#i made a pride flag lol
Re:“Dorley has a dark(er) companion institution full of Elle’s mind-slaved vampire thralls and both institutions have the same vibe of being a queasy ambiguous mix of a quirky queer women commune and a thing out of a horror story.”
That place is totally going to have a mix of Bea’s “don’t feminize me until I’ve had my coffee” force-fem themed knick-knacks from TheSisters of Dorley and those “eat, prey, love” vampire-themed knick-knacks from that vampire family’s house in Glow, Worm.
Also they’ve totally made up their own pride flag. Here’s my crude attempt at it:
The top four lines are from the regular human trans flag. The red is for blood, to represent the vampire thing, though it also represents solidarity with human Dorley girls and trans women (who shed blood during surgery) and solidarity with human cis women (who shed blood during menstruation). The black is for the basement, symbolically if not literally dark. The grey part at the bottom right is more-or-less the closest the normal human artist’s palette can get to the color most things more-or-less are in vampire night vision (it probably should be a lighter grey, but I wanted it to be distinct from the center white stripe). The black to grey thing is simultaneously a reminder that they aren’t as weak and vulnerable as they once were and a reminder that they were once weak and vulnerable and should empathize with and be kind to other people who are weak and vulnerable. There’s no blue at the bottom because they’re all women.
They’re really not satisfied with the grey. For vampires, a dark to humans but not totally dark space is filled with crisp delicate white light, like moonlight if it was somehow almost as bright as sunlight but still basically moonlight. There’s an emotionally evocative contrast between how a human experiences many dark-to-humans environments and how a vampire experiences them that’s totally lost if you can’t communicate that to a vampire many dark-to-humans environments are luminous, are beautiful. But they’ve never been able to find a pigment that simulates that sort of color/light. Maybe silver thread might come closest?
It’s important to remember here that the thrall brainwashing doesn’t make them zombies or pod people or drones, they still have a lot in common with their old human selves, they still have individual personalities and emotionally complex relationships with each other, they still have emotions, they still remember the experiences they had as humans and have emotions (often powerful emotions!) about them, they still have values and goals and desires of their own (though loyalty to Elle now comes first, of course), etc..
