Being a Vampire Sucks

Who wouldn’t want to be a vampire?  You never age, never die unless you piss off van Helsing, and can spend eternity living the good life with other immortal beautiful people.  Sounds good right?  Wrong!  Let’s look beneath the surface pleasures of being a creature of the night and look at why it sucks, pun extremely intended, to be a vampire.  Also for the sake of consistency, we’re going to look at only one type of vampire for this argument, the kind from the one and only Dracula by Bram Stoker.

First off the never aging thing only works if you drink blood regularly.  Dracula appeared as an old man until he had consumed enough blood to make himself appear youthful.  So if you want to be one of those veggie vamps or a blood teetotaler, you better get used to anti-wrinkle creams and walkers.

Next is the immortality.  Never dying does seem pretty good.  You’ll be able to collect on long term investments, amass a fortune, perfect your golf swing, and see history speed before you.  Sure you’ll lose your friends and loved ones, but you’ll make new ones and besides you always have your fellow vampires to hang out with.  This may have worked in the age before social media however.  Back in the middle ages, you could fake your death and get a new identity pretty easily.  Nothing like the days before written records.  Try pulling that off today with facial recognition software, social media, and increasingly tight security.  It can be done, but it’ll cost you.  Good thing you amassed that fortune I was talking about earlier.  And if you’re not so lucky, well, the dissection in a government lab shouldn’t do any lasting damage.

Third is being either hated by most of the public or seen as some weird deity by the minority.  Think about it, vampires have never been the good guys in our species’ folklore.  The whole vampire good guy thing is relatively new.  Most people upon discovering you that you are a blood sucker would try to stake you on the spot.  The others who would try to get you to turn them are, for the lack of a better word, a little off.  People don’t even like each other let alone some super powerful predator who feeds on them.  They’d start a mass hunt against you and you kind until they are certain all vampires are dead.  So you either have to hide out of fear of being hunted, or the idol of some weird teen.

I’m not going to talk about sunlight.  Dracula rules remember?  In this argument you can be in the sunlight, you just don’t like it and it weakens you.

Next we have the whole undead, Satan-spawn thing.  Don’t forget vampires are undead.  Technically as a vampire you’d be considered an affront to nature and most religions.  If you can live with being an abomination whose soul is doomed for eternal damnation, or some other punishment depending on your religious views, good for you.  If you’re atheist, disregard this paragraph.

Finally we have the fact that you feed on people.  Since you’re no longer human, it’s not cannibalism, but it’s close.  It’s like eating a monkey, it’s just wrong.  Think about it, do you really want to imagine eating people and feeling good about it?  That’s one reason vampires creep us out.  They eat us!  Just remember eating people is wrong.

So that’s pretty much why it would be bad to be a vampire.  They just don’t fit with today’s world.  Granted older vampires would be better off, they’ve had decades of experience avoiding angry mobs and working their way into society.  But for you wannabe vamps, don’t bother.  It’s not worth the trouble.

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