My What Big Teeth You Have

http://buffy.wikia.com/wiki/Dracula

Vampires. Weres. I know they're popular, and in limited doses, I'm fine with them. I stress 'limited doses' especially in worlds where the vamps and weres coexist. In every case thus far, when vamps and weres live in the same world, the vampires are unquestionably at the top of the food chain and the weres seem curiously neutered. In the animal kingdom, the wolves and big cats know their places in the food chain, that's true, but they're always pushing, always challenging, always chipping away at the edges of their limitations. If they don't, they starve. In all the stories with vampires and weres living in the same world, aren't there massive wars and cross species heirarchy challenges?

One of the main reasons I'm luke-warm on vampires and weres is that they're often nothing more than a stand in for a human alpha hero. Unless there's a specific reason a hero must be a vampire or a weresomething, why not just write the human? The danger of alpha heroes is that <gasp!> they are so not PC. Yet readers love them. So writers disguise them as alien - other. Then we don't have to explain why they're such domineering a-holes. They just can be.

Laughing? Ah, you shouldn't, you kow. You may have noticed that Word Whore Jeffe had a new novella debut this week. She wrote an alpha hero. He's not a vampire. He's not a were. Human. Normal. Very alpha.

Initially, reviewers loathed him with mad passion. They hated him for presuming to know what the heroine needed. Hated him for using her strengths and weaknesses to take her to her limits. *That's* the danger of the alpha hero. Yet how many vampire books have you read where there hero does the exact same things, yet no one hates him because he can't be judged by human standards?

Sapphire does come to a happy ending. The first few reviews may have hated Jeffe's very alpha hero. Readers seem to love him. Sapphire was number one in popularity on the Carina Press site for a week.