Female Empowerment
While Buffy set the standard for strong female vampire slayers, this story doubles down on girl power. Both the slayer and the vampire at the center of the story are strong females. What makes this an essential theme of the story is not so much that Calliope and Juliet are any stronger than other recent vampire story heroines, but that the story revolves around its female characters completely and comprehensively, both major and supporting. The empowerment at the heart of this thematic exploration is not to be found in any breakthrough on the part of a vampire or slayer but rather that all male characters are tangential to the central line of the plot. The story focuses on the two girls not as a gimmick amongst the vampire world but as an integral part of the non-supernatural world around them.
Same-Sex Relationships
At one point the narrator observes that “Ben figured out he preferred guys and she realized she preferred girls.” By leaning heavily into the queer culture by situating the simmering lesbian romance between vampire and slayer as just another part of a world inhabited by non-traditional sexuality, the story manages to also avoid making the same-sex crushing on each other a gimmick. Helping this along is that, despite the traditional masculine roles being assayed by high school girls, neither conforms to any of the rather rigid lesbian stereotypes. Both behave the same way that other girls in school—likely heterosexual—act. The thematic treatment essentially presumes that among any readily identifiable supernatural subgroup, there will be issues related to gender, sexuality, and identity. In this case, the same-sex desires just so happen to be taking place among a vampire, and the hunter is determined to stop her to stop her but is also incapacitated by desire.
Interracial Romance and Racism
The theme of racism as explored through interracial relationships is handled much like it has come to be handled in everything from movie remakes to detergent commercials. One of the main characters in the story has brown skin. The issue of her race is never an essential component of the narrative. In this rare case, the introduction of an interracial component works as intended. The recent vogue has been to insert interracial relationships into a story for no particularly pressing reason and then simply ignore the reality that such relationships must still daily contend with racism in America which only results in highlighting how the fictional world does not work at all like the real world. In the world of vampires and vampire slayers, however, race genuinely is color blind so it does not matter. The excellent means by which the story touches upon racism in interracial romances is to place it alongside the way it treats issues of sexual identity. It is not an issue to be addressed because it genuinely is not an issue in such a supernatural milieu. Racism, the story suggests, can be a completely non-existent part of the social fabric on the condition that the story is not trying to frame itself as taking place completely in the real world.
