse as to why he was a goody goody vampire and boyfriend to a vampire hunter. Most vampires there have no soul, which is a good point; no soul equals virtually no morals, kind of like the old tale of being a witch. An old gypsy thought it would be just desserts to give Angelus his soul back and deal with all the sins that he created in his wake thusfar as a vampire. Hence WHY he’s needy goody goody nice, because he must. Too bad it has to spawn “True Blood,” “The Vampire Diaries,” and the Twilight debacle. Television and movies have, all in all, become such a waste when it comes to entertainment and the internet is in the same boat.

Speaking of numbing the mind, I’m going to go play videogames to make me feel young again, albeit, it’s an empty feeling of youth. Lets see if I can rant about something tomorrow.

Down with big oil; TTFN

H.R. Green, 28th of October, 2009, 11:02 a.m. Burtchville, MI