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WARNING: vampire musings, as in undead, so probably more than a bit squicky.
Question. If you have what amounts to a vampire story in which the vampires in question are not, in fact, dead/undead ... do they actually count as vampires? Because I'm not sure. Possibly I'm just talking about systematised demonic possession, instead ...
Question. If you have what amounts to a vampire story in which the vampires in question are not, in fact, dead/undead ... do they actually count as vampires? Because I'm not sure. Possibly I'm just talking about systematised demonic possession, instead ...
Okay. Okay. So. I have a problem with vampires. Actually, with most undead, or at least the ones resulting from the reanimation (by whatever means) of corpses. Because ... ew. Mostly ew. Besides. Aside from straight-up magic, that really just doesn't work. It cannot be in any way efficient, because dead bodies sort of tend to lack important processes necessary for things like, moving, staying in one piece, attacking prey, what have you. If the thing inside them doesn't need to do those things (or has magic to sidestep them) ... then they probably shouldn't do a lot of other things fictional vampires also do. Like, you know, breathe, talk, have memories of being a human, etc. Also? If they drink blood for some sort of nutritional value? They should probably be drinking a whole hell of a lot more of it. And, you know, it should have something close to a rational, visible means of keeping them alive. I mean, what does blood do for what is essentially a corpse that is already dead? I mean, you can pour as much blood as you like on a body, if the body is dead, it's not going to do anything. So ... why, again?
Vampires just ... fundamentally don't make sense, to me. Or at least, the modern, pseudo-scientific versions thereof. Vampires that are essentially magic, like the original folkloric vampires, on the other hand, make a lot more sense. Because, you know, magic runs on different rules.
The original vampires were, from what I can see, basically demons/spirits who possessed handy corpses in order to affect the physical world (and drink blood). They had nothing to do with the person who used to inhabit that particular body. They weren't 'turned into' a vampire, in the sense of a person switching species, like a lot of modern vampires are. They were a completely different being possessing a human body. And the blood drinking doesn't appear to have much to do with keeping the corpse going, and more to do with being something the spirit/demon needed and used a possessed corpse to get. As in, the body was the tool to get the blood, not the blood was the tool to keep the body (though, if drinking blood increased the demon/spirit's power, it may have allowed them to keep the body going - possibly it's a bit recursive). The blood is not for its inherant physical nutritional value (of which, I gather, blood doesn't have much) that keeps a body going, but for some magical/spiritual value that keeps the demon or spirit going. Which, provided you are prepared to accept 'magic demon/spirit' as an explanation in the first place, actually makes a lot more sense.
Yes, I did just say 'if you accept magic as an explanation, it makes a lot more sense'. But, well, mythical monsters, people. If you're going to have a vampire in the first place, you might as well just go the whole hog and call it magic/paranormal/spirit, rather than trying to shoehorn in a pseudo-science explanation that does not, in fact, explain much of anything.
*deep breath* Anyway.
So. If we're riffing off the traditional, magical/demonic-style vampires, who function via possession, can we bring in some of the more interesting aspects of modern-style vampires too? Because while demons possessing corpses is cool if you need mooks and/or ghoul type enemies for a story, they don't really allow for a lot of the interesting parts of vampires - things like, you know, personality, tragic pasts, mystique, human-inhuman angst, transformation trauma, that sort of thing? To be fair, on a scale of demonic possessions, if you're stuck with the corpses of people who are already dead and therefore not in a position to protest, it ... sort of doesn't imply much about your capabilities as a demon, does it? I mean, hard to be cool and badass and mysterious if you're essentially a glorified supernatural graverobber (not that vampires have an easy time being cool and badass and mysterious anyway, but ... 'nother rant entirely). Plus. While it might be possible for said spirits/demons to be interesting as characters in their own right (now that I look at it, possibly there's a story there about the disenfranchised demon classes, too weak to do other than pick up leftovers), you don't get any of the 'human turned into a monster' angles that seem to be so much a part of the modern vampire's mystique.
You could, I suppose, if this is a spiritual rather than a demonic possession, bring back the spirit of the corpse's original owner to possess it. Which, actually kinda cool. And desperate (on the part of the person doing it, I mean). And definitely good story material. The vampire is essentially a blood-powered poltergeist possessing its own body. I'm sure I've seen that somewhere, and it's a better (to me, to me, I realise only this) story that 'person suddenly randomly switches to another species who can absolutely survive on meager amounts of blood despite the body still being a full-sized human body' ... Um. Note to self, ease up on this point, cease the ranting, yes ...
But you could also ... Well. You could also skip the whole 'corpse' part altogether, couldn't you? If you wanted a human-turned-into-a-monster-who-needs-blood angle, I mean. You could ... have the demon/spirit/magic possess a living human. A fully functional human body that still does the human body things, and the blood is for powering the demon/spirit/magic, as a kind of supernatural parasite/symbiote who gives supernatural powers/strength/invulnerability as its end of the deal. That makes sense, right?
That's sort of where I was thinking of going for this story.
That the 'vampire curse' is actually a result of an ancient spell, binding some form of magic (or possibly a demon or spirit) to a living human in order to give them the power to protect their people, powered, as so many heavy juju spells are, by blood sacrifice. The way it works would be that the spell/demon allows the human to utilise supernatural strength and other abilities, in return for a sacrifice of blood. The more blood it received (or, crucially, the better class of sacrifice), the more supernatural shit it could enable the human to do. It was still the human's responsibility to, you know, eat, and keep fit, and keep their own body functioning. The spell/demon was an extra, not the human themselves.
In the universe I'm thinking of, the humans in question would have, originally, been carefully chosen champions who could be trusted, presumably, not to abuse the power they were given/not to abuse the blood sacrifices (initially sort-of-willing by a desperate populace) made to allow it/at least take the sacrifices from the enemy rather than the people they were supposed to protect. And then, if under serious assault, either by other humans or supernatural predators, with said champions being destroyed in battle despite best efforts, maybe people started editting out things like, say, the selection process, the training parts, the 'you have a responsibility to protect us' parts. Maybe they can't make them fast enough (this is biblical-style, stone/bronze age style supernatural wars, I'm thinking), and they start giving the vampires they've already made the ability to pass on the spell in the field, to whoever is handy to get the current job done (I'm thinking they only pass on a partial version - extending their spirit/demon/spell to another person, unless the original vampire dies and thus passes the thing wholesale - hence later vampires becoming more powerful if they kill their sire). So vampires can make other vampires, possibly not with the best version of the spell possible, in desperate circumstances where people stop being really picky about who they're giving this power to.
I'm thinking the immortality part of it also wasn't part of the original aims of the spell. That they only figured out later that a human bound with this curse/to this spirit would last as long as the magic/spirit did. That they couldn't die. But they could age, unless they made the sacrifices to allow the spirit to keep them young (expenditure of power, requires fueling). And that ... that could have gone some truly horrifying places, in the early days. If one of these champions say, stopped making the blood sacrifice, lived out his life, got older and older, and didn't die. Because it's the human's job to take care of the body, not the spirit's, and without blood to power it, the spirit can't help anyway. And then they figured out, after it was already physically too late, that the spirit could compensate for the physical degradation with supernatural abilities, provided it had sufficient blood sacrifice to allow it, but because they'd let things get that far to begin with, it takes more and more to compensate. So you basically have a desperate spirit/spell chained to a degrading human body that won't die, with a human consciousness along for the ride, compensating as best it can but taking ever-increasing amounts of (other people's) blood to manage it. I'm guessing, under those circumstances, even if the human had been a champion to begin with, they wouldn't remain one long -_-;
So ... basically, the vampires were originally what amounts to a supernatural super-soldier program gone horribly wrong. And over the time since then, they've lost the knowledge of their origins, so later humans-who-become-vampires don't know that their own body is still alive in its own right (I mean, they still breathe and have heartbeats and things, but they don't register properly what it means), that they need to take care of it as if they WERE still alive, so they make the same mistakes, over and over - which is where we get the build-up of vampires myths, the idea that they're undead, etc. Later vampires become predators, or think they're meant to be predators, or choose to pass the spell to naturally predatory people on the grounds that they'll survive the demands of the condition better, and basically just generally devolve from the protectors they were originally meant to be to a group of, basically, magical serial killers. They probably don't last too long, individually, because taking more and more blood kinda tends to get you noticed by people.
There are ways around it, and things to make it harder for the spirit to do its job, which is where we get some of the traditional vampire weaknesses/myths. Sunlight (particularly sunrise/set) traditionally interferes with magic, so the vampires-are-weak-in-daylight thing could come from that. Vampires who did keep up their human body won't have half the same problems vampires who've been running solely on the spell's power would, because if the spell doesn't have to do as much work, it doesn't get affected so badly - meaning younger vamps and vamps who've taken care of themselves can probably go out in daylight. Holy items, etc, probably count as foreign magical/spiritual influences fouling the spell's/spirit's ability to function. Not able to enter dwelling places without permission is a standard problem for spirits/demons anyway.
And there are ways around it, so you can have your 'friendly neighbourhood vampires', and vampire main characters that aren't necessarily doomed to become ravening bloodthirsty monsters needing to be put down. Going back up to the idea up there, blood powers the spell/spirit not according to the rules of a living-creature-requiring-sustenance, but according to the rules of magic and sacrifice. So it's not the amount or even quality of the blood itself, but the quality of the sacrifice by which it is taken. Some sacrifices are more potent than others. Sacrifices involving death, obviously, but that's not exactly the heroic route. But things like, willing sacrifices meaning more than forced ones, sacrifices made from a position of weakness (if you've less to start with, offering the same amount matters more) eg hurt or wounded people, sacrifices made unselfishly rather than sacrifices aiming to get something from the vampire (like, 'if I give you blood, you protect me from the demons' being less potent that 'if I give you blood, at least one of us might survive this' or 'you're hurt, you need blood'), sacrifices from loved ones (again, not very heroic, though - at least if it's deliberate on the vampire's part), etc.
Also, stacking the deck in your favour by keeping up your body on your own, and keeping the big supernatural displays to a minimum, also really helps, and makes you less vulnerable to things interfering with the spell, for the basic reason that the less work the magic has to do, the less it costs you, and the less you're affected when it stops working/works less well. Vampires past a certain age are going to have problems regardless, because keeping you young will start taking effort, but small and regular sacrifices should work, keeping it up rather than trying to regain it all at once. Catastrophic events, though, like grevious injuries, or periods of enforced captivity/starvation (both of human food and blood) will probably do severe damage - once you lose it, you can't get it back. And the basic traditional vampire killing methods - decapitation, immolation, destruction of the heart/head, destruction of the body as a whole - work pretty well. Past a certain degree of physical damage, the spell/spirit simply can't keep functioning, and both it and the human it's attached to let go.
... Um. Right. That was the idea. And, yes, I've given it quite a bit of thought. Though I still haven't decided whether the curse itself is just a magical construct, sort of magical-extra-heart-slash-power-source thing, or if there's another spirit/demon being bound into the person. I ... actually gave some thought to that being a question in-universe. As in, even those vampires that know there's something bound in not knowing exactly what, because it's just been that long since the original spell was cast, and the original sorcerors not leaving very good (or, in fact, any) notes, and not telling the original vampires themselves, on the grounds that your supernatural supersoldiers don't necessarily need to know how their shiny new magical abilities work to know that they do, and could we get to the part where you use them, already? Preferably before we're overrun, thanks?
But ... The main question still stands. Am I actually talking about vampires at all, here? As in, can I call them vampires? Because it's mostly a possession/spell/supernatural-super-soldier deal, rather than vampires-as-a-species, so ... *shrugs* 'Vampire' is a fantastically loose term, and the original folkloric vampires were demonic-possession cases themselves, so it's not like there isn't precedent, but ... Yeah.
Am I talking about a vampire story, or have I got something else altogether? Also? Wow, that got long. *sheepish*
Vampires just ... fundamentally don't make sense, to me. Or at least, the modern, pseudo-scientific versions thereof. Vampires that are essentially magic, like the original folkloric vampires, on the other hand, make a lot more sense. Because, you know, magic runs on different rules.
The original vampires were, from what I can see, basically demons/spirits who possessed handy corpses in order to affect the physical world (and drink blood). They had nothing to do with the person who used to inhabit that particular body. They weren't 'turned into' a vampire, in the sense of a person switching species, like a lot of modern vampires are. They were a completely different being possessing a human body. And the blood drinking doesn't appear to have much to do with keeping the corpse going, and more to do with being something the spirit/demon needed and used a possessed corpse to get. As in, the body was the tool to get the blood, not the blood was the tool to keep the body (though, if drinking blood increased the demon/spirit's power, it may have allowed them to keep the body going - possibly it's a bit recursive). The blood is not for its inherant physical nutritional value (of which, I gather, blood doesn't have much) that keeps a body going, but for some magical/spiritual value that keeps the demon or spirit going. Which, provided you are prepared to accept 'magic demon/spirit' as an explanation in the first place, actually makes a lot more sense.
Yes, I did just say 'if you accept magic as an explanation, it makes a lot more sense'. But, well, mythical monsters, people. If you're going to have a vampire in the first place, you might as well just go the whole hog and call it magic/paranormal/spirit, rather than trying to shoehorn in a pseudo-science explanation that does not, in fact, explain much of anything.
*deep breath* Anyway.
So. If we're riffing off the traditional, magical/demonic-style vampires, who function via possession, can we bring in some of the more interesting aspects of modern-style vampires too? Because while demons possessing corpses is cool if you need mooks and/or ghoul type enemies for a story, they don't really allow for a lot of the interesting parts of vampires - things like, you know, personality, tragic pasts, mystique, human-inhuman angst, transformation trauma, that sort of thing? To be fair, on a scale of demonic possessions, if you're stuck with the corpses of people who are already dead and therefore not in a position to protest, it ... sort of doesn't imply much about your capabilities as a demon, does it? I mean, hard to be cool and badass and mysterious if you're essentially a glorified supernatural graverobber (not that vampires have an easy time being cool and badass and mysterious anyway, but ... 'nother rant entirely). Plus. While it might be possible for said spirits/demons to be interesting as characters in their own right (now that I look at it, possibly there's a story there about the disenfranchised demon classes, too weak to do other than pick up leftovers), you don't get any of the 'human turned into a monster' angles that seem to be so much a part of the modern vampire's mystique.
You could, I suppose, if this is a spiritual rather than a demonic possession, bring back the spirit of the corpse's original owner to possess it. Which, actually kinda cool. And desperate (on the part of the person doing it, I mean). And definitely good story material. The vampire is essentially a blood-powered poltergeist possessing its own body. I'm sure I've seen that somewhere, and it's a better (to me, to me, I realise only this) story that 'person suddenly randomly switches to another species who can absolutely survive on meager amounts of blood despite the body still being a full-sized human body' ... Um. Note to self, ease up on this point, cease the ranting, yes ...
But you could also ... Well. You could also skip the whole 'corpse' part altogether, couldn't you? If you wanted a human-turned-into-a-monster-who-needs-blood angle, I mean. You could ... have the demon/spirit/magic possess a living human. A fully functional human body that still does the human body things, and the blood is for powering the demon/spirit/magic, as a kind of supernatural parasite/symbiote who gives supernatural powers/strength/invulnerability as its end of the deal. That makes sense, right?
That's sort of where I was thinking of going for this story.
That the 'vampire curse' is actually a result of an ancient spell, binding some form of magic (or possibly a demon or spirit) to a living human in order to give them the power to protect their people, powered, as so many heavy juju spells are, by blood sacrifice. The way it works would be that the spell/demon allows the human to utilise supernatural strength and other abilities, in return for a sacrifice of blood. The more blood it received (or, crucially, the better class of sacrifice), the more supernatural shit it could enable the human to do. It was still the human's responsibility to, you know, eat, and keep fit, and keep their own body functioning. The spell/demon was an extra, not the human themselves.
In the universe I'm thinking of, the humans in question would have, originally, been carefully chosen champions who could be trusted, presumably, not to abuse the power they were given/not to abuse the blood sacrifices (initially sort-of-willing by a desperate populace) made to allow it/at least take the sacrifices from the enemy rather than the people they were supposed to protect. And then, if under serious assault, either by other humans or supernatural predators, with said champions being destroyed in battle despite best efforts, maybe people started editting out things like, say, the selection process, the training parts, the 'you have a responsibility to protect us' parts. Maybe they can't make them fast enough (this is biblical-style, stone/bronze age style supernatural wars, I'm thinking), and they start giving the vampires they've already made the ability to pass on the spell in the field, to whoever is handy to get the current job done (I'm thinking they only pass on a partial version - extending their spirit/demon/spell to another person, unless the original vampire dies and thus passes the thing wholesale - hence later vampires becoming more powerful if they kill their sire). So vampires can make other vampires, possibly not with the best version of the spell possible, in desperate circumstances where people stop being really picky about who they're giving this power to.
I'm thinking the immortality part of it also wasn't part of the original aims of the spell. That they only figured out later that a human bound with this curse/to this spirit would last as long as the magic/spirit did. That they couldn't die. But they could age, unless they made the sacrifices to allow the spirit to keep them young (expenditure of power, requires fueling). And that ... that could have gone some truly horrifying places, in the early days. If one of these champions say, stopped making the blood sacrifice, lived out his life, got older and older, and didn't die. Because it's the human's job to take care of the body, not the spirit's, and without blood to power it, the spirit can't help anyway. And then they figured out, after it was already physically too late, that the spirit could compensate for the physical degradation with supernatural abilities, provided it had sufficient blood sacrifice to allow it, but because they'd let things get that far to begin with, it takes more and more to compensate. So you basically have a desperate spirit/spell chained to a degrading human body that won't die, with a human consciousness along for the ride, compensating as best it can but taking ever-increasing amounts of (other people's) blood to manage it. I'm guessing, under those circumstances, even if the human had been a champion to begin with, they wouldn't remain one long -_-;
So ... basically, the vampires were originally what amounts to a supernatural super-soldier program gone horribly wrong. And over the time since then, they've lost the knowledge of their origins, so later humans-who-become-vampires don't know that their own body is still alive in its own right (I mean, they still breathe and have heartbeats and things, but they don't register properly what it means), that they need to take care of it as if they WERE still alive, so they make the same mistakes, over and over - which is where we get the build-up of vampires myths, the idea that they're undead, etc. Later vampires become predators, or think they're meant to be predators, or choose to pass the spell to naturally predatory people on the grounds that they'll survive the demands of the condition better, and basically just generally devolve from the protectors they were originally meant to be to a group of, basically, magical serial killers. They probably don't last too long, individually, because taking more and more blood kinda tends to get you noticed by people.
There are ways around it, and things to make it harder for the spirit to do its job, which is where we get some of the traditional vampire weaknesses/myths. Sunlight (particularly sunrise/set) traditionally interferes with magic, so the vampires-are-weak-in-daylight thing could come from that. Vampires who did keep up their human body won't have half the same problems vampires who've been running solely on the spell's power would, because if the spell doesn't have to do as much work, it doesn't get affected so badly - meaning younger vamps and vamps who've taken care of themselves can probably go out in daylight. Holy items, etc, probably count as foreign magical/spiritual influences fouling the spell's/spirit's ability to function. Not able to enter dwelling places without permission is a standard problem for spirits/demons anyway.
And there are ways around it, so you can have your 'friendly neighbourhood vampires', and vampire main characters that aren't necessarily doomed to become ravening bloodthirsty monsters needing to be put down. Going back up to the idea up there, blood powers the spell/spirit not according to the rules of a living-creature-requiring-sustenance, but according to the rules of magic and sacrifice. So it's not the amount or even quality of the blood itself, but the quality of the sacrifice by which it is taken. Some sacrifices are more potent than others. Sacrifices involving death, obviously, but that's not exactly the heroic route. But things like, willing sacrifices meaning more than forced ones, sacrifices made from a position of weakness (if you've less to start with, offering the same amount matters more) eg hurt or wounded people, sacrifices made unselfishly rather than sacrifices aiming to get something from the vampire (like, 'if I give you blood, you protect me from the demons' being less potent that 'if I give you blood, at least one of us might survive this' or 'you're hurt, you need blood'), sacrifices from loved ones (again, not very heroic, though - at least if it's deliberate on the vampire's part), etc.
Also, stacking the deck in your favour by keeping up your body on your own, and keeping the big supernatural displays to a minimum, also really helps, and makes you less vulnerable to things interfering with the spell, for the basic reason that the less work the magic has to do, the less it costs you, and the less you're affected when it stops working/works less well. Vampires past a certain age are going to have problems regardless, because keeping you young will start taking effort, but small and regular sacrifices should work, keeping it up rather than trying to regain it all at once. Catastrophic events, though, like grevious injuries, or periods of enforced captivity/starvation (both of human food and blood) will probably do severe damage - once you lose it, you can't get it back. And the basic traditional vampire killing methods - decapitation, immolation, destruction of the heart/head, destruction of the body as a whole - work pretty well. Past a certain degree of physical damage, the spell/spirit simply can't keep functioning, and both it and the human it's attached to let go.
... Um. Right. That was the idea. And, yes, I've given it quite a bit of thought. Though I still haven't decided whether the curse itself is just a magical construct, sort of magical-extra-heart-slash-power-source thing, or if there's another spirit/demon being bound into the person. I ... actually gave some thought to that being a question in-universe. As in, even those vampires that know there's something bound in not knowing exactly what, because it's just been that long since the original spell was cast, and the original sorcerors not leaving very good (or, in fact, any) notes, and not telling the original vampires themselves, on the grounds that your supernatural supersoldiers don't necessarily need to know how their shiny new magical abilities work to know that they do, and could we get to the part where you use them, already? Preferably before we're overrun, thanks?
But ... The main question still stands. Am I actually talking about vampires at all, here? As in, can I call them vampires? Because it's mostly a possession/spell/supernatural-super-soldier deal, rather than vampires-as-a-species, so ... *shrugs* 'Vampire' is a fantastically loose term, and the original folkloric vampires were demonic-possession cases themselves, so it's not like there isn't precedent, but ... Yeah.
Am I talking about a vampire story, or have I got something else altogether? Also? Wow, that got long. *sheepish*
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