I feel like I'm posting a lot lately. What's up with that, tbh.
Inspired by reading spoilers for a show I do not watch (and a quick convo w/![]()
12_12_12 !), I wanted to make this post. I got to thinking about the prevalence of supernatural pregnancies in the vampire genre (though, it must be said, pregnancy is a HUGE thing in horror in general, and I'll talk about that a bit too). That made me think about vampire kids, too, so that's where I'm going with this post. In my vague googling on the topic, I got mostly weird blogs of people who thought they were vampires. So. This is TENUOUSLY RESEARCHED and based mostly on my experiences as a teen goth who read a lot about vampires.
HORROR PREGNANCY
I'm not a huge watcher of horror, being something of a coward, but I have watched some and I'm also a person who exists on the internet, so it seems to me that pregnancy is a pretty recurring theme/trope/whatever you want to call it. This makes sense to me. At its heart, horror should be preying on and feeding into our deepest fears if it really wants to fuck us up, and pregnancy is terrifying. I think it's scary on both sides of the divide, and though I can't speak for men, as a woman who has not had a baby but plans to have one at some point in her life (sixty or seventy years from now, of course), the entire topic attracts and repels me in the same way horror movies do. I've watched terrifying birth documentaries. I read all those horrifying ONTD comments where people share their personal experiences of either having an easy breazy birth or...the opposite. There's also the fact that pregnancy is a national topic, that women are not allowed to have full control over their own bodies in the name of their fetuses, and that a lot of women the world over have been forced to carry children they don't want to have – or reap the consequences of trying not to. So it's not really surprising to me that these things would manifest in horror or fantasy, rendering babies into literal parasites and dismantling the process of pregnancy into its most base, scary form: your body is not yours, it is being used for a purpose beyond your control, and there is a foreign agent living inside you. That shit is FUCKED UP.
I've never seen Alien, but everyone goes on about the creature bursting through a man's chest; devil babies in Rosemary's Baby and The Omen; that French movie I read about once where a pregnant woman is menaced by a stranger who steals her baby OUT OF HER BODY by CUTTING HER OPEN WITH SCISSORS; whatever the fuck Ryan Murphy's damage is; this entire forty-three movie list I found on IMDB.
I think a component of the prevalence of pregnancy in vampire stories is simply that pregnancy is a big theme in horror in general, for all those reasons mentioned. It's not just the body horror itself, but also the idea of rendering the most common image of pure innocence (a baby, a child) into something distorted, twisted, and evil. I think our first thought (well, mine, at least) is that a supposedly undead body getting knocked up is too absurd to be believed, but then again, we will totally go with the idea that the dead can be reanimated and subsist on blood to survive, which also results in superhuman abilities. So. Disbelief can be stretched.
VAMPIRE KIDS
Personally, I tend to like vampire kids. I think there's a huge depth of creepiness to be mined there, and it appeals to me, for the most part. Interview with the Vampire is famous for this, and also my favorite; child vamp Claudia is probably one of my favorite fictional characters of ever. With Claudia, there is a very cut and dry backstory: Anne Rice lost her young daughter to leukemia, and in her grief, began reworking a short story into what would become the novel. Claudia aged up slightly in the film, but in the book, she has the body of a toddler, being turned when she was probably no more than five years old. This creates a lot of creepy shit and interesting shit. Interestingly, Claudia is a "better" vampire than either of her "parents," having zero memory of her human life and knowing nothing except vampirism. She lacks the morality and empathy that Louis and Lestat have, to certain degrees, and is in many ways more of an out-and-out predator. She also deals with having an intelligent adult woman's mind in a body that restricts her in just about every way.
I make a lot of rude jokes about Annie being a pedo because she sexualizes children and young teens very often (there is a "sensuality" to Claudia in the novel that is very grody), and I do think this often ends up a component of the physically very young vampire thing. Like, mentally they are adults, so this squicky dissonance ends up coming up. This exists with her other very young-looking vampire, Armand, who was turned around fourteen or fifteen and, similarly to Claudia, is much more of a predator than the other vampires in the book: pathologically controlling, morally bankrupt, and extremely manipulative.
There was a book I read as a pre-tween goth called The Silver Kiss about – just take a wild guess – a young girl who falls in love with a sexy mysterious vampire! Another thing that happens a lot. (I loved this book, and I remember very distinct things about it, like when the vampire dude drank her blood in a sexy way it felt like ~champagne bubbles bursting in her head. The same author also did Blood and Chocolate, which was about werewolves and which I loved a great deal more than vampire book. She also had an alien book I never read because fuck aliens.) The antagonist of the book was sexy vampire's brother, who had been turned as a small child and existed throughout the years getting himself adopted and then killing people, or something, I don't remember. But here again we have the extreme perversion of innocence becoming the most wicked and threatening thing.
I haven't seen Let the Right One In or its remake, but that revoles around a child vampire; BtVS had the Annointed One; AHS: Hotel has all those Children of the Corn running around. Twilight! Twilight is going to feature in this post, but mostly in the pregnancy section. My only real knowledge of Twilight kid vamps is that they are VERBOTEN and also that amazing gif where Dakota throws one into a bonfire. This is not my thesis, so I don't know what the first instance of a kid vampire is, or how that changed and grew over the years. But just based on these few examples, I think it has something to do with the fetishization of youth eternal gone horribly wrong. A huge appeal of vampires lies in their youth, beauty, and sex-appeal but the younger they are the more blurred and warped that appeal becomes. There's also just something unsettling about a kid who acts eerily adult.
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VAMPIRE PREGNANCY
The real point of the post! Preggo vamps: why is that such a common thing? The horror factor, the sheer fucked up-ness. And I don't wonder if...okay, I'm just spitballing here. But personally, a big part of the appeal of female vampires to me is that they are often selfish, cruel, nasty, and self-preserving above all else. Because they are explicitly "monsters," they are allowed to do things that "normal" women are not, and posess unflattering characteristics while still remaining interesting, even sympathetic characters. They have a power and a freedom not generally awarded to female characters. So I can't help but wonder if a lot of these pregnancies (almost always unwilling, unwanted, and extremely painful) are punishments for daring to have that freedom.
Let's go through some examples – positive first. Vamps, the Amy Heckerling movie with Krysten Ritter and Alicia Silverstone, had Krysten's character get pregnant (by Downton's Cousin Matthew, lulz). Within that vampire mythos, vampire ladies could get pregnant but their bodies couldn't support the pregnancy, so they would always miscarry. Krysten Ritter wanted her baby, there was a loophole to turn human again, so she did and all was well for her. That seems more of a case of filtering vampire tropes through chick-lit tropes for a sort of campy, frothy movie: whatever.
There was another book I read as a kid called Demon in My View (...yeah) where the main character was...oh god, it's such fanfic. Her mother had been turned into a vampire while pregnant, remained pregnant for twenty years or so (ew), then was turned human through a loophole and finally delivered her baby. That baby ended up being very Raven Enoby Dementia Darkness Way, i.e. she had ~pale skin and ~raven hair and a psychic connection with other vampires yadda yadda. The mother couldn't bear her little vamp-flavored baby so she gave her up for adoption. Fanfic Mary Sue Special Girl shit to the max.
There is a series of vampire books by Poppy Z. Brite that I never read but always meant to, that take vampires to what seems to be a more "organic" place – though, again, within the world of the books vampire pregnancy is not something that can be maintained. Vampires (from what I understand thanks to wikipedia) are a mutation of humans and can reproduce naturally (so, if you were a vampire, you were born one, not made) but pregnant female vampires always die in childbirth. Again, this seems to feed into the intrinsic ~wrongness of the entire situation but also, again, a punishment for women. Why any lady vampire would choose to continue carrying a child, or how this race would even continue to propagate, is beyond me.
Now onto stuff I know more about! Angel is the vampire pregnancy I have the most experience with and fondness for, but there is also the muuuuch discussed pregnancy and subsequent childbirth in Twilight. I never read past the first book in the Twilight series (which I only read out of snootiness, to see aht that fuss was about), but I've at least seen most of both parts of Breaking Dawn the movie, and I read a lot of humorous book recaps back in the day, so I feel like I've sorta got this.
First, Angel. Darla is maybe my favorite character in the Whedonverse (at the very least, she makes the top five) and I was a huge fan of her arc on Angel even though it ended in pregnancy and death, which is not ususally, you know, how I like my girls to go out. I found the loophole on the show acceptable (Darla and Angel bargain for a second life; it doesn't work for her but results in a baby) and I was very drawn to the push-pull of Darla's vampire nature vs the baby's soul. Seeing "we shared a soul" literally anywhere on the internet will automatically make me tear up. I teared up just now.
I think good writing and good acting can take nearly any absurd premise and make it totally believable. So even though while on its face, Darla's storyline wouldn't sound like something I enjoyed, it ended up being something I enjoyed greatly (less so Cordy's pregnancies, though they had their own pluses and minuses). The most questionable element for me is still the fact that Darla didn't want the baby but grew to love it anyway. I'm not averse to women having confusing or conflicting feelings about having children; in fact I really enjoy as much of that messy stuff as possible, and I do generally enjoy motherhood as a theme. There is just some iffiness for me even now that almost all unwanted pregnancies in television become wanted by the end, as though all women are mothers just waiting for the right switch to click on. That doesn't make any given storyline like that bad, but there needs to be more variety, you know? That can't be the ONLY way it goes. And just for the record, I don't think Darla's case was one of punishment at all; I think the writers felt they were actually rewarding her, in a way, by allowing her to go out in a way that was honorable, selfless, and totally on her own terms – a kind of hero's death. Darla spent her entire pregnancy trying and failing to end it, but when she really had the chance, when the baby was really in danger of dying, she saved it.
Okay, so, Twilight. Is a weird thing. I used to read Mark Reads Twilight way back in the day and he had some interesting theories about Stephanie Meyer's weird twisty Mormon stuff and how her potential conflicted feelings about marriage and childbirth (despite being part of a group that prized them particularly) expressed itself through Bella's horrific pregnancy and birth. Then in everything being super happy families aftermath. (P.S. When you google "pregnancy and childbirth in Twilight" you just get a lot of creepy horrible stuff about "twilight sleep," i.e. what they used to do to mothers back in the day.)
Not knowing much about Steph or Mormons, I can't really speak to that. Bella's pregnancy does seem to hit the checkboxes of supernatural pregnancies: rapidly growing fetus, relying on gross things for sustenance (Cordy drank blood in her first demonic pregnancy too, I think?), and a violent birth that kills the mother. With the added bonus of C-section via vampire teeth! It does seem to align very closesly with all those horror movie births I went on about, except Bella doesn't give birth to the Antichrist (well...remains to be seen, I guess, but in-universe it's not the Antichrist), she seems to Virgin Mary her way into one of those hyper-advanced seemingly-young pedo-tastic vampire kids, except, again, this is all a good thing, somehow. When I finally was able to Google correctly to find articles about it, one of them called it an "inverse of Rosemary's Baby, promising that no matter what you endure, everything will be fine."
I think that dissonance is what bothers people about Bella's pregnancy and birth? That things can be both full-speed full-scale horror and be a "good" thing, a celebratory thing, a happy thing.
I also read something very interesting here, which compares Bella's birth to Dany's in s1 of GoT, stating: "Yet in both cases, the dramatic climax of the story is predicated on questions of fertility, and a tragic childbirth was the test they needed to pass before their ultimate transformation, which left each incredibly powerful yet infertile: Vampire Bella and Dragon Dany." Another article calls it, "'real' as in a masterful deployment of metaphor that somehow nails the simultaneous horror and beauty of gestation and birth."
These are too opposing lines of thought but very interesting. The first goes to my vague as hell punishment theory, that to claim power women must give up something that has often been considered intrinsically female: the ability to produce children. The second article writer related to Bella's horrific birth because her own was pretty horrific, but she still loved and wanted her baby, so it wasn't all bad.
Honestly at the end of the day, I think it's really just a horror trope. Just like strangers being in your house or someone you love being suddenly different and strange, pregnancy is just one of those very everyday things that can be easily exploited to terrify us.
EDIT: Because I cannot BELIEVE I FORGOT BYZANTIUM, A MOVIE ENTIRELY ABOUT VAMPIRIC MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS, IN A POST ABOUT VAMPIRIC MOTHERS AND CHILDREN.
Byzantium doesn't have any vampire babies and is, in fact, a very unusual and non-traditional take on vampires. There are no fangs, and being turned involves travelling to a secret island and going through this sort of mystical test. Vampirism is also a brotherhood, passed down privately from man to man to the exclusion of women – until main character Clara takes revenge on her abuser, steals the relevant information, and becomes a vampire on her own. She quite literally seizes power specifically denied to her. She is punished for this (her abuser attacks her daughter Eleanor too) and decides to bring Eleanor to the island to be turned, which is kind of great in that she faces painful, unfair punishment for something and then decides to just DO THE THING MORE in response.
The two women spend centuries evading the men who want revenge on them for daring to take this power, which is a huge component of the movie, but another big theme is about examining a complicated mother/daughter relationship through a supernatural lens. As a human, Clara had been abused from a young age onward and eventually is forced to become a prostitute, which is when she conceives Eleanor. She isn't happy about the pregnancy but because it's old timey days, she just kind of has to have it. As Eleanor says later in narration, "[Clara] had meant to smother the baby as soon as it was born, but something made her look at it. She heard the thundering heartbeat, she smelled the baby’s bloodied head, and love confounded her."
Again, it feeds into the "women have a baby switch" kind of idea, but because everything Clara does is filtered through her, and all of her actions are motivated by her desires, it becomes not just palatable, but beautiful. I also like that Clara's ruthlessness is not ignored (she was going to smother the baby, not just hand it off somewhere), but just seems to be repurposed: Eleanor becomes an extension of her, in some way, and Clara's self-preservation instincts kick in to protect them both because of that. Of course, these things do not exist in a vaccuum and Mother Does Anything For Child is a trope for a reason. But I do think when appropriate attention is paid to who a female character is, it becomes more than a trope. It becomes a story populated with rich characters who feel like people.
Just a taste of how great this movie is – when the brotherhood ask Clara how she plans to use her new gift:
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A good note to officially end on, I think.
Inspired by reading spoilers for a show I do not watch (and a quick convo w/
12_12_12 !), I wanted to make this post. I got to thinking about the prevalence of supernatural pregnancies in the vampire genre (though, it must be said, pregnancy is a HUGE thing in horror in general, and I'll talk about that a bit too). That made me think about vampire kids, too, so that's where I'm going with this post. In my vague googling on the topic, I got mostly weird blogs of people who thought they were vampires. So. This is TENUOUSLY RESEARCHED and based mostly on my experiences as a teen goth who read a lot about vampires.HORROR PREGNANCY
I'm not a huge watcher of horror, being something of a coward, but I have watched some and I'm also a person who exists on the internet, so it seems to me that pregnancy is a pretty recurring theme/trope/whatever you want to call it. This makes sense to me. At its heart, horror should be preying on and feeding into our deepest fears if it really wants to fuck us up, and pregnancy is terrifying. I think it's scary on both sides of the divide, and though I can't speak for men, as a woman who has not had a baby but plans to have one at some point in her life (sixty or seventy years from now, of course), the entire topic attracts and repels me in the same way horror movies do. I've watched terrifying birth documentaries. I read all those horrifying ONTD comments where people share their personal experiences of either having an easy breazy birth or...the opposite. There's also the fact that pregnancy is a national topic, that women are not allowed to have full control over their own bodies in the name of their fetuses, and that a lot of women the world over have been forced to carry children they don't want to have – or reap the consequences of trying not to. So it's not really surprising to me that these things would manifest in horror or fantasy, rendering babies into literal parasites and dismantling the process of pregnancy into its most base, scary form: your body is not yours, it is being used for a purpose beyond your control, and there is a foreign agent living inside you. That shit is FUCKED UP.
I've never seen Alien, but everyone goes on about the creature bursting through a man's chest; devil babies in Rosemary's Baby and The Omen; that French movie I read about once where a pregnant woman is menaced by a stranger who steals her baby OUT OF HER BODY by CUTTING HER OPEN WITH SCISSORS; whatever the fuck Ryan Murphy's damage is; this entire forty-three movie list I found on IMDB.
I think a component of the prevalence of pregnancy in vampire stories is simply that pregnancy is a big theme in horror in general, for all those reasons mentioned. It's not just the body horror itself, but also the idea of rendering the most common image of pure innocence (a baby, a child) into something distorted, twisted, and evil. I think our first thought (well, mine, at least) is that a supposedly undead body getting knocked up is too absurd to be believed, but then again, we will totally go with the idea that the dead can be reanimated and subsist on blood to survive, which also results in superhuman abilities. So. Disbelief can be stretched.
VAMPIRE KIDS
Personally, I tend to like vampire kids. I think there's a huge depth of creepiness to be mined there, and it appeals to me, for the most part. Interview with the Vampire is famous for this, and also my favorite; child vamp Claudia is probably one of my favorite fictional characters of ever. With Claudia, there is a very cut and dry backstory: Anne Rice lost her young daughter to leukemia, and in her grief, began reworking a short story into what would become the novel. Claudia aged up slightly in the film, but in the book, she has the body of a toddler, being turned when she was probably no more than five years old. This creates a lot of creepy shit and interesting shit. Interestingly, Claudia is a "better" vampire than either of her "parents," having zero memory of her human life and knowing nothing except vampirism. She lacks the morality and empathy that Louis and Lestat have, to certain degrees, and is in many ways more of an out-and-out predator. She also deals with having an intelligent adult woman's mind in a body that restricts her in just about every way.
I make a lot of rude jokes about Annie being a pedo because she sexualizes children and young teens very often (there is a "sensuality" to Claudia in the novel that is very grody), and I do think this often ends up a component of the physically very young vampire thing. Like, mentally they are adults, so this squicky dissonance ends up coming up. This exists with her other very young-looking vampire, Armand, who was turned around fourteen or fifteen and, similarly to Claudia, is much more of a predator than the other vampires in the book: pathologically controlling, morally bankrupt, and extremely manipulative.
There was a book I read as a pre-tween goth called The Silver Kiss about – just take a wild guess – a young girl who falls in love with a sexy mysterious vampire! Another thing that happens a lot. (I loved this book, and I remember very distinct things about it, like when the vampire dude drank her blood in a sexy way it felt like ~champagne bubbles bursting in her head. The same author also did Blood and Chocolate, which was about werewolves and which I loved a great deal more than vampire book. She also had an alien book I never read because fuck aliens.) The antagonist of the book was sexy vampire's brother, who had been turned as a small child and existed throughout the years getting himself adopted and then killing people, or something, I don't remember. But here again we have the extreme perversion of innocence becoming the most wicked and threatening thing.
I haven't seen Let the Right One In or its remake, but that revoles around a child vampire; BtVS had the Annointed One; AHS: Hotel has all those Children of the Corn running around. Twilight! Twilight is going to feature in this post, but mostly in the pregnancy section. My only real knowledge of Twilight kid vamps is that they are VERBOTEN and also that amazing gif where Dakota throws one into a bonfire. This is not my thesis, so I don't know what the first instance of a kid vampire is, or how that changed and grew over the years. But just based on these few examples, I think it has something to do with the fetishization of youth eternal gone horribly wrong. A huge appeal of vampires lies in their youth, beauty, and sex-appeal but the younger they are the more blurred and warped that appeal becomes. There's also just something unsettling about a kid who acts eerily adult.
VAMPIRE PREGNANCY
The real point of the post! Preggo vamps: why is that such a common thing? The horror factor, the sheer fucked up-ness. And I don't wonder if...okay, I'm just spitballing here. But personally, a big part of the appeal of female vampires to me is that they are often selfish, cruel, nasty, and self-preserving above all else. Because they are explicitly "monsters," they are allowed to do things that "normal" women are not, and posess unflattering characteristics while still remaining interesting, even sympathetic characters. They have a power and a freedom not generally awarded to female characters. So I can't help but wonder if a lot of these pregnancies (almost always unwilling, unwanted, and extremely painful) are punishments for daring to have that freedom.
Let's go through some examples – positive first. Vamps, the Amy Heckerling movie with Krysten Ritter and Alicia Silverstone, had Krysten's character get pregnant (by Downton's Cousin Matthew, lulz). Within that vampire mythos, vampire ladies could get pregnant but their bodies couldn't support the pregnancy, so they would always miscarry. Krysten Ritter wanted her baby, there was a loophole to turn human again, so she did and all was well for her. That seems more of a case of filtering vampire tropes through chick-lit tropes for a sort of campy, frothy movie: whatever.
There was another book I read as a kid called Demon in My View (...yeah) where the main character was...oh god, it's such fanfic. Her mother had been turned into a vampire while pregnant, remained pregnant for twenty years or so (ew), then was turned human through a loophole and finally delivered her baby. That baby ended up being very Raven Enoby Dementia Darkness Way, i.e. she had ~pale skin and ~raven hair and a psychic connection with other vampires yadda yadda. The mother couldn't bear her little vamp-flavored baby so she gave her up for adoption. Fanfic Mary Sue Special Girl shit to the max.
There is a series of vampire books by Poppy Z. Brite that I never read but always meant to, that take vampires to what seems to be a more "organic" place – though, again, within the world of the books vampire pregnancy is not something that can be maintained. Vampires (from what I understand thanks to wikipedia) are a mutation of humans and can reproduce naturally (so, if you were a vampire, you were born one, not made) but pregnant female vampires always die in childbirth. Again, this seems to feed into the intrinsic ~wrongness of the entire situation but also, again, a punishment for women. Why any lady vampire would choose to continue carrying a child, or how this race would even continue to propagate, is beyond me.
Now onto stuff I know more about! Angel is the vampire pregnancy I have the most experience with and fondness for, but there is also the muuuuch discussed pregnancy and subsequent childbirth in Twilight. I never read past the first book in the Twilight series (which I only read out of snootiness, to see aht that fuss was about), but I've at least seen most of both parts of Breaking Dawn the movie, and I read a lot of humorous book recaps back in the day, so I feel like I've sorta got this.
First, Angel. Darla is maybe my favorite character in the Whedonverse (at the very least, she makes the top five) and I was a huge fan of her arc on Angel even though it ended in pregnancy and death, which is not ususally, you know, how I like my girls to go out. I found the loophole on the show acceptable (Darla and Angel bargain for a second life; it doesn't work for her but results in a baby) and I was very drawn to the push-pull of Darla's vampire nature vs the baby's soul. Seeing "we shared a soul" literally anywhere on the internet will automatically make me tear up. I teared up just now.
I think good writing and good acting can take nearly any absurd premise and make it totally believable. So even though while on its face, Darla's storyline wouldn't sound like something I enjoyed, it ended up being something I enjoyed greatly (less so Cordy's pregnancies, though they had their own pluses and minuses). The most questionable element for me is still the fact that Darla didn't want the baby but grew to love it anyway. I'm not averse to women having confusing or conflicting feelings about having children; in fact I really enjoy as much of that messy stuff as possible, and I do generally enjoy motherhood as a theme. There is just some iffiness for me even now that almost all unwanted pregnancies in television become wanted by the end, as though all women are mothers just waiting for the right switch to click on. That doesn't make any given storyline like that bad, but there needs to be more variety, you know? That can't be the ONLY way it goes. And just for the record, I don't think Darla's case was one of punishment at all; I think the writers felt they were actually rewarding her, in a way, by allowing her to go out in a way that was honorable, selfless, and totally on her own terms – a kind of hero's death. Darla spent her entire pregnancy trying and failing to end it, but when she really had the chance, when the baby was really in danger of dying, she saved it.
Okay, so, Twilight. Is a weird thing. I used to read Mark Reads Twilight way back in the day and he had some interesting theories about Stephanie Meyer's weird twisty Mormon stuff and how her potential conflicted feelings about marriage and childbirth (despite being part of a group that prized them particularly) expressed itself through Bella's horrific pregnancy and birth. Then in everything being super happy families aftermath. (P.S. When you google "pregnancy and childbirth in Twilight" you just get a lot of creepy horrible stuff about "twilight sleep," i.e. what they used to do to mothers back in the day.)
Not knowing much about Steph or Mormons, I can't really speak to that. Bella's pregnancy does seem to hit the checkboxes of supernatural pregnancies: rapidly growing fetus, relying on gross things for sustenance (Cordy drank blood in her first demonic pregnancy too, I think?), and a violent birth that kills the mother. With the added bonus of C-section via vampire teeth! It does seem to align very closesly with all those horror movie births I went on about, except Bella doesn't give birth to the Antichrist (well...remains to be seen, I guess, but in-universe it's not the Antichrist), she seems to Virgin Mary her way into one of those hyper-advanced seemingly-young pedo-tastic vampire kids, except, again, this is all a good thing, somehow. When I finally was able to Google correctly to find articles about it, one of them called it an "inverse of Rosemary's Baby, promising that no matter what you endure, everything will be fine."
I think that dissonance is what bothers people about Bella's pregnancy and birth? That things can be both full-speed full-scale horror and be a "good" thing, a celebratory thing, a happy thing.
I also read something very interesting here, which compares Bella's birth to Dany's in s1 of GoT, stating: "Yet in both cases, the dramatic climax of the story is predicated on questions of fertility, and a tragic childbirth was the test they needed to pass before their ultimate transformation, which left each incredibly powerful yet infertile: Vampire Bella and Dragon Dany." Another article calls it, "'real' as in a masterful deployment of metaphor that somehow nails the simultaneous horror and beauty of gestation and birth."
These are too opposing lines of thought but very interesting. The first goes to my vague as hell punishment theory, that to claim power women must give up something that has often been considered intrinsically female: the ability to produce children. The second article writer related to Bella's horrific birth because her own was pretty horrific, but she still loved and wanted her baby, so it wasn't all bad.
Honestly at the end of the day, I think it's really just a horror trope. Just like strangers being in your house or someone you love being suddenly different and strange, pregnancy is just one of those very everyday things that can be easily exploited to terrify us.
EDIT: Because I cannot BELIEVE I FORGOT BYZANTIUM, A MOVIE ENTIRELY ABOUT VAMPIRIC MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS, IN A POST ABOUT VAMPIRIC MOTHERS AND CHILDREN.
Byzantium doesn't have any vampire babies and is, in fact, a very unusual and non-traditional take on vampires. There are no fangs, and being turned involves travelling to a secret island and going through this sort of mystical test. Vampirism is also a brotherhood, passed down privately from man to man to the exclusion of women – until main character Clara takes revenge on her abuser, steals the relevant information, and becomes a vampire on her own. She quite literally seizes power specifically denied to her. She is punished for this (her abuser attacks her daughter Eleanor too) and decides to bring Eleanor to the island to be turned, which is kind of great in that she faces painful, unfair punishment for something and then decides to just DO THE THING MORE in response.
The two women spend centuries evading the men who want revenge on them for daring to take this power, which is a huge component of the movie, but another big theme is about examining a complicated mother/daughter relationship through a supernatural lens. As a human, Clara had been abused from a young age onward and eventually is forced to become a prostitute, which is when she conceives Eleanor. She isn't happy about the pregnancy but because it's old timey days, she just kind of has to have it. As Eleanor says later in narration, "[Clara] had meant to smother the baby as soon as it was born, but something made her look at it. She heard the thundering heartbeat, she smelled the baby’s bloodied head, and love confounded her."
Again, it feeds into the "women have a baby switch" kind of idea, but because everything Clara does is filtered through her, and all of her actions are motivated by her desires, it becomes not just palatable, but beautiful. I also like that Clara's ruthlessness is not ignored (she was going to smother the baby, not just hand it off somewhere), but just seems to be repurposed: Eleanor becomes an extension of her, in some way, and Clara's self-preservation instincts kick in to protect them both because of that. Of course, these things do not exist in a vaccuum and Mother Does Anything For Child is a trope for a reason. But I do think when appropriate attention is paid to who a female character is, it becomes more than a trope. It becomes a story populated with rich characters who feel like people.
Just a taste of how great this movie is – when the brotherhood ask Clara how she plans to use her new gift:
A good note to officially end on, I think.