SFTifoso wrote:I don't think you need to be some sort of psychopath to not commit suicide as a vampire. The real question is, is it possible to be a killing machine without actually being evil? IMO yes, it is very much possible. A vampire is basically a predator, not much different than predators in the wild; many of which eat their own kind. This, again, is injecting human morality into a vampire mind.
Eli, although he's 12, is very much capable of telling right from wrong. He is miserable, and even tries to commit suicide, but the will to survive overcomes him. You don't have to be a child to feel this.
I wonder how the rabbit feels about the eagle, or how the deer regards the mountain lion. "Evil" is a highly subjective term in human communities, shifting in shape and colour across the millennia and the continents according to the hasards humans perceive (or misapprehend) in their respective times and places. The eagle or the mountain lion, if it could speak, might simply shrug and say "I didn't ask to be born a predator", but Eli had
not been born a predator, and had not chosen to become one. With her having remained conspicuously human across the centuries, it's not necessarily "injection" to shoulder her with the weight of moral judgement, and her "evil" could be very clearly seen through the eyes of her victims' survivors.
SFTifoso wrote:mackousko wrote:I think you underestimate true nature of men. The will to survive is really a strong feeling. Wars tell us that even people who thought they could not kill have realized they can. Not only that, they even could turn the killing into routine thing after rather short period of time. My answer on the question is : I don´t know for sure what i would do after turning into vampire.
Killing can be a very normal thing, it simply is that it's looked down on in our modern culture. There are so many examples in history where people killed, rather routinely, and yet they had wives, children, etc., and where able to show loving human emotions.
And had Eli been born in such a time or place while she'd been a real child?
But that line of argument is moot within the context of the OP's question. We are ourselves not Eli, and never could be for precisely that reason: we were not born where and when Eli had been born, had not been reared as Elias had been, and have not lived through the periods of history that she has. What's more, we are not frozen into the mind of a preteen child; most of us don't really remember what it is to even be twelve. We are what we are, born in our various respective birthplaces less than a full span of human life; I believe I am one of the forum's older members, and my own lifetime covers just over a mere half century. We
are most of us born into a modern culture, with modern sensibilities and modern attitudes towards purposeless killing.
While it's foolish to suggest that we cannot kill simply because most of us have never been called up to do so, it strikes me as similarly foolish to assume that we could adjust to a lifestyle that requires the murder of two or three innocent people
per week for no other purpose than simply to sustain ourselves. We would become one of the very things that we've been taught to despise almost above anything else, and we couldn't even provide ourselves with the flimsy excuse of "serving the country" (said excuse being very cold comfort to the numbers of young people returning to the US from the Viet Nam nightmare with broken minds to match their shattered bodies) or "performing a public service" (since we could never really be sure that the street bum we just put away wasn't just the unremembered and unwanted detritus he appeared to be).
I do not believe I could survive such a plight.
