• NielsBohron@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Oh, now I have an idea for a new BBEG: A lich that got to their position by taking advantage of their privilege and refuses to acknowledge it.

    Definitely should be fully fleshed out (no pun intended) by flavoring with historical Trump actions like blaming minorities for everything (“that jogger was violently assaulted by these 5 goblins that simply happen to be nearby”), refusing to pay contractors for services rendered (“great job building my phylactery, it would be a shame if you got deported before I paid you”), using populist rhetoric to blame progressives for the problems caused by capitalism (“Minions, I know your wages are low, but it’s those adventurers fault for donating gold to the orphanage and causing all this inflation”). When he flees the adventurers, they could be slowed by a magical spell called “malicious litigation” that functions like a web spell on anyone who is not of noble birth.

    Minions could also include a ghoul as diplomatic envoy whose hair dye leaks and who accidentally books an event at Four Seasons Total Castle Care and several half-ogre sons who think they are going to inherit his lichdom but are too dumb to see they’re first on the chopping block when the chips are down.

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          https://unireadinghistory.com/2017/05/26/socialism-and-the-vampire/

          Dracula, and the vampire myth more generally, has also been read as a narrative on class relations and the struggle between capitalism and labour. It is this context that we shall examine below, with sharpened stake and cloves of garlic ready at hand, should they be needed.

          Vampire fiction as class allegory predates Dracula. The means by which vampires feed not only has sexual and Freudian subtexts, but is also a powerful representation of a classically exploitative relationship – one body drawing strength whilst the other weakens – and Marxist writers were not slow in appropriating this imagery. Crucially, the vampire is also aristocratic, unlike, for example, the lumpen-proletariat Frankenstein Monster. Early vampires in Balkan folklore may have been re-animated peasants, but by the time the vampire novel emerged in the early-nineteenth century the classic undead was very much from the noblesse.