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You could do some interesting stuff if there’s a section of vampires who aren’t required to participate in violence to enjoy the benefits of their condition, while another number has to perpetrate it in order to reproduce their number. There’s a perverse ethic to it, that some number of people have to be literally fed to the monster, but this enables more and more people to have lives of superb luxury and safety. Add a wrinkle or two and you’ve got a nice short story or novella right there.
vampirialism
The challenge would be to avoid making the story/lore immediately and irredeemably sexist against women.
China Mieville did something like this, but they were like literal giant mosquitoes where the female mosquitoes were monstrous and the male mosquitoes were basically scholars
iirc the females were also equally intelligent, they just got into an unstoppable blood craving when they saw a warm-blooded creature. then they had to remember and live with the shit they did. post-succ clarity, if you will
I think instead of specifically losing clarity when seeing a warm-blooded creature, they actually just always lost the ability to think rationally while hungry. So once they ate, they had a few days of no hunger and an ability to think and live normally even with humans (with the horrors of their just-completed murder of often humans). It was specifically hunger-related. Which is pretty on brand for China Mieville, exaggerating but connecting to the way hunger socially can cause actions which would otherwise be unacceptable. But also pinning that to mental states. It’s like it’s almost a critique, but simultaneously horrific in a way that also seems like the representatives of the poor are also evil
good analysis. mieville is doing marxist critique even when he’s worldbuilding a minor race that’s only in one chapter of a book (maybe they’re in other books i only read 2)
I also stopped after 2. It got old fast I guess. I read the series this comes from 2 books and then the one about the 2 countries in the same city
the hangover but it’s a vampire
Yeah they were also the last remnants of their society and species living as kept people on an isolated island because the males were gifted scholars.
They were nearly wiped out because their “Malarial Queendom” killed so many people their empire was unsustainable and collapsed from lack of available blood and then rebellions when the queens lost their grip on reality
Darkest Dungeon does literally this for its vampires.
Dang it
