Torkuda said:
Despite knowing that it?s incredibly silly, this is a subject that interests me. In the years following Twilight many people have started arguing about what are the essential elements of the vampire mythos. Before it was thought that, since vampires don?t exist, we can pretty much declare that they are whatever we want them to be. However in recent years people have started to insist that this is not so.
Personally I have had experiences with this. Perhaps that should be a secondary to this subject. Is this an acceptable vampire mythos for a sci-fi series:
Created in the 1500s by a race of aliens wanting to harvest humans as food, the vampires were humans with dragon DNA injected into them. The dragon DNA was supposed to make them more powerful and more compliant, as dragons were reptiles and therefore far less psychologically independent. At first the vampires served their alien overlords and started gathering human children for them to feast on. However over time reptilian mechanical psychology began to battle human emotional psychology. The more passionate or fierce the emotion the better chance it had of surviving as the two natures battled and eventually, the vampires became either cold blooded killers, or hyper idealists, in both cases becoming monstrous. The vampires are sentient and nothing about them requires them to be ?evil?, they just have issues with anything even resembling subtlety.
The vampires have healing powers, but no need to drink blood. They have super strength and speed but no fear of sunlight. They?re often ferocious killers, but generally have no interest in romancing boring humans even if they are into romance. They?re nigh immortal, but can be killed by any natural means that can?t be countered by their very considerable healing powers. Finally, they can morph into completely feral winged monstrosities.
(In my series of course, the ?vampires? are not the original ?vampires?. They have just come to be called that as part of an elaborate cover up for mutants living among us.)
I?ve been given plenty of hate on this and even those who don?t hate the story told me this should be probably a werewolf myth. Honestly, I never thought it mattered. When Lord Maelstrom kidnaps a human child in one of my stories, drains his blood and forces it through the pluming of his girlfriend?s house while dumping the body in the tub? I figured that was bringing horror back to the mythos. Folks have agreed that this is scary, but just not vampires. Thoughts?
Well, at the end of the day you wind up with a lot of people who like things a certain way, typically going back to the conventions started by authors like Anne Rice and PN Elrod. There is concern among that crowd that if people tinker with the concepts too much another fad might get started, and they will miss out on the formula writing they have come to love. It should be noted that another big contributor to this, is White Wolf's "Vampire the Masquerade" which was pretty much a well acknowleged rip-off of Anne Rice's work, early on it was news (on forums like the old FidoRPG Echo before the current WWW was in such heavy use) that Anne Rice would up giving White Wolf permission to use her stuff. Something that apparently came up briefly during the whole argument about whether White Wolf was being ripped off by the "Underworld" movies and the way they portrayed Vampires, as much as I loathe White Wolf I think they should have won, but on the merits that the story "For Love Of Monsters" (which they do own) was pretty much "Underworld" rather than due to the portrayal of Vampires on it's own. During this in some quarters it was hinted that White Wolf didn't actually try too hard, because they were mostly fulfilling a legal obligation to defend the IP aggressively since being allowed to rip them off could be seen as allowing Anne Rice's work to be ripped off, meaning she could potentially sue White Wolf for not trying to defend the IP if she really wanted to... in short a giant mess... that now that I've rambled had little to do with the point of this discussion.
At any rate, beyond a certain point you can only change an established concept so much before it becomes something else entirely. You can't just slap a label like "Vampire" on something and say it's okay because actual Vampires do not exist. That said I'd argue that the basic requirements for a Vampire are 1. Drinking Blood to survive, and 2. Being Undead. Beyond that it's pretty much fair game. The problem I'd have with your particular story is that your "Vampires" are not undead. It's important to note that one of the uncanny things about Vampires that helps keep them popular is that most cultures, including those who never had contact with each other, share myths and legends that basically amount to walking corpses coming back and specifically drinking blood.
I'd add a conditional #3 to that which gets touchy, that Vampires must have an occult origin rooted in darkness. I say this because one common threat to vampire myths is the Vampires being defeated or stood off by holy men, shamans, and/or religious iconography, although this can vary from culture to culture. The popular "Cross" is the symbol of the mainstream, western, Christian religion, but in China for example there have been stories about Vampires killed by bludgeoning them to death with a golden Buddha statue, and apparently ones about Aboriginals, Native Americans, and others having their own holy men chase them off or destroy them. Typically religious iconography and faith is the most reliable form of "Kryptonite" being more universal than even things like Sunlight. I say this is conditional because when doing a Vampire story, especially one that happens globally, you typically wind up needing to decide on the weaknesses of the Vampire, and having it be "anything viewed as holy" gets to be too much of a problem since anything you can think of is probably venerated by someone. As a result you wind up having to basically decide what the "true" religion is, and that can slot people off, which is why a lot of creators have moved away from it, or tried weakly to make the weakness simply be faith rather than any particular power behind it, though that raises questions as to why that works, and brings up the ridiculous vision of some Schtizo in an Asylum defeating Vampires with Breakfast Cereal if he really believes god talks to him through the sound his Rice Crispies make or whatever.
The book "The Keep" (which had a movie based on it) is one of the few sources that had the guts to touch on point #3. It features an apparent "Vampire" unleashed by Nazis in an old keep they are occupying to hold a road, the keep having oddly stylized crosses placed all through it. A jewish occultist they have prisoner who is trying to work out the problems has a crisis of faith when he sees that the cross has power over him, since to him that's a sign that Jesus was apparently real, and it means the Jews missed the boat and didn't recognize or acknowledge their own savior. Of course the twist to the story is that it's not a Vampire, and the "Cross" is odd because it's actually depicting the hilt of a sword. The Vampire is actually a semi-immortal sorcerer, who was imprisoned by a knight who was immortal as long as the sorcerer lived, who used his magic sword to imprison him instead of finishing the job so he wouldn't have to die. The finale is when the hero comes back for the finale, takes responsibility for his duty, reassembles the hilt and the blade, and strikes down the bad guy, fulfilling his duty. Kind of irrelevant, but it illustrates the role of religion in a vampire story, and the potential problems it represents... that story having done it rather cleverly. It should also be noted that the book at least is loosely connected to The Cthulhu mythos as they drop the Necronomicon in there.
At any rate, there you go, there are three, or two for the politically correct, requirements for something to be rightfully called an actual Vampire. Remember it's based on a set of myths and legends, not something that was created overnight for pop culture. Once you diverge from these basic points your away from the legends, and it becomes like saying there are giant bunny rabbits that are actually the dragons of myth. Once you get away from the "Really big, ferocious lizard" it's not a Dragon anymore. That's just how the myths and legends that defined the concept are.
but dragons have their own inescapable presence that hangs around regardless of which of the myriad kinds of dragons you use.
