Worldbuilding: Help Vaunted

Vampires, disease, chi, breath, and blood; it’s all connected. Western vampires drain the life from people with their blood, while eastern jiangshi steal qi from their victims’ breath. (So if you hold your breath, they can’t find you. As was well-illustrated in sometimes wacky detail in the 1985 Hong Kong jiangshi film, Mr. Vampire.) And both kinds of supernatural killers are known for spreading disease, through bites and evil miasmas. Which gives them a lot in common with mosquitoes. Yes, down to the finding people by their breath. Mosquitoes track carbon dioxide gradients to zero in on their warm-blooded prey. If you can keep that from them, they have a much harder time finding you.

Then again, if you can successfully block a carbon dioxide trail you’ve got something airtight so bugs likely aren’t getting in anyway. Oxygen might not be getting in either. In which case you’ve got bigger problems than itchy bug bites.

So vampires and mosquitoes have a lot in common. Possibly not enough; it’d be refreshing to have vampires that could be warded off by a good swatting. Though maybe these days a good SWATting would work….

What does this have to do with worldbuilding? Research. If you want to build something, say a fantastic version of vampires, you need solid foundations. That often means going back to the oldest sources you can for your research, so you can dig up what was originally written down about a monster, place, or event before someone decided to do a Freudian analysis or (shudder) a post-modern deconstruction of what it really meant.

Don’t make a copy of a copy of a copy. That way lies the blurry gray soulless sameness of AI art and Hollywood Marvel. Instead, think of how they designed the art for Stargate: read all the history, art, and legends, then close the books and create a new vision for the story.

Obviously your ability to dig will be limited by your resources; money, time, how many languages you read and speak, and so on. But persistence can sometimes pull up amazing stuff. I recently found a free article on falconry in Joseon Dynasty Korea, for one; and I’ve dug up vampire lore from all over the place through the years. Modern horror’s focus on the gore and supernatural speed and strength of the vampire ignores the fact that traditionally, once you’ve established that there may be a vampire killing people, the real trick is finding it, so you can deal with the corpse-monster once and for all. Original lore, especially in Eastern Europe, has all kinds of bits on how to track down the vampire’s grave, how to properly stake and/or burn it, and how to trap it in the grave by way of a net, rose branch, or other devices in case you can’t dig it up and dispose of it yet.

Which is a depressingly plausible scenario when vampires spread disease. By the time you’ve pinned down exactly which grave the damned thing is hiding in, your people may be too sick and exhausted to do more than drape a net over the spot and hope to buy a few days for somebody to get their strength back. Cows need to be milked or there’ll be no cheese for the winter. Fields need to be tended. A vampire killing people may not be everyone’s first priority.

Especially if it’s only attacking one family. (Not uncommon in certain areas.) And eh, no one much likes them….

Someone once said that if you watch enough monster movies you realize the problem is less the monster and more people’s reactions to it. Like cutting corners, trying to take advantage of the situation, or just refusing to believe it’s an actual problem until it tries to eat them. Mr. Vampire shows all of these; from fengshui apprentices horsing around with magic (because guys) to rice merchants mixing long-grain rice with the mystically effective sticky rice, to the head of the local police who got his position by nepotism arresting the one guy who knows what he’s doing. Yes, it’s a comedy, but man they came so close to a mass undead uprising.

Yet it didn’t happen. Because enough people paid attention and fixed things once they realized what was wrong. Which takes brains, more than firepower.

Do your research. Help heroes win by their wits!