Romanticizing the Confederacy: Modern Vampire Media as a Conduit for Misinformation
Keywords:
Misinformation, Disinformation, Media, HistoryAbstract
Vampires in television and film provide audiences with a unique link between past and present through their immortality. This becomes problematic when three popular vampire franchises – True Blood, Twilight, and The Vampire Diaries – all showcase important characters who were Confederate soldiers in their human lives. In a modern America that still sees the Confederate flag used as a popular symbol of racism, this misleading portrayal of the American Civil War allows people to form a connection to the average Confederate soldier through their favourite vampire. This paper argues that writing sympathetic fictional characters into historical events misrepresents those events and is a form of misinformation for individuals who lack the information literacy skills to separate the truth from fiction.
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