When Worlds Collide

[gfish]

People were over tonight and there was much watching of Buffy. I experienced a severe mental crossover between it and Guns, Germs and Steel, which continues to dominate my thoughts. What happens when vampires finally domesticate humans? Given the apparent low population density of vampires, it isn't too surprising that they haven't been able to yet. But once they do, they'll be able to move from being hunter/gathers to sedentary farmers. That will allow the development of all kinds of technology that wandering nomads just can't support, such as writing, pottery and metallurgy. The surplus of food will support specialty occupations like craftsperson, soldier and bureaucrat. Large scale political organizations will emerge, allowing for civic construction projects and conscription for armies of conquest. Living among their livestock and waste, they will also develop new crowd diseases. While this will slow their population growth some, it will equip them with biological weapons to help defend them against colonization by foreign vampires.

So the obvious question is, how can we keep ourselves from becoming domesticated?

Comments

[velvetknife.livejournal.com]

Eat lots of garlic?

[callmem.livejournal.com]

I think the Scooby gang solved this problem by increasing the number of slayers. With a better global distribution of the vampire's primary predator, they are less likely to find a safe haven to form geographically stable communities.

Taking your post at face value...

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

From my POV, it's already happened, long time ago. Not the literal blood-suck of a bufy-vamp, but the ongoing, chronic energy-vampiricism of a Tobacco industry, Nike wage-slavery, Big Oil agenda.

The only way this situation can persist, is for humans (they/we are hardly "people" in this context) to not understand the depths of our slavery.

vraptorz posted a link (http://www.livejournal.com/users/vraptorz/45287.html) to a Brian Eno Article, where he specifically points out:


It's kind of like those two movies which depict humans encased in Brood Comb: X-files and the first Matrix. In X-Files, the brood comb is a place that humans go to when they are trapped, but they have to make a wrong step before they go there. In the Matrix humans start off in the brood comb from birth, and have to somehow earn their way out.

Imagine living the X-Files plot inside the Matrix plot somehow. You're playing the role of Mulder, sniffing around the hive and risking capture, when in reality you're in the brood cell like you've always been, and fear of being in a place where you know how enslaved you are, is what keeps you in that cell.


See what you get when you talk about metaphore in the presence of someone with no sense of humor?

[jadine.livejournal.com]

Turn the vampires into cows, except at the full moon.

[gement.livejournal.com]

Aw, you beat me to it!

Though, I go a step further. Completely ignoring the season finale (no spoilers here, whee!), I have always seen the potential for the Slayer equivalent of a "puppy mill."

If they had any sense, the first thing the Council would do to a girl is hold her under water for a while. If they get her back, great. If they don't, not a lot of training lost. I figure they could keep 4 or 5 at a time alive that way.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

would that be vampirowerebovines?

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

I actually thought for a time that the season finale was going to *be* that. Just keep killing the next one and then bring her back to life, and then the next one, and so on and so on and so on!