Need help on a fantasy vampires

You didn't offend me. You just seemed to be doing the opposite of what you were asking for help with and I was trying to understand that.

 

i am listening and enjoying all of the ideas i am hearing, and i am taking the ideas i like. i am considering all, if not, most of them. i just wanted to state where i am currently at with my vampires.

 

How about having vampires which can be weakened by high pitched noises?

 

genius

 

Vampire in "Let me in"
Suffers massive hemorrhage when she enters the home without being invited in. (like a person with no clotting factor.)

She is like a shark when she smells blood, barely in control. (she doesn't kill her friend but runs out and kills the next closest person.)
Twilight-they have strong urge to eat when they smell blood.

She can eat candy(food) but she can't digest it, and gets sick.

Sunlight burns skin, even causing combustion and massive fire.

----Nothing original to offer, but the best way to avoid cliche is to know what is out there, and modify it or completely change it to avoid the cliche.

 

Let Me In isn't a bad story though. Maybe it's because I identify more with Oskar, an often bullied son of a single mother with a dipstick of a father, than I do with the whiny codependant Bella. And I sympathize more with the vampire here.

She may be immortal, but she's still a kid dealing with her body and having to survive in the world whatever way she can, including attaching herself to a raging pedophile to get her blood. She doesn't whine about it, but her need to make friends and connect to something makes me feel for how desperate it is. I don't want her to kill, but I don't want her to die either.

The thing is, like Cogito says, everything has been done before. It's all been done. That goes doubly so if your story is about vampires. But if it's a well written vampire story then I won't care.

And as far as cliches go, I find it even more cliche when a vampire novel goes out of it's way to point out how the vampires in the story are not cliche. IE: Unlike in the movies, vampires don't do X.

Don't tell me your vampires aren't vicious blood drinkers. Show me your vampire going to the local butcher to pay a kid to sneak him a pint of blood so that he doesn't have to kill someone for it. Show me, and make me either sympathize or hate them. That's what will make your vampire story stand out.

 

dont worry about that

 

Dunno their biggest weakness could be love? When you think of vampires you usually associate them with passion. So maybe if they experience love it destroys them? I mean they're cursed so why should they be able to experience a feeling like love? Just my 2 cents

 

Making some bloody good sense there mate.

 

How about vampires who can only feed off human blood? I remember reading a book about a vampire who tried to drink form animals and wound up with his face rotting off. Or how about vampires who don't drink blood but rather feed off of emotions, but they experience and amplify the emotion so if they were feeding off an angry person the vampire would fly into a frenzy or if they fed off a depressed individual the vampire would feel suicidal until they processed the psychic energy?

 

sounds good... im loving all the ideas im getting

 

Thanks! I'm writing my own vampire book but I don't want to give away what mine are like because it's set in modern day and it's a bit more er... sciencey? If that's a good way of putting it. They're not really a 'fantasy' creature in mine.

I suppose it might be a good idea to have a look at old vampire legends and take some ideas from those, maybe see what bats are weak against (hence why I suggested high pitched noises) and work from there, Dracula was a shape shifter, perhaps they could have a problem where if they stay in a different form for too long they'd be stuck like that forever? It would be quite amusing to have a vampire walking around with a bat on his shoulder which was actually a friend or relative who got stuck that way!

Damn, now I want to use that idea!

 

so its like urban fantasy sorta? sounds great, cant wait to read it. i think i might use the noise idea... thanks for the help!

 

If you take a sci-fi approach to vampirism (you consider the condition a illness) you may find out some reasonably logical weakness: for instance, if there's a virus that cause vampirism, you may make some research on famous viral infections and make an idea that might be unorthodox.

Most of the traditional weakness of the vampires are taken from slavic-christian myhtology: the vampire is a demon, therefore he can't stand the light, he's dead so he needs to rest underground, doesn't like crosses or any other christian related amulets (I always wondered what would have happened if the vampire was muslin or jewish...) etc..etc...

 

thanks for the help! and there are all kinda of vampires in islamic and jewish mythology. they are all defeated by the same basic methods

 

Actually in Islam they don't have vampires, they have ghouls that devour flesh, it makes sense since in the desert with low humidity corpses lose all the fluids very soon, for the jews there are blood sucking demons, like the greek Lamiae, but they aren't defeated with the same basic methods, they need to be exorcised, but nevermind my point was that the weakness of the vampire is basically related to slavic religious folklore, but if you base your story on the idea that vampirism is an infection like AIDS you can use all the problems real life patients have as weakness.

That would be interesting IMO because it was never tried on paper at least.

The other option is to make the vampires another subspeces of Homo Sapiens that evolved separately and always lived among the ordinary humans.

 

theyre all basically "vampires". i have a few ideas in mind, ill encorperate them as i go and see if they fit.

 

How about a weakness to decay? They are dead so it would be natural that their body starts to rot and such. Perhaps they have to get it maintained regularly in the vampire equivalent of a beauty parlor?