El Goonish Shive

But if the vampires are making a conscious choice to get help and be Good, that does mean more than if they were just Good All Along.

considering Sam is using his pockets to hide his female appendages and seems to know a thing or two about that kind of thing I'm going to take a wild guess and say He's transition Ft M

It does, but they're still far more dangerous allies than, say, sparkly princess unicorns or something would be. Their decision is commendable, but it's also the product of repressing their natural urges, taking a core element of their identity and bottling it deep down inside them. It's psychologically unhealthy and will produce no end of stress, frustration, and - ultimately - resentment.

Eventually, the strain of trying to put on a happy face and pretend everything's hunky-dory when every part of his body screams at him to rip your throat out and drink from your brain stem is going to get to be too much, and he is going to snap at the worst possible time, potentially after everyone's forgotten that he should probably be monitored at all times for exactly this scenario.

Morally commendable or not, when the most psychologically healthy thing an ally can do is butcher you and your entire crew in an orgy of blood and horror, it's maybe time to look into other allies, because this is not a tactically sound one.

Hell, there's a supporting character of the Dresden Files that can attest to that. I have never known the plight of a monster trying to be on the side of angels until I read that series.

Yeah, and a particularly despicable bad guy forces him to go back to the old slippery slope, by basically starving him into mindlessness, then feeding him victims. It's pretty heinous. Also, Shive's referred to Sam as he.

There's always the "only eat bad guys" solution. Yay for vampiric vigilantes.

Which works until scarcity of bad guys results in increasingly liberal definitions of the term.

edited 21st Oct '14 7:45:53 AM by TobiasDrake

Or they move on to animals. And humans fight their base natures that have survived since we split off from the other Apes and formed our own species.

Plothook!

There are some 'verses where vamps can only feed from humans. Generally because the condition is some sort of curse there but reasons vary.

edited 21st Oct '14 7:50:38 AM by Elfive

Are there verses with creatures who feed solely on vampires and can counter their powers/abilities but, thanks to some magical condition or whatever, are completely vulnerable to plain old unpowered humans?

Jojo has super-vamps that can be beaten by humans that know a particular martial art, but that kills vamps too (which is why they can't use it themselves) so anyone that can take them on can plough through vamps as well.

edited 21st Oct '14 8:36:40 AM by Elfive

Not really, no.

Humans are social animals who form symbiotic relationships, while also being territorial predators, and we behave like it. The main thing that separates man from other animals is the written word; we were able to discover a way to preserve knowledge and build upon the works of our ancestors, and that allowed us to create a civilization where we can fulfill most of our instinctive needs comfortably and reliably, except for those of us unfortunate enough not to be living in the First World, who still get to experience the savagery of nature as embodied through the elements, basic human needs, and other animals, including human animals.

After many centuries of advancement since splitting off from apes, we have managed to become apes with iPhones.

Also, humans aren't compelled to evil by merit of existence, making them not a good standard by which to measure this point by in the first place. As I mentioned earlier, the entire question is a Fantastic Aesop, as humans are neither Born Good nor possessing of Evil Nature. Humans are three-dimensional beings who have the freedom of choice.

edited 21st Oct '14 9:02:02 AM by TobiasDrake

Also current terminology prefers amab and afab / trans woman and trans man.

Mt F and Ft M are no good?

In some of the older generations, it will still be used, but Mt F and Ft M imply someone is BECOMING a gender. They WERE a guy, but they are BECOMING a woman.

Newer transgender rhetoric does not like what that implies, since it also reinforces a binary that doesn't exist. Amab and Afab (assigned male/female at birth) is gaining much more popularity for that, as well as the reinforcement of "trans woman" or "transgender woman" etc. etc.

There's a clip of Laverne Cox correcting a news pundit who said she was "biologically male" by saying "assigned male at birth"

edited 21st Oct '14 9:02:34 AM by MrAHR

I think it's because amab and afab cover agender and other gender and all that.

Honestly though the "preferred terminology" changes on such a regular basis that it's no wonder some people have trouble keeping up.

Correct, which is why I'm pointing out instead of going "wtf guys what are you saying this is super rude"

That said I would like to make the minor nitpick that when someone says that someone is a "biologically male woman" the "male" in there is referring to her chromosomal sex, not her gender. As such it is (probably) entirely accurate, if a tad clinical.

edited 21st Oct '14 9:11:07 AM by Elfive

Then there are things like intersexuality muddling things in that area.

How common is intersexuality, anyway? If you'll pardon the term, it seems to be a biological oddity, not a usual thing.

Hence the "probably".

According to this site, it is actually no all that rare. Counting all possible cases, it is about 1% of all people. That is not much, but a lot more than one would imagine. Most people probably met at last one person. I am guessing that the people are not much aware of that because it is such an intimate subject. Not one you would mention to anyone.

Of course, that was counting even the most subtle cases. The more self evident "intersex' cases are around one in one or two thousands. Between 0.1% and 0.05% of all cases, which is a lot rarer. Even then, it is a sizable number when you think about it.

edited 21st Oct '14 10:34:23 AM by Heatth

@17972 To be fair, that site repeatedly references a study that has had its findings questioned for accuracy. I don't know if I'd want to take that 1% as fact.

I think one major stumbling block in regards to determining just how many individuals count as "intersex" is that there's disagreement as to just what conditions qualify for the term. There's of course arguments for things like various expressions of Kleinfelter's (47-XXY chromosomal typing), although even that isn't universal (not every person with 47-XXY manifests elements of both male and female sexual organs). There are questions about 46-XY individuals with androgen insensitivity. Heck, there are even questions about people with 46-XY or 46-XX that just happen to demonstrate certain characteristics outside of the usual for their sex gene expression. Perhaps the easiest to describe of that camp without going into possible NSFW issues would be a male inherently capable of lactation unaided. We're talking about a guy who was born male, presents as male, identifies as male, and can even function as a male in the reproductive cycle... he just happens to be able to produce milk without surgical or pharmaceutical aid. Some people consider such a man to be intersexed, although there's also an argument that such a definition is overly broad.

There's also, of course, the simple issue of the vast majority of people just don't know their genetic breakdown. For all I know, I could be a mosaicised individual (i.e. a genetic chimera, formed by ovular merging during pregnancy) that happened to absorb a female twin in the womb, and thus I have some random body parts that are genetically female. And if that happened to include some parts of the female reproductive system, I could reasonably be classified as intersexed (though as I've had surgery to remove a cyst that would have made such organs obvious years ago, I feel fairly confident in saying that I do not).

In short, that 1% number could be correct, or it could be wrong - in either direction. We have too little information to know.

It also implies that a penis/vagina are inherently male/female, which is something else people would prefer to abolish. And I believe intersex population is about the same as the redhead population.

But no matter what, people are looking to abolish the genitals = chromosome = sex = gender equalizing that tends to be done.

edited 21st Oct '14 11:59:43 AM by MrAHR

If I can be a pedant, amab/afab seem a tad silly. Because they don't actually indicate what someone identifies as, do they? If one takes it literally, they only tell one what gender the person in question was originally prescribed; said person could identify as that still and it wouldn't technically be incorrect to call them amab/afab.

But that's just pedantry, and if people prefer those acronyms, makes sense to me, since the ambiguity there would presumably be made up for with context.