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Vegetarian Vampire

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All things considered, he's the third-least angst-ridden vampire-mallard in history.

"This authorization requires the undead to show, in detail, how it will meet its feeding needs for the given period in a way that does not involve harm to other citizens, visitors to the locale, or citizens of other locations that could find fault with the city’s harboring the undead in question. Most such plans revolve around the purchase of livestock from which the undead obtains sustenance."
Dungeons & Dragons, "Libris Mortis: The Book of Undead, Chapter 1 All About Undead"

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, or draining the victims to an extent that they're not at risk of dying. This often has drawbacks: the blood either might not be fresh or tastes unpalatable compared to (innocent) human blood. It allows the story to play up the "can the vampire control themself" angle.

The really lucky ones can substitute tomatoes, tomato juice, or even the color red.

A common strategy of Friendly Neighborhood Vampires and Vampire Detectives who feel grief at what they've become. Often overlaps with Cursed with Awesome. These are the friendliest vamps on the Sliding Scale of Vampire Friendliness. Compare the Vegetarian Carnivore, although that trope tends to apply to real-life animals; because vampires are mythical to begin with, making one vegetarian doesn't require the writer to contradict real-world biology. See also My Species Doth Protest Too Much, which tends to be more cultural than biological.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • Ayakashi Triangle: Sosuke Hinojiki is the humanoid development of an ikon, a type of Life Energy eating spirit, and was originally just as hunger-driven as when he was nonsapient. However, Suzu's influence caused Sosuke to suddenly stop wanting to eat life energy anymore, even though he doesn't understand why and gradually weakens to the point of passing out. Once the Fighting Spirit he used to eat with it goes out of control and is destroyed, Sosuke's hunger ceases.
  • In Blood+ Saya takes Vegetarian to the point she, as a general rule, doesn't even drink the blood; instead, she gets regular transfusions.
  • In Dance in the Vampire Bund the Bund's inhabitants use a blood substitute called stigma. It reportedly has a somewhat off taste, causing one of Mina's ladies-in-waiting to briefly develop a candy addiction out of a need to get the aftertaste out of her mouth.
  • Nezuko of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, unlike all other demons, refuses to devour humans. She still has their trademark Horror Hunger, so she keeps a chunk of bamboo in her mouth at all times to ensure she doesn't lose control and bite someone. The tradeoff is that she has to spend a lot of time sleeping to regain energy; man-eating demons seem to run at full throttle 24/7. Another demon, Tamayo, has found a way to suppress her Horror Hunger and can even work as a doctor without being overwhelmed by the smell of her patients' blood; she uses her profession to take blood "transfusions" from willing donors to sate her hunger.
  • Dragon Goes House-Hunting: Victor the vampire reveals that he doesn't drink blood (he finds the idea of drinking such substance revolting) and survives on bugs instead. Dearia believes that his lack of nutrition is the reason why he is unable to use most of the typical vampire abilities, such as transforming into mist and smoke.
  • Nyanpire from The Gothic World of Nyanpire loves strawberries and drinks ketchup. However, when he's away from his owner's home, he once started licking Masamunya's cuts and wounds when he saw some blood coming from his body after he tripped when he was about to attack him.
  • Gunbured × Sisters: Prior to meeting Dorothy, Maria, a dhampir, sated her blood-thirst by drinking from transfusion bags. Dorothy is in fact the first human whose blood she has consumed "from the vein", which lets her transform into a Stripperiffic Super Mode and was implicitly likened to losing her virginity.
  • Hellsing:
    • In the original manga and later in the OAV's, Seras abstains from blood completely except for one instance where Integra offered her some, and then later when a dying Pip offers her his.
    • In the Hellsing TV series, Seras has an aversion to drinking human blood, even from medical bags. Eventually she does drink from medical blood bags, but she never drinks blood directly from a human in the series.
  • Gabriel from I'm Gonna Be an Angel! has been seen drinking tomato juice in lieu of blood.
  • While vampires in Interviews with Monster Girls do get human blood rations from the government, it seems they can live off liver and tomato juice. They still have urges to bite, though, but those are controllable.
  • In Karas the Mikado need to drink blood (other than that they're not really vampires.) Nue is one that's had a Heel–Face Turn and refuses to harm humans. When he's severely weakened from a battle, the moth youkai that befriended him promises to get some human blood, prompting him to grab the boy's hand in a crushing grip. Turns out he meant from a blood bank.
  • Parasyte: Hideo Shimada, the man-eating parasite sent to spy on Shinichi, claims that he subsists on a diet similar to that of humans in order to get closer to him. He's lying, but the end of the story indicates that the surviving parasites restrict themselves to cattle to integrate with human society.
  • Pachira from Magical Pokaan survives on tomato juice, though she still craves real blood.
  • Played for Laughs in Rosario + Vampire: Moka is usually anemic because she usually drinks tomato juice, with the occasional blood transfusion pack.
    • And subverted right off the bat when her first act upon running into Tsukune is to bite his neck. She becomes instantly addicted to Tsukune's blood, commenting that "a girl never forgets her first time." Doubly subverted by the fact that her bite is treated like necking Tsukune, though it does deplete his energy.
    • After becoming a ghoul, Tsukune drinks large amounts of water to offset his thirst for blood.
  • In Strike the Blood, Kojou satisfies his blood lust by drinking his own blood through Nosebleeds (Our Vampires Are Different in this universe; their blood lust activates whenever they are sexually aroused, so in his case, he gets a nosebleed as a result). This however has the side effect to limit the access he has to his powers, as his familiars refuse to acknowledge him as their legitimate master as long as he hasn't drunk human blood. He eventually does feed on his Love Interest Yukina, but with her consent due to the need they had of his powers at the time, and he makes sure not to suck her dry.
  • While not strictly vampires, some Ghouls from Tokyo Ghoul employ alternate methods to survive without having to kill humans. The coffee shop Anteiku serves as a sort of "food bank" for the community, providing human meat scavenged from suicides or leftover kills. Ghouls also don't require very much meat if they're willing to control their urges: a cut about the size of a supermarket meat package will last them a while. This same method was practiced by Touka and Ayato's father, who became known as the "Corpse Collector" because he scavenged Human and Ghoul remains to feed his family. It didn't earn him any mercy, when Investigators from CCG caught him.
  • In Trinity Blood the vampires can substitute a substance called Aqua Vitae for blood, though it apparently tastes horrible. The manga and books state that "water of life" is donor blood in capsules that are dissolved in water. If it tastes bad, it's likely because it's disgustingly thin for their tastes. The New Human Empire considers selling your blood a decent equivalent to "welfare" for their lower-class human subjects.
  • Vlad Love revolves around a young vampire named Mai, who, despite requiring blood to survive, is unwilling to victimize innocent humans in order to get any. Her love interest Mitsugu comes up with the idea to organize a blood drive to provide her with the sustenance she needs.

    Comic Books 
  • In the 2000 AD strip Portals and Black Goo: Night Shift, about a gig-economy delivery driver supplying food to the Monster Mash, one of his regular stops is delivering plant-based blood substitute to a vampire who is both vegan and haemoglobin-intolerent. Which doesn't stop her being subjected to horrific Fantastic Racism from people who assume vampire equals bloodthirsty monster.
  • Batman Vampire features Batman joining forces with the renegade vampire Tanya and her pack, who were originally Dracula's followers until Tanya broke from his control and was able to devise a specially made artificial blood substitute to free them from the need to feed on humans. Batman initially survives on the substitute as well after his transformation into a vampire, but his bloodlust soon overtakes it, leaving him contemplating whether its loss of effectiveness is because he was bitten directly by Dracula or because he's just a more natural predator.
  • Uncle Festus from Alan Moore's The Bojeffries Saga who only drinks Soy Blood.
  • In Disney Mouse and Duck Comics, many strange vampires appear. In one comic, good vampires eat blood soup and blood sausage. One story was a parody of The Twilight Saga with werewolf-like farmers and a beautiful family (husband, wife, and little child) of vampire-like beetroot-eaters. Another parody of Twilight included Daisy as a duck in love with Donald as a member of a clan of vampires eating vegetables. There is also a parody of Dracula where vampires make their victims eat beetroot and feed on victims' energy when the victims turn into beetroot themselves.
  • The Heap is forced to drain animals of blood in order to get oxygen. However, despite being a near mindless beast with almost no memory of his prior human existence, he targets birds, dogs, and livestock, but he usually does not attack men, unless they are evil.
  • Dave in the graphic novel Life Sucks refuses to kill anyone, and as a consequence his vampire powers are weak and he can't use the cooler ones like flight.
  • A lot of vampires in the Marvel Universe don't drink blood directly from humans. Blade's the only one who usually refuses any type of blood though, relying on a synthetic serum. And funnily enough, Blade is allergic to animal blood.
  • My Life as a Vampire also has an alternative to blood that does not cause vampires to gain a Bloodlust.
  • Count Boscoe from Ninja High School is a Friendly Neighbourhood Vampire who subsist entirely on a blood substitute made by an unspecified "benefactor" (possibly Professor Steamhead, as they have met in the past).
  • Cassidy in Preacher does drink human blood, but he only eats people who piss him off/try to kill him/both. Most of the time he just eats very rare steak. He also encounters what seems to be a Classical Movie Vampire, but he turns out to be an utter poser unaware that he could drink animal blood despite Preacher vampires having no Classical Movie Vampire traits (no transforming or control over animals, no problems with garlic) who feeds on his "willing" victims, being unaware you could drink from animals. Cassidy ends up nailing him to a roof to wait until sunrise because catching fire in daylight is a weakness they have.
  • The titular character of The Tenth has used blood banks and villains for this purpose. Notably, he isn't actually a vampire— he's a sort of genetically engineered alien hybrid that needs the blood to prevent himself from Involuntary Shapeshifting into a hulking monster.
  • Vampirella
    • Vampirella herself had her blood substitute serum...in Warren times. Post-Warren times found that too sissy for a Bad Girl. There is always a surplus of villains to snack on; in any case, she will avoid biting an innocent.
    • A story in her magazine had a "vegetarian vampire"...but this is a subversion of this trope, as the story played in an SF setting with intelligent plants and the guy was evil. He met the usual vampire fate - a steak through his heart.

    Comic Strips 
  • SnarfQuest: After gaining the ability to communicate with everything, the gaggaleech is forced to change its diet from blood to fruit juice. Even then, it is extremely annoyed to find that even apples beg for mercy when being drained of their vital fluid.

    Fan Works 
  • The Miraculous Ladybug fic An Issue of Blood puts a twist on the trope; most modern vampires live on animal blood with the occasional supplement of human blood from blood banks to satisfy their nutritional needs. This lifestyle has the convenient side effect of curing a vampire's weakness to both sunlight and silver. However, a minority of vampires still feed solely on human blood, and while most of them make agrements with willing donors, some like to do it the old-fashioned way. One of the latter type coming to town and choosing Marinette as his next victim kicks off the plot.
  • NGE: Bloodlust have an example: Rei's first feeding came up as an emergency. When Maya noticed that Rei doesn't cast a mirror image, she immediately realized that Rei became a vampire and tried to flee. Rei, however, caught and drained her just enough so that Maya won't be able to resist her memory-altering power.note  She also announced that Tokyo-3 belongs to her which the vampire clans didn't give a damn to - good for her since she doesn't have to feed on humans.
    • Somewhat similarly, Kaji apparently doesn't have a problem with werewolf-Asuka releasing her pent-up aggression via massacring street thugs.
  • In Blood of Beauty, after falling in love with Blaze, a mortal, Shadow, a vampire, switches to drinking animal blood.
  • In chapter 3 of Harry Potter and the Pranking of the Multiverse, Harry's multiversal adventures bring him to the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The first thing he does is accidentally create a suggestion spell that spreads through touch and causes all vampires under its effect to go vegetarian.
  • Fluttershy in Nosflutteratu survives by mostly drinking blood donated from the local blood bank, with the occasional drink from a willing donor.
  • Played for Drama in The Rise of Darth Vulcan. Due to Princess Luna including vampire bats in their genetic makeup, thestrals require blood to survive. But since that creeps out the rest of the pony races, they passed a law banning the drinking of blood and requiring the thestrals to use an alchemical substitute that is barely sufficient to keep them alive. Needless to say, Luna is furious when she finds out that Celestia endorsed this.
  • Turning Point: Being a doctor, a humanitarian, and a freshly-sired vampire, Lisa refuses to feed on human blood, be it fresh or in stores. After she grows used to her new state, she decides that she would not be against feeding on animals, regarding how "[a] wolf still deserves to eat." Since humans are vampire's natural prey, animal blood leaves a bad taste in her mouth.
  • In EQUESTRIA GIRLS fanfic You Call That a Costume?, a spell that makes the Main 7 become their costumes transforms Fluttershy into a giant vampire bat. Despite this, she maintains her vegetarian ways, basically making her a giant fruit bat.

    Films — Animation 
  • Gummibär: The Yummy Gummy Search for Santa: Vampiro, one of Gummy Bear's friends, comes off as a stereotypical vampire bat and even speaks in Vampire Vords, but he's shown to only crave fruit juice rather than blood (though the implication of one from the other is no doubt intentional).
  • Neither Dracula nor his daughter Mavis feed on humans in Hotel Transylvania. In fact, Dracula does his best to avoid humans altogether and tries to instill fear of them into his daughter. When asked by a human, Dracula replies that he doesn't like the taste of human blood because it's "too fatty, and you never know where it's been." This, of course, implies that he did, at some point, try human blood. The movie asserts that they instead subsist on bugs, mice, and synthetic blood substitutes.
  • The obscure movie The Ketchup Vampires focuses on a group of vampires who, as the title implies, found a way to live off of tomato products. The antagonists of the film also count, as they eat blood sausage instead of actual blood.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Inverted in Blade.
    • Deacon Frost is exceptionally evil because he wants to industrialize blood production.
    • Played straight with Blade himself, who takes a serum to control his thirst, although he still drinks blood a couple of times when he's injured and needs to heal fast.
  • BloodRayne: Rayne tries to be this after she initially fed on the only person at the circus who'd been kind to her unintentionally, something she now regrets deeply, using animals like rats instead.
  • Daybreakers: A plot point. Over 90% of the world's population has been turned by a Vampire Apocalypse, and are now facing a blood shortage. Protagonist Edward Dalton is one. Not only is he reluctant to consume human blood, he is researching a synthetic substitute to eliminate the need for it.
    • His brother gives him an expensive gift: a bottle of genuine human blood. Frankie assures Edward it is much better than the pig's blood he subsists on. Edward pours the bottle down the drain in disgust.
    • In a meeting with human fugitives, Bennett notices Dalton is weak and tired. She offers him her blood. When he objects, he is told That Wasn't a Request. As Dalton drinks the much-needed blood he looks defeated and ashamed.
    • The setting shows the logical outcome of the need for so much blood: vast People Farms where captive humans are drained. Dalton looks at this necessity with horror; it seems to inform both his personal aversion to human blood and his urge to find another solution.
    • By the end, inverted by Corrupt Corporate Executive Bromley. Even with the artificial substitute available, rich connoisseurs like him will still want the real thing. He has no plans to stop preying on humans.
  • 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.
  • Subverted by Louis in Interview with the Vampire, who tries it initially after being turned because he holds what he calls a lingering respect for human life. He feeds on chickens and rats, but they're not enough to sate his gnawing hunger and they soon become scarce. His sire, Lestat, warns him that while it's useful when stuck on a ship at sea, it's more like surviving than living.
  • Kiss of the Damned: The Connecticut vampire community are all intent on feeding only from animals. Djuna and Xenia both break this in the face of intense temptation. Maia on the other hand rejects this idea entirely.
  • In The Littlest Vampire, vampires survive on cow blood; rather than death, the cows briefly gain vampiric powers as a result.
  • Mr. Busotsky in The Monster Club who survives by feeding on drunks and whose motto is 'feed without greed'. It is implied that his doing so sobers them up, and that he charges for the service.
  • My Best Friend is a Vampire: Friendly Neighborhood Vampires can buy blood at butcher shops.
  • Semi-averted by Caleb in Near Dark, who forgoes killing personally but drinks from the wrist of his vampire girlfriend, Mae. Whether she has to kill more people than usual in order to sustain him in this way is unclear, but the other vampires sure think it "ain't right!" for her to have to feed him.
  • The Vampires in Only Lovers Left Alive prefer to avoid killing people, and usually get their blood from hospitals. Their reasons are partly ethical, but they're also concerned about not attracting unwanted attention or ingesting the chemicals many humans have in their bodies.
  • Otto from Otto; or Up with Dead People is a vegan zombie. He was vegan when alive and now survives mainly by eating roadkill, so he doesn't have to kill an animal or a human being. although he eats the guts of a punker somewhere in the middle of the film, but he was horny and it was kind of consented.
  • Perfect Creature: The Brothers subsist entirely on willingly donated blood by the humans since they are religious figures who believe killing or drinking directly from the body to be sinful, with the sole exception of one named Edgar, who goes rogue and starts feeding on humans.
  • Theresa & Allison: When she's being oriented into vampire society, Theresa's told they have access to many blood banks if she doesn't want to kill for it. Theresa already considered feeding on rats because killing humans for blood left her extremely guilty. However, she'd told this doesn't work-it only makes vampires sick. Theresa signs up with the blood bank program right away due to her guilt.
  • In The Twins Effect, Razaf refuses to kill humans for their blood, and expects the rest of his family to do the same.
  • 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. This is not by choice, though. The non-killing policy was instituted by Victor in order to keep humans from attacking them. A policy he himself routinely violated but strictly enforced. They started with animal blood, then donor blood, then blood substitutes, then cloned blood.
  • The Hong Kong movie Vampire Vs Vampire includes a jiang-shi who is a child and sucks the juice from tomatoes.
  • Vamps: Goody and Stacy are both committed to feeding on wild animals only (like rats). They're part of a whole "Sanguines Anonymous" support group to help vampires do this.

    Literature 
  • 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 murdering people but chose not to... usually. During his initial appearance, Shadow needed to convince him to join their side of the war, and did so with a game of checkers, with the condition that if Shadow lost, he would get his skull smashed by Chernobog.
  • In Anno Dracula, most Friendly Neighbourhood Vampires will try not to feed from anyone who doesn't want them to and can live on animal blood if they have to, but they do have an urge to drink human blood that is hard to control. Two extreme examples appear in One Thousand Monsters: Captain Kostaki has sworn off blood entirely following the events of the first book (and not told anyone this, because he doesn't want to be congratulated for it or seen as some kind of hero) although he very nearly falls Off the Wagon a couple of times. And towards the end of the book, a certain pop-eyed sailor is turned by a Japanese willow-vampire, and acquires a craving similar to a regular vampire's for haemoglobin, but an inability to digest any animal product. So he needs to consume near-liquid, high-iron vegetables...
  • 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 and borrow a gargantuan stray cat for such purposes. Not only does it end up tasting 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.
  • 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 this is not quite the same as the trope, it is more true to the trope name. Pretty hilariously, Bunnicula manages to get a little closer to the trope when it's discovered that he likes vegetable juice more than draining vegetables dry - sort of the "blood bank" variant. With vegetables.
  • Pyotr in Spider Robinson's Callahan's 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.
  • Navarre House vampires in Chloe Neill's Chicagoland Vampires refrain from drinking directly under any circumstances, leading to a not entirely mature but still rather satisfying taunt by a member of another house: Bite me.
  • In The Chronicles of Vladimir Tod, Vlad prefers to drink from bagged blood, only drinking live blood when he can't resist the urge. He is also horrified by his actions immediately after doing so. Otis also tries to do this.
  • In The Unmasqued World of Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I., vampires make do with animal blood or expired donor bags from blood banks. A gray market exists for fresh human blood, although as yet it's not been established in-series whether such illicit suppliers get their stock by killing people.
  • Discworld:
  • 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.
  • In The Dresden Files, Thomas is an energy-based vampire who feeds by inducing sexual desire and then partaking of the emotions. After he nearly kills his girlfriend by overfeeding, 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 is implied (but not quite stated) to return to soulless debauchery. Later events reveal his girlfriend has arranged to let him feed off her consensually, and there is a short story in Side Jobs where he drains a woman who is part of an Apocalypse Cult. So, not quite vegetarian, but not an indiscriminate killer, either.
    • Also his little sister Inari, who very unusually plays this trope absolutely and totally literally, as she is both a vampire sort of and a strict vegetarian, as seen when she gets Harry a tofu pizza after he asked for "dead pigs and cows".
  • Spoofed in the short story "Eripmav" by Damon Knight, in which the vegetarian vampire is killed via a steak through the heart.
  • Zig-zagged in the Evernight series. Most of the friendlier vampires live primarily on animal blood; however even they occasionally drink human blood. Adrian and Celia keep human blood from blood banks in their apartment as "treats", whilst Bianca frequently feeds off Lucas, who actually rather enjoys this. Bianca makes a point of stating that being a veggie vamp is easier for most vampires because humans have a tendency to to scream and fight back (she likens it to trying to eat a hamburger that can punch you in the face). However, Balthazar states that all vampires need to consume human blood at some point, as animal blood alone doesn't cut it and could result in some Sanity Slippage. However, the nicer vampires prefer using blood banks or willing donors than just jumping on people.
  • Done literally in the Extreme Monsters book series with Val, the vampire of the team. His character bio states that he doesn't drink blood like his father and instead subsists on a vegetarian diet taught to him by his mother.
  • In Family Bites by Lisa Williams, the Alfonz family believe in drinking animal blood (in a glass, drained from prepared meat) and leaving humans alone. Except for Cousin Edgar, a nasty-minded traditionalist, and the younger son John, The Casanova who sees turning attractive women as part of his seduction technique.
  • Felix Gomez, the protagonist of Mario Acevedo's Vampire Detective Series, subsisted on animal blood from the time he was turned until near the climax of the first novel. This led his powers to gradually fade to the point where it became clear that he would have to change his diet in order to survive the story.
  • Drew Hayes's Fred, The Vampire Accountant series has the titular character only consume donor blood he obtains in a hospital. He cooks the books for the hospital administrator in return.
  • The Dracula from Dennis Jürgensen's Freddy series has learned to subside on red, raspberry flavored soda, which also happens to have the side effect of removing his weakness to sunlight.
  • In Golden Dawn, Herald makes it perfectly clear that he's only ever drunk goat's blood whilst in the mortal realm. But he has hunted and fed off his own kind whilst in Hell.
  • In the Give Yourself Goosebumps book Please Don't Feed the Vampire!, one ending where you decide to embrace being a vampire have you choosing to live off blood from raw steak, and yes, it does work.
  • In Help! I'm Trapped in a Vampire's Body, a malfunction with the body-switching machine turns Jake into a vampire. Luckily he discovers he can substitute V8 tomato juice before he actually drinks any blood. The former vampire has relied on this method for years due to disgust at the idea of drinking people's blood and is glad to be free of his vampirism.
  • In The Hollows series, living vampires don't need to drink blood at all (the undead ones aren't so lucky). Ivy is completely off at the start of the series; she starts again after a nasty encounter with Piscary.
  • The immortals in the Immortal Guardians series drink donated blood, and are also literal vegetarians when they eat "normal" food (which they also need to consume in addition to blood). Before the advent of blood banks, the immortals would feed on rapists and child molesters.
  • 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!
    • These vampires don't need to kill the victim to drink their blood. However, most do so because blood has an intoxicating effect on them, so they just keep on drinking until, suddenly, there's no more. Also, some older vampires just outright rip off the head and drink from the open neck. It's not clear how they can drain a human body from all blood in a few seconds, but then again they're supernatural creatures.
  • Averted/Subverted in Christopher Pike's The Last Vampire series. Alisa/Sita 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 will avoid killing them if possible - drinking only some of their blood, then wiping their memory. In Monster most of the vampires kill for blood. However, Angela Warner, by the end of the novel, learns to avoid humans and will only kill animals.
  • In the Lee Nez series vampires just plain don't require human blood. The title character buys cow blood from a slaughterhouse and says he uses it for fertilizer.
  • Oliver Johnson's The Lightbringer Trilogy had a character who, infected with vampirism, fed indirectly, one character leeching themselves and giving her the leeches to eat.
  • Bruce Coville's book Monster of the Year features The Count, who drinks only "the elixir of life": V8 juice. Through a straw. He says it feels more natural if he can suck it.
  • Ann Hodgman's My Babysitter Is a Vampire: Vampires can survive on human food, as evidenced by Vincent Graver's little brother Grebiv, who needed it because he refused to drink human or animal blood (in the latter case, he claimed he didn't like the taste, but the vampire explaining this claims it's more likely because he was just too "nice" to harm them). Vincent Graver also qualifies as a part-time vegetarian - while he's explicitly bitten humans with the goal of turning them, he gets most of his blood from a blood bank since in the setting anyone directly bitten by a vampire will become one.
  • In the Myth Adventures, vampires are visitors from another dimension called Limbo. On their home turf, they keep livestock to produce blood; one vampire describes drinking from a living victim as an "acquired taste" that he personally can't stand. Other dimensions' legends of bloodthirsty monsters are the fault of "old money" types going on vacation off-dimension and deciding the local rules don't apply. This also applies to the vampires' colonized dimension of Kowtow, only differing in who is being kept as livestock.
  • Nathaniel Keene: the main character drinks porcine blood, which - to him - does not smell nearly as appetizing as human blood. He almost slips up a few times.
  • Brian Lumley's Necroscope universe features vampires that are everything you'd expect and more. When Harry Keogh is finally turned, he settles for near-raw steak until his hunger for blood threatens to become insatiable, at which point he leaves Earth for the vampire world. There, among others of his kind, he makes the fatal mistake of still trying to restrain his vampire nature. It doesn't end well for him; he is crucified and is forced to watch as his son is shot dead and his vampire girlfriend is raped repeatedly, the agony only ending for her when she coughs up and arms the grenade she was holding in her throat and bites her rapist's head to stop him from escaping - yes, explosive decapitation works - and for him in nuclear obliteration.
  • In The Nekropolis Archives, an artificial blood substitute called aqua sanguis is available for socially conscious vampires who do not wish to prey on humans.
  • Kostya and his parents in the Night Watch (Series) are introduced as this as well as Friendly Neighborhood Vampires. They're nice people and besides drinking animal blood, it's shown that Kostya, a medical student, figured out the benefits of donated blood (and it's discussed how vampires had a role in advances in this area of medicine because it helped them to feed without killing). This is subverted later on though in the final book of the series, Kostya's father is overwhelmed with grief and rage at his son's death at Anton's hands, and so he breaks being a Vegetarian Vampire and powers himself by killing 50 people.
  • Vampires in Path Of The Hero must drink blood but there are blood fruits on the island where they are bred.
  • In Christopher Farnsworth's President's Vampire series; Nathaniel Cade doesn't drink human blood, except for the one time when he was made a vampire. He only feeds on animals, refusing even voluntarily donated or blood-bank-derived human blood because he feels that he is damned from his first feed and refuses to go further. As a result, he's less powerful than other vampires, can't shapeshift or fly, and it's said that his health will eventually deteriorate.
    • Demonstrated in the third book Red, White & Blood; after Cade is brutally injured in battle with the Boogeyman, he is fed human blood through IVs and donations while he is utterly incapacitated and in no position to protest, which restores him to health in a few days.
  • A zombie version in Quazi, where the Quazi are the "ascended" versions of the Risen. While the Risen are your typical mindless flesh-eaters, the Quazi are unable to digest animal proteins and only eat organic plant food. And it's not just a personal choice. A Quazi, who eats meat or drinks milk, will vomit it back in short order.
  • In the Ravenloft novel Vampire of the Mists Jander Sunstar in centuries he existed on Faerûn (after getting rid of his vampiric master and before being caught by the Demiplane of Dread) fed mostly on lowly animals. When it wasn't enough, on inmates of an insane asylum — they didn't object much, especially those who saw worse things all the time and eagerly informed him on details.
  • The vampires of The Reformed Vampire Support Group subsist on guinea pigs, although they have to take supplements to counter both the lack of certain nutrients that are only found in human blood and the impurities that animal blood contains. It's also incredibly messy (the protagonist prefers to feed in the bathroom, to make cleanup easier) and results in them lacking the strength a vampire who feeds on human blood has — in addition to causing nausea and a general malaise. But they consider it better than the alternative since, in-universe, vampirism spreads like an infection - causing them to turn any humans they bite.
  • Retired Witches Mysteries: Or vegetarian werewolf, as the case is. Larry Tyler, a middle-aged werewolf, is a literal vegetarian and confirmed pacifist who lives on a boat, keeping himself anchored far enough out to sea during the full moon in order to keep himself from hurting anyone, and drinks a special herbal tea that helps as well.
  • Downplayed in the Sabina Kane series. Sabina does feed on humans, but not indiscriminately: her preference is to go to a bad part of town and wait for someone to try to mug or rape her.
  • 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 before his friends convince him to start feeding properly. Mr. Crepsley is known to keep bottles of blood which he has with meals like wine, and at one point a starving vampire steals a blood bag from a hospital, though preserved blood is likewise noted as a poor substitute for feeding directly.
    • Taking things more literally, a cook who is preparing a (mundane) meal for Darren asks him if he is vegetarian, which is treated by the other characters as a stupid question.
  • Adrian de Brezé in The Shadowspawn feeds from a willing girlfriend, and off stored blood (honestly bought and paid for) when she is not enough. The latter supposedly tastes horrible.
    • In the Shadowrun novel Crimson, the main character is a vampire who's found that he, along with the ghouls he hangs out with, can feed off Insect Spirits: normally both ghouls and vampires in the Shadowrun universe need to feed off the life-Essence of metahumans, but Insect Spirits are apparently just barely close enough to being human that they can be used instead. Though they taste like shit.
  • Siren Novels: Sirens gain power by seducing men, then luring them into the ocean and drowning them. Some sirens try to live without killing anyone, instead getting smaller energy boosts by drinking large amounts of salt water and flirting with or singing to men. Their lives are much harder than other sirens - they're constantly thirsty for salt water, they're both physically and magically weaker than others, and they tend to die young.
  • 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.
  • There's a book called Suck It Up where the main character is a vampire who's never drunk blood of any sort; instead he lives on a soy substitute.
  • The Twilight Saga: The Cullens call themselves "vegetarians" because they feed on animals, not people. It is the reason why they have golden eyes, as vampires who feed on human blood have dark red eyes. However, they aren't perfect — Edward went through a five-year period (1927-1931) where he left the family and fed exclusively on human criminals, but eventually gave it up and returned to his animal diet; Emmett is mentioned to have lost control around two "singers" — humans whose blood smelled particularly attractive to him; and Jasper, among the newest members of the coven and the one still having difficulty adjusting from his previously human diet, instigates the events of New Moon when Bella's paper cut blood briefly overwhelms him. The Cullen family's allied coven, the Denali, also practice the same diet and have the same golden eyes.
  • Stefan Salvatore from The Vampire Diaries. Stefan refuses to drink human blood and kill innocent human life so therefore, he has chosen to live on a strict diet of animal blood. Stefan normally hunts forest animals such as birds, deer, rabbits, and squirrels
  • 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. Another one lives on a fancy Long Island estate, and keeps horses for both riding and blood.
  • Samantha Moon of the Vampire For Hire series had subsisted entirely on blood from the butcher shop for the six years before the start of the first book. It's frequently noted that it allows her to survive, but the various chemicals and impurities make her sick to her stomach. Human blood, particularly blood drawn recently from the living, not only tastes infinitely better but also gives her more power. Although she has yet to drink directly from an unwilling victim, she's been sliding down a slippery slope toward that end.
  • Vampire High is a very clever comedy book about a normal boy who, after flunking out of every single one of his classes, including homeroom, is sent to a high school for vampires, being among the only humans there. At some point in it, one of his vampire friends requires blood or else he'll end up dying. How does his friend get it? By having his mother use a needle to draw blood from the main character and transferring it to him. Other than that, they usually just get it from the blood bank.
  • Karen Russell's "Vampires in the Lemon Grove", a short story about a married vampire couple, explores the idea that vampires don't actually need to drink blood at all, but are merely plagued by intense and unquenchable thirst, which some of them attempt to quench with blood. The husband Clyde (who narrates the story) notes that they spent years seeking out a decent alternative to blood once they realized that they didn't need to drink it, sampling around a thousand beverages from all around the world ("liquid chimeras" that included "mint tea in Fez", "Cherry Coke floats in rural Alabama", and "jet-black coffee in Bogotá") before finding that Sorrento lemons quenched their thirst. Plus: before Clyde's wife turned his lifestyle around, he notes that he tried to emulate most stereotypical traits of vampires that he learned about from stories (he wore a velvet cape, avoided garlic and sunshine, napped in a coffin, etc.), implying that real vampires only drink blood because they assume that they're supposed to.
  • In Void City, some vampires, such as Evelyn, choose to subsist entirely on animal blood. However, this isn't an option for Eric, as his body rejects all but human blood.
  • Emiel Regis Rohellec Terzieff-Godefroy (Regis for short) from The Witcher saga takes this trope a step further, completely refraining from drinking it - blood in this universe is essentially alcohol for vampires, and he's undergoing a rehab.
  • Nastily averted in A Wolf in the Soul. In fact, it is suggested that Greg's vegetarianism as a human makes the carnivorous behavior of his wolf form a lot harder to control.
  • In The Zombie Knight, Ibai Blackburn is an aberration who has never eaten a human soul, only animals (and he even put the animals' bodies to productive use). During the Marshrock battle, he was deliberately offered several captured reapers to eat and a promise that no one would know, and refused.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • Angel bought cow and pig blood from a neighborhood all-night butcher. During his lowest hours after getting his soul back, Angel drank blood from rats. Later, it's apparently "spiced" with a bit of otter. At one point it was also spiked with Connor's blood, making Angel more violent than normal.
    • Spike was initially forced to become this after being chipped, also relying on animal blood from the butchers' to survive as he could no longer bite anyone without getting zapped. After he earns his soul, he continues to partake in this voluntarily even once the chip has been removed.
    • Harmony was told to do the same when Angel hired her to work at Wolfram and Hart, although since she only had a contract and not a soul, it's not entirely clear whether she stuck to the diet. Given that one episode centered around her thinking that she'd unknowingly drunk human blood and panicking that the blood inspection would pick this up, it seems pretty clear that she did. For a while, anyway. Indeed, she claimed, at the beginning of her term at Wolfram and Hart, that she had already been following the diet of a good vampire before the company policy forced it on her. "I'm totally off the human blood. That's not even a thing." She seems to be telling the truth (though maybe with the exception of some relapses); there's never an indication to the contrary.
  • In Being Human, vampires' need for blood is more of a craving than a biological necessity. The main vampire works at a hospital so he can drink the donated blood, but it's not fresh, so it barely does anything for the cravings. It's unclear whether vampires really can survive indefinitely without any blood at all.
    • In Being Human (US), vampires are shown surviving for decades buried underground without blood—though they come out desperately hungry and weak. Vampires can live on bagged human blood, which lets them control their cravings but (as Aidan says) "tastes like ass".
  • While Henry Fitzroy in Blood Ties (2007) feeds on humans, he makes it a point not to kill anyone and usually does it during sex, so the "donor" thinks he's just being kinky. He does vaguely mention that, occasionally, someone does die. However, the person he mentioned in relation to this was not, in fact, dead but a vampire.
  • A Discovery of Witches: Matthew only appears to feed on animals, along with the rest of his family. An exception is when he attacks Gillian.
  • Morgan Freeman played a vampire on The Electric Company (1971), who at first was explicitly said to be Dracula himself (and who was shown to attack people for their blood) , but in one skit he was called Vincent The Vegetable Vampire. Response to Moral Guardians, a bout of Early-Installment Weirdness, or maybe they were just talking about the letter "V" that day and wanted an Alliterative Name?
  • First Kill: Juliette is a bubbly, sweet-natured teenage girl who rambles adorably and is also a newly developing but capable vampire.
  • Forever Knight
    • Vampire Detective Nick Knight drinks cow blood rather than feed off humans; his sire LaCroix finds this disgusting. He's also shown trying various green chemicals that Natalie mixes up to ween him off blood; unfortunately Nick finds them disgusting. And on one occasion Nick buys a burger to eat, and when his human partner Schanke tastes it, he finds it disgusting. It's tofu.
    • There's also a vampire in season 3 who prefers to feed on rats, but that's nothing to do with ethics; apparently whatever species you first feed on as a vampire, you'll have a taste for forever after. Unfortunately a disease from an infected rat does a cross species jump and infects the rest of the vampire community.
  • Hemlock Grove: After spending several seasons dealing with the hunger, Roman discovers that most Upir refrain from hunting and instead seek occupations like working in blood banks or morgues so they don't attract too much attention. Or if they do hunt, then criminals are generally fair game.
  • Interview with the Vampire (2022): By 2022, Louis de Pointe du Lac has become one, only feeding on animals, donor blood, or volunteers like Damek and Rashid. He claims not to have killed any human since 2000. Louis also had a stint of vegetarianism from 1917 to 1937 where he limited his diet to animal blood (the one blip during this time period is when he drained Alderman Fenwick to death, a racist Asshole Victim). However, it ended when Lestat de Lioncourt and Claudia convinced him to resume eating humans after they criticized Louis for his air of superiority for being a vegetarian. In the Season 2 First Look Scene, Louis was a part-time vegetarian by the time he arrived in Paris in the 1940s because he explained to Armand that "I feast human every other night."
  • While not a vampire, Liv from iZombie doesn't kill people for brains; she works in the coroner's office where she can get a steady supply.
  • Li'l Horrors: Being a kids show, the resident vampire Vlad is never shown feeding on blood.
  • While not a vampire, Bo the Succubus of Lost Girl prefers to feed only her two willing lovers, or take just a bit here and there from folks she needs to "distract" for one reason or another to advance the plot. When comparing the Light and Dark Fey, the leader of the Light says that the Dark kill for the sheer joy of it, while the Light are more like Native American hunters, taking only what they need and acknowledging their actions. When Bo asks where she fits in this analogy, the earnest response is "An annoying vegan."
  • Moonlight:
    • A vampire working at the coroner's office does a good side-business in bags of blood.
    • Other vampires like Josef Kostan prefer to keep a harem of human women (or men) to feed on occasionally. They usually don't mind.
      Josef: You seriously drink this stuff? What is it? Like not-fat, soy, vegan blood?
      • Josef himself is shown occasionally drinking bottled blood like it's alcohol. In one episode, after the death of one of his old friends, Mick leaves him a bottle of the stuff, and Josef drinks it as a human would drink booze in order to forget.
  • My Babysitter's a Vampire: Sarah is averse to drinking human blood and mentions getting her fill from animals and later a magic potion that acts as a blood substitute. In one episode Erica, who otherwise has no compulsions against eating humans, volunteers at a blood drive hoping to steal the blood. It turns out that the nurses who organized the drive are actually vampires who were planning to use the blood for themselves.
  • Count von Count, who lives on Sesame Street, has never officially been called a vampire, but he is clearly based on one at least; like most creatures on the show, he would never hurt a fly.
  • The Wraith of Stargate Atlantis can best be described as Soul Vampires. Through the course of the series, we meet a few who want to find a means other than feeding on humans to survive. An early episode has an old man secretly raising a young Wraith as his "daughter" who claims to have cured her hunger with local herbs. Turns she was lying and sneaking off to feed whenever the hunger grew too great, but she didn't want to. This meeting plus the knowledge of the Araetis Bug origins of the Wraith worked together to create the Atlantis Expedition's efforts to create a retrovirus to humanify the Wraith. Late seasons had long arcs involving the Wraith named "Tod" who wanted to help the Expedition perfect said virus to free his alliance from their need to feed - as well as to weaponize for use against other Wraith in their civil war.
  • Supernatural:
    • An episode had a group of vampires who fed on cows to avoid notice from hunters. Gordon didn't care.
    • After Benny is freed from Purgatory, he goes out of his way to subsist on blood packs instead of feeding directly on humans so he doesn't attract attention from hunters.
    • Werewolves who don't want to eat human hearts, like Garth and his wife, will substitute animal hearts and slabs of raw beef.
  • Zigzagged in the Tales from the Crypt episode "The Reluctant Vampire". Malcolm McDowell plays Donald Longtooth, a meek vampire who avoids killing humans by working as the night guard at a blood bank. When the manager announces the bank is in trouble due to a shortage, a contrite Longtooth decides to fill the coffers himself. He can't bring himself to kill innocent people, so he attacks criminals, asking them medical questions beforehand. These kills are comedic, especially for Tales with Longtooth using an IV in the neck, then using the Heimlich maneuver and even jumping on bellies to get all the blood out. These actions are only part of the story...
  • In True Blood synthetic blood is sold in bottles for all your Friendly Neighborhood Vampire needs. Comes in different flavors supposed to imitate the four blood types, but the taste is still described as "It keeps you alive, but it'll bore you to death".
  • The Twilight Zone (1985): In "Red Snow", the vampires get along well with the locals at the Penal Colony and only drink the blood of Savage Wolves as long as wolves are available. When they aren't, the vampires drain dangerous criminals and Dirty Commies serving the government's agenda.
  • The Vampire Diaries: There are some examples, but not drinking human blood does make them weaker.
    • Stefan Salvatore embodies this trope, preferring to feed from animals than to feed on humans in order to maintain his humanity and keep his bloodlust in check. According to Damon, Stefan's favorite blood is puppy, though he was probably was just trying to disturb Elena. He is not as Veggie in later episodes. In order to fight Katherine and other vampires more powerful than himself he now does drink human blood from blood bank bags. In Season 3 he also obeys Klaus' orders to drink directly and savagely from humans.
    • Stefan's best friend, Lexi, avoided this trope by drinking human blood from blood bags instead, saying she was too weak to fully resist human blood.
    • In the sequel series Legacies Alaric has imposed a blood bags only diet on the students at the Salvatore Academy. Those who violate it are locked away.
  • As well as drinking soy blood, in Season 5 of Young Dracula Vlad reveals he has become an actual vegetarian. Talitha is likely partially responsible for his decision to go vegetarian.
    • Somewhat averted in season 3, as Erin is a vegetarian before being turned, and ends up drinking blood in direct violation of the ceasefire. This was very much a direct "screw you" to Vlad

    Tabletop Games 
  • From the d20 Modern sourcebook D20 Future, you have mutations. One of them is blood hunger. Blood hunger is a drawback that forces the one afflicted to "drain a pint of blood from a living creature once every 24 hours", or suffer Constitution damage (degrading physical health). Note that the mutation doesn't state "human", "humanoid", but creature. Cats, dogs, rats, etc... are fair game.
  • In Ravenloft, vampires who don't wish to destroy their victims' health can resort to "shallow feeding", drinking only enough blood from each one to cause temporary Constitution damage rather than permanent drain. The downside to this is that they have to feed on several different people every night, which greatly increases the risk of discovery.
  • In Shadowrun it's a bit difficult for actual vampires to go "vegetarian" since they need to inflict permanent Essence loss on a human, but some "civilized" ghoul communities make arrangements for "ethical" sources of human flesh from hospitals, morgues, back-alley cyberdocs, Shadowrunners...
  • 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. Preserved blood is also substantially less "nutritious" than fresh blood, so it's mainly used for emergency rations.
    • After a certain Generation, a vampire couldn't subsist on animal blood. Elders of a certain level could only feed on other vampires. Methuselahs could only feed on Elders. The Big Bads of the setting, the Antediluvians who founded the clans, could only feed on Methuselahs. It's unknown if Caine himself needed to feed at all, but it seems unlikely.
    • Ventrue have the weakness of being only able to feed on one type of blood. Depending on what was chosen at character creation, they could be barred from this... or forced into this. This only applied to mortal sources - they were always allowed to indulge in the vampiric version of I'm a Humanitarian.
    • Nosferatu actually prefer feeding on rats, as it gives them an additional blood point. Since the sewers are full of rats, it's a hell of a lot more convenient.
  • Similarly, 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, 7 needs vampires). Of course, this may reduce the vampire's power as well.
    • 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.
    • Haven't I got good news for you, fellow kindred: if you can get a Sin-Eater to bring you to the Underworld, you can actually subsist on the abundant blood-like drips there. Just don't cross paths with the local Kerberoi, OK?
  • Warhammer:
    • Vampires of the Blood Dragon line have freed themselves entirely from the need to drink human blood. How do they do this? By killing full-grown dragons in single combat and draining all of their blood.
    • Gotrek & Felix encountered some vampires who still feed on humans but take the Pragmatic Villainy approach in that they only feed on their retinue, who were already willing to die for them (like Bretonnian knights assigned to guard them) and unite against the usual "take over the world" vampires. Of course, they tend to be weaker due to their self-imposed restrictions.

    Video Games 
  • Baldur's Gate III.
    • Zig-Zagged by Token Evil Teammate Astarion. After his true nature is revealed he states "I only feed on beasts, mindless creatures! You know, boars, deer, kobolds." However, after being accepted by the Player Character he'll happily add their enemies to the list, debuffing them while healing and buffing himself.
    • Omeluum is a non-evil Mind Flayer (a race that eats brains) who is attempting to become one of these by researching a vegan substitute for brains.
  • Rachel Alucard from BlazBlue only sucked someone's blood once, and that's because said person is dying and can only be saved by turning him into a Dhampyr through the bite. And for the rest of time, she prefers drinking high-class tea, when she's not snarking everyone she comes across or beating up her familiars.
  • Rather than attacking humans in Boktai 2: Solar Boy Django, Django's vampire form is able to replenish health either by sucking blood from enemies or drinking tomato juice. There is one way in the entire game to drink human blood as an Easter Egg, and it lands you right into a Non-Standard Game Over.
  • Champions of Norrath has a Dark Elf vampire named Sylea. She looks like she invokes the Vampires Are Sex Gods trope, but is actually more akin to a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire and prefers to sate her urges by feasting on bloodvine flowers.
  • Coffee Talk: According to Hyde, an experimental synthetic blood substitute was developed not too long before the start of the game. He mentions that he's one of the vampires trying a "vegan diet", and he used to get "blüdwyne", a synthetic blood drink, from the café back when it used to be a bar.
  • Demons in the Disgaea 'verse are already fairly on the noble side of Noble Demon, but the self-proclaimed delinquents of the evil academy in Disgaea 3 do things like organize blood drives as part of their thing.
    • Disgaea 4 brings us Valvatorez, who's been sustaining himself off of sardines for four-freakin'-hundred years as a promise to another individual. Apparently he eats the entire thing without bleeding it first, thus surviving off sardine instead of human blood. His powers have waned as a result, but he intends to find an alternative in regaining his power despite this setback.
  • The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has Count Hassildor. Although it's never specified what he drinks, it becomes clear through several quests that he is very careful to not let his urges turn him evil, and despises other vampires that have.note  All he really wants is to help his wife, who is also a vampire but comatose because she couldn't come to terms with her condition.
    • Of course, Elder Scrolls vampires - or at least the Cyrodiilic strain - don't seem to require blood to survive (one that you meet has survived trapped in a room for several decades with no source), but they tend to go completely insane after being denied blood for too long. In fact, as the player character, if you contract vampirism, you actually become stronger if you do not feed for several days, although you will become more sensitive to sun damage — and progressively more monstrous in appearance, to the point that after too long, almost all Non Player Characters will refuse to talk to you outright.
    • In the Skyrim expansion Dawnguard, you will never see your vampire companion Serana feed on blood, nor does she suffer any negative side effects from her abstinence. She can coexist with mortals just fine; if you side with the Dawnguard, she'll end up staying with them afterwards without trouble, and no one will say anything about you hanging out with her. Also, if you ask her about curing her vampirism, she says that "it would be nice to not be thirsty all the time". Serana may in fact be a teetotaler. You also meet her mother, who has spent centuries in the Soul Cairn with no visible source on which to feed, and yet she seems perfectly healthy. It's worth noting that Serana and her mother are both "pureblood" vampires, meaning they received their vampirism directly from a Daedric prince rather than being bitten by another vampire, which may at least somewhat account for their ability to go without feeding.
  • Harshly averted in Eternal Champions for the vampire MidKnight. His body is wasting away because he refuses to kill any people to keep himself alive, but he has no workarounds like raiding blood banks or drinking animal blood; only fresh blood taken from a human victim can nourish him.
  • Fallout 3: The "vampires" can be convinced to live off of blood packs instead of attacking people and animals. Stay on their good side and their leader can even teach you how to get the most out of the packs, making them a useful healing item for yourself.
  • Slayer in Guilty Gear doesn't need to hunt humans since his wife Sharon is both immortal and a willing blood donator, as evidenced by his intros that show him draining her dry prior to a match, but she always survives.
    • Likewise, his fellow vampire Nagoriyuki underwent intense training to subdue his vampire instincts, and only bites his opponents to damage them. According to his profile, he gets by with tomato juice and his Trademark Favorite Food, onigiri.
  • In Immortal Souls, John Turner says at one point that he doesn't drink human blood, though what he does drink instead is never mentioned.
  • King's Bounty: Armored Princess features one of those... unfortunately, he feeds on the sap of living trees instead.
  • A vampire in Nobody Saves the World is able to subsist on grape juice. However, he's been kicked out of his castle by monsters, and he's worried that without access to his stash, he might have to resort to drinking cow blood.
  • RuneScape: Mostly averted except at the end of the Myreque quest series, most vampyres in Morytania become this after signing a peace treaty with the human kingdom of Misthalin. Now, vampyres have to pay humans to drink their blood, and humans are also selling them pigs to help sate their bloodthirst, since Morytania is not exactly suited to farming.
  • The Sims:
    • In The Sims 3's Late Night and Supernatural expansions, vampire Sims can subsist on "plasma" fruit or juice instead of human blood. Indeed, if a sim with the Vegetarian trait becomes a vampire, they can't drink from other sims without getting sick, and must subsist on plasma from other sources. That said, sim-vampires don't kill sims they drink from (and can't turn sims into vampires by accident) so it's not that big a deal either way.
    • Vampires behave similarly in The Sims 4's Vampires expansion. You can choose to subsist on plasma fruit (which can be made into salads and juice) and plasma packs (made from fish and frogs) or find a willing donor. There's even an aspiration, Good Vampire, for playing a vampire Sim as this. It's not an easy path, though, as plasma only replenishes a small bit of your thirst compared to biting someone, and it can be difficult to convince a human Sim to let you suck their blood.
  • In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, when Pit nervously asks if Alucard wants to suck his blood, Alucard responds that he doesn't like the taste, and his mother Lisa taught him not to harm people anyway.
  • Trick & Treat: Richard, who can't drink blood, and can only subsist on the fruit of tomatoes.
  • Spike McFang and his cohorts in The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang are vampires who drink tomato juice to replenish health.
  • Vampires Dawn offers you to buy blood from secret traders. Sure, it's said to be a mixture of human and animal blood, but you don't have to kill humans yourself to get your blood, keeping your humanity value high if you so desire. The second game additionally offers you to kill animals to keep your blood levels high and your humanity value unaffected.
  • In Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, players can opt to buy from the blood bank rather than feed on humans (and there are places where blood packs can be found). Most can feed on rats - Nosferatu can thrive on rats, even though they don't raise the blood meter or the HP by that much (since they're small, they get sucked dry in one bite; on the other hand, they are rather abundant in the sewers).
    • However, Ventrue get no nourishment at all from feeding on rats (or prostitutes or the homeless). This is because their weakness in the tabletop game is that Ventrue can only subsist on one specific type of blood, softened here to "only well-off humans" (which, in all fairness, suits well the Ventrue's nature).
  • Voltaire: The Vegan Vampire: Exaggerated. Voltaire is completely vegan, eating only fruits and vegetables from his garden.
  • Loue from A Witch's Tale habitually snacks on tomatoes. In fact, they are used to revive Liddell if she is killed.
  • Wizard101 has a seasonal dungeon open on Halloween in which a vampire rabbit is causing vegetables to become undead. Subverted, when you fight your way to him, he gets angry enough to "expand [his] palette."
  • In Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, the main character has written an article for a tabloid about a vegetarian vampire.

    Visual Novels 
  • In Ballads at Midnight, criminals of Illuvia are routinely sentenced to be ripped apart by a vampire. However, when you meet him, Lucius claims he will not hurt you because he generally survives on fish blood and has incredible "self-control." This is from necessity, because he lives in relative isolation. Vampires can't cross water and his estate is surrounded by a moat... He does occasionally chow down on any "guests" who attack him first, though.
  • Vampires are commonplace and common knowledge in Coffee Talk, and as such a synthetic blood substitute has been developed not long before the start of the game. Hyde, a regular patron of the titular Coffee Talk, is a vampire who mentions that he's trying to go "vegan" in his first scene.
  • Arcueid from Tsukihime doesn't actually need blood since she's a "True Ancestor", but she does crave it badly, and yet she can mostly fight off the urge to bite. That craving is caused by Roa by offering a rose with some of his blood on it. The results were devastating to say the least: She annihilated the vast majority of the remaining True Ancestors, which were largely neutral or even slightly positive towards mankind.

    Web Animation 
  • Draculaura from Monster High isn't just a vegetarian — she's a vegan, and subsists on a variety of fruits and vegetables, with heavy doses of iron supplements on the side to make up for the blood she's not getting. Even hearing the word or seeing blood makes her faint now. It's also heavily implied that she wasn't always this way.
  • Natural Habitat Shorts deconstructs the "vampires substituting blood with something else" variation of this trope by pointing out that vampire bats, the closest thing we have to vampires in Real Life, depend on blood as their only source of food, and can't not drink it. The short "Fine Dying" depicts a vampire bat who has decided to abstain from blood, which ends up causing him to drop dead in the middle of a conversation.

    Webcomics 
  • In Charby the Vampirate when Diana is changed by some vampires looking for revenge on her Vampire Hunter boyfriend he keeps her supplied with blood so that she never has to hunt humans, and she does not seem to want to either as she still cares about him.
  • Nina Delacroix in Eerie Cuties doesn't drink blood. She craves chocolate instead. Presumably because she was born on Easter. Her family members drink blood, but they don't kill the people they take it from.
    • An interesting variation, since she doesn't see anything wrong with drinking someone's blood except for some embarrassment from the victim.
    • For some reason, Blair is prepared to kill Nina if she ever develops a taste for blood.
  • Miss Loveworth from IronGate has never tasted human blood and finds the very idea disgusting. She gets by feeding on small amounts of blood taken from cows kept on the IronGate grounds.
  • Last Res0rt:
    • When Qin Xu was a doctor he either fed from corpses or off his Jerkass coworkers, it's not entirely clear. After his arrest, he's required to only drink donor blood with medical Nanomachines, or "glitter" filtered out, we see why after Cypress dives into a vat of glitter and he has to suck out the excess.
    • Jigsaw tries, attempting to feed painlessly off someone who'd already given her permission. But, after getting shot by a Star Org sniper she goes into "zombie mode" and drains him.
  • Lotus Cobra Is Evil: In "Journey to Nowhere", also a reference to the card, from the source work, Magic: The Gathering, the vampire, Sorin, is forced to, as part of being Nissa's servant, and although Nissa doesn't know it, threatened with Cessation of Existence by another.
  • Vampires in Orange Marmalade have been drinking pig blood for decades - they can even buy cartons of it for lunch. They do this because doing so is the only reason human governments allow them to live and if they didn't, it is implied their whole race would have been killed off long ago. The main character, who is a vampire, is shocked and horrified when she finds out one of her relatives drinks human blood.
  • In Project Future, Angels, Demons and 'Cubi can extend their own lifespan by consuming souls. The titular Project aims to end this horrible practice forever, by selling soul-like energy packets produced using a powerful reactor.
  • In Sam & Fuzzy, the discovery of synthetic blood turned the entire race of vampires into this long ago. According to Edwin, drinking blood au naturelle is viewed by modern vampires much like hunting down a cow and slaughtering it yourself each time you want to eat beef is viewed by modern humans.
  • School Bites includes a vegan vampire. Good thing the school can accommodate her.
  • Nick in Schwarz Kreuz, firmly.
  • Vampires in Steam Punkd can get by on drinking animal blood, something many do if they have mortal families (drinking humanoid blood comes naturally to vampires, so many avoid it to keep from seeing their families as food).
    • Inverted with Dampyrs, the half-vampire children of the above families. They don't need to drink blood at all but can drink animal blood. Dampyrs can't drink humanoid blood because it is too potent for their under-developed vampire anatomy elements.
    • Vessa at one point says that Dampyrs can drink human blood, but it would be like "going from drinking a beer to drinking rubbing alcohol".
  • Vampire Husband: Charles the vampire drinks pigs blood. He had once drained the orange out of a carrot because he was curious.
  • Walking in the Dark: Ben carries around a flask full of blood that he gets through an arrangement with the local hospital.

    Web Original 
  • Chipz from Ascension Academy has refused to drink blood of any kind, fueled by his loathing of Vampires. He was turned without choice when he was very young after vampires had already slaughtered his family. For a time he was force-fed blood, but he never willingly drank. Now that he is away from the other Vampires he has had the freedom to forgo feeding for much longer- far longer than should be possible according to Victor. Vampires should begin to go rabid and transform into a Vargheist after mere months without blood, but Chipz has not gone a full two years without feeding, which confuses Victor greatly.
  • Shadowa Moon (and the rest of her family) from The Questport Chronicles.

    Web Videos 
  • Victor Pence describes himself in The Out Crowd as "a vegetarian". Details have not been forthcoming.

    Western Animation 
  • The ABC Weekend Special: Their version of Bunnicula stayed true to this trope, despite the title character's cartoon makeover.
  • Marceline from Adventure Time doesn't feed on blood, just the color red (as she demonstrates by sucking a strawberry dry, leaving it gray). She claims all vampires can eat red instead of blood, but just refuse to. This is why she doesn't feel any guilt for personally killing every vampire that came before her. One vampire said he was satisfied with eating animal blood, though Marceline sees that as an inadequate solution, probably because most animals in Ooo are sapient.
  • The titular character of Bunnicula is another literal Vegetarian Vampire, who drains carrot juice instead of blood (he is a bunny). He can also drain the juice of other vegetables and fruit, and can gain new powers from them temporarily.
  • Count Duckula is a literal Vegetarian Vampire, due to a botched resurrection ritual (Nanny mistook tomato sauce for blood).
    • The Danger Mouse reboot series shows that Duckula has found a loophole — he uses a special TV signal to turn viewers into living vegetables so he may eat them.
  • Played with in the Darkwing Duck episode "Monsters R Us". After being turned into a vampire bat by Morgana's father, Launchpad drinks a bottle of ketchup to counteract his thirst for blood, but it doesn't work.
  • The Exorsisters, Sinista and Bimbella, from Dr. Zitbag's Transylvania Pet Shop. Usually.
  • One episode of DuckTales (1987) featured a vampire who could survive on apples. (As a bonus, he claimed, they were good for his teeth, a common claim made by dentists.)
  • An episode of Garfield and Friends had Garfield as Count Lasagna, a vampire cat who only ate Italian food, although this still provoked a mob of hungry villagers who kept having their takeout deliveries stolen.
  • In Growing Up Creepie, Creepie's cousins, two vampire-like mosquitoes, revealed they are now vegans.
  • The I Am Weasel episode "I Am Vampire" featured Weasel and Baboon as vampires who only drank low-fat canned blood.
  • In the German series "Die Ketchup-Vampire", there are the eponymous good vampires feeding on ketchup, and the evil ones, eating blood sausage. When forced to eat the other kind of food, it causes a face/heel (or vice versa) turn. To achieve actual blood-drinking, a dark ritual would be required.
  • Draculaura of Monster High is also literal Vegetarian Vampire similar to Count Duckula. In fact, the mere sight of meat or hearing the word blood causes her to faint!
  • Vampire fruit bats in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic are exactly what they sound like - vampire bats that suck the juice out of fruit. And then Fluttershy is accidentally turned into some sort of vampire fruit bat/pegasus hybrid that certainly doesn't feed on ponies.
  • One episode of The Real Ghostbusters had the guys encounter a rather elderly vampire. He disliked feeding on people and explained that he was able to sustain himself through the ingestion of artificial blood provided to him by a blood bank.
  • A Robot Chicken parody of Monster High has the Crypt Keeper blow up Monster High in retaliation for copying his Pungeon Master bit. When defending himself in court, he deconstructs Draculaura's claim of being vegan by pointing out the term is relatively recent and questions what she did before the concept. She concedes that it was "blood of the innocent", winning him the case.
  • Played with the Vampire in one early short of The Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo Show. He drinks tomato juice, but he'd much rather have actual blood, which he'd run out of when Shaggy, Scooby, and Scrappy come across him.
  • Probably Sibella in Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School. The only thing we ever see her drain is a crabapple.
  • In The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, one of King Koopa's many parodies was as Count Koopula, a tomato sauce-sucking vampire. It wasn't so much fear of what he ate that scared Mario and the others as it was being turned into vampires like him.
  • Vampires in Ugly Americans are legally required to only feed on animals.

Alternative Title(s): Vampire At The Bloodbank

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