Tonight is the season finale of The Vampire Diaries, another CW teen show that I promise is better than it sounds, and so it seemed like a good opportunity for a vampire post. Not that it takes a lot of persuasion for me to talk about vampires, or anything. Anyway. In the past few years, mainly due to the Twilight phenomenon, there's been a fair amount written (by Alyssa, even) about why teenagers like vampire stories. But in her Television Without Pity recap of a recent episode, Cindy McLennan asks: "Rational-Me doesn't think for one second that [145 + 16 + x] year old Anna could be in love with this teenaged boy. What's the draw? Physicality aside, at minimum, wouldn't she need a human who was 40 or 50 years old?" Indeed! Why are all these vampires wanting to hang around with obnoxious whiny teenagers in the first place?
If we ignore the actual plots and characters for a moment, the reasons why people who create vampire stories would want their vampires to hang out with teens are clear enough. In general, TV shows and movies do better when their leads are young and hot. This is presumably why we generally see main characters who became vampires in their late teens or twenties. (Rules for how vampires work vary wildly from fictional universe to fictional universe, but in virtually all cases, vampires stop aging at the moment at which they become vampires.) More specifically, if teenagers are the biggest bloc of fans for vampire-based entertainment, the characters, both human and vampire, are likely to be young.
When a vampire character has been set in his teens or twenties, and is going to have a human romantic interest, it also makes sense from a marketing perspective to have this human character be just as young. It might make sense from a story perspective for a 100+-year-old vampire to fall in love with someone of any age, but relationships involving huge age differences are seen as odd and even culturally unacceptable. Besides, would teen girls want to watch (or read about) Edward Cullen or Stefan Salvatore wooing a 50-year-old? Probably not. They want the hot vampire to want a girl with whom they identify.
So, okay, it makes sense for vampire stories to be set up that way. But is it internally justified as well? Producers and writers want vampires to want teenagers, but how about the vampires themselves? Cindy McLennan suggests one theory: "Vampires stop maturing (emotionally and mentally) at the age at which they're sired." There's definitely something to that; vampires generally act more like teenagers than like old men. I'm not sure it's an absolute rule, because they can certainly change, psychologically and emotionally, over time, but I suppose there's a difference between actually maturing and allowing events to shape one's psyche. And now I am likely splitting hairs.
Of course, there's a practical reason for vampires to spend time with teenagers, too, both in a romantic sense and a more general sense. The one thing vampires almost always want - well, no, the one thing is blood. Okay, the second thing vampires almost always want is a way to blend in and keep people from knowing that they're vampires. So if they look young, this means that it's easier to fit in if they spend time with people who actually are young.
And then there's that immortality thing. In theory, if a vampire cares about a human, eventually the human will die, and the vampire won't, and so the vampire will be sad and so have another reason to be moody for a few centuries. Picking humans to love when they're teenagers doesn't dispense with this issue, of course, but it does prolong the amount of time the vampire and human can spend together.
In actuality, the humans generally figure out that the way to deal with this issue is to become vampires themselves, so by falling for a teenager, the vampire has actually just procured himself a few more decades of "Please turn me" whining. You'd think the vampires would compare notes and learn some better way to deal with this than the "No, I don't want you to be eternally damned" argument, as teen girls obviously can't be bothered with worrying about eternal damnation when they're worried about - gasp - getting old. I thought there was hope for The Vampire Diaries' Damon Salvatore, since he read at least one Twilight book and was none too impressed. But nope. Last week he all but admitted that he's in love with teenaged Elena.