I can really appreciate that message. It's a good one for addiction, depression, really any condition that encourages a toxic positive feedback loop. Not always an easy aphorism to follow, but I can really appreciate the message.

Exactly. Falling off the wagon doesn't mean you can never get back on it again.

@@DrDark0 'toxic positive feedback loop' is a good way of putting it and given how much depression and substance abuse can go hand in hand particularly relevant. I was fortunate enough to be allocated a therapist who suggest Compassion Focused Therapy, its just cognitive behavioural therapy in terms of the 'mechanics' of it but its HYPER focussed on self acceptance and self forgiveness. Had tried CBT 3 times and found it utterly useless, did CFT and it was like I was cured overnight, which after about 20 years of depression to varying degrees getting a handle on it over 6 weeks is effectively overnight. Best way to describe it is CBT is like getting therapy from Data. CFT is like talking to Guinan... Okay best way to put it to someone who watched Star Trek Next Gen anyway.

That's why people thought the Todd section of the Bojack Horseman finale was so great.

P:@@fromthedumpstertothegrave3689 Perfect metaphor, thank you.

There does seem to be a combination in this vampiric lore that blood is both nourishment and drug to the vampire. One might say the same to an overeater, that they get some endorphin fix by overeating, but I'm not sure where the science is on that, so I can't say for sure.

I was gonna say, food addiction (I know that's not what it's called), but you got there first.

I think they kind of used Schanke to be everything wrong with humanity, but not in any great excess. He's a bit of a creep but seems to have the good sense to back off when he realizes he oversteps.

It's kind of worse for vampires. A food addict often has specific addictions, like excessive sweets or overly rich foods. One can easily survive without sweets or overly rich foods by going to a leaner diet or severely limiting their intake. Vampires need one kind of nourishment. They can abstain from drinking human blood, perhaps, but with this episode showing blood to be both nourishment and drug simultaneously, that makes it especially difficult to manage.

@@Craxin01 sugar is more addictive than cocaine my friend.

@@Aogami20 That's because it's in everything. If cocaine were as ubiquitous and had a massive lobby arm, it'd have far more addict.

@@Craxin01 it's in everything BECAUSE IT'S ADDICTIVE. Why do you think McDonalds puts sugar in their hamburger meat?

​@@Aogami20 We forget we're primates and we still have caveman brain. Our brains burn a third of all calories we consume, so it's less that it's addictive and more that our brains are programmed to crave sugar. If we were still hunter gatherers, it'd be far less of a problem, because there's only so much sugar in the fruits and vegetables we'd be searching for. If you ate as many apples to get the same calories as a single can of soda, you'd have an unbearable belly ache from stuffing yourself so much. In order to stop people doing normal human things, you kind of have to program them to do so, to ignore nature's programming. Finally, it's profit, greed, that compels so many companies to seek out cheap sugar, especially the sugar industry and their lobbyists. They funded a campaign to push the blame for our expanding waistlines into the consumption of fat, so a lot of corporations seeing their "research" started cutting fat out of everything. Fat tastes good, another calorie rich substance our brains crave, and cutting it out really made foods bland. So, they added salt and sugar to replace the lost flavor. It doesn't help processing food already strips a lot of flavor out of it. A can of corn would be absolutely flavorless because of the canning process if they didn't add salt and sugar to it.

I don't think this is really true? The generalized version of it pre-AA wasn't an "anonymous" recovery program but really more of an evangelism thing; pretty sure the "anonymous" stuff started with Alcoholics Anonymous and that was in fact a very specific goal-oriented group with one specific vice in mind. There are some more general 12-step "recovery" things now in churches but they're much newer and much less effective, and like the biggest version of that that I know of had barely been founded when this aired. Which is what makes this kinda weird, to me, because it did *become* a thing more in the late 90s and into the 2000s? But at the time this aired I think the closest generalized alternatives weren't 12-step programs but things like Narconon and Synanon, which were still at least broadly substance-focused. Some churches might have run their own AA knockoffs, but it wasn't super common so far as I know. This if anything has a lot more vibes of "we made a generic version of this because we needed Nick and a sex addict to be going to the same meeting".

@@Nassifeh I think I wrongly generalized there, especially in my first couple sentences, I'm sorry. I will leave my comment above unedited so people can read and learn from my fail. My experience with this is far outweighed on the North American Christian church history side, and not that strong on the history of the general group recovery format. I do remember the running of such programs in the types of churches I grew up in. Not all of those churches would advertise the meetings on their church events calendars, but I would see them happening as a kid and teenager while at church for unrelated events. I do know of the "recovery" one you refer to, which started I think sometime in the 2000s? The church I and my family attended at the time held some of their more populous meetings for the city, and if I recall correctly from a presentation about it over a decade ago, it was started out of one of the models I mentioned in my first sentence of the comment above. I've more recently gone through a lengthy "midlife crisis" of faith many have termed "Deconstruction." For me this has brought about a lot of rethinking the practices of Christianity as I know it, and even leaving and repenting from them where applicable. But even well before then, I privately thought that attending such a program at the church oneself attends would be unwise for so many reasons, and that the Church itself might try to take too much influence over the program. I celebrate churches that actually do use their facilities to make their communities better places to live all of the days of the week, though. It's...complex.

Honestly ANY eating disorder I'd think. I'm gunna Shapiro this statistic and say 99% of addicts find abstinence easier than moderation and pretty much any addict can choose that easier of the two options, abstiance. If your addiction is to food, or is an eating disorder in which your attitude to food is so close to that of an addiction (IE an addiction to control in terms of annorexia/bullemia) thefuck do you do? Abstain from food for the rest of your life? Having no choice but to moderate when you have the mind and habits of an addict... yeah, that must be fuckin tough.

It is.​@@fromthedumpstertothegrave3689

Good point. People are addicted to food but can’t go cold turkey or they will die. It also makes people “stronger” as malnutrition is a mother ucka.

From my time knowing people going through recovery, it actually does make a good amount of metaphorical sense from a certain perspective. People going through recovery will always be addicts at their core. That addiction is hardwired into them. The people who are able to navigate recovery well often find ways of taking the addictive part of their personality and replacing their harmful addictions with less harmful addictions. A vampire who uses animal blood or ethically sourced human blood to manage their dependency on blood kind of fits in this framework.

Crap now I want Drake to show up in this, which is technically entirely possible as a 90s show filmed in Toronto, so now I’m gonna be wanting that even more than I want LaCroix to still be alive, both of which are NOT gonna happen

Forever Knight, it is like Degrassi with less vampires, less crime and less deaths!

I think this is why it's a bad idea to talk about food like an addiction, though. It's not the same thing. We can have unhealthy behaviors around food and eating, but they aren't best treated by treating them like they're somehow equivalent to substance abuse. Not all unhealthy behavior has to be "basically an addiction", and 12-step isn't the best program for everything or even most things.

​@@Nassifeh I'd argue that it's not even the best option for addiction. The whole thing is based on the idea that a bunch of white guys in the first half of the 1900s had about how addiction happens because of selfishness and it's cure is selflessness. Never mind that if anything women getting sober tend to have a pattern of almost the opposite of that and telling them otherwise only makes them more vulnerable to being exploited...

Ahh, like how True Blood did this with "Fangtasia" for all of two seconds.

This show kinda does cover that concept. I don't want to spoil too much (for you, anyone else in the comments, and especially the host of these epic videos here.) But the vamps of this series do recieve some memories from the red stuff, a "dinner and a show" all at once. Which is, according to longtime fans, why the other vamps consider animal sources so very subpar. It's an okay apocalypse food to pretty much all of them, but 1990s Toronto is just about as far from that need as they've ever experienced.

A lot of vamp media seems to want to make that analogy. It never really works, but bless them, they keep trying.

The American one, or the British one?

"Do not get addicted to water, for you will resent its absence"

I always felt like Being Human is the only show that actually made that plot compelling because it was shown that Vampires *could* go without blood, and that all drinking blood did was get them high off killing people and destroying lives, but the desire to do it will naively always be there, even if they've beat it for years and years.

​@@theawesome925Well it also (in the U.K version) helped them suppress their conscience and guilt over things they'd done.

I think Jeanette wants Nick to be his best self, and while she really wishes that his best self were cool evil Nick, she recognizes on some level that it isn't.

@@StephenLeaSheppard good point, I'm sure Jeanette would selfishly love for Nick to be evil again but she knows being evil isn't what Nick really wants even if it's what she and Lacroix wants , she cares more for Nick's feelings than her own

Janette just wants Nick close, it's LaCroix that wants him evil.

@@ScaredyCatsTV yeah that makes more sense

​@@ScaredyCatsTV I think Jeanette also has an aspect of being Nick's personal friend. She knows this isn't what Nick wants for himself, and she respects what Nick wants for himself.

She's in an episode of Due South in the early nineties, which honestly due south he's a similar Toronto gritty fantasy thing going on

@@etevenatkowicz9745 I loved Due South as a kid.

Hey now, some of our best LGBTQ+ media is written by a guy whose name is pronounced "Kneel, GayMan" and his cishet self is beloved in our community. *Beloved.* (Probably also because he openly admits "hey that thing I did over 40 years ago was *not* the best look, so I'll rectify it in this adaptation.")