If a story, game, show, or movie contains vampires, I am immediately bored and will suspect the creator of being uncreative. Vampires are not cool. They have never been cool. The are the most overdone “monsters” in any form of media. And they are almost always the same; people with the mannerisms from 1800’s England or France and the dress sense of a 2005 Hot Topic. Why not ancient Babylon? Why not South American vampires? Why are their personalities always the fucking same? Why are they always so fucking formal? Why always the 1800’s; this one bugs me the most because the media often claims that Vampires are thousands of years old, so supposedly they kept up with the times until the 1800’s and then just stopped. It’s because writers who use them are lazy and uncreative.
“Oh it’s a metaphor for the duality of man and how there are secretly monsters living among-” shut the fuck up. Use a different metaphor if it’s that important to your story. But it never is. That’s never important to the story because they are always just so fucking lame. Always the same powers. Always the same weaknesses. They have been done to hell and back.
Use. A different. Monster.
That sounds like a Pishtaco from Andean folklore.
Totally off the point of the thread but I only know about pishtacos because I just read a couple books by Richard K. Morgan (the Altered Carbon guy), Thirteen and Thin Air, which are sci-fi with a bunch of Andean culture and folklore which I had never run across before. The reason for all the Andean stuff is the first space elevator was built down there (needs to be at the equator) and because of this many of the workers, including Mars colonists without special skills, are from the Altiplano. So on Mars, even hundreds of years later, that culture is very prevalent, including having Quechua as a major language. And because of all the money flowing through the region local Quechua speaking organized crime families get very powerful. Lots of fun (made-up, I assume) local expressions in the books like “Pachamama’s tits!” and “Fucked by Supay’s cock”.