drakkar wrote:sauvin wrote:.. A turned Oskar is a changed Oskar, there's a very large risk the delicate dynamic between the two would change. Forget minders, how could we envision turning Oskar such that their relationship as it was when they left Blackeberb wouldn't turn into something different, and probably something worse?
It struck me that Oskar is bound to change anyway, vampire or not. Eli also has changed along a different axis of human/non-human; that change may not be complete (nor irreversible) when they leave Blackeberg. So now I'm more puzzled than ever. A caretaker would probably be something different than what Eli used to contract, because her knowledge about love has increased. I got the impression that in the book Eli think she loves Håkan in the beginning, she doesn't know about anything better. She does now, and so does Oskar.
I really couldn't agree more. This is precisely the impression I get, and strongly.
As they ride off into the future, Eli as yet still has no real idea what love is, but knows now that she doesn't know, and she knows Oskar can show her. Likewise, Oskar still has no idea what the life of a vampire is like, and he knows that what he already does know is just the tip of the iceberg, and knows she's going to show him (whether he wants to see it or not and whether
she wants to or not), but what he also knows is... well... he just doesn't care.
The two are very well matched! He may not be the most socialised young man in the known universe, but he's parsecs ahead of her in this regard, and his genuine regard and concern for her can turn a true monster into truly just a little girl with a monstrous illness. He'll be her psychoanalyst, one suspects, with the very best kind of certification for this work: a warm heart. She, on the other hand, is the very embodiment of cold nighttime pragmatism and of ultimate selfishness; she's a dog-eat-dog survivor thousands of times over. She'll teach him how to survive, and he'll teach her how to live.
Yes, they're both bound to change. Oskar will change more, I think, because his natural mental and emotional equipment will have to yield to simple adolescence. His thought processes will become more encompassing and more complex, and so will his world. Hers won't, but that's not to say her outlook can't change. Children are nothing if not adaptable, even eternal children, I suspect.
I think, though, that his view of Eli won't change much over the years. Yes, the romance of a normal couple of twelve year olds can be insanely intense and just as insanely brief, but the circumstances surrounding the initial romance between these two were insanely extreme. She's not only the strange little girl who returned his affections and acted like she enjoyed his company, she's also the avenging angel who shielded him - this kind of memory goes very deep almost instantly and is nearly impossible to dislodge.
I suspect that Eli herself won't be as volatile as most twelve year old children, partly because she might be stuck in a physical and emotional stasis at a time in the life of a normal child when everything is a roiling, bubbling couldron of change, but she
is stuck at a particular point in this process. Paradoxically enough (big surprise, eh?), she's stuck with "static flux". She, too, was deeply impressed; Oskar may not have been the first child friend she's had over the years, but he very well may have been the first human being
ever to have seen and echoed her surviving humanity. My belief is that his role as her teacher and mentor is established forever.
Eli won't look to minders like Hakan anymore for anything beyond material needs, but I think she'd still need minders, even with a growing Oskar at her side. There are stupid, unromantic little details like leases and licenses to worry about, the appearance of respectability (children do not routinely live in apartments or rent hotel rooms by themselves) and, as we've speculated before, relatively easily discarded cutouts to distance her at least temporarily from the murders that must follow and surround her. They'll be her minders in name only; they'll be much more frankly the servant as Oskar takes on more and more responsibility for mentorship.
I've explored only very briefly how this kind of existence might develop, only as deeply and as far as I thought I needed for exploring Oskar at 40, and no further. For me, exploration this path slams directly into the ROAD CLOSED sign, so we'll just suggest that the relationships between the children and her minders would likely prove, um, "unstable".
I
have spent a few hours considering how things might be different if Eli were to approach drug dealers and other human parasites, but those avenues assumed an Eli on her own, with no Oskar in tow. I'd think she'd be
more inclined to pursue and recruit the kinds of men she's used to, rather than less, because she already has an abiding understanding of the basic ground rules for dealing with such men (or women, on rare occasion), and she'd feel more in control than if she were to try to interact with men whose backgrounds and motivations she might feel less familiar with. The predator Eli
really doesn't like what she doesn't understand, and now she has an Oskar to protect even while she sleeps. She can always use the stick-and-carrot approach to insulate Oskar from such men: "I am the carrot; touch Oskar and you get the stick, and mine is NOT a stick you want hitting you in the head. It really, really isn't".
Edit:
ykeleven wrote:Unless Oskar has some unknown pedophile tendencies, I don't think he'll want to be with Eli for that many years. In my opinion, Oskar will either turn (and risk losing it all) or outgrow Eli (and leave her one day).
I once hallucinated a scenario in which Oskar and Eli live most of his natural (unturned) life in seclusion - how such a premise could be materialised is an engineering task for another time - and speculated that Eli's child-like appearance wouldn't matter because she'll just always be what she's always been. With no outside influences, no human interaction at all, Oskar wouldn't have a meaningful basis for comparison. He wouldn't find himself comparing himself to teenaged peers pairing up with cute girls with big knockers, wouldn't have to re-examine his moral or social status as he contrasts his life with thirty- and forty-something friends with preteen children. He'd have no reason to question his relationship with her because it's just... always been this way. It'd be "natural".
Assuming life for Eli proceeds as it always had, though, hunting and killing for food and being forced into a reactively nomadic vagrancy as a consequence, it could be argued that Oskar living this life with her would still be markedly isolated. He might realise it's not "natural" as he sees families with preteen children going to malls and movies, and he'd probably have to start pretending a more "avuncular" or "paternal" role for camouflage, but the bulk of his private life would still be with
her. I'm not at all certain that "paedophilia" would be relevant because it would still be the asexual child
within him interacting with her even if their relationship were to eventually include physical intimacy.
A bit more speculation in this vein appears in discussion of "Oskar at 40" in the fanfiction section, if you're interested, and in "Eli Thinking about Oskar at 40".
However things might play out for them, for however long Oskar actually survives life with her (I included being turned as "survival"), I really can't see him leaving her, ever. He's a deeply emotionally traumatised kid who'd had to grow up too far too fast alone before he'd met Eli, and she's his first love. This kind of attachment can be dismayingly tenacious.
