The Monstrous Fantastic Conference Paper Abstracts - International ...

94. (FTV/CYA) Monstrosity and Deviance in Supernatural Teen Dramas on Television PalmChair: Victoria ByardUniversity of Leicester“I don't know whether to kill it or lick it”: Sex, Love, and Power in MTv’s Teen WolfElson BondTarleton State UniversityMTv’s series Teen Wolf, which debuted in the summer of 2011, does update the adolescent lycanthropy genre, but, on the whole, the teendrama retains more tropes than it modifies, re-skinning rather than remodeling the parallels between ordinary growing up and shape-shifting.In particular, it retains such elements as absent parents, work/school tensions, male athletic success, sexual anxieties, and physicaltransformation. Its innovations—which, I argue, are significant to this generation of teen viewers—include more lethal, self-reliant femalecharacters, more sexually explicit content, a focus on lacrosse, and an increase in the male mentor figure, connected implicitly to a homoeroticelement that seems new to the genre.Dawson’s Creek of the Undead: How the Television Series The Vampire Diaries Puts the ‘Ick!’ back in GothicDeborah ChristieECPI UniversityThis paper examines the ways in which the television adaptation of The Vampire Diaries incorporates traditional gothic elements in a way thatrevises the “vampire with a soul” element common in late twentieth-century vampire romances such as Anne Rice’s Lestat series and JossWhedon’s television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and more recent works such as the Twilight trilogy. In particular, The Vampire Diariesresists the easy connection between love and redemption and instead allows its monstrous characters to be monsters, albeit dangerouslyattractive ones.The Ties that Bind: Family Values in The Secret CircleMargo CollinsDeVry CollegeOstensibly the story of a group of genetic witches in a small harbor town, The Secret Circle(a television series adapted from L.J. Smith’s novels)focuses upon the ways in which a “bound circle”—a coven of six teen witches—must learn to work magic together in order to protectthemselves from witch-hunters and to learn the secret of their parents’ untimely demise. In its focus on family ties, both among geneticallyconnected family members and among the members of the created family of the bound circle, the show takes the traditional gothic fascinationwith the past (particularly the decayed past) and imbues it with new energy.95. (PCS/VPA) Monstrous Narratives MagnoliaChair: Eden Lee LacknerVictoria University of WellingtonMonsters and Mass Effect: Exploring the Fear of the PosthumanAmanda M. SchultzUniversity of Wisconsin - La CrosseBioware’s recent titles Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 explore the contemporary fears of artificial intelligence. Each sect of AI represents varyingideas based on the posthumanism concept, showing the player three different possibilities of AI potentially causing the end of the human race.Sweetness and Night: The Lure of the Monstrous in Fan Fictions and AudiencesBarbara LucasIndependent ScholarGiven the fact that popular media often casts the monstrous as tragically romantic, it should come as no surprise that a majority of fan worksmirror that tendency and result in artifacts where the monstrous sparkles instead of stuns, where it is tamed and restrained within thecomfortable confines of traditional romance genre tropes. In discussing the intersection of the monstrous and the erotic, Clive Barker, whosework has been called “a vast torture garden of forbidden delights,” notes that “[w]e want the erotic experience to remove us from themundane, the banal. We want eroticism to transfigure us.” This impulse in which the dark erotic/romantic captures a loss of control and of selfalso exists within a much smaller subgenre of fan works, and by examining several fannish artifacts and fans’ responses to them, we will explorethe various pleasures offered by these artifacts.