Gotta kill to eat, gotta eat to live

Empata's story in "Inca Mummy Girl" brought to my mind the question "Would you kill someone if it was the only way you could survive?" We - or at least I - don't really think of Empata as being truly evil. She only kills people because she has to in order to keep up her existence. I mean, most people eat animals for the same reason (me included), and I don't really think of that as evil, just as I don't think a bat eating a mosquito in order to survive is evil either. (Then again, coming from Minnesota where lakes and therefore mosquitoes run rampant, I'm quite happy with anything that keeps down the mosquito population. But I digress.) What is interesting about this question is if you transfer the same logic to Carmilla. She only kills people and sucks their blood in order to survive, and she (presumably) didn't want to be a vampire in the first place. But I definitely think of her as more evil than Empata. I would also never call Empata anything remotely resembling "good". This tension between being an "evil" character or one you can be sympathetic to is a very intriguing theme which seems to be prevalent in the Gothic. I think it's why sympathetic monsters like Empata, Angel, and Spike in Buffy, or the classic Frankenstein's monster, are, despite their wicked actions and identities as murderers, so appealing.

As a side note since I didn't really mention Byers' article in this post, I really like her point that Buffy is an entertainment medium and therefore can have feminist aspects as well as potentially sexist ones. It's another instance of the blurring of lines that we've been talking about and I think it applies to almost everything else we're reading since the Gothic genre seems to mostly be geared towards entertainment.