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Vampire Vannabe
aka: Vampire Wannabe

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Renfield: I need lives. I need lives for the master!
Jack Seward: What? What master?
Renfield: The master will come, and he has promised to make me immortal!

Vampires are Cool. Vampires Are Rich, and Powerful, and Sex Gods. Vampires can — potentially, at least — live for centuries. Who wouldn't want to be a vampire?

Vampires are surrounded by humans who, while they haven't been bitten, do their masters' bidding in the hope that they will be. Sometimes they're under some sort of mind control, but often they're just willing vampire groupies. How likely their loyalty is to actually be rewarded depends on the vamp, however — they might be exploiting this trope as a not-so-Secret Test of Character in order to keep the bloodline pure.

The wannabe's desire can be justified, if the work's version of vampires are Cursed with Awesome, gaining great powers and few if any weaknesses. This can lead to dissonance if the wannabe is portrayed as a foolish coward regardless of this — perhaps because being a vampire is just inherently evil. Or possibly because the Vampire Vannabe leaves him-/herself wide open to a Pretender Diss, whether from actual vamps or their enemies.

Can work as a deconstruction of the exponential population growth that would result from the more common "everyone bitten becomes a vampire" model — in this case, the familiars may be feedstock as well, with conversion requiring some more complicated ritual the vampire can choose to initiate.

This trope can apply to characters who already have vampire elements, but want to become a real vampire, which can happen to a Dhampyr. However, just pretending to be one or dressing up as one does not count.

Polar opposite of I Hate You, Vampire Dad, although that can be the end result if the gig isn't all it was cracked up to be. These characters are often Goths, at least in their minds, and always Les Collaborateurs, usually Working for a Body Upgrade. A subtrope of Sham Supernatural. Compare The Renfield, Transhuman Treachery. Contrast Super Loser, when being a vampire is no guarantee of coolness, and Emergency Transformation, when the person might or might not want to become a vampire or other monster, but basically has no alternative. If they are seeking to be bitten by a vamp, they are a Voluntary Vampire Victim.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • In Vampire Hunter D, one of Count Lee's minions is in it for the goal of becoming a vampire himself one day.
  • Call of the Night:
    • The story revolves around Kou Yamori, an insomniac middle-schooler dissatisfied with his life, trying to fall in love with Nazuna Nanakusa, a vampire, as a requirement for her to be able to turn him. There is a catch, however: humans are only able to be turned into vampires until after a year since they are first bitten. If Kou can't make it within a year (having been bitten in the first chapter), Nazuna's vampire acquaintances will kill him for knowing too much about vampires. At one point, said acquaintances offer to allow Kou to choose one of them to turn him into a vampire instead so that they won't have to kill him, but he prefers to stick with Nazuna.
    • Akiyama asks Seri to turn him into her offspring so that they can stay as friends and she won't have to kill him.
    • After falling in love with Haru Nanakusa and learning that she was a vampire, Kabura asked her to turn her into one so that she could escape her life as a human, which she saw as utterly miserable.
    • Midori's offspring, LoveGreen, asked her to turn him into a vampire the second she told him she was one, much to her slight amusement.
    • Ten years ago, Kyouko Mejiro allowed Nazuna to bite her in the hopes of becoming a vampire herself. Because she apparently didn't love Nazuna hard enough, however, it didn't work.
    • After learning that Kiku, the girl he's been seeing for weeks, is a vampire, Mahiru decides to compete with Yamori to see which of the two can get turned into a vampire first. After he's manipulated by Kiku into severing all ties with friends and family, however, Mahiru decides that he doesn't particularly care about becoming a vampire anymore as long as he can be with Kiku.
  • Hellsing:
    • Several members of the British army and government betray their home country in the hopes of getting turned. The ones that do get turned are easily destroyed by the Hellsing Organization or indeed by Rip van Winkle.
    • The Nazi army also has collaborators in the Brazilian police force, elderly German officers who are angry about the Major's stalling at turning them into vampires, and possibly the thugs who are dumb enough to attack Alexander Anderson with guns (the latter could also have been actual, if very weak vampires though). All of them soon learn that this isn't the series to be in if you're any kind of a wannabe.
  • Not necessarily vampires, but groups of Homunculi in Buso Renkin are often assisted by humans called familiars, who help the homunculi when possible in the hopes of becoming humanoid homunculi themselves. Failure results in being eaten. There's also the fact that, if they refuse to become familiars, then their would-be recruiter would probably have eaten them on the spot. Not really much of a choice, there.
  • In Jojos Bizarre Adventure, Straizo was originally a heroic Ripple user who fought side by side with Jonathan Joestar against Dio in Part I. In Part II decades later, time is starting to catch up with him even though the Ripple slows down aging. He betrays Speedwagon and kills his men so he can use a Stone Mask to become a vampire. Straizo confesses that he was awestruck by Dio's eternal youth and beauty and wanted the same for himself.
  • Vampire Princess Miyu: A man who witnesses Miyu in action demands she make him a vampire too, gushing about how amazing her powers are. Miyu calmly but firmly refuses, calling him out for just wanting power so he can abuse it, then turns to leave. He chases after her into the fog... and falls to his death when he ends up running right off the building.

    Comic Books 
  • In the graphic novel Life Sucks, Dave and his friend Jerome, who are actually vampires, have a good laugh at a Goth guy who goes around in a black cape using a fake Transylvanian accent. More seriously, Dave's crush Rosa wants to be a vampire, based on her fantasy of vampires being rich, cultured and sexy.
  • There is a Jhonen Vasquez story where a Goth boy who wants to be a vampire for real finally meets an undead guy willing to grant his wish. The results... aren't pretty. The vampire claims that beauty would come with time and patience, which was a downright lie, as the condition only got worse. Though it manages to play it straight and subvert it- while Eric (the victim) is one hideous vampire, the one who did the turning was plenty attractive.
  • Les Enfants du Sang in Preacher. Weird goths who act as groupies to the Lestat parody Ecarius (who is a vampire, but tries to act like a Classical Movie Vampire when Our Vampires Are Different is very much in effect). He leads them on with the promise of eventual vampirism... and once he gets bored with one of them, he kills and eats them. Cassidy, who's not at all nice himself, is disgusted by this and leaves Ecarius nailed to a church roof just before dawn.
  • The vampiric Batman villain called the Monk has a minion named Dala who, in her modern incarnation, is a Goth human who wants to become a vampire. In earlier incarnations she was a vampire herself.
  • The Hack/Slash story Murder Messiah had a normal human serial killer who wanted to become a slasher. He assumed the best way to try to figure out how was by getting Cassie's attention.
  • JSA Classified: In "Nightfall" Dr. Mid-Nite is trying to track down a serial killer who seems to be a vampire and goes to a nightclub which caters to people playing at being vampires. He does actually find the killer there and the killer turns out to be a sick metahuman who'd convinced himself he was a vampire.
  • Spider-Man: In The Amazing Spider-Man (1999) #622, Peter has to retrieve a vial of his blood that ended up at a nightclub for partiers that try to imitate vampires by drinking the blood of celebrities. Much to his bewilderment, the club-goers are dressed like the cast of Twilight ("Is that ... glitter?") rather than the goths he was expecting.

    Fan Works 
  • The vampire AU is its own genre in many fandoms.
  • The Harry Potter fan story My Immortal turns Harry himself into one.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • All the Blade Trilogy films feature Scannable Man versions of these, known as "familiars"; they have the glyph of the vampire who owns them tattooed somewhere on their body. Some of them serve because they believe that it will protect them from being bled dry. Doesn't always work.
    • In the first film, Frost is dismissed as a Vampire Vannabe by the Elders despite him being an actual vampire. According to them, since he was once human and turned into a vampire, unlike them who were born vampires, he does not qualify as a "true" vampire. Rather than wilt under this, he murders the head Elder and then uses the rest as sacrifices to become a Vampire God. That'll teach them!
  • The Vampire's Assistant. In a twist it's the best friend who wants to be the vampire, not the protagonist.
  • Dracula's groupies in various Hammer Horror flicks.
  • The Stranger from 30 Days of Night, who paves the way for the vampires by stealing and destroying the town's means of communication in exchange for being turned. They don't. Notably averted in the sequel. After their resident Vampire Wannabe mercilessly snaps a victim's neck, they actually turn him into a vampire and send him after the good guys.
  • The main character in the Tales from the Grave, Volume 2: Happy Holidays segment "Love Bites".
  • Beetlejuice. Goth girl Lydia Deetz wants to die and become a ghost like the Maitlands.
  • The "vampire" in Transylvania 6-5000 turns out to be a once-ugly woman who began dressing like one to get attention, and continued to do so even after plastic surgery made her gorgeous.
  • The premise of the George A. Romero film Martin. The trope is played with, however, because Martin's "vampirism" is a sexual fetish as well as a form of Domestic Abuse. Vampirism is never treated as supernatural, unlike a lot of other movies. Martin's older-looking cousin has convinced him he's a vampire, and kills him at the end.
  • This is taken to a creepy extreme in Vampire's Kiss, as the protagonist's insanity causes him to think that he's becoming a vampire, something he seems eager to embrace.
  • In the film of Queen of the Damned, Jesse is obsessed with vampires, ignoring her occult organization's pleas to simply observe them. She pursues Lestat to the point of being a borderline Stalker with a Crush. This is later explained when it's revealed that her distant ancestors were actually vampires and cared for her since her birth.
  • What We Do in the Shadows: Many vampires have “familiars”; vampire wannabes who serve as The Renfield in exchange for being turned. The long-suffering Jackie is Deacon’s familiar and is starting to get pissed over his lame excuses to not turn her yet. Eventually, she gets so fed up that she quits and convinces Nick to turn her on the way out, much to Deacon’s irritation.
  • BloodRayne: Kagan and the other powerful vampires have many human soldiers who serve them with the promise of being made vampires themselves in the future.

    Literature 
  • Even Dracula itself has one, of a sort, in Renfield (yes, that Renfield) who tries to emulate vampire immortality, but with a rather mistaken and icky method.
  • In The Saga of Darren Shan, Darren's friend was like this, to the point of blackmailing a vampire to try to get bitten. (The 'vampire' bit specifically is downplayed; he had no interest in vampires before knowing they were real, and being a vampire would have been low on his list of things to become had he actually written said list. He did want to be a natural and unrestrained predator upon humanity since early childhood, though.)
  • Vampire Academy has humans who willingly help the Strigoi in hopes of being turned.
  • The Vampire Chronicles:
    • At the end of Interview with the Vampire, the journalist actually asks to be 'turned', which pisses Louis off to no end, since the entire POINT of him recounting his life-story was to show how being a vampire had made his 'life' a living (undead?) hell. (The journalist ends up getting his wish in Queen of the Damned.)
    • Daniel Molloy (the journalist) actually spends a decent chunk of Queen of the Damned as Armand's companion, constantly begging to be turned. Armand only does it to save Daniel from alcoholism. Daniel ends up losing his mind later, this time under Marius's wing.
    • On the flipside is David Talbot, an old man in charge of an organization that studies the supernatural. Lestat constantly offers to turn him, only for David to refuse on the grounds that he is too old. When David gets a new, younger, body (Tale of the Body Thief), Lestat turns him by force For the Evulz.
  • Terry Pratchett's Discworld:
    • Arthur and Doreen Winkings in Reaper Man. Middle-class citizens of Ankh-Morpork, he is, very technically, a real vampire (who Just Wants To Be Normal), while she desperately pretends to be a "traditional" vampire, complete with Überwald accent, on the grounds that married couples should share things like that. Unfortunately, vampire brides being pale, thin, and aristocratic does not go well with being short, fat and painfully middle-class.
    • Carpe Jugulum features a sort-of inversion, with teenage Uberwaldian vampires giving themselves deliberately mundane names and playing at being Muggles.
      • The Black Ribboners are a further development of the same idea from a much less pretentious angle. Being a traditional Vampire in most of Discworld society (i.e., outside of Uberwald) is not a secure or happy way to live, so the Black Ribboners are (or at least act like) Human Vannabes, at least in the sense of desperately wanting to fit in. Part of this is that they rely on Addiction Displacement to put their focus on something else while getting their nourishment from animal blood, and acting like traditional vampires is a good way to fall off the wagon.
    • Marginal notations in the vampires' edition of the Discworld Diary suggest that one member of Ankh-Morpork's League of Temperance is actually a human who looks like a vampire and enjoys hanging around with them. Even the other League members are fooled.
  • The Twilight Saga:
    • Bella wants to become a vampire. One of the ongoing conflicts of the first half of the series stems from the fact that Edward, who regards being a vampire as a curse, really doesn't want this to happen.
    • The Volturi's human secretary Gianna is also this, working for them in the hope that they'll decide to turn her, but knowing she may simply end up as a snack instead. Unfortunately for her, it ends up being the latter. It's made clear that the Volturi never had any intention of turning her, and were simply keeping her around until she was no longer useful to them.
  • In George R. R. Martin's Fevre Dream, this is how Damon Julian, the leader of the evil vampires, motivates his competent (but not too bright) human servant. However, in this setting, it isn't even possible for humans to be made into vampires. Apparently, Damon likes to string his servants along with the promise of eventually being turned as a reward for their service, then when they're too old to be useful, he abandons them and doesn't even have the decency to end their wretched lives. A good vampire encounters one such former servant and realizes the old man has been murdering and eating people in a hopeless attempt at prolonging his life.
  • Lonely Werewolf Girl has a werewolf wannabe in the form of Big Bad Sarapen's spy, Madrigal. Since Sarapen is operating straight out of the super-villain's playbook and werewolves are born not bit in this setting, you can probably guess how this went.
  • Red Court vampires in The Dresden Files tend to attract groupies like this. Some of them mistakenly believe they can become immortalnote ; others are just addicted to the vamps' narcotic saliva.
    • The short story "It's My Birthday, Too" deals with a somewhat unpopular member of a Vampire-type LARP becoming a vampire and seeking revenge on the group that spurned her. In something of a twist, she's turned by the Black Court, and already looks desiccated despite only being a vampire for a few months. Not that she cares...
      • When Harry finds his brother Thomas (who, incidentally, actually is a vampire) participating in the aforementioned LARP, he has a bit of a freakout and asks Thomas how he can encourage this acting when he (Thomas) knows just how dangerous vampires are. Thomas points out that the whole reason the vampire-wizard war was being fought was so that the LARPers wouldn't ever have to face real vampires and find out what the real thing is like.
  • The Kitty Norville series has several callers who want to be turned into vampires, werewolves, etc. Kitty's advice is always that it is a one-way trip to a life that's not as romantic as it sounds. Don't do it. She also gets a caller who's an actual vampire that's stuck working the graveyard shift at a convenience store and wants to tell the wannabes how "glamorous" being a vampire really is.
  • In Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls, Christian runs into some of these, of course with Poppy Z's vamps being a totally different species, he just tells them he will and then eats them.
  • In the novel Twelve, one of the vampire wannabes isn't a vampire. This is a major surprise to the reader, the main character, and in the sequel, even to other vampires. Being able to pretend to be a blood-sucking torture-loving inhuman monster is not played for laughs.
  • In the Shadowrun / Earthdawn novel Worlds Without End, an immortal elf recalls being confronted by a mortal who'd figured out her secret and demanded she make him immortal as well. She stages a fake "conversion ritual" in which she cusses him out viciously in long-dead languages, then causes him to die of a brain aneurysm.
  • In the first of Neil Gaiman's short stories "Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot," the Fool spends night after night waiting in a graveyard in hopes of being turned into a vampire because of the promise of eternal life. But when he finally explains his motivation to a real vampire, it laughs at him for thinking being undead is anything like being alive.
  • Raven from (the appropriately named) Vampire Kisses. To put it bluntly, she has a fetish for them. Her boyfriend (an actual vampire) constantly reassures her that she has the better end of the deal, though.
  • The Coldest Girl in Coldtown has vampires restricted to Fantastic Ghettoes ("Coldtowns"), along with humans who sneak in in the hopes of being turned.
  • The Parasol Protectorate: Almost all drones serve their vampire lord or lady in hopes of someday being turned. Clavigers serve the same role for werewolves. Generally the supernaturals are being honest about the whole thing, with the instances of conversion low because even carefully selecting candidates leaves them with a rather low chance of surviving the change which only slightly improves over time and exposure. While these people are usually also picked for their usefulness as servants, their masters also tend to care enough for them to not casually risk the remainder of their potentially promising human lives.
  • A strange, tragic example in the Richard Matheson story "Drink My Red Blood!" (read it here): a young boy with mental issues becomes obsessed with the novel Dracula to the point that he believes a vampire bat at the local zoo is a transformed vampire. He ends up freeing the bat from the zoo, taking it someplace quiet, and cutting his own throat as an offering to "The Count". Was he right about "The Count" or was it a dying hallucination?
  • An outtake at the back of Fancy Apartments invokes this trope... oddly. A goth accuses a vampire of being a vampire wannabe and sarcastically suggets he throws sparkles on himself. This makes sense in context.
  • F. Paul Wilson's short story "Midnight Mass" has the Vichy, who are this, though some may also be The Renfield.
  • Son of a Liche has a teenage girl enlist with Detarr Ur'Mayan's undead horde seeking to become a vampire. Unfortunately she accidentally looks the wraith handling paperwork in the eye and ends up less corporeal than she wished.
  • Team Human is an Affectionate Parody of The Twilight Saga, about a girl named Mel who wants to stop her best friend from becoming a vampire. Mel then winds up in a relationship with Kit, who was raised by vampires and also wants to "transition" when he's old enough. Neither are the brooding Goths typical of this trope, though we do see that "vamposeurs" like that also exist.
  • Universal Monsters: In book 1, Joe and Captain Bob discover that Devin Chavarria's boyfriend "Slice" owns a book, The Legend of the Vampire, that's essentially a guide for people like this — it's all about vampire worship, how to become one and similar things. He apparently wants to be one himself, having even filed his teeth down to points.

    Live-Action TV 
  • After Mitchell tells the vampires in Being Human to go clean, one of them finds a chatroom full of these and argues that they shouldn't count, since they want to be bitten.
    • In the fourth series episode "The Graveyard Shift", Vampire Vannabe Michaela makes Hal's first day out in the modern human world very uncomfortable by telling him about her fantasies of blood and slaughter so she can seem dark and interesting.
  • Buffyverse:
    • The Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Lie to Me" features a group of vampire wannabes who think that they were going to be turned. Spike and his crew are actually just going to eat them, though they're willing to turn the one who set this up: an old friend of Buffy who's Secretly Dying.
    • Also, in the Angel episode "Eternity", an actress wants to become a vampire for the eternal youth. After getting a glimpse of soulless Angel and finding what being a vampire was really about, she ran off and never returned.
    • A non-canon Angel comic book has this plot, with a group of Corrupt Corporate Executives trying to use a VERY unwilling Angel and a hired Gypsy to turn rich idiots into ensouled vampires. It works about as well as you would expect.
    • A big part of Simone's plan is to become a vampire with Slayer powers to kill Buffy.
  • One of the clients in The Collector made a Deal with the Devil to become a vampire. She didn't realize at the time, but vampires were completely fictional before she got her wish.
  • CSI has featured this twice; once with a group of vampire wannabes who were teeth-gratingly oblivious to the reality that one of their friends had died ("Suckers"), and once with both vampire and werewolf wannabes, who naturally enough had an escalating rivalry going on over their preferred form of fantasy dress-up ("Blood Moon").
  • Twice in Dracula The Series. First in "The Vampire Solution", when Gustav goes to save his friend Arthur Bauer only to find out he planned to be captured and another time in "Bats In The Attic" Subverted in the fact that Lawrence Lei already is a vampire.
  • The villain of the Fear Itself episode "Something with Bite" was a man copycatting werewolves in the hope of attracting the attention of a real one who could turn him.
  • In Forever Knight, why does every other woman who discovers that Nick is a vampire throw herself into his arms and demand to be turned? As Nick is trying to find out how to make himself normal again, he's not happy.
  • Interview with the Vampire (2022): In 1973, a 20-year-old Daniel Molloy was apparently high on drugs when he asked Louis de Pointe du Lac to turn him into a vampire, and Louis almost killed him for doing so because he believed the brash young reporter was being "disrespectful."
  • In an episode of Sanctuary (2007), a group of college dropouts get turned into vampires, and then quickly fall headlong into this trope, trying to turn their friends into groupies. The resident True Vampire tries to convince them that it's not everything the stories (or even his own papers on the subject) say, yet. Tesla's plan is to make them into vamps over several decades. Presumably, by that point they're a little wiser. He doesn't anticipate one of them crashing his car and dying, which triggers a premature change. He then proceeds to kill all his friends who attended the same rehab clinic (a front for Tesla's research), turning them as well. They then attempt to bite a friend of theirs only for him to bleed out on the floor. Biting doesn't work. Then again, they're not true vampires, and neither is Tesla. All true vamps were killed centuries ago.
  • One human slave of the Goa'uld in Stargate SG-1 is shown to be well aware that he's not serving gods, just technologically advanced and powerful aliens, but he serves them dutifully nonetheless in the hopes of one day becoming a host.
  • Supernatural:
    • In the episode "Live Free or Twi-Hard", the alpha vampire goes on a mass recruiting drive by having his minions target and turn young women interested in being Bella to their Edward (or vice versa). Unfortunately for them, the vampires of Supernatural are much less sparkly.
    • The MOTW in "Monster Movie" is a shapeshifter who chooses to look and act like an archetypical vampire — or sometimes a werewolf or mummy — because he's a fan of (see title.) As a shapeshifter he's hated and despised, but the movie monsters are sexy and powerful.
  • "Fangbangers" in True Blood and The Southern Vampire Mysteries fit this to a T. On the other hand, the main character Sookie is a subversion as she has repeatedly said she doesn't want to be a vampire, she just likes them because she can't hear their thoughts. Actually, most fangbangers apparently have no desire of being turned themselves. They just like to have vampiric sex partners.
  • The Twilight Zone (1985): In "Red Snow", the Communist Party secretary Ivan Povin agreed to become a vampire shortly after arriving in the Siberian gulag because he knew that it would be difficult to survive the harsh conditions otherwise. Although he is initially disgusted by the vampires and fears that they intend to feed on him, KGB Colonel Ilyanov later agrees to be made a vampire himself. Valentina Orlova convinces him that the best way to defeat the Soviet Union is to create further vampires and take it down from the inside.
  • What We Do in the Shadows (2019): Guillermo's main reason for remaining as Nandor's familiar for so long is because he desperately wants to be turned into one himself. Unfortunately for him, Nandor is reluctant to do so, and has been putting it off for 12 years. In season 3 it is revealed that Nandor views vampirism as a curse, and that he cares too much about Guillermo to put him through that.
  • The X-Files: The episode "Bad Blood" has a vampire wannabe who is also a vampire, only a different one: everyone in the town has glowing green eyes and drinks blood, but he also wears fake fangs and follows other vampire movie cliches. The other vampires regard him as something of an embarrassment, as he just draws attention to them and they just want to live quietly.

    Music 
  • Indie musician Scott Wicken had a song called "He Wants to Be a Vampire." "Sleeps all day, hates the beach... goes to the club to show off his ''Gothic! Dance! Moves!''

    Newspaper Comics 
  • Professor Stokes, a villain introduced in a 2020 arc in Dick Tracy, is a vampire lore expert who uses a shoulder-mounted blood extraction machine to target three sisters so that he and not they will inherit a substantial amount of money. The story kicks off with him successfully killing one of them.

    Tabletop Games 
  • "Wannabe Vampire" is a monster in Munchkin. Clerics can scare him off by saying "Ooga booga."
  • A sort of Meta example happens in Vampire: The Requiem. This trope is played straight(ish) with a lot of Ghouls and the blood addicted, but there is a vampire bloodline, The Players, who want to be the stereotypical "cool" vampires. Y'see, the game has five vampire clans; the sexy ones are the Daeva, and the shadowy ones are the Mekhet. The Players are what happened when a Mekhet wanted really badly to be like the Daeva. The result? They gained some of their special powers, but not their actual "cool". Every time a Player fails an action using a power, those who witnessed it see him as the poser he is and are immune to further uses of that power.
    • Ironically, other vampires are at the least wary of them, if not outright scared — because with the way vampires work, something that weak has to have some nasty surprises in store... right?
  • Lahmian vampires in Warhammer are a sect of Vamps so alluring they can control men's minds. Their army list includes mortal human characters fighting for their favour.
    • This is the reason why mortal necromancers are included in the Vampire Counts faction, as the vast majority of them seek out a vampire as a patron in the hope they'll get turned into a vampire if prove to be valuable. Defied by Heinrich Kemmler, who in the lore is noted to have nothing but scorn for those who try to cheat death by becoming less than human.
  • Call of Cthulhu supplement Cthulhu Companion, adventure "The Rescue". Jocko wants to become a werewolf like Rafe Pelton. Pelton has lied to him, telling him he can gain the power of transformation by performing ludicrous and humiliating "meditative rites".
  • In the spoof of Twilight 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons adventure "Dusk", one of the characters is a fake vampire. The Player Characters will probably kill him, thinking he's a threat, or wonder why Turn Undead doesn't work on him. There are also vampire fangirls.
  • Magic: The Gathering demonstrates this trope with the card Chosen of Markov.
  • Ravenloft:
    • Played for tragedy with the Vorlog monster, a human who was being transformed into a vampire's companion — a uniquely powerful vampire spawn created to be Mindlink Mates with their sire, hence their original nicknames of "Brides and Grooms" — only for the vampire to be slain before the transformation was complete. The result is a deranged dhampyr-like creature that tries to be a vampire, but can't, and desperately seeks out companions to try and fill the void missing from its slain creator. And because it's insane with an impossibly idealized image of its creator, its "surrogates" inevitably end up being killed when it decides they're not good enough.
    • The stirgoi of 5th Edition are either humanoids who were experimented on, or stirges — ugly, blood-drinking pests — who drained blood from a well-fed vampire and were transformed into an intelligent humanoid being. At any rate, they're hideous monsters with vampire-ish behavior but none of the charm. Some stirgoi seek a cure for their condition, but others embrace it, and these "would-be bloodsucker aristocrats create stirge courts amid scabrous husk-decorated villas and drain the life from any who balk at their grotesque gentility."

    Video Games 
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • Morrowind has a side quest you can only receive if you are a vampire. A mother recruits you to convince her vampire fanboy son not to be turned. It's impossible to talk him out of it and if you try to fight him straight up, you'll kill him easily. The only way to complete the quest is to fight him and lose, letting him wail on you for a while until he decides that vampires are weak and overrated.
    • The chance to become a vampire is offered as a reward for achieving a certain rank in the Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion.
    • Likewise in Skyrim's Dawnguard expansion.
  • Heroes of Might and Magic 4 had Captain Enric, who betrays his village and frames a random barbarian warlord with its destruction, when the necromancer Gauldoth promises to turn him into a vampire. Later while scavenging the remains of a village under Gauldoth's jurisdiction that was destroyed in a demon raid, Vampire Enric attacks a survivor for her blood, because it's what vampires do. Gauldoth being the way he is, stops Enric and brutally executes him as an example to anyone who harms his living subjects.
  • In The Sims 2, Sims with the Knowledge aspiration sometimes desire to become a vampire, werewolf or witch. Other Sims usually fear becoming anything supernatural.
  • Legacy of Kain: In Blood Omen 2, it was implied that there was a bishop who was working for the vampires in exchange for a promise of immortality. They seemed neither inclined nor able to grant it to him.
    • In Soul Reaver, among the massive amount of cut content was a side-story involving Raziel finding the spiritual leader of the last human sanctuary who used mind control feed her followers to vampires in the hopes of being turned. Raziel would have killed her and learned Mind Control from her soul.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has a street gang working for the Sabbat in hopes of becoming Sabbat vampires via "shovelheading" (a very unpleasant form of turning into a vampire, which few of them would survive). They are used as the muscle in the Sabbat's weapon smuggling operation and are all killed by the protagonist.
  • A minor implied example of the "willing blood donor" variant in Streets of Rogue, normally a vampire biting anyone will turn them hostile immediately even if they are a loyal ally but if they're fully aligned then they'll actually allow you to drink up to about a quarter of their health without complaint.
  • In World of Warcraft, there is a side quest revolving around a Worgen Wannabe. Tess Greymane, daughter of King Greymane, asks her Worgen father to give her the Worgen curse. She wants to understand the plight, struggle, and strength of her people as most Gilneans were turned into Worgen. Her father adamantly refuses, of course. She is given a simulation of the curse thanks to a Night Elf druid, the Wild God Goldrinn, and the power of the Emerald Dream. Reinacting the Battle for Gilneas in the form of a Worgen, Tess gets a taste of the rage but finds it ultimately changed nothing against the Forsaken invaders. Tess leaves the experience learning that she doesn't need to be cursed to understand her people, they are still her people.

    Visual Novels 
  • This is Wilhelm Ehrenburg's entire shtick from Dies Irae. Being born an albino, he shuns the light an wishes to become a creature of the night as the vampires he admires. And in this universe where I Reject Your Reality is taken to the most literal extreme, he is fully able to create a realm of the Blood Moon where he becomes as close to a true vampire as possible for as long as it remains active.

    Webcomics 
  • Parodied in this Wondermark strip.
  • Spinnerette:
    • Cal Warden's army of fangirls, who attack Spinnerette.
    • The Werewolf of London, Ontario has fanboys of his own, though he finds the concept rather less amusing.
  • The Kingfisher has at least one vampire wannabe, who misses her big chance and does not become a significant character: Arsonella Jones.
  • Played for irony in Schwarz Kreuz, where the Vampire Vannabe is named Harker.
  • Hector Marlowe from Charby the Vampirate, whose brother Victor is a vampire hunter.

    Web Videos 
  • During the Outside Xbox playthrough of the Resident Evil Village demo, Jane Douglas repeatedly expressed interest in being adopted into the Dimitrescu household. Until the arrival of Lady Alcina, whom she merely wanted to have step on her.
  • The entire shtick of Vampire Reviews is that (In-Universe) Elisa is a pretentious, unemployed Goth who either believes she is a vampire or aspires to be.

    Western Animation 
  • Played hilariously in the South Park episode "The Ungroundable" when a group of kids pretended to be vampires because it was the "in thing", much to the annoyance of the local goth kids who everyone kept confusing for the "vampires", and Butters wants to join them. Of course, they weren't really vampires but Butters actually thinks they are. Additionally, the Goths attempt to get rid of the Vampire kids by threatening to stake their leader.
  • An episode of Batman Beyond had a man aiding Inque because he was obsessed with her, and wanted to be like her. When the time came to reward him, she only administered half the treatment, leaving him a humanoid Blob Monster.
  • Beavis and Butt-Head once decided that emulating Twilight vampires or werewolves would be a good way to meet girls, so they went searching for one or the other to bite them. They succeeded in getting bitten, but by a grimy deranged human bum whose teeth gave them nasty infections.
  • The CatDog Halloween Episode "CatDogula" had Eddie the Squirrel, keeping consistent with desperately wanting to join the Greasers, begging the vampirized Greasers to bite him so he can become a Greaser vampire. As usual, the Greasers ignore him.
  • Kaeloo: Episode 110 revolves around Stumpy wanting to become a vampire. When Quack Quack ends up becoming a vampire, he follows him around being his slave and begging him to bite him so he could also become a vampire. He succeeds in the end, but he steps into the sun seconds later and is reduced to a pile of ash.

Because a bat's the only bat who knows where it's at...

Alternative Title(s): Vampire Wannabe

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