Vampires and Werewolves - The Eternal Struggle

The conflict between vampires and werewolves is one which has developed over the last hundred years or so. Before that media was much harder to come by, and so stories of such creatures were often relegated to tales told town to town, whispered, spoken in hushed tones across bar room tables, or harshly reprimanded to children as cautionary tales when they misbehaved.

However with the great explosion of media content in the world today, many of these disparate creatures have been purified down into archetypal forms. We have a vision of pale fanged vampires craving human blood, and huge ravenous werewolves, hunting the forests of the night. These two images both speak to primal visions that we all have intrinsically written in our psyches.

The idea of the vampire is of an anti human. Their nature is death and yet they move, they live on death, and yet they do live, and so they are polar opposites of humanity. They can almost be seen as more than human. Just think, if humans are better than animals, and eat animals to survive, what does that say about vampires... who eat humans to survive?

The werewolf is quite the opposite. These creatures tend to be very human, so much so that they touch on parts of the human psyche that are often buried beneath layers of civilization. They are representative of the animal within, the ancient primal monsters that we emerged from in the primordial days of our development.

The nature of these two creatures developed because we need to fit them into archetypes. The hulking primordial beast, and the overly refined super civilized gentleman, these are two polar aspects of the human mind. It therefore makes sense that these creatures would be pitted against one another as enemies, doomed to battle back and forth in an eternal struggle that keeps the story interesting.

http://www.RolePages.com is a vampire and werewolf roleplaying chat game, with social networking aspects, that allows you to create a full fictional profile as a walker of the night or wild and ravenous lycan, and then interact with others to tell interactive stories. Jim Slate, the author of this article, is one of the narrators for the site.