Feminist Analysis

[DavidZahir]

My main point remains unanswered. Which is more likely--that she burned herself to death on purpose because she anticipated being alone, or because of a visceral horror to what she had become based on the actual experience she'd just endured?

The former. It would be rather contradictory if she had premeditated the attack, and then was horrified by it to the point of becoming suicidal. In the book it's pretty clear it was being alone; at no point does she give a moment's thought to the issues surrounding killing people she doesn't love.

Honestly, you seem to making assumptions about human behavior based on linear theories rather than a sense of how human beings actually behave and act. Sorry, but what you just described is not even remotely what I saw in the movie or read in the book. It just didn't happen.

[cmfireflies]

My main point remains unanswered. Which is more likely--that she burned herself to death on purpose because she anticipated being alone, or because of a visceral horror to what she had become based on the actual experience she'd just endured?

Neither, dying was just easier at that opportunity, whereas succumbing to the vampiric urges was easier at night.

[Dragonclaws]

*Why Gosta? Any of the other drunks would've invited her in, surely. Because she didn't like him? I find Eli's 'equal opportunities' approach more wholesome, and much better than choosing victims on the basis of whether you personally like them or not.

She avoided eating Oskar for that reason. I mean, she didn't have anything against Jocke or Virginia, but she had an active like for Oskar that made her hunt elsewhere. Even when she started to vamp out at the sight of his blood, she shooed him away and ran off. Virginia likewise avoids specifically hunting people she likes. I think all vampires would hunt this way.

But it's very different to avoid the one person you love, and otherwise choose randomly, and another to deliberately choose your victim because you don't like him specifically (Virginia didn't go after a stanger, like Eli usually did - the only real exception was Hakan and there were special circumstances that didn't apply to Gosta). Virginia's approach amounts to the death penalty for losing a popularity contest.

It strikes me that the difference in how they hunt is that Eli goes for people out in the open as well as sneaking hir way into people's homes, and Virginia was just thinking in terms of being let in. Their ages make house-hunting, if you will, very different. Eli just has to pull the pitiable little girl routine, while an adult would find this very hard. Virginia needed someone who would let her in, which would be someone who knew her pretty well. Among the people in that group, there were loved ones; she picked one she didn't like. She didn't go around preying on random people outside of housing like Eli did with Jocke, but she was a young vamp yet to devise traps. It's really just an issue of convenience in hunting.