#literally everytime someone expresses even mild interest in this concept I go nuts

[ghostinacardboardbox-oldblog]

Can we have more info on the old vampires vs new vampires thing you mentioned? Plzzzz🥺

Yes! You can always have stuff from this au by the way. The problem is not getting me to talk about it, it’s getting me to shut up. This got a little long, so I’m putting it under a cut.

Also uhh warning I guess for general vampire stuff? Nothing graphic but mentions of blood and death.

So I actually had to go through my posts about the au so far to find what exactly I said about the ages of vampires and what I mentioned is that none of the main characters in this story have been undead for a long period of time. That wasn’t something I set out to do, but it worked out that way when I was trying to work out character dynamics; they all have to be close-ish in age both physically and chronologically.

(Gonna be honest, part of why this is the case is so I could avoid the trope of “ancient immortal falls in love with very young human” and part of it is for comedy reasons.)

I mean, Spot, Jack, and Race all make sense being that young just from a story standpoint. Spot and Jack are brothers and we’re only turned about a year apart, and Racetrack knew them before he was turned. I haven’t mentioned the only other main vamp yet, but it’s a similar case to Race as far as timeline. That leaves Sniper, who I mentioned is the oldest. This is by chronological age but not physical. Race is actually the “oldest,” technically, because he is turned so much later in the timeline, but Sniper has like… existed the longest, both as a human and a vampire. She’s been a vampire for six years, Spot for almost four, Jack for almost two, and everyone else important actually gets turned during the course of the story.

So that’s just a breakdown of the cast itself. This brings us to the question of why all of them were turned so recently. A sudden spike in the number of vampires in this specific area doesn’t imply good things; there have to be older vampires somewhere, and for some reason they’ve started turning a lot more people. Sort of.

There isn’t necessarily an actual spike in the amount of vampire activity, it just turns out that this group specifically is a mess. There is drama due to Spot and Jack, brothers, being vampires. There is drama due to Race, The guy who hangs out with vampires, being a vampire. There is drama due to the fact that the super secret extra vampire is involved in like four different side plots at once. There very much is a reason that all of these guys are vampires and that reason is that every single one of them is causing problems both by accident and on purpose.

Sniper isn’t involved in much drama actually. She’s pretty cool and does interact with the main group a lot, but she skips the phase all of the others had to go through that was “I just met the Brothers McFang and now I’m dead, unclear if those events are related” and instead showed up, already a vampire and pretty unproblematic other than the drinking human blood thing.

I will say that the tone changes real quick when we jump over to the perspective of the vampire hunters, though. There are a couple of them with very different attitudes regarding the whole situation, but the one thing they agree on is that an increasing number of vampire attacks is bad, and they don’t have the context that actually theres just One Group of college kids who can’t keep it together. To them, there is a very real threat happening. I’m fairly sure that this will end up reading similarly to modern readers of Dracula already knowing Dracula is the vampire and laughing at the characters for not getting it.

Aside from the plot just being an absolute disaster, there is some lore about how vampires “age.” They don’t age physically, so for example Sniper is permanently 20 years old even though she should be about 26. The major signs of a vampire’s age are their actual abilities and weaknesses, which change slightly.

Younger vampires aren’t as hungry as often. I’m imagining this as, like, since they sustain themselves on the life force of human, it makes sense that the longer they are dead, the more they need to feed, right? That’s what I was going for. And this change is fairly rapid. It’s not going to hurt them to be hungry for a while, it just sucks, so they avoid it. Racetrack, for example, can probably go close to a year before even really noticing the desire to hunt, as opposed to Sniper who can only comfortably go a few weeks between hunts. She could survive just as long as Race could, but it would be the literal worst. So why would she do that.

The actual characteristics that make them look more and more vampiric increase with age. None of them look out of the ordinary, but if they give it a few decades, their fangs will be more noticeable and they will generally just look more dead. I think it’s an interesting concept that the immortals will, at some point, decay past the point of passing as still human. They’ll still survive, but they can’t be the same. Maybe that isn’t original idk.

They also get faster. They can go pretty heckin fast from the moment they’re turned, but a vampire a few centuries old may be able to break the sound barrier, if they really try. It improves hunting, which is a necessary advantage since they won’t be able to easily blend in by that point.

I don’t know if any of this really answered the question you were asking, but here’s some stuff! I hope you enjoy it.