so the idea I guess for the succubus/incubus comes from night terrors and wet dreams, but it occurs to me that outside of chick tracts there isn’t really a motif of demons who encourage you to commit a specific flavour of sin just because sinning is bad (rather than because it’ll lead you to an ironic temporal comeuppance). like in principle you could have one for every deadly sin:
- Wrath demons are just internet trolls, I guess
- Gluttony demons bring pastries and drugs and convince you to have them
- Sloth demons encourage you to skip work or procrastinate with fun activities
- Envy demons are like Lady Macbeth, or else they talk a lot about how great someone else is and it makes you mad
- Greed demons are like salespeople or motivational speakers?
- And then Pride demons compliment you and make you feel good about yourself and less dependent on others, not to lead you to ruin but just to make you more proud
Feel free to come up with whimsical names for all of these (e.g. “thancubus” for pride, and so on), I gave up because some were hard.
Anyhow, I guess what contributes to the modern appeal of the succubus thing now that we no longer care that much about demonic taxonomy is that succubi have EC Comics appeal, in that you can appeal to someone’s prurient interests in a naughty, edgy way while at least paying lip service to the peril of sexual immorality. This is a lot harder to pull off with the other types of demons because you need the act of engaging with the depiction to also be a form of the sin in question, but I feel like there’s potential there. Lots of fattening food already gushes about how sinful it is, so you just need to personify that into some kind of satanic pastry chef or whatever. Then a sexy, mass-appeal greed demon would just be, like, a mashup of Courage Wolf, the Wolf of Wall Street, and the “show me the money” scene from Jerry Macguire? There’s some potential there, is what I’m saying
Edit: Oh actually the thing where people defiantly identify with hippie-scare stuff about how free love and marijuana will destroy you and so forth are 99% of the way to a sloth demon motif, that’d be a really easy jump
This is a boring response rather than a cool one, but I think it’s important to note that the succubus who has survived into pop-culture fantasy lore bears essentially no resemblance to the succubus of medieval demonology. Even the whole “provoking the Sin of Lust because lust is super sinful” thing is…downplayed, a lot, when it’s there at all. Which is not surprising. Virtually no one in the target audience for this stuff – virtually no one at all! – thinks of lust, qua lust, as being a real component of evil in any way. When it’s categorized as a sin at all (which is increasingly rare), it’s a cute “sin” that doesn’t even pretend to have serious moral valence.
You could have neo-succubi as demons of Serious Bad Sexual Behavior, as the mainstream understands it now, with a vibe that focuses more on rape and predation etc. But as it turns out you don’t get that either.
What you actually get are sexy demon chicks, who are useful to have in your Big Bucket o’ Tropes, because hell demons are cool and sexy chicks are also cool and you want to be able to call upon the narrative forces of sexiness when you’re doing something hell-flavored.