Evil Vampires: Nature Or Nurture?

white avenger

white avenger

white avenger
Joined
Sep 30, 2006
Messages
16,036
Age
78
Location
rome, georgia
Just an odd thought, but do you think that it just MIGHT be possible to take a vampire, just as he or she is crawling out of the ground, keep it separate from all of its kind, feed it only animal blood, and suppress, if not eliminate its predatory tendency? Buffy and the others stake so many fledgelings, before they ever feed for the first time, it would be totally possible that at least a few could be captured and tamed" in that way. (For what reason such a thing would be tried, I have no idea, unless maybe someone like the Initiative would do it, which might make for an interesting story)

At the very least, it would make for an interesting experiment, assuming that there could be some place where they could be totally isolated, like an island, with enough animals provided to supply them with food.

What gave me this idea was remembering the old "Phantom" comic strip in which he did exactly that with big cats, mostly lions, on an island he named Eden. The lions were fed an exclusive diet of fish, and so never had the urge to hunt its normal prey.
 
Well thats what the initiative were doing. But no I dont think it's possible, they dont have a soul, no concept of right or wrong.

Harmony tired and didn't succeed, Spike had it forced on him, but tried to rape Buffy, it will always be part of them.
 
Black Eye Guy said:
Well thats what the initiative were doing. But no I dont think it's possible, they dont have a soul, no concept of right or wrong.

Harmony tired and didn't succeed, Spike had it forced on him, but tried to rape Buffy, it will always be part of them.
Click to expand...

But it could be argued that both Spike and Harmony associated with other normal vampires, and acted as they did because that's how they were taught to act. Totally isolated from the moment of resurrection, conditioned to not see humans as natural prey, that tendency might be eliminated, or at least suppressed.

Dogs are natural predators, but that tendency is so suppressed in most family pets that they would literally starve without someone to feed them. (Certainly, there are cases of abandoned dogs reverting to the wild, but those cases are rare in the extreme unless the dog is adopted into a pack of truly wild dogs) Even big cats, like lions and tigers, have been successfully conditioned not to attack other animals as long as sufficient food is provided for them.
 
In real life this is absolutely possible, but it usually requires conditioning for generations. Taking a wild animal at birth and trying to domesticate it is often done, and it does in fact work most of the time, but it only takes one bad luck of the animals instincts taking over for someone to get killed. This was seen countless times in history with lions, elephants, whales etc. For animals to be domesticated like dogs were, it usually takes a minimum of a few generation to partially eliminate the "aggressive gene", done at first most likely by only breeding the "nicer" or "weaker" dogs. Eventually, you get a breed that doesn't carry the gene. For example, the flight or flee response.

Now vampires aren't exactly based on genetics, but it is in their nature to kill, I think it'd be possible to temporarily suppress some of the behaviours, but they would always remain dangerous no matter what. Especially since the way they are sired means that each new born vampires doesn't acquire anything from the previous vampire, so the experiments would have to be done over and over again without success. If vampires worked like dogs, than maybe it'd be possible by using "nicer" vampires as sires, like Harmony, until we get a breed of fairly harmless vampires.
 
In the Buffyverse? Sure, it'd probably be possible to train (tame) a vampire. That's pretty much what happened with Spike, Harmony and apparently numerous other vampires in s8 when the public began accepting vampires, right?
 
Blaze
Blaze
dam I really need to read s8
As I so often do, I have to agree with [MENTION=8404]Blaze[/MENTION]. In real life, this practice obviously works. I've owned animals my entire life. Some have been very calm and docile from birth while others haven't and it is with those I've had to work more. In the end though, I have never owned an animal that I haven't been able to work with.

However, it's different in the Buffyverse. The show(s) make it very clear that vampires are evil. That an extra-dimensional demon literally invades the corpse of the turned and sets up shop in their body, and that that demon is evil. Now clearly, there are varying degrees of evil, but even the so-called moderates, like Spike and Harmony (as opposed the world-destruction bent vampires like The Master and Angelus), prove to be evil despite any sort of conditioning to the contrary. I mean, Spike had a pretty powerful motivator in Buffy to "act good" and he just...couldn't. I mentioned this in another thread about the infamous "Seeing Red" scene. As much as I hate it and think it's a dumb scene, the point of it is to show that no matter how "good" Spike acts, he's still, at the end of the day, a soulless vampire. He has no real conscious.

Now, granted, Spike and Harmony weren't raised from "birth", but consider Holden Webster, who right from being sired was met by a very non-confrontational Buffy. He talked with Buffy for hours in what seemed to be a very productive sitting and still couldn't wait to kill her.

I think vampires are evil, through and through.
 
idk, there was that one episode where Buffy met the vampire she new from school right as he came out of the ground. They talked and she opened up and stuff, they had a nice time, but eventually he decided it was time to try and kill her. He did that with no contact with any other vampires or anything so idk. Vampires are ultimately just there demons with out a soul allowing them to care. The Buffyverse kinda blurs that later in the show. In the early season Vampires werre just evil but later for plot purposes vampires started to be able to care and have consciences like Harmony and Spike.
 
Vampires have all of the memories of their past lives, as well as emotions other than evil. They aren't the same person though. They are connected to some evil deep down. I do think though that because Vampires share the same memories of the past that some have the potential to be more evil.

Idk though because Angelus was one of the most evil vampires in the 'Verse and he was just a drunk as a human being. Spike was a romantic as a human and became sadistic after being turned. There's really no correlation, some Vampires are just more evil than others. Some can act on feelings other than just evil, others seem dominated by it.
 
Vampires do end up identifying with their former human selves as we see in this exchange in "Real Me" 5ABB02":

"XANDER: I just, I just can't picture anyone pathetic enough to be following - (Looks at the minions again and pretends to be shocked) Is that Brad Konig? Huh! Hey Brad, who'd have thought when you were beating up kids in gym class, you'd end up Harmony's lapdog?

BRAD: Screw you, Harris.

HARMONY: You should know all about being somebody's lapdog. I hear you were a good little puppy for Dracula."

In "Lie to Me" 2V07, Buffy says:

"Well, I've got a news flash for you, braintrust: that's not how
it works. You die, and a demon sets up shop in your old house, and it
walks, and it talks, and it remembers your life, but it's not you."
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom