>Well, you avoid most of the typical tropes or put your own spin on
>them.
(...)
>Back on track, I figure that you like the aesthetics of vampires,
>especially cute vampire girls, and pick ones whose personality
>idiosyncrasies mesh well with those of the other characters in the
>story.

You make good points. In this case, in particular, it helps that there are so many divergent interpretations of the character out there already. Sort of like Kancolle, or the Vocaloid characters (not to quite the latter extent, since they're kind of chameleons by design, if you see what I mean)—there's so much room for interpretation in the canon that one doesn't really have to worry about getting it "wrong" (insofar as I ever worry about that).

In Remilia's case, fanwork interpretations of her range across a wide spectrum of both moral standing and competence, from classic gothic-horror "you mortals are but cattle to me" monster-in-human(ish)-shape to "the Charlie Brown of vampires". I went for kind of a middle road with my version—she does like to play to the room (and sometimes it doesn't work), but if you get to know her, as we've already seen, she's a sweetheart—but still one who shouldn't be trifled with. Or, put another way, I think it's cute when her attempts to be badass don't work, but only under the right circumstances. :)

Also, upon reflection, I think the general point fits into the larger framework of my dislike for the concept of "inherent evil". This has been getting a lot of play in RPG circles online at the moment because of WotC's recent 86ing of "evil races" in Dungeons & Dragons, and I don't want to come across as totally there-before-it-was-cool about this, but I was there before it was cool. Even when collective stereotypes do generally hold (as with, say, the svartelves of UF's Upper Worlds), I've tried to make it clear that they're not congenitally evil, it's just that culturally they tend to be assholes. And as an extension of that, I like it when characters who are "supposed" to be evil buck the system, which is basicallly every "good" vampire ever.

TLDR: I guess it's mostly that, like G says, vampires are people too. :)

(An aside: Back in the day, there used to be a cheesy direct-to-syndication TV show called Forever Knight, about a vampire police detective. I only watched it when it was randomly on in the middle of the night, so I never got any sense of the overall plot if there was one, but I liked the concept, even though it made no actual sense. How would a vampire ever get through the police academy and the inevitable years as a patrol officer before making it to detective and theoretically getting to set his own hours? You can't wangle it so you always work at night when you're in uniform. Anyway. About the only detail I can remember now is that the vampire cop owned a 1959 Cadillac specifically because it had a very large trunk he could hide in during the day, which was a nice touch. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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