re:Vampires

So, I saw the second Twilight movie lately, and while I do indeed know I’m about fifteen years late, it got me thinking about vampire media as a whole.

Am i a vampire expert?

No. Not even a little.

But I like them! Vampires are fun, they’re trope-y, they’re sexy and mysterious. I’ve had my fair share of vampire stories, in a few different mediums, and I’ve noticed quite the problem in all of them.

people want vampires to be really, really boring.

Now, what could that mean?

Well, vampires as a whole have a very loose canon, filling niches of urban legend, myth, trope, and many other forms of tall tale. Because of this, vampire history and writing is very hazy. While they’ve been oft-depicted as aristocrats, nobles, and other forms of society-removed high status weirdos (Castlevania, Dracula, Nosferatu, Masquerade, Carmilla), the down to earth, urban fantasy heartthrob is quite the popular case too (Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, Interview, Buffy, Blade (and we’ll get to Blade), and so on. These are tropes, and I want to make extraordinarily clear that I do indeed like them as tropes. My problem with these tropes, however, is that they lend themselves to such seriousness it makes the fantasy part of urban fantasy so very dull.

Vampires are so, so, so, so serious now! Aren’t they? They need to be so aloof and sexy and powerful and mysterious and fantastical. Nobody would want to bone Edward Cullen if he could be scared by garlic. I get that, I really do, but vampire authors have taken that as an excuse to run away with turning vampires into generic fantasy schlock. Here’s a quick rundown of the fantastical elements of the vampires in Twilight.

Twilight vampires have

• Superhuman physical capabilities
• A non-necessary lust for human blood
• A unique magic gift (which are all boring and suck but that’s not relevant)
• Skin that glows in the sun
• A natural immortality
• The ability to turn others into vampires.

And they can be dealt with by

• Tearing apart a vampire and burning the pieces before they can recover.

Is this not completely dull? That’s a slightly unique zombie. That’s a My Hero Academia character. This isn’t a one-off to be hand-waved by saying it’s just meant to sell books to teenage girls, either. Here are the characteristics of Dracula from Castlevania:

• Superhuman physical characteristics
• Immortality (most kinds)
• A bunch of anime magic bullshit

And he can be killed (sometimes) via stake through the heart.

In fact, most of these type of stories go to explicitly show that things like holy water, garlic, and even in extreme cases, the sun itself do nothing to harm our fanged friends.

let them be stupid!

Isn’t it a little too bog-standard to turn these storied legends into generic superpowered humans. Treating vampires either as the vile embodiments of sin they were originally thought up as or as obtuse pretty boys are both fun, but only if you let them be. My favorite scene in The Vampire Diaries (which otherwise has completely dull depictions of vampires) involves the one classic vampire rule they stick to – a vampire gets locked out of his house that he lives alone in, and thus, can’t be invited back in. He complains to another vampire friend of his who groans in agreement over what must be a common mishap of vampire society.

Here is a non-comprehensive list of arguably camp-y vampire traits, powers, weaknesses, features and ideas that I think make for much more interesting aspects of creating a realistic vampire existence in a given fantasy world:

• Vampire coffins are particular, and how they rest in them is too. Do not give your vampire an aesthetic instagram-able room, unless there’s a giant coffin in the corner in view of a window with the dirt of their native home inside. Vampires are often bound to their burial land, and that can be fun to play with in your story. Maybe the human getting turned has to decide where they’re to be turned, and it’s a big character moment.
• Remember that vampires are meant to be old. Most authors keep this pretty concentrated, but it doesn’t have to be. Dracula is often the first vampire, and he’s only about 600 years old. Play with the setting more! Old slang, bad style, weird references, and so on. Write them like they would be!
• Vampire appearance shouldn’t be so fluid. What’s the point of having sharp canines if they can retract them?
• Vampires sometimes have weird wallcrawling or flight abilities. Plan their living spaces around this!
• Some vampires get by just by drinking animal blood. Decide on how this distinction is going to actually work in your world between feeding on nothing, animals, humans, and supernatural creatures. Be consistent.
• Vampires can shapeshift, usually into bats, vermin, or wolves. Design vampire homes around their movement!
• Vampires shouldn’t do mind control. Other people do mind control. Bitten and killed thralls are neutral.
• Vampires don’t do anime magic bullshit unless they have good reason to do anime magic bullshit. If your world has wizards, let there be vampire wizards, but vampires cannot summon fireballs or see the future for the sake of doing so.
• Holy stuff. Best for high fantasy or vampire-as-allegory.
• Garlic/wolvesbane. Write a date night scene!
• Silver, and by extension, mirrors.
• Non-artificial light, of any kind.
• Staking. Also best for high fantasy and stories involving Dracula.
• Decapitation.
• Running water! Plan locations around this!
• Home invitations.
• Salt circles and the like. Come up with bullshit rules they have to follow.
• Rooster calls! Let the sexy magic boys be scared of chickens, please!
• Roses on the coffin can stop them from escaping.
• Arithmomania. Make them a neurotic weirdo, please. They’re already hundreds of years old.
• LORE! Vampires have a storied history by now. Let your vampires be scared of Count Orlok. Let them mention meeting Dracula at a pub. Your story isn’t serious enough to pass up vampire celebrities.

We can see a trend with a lot of these, right? They’re not intimidating or hot or even a little cool. But that’s kind of the point. These small little quirks can help build established vampire communities and societies along with jargon, experience, and the like. It makes a much less generic, much more breathing world for your creatures to live in outside of vague evil councils or generic noble structures.

Blade is horrible, I mean bad, I mean really, really, really bad, but even Blade does a good job of making vampires feel like they live together. Vampires have clubs underneath butcher shops where leftover cow blood is used during raves for crowd control. That’s awesome! That’s really badass! If I was a vampire, I WOULD want to go to the blood raves and party! In fact, let’s take a brief detour.

vampire cities, societies, and creating cultures

Everybody knows vampires like New Orleans. So why doesn’t anybody write vampires liking jazz? Or really speaking creole? Let structures of vampire groups form where they live as a function of them being vampires! A very simple worldbuilding exercise is simply to pick a place, decide when and how vampires appeared, and just trace how that could develop to now. In fact, here’s a short list of places I think would be excellent for practice:

• New Orleans, obviously. Good middleground between aristocrat vamps and sexy vamps.
• Targoviste, for all your classic Dracula needs.
• London, if you want to be boring.
• Edinburgh, if you want to make the noble vampires fun.
• Seattle. For Twilight-style vampires.
• Chicago.
• Boston.
• Johannesburg.
• Rural Maine. If I lived two hundred years, I’d leave for rural Maine.
• Rural Oregon.
• Kyoto.
• Vienna. Hapsburgs might as well be vampires.
• Hokkaido.
• Moscow.
• Krakow.
• Valencia.
• Miami, for influencer model vampires.
• Lagos.
• Cairo. Jojo’s did it, but Jojo’s didn’t do it well.
• Rabat.
• Buenos Aires.
• Rio! Let the vampires celebrate Carnival, I beg you.
• Across the Andes, for more of a horror story.

How do vampires party? Do they take the subway? If I was a vampire and I could turn into a bat, wouldn’t my house be weird as hell? How do they talk to each other? Do they have slang? Celebrities? Forums? Tokyo Ghoul showed up Ghoul coffee shops – why can’t there be a vampire burger joint.

Why do so many vampires talk like that? Stop making them talk like that! If I was from Napoleonic France, I wouldn’t talk like that.

Show their holidays, their parties. Show vampire families. Write a scene where someone gets turned and please make it interesting for once. Make the turning process interesting! Is it a celebration? A torture? A necessary going-about almost like a fast, or do we throw a new birthday? What about vampire sympathizers? How do they interact? Other supernatural monsters? Maybe there’s a small town in Canada where they’re just cool with vampires. Maybe a rich vampire moved into a village in Sichuan and has been slowly clawing his grip over it. A vampire-owned apartment building for supernatural creatures? A city that really doesn’t sleep. Hell, the first vampire bishop getting appointed.

People always forget to ask questions with vampires! They’re a trope, and they’re usually used to fill a purpose, so we forget to make them really fun, or mysterious, or scary. They become stock, and I hate that because I really do love the vampire trope and vampire media. Supernatural societies are so interesting to develop because of how they differ from ours, so why don’t we embellish the small differences more to create more fun worlds?