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.
I like vampire stories that use them to explore addiction dynamics. The one that stood out to me was the “Joe Pitt Casebooks” - very gritty, set in Manhattan with not a victorian accent in sight. Standouts for me included a monastic sect that spend their time fasting and meditating in the belief they can train away their need for blood, and sunlight not burning but causing essentially instant cancerous tumor growth. Also, the “monsters living among us” is more of the Epstein variety than every single vampire being a literal monster.
There is emo but it’s more of a “I can’t stop fucking up my life” kind of emo than “woe is me sob sob cry” emo.
I suspect this won’t be enough of a departure from what you complain about to be palatable.