Has interjecting "queerness" into anything made it better? Anything at all?
Vampires are inhuman monsters. They're about as queer as orcs are black.
Which is to say they are only these things in the addled mind of a leftist.
Both have had increasingly human qualities projected on to them. For better or worse. With varying degrees of success.
IMO, even the most heroic vampire needs to have a darker nature to reject or struggle against. Otherwise there is no point to making them a literal blood-sucking monster as opposed to a straight up superhero.
With orcs, you don't have that same baggage. They're figures of comedy in Disney's
Sleeping Beauty, runaway bioweapons in
Warhammer 40,000, unfortunately overlooked tragic figures in Tolkien's
The Lord of the Rings, the reformed conquistadors of
WarCraft, the brooding big-dicked (anti)heroes of Amazon-published romance novels, etc.
IMO, orcs don't have a single point of reference the way that vampires have their hunger. They're vastly more flexible, but at the same time have less identity. Or maybe I'm wrong. (At least post-Tolkien, since they weren't an established trope prior like fairy tale dwarves and elves were. I'd love to see any counter examples, because I've been searching without success. And no, the Greco-Roman chthonic deity of oaths doesn't count.) I'm sure you could well argue that the shared point of reference for all orcs is war, violence, masculinity, and how we handle and view it. Or basically the fantasy genre's Klingons and storm troopers.
Has interjecting "queerness" into anything made it better? Anything at all?
Vampires are inhuman monsters. They're about as queer as orcs are black.
Which is to say they are only these things in the addled mind of a leftist.
Well said.
It's very strange watching these lunatics shoehorn their identity politics into the depictions of what are usually villains. You'd think they'd go after the heroes instead.
Well, postmodernist deconstructionism encourages adherents to reverse interpretations of traditional media: depict the heroes as villains and the villains as heroes. These sorts of people nurse persecution complexes that encourage them to identify with villains (because villains are persecuted for their villainy, rightly so) while downplaying, ignoring, or reversing the villainy. That's why we have movies like
Maleficent and
Cruella. That attitude feeds into the toxic aspects of the "representation matters" movement.
Of course, most of these people are obviously ignorant millennials and zoomers who somehow missed out on all the representation we did get since the 80s. Geordi LaForge, Static Shock, Ellen Ripley, John Stewart, She-Ra, etc.
But I digress.