#WHY ARE THEY SO FUCKED UP WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP CLAIMING THEY ARE SUPERPREDATORS

[rxttenfish]

Vampire hater? I that vampires were objectively perfect metaphors for predators?

I've always thought there was a lot of fun stuff they can be used for. Can your tirade be today?

lol. lmfao. i think vampires remain god awful metaphors for predators the second you know anything about predation or how it happens in nature.

okay lets start with the parasite bit because thats easier for me. parasitism is also a little bit of a... non-definition too, and technically is just another form of predation too (much like how we should probably define herbivores as predators too because plants are alive and just as alive as animals and the actual mechanics of herbivory is better understood that way but Oh Well i cant even get people to understand that reptiles are alive so plants are a no-go), so all im really talking about is disputing a certain idea of how they behave as predators. for the purposes of this, lets define parasitism as a form of predation that consumes prey in units of less than one.

for one, in a significant chunk of media, a vampire preying on a human usually kills that human. im assuming for this that the amount of blood they need is just equivalent to one human, rather than getting into the supernatural weeds of why this kills the human. you could also just assume the vampire is incompetent and dispatches the prey due to not know how to feed on blood and NOT, but thats bad for the species if all vampires do that.

this is BAD for a parasite. parasites do not actually want to kill their hosts. why would they? for most parasites, the host is not only their source of food but their HOUSE, their source of everything in the world. sure, never leaving the host makes reproduction a complicated mess, but thats the price you pay for getting literally everything handed to you on a silver platter. a parasite is not designed to leave the host, or not for long, and usually makes use of intermediate hosts to do so anyways, minimizing non-host time. did you know most parasites dont actually have any adaptations to manage their body temperature? because if they live inside a host body, then they can just use the hosts body temperature in the first place, nice and perfect for them.

high parasite loads in single hosts are not actually good for the parasite, anyways. anything that effects host health isnt good for the parasite, actually, because they run on such a fine line of "host is healthy and happy = even better food and house for me!" and "host cannot be TOO healthy and happy, because then their immune system has an even better chance to kick me out and kill me (at the same time ofc)"

vampires that just... kill their host upon first contact with said host are not being very good parasites. theyre bad parasites actually. why are you burning your own fields. the blood comes BACK.

but this is when you say, ah! but what if theyre like mosquitos and vampire bats and other forms of parasites that dont live inside their hosts body!

one, you still have the issue of STOP KILLING YOUR DAMN HOSTS. stop removing food sources for yourself in the future!!! but also, theres a reason vampire bats are so fucking weird for deciding to become obligate sangivores as tetrapods, and its because blood is a pretty shitty source of nutrition. its high in certain things, sure, but also it is crucially missing several different things necessary for life to Function, and this is a pretty extreme way to live if you cant just find ways around that. ie: is a vertebrate.

lack of detection is also the name of the game here. you do not want your prey to even notice that you are there, you do not want them to dislodge you, you want to get in and get out. why are you being the exact same fucking size as your prey. thats how you get immediately noticed. and you LOOK like how your prey looks???? in a social animal???? good job getting marked as 1. OUTSIDER TO INSIDE GROUP and 2. POTENTIAL THREAT. theres so much back and forth, pros and cons, competition and collaboration, in social species, that you shouldnt get wrapped up in that if you can help it (which you shouldnt, because you are trying to eat these people, not have your own feeding attempt thwarted because they pulled you into their social dramas and now you cant get close enough to any of them without getting noticed or possibly attacked anyways)

honestly the size thing is one of the big things for me. it makes no sense. theres a reason predators as a rule are smaller than the prey that they hunt, and thats because the 10% rule of tropic levels still applies here. you are operating at an energy deficit. the energy it takes to capture and kill and feed and digest (because you have to have energy to even begin eating something!! even if you dont catch it yourself!! digestion consumes energy!!!) something the size of a human will NOT be made up for by the energy you get from that human if you are ALSO the same size as a human. you are so much more likely to get caught and found out (and no i do not care how op your vampires are, getting outnumbered is far more powerful in real life than it has ever been in fiction because fiction solely runs on "rule of cool" and it kills me when people then try to apply it to real life) (see also: STOP KILLING YOUR SOURCE OF FOOD YOU IDIOTS) (YOU DO NOT GO INTO THE FIELD AND START KILLING ALL OF YOUR HERD OF COWS BECAUSE ONE BULL GORED SOMEONE) (YOU HAVE TO EAT TOO) and to have your feeding attempt botched if you are the size of a human. theres a reason all the sangivores we have are all fractions of a size of the animals that they feed on, AND this is already counting sangivores who eat OTHER stuff too (a lot of blood-feeding insects will also be important pollinators who eat nectar!! vampire bats are weird by only eating blood!!!)

theres also the issue of timing. vampires ALWAYS eat way more often than they should. like, okay, blood is garbage food and it has no fat meaning no extra stores of energy to prevent immediate starvation if you miss one feeding. but these are also animals that are taking a little bit of blood from an animal far larger than them who will not miss that amount of blood taken. they can afford to double-dip, because they arent killing their prey. sure, they can kill their prey in massive swarms, but not only does this primarily effect the young/small/weak and less so for the adults (a fair enough price to pay, babies are cheap and animals always seem to have a higher mortality in their early life than adulthood), but also this is a pretty rare situation to begin with and the bust/boom suggested would be beneficial enough alone to make up for the cost of these losses.

but no. vampires are killing their prey, they have to take a large amount of blood at once (one whole human the same size as them), and they only specialize into ONE TYPE OF PREY. yes, i know theres recent talk of vampires who eat animals, but no. im going pop vampire, the vampire that most people will first think of when thinking of a vampire, basic as shit.

humans are bad prey, okay? this is what all these stories dont understand. humans are really, really bad prey. first of all, we are apex predators to begin with (do not come at me and argue with me about this, an apex predator is literally just one of the largest predators in its ecosystem, can (not necessarily will) eat nearly any other type of animal in said ecosystem, and is rarely predated upon as adults. lions and bears and tigers and sharks are all regularly eaten by other animals when they are cubs. like i said. infant mortality is universally pretty high), so thats a bad call. even in cases of maneaters that exist, theyre nearly all animals that have had their natural form of living interrupted in some way. habitation is the least damaging option (aka why you need to STOP FEEDING THE WILDLIFE), but also if the animal is injured, or sick, or very old, or nursing cubs. aka, all the cases where we would expect an animal to start taking on riskier prey that cannot pan out. the lions of tsavo could not eat their regular prey due to injury and already were feeding off of bodies left behind by the human atrocities of the railroad being constructed. humans both remember and hold grudges. this is a bad strategy, and vampires have made the fatal mistake of absolutely needing to be in absolutely tiny populations just to make the numbers work and also being large enough to actively target. you cannot squish every mosquito, but one vampire already requires such a massive population to support them that you can easily drive them to localized extinction by just killing one.

which is another thing. if you are killing a human every time you eat, and you are eating often, then the humans are not replacing themselves. humans take at least 9 months to make another human, and even that is basically useless without a good decade and a half more of just waiting for them to grow up and get to a decent size which might then be useful for you. if you target the infants to begin with, then thats way less blood, not going to be enough, and youre going to make multiple kills in one night just to make up for that absence, and then some because you need even MORE to make up for the extra energy you just spent obtaining all of said infants. not to mention the time lag itll take for the same humans to make more humans to replace those, AND humans have a limited reproductive window to begin with. this is very bad if you have to eat more than once a week. hell, this is bad if youre even doing the regular predator thing of eating a single large prey maybe once a month (and they supplement their diet with other, smaller prey items to make up for the energy deficit). do you know how long it takes a wildebeest or a zebra to go from calf to reproductive adult? its not 18 years, okay.

and again i just sit here and fume thinking about every excuse made that vampires are using mimicry to look like humans to get close to them. first of all, thats not how most aggressive mimicry works. most aggressive mimicry is looking like something appetizing to your prey item, something it wants to get close to, or something it wouldnt even notice at all. usually if youre looking like a specific animal, its not actually FOR that animal, and aggressive mimicry to begin with is rarer than you think. the only example i can think of is the (small!!!!) fraction of ant-mimicking jumping spiders that do prey on ants, but not only is this rare due to how scary ants themselves are, but it cannot really be just copy + pasted onto humans, who have an entirely different reproductive setup and no queens that churn out hundreds of offspring a day (more than any spider could eat in the one single community of ants) and are mammalian megafauna that have extremely high energetic needs and physical effort required just to kill a single one of those bastards, let alone repeatedly doing it more than once, AND being obligated to navigate space in the same way that they do.

all of this is nonsensical because i am very sick right now so you know. unpolished vampire rant.

[amillioninprizes]

Permalink to the following comment. I’m going to the NYC march later, but this articulates something I’ve been feeling angry about for the better part of the last year:

I won’t march because I’m wondering where the hell were these people before the election and mobilizing voters to stop Trump? Where were these hundreds of thousands of people to help GOTV in their states? Did all of these people vote? Where were they in the 2010 and 2014 elections to vote against Republicans who were eroding voting rights in their respective states? Where were they when Obama needed votes in the House and Senate? Senate votes aren’t gerrymandered, so where were they to help him at least get a Senate to confirm federal judgeships, such as the final SCOTUS seat Trump gets in addition to the hundred of federal judgeships Obama couldn’t get filled because of the GOP?

Now they care about LGBT people, women losing our rights, civil rights, free press, public schools, the ACA, Social Security, rights for the disabled, Medicare, expansion of healthcare, public schools, Planned Parenthood, the SCOTUS, climate change, police reform, and all the other causes I see represented today? They’ve had a chance since 2008 to stop this and they didn’t. They never countered the Teahadists with this enthusiasm. Progressive policies were stalled, hard won civil rights were rolled back, and Obama’s domestic agenda was stalled because we weren’t there for him in midterm elections or helping him win the PR battle (to be fair, he admits to failing to understand the usefulness of political theater and PR) for his policies. Now you all are weeping, rending garments, gnashing your teeth, and falling out because he’s gone. Well, he asked you to turn up and vote if you still supported him, but you were comfortable enough telling pollsters how much you approve of him. Now you care?

And, this November, when this energy was all that stood between this and Trump, most of you all bitched about Hillary’s email hygiene how she wasn’t perfect, how she was problematic, how she was a warmonger, how she was too close to Wall Street, how she was late to the show on same-sex marriage and LGBT rights (no one cared that she took the biggest step to help trans people get IDs as was within her power to do so as SoS), too close to Israel, hated people of color, and did nothing for the poor. She was fighting for universal healthcare before it was cool and got dragged for it because why should a FLOTUS, who had experience in expanding healthcare in one of the poorest states, get involved. No woman withstood the assaults of the GOP and Trump more than Hillary did. Has there ever been a presidential candidate who gave a feminist and strong defense of abortion rights on a presidential debate stage as she did this fall? Has there been a president with a more progressive platform? She stood between us, the Trump administration, and a Republican Congress but you couldn’t be bothered to summon this energy until now to support her and the new blood the Democrats were trying to bring into the Congress.. Indeed, you all couldn’t bother to stop hating her, lambasting her, spreading right-wing propaganda about her, spreading misogynistic left-wing propaganda about her, and generally hating her because she wasn’t one of the “problematic” men you loved and still love.

I also won’t march because Hillary is blamed for things she didn’t do, when the men who did them are still beloved. “Uncle” Joe Biden gets mad love around here and other quarters, but he wrote the 1994 Crime Bill for which Hillary, who didn’t vote for it, does. Bernie voted for that bill, and not because of the assault weapons ban as he claimed as he voted for it before that was added to it, and he never gets the blame. The “superpredator” remark, which was borrowed from a Princeton sociologist who now denounces it too, rightfully got a lot of attention. Bernie Sanders called the same group of people “sociopaths” on the floor of the House of Representatives, but no one gave a fuck.

Uncle Joe was also the main advocate for the banking and credit card industries. His nickname used to be Senator Joseph Biden (D-MBNA). Hillary voted in favor of every banking regulation bill save for one because it allowed people to discharge back child support in bankruptcy which would severely hurt single parents, the vast majority of them women, who already don’t get adequate child support. She missed one vote because Bill was coming out of heart surgery, but attempted to keep it from coming up for a vote on procedural grounds. But, you know, speaking fees at Goldman-Sachs were the real issue, not her voting record. As for her donors, I’d like to remind everyone that people who worked on Wall Street were her constituents insofar as people who work there live in the state of New York. People donate to Senate campaigns in the states where they live. Also, no one really had a problem with Bernie accepting money Hillary got from those people to run a much cheaper campaign in Vermont. I guess it miraculously became pure, clean, and holy when he touched it.

Hillary gets the blame for Libya, but Obama is the only one who could have authorized any US participation, yet he gets a pass for ordering it. That’s not even mentioning that France and the UK started the whole thing and came to us for help when they finally realized they were stupid enough to believe they had the military resources to carry it out.

Hillary and the foreign minister of Russia had signed a diplomatic solution for solving the crisis in Syria while other people were fucking around bickering, but Obama withdrew it when he was getting criticized in the 2012 election for being too soft on Russia. To be clear: Hillary got Russia to agree to a diplomatic solution to that would have pushed its client state to make a change that would have stopped the carnage and put in place a leader the Syrian people would accept (Bashar al-Asaad will never be accepted back and can only stay in power by killing people on a large scale).

Obama maintained a kill list, which he used regularly, but she’s called “Killary”. Obama ordered drone strikes that killed thousands of innocent people, have caused PTSD in Pakistan, and outraged the world. But, Obama, the man people still love to this very day, isn’t the murderer of Muslims, Hillary is. Bernie Sanders is the dove who wants to clamp down on military spending who never saw a war appropriations bill he didn’t like, especially for the trillion dollar DoD boondoggle F-35. That plane will never be built but he keeps voting for it because it is being “built” in Vermont and there is no end in sight for that project so the cost continues to rise.

I really won’t march because one of the women Bernie Bros who organized these marches uses Hillary’s quotes to galvanize support for the march. Not only did she spread hatred for Hillary, she uses these quotes without attribution. She claims Hillary is not on the honor roll of women because Hillary attended the inauguration. She, and others, STILL DON’T GET IT: Hillary had to be problematic and do shit she probably didn’t/doesn’t like doing because she is also the former First Lady of the United States. She, like Michelle Obama, are still very much at the mercy of the gender roles society set in place for them long ago. She wasn’t there as a former US Senator or Secretary of State, she had to be there as someone’s wife. All she’s done was wiped away and undermined as she had to sit there and smile as his supporters heckled her with chants to lock her up. She had to sit there and smile as she watched a man who is unqualified, done no public service, and got away with shit she never could have gotten away with, took the job she deserved. (How many of us can relate to the experience of watching a less qualified man taking a job or getting credit for something you deserved over him). Her highest duty yesterday wasn’t to maintain her dignity, it was to show deference to her status as a wife of a president. She had to do it and other things because women don’t get to act like men and we certainly can’t not act like them if we want to see power.

This march is cynical. It represents the craven interests of those who are trying to make up for their lack of activism over the years and at the most critical point in the history of our republic and maybe the world. Now the White House webpage has erased any references to LGBT rights, civil rights, and climate change. In their place are pages devoted to the denunciation of Muslims and sinister vows to end the “anti-police atmosphere in this country.” You handed a bigot and bigoted congressional majority, and SCOTUS seats. We’ll live with your indifference for generations. Your enthusiasm today won’t change shit. The charitable view of it is that it is a day late and a dollar short.