ok so in brief here's the take:

It's extremely difficult to code vampire iconography as the symbol of the Evil Rich because defining the Evil Rich as a Parasitic, Chameleonic and Sexually Ambiguous Other is aiming *entirely* at the wrong things. https://twitter.com/loudpenitent/status/1315023977052397568

In most mythos vampires are converted (in a highly sexually-coded fashion, and quite often against their will) away from Good Wholesome Mainstream Religious and Sexual Identity to Wanton Queer-Coded Murderthots, thereby licensing their destruction.

this is, uh, bad.

But more to the point, the mythology just doesn't really WORK as Why The Predatory Rich are Bad. Defining your predatory rich as a distinctively non-hegemonic minority is a trick a lot of populist takes love, but it emphasizes the Otherness of a very non-Other evil.

The Wicked Rich are not wicked because they are OTHERS - they're the exemplars of the hegemony! They're the ones who define its power structures and values!

The saying goes "antisemitism is the socialism of fools," right? It doesn't target wealth, it targets difference.

And the differences that populists consistently and particularly seize upon are not moral or behavioral, they are cultural, sexual, and religious. The vampire parasitically drinking the vigor of the working classes is a trenchant metaphor but *guess who gets called parasites*?

"You queer folks luring good wholesome kids into your decadent and unclean lifestyles"
"You Jews stealing our money and ruining our communities and perverting our Christian ceremonies"

Etc. Etc. Etc. Insert marginalized minority here - and it is, pointedly, a minority.

Vampires-as-the-symbol-source-of-all-social-evils is always ultimately blaming a small, discrete minority symbol for the evils of society at large. Again, this is why it's so popular among populists, for whom the latent goodness of the hegemonic mass is a moral premise.

Our society isn't evil because of parasitism, it's evil because of the values that the population upholds, and the latent social structures that prop up powerful elites who are, nonetheless, not especially culturally distinct in religion, sexuality or customs from those they rule

Worse yet, you end up with a premise of, in effect: "if we could only purify our society of that disgusting minority group of subhumans and those that they have perverted to decadence, society would be safe for wholesome (cishet Christian) people."

Take that in.

So yeah, this metaphor doesn't actually work as well once you start really thinking about it.

"But Penitent vampires are so often hyper-white coded-"

Oh, you mean like how Ashkenazi Jews usually are (due partly to the continued invisibility of JoC)?

"Well they're so frequently depicted as decadent and corrupt, they're metaphorical rapists-"
You mean like how popular society envisions queer (and Jewish) identities as effeminate, decadent, and sexually predatory? Keep going, friend!

See, the metaphor doesn't work, not because it doesn't clearly push buttons in peoples' brains but because it's pushing all of (mainstream, Christian, cishet) society's BAD buttons. It's deliberately appealing to our xenophobia, queerphobia and vindictive populism!

The vampire has tremendous popularity as a populist, Workerist, and - bluntly - cishet boogeyman precisely because it's pushing all those fears of emasculation, resentment of Others outside the "blue collar" populist space & hostility to those outside the cultural norm.

Does this mean you can't do evil vampire stories? Of course not. Illustrating a massive flaw in the metaphor is just illustrating a flaw in the metaphor, you can totally write around it.

But it is worth thinking about how very, very flawed the metaphor is, all the same.

And of course, as I mentioned elsewhere, once your story has like, a vampire *culture*, you fundamentally can't treat them as anything other than a demographic.

And blaming an entire minority demographic for the corruption of hegemonic society against its will is Nazi shit,

Many such vampire stories don't actually so much emphasize their blood drinking as a source of revulsion. Instead, what they focus upon is their sexual immorality, their decadence, all those gut-level disgust reactions that society has neatly associated w/certain minorities.

I mean if it's just *violence* we're supposed to find repellent we'd logically be finding the vampire hunter just as abhorrent right? But we obviously don't; these are action stories, and killing no-names isn't an especially significant moral transgression therein.

No, these stories instead get us to find vampires repellent by depictions of (often, bluntly, antisemitism-myth-adjacent) physical unloveliness, or by depicting them being extremely queer and kinky.

Blood-drinking is secondary to non-vanilla-Christian-cishet-ness.

Storytelling language doesn't just work in overts, it works in subconscious reactions and associations. Playing to the audience's prejudices is potent.

It's a lot why "pop culture" rich people are always effeminate bluebloods compared to red-blooded Real Americans.

Wait I liked about being done.
Anyways this isn't even *just* an overt antisemitism thing bc Blood Libel. A lot of it taps into about masculinity anxieties and angry reptile brain contempt for those who are not "real Christian men" holding power over Christian men.

That's why you're so frequently seeing these evil rich parasite characters as queer, cowardly, cringing, effeminate, when...well, when some of the most destructive rich people currently in our world are *EXTREMELY CULTURALLY VANILLA* and in many respects value hyper-masculinity.

Their being rich in filmic language isn't really the problem, the problem is that they aren't Real Men, and yet their mere *money* (or vampirism, with vampires) is giving them unearned power over True Men.

And as you can see, that's fucked up!

That's where we get all this bullshit Workerism about how real men are working Real Jobs in dying coal mine towns and muscular manufacturing, doing Real Work and having Masculine Pride, not like effeminate office workers and girly retail workers and service industries.

So give it some thought.

NOW, /thread. Curious what @nberlat thinks of all this.