You seem more...optimistic than usual," I observed. "I haven't seen you like this before.""Isn't it supposed to be like this?" He smiled. "The glory of first love, and all that. It's incredible, isn't it, the difference between reading about something, seeing it in pictures, and experiencing it?
In my own opinion (key word), the foundation of feminism is this: being able to choose. The core of anti-feminism is, conversely, telling a woman she can't do something solely because she's a woman—taking any choice away from her specifically because of her gender. ... One of the weird things about modern feminism is that some feminists seem to be putting their own limits on women's choices. That feels backward to me. It's as if you can't choose a family on your own terms and still be considered a strong woman. How is that empowering? Are there rules about if, when, and how we love or marry and if, when, and how we have kids? Are there jobs we can and can't have in order to be a "real" feminist? To me, those limitations seem anti-feminist in basic principle.
Then you have this other phenomena of the paranormal romance. It's all the benefits of being a vampire without the sacrifices. By the gods, Meyer's vampires walk around sparkling in the daylight and some are vegetarians. But this phenomenon is also tied to a lot of our communal fears. Fear of aging. Fear of fading youth. Fear of loneliness. But whereas the classic motifs are more concerned with confronting and overcoming our fears, the fears of the paranormal romance genre become twisted fantasies of denial. The idea of staying young, attractive and powerful for eternity feeds into the modern self-absorbed ethos.
Vampires used to be the Dracula types, but in the last ten years most of them have become weak, brooding androgynes that only go after teenagers. A friend of mine took the opportunity to rid his whole city of them after the forth Mormon Vamps book hit and the sparkle meme was at its strongest.""So does that make Ms. Mormon Sparkle Vamp a hero?""Of a sort. Before they started to sparkle, there were a lot of vamps who were tortured antiheroes, thanks to Rice and Whedon."Ree grimaced. "Do you know if she was clued in?"Eastwood shrugged. "She's very secretive, no one in the Underground has been able to say for sure. It's all rumor. My guess is she lost someone to a vampire and decided the greatest revenge she could inflict was to turn them into a laughing stock.
It takes a few days for the transformation to be complete, depending on how much venom is in the bloodstream, how close the venom is to the heart. As long as the heart keeps beating, poison spreads, healing, changing the body as it moves through it. Eventually the heart stops, and the conversion is finished. But all the time, every minute of it, a victim would be wishing for death