Our Vampires Are Different/Headscratchers

If you have a problem with vampires, list them here. But first:

• 1. No griping about the inconsistent portryals. Vampires can be portrayed flexibly while still retaining the essental traits.
• 2. Sign your entries.
• 3. Make sure your problem has already been addressed before posting.
• 4. Elaborate your entries. Don't be vague.
• 5. NO TWILIGHT EXAMPLES. We know it's a disgrace to vampires. Take it to Darth Wiki.

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• Tweedly Dee- Why is it that authors have a tendency to make Vampires super-duper undefeatable death machines without thinking the finer details through, like how a race of invincible parasitoids who can reproduce through assimilation haven't already taken over the planet when Muggles are apparently powerless? Why won't authors be truly brave and make vampires pathetic?
  • I've always believed that the best authors make vampires who are not all around stronger than humans, but have their strengths and weaknesses in different places than humans.(Stokers Dracula was super humanly strong and could shape shift...unless he was in sunlight, he was also extremely vulnerable to silver, garlic and sacred objects. In some ways he was more powerful than a human, but in others he was considerably weaker.) The whole point of the vampire in fiction, to me, is to make the reader ask if living for ever would be worth it if you also hade to deal with the negative aspects of being a vampire. That's why vampires become pointless, as characters, if there is no downside to being a vampire.
  • Because when the vampire is a villain, you get a story about a hero fighting a pathetic harmless monster. Vampires have to be menacing and powerful for dramatic tension. I suspect that the take over the world thing is covered by their being outnumbered or some weird Balance of Good and Evil they follow or something.
  • Dark Nemesis- As powerful as the vamps are, if you're a vampire, you have to contend with a few things. For 10-14 hours of every single day, Kryptonite Is Everywhere. You're allergic to garlic, which isn't exactly in low supply. And if the Muggles don't want you in their homes, you can't come in. Then you have to factor in the humans who are Dangerously Genre Savvy about your weaknesses to construct an entire arsenal out of them. Ironically, none of these weaknesses are present in, and your question applies perfectly to the work that shall remain nameless.
  • Devoured By Robots- The vampire dominated world thing has been represented with I Am Legend, and to a lesser extent with the White Wolf roleplaying setting. Most sources of vampire fiction have some special circumstances for spreading the curse to keep the world from being mostly vamp. It's hard to disagree with you, though. Vampire-themed fiction on the whole seems like it has been stuck in a stylistic rut for some time. The genre could probably use a bit deeper, more surgical deconstruction.
  • Lawyer Dude- Many works of vampire fiction don't think this issue through thoroughly enough. The most common explanations are that vampires do secretly rule the world, acting through pawns and patsies. They don't rule openly because if humanity knew about them, they'd be hunted down and destroyed. One human isn't a threat. Seven billion are. There aren't more because there's usually some restriction on how often they can or will reproduce. Also, more vampires means more competition for food.
  • Eks-Because all the vampires would have to be on the same page to take over the world. In most vampire stories, there are many different "sects" or "clans" of vampires.
  • User:Motree: Got ya covered, buddy. The only major perk of being a vampire in my 'verse is a really long lifespan, and not needing to feed as much to keep your body running. Otherwise, you're really not that powerful and the vampires in-verse find it baffling as to why humans insist on overpowering them so and are a bit offended that they get portrayed as viral undead.
  • Because those circumstances don't happen. In many stories, an exceptionally powerful vampire is the product of much work, a long lifespan or a special case, the general bloodsucking population isn't too threatening. Even there, humans have a natural defense that develops if vampires are in the vicinity too long. Many works take this even further and create a Food Chain of Evil to keep vampires in check. Even when there is no natural defense, predator or competing species, vampires tend to fight amongst themselves. Add a few I Hate You, Vampire Dad cases and there you go. In the event that vampires really aren't hindered by any of those, and for whatever reason, can't be killed by human beings they usually do rule the world as in Daybreakers, or there is something to limit their reproduction as in Darkstalkers where the really powerful ones aren't even from Earth and don't care to rule it.--Cider
• Blunderbuss - Why is it whenever we see vampires wearing old-fashioned clothes to signify their age, it's always always always clothes from the Victorian era? For god's sake, if they truely are ageless, why would they stick to clothes of any particular period much less that one? You'd think vampires would frown heavily on that time period considering that was when their prey started vastly outnumbering them, got a lot more dangerous, and their scientific advances were more deadly than traditional measures. Not to mention that it's really, really overdone at this point. Where are the Renaissance vampires? The medieval vampires? The Roman vampires? I'd pay a lot of money to see a series where the hero/ine bursts into the vampire feast and find that its a huge toga party.
  • Anomaly: In The Dresden Files, the recurring vampire Mavra dresses in a way described as similar to portrayals of Hamlet. Sure it's no toga, but it's still a nice bit farther back than Victorian. Also, I'd guess the reason for the common use of Victorian garb is because it looks the most 'old-timey' to a modern audience.
  • Vampire Toga Party. I would pay to see that too, and I am notoriously stingy on such things.
  • My guess: you can go anywhere now with Victorian clothes, specially if you have eternal youth. People will just think "Oh, those freaking post-modernist guys today...". Try do the same wearing some togas. But still, I'm in to see the Vampire Toga Party.
    • Though vampires probably don't wear togas for the same reason Superman doesn't. It's not the draft, but the flight.
  • Victorian dress looks cool. Also, vampire toga party. I sincerely thank you for that glorious image.
  • Blunderbuss: Wow, I had no idea that other people would love the vampire toga party idea so much. That's it, I'm gonna draw this.
  • Doctor Nemesis: I think that Victorian dress conveys a sense of history while still being relatively 'modern'; most Victorian dress (at least, for men; not so sure about the styles for women) is not incredibly different from the kind of formalwear you still see people wearing today, whereas you very rarely see people wearing Renaissance-style ruffled collars or Roman togas outside of a fancy-dress party style environment (although I fourth the idea of the Vampire Toga Party, by the way). It helps the Masquerade; you come across a man wearing a tailcoat, waistcoat and cravat at night, you might just assume he was going home from a wedding or something. Plus, most of the works that codify the modern vampire -- especially Dracula -- came from the Victorian era or thereabouts, so it probably helped codify the dress sense as well.
    • Underachiever: Amusingly enough, in the original novel Count Dracula himself kind of averts this. He wants to move to London, so he acquires clothes in the style currently (at the time) actually worn there specifically so as not to draw attention by standing out as an obvious foreigner. Abandoning the Transylvanian fashions that he's presumably grown rather more used to down the years in the process isn't ever seen to bother him at all.
    • Dementia 13: I think it's bingo on that one, because what most people see as the "rules" of what vampires are consist almost completely of Bram Stoker's Victorian-era depiction. If you mess much with that, you'll run into a Reality Is Unrealistic kind of problem.
  • It's easier to show than tell in most works, and I get the feeling most people who'd want to write a vampire-based work aren't enough of qualified historians to convey a true sense of "This guy has been alive for eight hundred years and I have the masterful hand of dialogue and description to prove it." It does bug me too, though, as it has become annoyingly clichéd.
  • User:Motree: Once again, covered. They're a living, but long-lived species in my verse and tend to dress with the times so that they don't look like total fools.
• Musereader: It's always a Vampire boy and Human Girl, Buffy and True Blood (Slayer and fairy but close enough), Vampire Diaries, Twilight, Moonlight, Blood ties, The Hallows, Anita Blake. Somebody give me the opposite please!
  • Let the Right One In... wait... what?
  • The reason for the standard pairing is likely to portray the male as dark, yet charming, who could corrupt even the innocent virgin girl. And, of course, all the sexual connotations that go in with vampire bites, which gave rise to Lesbian Vampire.
  • User:Motree: Aaaaaand... Covered. A major vampire character of mine is a female intelligent but naive Kuudere. The only male vampire with any focus is her father, and he's happily married to his cousin (To explain that... Vampires in my verse are a bit like wolves in that they rarely breed outside the pack, so to speak. Meaning there's usually a LOT of incest going on, which results in members of individual families looking pretty much the same.)
  • That isn't always the case either. But you were probably told to avoid the Ultraviolet film. -- Cider
• The fact that vampires can even be killed. Shouldn't they be immortal?
  • Equivalent exchange. Vampires have to feed off life to prolong their own, 'Immortality' varies between works, it usually means longer life, and makes you difficult to kill. It however, does not make you immune to decapitation, fire, sunlight, or a stake to the heart pumping the stolen blood through your veins. Immortality is as far as you can live without dying -- Vampirehood just decreases the chance of that.
    • This. As long as they have access to the blood of the living and don't get killed along the way, vampires can potentially live forever.
    • A creature being immortal only means that it is not subject to age or decay, not that it is impervious to all forms of harm.
    • Immortal does not mean invulnerable.
    • It's basic rules of physics. If it exists in our universe, and can interact with us, then we can interact with it. If we can interact with it, theoretically, we can kill it. Throw enough energy at something and it will die.
  • Or more specifically, throw enough energy at ti to randomize it and make it not it anymore.
• Why do vampire movies never mention what would happen if vampires don't drink enough blood? They'd probably starve, right? You'd think that'd be included on any movie's "how to kill a vampire" list.
  • I can't recall any instance of a vampire in any media dying that way. An unfed vampire tends to become completely inert but still alive and potentially conscience (as Lestat does, going into the earth and remaining still for decades but still psychically spying on all around him).
    • It's commonly explained in stories where vampires are protagonists. Usually, it's just plain old starvation, though Daybreakers had a lack of blood transform them into bat creatures and in Being Human (UK) vampires don't actually need blood at all.
  • In one webcomic, 'Vampires vs Zombies', vampires turn into zombies if sufficiently starved. A Zombie Apocalypse started because somebody sealed a vampire into a coffin and dumped him into the ocean. He turned into a zombie and eventually got out of the coffin. Oops.
    • It's a special case, but when Grlscz in The Wisdom of Crocodiles fails to feed, he takes on hemophilia-like symptoms and becomes susceptible to even simple wounds.
• It can be hard to differentiate between traits from folklore and traits from modern fiction. Does anyone know some sources on the subject?
  • As long as you don't cry about how anybody can edit it, wikipedia is actually a pretty good source.
  • Order J. Gordon Melton's The Vampire Book and you'll be set. It's not always well-written, but it is encyclopedic.