I figure that dystopias will come back in style /eventually/ and I'd be interested to see how the modern crop of authors would spin those tales.
Everything comes back into style eventually, and I don't even think dystopias completely went away, although the 'dystopia contrived to provide maximum angst for a forbidden love YA couple' type certainly seems to have gone away for good, at least for the moment.
if not a comedy, a bit on the nose?
So this basically came from two separate ideas:
1. A lot of people in early adulthood are working in dead-end, soul-destroying jobs for very little money and with very little hope of career progression, and many such people would probably rather spend their time doing something more fulfilling (making art, working in a job that they find more meaningful, etc) if money were taken out of the equation. 2. In settings where vampires exist (and where the version of vampires is such that being bitten by a vampire doesn't automatically turn a human into a vampire, or necessarily kill the human), it's always been crazy to me that more vampires don't set up arrangements with humans whereby they basically pay groups of humans to be their blood donors. This has always struck me as a much more practical and sustainable solution — the vampires don't destroy their source of food, there's less conflict (so a quieter unlife for all concerned), and vampires don't keep getting run out of town by hordes of angry humans who inevitably notice the piles of dead bodies drained of all blood accumulating in their city.
This then turned into a story where a pair of vampires owned a piece of prime real estate in one of the expensive suburbs around Sydney Uni, and they ended up with a bunch of blood-donating human housemates who got to live rent-free in a fantastic house, were able to do whatever kind of work they wanted because money was no longer a concern (so one was a guy who was just taking forever to do his PhD but didn't need to worry about funding running out, another was a woman who had zero ambition and just wanted to work part-time at a local cafe for the social aspect, another was an artist, and so on), and in exchange for this cushy situation the humans donated their blood to the vampires whenever needed. So, literal capitalist vampires. The problem was that I could never work out what the overarching plot was, beyond minor episodes of interpersonal drama. And then What We Do in the Shadows came out.
(There was also a Netflix film about a plucky gang of children in New York City who discovered the gentrifiers in their neighbourhood were actual vampires, literally draining the lifeblood from the area!)
no subject
Everything comes back into style eventually, and I don't even think dystopias completely went away, although the 'dystopia contrived to provide maximum angst for a forbidden love YA couple' type certainly seems to have gone away for good, at least for the moment.
if not a comedy, a bit on the nose?
So this basically came from two separate ideas:
1. A lot of people in early adulthood are working in dead-end, soul-destroying jobs for very little money and with very little hope of career progression, and many such people would probably rather spend their time doing something more fulfilling (making art, working in a job that they find more meaningful, etc) if money were taken out of the equation.
2. In settings where vampires exist (and where the version of vampires is such that being bitten by a vampire doesn't automatically turn a human into a vampire, or necessarily kill the human), it's always been crazy to me that more vampires don't set up arrangements with humans whereby they basically pay groups of humans to be their blood donors. This has always struck me as a much more practical and sustainable solution — the vampires don't destroy their source of food, there's less conflict (so a quieter unlife for all concerned), and vampires don't keep getting run out of town by hordes of angry humans who inevitably notice the piles of dead bodies drained of all blood accumulating in their city.
This then turned into a story where a pair of vampires owned a piece of prime real estate in one of the expensive suburbs around Sydney Uni, and they ended up with a bunch of blood-donating human housemates who got to live rent-free in a fantastic house, were able to do whatever kind of work they wanted because money was no longer a concern (so one was a guy who was just taking forever to do his PhD but didn't need to worry about funding running out, another was a woman who had zero ambition and just wanted to work part-time at a local cafe for the social aspect, another was an artist, and so on), and in exchange for this cushy situation the humans donated their blood to the vampires whenever needed. So, literal capitalist vampires. The problem was that I could never work out what the overarching plot was, beyond minor episodes of interpersonal drama. And then What We Do in the Shadows came out.
(There was also a Netflix film about a plucky gang of children in New York City who discovered the gentrifiers in their neighbourhood were actual vampires, literally draining the lifeblood from the area!)