Ripping The Vampire A New One

Beautiful skins that hide terrifying monsters has been done by The Dresden Files.

Although, there's no reason why you can't do it, but different. It's a good idea.

Easy enough fix. Exaggerate the trope. They had pretty people that were really monsters? You have The Beautiful People that are really Humanoid Abominations. Then rip apart all the fantasy and escapism that might have come from that, and show exactly how fucked up such beings would have to be, both mentally and physically. I imagine they'd have a total (psychotic) break from reality, and wouldn't even be able to appreciate humans as sentient beings. Like Dr. Manhattan, but much, much worse. Or, put another way, humans who've been changed so much by being a vampire that they're Human Aliens / Starfish Aliens / Humanoid Abominations, since we all know nobody in Real Life could ever handle superpowers like how the modern vampire usually has...

edited 9th Jul '11 4:45:59 PM by USAF713

I'd go the American Vampire route. Bring vampires back to their bloodthirsty, violent roots. Also, let's exploit the whole blood as an aphrodisiac angle. In issue four, after "feeding" off of Henry, Pearl makes out and makes sweet, sweet, love to him.

Now there's an idea: fangbangers. A whole subculture who let vampires feed off of them and then fuck eachother like mad rabbits. I know that a loss of blood increases alcohol buzz, why not orgasm length and quality?

Except that would be romanticizing the usual modern conventions. Deconstruction is tearing it down and showing that it definitely sucks and wouldn't be fun in real life as usually presented. The sex really has to go if you want to seriously do that with modern vampires... that, or you must utilize liberal helpings of Fan Disservice.

How about we introduce a vampire fetish for menstrual blood, then?

Further, we could also explore the possibility of certain blood types as drugs. Maybe we could have vampires mainlining type A positive, or vice-versa for humans. Maybe we could make it that vampire blood is the new heroin for humans.

edited 9th Jul '11 5:59:21 PM by EnglishMajor

Firstly, ew.

Secondly, it sounds too much like True Blood (which, although I've only seen a little bit of it, is more reconstruction than deconstruction). Besides, I thought we said there would be no vampire societies? Well, for humans to get at vampire blood, they'd have to know about them in significant quantity and be able to access them easily. That would probably require some kind of secret vampire society.

How about having human blood be a simultaneous addicting substance for vampires and a biologically destructive agent? Like, they can't get enough, but at the same time, it destroys their bodies? Conversely, although the vampires may have some kind of venom (paralysis? Sounds like a good hunting tool), which might not cause vampirism, perhaps their blood does? So any vampire hunters could only kill about one before getting the disease, leading to absolute 100% occurrence rates of literal He Who Fights Monsters via You Are The Demons...

Maybe we should think about deconstructing the "turning ritual".

Unless it was hollow, like a venomous snake's. The snake's fangs are designed for injecting stuff, but the same design could work just as well for pulling stuff out. Though they'd probably need to inject the person with anticoagulants to keep the blood from clotting their fangs. Which wouldn't be that bad if they were gentle, since puncture wounds don't bleed much, but if the vampire was rough (or someone tried to tear them off) and they tore their skin instead of just puncturing it, the wound would bleed quite badly.

Vampires should be reduced to feral states. Echoing the earlier sentient: throats should be ripped out. Vampires should also have pack mentalities like wolves or raptors.

There's an idea: make our vampires like animals. Vampire wolves or even reptilian vampires (a la the Taipanese vampires from American Vampire. Enjoy.

Make the vampire a solitary monster who is completely about invasion/violation in every way possible. Perhaps they "wear the skin" of the last person they killed, which is what gives rise to the notion that vampires turn other people into vampires.

It wouldn't make much sense biologically to suck something into a hollow tooth (where would the blood go?) - if you went with a grooved tooth, that works (that's what I did).

I read a story once where vampires were just mindlessly violent blood-lusting corpses who grew more inhuman and vicious the longer they were dead and were mentally controlled by Necromancers like avatars or puppets.

I read another story where if you had sex with a vampire you died. Period. Also they smelled like snakes.

If you really want to screw with readers, have them not just drink blood, but literally EAT people. For some reason blood drinking is civilized to people, like wine-tasting or something. Chomping away at the meaty bits though is terrifying.

• Also this was mentioned like forever ago, that vampire societies make no sense, but vampires societies actually do make a certain amount of sense, to be honest (assuming they are human like in their thinking). All vampires are made by another vampire, usually on purpose, so logically every vampire has to know AT LEAST one other vampire, the one that turned them. It's not like they appear out of a vacuum and have to search the world for others like themselves.

edited 10th Jul '11 11:22:52 PM by NoirGrimoir