The Eternal Conflict

The Eternal Conflict

Vampires originated in Greek mythology, there was a man named Ambrogio who fell in love with a woman named Selena. Long story short, Ambrogio goes to the Oracle to see Apollo, the sun god and asked him to get the woman to marry him. Apollo also wanted to marry Selena, so he made Ambrogio’s skin burn when it came into contact with the sun. Ambrogio then turned to Hades and Artemis and stole Artemis’s silver bow to complete a deal made with Hades, so she made silver burn his skin as well. Then she later felt pity for him and allowed him to possess immortality, super strength, and fangs. This is the basis for most vampire movies, stories, and books.

One such vampire series; Twilight by Stephanie Myers, encapsulates Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, two polar opposites who try to survive in both their own separate worlds and the world they create together. Bella Swan has just recently moved to Washington State as an awkward teenager who can’t fit in. All of this changes when she meets Edward Cullen, the mysterious vampire who takes a special liking to Bella. He likes her so much that he eventually turns her into a vampire.

A different take on vampirism is in the solo book The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black, where a young teenager Tana, lives in a time when around ten to twelve years prior there was a huge vampire epidemic. Since then the country and the world has learned how to deal with this problem. In present-day Tana goes to a house party to have fun, all is going well until she wakes up the next morning with a hangover and dead bodies everywhere. She tries to collect herself as quickly as possible, as the sleeping vampires will soon eat again when she meets Gavriel, a vampire who will be her light out of this never-ending tunnel.

As with the story of Ambrogio and Selena, there are distinct qualities of vampires and their existence. The most known, how a vampire will simply bite a mortal human, and then that person will transform into a vampire themselves. In Twilight, Bella slowly recuperates the feelings towards Edward and they fall in love. Naturally, as things go, Bella ends up getting pregnant–there’s only one problem though, vampires and humans should never be able to conceive a child, let alone have the mother survive the birth. As Bella is in labor the baby is growing too powerful for Bella. In a last-ditch effort to save Bella, Edward–who comes from a family of vampires who don’t drink blood–drinks her blood, therefore, turning her into a vampire and making her immortal. Twilight follows the typical backstory of vampires.

Tana has been experiencing vampires ever since she was five when her mom came home one night after a party and didn’t look well. As soon as the outbreaks started getting really bad, and were causing lots of fear, schools began teaching vampire prevention. Tana knew all about how the Cold went. When someone was bitten by a vampire, the vampire’s infected blood started coursing through the mortal’s blood, making the human go Cold. Not like a cold when you sneezed and had a sore throat, but an infection of your blood–a disease. The only cure for this disease was you couldn’t consume human blood for eighty-eight days. If you consumed human blood, then the infection would take hold of your body, and you would die, and then come back to life again, born anew. The difference between Twilight and The Coldest Girl in Coldtown is that in Twilight it follows the atypical tale of vampirism. While in The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, the author gives an explanation of how to turn into a vampire and how to avoid being turned into a vampire. Holly Black gives a sense of reasoning and almost a false sense of science behind the madness that is vampires.

Love is common in both humans and vampires, one specific aspect that is also common is a love triangle. In a love triangle, there are three people, two of whom are fighting over the third person. In Twilight, Bella first meets Edward and begins her journey on a road towards love, and along the way, she meets Jacob Black the shape-shifting werewolf. As she spends time with both Edward and Jacob, her feelings for both of them collide. She feels as if she has a strong connection with Edward, especially how he always looks at her in a special way. While she spends a good deal of time with Edward, she also starts to trickle off and spend time with Jacob, where she begins to doubt which one she likes the most. Jacob gives her signs that he likes her, but she chooses to ignore his advances and goes with her gut–Edward.

After collecting herself from her terrifying surroundings, Tana looks around the house and finds her ex-boyfriend Aidan tied to a bed unconscious. Then she hears rattling and notices the vampire–Gavriel–secured to a bed by chains. After a quick think through, she decides to free both, even though, she wanted to leave Aidan there to die. As they escape the house and begin their journey towards a Coldtown, Tana gets stuck with feelings from the past towards Aidan, and new blossoming feelings with Gavriel. As they are trying to get to their safe haven, Aidan tries to rekindle old feelings to no avail, while Tana is entranced by the new boy on the block. While Bella has two boys who constantly want her attention, Tana chooses to ignore Aidan, in order to focus on the task at hand. In the end, Bella chooses the one whom she’s known longest and has the most connection with. Tana chooses to save her life and those around her versus focusing on which boy she should engage with. Both experienced young love, and in two separate ways, they dealt with the consequences.

Two separate books, one main theme, six totally different characters. Both books tackled a tale as old as time itself–especially when you can live forever. Twilight took on the more traditional theme of vampires and didn’t add any special twists. Unlike Twilight, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown took the average tale of vampires and flipped it on its head. By adding that becoming a vampire can be a disease and not merely just an act that can be completed in a meager couple of minutes, it added a layer of complexity to a basic storyline. Both were about vampires and the consequences of following one blindly, but The Coldest Girl in Coldtown showed aspects of a more developed theme of vampires and went past the line of no return in not only the fictional realm, but the vampire realm.