I Heart YA #2 Who's Your Freak?

 So, I'm jumping on this Blog Carnival train, since it looks like fun.  And I need something to remind me that YA is awesome, when the rest of my life is going to be Middle Welsh (*urgh*).
So, I haven't been into vampires since I was twelve.  When I was twelve, I was very into vampires, not YA vampires all that much (though I will admit to a weakness for LJ Smith) but Old Vampires.  The ones that went to a party and decapitated everyone, then cut off their lips and set the heads in a window so that the passers-by would think they were laughing.  I read Carmilla and Christobel, where vampirism was the embodiment of a possessive, homo-erotic, feminine sexuality.  Why wouldn't  have been into vampires?  *grin*But I'm not into vampires anymore.  They're so Slavic, and I'm into Celtic and Sanskrit these days (re: Middle Welsh).
One of my favorite creatures is the Yogini.  She is described as a messenger from the gods, bringing their gifts of Soma to the Siddha petitioners.  Exchanging bodily fluids for the gift of flight.  But sometimes, she's not so kind and dutiful.  Sometimes she's a goddess in her own right, accepting blood sacrifice, bringing disease and death.  Sometimes she is a bird and sometimes a snake, but always a woman, and always more dangerous than you expect.
But, of course, I am a Celticist as well.  And although I get a little ragey when people talk about Druids as some secret cult and not as a politically savvy upper-class, I still have a deep affection for the Sidhe.  Nothing, though, will ever compare with Susanna Clarke's depiction of the dance at Lost Hope, the utter strangeness of a different world, the sense of beauty, so foreign from our own, and yet not foreign, the ball gown the color of rainstorms and thunder and mist.
My own Sidhe are much more normal, I suppose.  They are interested in science, in the same way humans are interested in magic, for their own ends.  To them, humans are animals, merely meat.  Their bloodlines increase in strength and power the more singular and less diffuse they are, so marrying sisters and uncles is only to be expected.  They are transfixed by a song or a poem, but find human arts crude and primitive.  They are beautiful, like an ice sculpture, but utterly inhuman.  Don't try to reach out and touch.  They won't ever let you go.

Arthur Rackham