sirobvious
I know that’s kind of the go-to thing to show that a vampire character is “one of the good ones” or whatever but it actually seems a little bit more fucked up for a vampire to steal blood from a blood bank than for a vampire to attack people for blood, at least as long as it’s not the kind of vampire where a bite is instantly lethal like it never stops bleeding.
People can recover from losing some blood but blood bank blood is constantly in short supply and is reserved for people who imminently need blood transfusion of a specific blood type or else they die.
buckskinblues
I also hate the “I can just substitute human blood with animal blood” like the whole idea of vampirism sort of hinges on the fact the only thing you can feed off of are humans.
sirobvious
Once you start having vampires subsist on animals, well, like, so do humans. In fact the average human probably eats more animals per year than most of the animal-blood-drinking vampires I’ve seen depicted.
That’s not a vampire, all you’ve written is an immortal superhuman who subsists on…food, even if it’s a bit undercooked. That’s a fucking elf.
sirobvious
Some of y’all’s ideas of other options for “ethical” vampires is insane.
“Ethical vampires should feed on criminals.” So it is ethical for a person to get death penalty without trial and/or to be literally consumed by other citizens as punishment for a crime? That’s the prison-industrial complex.
sirobvious
If you’re thinking about adding a comment on this post that outlines some way that vampires could actually be totally ethical, don’t:
1. I heard it before, twice.
2. You’re wrong. Don’t take this as a challenge, you’ve already failed and you’re wrong because
3. Even if you come up with something ethical, which you probably still didn’t, you’re missing the point of vampires!
sirobvious
I think the DESPERATION yet utter failure to find an ethical means of vampirism when confronted with this post is part of like, a wider trend in the culture of this website or fandom in general or something of complete black&white thinking on morality and also probably Puritanism.
sirobvious
I think somebody should write an essay on this instead of the next comment they’re about to make about how vampires should just feed on cops or politicians or billionaires or criminals or consenting victims (all of which present some pretty serious ethical problems that nobody has apparently considered!)
In your desperate need to find a means for vampires to exist totally without harm to anyone else, in these scenarios you posit, y’all have created so many more ethical problems, all while patting yourself on the back.
sirobvious
Bad Ethics Commented on this Post Masterpost
Great story ideas, terrible ethics.
“Don’t worry guys, there’s this type of person called a ‘bad person’, and if we just kill enough of them everything will be alright!”
“Vampires should just feed off of: [whatever human beings I can most comfortabley other]!”
Criminals
>Prison-industrial complex, already addressed this, already happening IRL.
>Would lead to more “tough on crime” bills like the war on drugs to put more and more people in prison so vampires never run out of food.
Cops
>Particularly hard targets.
>Always armed.
>Always in radio contact with other cops.
>Deaths more likely to be seriously investigated.
>City just hires more cops.
>Resulting moral panic from random attacks on cops easily spun towards more police funding, more heavily armed police, curfews, blame shifted onto minorities.
Politicians & Billionares
>Surrounded by security 24/7. Fucking untouchable if they’re anybody who’s anybody.
>Money&power just goes to the next guy in line.
>Start reading again from the top.
Nazis
>Start reading again from the top.
Landlords
>Start reading again from the top.
All of the Above
>Vampires live forever and always gotta be drinking blood. Who do they eat when they run out of bad people?
>How many provably irredeemable Nazis are there really?
>How long before they start justifying anyone with a dubious tweet from 6 years ago?
“Vampires should just pay people to give them blood!”
>Society’s most desperate and poor people forced to sell part of their body to ‘earn a living’.
>Already a thing IRL.
“Vampires should just find kinky goths who get off from having their blood drunk!”
>Vampires essentially sex workers then.
>What if your every meal had to be filmed and the uploaded as a mukbang fetish video on pornhub
>What if your every meal relied on the next horny John coming around to get his neck bitten
>Ugly vampires starve.
“Vampires should drink from a consenting partner!”
>Relationship is literally draining.
>“You can’t break up with me, I’ll starve.”
>“You can’t break up with me, you’ll starve.”
>Ugly vampires starve.
“Vampires should steal from blood banks!”
>Already addressed this.
“Vampires should drink blood from animals because animal blood is not biologically different from human blood!”
>Fuck
>off
“There should be blood donation drives for vampires!”
>Actually, pretty good.
>Unfortnately, we can’t even supply enough donated blood for the existing IRL mortals who need it.
>What does a vampire do when their gofundme is $20 short?
Conclusion
All of these, as well as whatever other attempt at “solving” vampirism anyone else is going to inevitably comment in response, fail to provide a feasible way for a vampire to ethically drink human blood. However, they’re almost there, just barely brushing past the point, which is that vampires are unethical. Instead of a problem to be solved in worldbuidling, this is the ideal springboard for a story that says something about fucking society! Good stories aren’t about utopian societies or perfect people–unless those utopian societies and perfection are a lie–they’re about societies and people with problems and who cause problems! Vampires are a curse, they exists to cause problems, you take that from them in your story and they’re nothing. If you instead embrace how characters–even as protagonists–cause problems, you might actually stumble onto a theme or two.
worldbuilding-tomfoolery
These are genuinely excellent and thought out points! I’m going to come back to this post whenever I’m writing or thinking about vampires & vampirethics.
Now I’ll chime in completely unhelpfully with, if the rule is that the vampire can only gain sustenance from humans but the fluid doesn’t matter, they should eat via blowjob.