Do you think VTM will ever become mainstream?

[MarkK]

Make em big then. Things like zombies or heroes or vampires go up and down, but the driving force behind the ups is quality and the driving force behind the downs is a lack of it. I don't think of oversaturation as a direct determiner of decline (unless someone's insisting on an interdependent shared universe where I feel like I have to catch up on everything just to fully enjoy what's current *Marvel*) Oversaturation is really a product of lazy producers churning out crap that's dressed up as it. If every zombie film was great and the genre adapted beyond regurgitating it's basic principles it would have never died out.
Yes, that's a bit of a stretch since zombies are kind of unreasonable in it's own setting (I can buy into Superman punching apart an asteroid to save the earth or even fooling a Pulitzer prize winning journalist with a alter ego that's often in proximity to her, but a bunch of slow people who are defeated by chain link fences overrunning a modern mechanized military? not at all.) But VTM actually does well because, y'know, it doesn't stop at "vampires" or focus on people surviving the vampires, it depicts vampires as complex people. Vampires will always have the potential to work because they're larger than life figures.

You cannot will Hollywood into caring about something that is not, at the moment, making enough of a pop cultural imprint in wider audiences or even popular subcultures for them to care about. It is telling that the even moderately major efforts at vampire media things in recent years have been basically comedic parodies, or an ultimately so far minor set of shows on AMC.

The only hope you or anyone really have for VtM to go mainstream is for Hollywood's endless quest to regurgitate every even semi old IP resulting in a Twilight Revival both happening and being successful, and the people doing VtM being able to hold their nose this time and jump on the ride in some related way. But when even the much ballyhooed True Blood revival just got shot down before it could even get going (and that show was a big ol big deal when it was popular), odds even for that are low.

[Lysander]

Vampires will always be a popular type of monster and lets not write them off yet. All it takes is just one good movie or horror writer with his or her own spin on the lore to make it good and get people interested again. As long as the characters are interesting and flawed and there is a good story and we don't have Gary & Mary Sue cardboard characters then I'm sure interest will be peaked.

[MarkK]

Vampires will always be a popular type of monster and lets not write them off yet. All it takes is just one good movie or horror writer with his or her own spin on the lore to make it good and get people interested again. As long as the characters are interesting and flawed and there is a good story and we don't have Gary & Mary Sue cardboard characters then I'm sure interest will be peaked.

I'm going to be real with you here, the last two really, truly big popular culture vampire runs of living memory post the 80s-90s Goth cultural movement riding high being Twilight and True Blood means that interest in vampires had, ehhmm, very little of the things you are hoping for (I kid True Blood. I kid because Iove, sort of, if I squint while looking from an angle. But mostly just at Russel Edgington).

Popular= good are not the same things sometimes, and even often. It less takes a story being good and more, like many pop culture trends, just somehow tapping in *juuust right* to a popular appeal or sentiment at somehow at just the right time so successfully, that every other clever media critic person rushes to write a thinkpiece about how we should have seen that coming the whole time in hindsight.

Might vampires come out of nowhere and do that again? Maybe! But nothing from the current successes of such things suggests it.

We're otherwise mostly just getting the usual "it's been coming up on over ten years since the thing we laughed at for being dumb happened, it's time to be contrarian and say it was totally cool actually", which isn't enough to sustain a full pop culture revival on its own. (Or again, the True Blood revival would not have just been killed off).

I mean Vampire Diaries ended in 2017 I suppose, but it was nowhere near the cultural explosion of the other two by the end of its run (or even the beginning, where granted it was regardless still crazy popular), and also, brace yourself for being an old, that was basically six years ago (the other two, obviously, even older).

VtM the tabletop roleplaying game itself, as far as its 5th edition is 5 years old now. If anyone in the company really does have some goal of recapturing the wider cultural zeitgeist or even simply of Vampire's previous level of prominence/success in gaming, while I'm sure the game has done well enough just fine to justify continuing to publish it, it has definitely not done that first or second thing. And whatever all you can and could say about that potentially reflecting the game itself, it also reflects pretty well how cultural trends move on and leave things behind.

[Father Enoch]

There's a Blade Remake coming out, remember. Blade may not revive vampires by himself, but he (hopefully) won't hurt, either.

[Muad'Dib]

I'm going to be real with you here, the last two really, truly big popular culture vampire runs of living memory post the 80s-90s Goth cultural movement riding high being Twilight and True Blood means that interest in vampires had, ehhmm, very little of the things you are hoping for (I kid True Blood. I kid because Iove, sort of, if I squint while looking from an angle. But mostly just at Russel Edgington).

We're otherwise mostly just getting the usual "it's been coming up on over ten years since the thing we laughed at for being dumb happened, it's time to be contrarian and say it was totally cool actually", which isn't enough to sustain a full pop culture revival on its own. (Or again, the True Blood revival would not have just been killed off).

I mean Vampire Diaries ended in 2017 I suppose, but it was nowhere near the cultural explosion of the other two by the end of its run (or even the beginning, where granted it was regardless still crazy popular), and also, brace yourself for being an old, that was basically six years ago (the other two, obviously, even older).

A very good vampire fiction movie is The Hunger (also called The Riddle of Immortality). Really puts across how vampires in various stories are otherworldy, beautiful, wise, and exceptional. One of my favourite movies, the mood, pacing, scenery and atmosphere are very nice and interesting.

[videopete]

You dont want mainstream, you want successful and good with a large enough following to sustain it. Vampire in the 90s was peak, and I damn near missed it, coming in at the time of Gehenna, so I am is as young as they can be when Vampire was popular and could have played it and not be horriblely inappropriate and I'm closer to 40 than hip 20 year old (jesus that hurts). See Paradox wanted to take WoD mainstream and for that they took a cleaver to the setting and lore to make it accessible but released these in universe prentensious faction source books and I am an older fan and was still lost. The problem is that VtM was a dark cynical setting written in the early 90s by people who lived in the Reagan Era who happend to be very punk and goth. You know very church friendly people. My kind of people (the Vampire people not the chirch people). The problem was, Vampire at its best is problematic, and it needs to be. It was crass, dark, and obscene, each book offended some one on something. It was violent, dark, blood soaked sex and beautiful. It espoused the crimes of systemic oppression and made you part of it, why because you are playing a game of personal horror where you are a blood drinking parasitic corpse. If you didn't get message that this game was filled with pitch black satire that was heavy handed with its messaging then keep playing cause the jokes on you, buy more product so we can keep the lights on and telling you that this world is horrible and so are you. Then we got some suits and activists come in who didn't get the joke, didn't understand the nessisary ugliness. That this is a Game set in the World of Darkness, where you are the monsters, who sometimes fights monsters but monsters you shall be and you can't be more on the chin than that. I guess we are just going to keep getting some variation of the trench coat katanas (not that there is anything wrong with that perse)(trying to make this a game of cool Vampire heroes)
This was a game made by outcasts for outcasts and thats okay, and we already sacrificed so much to try to make it mainstream and it is hurting the very brand it's trying save.
Best we can do, salvage what we can, nuture the next generation of players, keep the old lore alive, and can some one please write a God damn Vampire story that's good, and not a love story, and if you know of one let me know.

[MarkK]

Oh hey, I'm not overall saying whether mainstream is good or bad, I'm just noting, odds of it ever being such again are super low, and if that has been an actual goal of the current VtM making team, they have definitely not met it in any real sense. And to a certain extent, that might be impossible for them to do anyway, as things stand culturally.

(Well, no, the one nice thing about mainstream and gaming is that it's certainly easier to find players and games and even be spoiled for choice when something is popular, there is that.)

[MarkK]

I suppose the one other thing I would otherwise note is, ultimately, while not as once it was, this game is five years old. It hasn't folded. While not one that has pushed it into some gaming upper stratosphere, it has its own fanbase who have probably never known anything but this version of VtM at this point, and part of the entire goal was to get said new fanbase. And if they get kudos along the way from the older fans who feel vindicated by this edition's choices (for all that I happen to personally feel those choices are ill made, smug, and vengeful), hey, bonus.

That doesn't make the game good, it just means that, as far as this theme of "ignoring their customer base" and all that sort of thing I'm seeing, they aren't. They've just decided what they want their customer base to be, what that marketing budget thereby goes to, and who they have decided is irrelevant to it. And since, again, we're talking about a five year old gameline, that means 5th edition has another year to go to have lasted roughly/almost as long as either Second Edition or Revised. As a product that exists in the world of ttrpg gaming, I don't like it, but it's sustaining itself seemingly just fine.

Also it's a bit.. I don't know, you have the repeated horrible choices made in various 5th ed books/content/marketing/etc. at this point as far as any basic sensitivity to the experiences of various ethnicities and marginalized populations, and yet at the exact same time people who gripe about 5th ed griping that it's "activism run amok". Someone more clever than I would probably want to jump on that to claim "clearly that means they're taking some mythical correct middle ground, where it's just offensive enough, as a treat!", but I don't know, to me that feels more than a bit grim in a "well I don't feel like I have a place in the current edition, and maybe I never really did in all the previous ones either" kind of way.

There's something wild about watching some of the writers and devs and current fans otherwise pick out the most reactionary takes they can find of V5 criticism as far as "this is the only real reason anyone ever dislikes this game" to dismiss any other critique of it in terms of craft or playability, and basically lean on that to act like their own Second Inquisition Brazil content shaped missteps are clearly not even worthy of note, even though they somehow keep finding ways to happen. And yet at the same time that happens, there is still this full throated gripe that keeps popping up about VtM no longer being free to be offensive or what have you.

Maybe what I'm saying then is that perhaps the game doesn't really deserve to have mainstream popularity again, even if it could. Maybe it shouldn't.

I suppose that was just stream of consciousnessing my weariness of the state of the discourse these days.

[Muad'Dib]

Oh hey, I'm not overall saying whether mainstream is good or bad

This is so subjective and full of variables that it could as well change based on what day of the week (or month) it is currently.

[MarkK]

This is so subjective and full of variables that it could as well change based on what day of the week (or month) it is currently.

I'm really not sure what you're trying to say in reply to me there.

[Muad'Dib]

I'm really not sure what you're trying to say in reply to me there.

This was me putting forth an idea in regard to what can happen when a work of art, fiction, or culture moves in it's popularity and reach towards what is called conventional or mainstream. I consider it that when this occurs, then it can very well be hard to evaluate how various issues and events related to this particular piece of culture are changed or affected.

[MarkK]

This was me putting forth an idea in regard to what can happen when a work of art, fiction, or culture moves in it's popularity and reach towards what is called conventional or mainstream. I consider it that when this occurs, then it can very well be hard to evaluate how various issues and events related to this particular piece of culture are changed or affected.

That's a bit.. non sequitur-y to reply like that then? It's just a note that something achieving broad scale cultural notability is not always the same thing as whether it's good or not.

[Lysander]

There's a Blade Remake coming out, remember. Blade may not revive vampires by himself, but he (hopefully) won't hurt, either.

I heard that movie was in limbo for the time being and I'm not sure how scary a PG-13 rated movie will be when it comes to a character like Blade and how do you top Wesley Snipes performance as Blade. I can't think of to many current actors who could pull it off currently. This generation gap thing sucks as I can't even name a top shelf action hero or heroine under the age 40-45 anymore like I used to.

[Lysander]

MarkK I'm still hopeful in the film industry despite my recent posts on how I feel about Hollywood current skill of storytelling and think there will be a crop of films that will make people want to go out to see them. Hence my original statement interest in vampires will be there and it's just waiting for the right writer, cast of actors, director and etc to come together.

[Psicose]

If the intention is the VTM series, this has material for adaptations like in games, movies, books, novels and several other things, so this is not impossible, it all depends on someone being able to make a highly successful adaptation. Now, one thing that scares me is that if this happens it could draw unwanted attention and VTM as well as other WOD branches need to change to avoid problems. That said, in part, I prefer the VTM to remain something more underground.