I’ve run into this trope a fair number of times; Anno Dracula, Owari no Seraph, and Noblesse are some of the better-known versions. And it makes me pause, and frown. Because why. Why would vampires want to rule the world? It’s too much like work.
This is particularly annoying because the concept of vampire most people are aiming at in these scenarios is supernatural apex predator. You know, the whole, “they’re so much stronger, faster, everything than humans, we’re nothing more than cattle to them!” etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
You see, actual apex predators don’t work that way. In fact, most apex predators work as little as possible. See great whites, tigers, lions, crocodiles, and so many more. The whole point of being an apex predator is being the biggest, baddest thing in the ecosystem. You hunt when you’re hungry – and when you’re not, you flake out.
Lions may be the champion sleepers, spending most of the day a-snooze, but no true apex predator spends energy it doesn’t have to. As a predator, all your food is scared to death of you, and doesn’t want to be eaten. It’ll fight tooth and nail, even in dying. Who knows, it might get lucky. And one small scratch in the right place could lead to infection, and then your great and terrible predator will be terribly dead.
The more energy you use, the more prey you have to chase, the more chances you have to get injured. Apex predators are strategically lazy.
If vampires are so driven by predatory instincts, then they should be lazy, too. Ordering people around, much less ruling them, is so much work.
In the case of the original Dracula, it’s understandable. Vlad Tepesh was a bloodthirsty ruler of men, there’s no reason that should change just because he’s now living-impaired. And he’s not trying to rule England. Only move there, and spawn a new pack of vampire brides.
He is, in fact, acting much more like an apex predator than modern imitators. Just read the ship’s log of the Demeter in the book. One passenger and crewman after another, suddenly vanishing, always when there were no witnesses. It’s like having a tiger on board. Brr.
(Yes, I highly advise re-reading Dracula when you’re poking how to do vampire behavior. It’s a classic for a reason.)
Long story short – if you want to do a story with vampire overlords, fine. But they wouldn’t be that way because they were supernatural predators. They would be that way because they used to be human, and now they have the horrible strength to feed a lust for power over their fellow men.
After all, what really makes a vampire terrifying, is the thought, that could be me.
Crossover Queen's Creative Chaos 
So the trick there is that humans are predators, and we’re smart enough to invent tools like meat-packing plants.
It’s much more lazy, and safe, to do it that way.
But it’s hard to sell the “beautiful predator” motif when they’re wearing hairnets and tyvec coveralls, so the authors default to posing around thrones.
Honestly it’s rare to see any kind of Overlord character actually engage in anything like rulership.
Apparently bureaucracy just doesn’t have the power-fantasy cache they’re looking for.
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*Waggles hand* The thing with humans is we’re opportunistic omnivores who love meat. So, not pure predators. And that leads to a host of interesting behaviors.
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Well, some of it, many of the people writing about power politics are doing so based on generations of stories working over the same tropes.
Leadership is hard. Management is hard.
And stories constrain the information that you can possibly provide to a reader.
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What really needs explaining is why Vlad wouldn’t have taken over the Ottoman Empire, freed Constantinople and the Holy Land, and crusaded all the way to Indonesia. He had a grudge, after all.
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It was probably an ego thing.
Vlad had that whole “impaler” rep going, then English colonialism starts massacring people wholesale.
He had to go to England to learn evil.
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You would think so, yes.
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I like this idea, could fit into some things.
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If you want an example of more ‘subtle’ vampire overlords check out Dresden Files. There they aren’t controlling the governments, they’re controlling the people that run the governments.
In Latin America the Red Court are the puppet-masters of the entire region and while not tending to direct control most things (unless they feel they need to), when they say “jump” the policy makers, military leaders etc all say “How high?”.
North America however is firmly in the grip of the White Court. Apparently to the point that they can redirect an entire carrier group from it’s normal operations to pick up two people and deliver them elsewhere and nobody in the entire US government (military or civilian) says a thing.
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Dresden Files is a good example of Vampire overlords done right. I think so is “Vampire The MAsquarade” – Vampires are better as leaders of conspiracy, with shady deals and acting from the shadows, rather then outright ‘ruling’.
even the vampires from warhammer fantasy can be something to look at. and those are actual overlords…
hell-look at the Castlevania cartoon! Dracula didn’t care for ruling at all, he just sat, chill, in his castle, or traveled the world and met interesting people, doing stuff a wealthy noble does, and only really went all out when he was on a roaring rampage of revenge- and he had no plans to survive that, only to vent his great rage.
While the vampire sisters that had their own territory, well, it started wanting to improve their situation, and make it harder for someone to trouble them, and it ended badly for them.
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Got to thinking about what good hunting tactics for vampires *would* be, and… well, short version? Pretty much *anything* where you’re hooking up for illicit behavior that is not generally spoken of in public.
IE, same reason serial killers go for hookers.
There really isn’t a good reason for them to go into farming mode, it would be much more practical to kill off competition and just hang around salt blocks/watering holes, so to speak.
I know I’ve seen artwork of the hunting-via-romance thing….
:digs:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/18Any3
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Y’know, I think Seraph of the End is a bit of a subversion of your argument. The vampires weren’t originally ruling the world, they stepped up because humanity screwed up and something (I don’t think it’s actually God) decided to smack humanity down hard with some sort of unknown virus and the monsters called the Four Horsemen of John. So really, they mostly stepped up to protect what was left of their food supply, and aren’t much motivated past that, with a few notable exceptions like Krul.
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Why must you throw catnip in front of my muse? I’m trying to get it to concentrate on other things!
Joking aside, I can see an amazing set up for a subversion of the trope. Imagine the local vampires have gotten organized. There is someone who is their local tax-bat and collects income from them to fund one common investment they all have.
What is this common investment? A little place called Castlevania.
Picture it – a castle specifically built to be a perfect nesting ground for non-sapient dark critters. The various crypts and galleries aren’t there to be functional in the traditional sense – they are there to give the critters places to feel safe. (And, oh yes, make more dark critters.) There are traps, sure, but the treasure isn’t the belongings of a Dark Lord, no, the treasure are things that hapless adventurers left behind when they got eaten.
For bonus points the “Dracula” in the castle is actually an advanced decoy.
Whenever the local adventurers start becoming a problem the vampires make minor repairs to Castlevania, make a new decoy, and do a few “terrorize the locals without actually risking getting hurt” raids through the nearby villages.
Sooner or later the adventurers will start wandering into Castlevania..
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Yeah, the time when I was playing around with knock off North Korea in space, I explicitly decided that the inner party wasn’t going to be vampires or similar. Would have created a situation where there are a bunch of implications that I did not care for, aesthetically. Forex, solutions to certain kinds of difficult problem that are simple, bloody, and fit narrative tropes that do not describe the real world. (Or, at least, for that project it wasn’t an aesthetic that I liked. )
In another play around story seed, I decided that I absolutely did not want to make the secret vampire criminal conspiracies serve some important occult purpose. There are times when I simply have no interest in justifying evil.
It does seem to me like a vampire ruling class might possibly tend to be a bit terrible at effective rule, and the welfare of their subjects. Which thought of course leads me to poke at possibilities.
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One thing where this could make sense? What is the safest and most risk free way for an apex predator to get some food?
Domesticate it. Look at how big cattle are to humans. Yet we boss them around and feed them into single file lines to be turned into hamburger and steak.
Or take pigs. Smart and viscous. There is a reason every panics early in the Wizard of Oz when Dorthy falls into an occupied pig pen. Since the Spanish dropped them here a half a millennia ago as an invasive species? Feral hogs have been a plague for the southern US that has resisted all attempts to stamp them out, even with helicopters and high powered firearms.
Yes it is work setting up administration, but you can farm some of that out to human overseers. And the reward is you don’t have to hunt down prey on the run, who might pull out a wooden stake or try to splash you with holy water. With the right manipulation of your captive human culture, you can even have them walk semi-willingly into your room to be fed from. Or at least get them to the point they won’t put up any dangerous resistance. And keep a lid on any tools that might give those humans a chance against a vampire.
Pigs might be a better analogy than cattle for Vampire Farmed Humans here. Smart, viscious, and very escape prone. Vampire hunters being analogous to feral pigs, quite happy to flip the food chain on an Vampire that tried their hand at ‘more natural’ hunting.
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Of course depending on how the Vampires feed etc, they would need to maintain very strict population controls on themselves if intending to ‘farm’ humans. For example if the vampire only needs to drain some of a human’s blood per day it’s not that bad (just keep a rotation ala IRL blood donation).
But if say in order to be satisfied they need to drain an average sized adult human to death? Humans don’t mature/reach full growth that quickly compared to most animals meaning you’d need a very big population that can only sustain a handful (at most) of vampires.
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That is almost exactly the point (one of the points) about vampires Terry Pratchett was making in CarpeJugulum. Because the current Count de Magpyr drinks blood, but what he lives on is power over others. And that is why GW can’t be having with him and his ilk invading Lancre.
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