Worldbuilding Flub #1: Coexisting Incompatible Species, or, PLEASE JUST KILL THE VAMPIRES

There is a prolific sentiment among younger writers — or anyone whose conception of how to write has been woefully destroyed by tumblr, booktube, wattpad, or wherever’s worthless ‘do whatever’ advice — that all plots, all ideas, or all stories are doable. Is there a story that you cannot write? “No!” they’ll say. “No, there is bad taste, but there’s nothing that can’t be done.”

Liars! My aspiring creative writing friends, who would like to make something fun and perhaps good, you have been greatly deceived! There are in fact story ideas, plotlines, or thematic arguments that will simply never work; no matter how you massage them, no matter how you jimmy your characters, no matter how you twist your canon to justify what was from the start an abortive worldbuilding choice. I am here to present to you something that is not simply ‘amateur worldbuilding’ or ‘lighthearted worldbuilding’ but an error in worldbuilding, that if you allow it into your story, or your setting, will grow from a cute fanciful idea into a rampaging beast that will destroy your setting, and its heart, utterly, from the ribcage out.

We’re here today to talk about the problem of VAMPIRES.

What’s the problem with vampires?

Vampires? Where was I complaining about vampires? Vampires are fine. We all love a good icky vampire. A hideous, awful, seductive villain that sweeps some naive pollyanna off her feet, then corrupts her, slaughters her, and consumes her — great stuff, great material for your protagonist to shove the rotten head thereof on a pike. “But Callie,” wait huh? “That’s a bad vampire. That’s been done. That’s boring. I want a heroic vampire. No no, I want a GOOD vampire! I want a funny misunderstood vampire who crochets teddy bears for orphans and gawks wondrously at butterflies, then macks on his devoted lover, sensuously and full-heartedly, while the protagonist with the stake gets to rot in the gutter, or perhaps better yet realises he’s been a cold-hearted murderous twit and makes friends! It’d be hard to live as a vampire when everyone’s being so judgemental. Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone could get along with the vampires? They’re innocent, after all, because they can’t help it that they murder people to live.”

I sense that some of you morally twisted wrecks don’t quite see the problem here.

‘I want a cute, funny, sympathetic hero’ who ‘murders people to live’.

Does anyone here see the problem?

‘A cute, funny, sympathetic hero’ who ‘murders people to live’ is evil. They are evil. They are a predator. It does not matter that they’re ‘nice’, it does not matter that they love their supporters, they are still entirely evil. They have no capacity not to predate on another sentient being as food; thus, it will inevitably happen that someone who would stand in opposition to this character is completely justified to do so. In fact, if every member of the prey species decided they never wanted to have anything to do with that character, because they do not want to die, and in doing removed its food source, and so killed it, they are completely justified to do so. The only contrary argument — the only contrary argument — is that the prey group should for some inexplicable reason consent to being murdered, and now here you are, in a very awkward position, of writing a narrative tailored around why enabling or cooperating with the predator is ‘a good thing, actually’.

(’I didn’t mean anything that deep! I just wanted to write about funny vampires…’ Too bad! That’s the implication underpinning your whole plotline with this character now.)

This is the ‘coexisting incompatible species’ problem, and the core of it is this: when you have two sentient species within a story, and one of them (Species A, or ‘vampires’) must lethally predate on the other (Species B, or ‘humans’) as their primary, or only form of sustenance… and you, in your limitless wisdom, decide these species should peacefully coexist. In fact you get the brilliant idea to write a story all about how these species could coexist.

Nope! It’s not going to happen. There is an inherently unbalanced power dynamic that ensures peace is not possible. Beyond the simple predator/prey dynamic, it’s also usually the case that the ‘vampires’ (be they demons, oni, or whatever) also are exceedingly more powerful in body and magic than the humans, and if they wanted to enslave them, (and there is an incentive here why they should: to have a reliable food source), probably could.

This is a common mistake, and one I think everyone makes at least once. When I was a kid I certainly did it. I often see people doing it, usually for the basic idea of ‘I wish everybody were friends, even the bad guys’ — which is a sweet enough thought on the surface, but breaks down into a nightmare when the ‘bad guys’ in question aren’t just misguided humans, but a completely different species without the capacity to stop being bad; because they are obligated, as a facet of their existence, to always, forever, predictably, do the thing that makes the ‘good guys’ reject them, justifiably, because ‘the thing’ is murder-cannibalism.

But I like vampires and relate to vampires, so I want a nice vampire, because I’m a misfit…

Great! Write a misfit. Not an obligate serial murderer. Voila, you have dodged the whole issue.

Is a glib way of saying it, but seriously. If you relate to the ‘villain’ position in a typical story, and I’m making the broad assumption that you are not actually dependant on the lifeblood of others or whatever else condition makes such villains reviled, then it’s disingenuous and reflective of bad self-esteem to escalate the point of rejection into something worse than whatever your situation is while simultaneously advocating an innocence for ‘anything’ by way of helplessness. You can get away with these characters if you remain grounded in the fact that they’re evil, and that the rejection they get is deserved, and so don’t present them as heroes. They can be useful for venting or introspection on that basis. Moreover I can certainly understand being maltreated for something you couldn’t help. But I can also tell you that you are not literally an evil vampire for it, unless you really, really want to hold onto a bad mindset that inherently places you out of ‘the norm’.

Apologetics for the vampires.

So, being that I have presented the problem, I’m sure there are people rushing with ideas to test my exacting claims and try to make the situation work. ‘The situation’ again being, two sentient races, one an obligate predator of the other, coexisting peacefully as the ‘lesson’ of the story. Let’s try some counterpoints.

• Humans eat livestock, so there’s no real difference between that and vampires eating humans…

  Wrong! Humans have the capacity not to eat livestock. The vampires have no capacity not to eat humans. If you are using predation as an analogy of good and evil, or as a statement on living beings exploiting each other, the humans have the capacity to be non-exploitative; the vampires don’t, so between the two parties the correct one, or at least the more hopeful, are the humans. Moreover humans have Godly authority to eat animals but that gets into a whole religious thing. You can make a ‘sentience’ stance if you’re athiest.
  
  (You also have to take into consideration; if all the world was vampires, the vampires will all die. But if all the world was humans, there’s still a ton of life. If you proliferate something to its extreme so everything is only it, moreover, a completely healthy and unbothered specimen of it, and the result is that everything including them dies, that thing is evil. Just so you know!)
  
  (Further please remember that you’re a human, writing for an audience of humans, who, assuming they don’t hate themselves, will naturally root for the humans, and that a vampire of the kind you are presenting is not real. They do not exist. There isn’t a moral point to make or sympathy to have about a grievance that doesn’t happen; if you want to make a point about a grievance that does, then use circumstances that are actually real. What’s the use of a vampire then? The use of a vampire is as a caricature of an exploitative predator that never changes.)

• What if the people want to keep the vampires, because the vampires give you powers/tech/military resources/etc?

  Correction, the vampires give the people collaborating with them powers. They are killing the people who don’t. In common parlance this is ‘human sacrifice’, with a dash of ‘bribery’ on top, both tempting AND evil on behalf of BOTH parties. If the vampires’ powers, also, are covetable, it puts those who do not want to kill for the vampires in an extremely bad position where they don’t just have to deal with the vampires themselves, but whatever human party is supporting them, and is likely to leave them victimised or culpable to aid the vampires (when they usually wouldn’t) in a murderous arms-race. The problem is resolved if you simply kill all the vampires.

• What if the vampires only go after ‘the right’ people? Such as criminals, etc…

  If the vampire(s) are acting independently, they will inevitably go after a ‘wrong’ person. You cannot figure every individual vampire will have appropriate judgement on who is/is not suitable to kill, or even necessarily want to discern such. This solution implies then, a law among the vampires, that is subservient to the human law of acceptable and unacceptable targets; they are effectively, a roundabout execution-weapon of the human rulers/lawmakers, dependant on a steady flow of criminals to feed themselves. Depending on the voraciousness of the vampire diet, this quota may not be realistic to keep by the ‘natural’ number of criminals, and would incentivise the vampires to promote worse criminality than themselves within the human populace, to have more food, or heavily restrict their numbers to the point they don’t have agency. This is not peaceful coexistence but a weird caste-slavery that begs the question of why bother keeping the vampires.

• If the vampires ran the society…

  Then the humans are slaves. They are pets. You would sooner or later get a setting like The Promised Neverland, where there is a level of ‘coexistence’ between humans and vampires (oni), but the only purpose a human would serve within a vampire society would be as food, or to avoid being food, sooner or later. Any human who would want to escape the society would be completely justified. Any human who would voluntarily stay in it is suicidal.

• What if the vampires don’t kill the people they eat, but only need a bit of blood…

  This is a slimy compromise that minimises the core of the issue, that is, finding justifications for why people should willingly be predated upon, and presenting it as a moral imperative to do so, without actually addressing that the inherent existence of these creatures is exploitative and predatory. You still retain all the same problems, except that you can say ‘they can get blood from a blood bank’ (Is there an implication of coerced donations in this, or do you have about the same levels of donations as usual, and just a whole lot less blood in the hospital for injured humans?), or, ‘they found one person who really loves them and feeds them’, which does reduce the societal impact, but is assuredly ruining that person’s life, or at minimum has this despicably inherent codependent dynamic going on, alongside opening a possible contingent of devoted bloodsuckers that don’t care about keeping the peace (so being machiavellian, nonconsensual suckings, accidental/purposeful deaths, etc) and vice versa, that in the end again begs the question of why bother keeping the vampires.

How do you solve the vampire problem?

So you still disbelieve me, and have gone on to write a story about humans and vampires coexisting. Godspeed. Peace to you. And you’re plotting, and you’re going along plotting, and you’re starting to grapple with it, and it’s building up, and it’s building up, and you’re going weird places and, now you’re wrestling with it, you’re wrestling and…

Oh…

Oh, no…

CALLIE WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. Yes, correct. You have realised your vampire problem is a problem. You’ve written yourself into a cheeky corner and need to address the vampires. You need to solve the vampires.

How do you solve the vampires? There are two answers. There are only, and I mean exactly ONLY, two ways to resolve a ‘vampire problem’.

The first one is KILL ALL THE VAMPIRES. Just do it. Humbly trash your worthless attempt at ‘grey’ morality, accept that the evil monsters are evil, and genocide every one of them. Shiki is one of the few modern media I’ve found that actually does this and it is INCREDIBLY cathartic. Don’t want to? That’s fine, there is an alternative.

The second solution is CURE ALL THE VAMPIRES. What does this mean? It means, by some method that is probably supernatural, permanently altering the nature of the vampire species so that they are no longer obligate predators of humans. So that they can eat salad or something. It means changing all the vampires so that they’re no longer vampires. Then coexistence with humans is possible. This is the solution that The Promised Neverland takes, and this is the only solution to vampires other than killing them. You cannot have your cake of ‘anthropophage race’ and eat it ‘but they’re friendly too’ on this matter.

So also, because they’ll come up: what about a setting like Beastars or Zootopia? Those aren’t the dilemmas I’m speaking about here, since the predators in both those settings can live off alternate foods. They aren’t obligate human-eaters, despite their bent towards being so, as they do have the capacity to suppress their urges. It’s a tense coexistence, and best off not happening, but these groups can coexist.

Are there any good vampires? Yes. In all of fiction there is one good vampire. It’s Ritsuko Kunihiro from Shiki. She gets bitten, turned into a vampire, then starves herself by refusing to eat anyone, then, once she can, lets herself burn to death in the sun. This is the only good vampire.

"You're salty about this Callie" Yes! I am. I am sick of everyone who has tried to make me sympathise with the stupid vampires, or who contrives a vacuous point on 'the evils of humanity, ohhhh those humans are so bad, life would be so much better if there weren't any BLOODTHIRSTY humans around,' because of a false equivalency between an irredeemable fictional puppy-eyed murder demon (but who I'm supposed to like also?) and Greg who with God's blessing ate KFC. If you think world peace could be had if everybody went vegan. Then please go ahead and write about that.

Heed my words! Listen to them well! And it’ll save you a ton of finagling and frustration! And if you do not... woe, woe, ye and ye story surely be doomed...