The Selinaverse is the nickname given by Shlomi Fish to the world he came up with, and in which Selina Mandrake - The Slayer and Star Trek: We, the Living Dead take place. The Selinaversa is supposedly the real world, where people have watched and enjoyed the original shows, and consider them as fiction. The concept of a vampire is very different in the Selinaverse than in the various Buffy fanfiction.
Some links about the Selinaverse are:
- Shlomi Fish’s blog post “We are the Qs of the Q Continuum”
- Star Trek: “We, the Living Dead” - more marketed as “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” fan fiction, but still part of the Selinaverse.
A vampire in the Selinaverse is a perfectly normal human being biologically, but one whose mind not only does not age, but constantly becomes more and more capable. A vampire (either a man or a woman) constantly challenges the norms of their society and external authorities; refuses to pre-accept dogma, prejudice and the irrational beliefs of their peers; upholds ethics and morality, and refuse to ever succumb to largescale immorality and lack of ethics; and constantly expands their skillset. Related to this concept of vampire are the concepts of a Geek, a hacker (not necessarily a computer intruder - see Paul Graham’s “The Word Hacker”), an Amateur (see Paul Graham’s “What Business Can Learn from Open Source”, and the older concepts of a Philosopher, a Jew or a Semite.
As opposed to the real world, where the phenomenon described by these vampires exists to a large extent, some vampires in the Selinaverse can live forever mind, body and soul, only sometimes moving to a different location, growing younger, or remaining as young as they are. Furthermore, they have a certain “Elders of Zion” or “Illuminati”-like grand worldwide conspiracy to indoctrinate and inspire new members into their ranks, and to fight what they consider evil (and what many common mortals believe is actually “good”, “just”, or “compassionate”), and they communicate and find inspiration using a lot of works of ancient or popular culture.
Some of the most influential vampires, including Buffy Summers, Milady de-Winter, and many characters of such ancient myths as the Hebrew Bible and the Greek mythology, are actually clearly fictional.
Otherwise, vampires vary greatly in sex, shape, ethnicity, race, origin, abilities, passions, character, and beliefs.
External Links
Slaying in the Selinaverse does not imply actually killing a vampire, but rather taking him or her out of the equation somehow, by proving to him that he was wrong or changing his mind, or, in extreme cases, faking his death and allowing him to start a new life somewhere else. Slaying is also commonly done by being friendly, supportive, patient, and compassionate (see Stoicism, the practice of Saladin, and the “verbal judo” method from the book Feeling Good for more information) rather than by exerting force or being stubborn.
Dispelling was considered by the Bajoran scholars to be the next and more powerful level after Slaying, which is why they were looking forward for The Dispeller who will finally slay (and dispel) The Slayer. The classic parable of Dispelling is Andersen’s The Emperor's New Clothes where a young and mischevious boy reveals that people were simply deceiving themselves about admitting an obvious folly. Nevertheless, in the Selinaverse, vampires have been dispelling follies, dogma, social conventions, taboos and prejudice, practically since the dawn of time - both in Earth and outside it, by humans, the so-called Star Trek human-like and human-compatible aliens, and by extra-terresterials of many other forms.
Like slayers, some of the most respected dispellers were actually clearly fictional or even mythical. Some notable dispellings:
- Bertnard Russel’s insistance that non-married couples can live together and even have sex, which is now quite acceptable in the western world, but was then considered blasphemous.
- Saladin's relentless chivalrious, forgiving and noble behaviour that made his supposedly Christian contemporaries look extremely bad, and despite all that (or because of that) allowed him to liberate Palestine (a.k.a the Land of Israel) from the rule of the vicious Knights Templar.
- Mohandas Gandhi (a.k.a Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi or Gandhiji)’s struggle to liberate India from British rule and collpase the British empire (for the benefit of Britishmen and non-Britishmen alike).
- Despite that, Monty Python’s “What have the Romans ever done for us?” skit dispelled the fact that the British empire was non-benevolent, and that the former colonies should blame all their problems on their conquestors.
- The Monty Python crew had dispelled countless of other follies in their skits, which can be found on YouTube.
- While many people laughed after the Roman Catholic Pope opened a Twitter account, it was his acceptance of the fact that Twitter (and similar mediums such as Facebook and Google-Plus) are the next logical step in publishing texts for human consumption after other subversive mediums such as the alphabet (which was once quite similar to twitter) and the printing press (which shortly after Gutenber's Bible, started to cause a huge deterioriation in quality). It is his acknowledgement that if the Roman Catholic Church is going to survive in a certain form (however different than it is today), it should embrace modern mediums, which are now considered as low-life as some of the older and now more established mediums of communication. (Note: it does not mean I approve of the Roman Catholic Church or the Pope as a whole, just that this action is notable as dispelling.)
- The methodical dispelling of the Judeo-Christian sexual ethics (and sometimes other types of ethics) done by the sitcom television show “Friends”.
- The English Wikipedia, and to a lesser extent other Wikimedia projects and other wikis such as those on Wikia, made the case that a methodical and collaborative contribution by many different and entuhsiastic people (a.k.a “user-generated content”) can exceed traditional one-to-many publishing (so-called "Web 1.0") in both scope, and often in quality. At first, there was a lot of resistance and contempt to Wikipedia, but the Internet has eventually become so dependent on it that it was pointless to block it. It's not that Wikipedia became less subversive - it was that the Internet as a whole became more subversive as a result.
- The “Ceiling cat is watching you masturbate” lolcat was a death blow to the concept of an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, God, who cares about the minutae details of what you do and what you think or how you feel.
The Invisible
Normally, in every historical vampire “scene”, there are vampires who play various roles: The Master, The Integrator, The Slayer, The Antagonist, etc. Yet, the “deadliest” vampire and the one who causes the most “damage” is none other than “The Invisible”. The man (or the woman) that few people have heard about, that is often misunderstood, dismissed or looked down upon, that is actually reportedly controlling everything behind the scenes.
The Neo-Tech literature said that “perhaps the worst neocheater is the invisible” although neocheaters in Neo-Tech are the exact opposite of the vampires of the Selinaverse. One of the most powerful depictions of the invisible is in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged where it is none other than John Galt. However, John Galt is a master-vampire-turned-bad, using his convincing powers to be, while perfectly ethical, incredibly immoral. Shlomi Fish, the author of the Selina Mandrake screenplay also thinks it's incredibly unrealistic because no force except death or a bad physical injury can stop a true artist, and hence a vampire, from publishing his or her artwork to the widest audience possible, all while behaving legally, ethically and morally.
In a sense, John Galt was an echo of Ayn Rand’s younger self: a young immigrant from Soviet Russia to the United States, who published some unsuccessful books (and H. L. Mencken who at the time was a very famous intellectual and writer, spoke highly of her We the Living, while it was still unsuccessful) who accepted her fate, entered a happy marriage, and networked through word-of-mouth and working at various jobs, and continued writing until the book The Fountainhead became a spectacular success years after its publication. Many invisible vampires have normally eventually gained a wide recognition.
Yet another depiction of the invisible, is detailed in a blog post titled “The Ultimate Conspiracy Theory Behind the Story of the Scroll of Esther” where Mordechai from the Book of Esther is revealed to having been the invisible.
In real life, Shlomi Fish, the author of Selina Mandrake - The Slayer had an unnatural obsession with becoming the invisible of today’s global Internet scene. While being a big fan of Ayn Rand’s words, deeds and legacy, he distanced himself from some of her “20th century fads” like originality (vs. writing fan fiction and building upon other people's work and cross-polination), professionalism (vs. being an amateur, and allowing some sloppiness and imperfection in exchange for a faster time to market), and also eventually adopted pluralism (as in accepting idioms from foreign cultures and people who oppose you, as opposed to tribalism), as well as tolerance and forgiveness (as opposed to revenge or “may my soul die with philistines”/“I'm taking them all with me” brutality). He also naturally has no qualms of introducing supernatural elements to his stories for better comedic effects. His main pride is still his home site which hosts many different web resources, both short and long and which most people still don't know about, but often people who do testify to spend hours on ends reading and enjoying it.
Various blog posts and home page features by Mr. Fish have been featured on Slashdot.org and various other news sites, blogs and microblogs, but it was still more like “10 minutes of fame” rather than actually being famous so as of 23 February, 2013, he still has the status of the Invisible. There are other notable past invisibles who are now somewhat more famous such as Larry Wall (known as the father of the Perl programming language, and the first versions of the patch and rn (= read news) programs, which although much smaller in scope, were each arguably even more important than Perl); or Christina Grimmie, a self-deprecating, and initially very amateuristic, singer and pianist who covered many contemporary songs and has recently found incredible success on YouTube and outside, and has been an underage teenager throughout most of her career as of this writing (23 February, 2013).
Further reading
- Selina Mandrake
- Q Conntinuum (Selinaverse)
- Sarah Michelle Gellar (Selinaverse)