 When magical creatures show up in fiction, there are many different ways to portray them. Their history, powers, temperament, and position in society are all unique depending on the interpretations of the creator. Whether you're talking about werewolves, vampires, ghosts, zombies, multi-dimensional K-pop stars, or wizards, everyone has a different take on them. And that's a good thing. The ways in which the mythology differs from other franchises and legends is a vital part of the identity. One of the most common mythical creatures that we see nowadays is the vampire. Vampires have appeared in everything from dark horror stories to action romps to horny fantasies. Some people are purists, of a sort, and get annoyed when they deviate from the, quote, canon version. The thing is, any interpretation of vampires is canon. There was quite a bit of variation in the old folk tales that gave birth to the modern stories. An example of this would be how people got upset when the vampires in Twilight sparkled, claiming that vampires don't sparkle. The thing about that is, vampires don't do anything, since, you know, they're not real. In most of the original legends, vampires weren't hurt by sunlight either, but no one complains about modern works changing that because it works as an interesting weakness for them, whether they're scary monsters or inhuman heroes. There's no right or wrong way to do this beyond what you think is cool. Vampires have been around forever and in many different cultures. What we think of as vampires today stems primarily from European legends and Bram Stoker's Dracula, which came out way back in 1897. However, there's plenty of wiggle room even within that framework, which is what I wanted to look at today. As a rule, vampires are humanoid creatures who live forever, or at least a very long time, feed on blood, usually human blood, and that's pretty much it. Outside of those two foundational details, you can change pretty much anything you want and your creations will still be recognizable as vampires. Over the past hundred years in some change, they've expanded. They're no longer just vaguely Eastern European-style aristocrats in capes who are scared off by crosses and spices. They can be everything from scary to pitiful to sexy to alien. There are many different ways to do vampires. Let's look at some. Let's start with the obvious. Are the vampires supposed to be bloodthirsty monsters that all need to be put down? Or are they meant to be alluring and beautiful, immortal humans? The late aughts brought the world a metric fuckload of young adult romance series featuring vampires, some of which was bad, some of which was bad, and some of which was even bad. For some time, vampire men falling in love with young women has practically been the default setting for anything vampire-related. Twilight obviously didn't invent the idea of vampires being hot. It wasn't even the first mainstream success that did so. Interview with the vampire came out decades earlier and goes to great lengths to point out how hot all the vamps are. But boy, did it catapult the sexy vamps into everybody's eyeballs. And with the recent renaissance, we can periodically be reminded of all the crappy parts of Twilight until the day we die and our deeds fade into the anonymous dustbin of history. By now, this has been played straight, subverted, and parodied so many times that it's almost a given that anything vampire-related will feature human-vampire relations. If this is the case, then vampires will largely just be humans that happen to drink blood. There won't be much of anything to differentiate them mentally, and if there is, it will usually involve being a psychopath. E.g., interview with the vampire features vampires that largely view humans as livestock to be consumed at their leisure. In the vampire diaries, vampires can... turn off their emotions at will? So they have a good mode and an evil mode? What? But none of that stops them from being sexy. Did you know that Richard Ramirez married a fan while he was in prison? Serial killers often receive love letters from people who find their actions sexy. It's due to a phenomenon called Hybristophilia. Sometimes the process of becoming a vampire specifically makes humans more beautiful, as in Twilight. Other times, the writers slash casting directors decided to exclusively make them all good-looking because they could. After all, there's no ugly people in Hollywood. These types of vampires are meant to be more mature and knowledgeable of human nature than regular people. They know exactly what makes you tick, even better than you yourself do. And that gives them an intoxicating air. Moreover, they exist in a hidden subculture that engages in debauchery frowned upon by society at large, namely drinking blood. There's some queer subtext there and things like interview lean into it hard. Basically, they're written for teenage girls who have a weird relationship with their English teacher, only they have the aesthetic of an Evanescence album cover. When this first came around, it was a new, subversive way to tackle these creatures that had been in the cultural zeitgeist for centuries. After more than 10 years of watching teen girls hang off brooding bloodsuckers, though, it's gotten a bit stale. Unless it involves crucifix nail nipples... I'll give some of you a moment to Google that. Nowadays, the only times vampires are not sexy is when the creator goes out of their way to make them gross, e.g. the strain, where the vampires lose all their hair and their genitalia after being infected. That series is specifically about how the Strigoi are mindless creatures that function as limbs of an eldritch abomination and have no thoughts beyond thirsting for blood, though. There's no redeeming them or forming a friendship with them. They're an unending, unstoppable horde. So the choice of sexy vampires or scary vampires is basically a choice about whether your vampire story is horror or not. And if it is horror, what type of horror? Bram Stoker's Dracula isn't exactly sexy, but he's not ugly either. Maybe a bit of a challenge, Wank. He's a monster who feeds on humans, using their lives to fuel his immortal indulgences. If he doesn't kill them, he puts his fingers in their minds, twisting them until they become thralls to his will. He's a monster, but he's a very different type of monster than the Strigoi. He's a representative of how your social betters take advantage of you, while they are representatives of out-of-control plagues and the breakdown of society that accompanies them. Both terrifying in very different ways. And neither are hot. Are the vampires supposed to be magical creatures that don't fit into modern human understanding of the world? Or are they the creations of something understood by modern science? Much like zombies, some modern works have decided that they need a, quote, scientific explanation for why humans might turn into undead abominations. This is supposed to require less suspension of disbelief, but a lot of the time it has the opposite effect, since a virus can't cause humans to grow a tentacle in their throat. V-Wars goes a little less dumb with it. There, a virus that was frozen in ice for millennia comes back and turns humans into superhumans who need blood. They call themselves... Bloods. Of course, when vampires have a scientific explanation, you can't just call them vampires. Again, much like zombies, you have to come up with a new moniker, because obviously gritty, dark, adult stories can't call something by its name. Instead, they call them stragoi, or dampier, or bloods, or leeches. Because of their sciencey nature, most of the silly weaknesses vampires have are discarded. A weakness to sunlight tends to stick around, sometimes silver as well, but things like being repelled by garlic, being unable to enter homes without permission, and having to count mustard seeds if you spill them are impossible to come up with realistic justifications for. If you don't feel like taking yourself too seriously, though, you can discard the pseudoscience and just say, fuck it, they're magic. This is what most old stories went with, and many sexy vampire tales fall into this category, too. Magic vampirism isn't caused by a virus or anything like that, it just is. Because of that, the vampires usually have more esoteric weaknesses, and they're usually affected more strongly by those weaknesses. E.g., they'll burst into flames the instant the sun touches them, like in Daybreakers, rather than just being burned by it over the course of several seconds, like in The Strain. One that's largely fallen out of favor nowadays is being unable to enter a home without permission, probably because it makes them seem less threatening if you can escape them just by going inside. It's still used occasionally, though, like in The Vampire Diaries, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or The Remake of Fright Night. If vampires are magical creatures, there's still a spectrum of powers they can have. Superstrength, speed, and senses are almost a given nowadays. Some other common ones include immortality, the ability to fly, the ability to turn invisible, and controlling the minds of humans. In things like House of Night, they have a ton of magic powers, much like a wizard or something. They can summon dead spirits and curse each other and send souls to the afterlife, and... that's all I remember. And I refuse to research that series, I spent too much time reading it already. Anime is notorious for this sort of thing. Remember Seraph of the End? Of course not, no one does. It was a shitty knockoff of Attack on Titan where they used vampires instead of Titans. Except here, the vampires are superhumans who release a virus to kill most of humanity, and they fight with demon-possessed swords, and the humans have to use magical demon weapons to kill them, too. And they create giant monsters to roam the streets of Tokyo. And the human main character has a mysterious ability that gives him... the power to control salt? Fucking hell, Japan. How human are the vampires? Are they just people who drink blood? Or are they little more than animals hunting their prey under the cover of darkness? The majority of the time, they fit into the first category. Even if they see themselves as above humans or as a separate species, they still act and think very closely to the humans they feed on. In this case, they'll usually blend in with human society, either posing as aristocrats and using their wealth to attract prey, or just regular Joes who work knights. In each case, they keep their kills and their true nature secret. Sometimes they'll still keep their distance from humans, like in the original Dracula story where he lived in a castle far from everyone. He still pretended to be human, he just didn't interact with them much. This is the preferred way of handling sexy vampires, since it's hard to fall in love with wild animals. Once in a blue moon, though, you'll come across vampires that have truly become the beasts people think of them as. The strain is the most notable example of this. A few progenitor vampires and their favored servants have human intelligence, the rest are just zombies with tentacle tongues. Blood Red Sky also does this, I think. I fell asleep 20 minutes into that piece of shit film. A more common trope is that vampires turn into mindless ghouls when they don't get enough blood or when they have the wrong kind of blood. Daybreakers, a film with a great setup and negative payoff, feature several vampires that have gone feral after starving. And the supply of human blood is running low, putting everyone at risk for turning into that same kind of monster. Or the Van Helsing TV series where the exact same thing happens, but I need a second example before moving on to the next point on the list. Are vampires just people that are slightly stronger than normal, or are they taking on entire armies alone? There are some vampires that are so far above humans that trying to fight them normally as a recipe for getting sucked on harder than Hugh Hefner. Let's go back to Seraph of the End. I know, I don't want to either, where vampires crash a plane into a city and invade on foot. While they do that, instead of firing some artillery at the humans from a distance, I don't know. Then they start mowing down dozens of soldiers with little effort, and all of this is after they killed 90% of the world, remember. These guys are stupidly powerful. Sure, the regular vamps are little more than mooks for the heroes to mow down. Their leaders are still demigods that humans can only fight because of anime logic. There are other examples of this. Vampires from Castlevania to the Elder Scrolls to the Originals that possess an array of magic powers, or are simply so strong that humans need a lot of skill, preparation, teamwork, and luck to take them down. Most of the time, this is extremely stupid because the only way humans can fight them is with modern technology. If vampires had simply decided they wanted to conquer the world 3,000 years ago, nothing could have stopped them. It makes sense to stay hidden today when we can drop a nuke on them, but why would they have bothered keeping away from us in the first place? That's something I liked about the Castlevania anime. Dracula just decides he wants to exterminate humanity one day, and without the heroes, he would have done so. On the other hand, some are just slightly stronger than normal, or even at human level. In Cirque de Freak, vampires are basically a secret society of people who get sunburned easily. They're faster and stronger than humans, sure, but they won't be dodging bullets or flipping over tanks anytime soon. In this case, it makes sense for them to keep their existence a secret since, well, humans would likely kill any vampires they came across out of fear of being drained. Of course, vampires don't kill their prey in this series. That would be their cousins, the Vampanese. Those are a type of vampire who go into a trance when feeding that forces them to kill every time they do it. After years of this, their skin turns purple too. Wait, what? After generations and centuries of living completely separate from humanity, both vampires and Vampanese have developed very distinct cultures that wouldn't allow them to reveal themselves to humanity, even if some of them thought it was a good idea. They live nomadic lifestyles, roughing it in the woods, and only ever relying on themselves. They're so obsessed with machismo that they aren't even allowed to fight with ranged weapons. Any vampires that act contrary to these cultural norms will be ostracized at best and hunted down as traitors at worst. I know that sounds weird, but these people also lock themselves into a metal box that periodically shoots jets of fire at them as a rite of passage into adulthood. Darren Shan is nutty. Which type the writers choose here is generally based on how crazy they want their story to get. If it's about saving the world or even just a single town from a vampiric army, they make them more powerful. If it's smaller scale and based on some other sort of conflict, they're usually weaker. Are the vampires a secret part of our world that exists alongside gunpowder weaponry and the internet? Or are they a fantastical part of an already fantastical realm? Most vampire stories take place in our real world. Some in different time periods, some in which vampires are known to the public at large, but it's always some variation of our world and our society. Whether the vampires have some sort of governing structure, or they're just a scattered collective, they're usually a secret from society at large. One of the best examples of this I've seen is, oddly enough, Vampire Academy. I'm dead serious. The vampires keep themselves secret for good reasons, since they're not all that powerful and they'd be vulnerable to attack from armed humans. They still have magic though, allowing them to make their schools invisible and wipe memories, so it's believable that they would be able to hide too. It's a surprising bit of intelligent world building from an otherwise shitty book. A small number of vampires exist in fantasy realms though. Things like the Elder Scrolls and Priests feature vampires as an aspect of a wholly fictional setting, although they're often just one more race among many. In the Elder Scrolls, vampirism is a disease that only some races can contract, since some, like Argonians, are immune to all diseases. I think the lore for that series is both inconsistent and insane. There's also over 100 different vampire bloodlines to account for the large variation in their powers and abilities. That's a clever way to give players different enemies and different powers from game to game. Warhammer is similar since... No, I'm not getting into Warhammer lore. I want to write this before I'm 35. In Priests, vampires are like insects. A single queen births hundreds of them who all congregate in a hive. They can't turn humans into vampires any more than we can turn gorillas into dogs. Except for Carl Urban, who becomes a vampire who is immune to sunlight somehow. Rosario Vampire has vampires as their own race too. They're just a race of waifus who don't need to drink human blood for survival. They just like the taste. Crosses don't hurt them, they just suppress their vampiric abilities, rendering them only slightly stronger than humans. The main waifu of the story wears a rosary most of the time and only takes it off when she needs to fight. But when she does that, a separate personality comes out. Then later, protagonist Koon realizes that the girl he fell in love with, Moka, was actually the personality of Moka's mother who had her memories erased and the inner Moka was the real one all along. I know that sounds made up, but no, it's a real plot point. Vampires can't turn humans into them, but they can inject them with their blood, temporarily giving them vampiric powers. Doing this too many times will turn them into mindless ghouls though. As a brief aside, the Rosario Vampire mongos transition from standard harem hijinks into an action series with a continuous storyline is impressive. The vampires evolve beyond being harem stereotypes and the lore of the setting gets fleshed out and becomes genuinely interesting. It's impressive how much it changed. Are vampires the only supernatural thing in this world or is it full of other types of paranormal phenomena? Vampires are fun. However, unless you do something extremely new with them, they get old quick. They drink blood, sunlight burns them, a stake through the heart kills them, they commit statutory rape. We get it, there's only so many new ways you can do that. You go through three or four books and you run out of storylines or three or four seasons of TV or whatever. Every major character knows about the supernatural. Most of them have been turned into vampires, possibly even back into humans. They've evaded and or defeated hunters. The main couple has confessed their love and there's just not much more to do. At that point, you have to get creative. Maybe you can introduce a separate breed of vampires for them to war against or otherwise interact with. In Underworld Blood Wars, they introduce the Nordic vampire bloodline who all look like elves for some reason while the others mostly look like Matrix cosplayers mixed with the crowd at a Nightwish concert. Vampire contains several different bloodlines that range from regular-looking vamps to hulking monstrosities to rotting beasts with animal-level intelligence. And like I mentioned before, there are the vamponies from Sork to Freak. When they just throw in different breeds of vampires, it allows writers to play around with different types of creatures without feeling too much like fantasy. After all, many audience members only like fantasy in small amounts. That's why it took so long for things like Lord of the Rings and Wheel of Time to get adapted to screen. Vampires can only be changed so much, though. If you let a series go on long enough, the writers will think vampires aren't enough anymore and they'll start pulling in other mystical creatures. Werewolves, fairies, witches, mildly racist depictions of Romani, and whatever else you can think of all get thrown in eventually. This is why most pure vampire stories don't last that long. Seraph of the End... Goddammit, this again? ...has this in spades. Angels, demons, vampires, magical human cults, horsemen of the apocalypse... D- Anime... Why are you like this? Based on the title, you'd think the vampire diaries would be about, well, vampires. Instead, they bring in witches, travelers who are just a different type of witch, uh, no comment. Werewolves, doppelgangers, banshees, ghosts, kitsune, and more. This is what happens when a franchise that had enough material for maybe two seasons gets stretched out to seven seasons, then also gets two spin-offs. The Teen Wolf Show went down a similar path. It started off about werewolves, then it introduced hellhounds, chimera, conimas, also banshees, also kitsune... You know, Hollywood writers, there's nothing stopping you from inventing new creatures. Most of the time you change these things so far from the legends they're based on, you could change the names and no one would even notice what they're supposed to be. Then it would seem less like you were just aping other series that threw in the kitchen sink. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as the name suggests, starts off focusing on killing vampires. It doesn't take long for other supernatural phenomena to begin though, and for all its other flaws, the show created new creatures like the She-Mantis and the old ones rather than just bringing life to monsters from old legends. Same with Grimm. The legends were an inspiration, but the writers weren't beholden to them. However many magical things there are, if vampires are what the focus is at the beginning, they're usually going to get the majority of the attention and focus throughout. And I think I've found the reason for that. Traditional werewolves are too beastly to build a story around unless you do the old school thing where they only turn once a month and other than that they're just normal people. But most modern works tend to allow them to transform whenever they want so they don't seem like pussies. There's still plenty of werewolf stuff out there, but it's largely erotica. For whatever reason, no one is played around with werewolves as much as vampires. Fairies are too inhuman to connect with, which is too normal to be that interesting on their own, demons too evil to be anything but villains. Vampires usually hit the sweet spot between mundane and paranormal. They have potential to be good, evil, or somewhere in between. They look human, meaning they can be Teen Vogue models or wrinkled elders. Their powers have enough wiggle room to let them be demigods who have slumbered for centuries or mostly regular folks who blend in with society. The fact is, vampires aren't a genre. They're just something you can throw into almost any other kind of story. Twilight Shoulder is a lot of the blame for the explosion in vampire-related media that began around 15 years ago, similar to how The Walking Dead helped bring on so many zombie shows. It was not the sole reason, though. Even other shitty Teen Vampire romances made an effort to be a little different. A little. Most of them attempted to add in a real storyline outside of the face-sucking, though most of them still sucked. And that's because vampires have a lot of room for flexibility and interpretation. They don't have to be villainous monsters like they used to. They can be heroes, romantic interests, misunderstood adversaries, even a metaphor for being gay. They've come a long way since Nosferatu. With other mythical creatures going through this same sort of change over the past few decades, I'm interested to see where things will go in the future. Maybe demons will become pure expressions of human emotion that help us understand how to live. Maybe elves will become the dominant force in the world while humans are relegated to hiding in the wilderness. Maybe ghosts will develop their own societies and live alongside us. Maybe necromancers will start to be portrayed as benevolent. And yes, there are some places where these have all happened, but they're not the norm by any means. It's neat to see how things have changed over the years. Even more importantly, though, I wanted to take some time to explore how tropes are not set in stone. Even if it seems like everybody else is doing something in one specific way, there's absolutely nothing forcing everyone else to do it the same way. Use your imagination. It's the only thing that keeps our knowledge of this fathomless, unfeeling void at bay. Insert strong closing line here. If you watched this far, thank you so much. By this point, most people have just taken to the comments section to tell me to kill myself. I wouldn't be able to do videos like this without all my patrons whose names you see here. And a special thanks to my $10 and up patrons. Oppo Savalainen, Eris Targaryen, Olivia Rayan, Brother Santotys, Buffy Valentine, Carolina Clay, Dan Anceliovic, Dark King, Echo, Great Griebo, KartKat Katsune, Liza Rudikova, Lord Tiebreaker, Madison Lewis Bennett, Marilyn Roxy, Matthew Bordero, Michael Weingartner, microphone, Peep the Toad, Return of Cardamom, SadMartigan, Silyr the Vixen, Tom Beanie, and of course, Vaivictus. All of you are just absolutely the best. If you want to get your name on here, consider becoming a patron. If you don't want to do that, you could always support the channel here on YouTube or just like the video, comment, and subscribe to my channel. All those are great. And that's all for my takes for today. Goodbye.