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redirected from Main.VampireAtTheBloodbank

Vampirism is a nasty, nasty business. By nature, vampires have to kill to survive, and the existence of just one vampire means the death of countless innocent people. Right?

Well... not always.

Some vampires have a moral code and are aware of all the suffering their bloodlust can cause, so they go out of their way to not kill humans. They find other sources of blood such as animals (often cattle) or blood banks, or restrict their sources to serial killers and other unsavory types. This often has drawbacks: The blood either might not be fresh or tastes unpalatable compared to human blood. It allows the story to play up the "can the vampire control him/herself" angle.

The really lucky ones can substitute tomatoes.

A common strategy of Friendly Neighborhood Vampires and Vampire Detectives. Often overlaps with Cursed With Awesome.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Gabriel from Tenshi ni Narumon has been seen drinking tomato juice in lieu of blood.
• In Hellsing, Ceras finds a plastic bag full of blood in her cell, and refuses to gain full vampiric powers by drinking human blood until a dying Pip offers her his.
• Played For Laughs in Rosario To Vampire: Moka drinks tomato juice, which makes her anemic, despite the fact that her bite doesn't kill.
• Arcueid from Tsukihime doesn't actually needs blood since she's a "True Ancestor", but she does craves it badly, and yet she can mostly fight off the urge to bite.

Comics

• A lot of vampires in Marvel don't drink blood directly from humans. Blade's the only one who refuses any type of blood though, relying on a synthetic serum. (Well, besides the species that don't even drink blood to begin with)

Film

• In The Littlest Vampire, vampires survive on cow blood; rather than death, the cows gain vampiric powers briefly as a result.
• In Innocent Blood: Marie can only make someone else into a vampire or kill them, so her solution is to bite criminals and then decapitate them with a large shotgun.
• My Best Friend Is A Vampire: Friendly Neighborhood Vampires can buy blood at butcher shops.
• In the Underworld series, one of the vampires' many legitimate businesses is that of making artificial blood that has uses both for them and the medical community at large.

Literature

• In Discworld, there are reformed vampires called "black ribboners" who fill their urge for blood by becoming obsessed with something else, e.g. Otto Chriek with taking pictures and Maladict with drinking coffee. They still need to drink blood to survive, but they don't do it very often and use animal blood.
  • Doreen Winkings The Countess Notfaroutoe, while quite keen on her husband taking up most aspects of the vampire lifestyle, has told him that he can have rare steak, and like it.
• The protagonist of The Vampire Files, a Vampire Detective Series of novels, "lives" in Depression-era Chicago and visits its slaughterhouses to drink blood from there.
• Chernobog in American Gods. He is something of a God Of Evil in Slavic Mythology, and it's mentioned that he previously worked at a slaughterhouse, killing cattle with a hammer. Given that one scene shows him gaining power by going to a site where serial killers buried their victims, the implication is that he probably could have powered himself by killing people but chose not to.
• Pyotr in Spider Robinson's Callahans Crosstime Saloon. He's an old style vampire, who originally got a job at an inner-city sell-your-blood blood bank, where he became an alcoholic because the blood he was skimming out of inventory mostly came from winos. He eventually gets sober and winds up a regular at Callahan's, where he becomes the resident designated driver. Saying more would spoil the story.
• Trope Namer: The Cullens in Twilight call themselves "vegetarians" because they feed on animals, not people. Actual vegetarians might disagree. Also the animals.
  • Which is one of the many reasons why the general vampire fanbase hates them.
  • It's also Older Than They Think: the term "vegetarian" was featured in lists of vampire slang for Vampire The Masquerade at least a decade before Twilight was written.
• Vampires in The Saga Of Darren Shan don't kill the people they drink from, but the main character still refuses to do it and feeds from animals instead. This isn't quite as nutritious though, and he comes near death.
  • There is also a scene in which a starving vampire steals a blood bag from a hospital.
• In The Dresden Files, Thomas is an energy-based vampire who feeds by inducing sexual desire and then partaking of the emotions. After learning of his true ancestry, Thomas becomes a hairdresser at a beauty salon and is able to survive by making a lot of women feel a little more sexy about themselves. That is, until he gets tortured by the Skinwalker and returns to soulless debauchery.
• Louis from Interview With The Vampire subsisted upon rats when he was first turned into a vampire, for which he was mocked by his sire Lestat as a coward and a weakling.
  Lestat: All I need to find you, Louis, is follow the corpses of rats!
• In one Doctor Who Expanded Universe book, Nyssa is bitten by a vampire and tries to create a synthetic blood substitute so she doesn't end up killing people. It just makes her throw up.
• A children's book titled Bunnicula parodied the classic vampire with a "vampire bunny rabbit" who, instead of seeking out humans to feast on, preyed on all the vegetables left around the house. While ironically this is not quite the same as the trope, it is more true to the trope name.
• The Lightbringer series had a character who, infected with vampirism, fed indirectly, one character leeching themselves and giving her the leeches to eat.
• In The Saga of Darren Shan the vampires don't need to kill when they feed, and instead drink only a little bit. This is in contrast to the Vampanese, who feel it is ignoble not to kill when you feed (their justification being that you preserve a part of someone's soul if you kill them in this manner).
• Averted/Subverted in Christopher Pike's The Last Vampire series. The character will drink the blood of people she has to kill because, well, why let it go to waste? But, she has the power to control people and wipe their memories, and her need for blood (usually) isn't really enough to kill them anyway, so why not feed on humans?
• In The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries, a synthetic blood replica has been developed, allowing any vampire this status. It's a major factor in their deciding to reveal their existence to the world.
• Subverted in Bloodsucking Fiends and You Suck. When Jody's normal source of blood runs dry, she and Tommy decide to try the animal blood route borrow a gargantuan stray cat for such purposes. Not only does it end up tasting bloody awful (even after they deal with the problem of fur), but it turns out that drinking the blood of an alert and terrified ball of fuzz, fangs, and claws takes a lot more effort than finding a passed out hobo to drink from.

Live Action TV

• Moonlight: a vampire working at the coroner's office does a good side-business in bags of blood.
• Forever Knight: Vampire Detective Nick drinks cow blood.
• Angel (and then later Spike after he regains his soul) bought cow and pig blood from a neighborhood all-night butcher.
  • Later, it's apparently "spiced" with a bit of otter.
• In True Blood synthetic blood is sold in bottles for all your Friendly Neighborhood Vampire needs.
• The main vampire in Being Human works at a hospital so he can drink from bags of blood; unfortunately because it's not fresh it doesn't work quite as well.
• Morgan Freeman played a vampire on The Electric Company, who at first was supposed to be Dracula himself but later became Vincent The Vegetable Vampire [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmCQneHAkA]. Response to Moral Guardians or just plain Rule Of Funny?
• An episode of Supernatural had a group of vampires who fed on cows to avoid notice from hunters. Gordon didn't care.
  • The fact that they had to kill the cows is something of a Wall Banger, because it was made pretty clear the previous season that it took an entire coven of vampires weeks to drain a pair of victims. Why not just drink a little from a different cow every night? How much blood could they really need if it takes them so long to kill humans?

Tabletop RPG

• Vampires in Vampire The Masquerade can subsist on animal blood if they wish, but it is not very palatable and only recovers about half as many Blood Points as human blood. Those who feed exclusively from animals are often mocked in Kindred society, and are called "vegetaries" or "farmers" among neonates. In addition, some neonate vampires have been known to engage in "banking" or raiding blood banks, a practice that is frowned upon in Kindred society, not the very least because of the threat to the Masquerade.
  • In Vampire The Requiem older vampires can't feed on animals. Drinking animal blood just doesn't do anything for them. Even older vampires can't even feed on humans - they need other vampires to feed on. A vampire can reduce his vampiric age by going into hibernation for a longer while (25 years per "blood potency" point - 1 is minimum, 10 is maximum, 3 needs humans, 9 needs vampires). This of course may reduce vampire's power.
    • Although the Ordo Dracul have found ways to survive on human or animal blood even after reaching the heights of power. But then again, they're vampiric transcendentalists — it's what they do.

Video Games

• The "vampires" in Fallout3 can be convinced to live off of blood packs instead of attacking people and animals.
• Demons in the Disgaea 'verse are already fairly on the noble side of Noble Demon (except those few Complete Monster types), but the self-proclaimed delinquents of the evil academy in the third game do things like organize blood drives as part of their thing.
• Spike McFang and his cohorts in The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang were Bowdlerized into literal examples. Originally, they ate hearts to recover health; these were changed to tomatoes.

Western Animation

• Count Duckula is a literal Vegetarian Vampire, due to a botched reincarnation ritual (Nanny mistook tomato sauce for blood).

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