Chiefly concerning wizards

Hisashiburi, na?

Anyhoo. So I recently decided to read Mahou Sensei Negima, and it got me to thinking: manga about children with magic, are much better than Harry Potter (the HP influence on Negima's pretty obvious). Just in Negima:

• The Latin. Negi's spells are just flat out in better Latin than Harry's—apparently Akamatsu Ken can be bothered to notice that Latin spellcasting is in the subjunctive, for instance. Also, when the Thousand Master casts older spells, they're in Greek! Real Greek, too, not English written in the Symbol font, though I don't know enough Greek to know how good of Greek.
• Negi's spells have a lot more range, though the change to an action series sorta made the utility spells get short shrift in favor of the combat. But Harry Potter made that same shift, and then we discovered the wizarding world has no combat spells that aren't illegal. Also, no area-effect spells! And then again, when Harry was carving things in his arms for Umbridge, who else wanted her to check...and get the message, "I took Explosive Runes today."
  Ahem. But in Negima, he's got like 29 different levels of Sagitta Magica (somehow I suspect we know that name from somewhere *cough*magic missile*cough*), for each element!!! Also I dig the combining magic with martial arts, though this series suffers from the bizarre conception Chinese martial arts are strong (also that Europe doesn't have any, or at least none of them have shown up—anyone else wanna see magic + savate?)
• Just, the shonen series-ness of it: Negi is more of a man at ten than Harry is at seventeen. Admittedly Akamatsu has an advantage in writing about a young boy's heart that Rowling didn't—as in, he is a boy—but I don't think his female characters are half as off as Rowling's male ones.
• All that said, I finally found a vampire character I hate more than Alucard and Edward Cullen: Evangeline A. K. McDowell. The real problem with her is she has her moments (her Kugimiya Rie-type tsundere scenes), and then she starts fighting, and you have to hate her Alucard!Sue-ness.
• Actually come to think of it, and I just realized it now, Akamatsu apparently has trouble writing strong female characters (as in "female characters who can kick your ass," not Strong Female Characters™ as in "good female role-model based on a hilariously androcentric conception of strength"). Other than Ku Fei (whose saving grace is she's a ditz), Asuna, and Setsuna, all the powerful girls are obnoxious bundles of stereotypes and cliches, and most of them are Sue-y, too—especially what's-her-name, the gun chick. Still better than Potter, though.

And then there's Naruto. "That's a reach," you say. No, it's not. It was originally gonna be a manga about a kid in a wizard school, but then Kishimoto-sensei decided he hated drawing Naruto's goggles, and drew other things on his forehead instead, until he came to the ninja hachimaki and decided to change them from wizards to ninjas (who have magic, in folklore). And the rest was history (and then, apparently, a couple years later, Kishimoto heard about some English book series, and realized he'd really dodged a bullet).

Actually Naruto's got more similarities to HP than that. Except it's better.

Consider.

• Team 7 is made up of the chump, the bookworm, and the broody last survivor of a rich family. Also the chump has orange hair. Also the last survivor has a mark put on him by a guy who can talk to snakes. So Naruto is Harry Potter, except about Ron.
• Orochimaru is basically Voldemort, except with a good motivation and actual talent as a villain.
• Sandaime Hokage is Dumbledore, except he doesn't make everyone else make sacrifices and endure suffering, while getting off the hook himself by forcing someone to euthanize him. Oh, and he actually stands up to the evil student he couldn't kill before, rather than hoping a bunch of children can pull it off.
• Itachi is Snape, except Kishimoto realized the whole double-agent assassin thing was a really nasty thing to make someone do, and had Danzo do it, instead of the Hokage—because Hokage actually earns his people's love and loyalty.
• The Chûnin exam arc was the Wizarding Cup—which I realize makes Gaara Viktor Krum, for which I apologize to the fangirls—except instead of "this minor international school contest makes international news," it was, "this thing that directly affects the military strength of every nation on the planet, except the one that uses samurai instead of ninja, is obviously international news."
• The Akatsuki and Sound Ninjas are actually competent, and the ninja villages actually have defenses. Meanwhile the Death Eaters re-enact Three Stooges bits during battles, and the wizarding world's entire defense appears to be Aurors, which would be like England's only law enforcement and military forces being the CID. At its current strength. And staffed by the gumbies from the Monty Python Architect Sketch.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Rowling should be embarrassed.

Plaudite, amici, epicus finitus est

Well, took less time than I'd thought, but I've finished rewriting my SF novel Faith of the Phoenix. It comes out to 336 pages, letter size 11-pt Times New Roman, 1-inch margin, or 571 pages in 9-pt trade-paperback size. Yes, I never do anything small, children. Now to get someone to edit it (probably my mother), and then to figure out how to get the thing published.

Ah, you ask, why that title? It has nothing to do with the Phoenix-as-Christ-image thing—which I hate. It has still less to do with the Order of the Phoenix (though the confusion of the two might sell my book for me, as Belloc hoped his Green Overcoat would with Baring's Green Elephant). Indeed, the Phoenix Society is the name of the bad guys of my book. Though if you ask my little sister, Dumbledore's plenty likely to strap a bomb to a 12-year-old (he gets seventh graders to fight an awful lot of his battles for him, and wizard brats are civilians, not trained black ops soldiers like in Naruto).

Faith of the Phoenix is a rather free and easy translation of the Latin Punica Fides, more literally Carthaginian (=Phoenician) trustworthiness. It's basically the Roman equivalent of "White Man Speak with Forked Tongue," because the Carthaginian honor-code only applied to other Phoenicians, while the Roman one applied to everyone (ideally, anyway; the Carthaginians didn't even try).

Betrayal of "outsiders" is a major theme of the book; too many modern thinkers (Communists, to name an obvious example), say one need only keep one's word, alliances, etc., with people who agree with one ("That which advances the program of Marx is alone good; that which impedes it is alone evil"), and more generally, that only those who serve whatever ideology have any rights.

The story is about a future where the humans have colonized many nearby stars, under the auspices of the UN (it's the same UN, though some of its rules are different), and they've run afoul of an alien race that's rather more of a stickler for the sanctity of promises. They're felinoids whose culture is sorta part Roman, part Medieval, and part Napoleonic. Now imagine if those people had to deal with our politicians...and had more advanced tech than us, and liked to fight as much as the Romans, medievals, and pre-WWI French.

So, after humanity got its nether regions handed to it, a guy starts a sort of "pretend we never lost that war we deserved to lose" movement, on this one planet, and kidnaps some of the aliens' citizens. The aliens dispatch one of their cops to find the victims (and whomp their kidnapper), and the story's about the cop meeting various people, his species, humans, and members of this other species with super psionics and a religion best described as Evangelical Heideggerianism. There's also one of his people who's been kidnapped (a cranky, not to say tsundere, computer technician who loathes humans, though she comes to like a few), a telepathic gunrunner who's been betrayed by the kidnapper-guy, and a girl whose family got killed when the aliens blew up the station they lived on, so she joined the bad guy. There's also an assassin droid and the alien emperor (most easily described as Tamaki from Ouran High Host Club meets Jacuzzi Splot from Baccano); those are the viewpoint characters, anyway—I got a cast of sodding thousands, dude. Major non-POV characters include other androids, the gunrunner's fiancée, another alien comp-tech (a boy this time), and several members of a revived samurai caste.

The humans've compromised between socialism and capitalism, with a thing called permanent employment (see the economic works of Hilaire Belloc); the aliens' economics is a mix of guilds (be seated—think of them as professionals' co-ops if you must) and Chesterton-style distributist agriculture (peasant proprietorship). Humans' politics are like their politics now, only usually worse (I know, I'm scared too), while the aliens' government's a militarchic democracy with a strong executive, called an Empire for convenience (political power's attained by military service, but anyone can be promoted from the ranks).

I also have dialog in two different, related alien languages, plus a third spoken by the existential evangelist aliens. Also in Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Korean, Cantonese, Mandarin, and two dialects of French. And mottoes in Latin! Keep yer shirt on, I translate when it matters.

Yoroshiku o-negai shimasu. Eventually.

Things I'd like to see

So I thought I'd make a list of some things I'd like to see in movies/TV. Doubt I will, but hope springs eternal.

1. How about one of those gun-toting pacifists' companions disarms them every time they point a gun, and says, "Hey, idiot, second rule of gun safety: never point a gun at anything you aren't willing to destroy."


2. How about a tiny chick, like River in Firefly, who gets her a$$ handed to her on a plate after trying to use brute force on guys twice her size? Yeah, tiny people can kick butt...but they better damn well use technique. And no, moving like a ballerina is not technique. How about jujutsu? It really works, and it looks utterly awesome, at least to people who know anything.


3. Vampires who aren't only dead, they're actually based on specific legendary types. How about Slavic vampires, with their long (and bladed) tongues, two hearts, rising at noon, and iron teeth?


4. Elves who aren't like the ones in Tolkien, but like the ones in legends. Actually I have seen that, but most people don't know Sesshômaru is an elf.


5. Shows that have learned the Kzinti Lesson ("There is no such thing as a disarmed spacefaring civilization"), and the law it's a special case of ("Anything usable as an interesting spaceship engine, is a WMD.")


6. Settings where the WMDs we call spaceships are really regulated like they would be—no "no formal training" people with mystical (and, ironically, sexist) intuitive skills with engines, like Kaylee in Firefly. Seriously, do we let nice little hippie undergrads use the LHC? 'Cause a decent rocket makes it look like a damn laser-pointer.

Yes, I used the abbreviation on that last one just to play with the acronym command in html. You can do it with abbreviations, too (Mlle.), and apparently definitions (slavery).

Curiously well-armed pacifists

So, I was reading a largely forgettable little manga called Zero In, and in it, there's a chick from this private para-police force, if that makes sense, who's a genius with guns...but won't kill. There's similar characters in Black Cat (Saya, and later Train), and Kaoru's school of kenjutsu in Rurouni Kenshin (except, you know, with swords). All of them insist that you don't have to use guns (or swords) to kill, in a pitiable little "this is a shonen series so we can't have a body count" gesture, that makes Batman's hoplophobia look downright respectable.

Unfortunately, it's codswallop. Guns and swords have one purpose: killing stuff. Yes, you can use them to hunt as well as to fight, but their only purpose is to spill the blood of other living things. You can't, in real life, "intentionally miss the vital spot", or whatever; while swords have flats, if you get cut, blood-loss and infection will do you pretty soon, especially in a premodern setting. Guns are even worse—even little bullets make some big holes. There's a reason the M16 (which shoots itty-bitty .22 caliber) was nicknamed "the Meat Axe." People survive gunshot wounds all the time (now), but frequently lose the use of limbs or major muscles...or have to have their wife get into the shower with them, and take out their intestine and wash it so it doesn't get infected while they heal.

Yeah, that really happened to the husband of one of my mom's friends after he got gut-shot (he's a cop).

If you want guns in your story, you damn well better make it a story where people die, because that's what guns (also swords) do. You want your hero not to kill people? Fine (though I think you're a sissy); give him/her/it/Mokona nonlethal weapons. Jutte, for instance (Japanese cops' truncheons). Otherwise, man up and show your hero coming to grips, like a grownup, with spilling the blood of other people.

A final, irksome point: for some weird reason, people in manga who follow this nonsense, are frequently supposed to be following the path of Yagyû Munenori's Life-giving Sword (I think Kaoru in Kenshin is, though I've never paid much attention to that overrated series).

But, uh, gee, the whole point of Life-Giving Sword is that, by killing evil men, you give life to the thousands they would harm.

Those who take up arms when this is necessary, are also following the Way of Heaven. If you ask me why this is so, I reply that flowers and greenery bloom among the spring breezes, but they wither and fall in the frosts of autumn.

But then, I've actually read Munenori.

Random noticey bits

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.—H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

Unfortunately I was never granted that mercy, and I see connections everywhere. That it might be connected to my anxiety disorder, is basically the premise of Monk. But here's a few of the things I noticed.

• Shinto, and indeed all traditional, non-transcendental religions (so, Native American and "animist" religions, folk religions, ancient paganism, but not Christianity, Buddhism, or {probably} Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism), can have their ethics summed up in one sentence:
  

  "All of human society is a Nash equilibrium."

  Think about it. A Nash equilibrium is a state of affairs where no individual will improve his chances of success by acting unilaterally. In Shinto, it's not even good to do nice things unilaterally, since that puts people in your debt, and if they can't pay it off, they'll resent it.


• Karl Popper, the vastly overrated philosopher of science, established falsifiability as the standard of science. It's not without its value as a standard, but it can't be used as an Occam-style "Razor".
  
  Here's why.
  
  So, apparently they managed to disprove one of Michael Behe's chief Intelligent Design arguments, irreducible complexity, by producing something he said was irreducibly complex in random circumstances. Thus, by Popper's standard, ID was science, it was just wrong. So far so good.
  
  Now how exactly would we disprove Darwinism?
  
  Somehow it seems to me that anything that says ID is more science than Darwin is, is probably not a friend to the kind of science-fetishists who think Popper was so brilliant.
  
  I say ditch Popper, keep Darwin, and ignore ID. As theoretical particle physicist Stephen Barr essentially said of ID, "Life is where you're looking for the signs of design? And what about the ten billion years before it showed up?" Course, that also kinda blows those Darwin-fetishizing atheists out of the water, too. See, if Darwin is an adequate explanation of the entire universe, not just one aspect of the tiny part of it that's alive, then LBJ's Great Society is an adequate explanation of America, and we have no need of the hypothesis of the Founding Fathers.


• So, linguistic note. When people pronounce Iran and Iraq as Airann and Airack, they're actually being more correct and consistent, for English.
  
  See, ever since the Great Vowel Shift, long vowels in English, other than E, have become diphthongs (A is ei, I is ai, O is ou, and U is...iu? jü?).
  
  Anyway, there's a rule in English, similar to rules in several other Germanic languages, that vowels before single medial consonants are long. That's the difference between the English pronunciations of "irate" and "irritable". I think it might actually be why final-silent-E makes the preceding vowel long: because it makes the final consonant orthographically medial.

Are you qualified?

So, I had to go to some irritating SF websites (I was trying to find a decent rocket engine; I found the beam-core antimatter rocket, which, however, brought with it a number of headaches—but I'm okay now). The folks running the sites knew their rocket science, though they had an oddly-shortsighted conception of science—they don't seem, for instance, to have even heard of the Alcubierre warp (not that it'd necessarily work, but they didn't even seem to know that there is a theoretical way to get FTL without violating relativity).

But whenever they mentioned something other than physics, they uttered howlers that a third grader would sneer at.

Basically, science fiction writers seem to think if they write the physics right, they can make up whatever horse-hockey they want in other fields. Who knew the Baron d'Holbach ("All the errors of men are really errors in physics") was the only critic they were worried about? (That'd come as news to Robert "bang the research assistants and sell secrets to Stalin" Oppenheimer, too, wouldn't it?)

• Bad linguistics arising from bad philosophy. So some idiot's story involved a logical conlang a la Lojban, because natural languages ("originating in superstitious eras") are full of inaccuracies. The example? The verb to be having all those senses, "all of them false to fact."
  
  Little boy, don't play with grownups' things. No language, natural, artificial, or machine, can cope with Being. As mentioned previously, language is composed of subject and predicate; Being is radically simple. Remember how the laws of physics can't describe a black hole well, because it's a singularity? Well, a black hole is actually a three way composite, in logic: it's a thing (essence) that has properties, however ill-defined (accidents) and it exists (being). Even math (most rationalists are some form of mathematical realists) is a composite, since it's things (essence) that exist (being). But Being? Just being. Your language is incapable of coping with that logical singularity, little boy.


• Bad sociology, deriving from errors in history and economics. How about, "You can't have lords without peasants." Really? 'Cause, um, the Glorious Revolution, which about quintupled the power of England's Lords, also ended the existence of England's proto-peasantry. The Lords, and their party the Whigs (the original Tories were populist, that's why they were monarchists), were the driving force behind England's Industrial Revolution, too.
  
  How about capitalism? 'Cause lord knows the Meiji era zaibatsu didn't have a bunch of samurai and noble clans running them, and not a single Scottish, English, or German noble was involved in industrialism in their cultures, right? If you have an elite class—which is a part of the definition of Capitalism, toddlers—you could have a feudal or Austrian-style aristocratic system. There's no reason the economic elite couldn't also be the military elite, as was the case in Prussia and is the case in both halves of Korea. Crew-based elites, a la Mt. Lookitthat in Niven or the Guild in Dune (and its knockoff in Last Exile) would be quite likely, too.
  
  How about we junk the Hegelian nonsense about the ever-unfolding increase in social equality, since it ain't gonna happen?


• Pointless, rather provincial naysaying. "Space ranks will be Air Force, not Navy." I have three problems with this.
  1. Just because NASA is Air Force doesn't mean its successors will be—navies have a lot more manufacturing infrastructure.
  2. Large spaceships are more like sea vessels than air vessels, and therefore the organization will be more like that on a ship (large organization for handling one vessel) than that on an air base (large organization for handling multiple small vessels).
  3. Most importantly, the Royal Air Force is organized quasi-navally, you provincial little infant cornpone.
  
  
• Bad scientific anthropology deriving from bad philosophical anthropology. Specifically, aliens determined entirely by their ecological niche (I'm looking at you, Niven). Really? As everyone knows, humans behave just like ostriches (terrestrial, bipedal, plains-dwelling omnivores). The total homogeneity of all human cultures—ancient Romans, 19th Century Navajos, and modern Englishmen behave precisely the same way, right?—is due to ecological niche being far more important than culture, history, or, God forbid, free will. Right, zygotes?
  
  Also, zygotes, must we have all those bizarrely misogynistic, or radically feminist, gender roles? Considering how advantageous human sexual roles were for our survival, I'm guessing aliens are going to have had to develop something similar. That is, different roles, but approximate social equality (though whichever sex handles the more glamorous jobs is probably going to get higher status). The really lopsided gender roles observed in some human cultures—the Middle East, Joseon Korea—are usually only possible once a certain level of civilization sets in, and generally only under the influence of consciously-simplified ideologies. Confucianism proper, for instance, is much easier on women than Neo-Confucianism, because Neo was a conscious striving to conform society (prescriptively) to an order that Confucianism was just observing (descriptively) as a tendency.
  
  But I doubt most of them have even heard of Joseon Korea.

How about we don't write things into our books until we've cleared the fallopian tube and read up on them, hmmm?

Captain's Logs From Nowhere

So, with the release of the new Star Trek movie (AKA Dawson's Trek, Trek: 90210, Degrassi: The Next Generation (wait...)), people are actually trying to say nice things about Star Trek. Only, unfortunately, the only nice thing you can say about Star Trek—especially this prepubescent take on the franchise—is that its vision of the future is "optimistic."

And dear God, the animals actually think that's a good thing.

Oh, sure, Star Trek is optimistic—in a quasi-Hegelian Marxist triumphalism sort of way. Roddenberry's conception of a happy future is oddly similar to the ideal Socialist state...because he was a Pinko half-wit.

Seriously, all you Libertarians that like Star Trek: were you that scared by the Cold War, that you latched onto anything that presented a future where the bomb didn't fall? Even if the show was cheerleading for the destruction of everything you hold dear, especially the system you treat as a fetish? The show said the same thing about your god it said about mine: Trek's no nicer to the almighty Market (pbui) and its Invisible Hand (if I may be so bold as to mention holy matters) than it is to Christianity.

And here's something apparently nobody notices: the supposedly optimistic future isn't even all that appealing, especially in TNG. Consider their leisure hours: they play tennis, study judo, and listen to (exclusively) coffee bar jazz or classical music. They read only the classics. They play chess; their parties look like they should be happening in some semi-employed playwright's loft in the Village.

They're fricking space Yuppies. Rather pretentious space Yuppies, who probably subscribe to The New Yorker—to read it, I mean, not just leave it lying around so they look sophisticated to shallow people. Spiritually speaking, that makes Planet of the Apes look downright Pollyanna-ish.

Oh, and how about the aliens?

Klingons: They went from being a stand-in for some Cold War player or other, to being a stereotype of warrior cultures (about 3 parts Viking to 1 part Sioux)...except nobody paused to do a lick of research into how warrior cultures function. They're also supposed to be great warriors, and yet they never kick!

Vulcans: They're ethical-cultural Jews—only Comtist positivists! ('cause Lord knows positivism hadn't been discredited by the forties)

Romulans: utterly, utterly wasted, because the show being written at a third-grade level requires simplistic bad guys. Ditto Cardassians. Their cultures look vastly preferable to 24C humanity, frankly.

Don't even get me started on the Borg, although their original version (where they were tech-looters, not "assimilate everything" cliches) was better. And Guinan? It wouldn't be TV from the 90s without Whoopi Goldberg as a Magical Negro!

The more one thinks about it, the more it becomes apparent that Star Trek is only optimistic if you're the sworn enemy of all mankind.

Gun X Sword

Time now to review my favorite show. Ever.

Since this is a positive review, let's start with the bad. The dub—seriously, did they even watch the Japanese version? Van's supposed to sound like he just woke up with a hangover from hell, not be all energetic and snotty. Also his name is pronounced "Van," as in the thing whose roof Leonardo thinks should be 3 feet higher, not "von" as in a Junker's middle name. Yes Japanese has a different A from English (theirs is IPA ɑ, ours is IPA æ), but in what universe do you render an A as IPA ɔ?

The end.

The good. How about, the voices (in Japanese)? Van's aforementioned hangover voice, Wendy and Pricilla's two levels of teenage girl voice, Ray's stone-cold insanity, Josh's innocent-little-boy voice, and Carmen...being Inoue Kikuko. Inoue Kikuko's voice...

Sorry, what was I saying? Right. How about the tongue-in-cheek but serious tone—gruesome, pointless murder and all-consuming revenge, on the one hand, and Mexican Voltron (and, later, a Robot-Luchador nun!) on the other. Need we even mention Mizugi? (Yeah, right, "Missoghi"—you named a country "swimsuit," gentlemen, now man up and admit it)

I really dig the outright iconoclasm of it—hatred saves the world, hippies, choke on that!—and how it's actually surprisingly deep. If you look at it, they basically said, "Look, let's write a story that'll stand on its own...and then throw in mecha," and yet the Armor doesn't feel tacked on.

How about the characters? Van's astounding—they took the "drifter" archetype and made him practically feral (though not compared to Calossa and Melissa). Carmen is pretty much the how-to for strong female characters—she's smart, tough, capable, (and also a dependable Oneechan-type, appropriately) but also a little insecure and spiteful. That is, she's actually got believable flaws, she isn't a Mary Sue who took two d20 rolls on "Table 37: Ridiculous Soap Opera Problems" to pretend to be well-rounded. Pricilla's a great gal, too: she's in the same league as Van and Ray, combat-wise...and she's a complete ditz (probably not as much as Van, but since he gives an entirely new meaning to "Invincible Ignorance" that's understandable). Wendy's just about the perfect execution of an adolescent character (Josh too, from a different angle), and Ray's the most believable tortured psycho in anything. The villain's the best ever, too, but don't let's give spoilers.

Plus, dammit, it's an anime with a Pulp Fiction reference.

Go, run, watch it! Over and over and over until you die and then come back and haunt somewhere that it's showing!

You ever notice?

Be sure to read the last one, about vampires, kay?

So anyway I noticed a couple of things, and I thought I'd share them:

1. The Packer power sweep (look it up), in which guys block the other side's defense and then the quarterback goes around on whichever side there's an opening, appears to me to work on the same principle as Napoleon's strategy of detached reserves. If that doesn't tell you football is the best sport ever, you're no son of mine.


2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, aside from being an example of how monstrously overrated Joss Whedon is, is something else, that I for one found kinda funny.
   
   It's Magical Girl.
   
   It wasn't so much, in the movie, but then the movie was directed by someone who realized how utterly laughable the concept "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is—if you name an idea that you mean seriously "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," they should lock you away. But in the series...how long, exactly, did it take her to collect a bevy of Slayer Scouts?
   
   What's really funny is that Whedon really thought he was thinking for himself...while recreating standard boilerplate mahô shôjô from end to end. Apparently he does that in his comics a lot, too—I hear (I don't read Marvel) that he did an X-Men story wherein he demonstrated that he thinks "computer simulations achieving sentience" is a downright groundbreaking idea. Did the name Moriarti occur to him at any time?


3. The President of the US (as such, I mean, not any one holder of the office) is the following, explicitly in the Constitution or by tradition:
   
   
   • The supreme executive of a state formally known as a Republic, that encompasses many "tribes".
   
   
   • The Commander-in-Chief of its military.
   
   
   • First among equals of its citizens.
   
   
   • Its chief of State.
   
   
   • Empowered to veto laws from the Senate.
   
   That is to say, he's the consul/censor, the imperator, the princeps, arguably the pater patriae, and claims tribunitia potestas. So, pace Pat Buchanan, looks to me like the only difference between the POTUS and Caesar Invictus is that Presidents are term-limited (and don't wear snazzy purple robes).


4. My little sister actually came up with this, but Hitchcock's The Birds is, essentially, a zombie movie.


5. Movies like Blade, and even more Vampire Hunter D, and anything where one of Them (whatever They happen to be) fights Them for us, are, interestingly, excellent arguments in favor of strong monarchy. See, monarchy does have a very real advantage of limiting the power of the society's elite; America and France have always been monarchies, that's why our Republics have such strong executives, while England has always been an aristocracy, at best—usually an oligarchy—which is why the PM is basically just a Super-Whip. A king—or any strong executive—is, in essence, one of Them (a politician) who fights Them for us, because they're the chief threat to his power if for no better reason.


6. Finally, has anyone else noticed that Riddick, as in Chronicles of, is essentially the Monkey King?

Vampires

So I got to thinking, and I realized, I really dig vampires. But they aren't usually done that well. You get one, or two, or both, of these gaping errors:

1. The science vampire. Vampires are mutants, or people with a disease, or some crap...yet they usually still lack reflections, and have about half their physically impossible powers.
   
   One could probably write a doctoral thesis on how our society feels the need to scientify (?) everything, turning elves and goblins into paraterrestrials or aliens—and turning flat-out trolls into cryptid great apes (read some actual accounts of bigfoot sightings: do apes whistle, have glowing eyes, or turn into mist?). Why would you bother to have a usually-bullcrap scientific explanation for vampires? Do you think your subliterate handwaving will heighten the realism? Newsflash, turkeys: nothing is less realistic than your mutants with magic. Ghosts, vampires, fairies, the gods, are just out of our ordinary experience, something we don't know about, that follows different rules. Your stupid mutants are a gross violation of rules we know quite well.


2. Inexplicably overpowered/de-weakened vampires. Often combined with the above, vampires are immune to their traditional weaknesses. Not usually sunlight, though—and they usually change it to "any UV", which is patently impossible for any creature that evolved on earth. Yet the vampires usually lose their weaknesses to crosses (or have it weakened to "only if the person with the cross has faith"—up yours, Kierke-tard), garlic, and running water.

Why do they do this?

The Science-Vampire is because they're half-educated, simpleminded slaves, the same as the reason for most of their failures. They've heard that science has disproved vampires, never mind that science is inherently incapable of saying anything about what are, in essence, ghosts on steroids.

Ignoramus: Walking through walls violates the laws of physics.
Sapiens: You're drinking beer. That violates the laws of Saudi Arabia.
Ignoramus: (confused) We're not in Saudia Arabia.
Sapiens: (insanely optimistic) Perhaps you begin to see the point.

As for the weaknesses, and neglect of same, they probably aren't smart enough to write around those difficulties, so they take them away with nothing to balance them.

That said, some of the rules as used by the classics, like Dracula, are actually more complex. See, the traditions of mankind were not invented by people raised on Sesame Street, they were created by people who could actually enjoy poetry in dactylic hexameters, without rhymes.

• Sunlight.
  Yes, yes, in folklore the sun doesn't kill them, we know. It does hurt ghosts, trolls, dwarves, and goblins, though. Anyway, vampires seem to be weak in the heart, and sunlight hurting them, or turning off most of their powers, may have to do with the heart being the organ of the sun in several different traditions. That or they're just spoooooky and therefore creatures of night.


• Running water.
  In folklore, it's the powers of vampires, witches, etc. that are stopped by running water, not the creatures themselves; since folkloric vampires are often projections of a witch's soul, or are tied to a grave, they obviously can't pursue a victim over running water.


• Garlic.
  In alchemical terms, garlic would be of use against vampires because of its sulfur—sulfur is the alchemist's gold, and is associated with the sun. Gold itself might have a similar effect. Anything with mercury in it would similarly be effective against werewolves, since they're alive and mercury is the opposite of alchemists' gold. Also, silver itself works against werewolves because it's the metal of the moon (it also has a purifying effect, in alchemy—and swimming pools—that might simply undo a spell that grants werewolf powers, and might also do away with vampires).


• Stake through the heart.
  Actually, in folklore, this won't do it: vampires, like Hopi and Aztec skinwalkers, often have two hearts. At best this'll immobilize them; you gotta do the head to get 'em, generally.


• Crosses.
  Vampires don't, in folklore, turn the people they bite; more often, they're like Japanese onryô: the lingering resentment of people that died badly—suicide shows up a lot. Of course, being killed by a vampire ain't a good death, so there's that. But anyway, the Cross, as a symbol of existence-as-a-good-thing (i.e. God), might not be too pleasant to look at, to a wrathful ghost.