Do you think vampires shit themselves when they get turned?
People often shit themselves when they die... Do vampires when they get turned from alive to undead?? This is important lore to consider
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Well, like others have said, Anne Rice specifically describes the process, which includes purging the digestive and excretory tracts entirely. Vomiting, urinating, and defecating.
Most authors don't cover that stuff at all because it's not really what most readers want. They want the stuff that's fantastic, not gritty. Or, that's what authors assume their readers want. Since Anne Rice's success, vampires tend to be written less as horror, and I'd argue that the majority of vampire fiction is now in the paranormal romance category. Chances are that they're right in that assumption.
Take what it is likely the most successful paranormal romance series, the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris. She does a little of the gritty with it, but avoids the "nasty" parts. I would say that pretty much every fan of the series from before the show (true blood, for anyone not aware of the books and show) wouldn't have been a fan if she'd written in any scenes with even the humans pooping "on screen". Some of the fans from after the show might not have been bothered.
But, that kind of vampire story isn't really a vampire story. They're romance stories truth vampire characters. And, usually, they're written with female protagonists for a cis-hetero adult woman audience in mind. Even when written with a vampire protagonist, it's almost always going to be a female vampire, or if it's a male vampire, they'll be into men. I'm sure there's exceptions, but that's what the genre was built on.
If you get into urban fantasy, you'll find grittier vampire stories and characters, but even there, you only find passing mentions of human digestive products because most people don't want to read about something they experience regularly.
Now! Having written fantasy and urban fantasy books myself, as well as having done world building for my home brew ttrpg, I have addressed this in passing.
There's multiple types of vampires between my various settings. But the most common one is formed by a magic based symbiotic virus. That kind of vampire doesn't excrete anything during their rebirth because the virus is going to reshape the organs involved, and converts what would normally be waste into usable materials and/or energy.
Those vampires only defecate when they eat normal food. This is not something they do often because the virus rewires their brain and sensory organs in a way that vegetables are unpleasant, and cooked meat is as well. Even raw meat doesn't smell like food to them, though when they choose or have to eat things other than blood, raw meat is the only thing that tastes like food to them. It just tastes very weak and unsatisfying. They'll still be hungry if they shovel down as much meat as their reformed stomachs can hold.
But, when they do eat normal food, they excrete it eventually. The symbiote after transforming the body no longer inhabits the digestive tract, and it has killed off the gut biome. So, what comes out is what went in; chewed up food. The only time that changes is when there are living microbes on the food. The symbiote will attack those to kill them off, and that does result in some of the food being broken down as well, but it isn't digested, it's more that the cells in the food are damaged and leaking.
In other words, you don't want to be around vampire poop in my universe lol.
You also don't want to be around a vampire that needs to poop they get grumpy because you only are the remnants of their intestines now moving, they're uncomfortable. There's also the reaction of the symbiote when it needs to cleanse any food. It sends signals across the body that there's something unwanted present, so the vampire feels slightly angry, and possibly nervous.
The only things a vampire can take in and use would be liquids, but except for plain water, and made up beverages created by the vampires, the process is the same. Water will get absorbed, and whatever is left over gets pooped out rather than being absorbed and filtered out into urine. The beverages they've made themselves, like blood wine, are grown specifically to make sure the symbiote will treat the non water components like blood. Which, there's this whole thing about fields of grapes being grown in symbiote rich soil, etc that makes that possible, but I doubt anyone cares lol.
Back to the lore related to digestion. The point of all that is that I'm a tad strange regarding imaginary creatures. When, why, and how they poop is, to me, essential lore. Same with reproduction. So every fictional species/race in my stuff, I've thought it out for them. I've even got answers for creatures I didn't build myself (and I say build because stuff like vampires can't be claimed as a creation, but you can put them together. It's like fictional legos).
This guy knows vampire shitting
Damn you e done your research 😯
Upvoted for insane effort, but please tell me you touched grass in the last 12 months...
Grass? Isn't that what you people on the outside smoke?
The interesting thing is I could make the argument that the magic virus variant is the same as Anne Rice's.
I remember reading a fever dream of a book when I was a teenager called Vampire Virus- I feel like I recall that book addressing voiding the digestive tract as well. It's certainly addressed in some places...
It's the kind of theory that makes me want to write again.
Well, Anne Rice's vamps were not viral at all. They were inhabited by a spirit.
My symbiotic vampires were built to allow for a wide range of vampire powers. Anything from old school Dracula to Lestat, to things like the red and white court of the Dresden files. The symbiote was a way (originally) to let my players have any kind of vampire they wanted without having to find a new explanation each time.
It turned into more than that over time though.
I'm with you on remembering some other mentions if it though. Can't really pin down where, but there's that niggling little itch in memory that says I've read it.
Shit, though. Write! Doesn't have to be for anything but the fun of it.
written with female protagonists for a cis-hetero adult woman audience in mind
You sure?
Yup.
I talk to other writers. We discuss this kind of thing sometimes. Even the bigger names sometimes cross into amateur spaces.
Paranormal romance, as a genre, is driven by the same markets as traditional romance. The stuff that sells is marketed to straight women because they're the ones that spend on it reliably.
Hell, good luck finding men that write paranormal romance at all, much less in traditional publishing. They exist, but it's not the norm.
Now, you get into some of the dedicated fan fiction, the blog level publishing, and the non commercial self publishing, you find more that's geared to other audiences. But those spaces exist because you aren't going to reliably sell things that don't interest straight women. You'll run into what is written with gay or bi characters in the mainstream, but it's still being written for the straight women to buy. It's a woefully underrepresented segment, but the truth is that the markets are marginal to begin with, and writing for them simply isn't going to make enough money to be something traditional publishing invests in.
Yeah, you can argue whether or not fan fiction, and non commercial self publishing is or isn't part of the overall "writing" population. But even if you include that, you're looking at a tiny fragment of any given genre. It's also a tiny fragment of readership.
I have a novella based around magical transition that's out there, under a pen name. Decent story, and I get the occasional email about it. But compare that to the volume I get from anything else, and it's barely a trickle (mind you, the total volume of everything is a trickle to begin with, we're talking maybe a dozen a month at most).
Go look up some of the bigger names in paranormal romance. There's usually going to be footage of them doing talks at cons, that kind of thing. The audiences are going to be damn near all women. The writers are almost all women. It's not a closed market, all sides of it except publishers are more than welcoming of men and non hetero fans for sure. There's all kinds of LGBTQ folks scattered through the crowds. But they are scattered.
If you aren't a writer, and one that has some degree of presence that's vettable, you aren't getting into the private groups where things get discussed about the inside aspects of trying to write. But inside them, anyone that's actively seeking readers, free or paid, is going to have their intended audience because it's just a fact that genres exist, and that they tend to have demographics. So you have to keep that in mind, or not get read.
Which brings us back to the beginning. Yes, I'm sure of what I said. It wasn't an offhand comment.