You are Constantine. You have been a vampire for four hundred years. You've worked out your own way of being a vampire, and it works for you.
It worked for you.
It worked until you were captured and chained around sunlight, surrounded by enemies, and your death was a matter of time. This was, incidentally, the death of your way of being.
And then of all things a human, left to taunt you, turns out to be your salvation.
And then she keeps... turning up. The bond made when she saved you was always going to be inconvenient, but it keeps strengthening. She explodes one of your enemies - a minor one, but she exploded it. She's getting stronger, more rooted in her power. Every time you show her something, she... twists it, and gives it back different.
In four hundred years, you have not seen such differences.
She invades your earthhouse. She calls the path she took 'nowheresville'. She comes on to you. She shows you how to navigate using 'nowheresville' and human comboxes. She takes the ancient charm you gave her and puts it with one she found and one she made. They seem to be equally powerful.
She is, despite you, showing you a new way of being.
You think it might work.
@nimblermortal I get that you have to leave the punchline in the tags, but must you leave the punchline in the tags??
Nope, not a comics thing! This is about Sunshine by Robin McKinley.
Sunshine asks the hard-hitting vampire story questions like, "Is it possible to contain a dense fruit pudding inside a light and fluffy pastry?"
Sunshine asks you what would happen if a human magic-wielder - wait, hold on a dozen pages, we need to talk about what would happen if were-chickens were a thing and whether the government or the black market would develop anti-lycanthropy drugs faster.
Sunshine asks why we have to focus on the action of a horror story and not on the denial aspect of PTSD recovery. Or, better yet, what a chocolate eschatology would look like.
It's very well written. I'm part way through an extremely casual reread and it occurred to me that, while Sunshine repeatedly emphasizes how powerful and scary Con is, from his perspective she is ratcheting up her incomprehensible threat level at a terrifying speed.
It's also interesting how Con expresses himself in deeply abstract ways, which mesh with the way he interacts with magic and the world, whereas Sunshine is extremely concrete.
