Vampires and the Absence of the Patter Of Little Feet. Life Just Sucks for Them.

It’s pretty much a universal standard across vampire fiction that children don’t exist in the vampire world. Vampires don’t create vampires out of children because those children never grow up. They go mad, or other horrible and desparately sad things happen to the minds of the vampires trapped in those eternally immature bodies.

Some authors deal with the long ago past when vampires did, once upon a time, convert children but mostly, the practice has become proscribed and repressed amongst the vampires themselves, to be ruthlressly punished simply because the results are such a disaster.

It’s pretty much a given that vampires can’t procreate. One unusual exception is Laurell K. Hamilton’s world, where vampires sometimes have viable sperm, but the risks of a pregnancy going wrong are extremely high — the “Vlad Syndrome” complications require aborting the fetus.

It’s pretty much accepted that vampires can’t have children once they’ve been brought over. If they had children as humans, then often they’re forced to leave those children behind — abandoning them because their new lifestyle makes them too dangerous and their children too vulnerable to the denizens of the new world they now inhabit. Bill Compton from the Sookie Stackhouse novels is one example.

It would be fair to say that the vast majority of vampires, then, are utterly without children in their lives.

Yet most vampires in fiction seem to go through their long, long lives barely regretting the loss.

Given that vampires are essentially immortal — they live forever unless someone manages to kill them in one of a few limited and specific ways — then the absence of a next generation might not occur to most vampires as being a very high priority in their lives.

However, all vampires start out being human, with human drives and needs and a human psychology. The need to procreate and the love of children and family is stamped into their DNA. Every vampire spent a childhood and early adulthood influenced by their family, friends and community, watching couple fall in love, marry and have children, watching those children grow and play around them.

There is no possible way that every vampire that ever existed can shrug off twenty or thirty or more years of that sort of survival instinct and influence and say “it doesn’t matter anyway.” There’s got to be some sort of mental adjustment by all vampires to the idea that they’re either never going to have children of their own, or not going to see their children grow up, or never going to belong to their families again in the way they thought they were going to. Depending on how important children and family were to the individual vampire, that adjustment might be small, or it might be massive.

It’s entirely possible, too, that the adjustment wouldn’t happen just once. Vampires live such long lives, they would be acquiring wisdom and adjusting their perspective and attitudes all the time. A vampire that was brought over when he was in his early twenties might not find the idea of never having children such a drama, at first. But after a century or two, when all his original friends and relatives have passed away and all he has around him are those friends he has acquired since he was made, and the vampires he knows, then the idea of children, roots, family and a personal history may suddenly acquire far more meaning and importance. The loss of it will impact anew.

I often wonder why more vampires aren’t shown in fiction as being stark raving mad. After a century or two of making such huge adjustments, their delicate human psychology really should have simply given up and gone around the twist. Whenever you do see a well-adjusted, only-slightly eccentic vampire who has reached his millenium mark, you know that vampire has got to have a very unusual mind to have lived so long and adjusted so well. No children, not ever. No family. Friends dying all the time. No one to remember them. No personal history or legacy. No food, ever. Sucking blood for the rest of their unnatural.

Life just sucks for them.

One of the characters in Beauty’s Beasts, Damien, is over a thousand years old, and Nicholas Sherwood, who begins the series as his lover, is over 900 years old. This crumbling of the psychology in the long term and the human drive for procreation were challenges I faced when I was building the Guardian Bonds series. I thought it would be interesting to have vampires who wanted children in their lives and actively worked to include them. The series arcs were built around my solutions. I can’t explain them here without giving massive spoilers, but instead I’ll lift a single brow, smile mysteriously and urge you to read the series. :)