The Effects of Immortality on the Psyche.

I read a paranormal romance on the weekend that will remain nameless because it hit the wall by chapter four.

Yeah, vampires ain’t gonna go away any time soon, and we all love ‘em to death, pun intended, but that doesn’t mean we can take ‘em for granted, but that’s just what this author seemed to do, and it pisses me off that the editors and publisher let the story get into print that way.

The so called vampire hero of this story had been around for three hundred years or so. He was turned during the Salem witchcraft trials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692. So far, so good.

Except that the hero acted like he was born in 1982, and grew up in the midwest, and just happened to have pointy teeth and an aversion to daylight (and not much of one at that).

He’s been alive for three hundred fucking years!!!! That’s going to have some effect on his outlook on life for chrissake!

Vampires are unique in the fantasy world. Of all the immortal characters they were human, first, and they have a human psyche that need to cope with the fact of their immortal existance.

Look, there’s several different ways the human mind might handle immortality and the long, long stretch of years. Anne Rice studied it (you might study her if you’re going to dip into writing fantasy yourself), and all fantasy writers who tackle immortal races have to at least consider the implications of it somewhere along the way.

1) Non-handling it.

The human mind might not be able to cope with the idea of immortality at all, and just go bonkers. After a number of years, vampires could just go off the deep end, and either suicide or find creative ways to self-destruct or get themselves killed, or otherways slide into dark mental abysses with no returns. Game over.

2) Mental Shifting

There’s a school of thought that says the human mind may cope only by changing in weird and wonderful ways. The coping mechanisms would make the resulting psyche resemble nothing human. So you’d have a vampire with behavioural patterns that would be weird and just a little creepy, to say the least. And the longer the vampire had been alive, the stranger the coping behaviour would be. You would end up with some very dark, strange characters.

3) Acceptance and immersion

One of my favourite sayings is “Youth is wasted on the young” — and only people who have started to feel the effects of gravity on their bodies can really appreciate the full meaning of the saying. Vampires would be amongst those who would look at that saying, and nod their heads in deep agreement, even though they look like twenty-somethings most of the time.

Vampires could look at their lost humanity, and cherish it. They’re basically very old people in young bodies, with all that wisdom and experience locked in their heads. Especially in urban fantasy, it would be hard for a vampire to resist the lure of mixing with humans and pretending to be one again. And it would be hard for a vampire to actually pull it off convincingly because their reactions would be all wrong. Consider that a 90 year old man’s response to modern rock is different to a 20 year old’s. Just because the 90 year old and the 20 year old happen to look exactly alike is a trap that the unwary writer may fall into with a loud thud if they haven’t considered this question in full.

4) Progressive development

I guess this is the default position most writers take because they haven’t thought it through much at all. It’s the one that says that okay, the vampire has been around for three hundred years, and in those three hundred years, his tastes, thoughts, philosophies, education, desires, cultural influences and so forth — the sum total of who he is, and everything that makes his behavioural choices for him — has evolved right along with history. So the vampire is into heavy metal and studded leather jeans now, because that’s hot and trendy.

The one problem with that default position is this: Is your dad listening to the same music that you are these days? No, I thought not.

The human pysche does NOT evolve to keep up with culture. If you’re going to use this option for your vampires, you have to justify it. Maybe the fact of their immortality gives them a fresh outlook on life, and allows them to regenerate their tastes, like a permanent adolescence, when everything is new and wonderful.

Or maybe they simply make a deliberate choice to assimilate, and work to listen to and enjoy the latest death metal and designer low rise pants.

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It could be that your vampires exhibit a range of these effects, combinations of them, or some of them even more stranger than those I’ve outlined above. If you put some real thought into it, you could come up with a whole new spin on the idea of immortal characters.

But put some thought into it. I mean, first of all the vampire (usually) died, then got made, and now has to cope with the idea of immortality. After the first rush of joy wears off, immortality has some serious implications that the human mind has to deal with.

Don’t toss a couple of centuries of character-building out the window. Your readers (that’s me) will hate you for it.

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This post first appeared on the Teal Ceagh website,
before Teal Ceagh “came out”.