You have your SciFi guys that like to speak Klingon and dress in costumes and do role playing. They can get so caught up in their characters that the identity beats anything they could create just being “themselves.” I understand the reasoning behind pretending to be something which is fictional to begin with. It's like taking our mundane world and making it a little more exciting.
I even understand the folks with low self-esteem who get nose jobs and boob jobs and take photos of Angelina Jolie or Jennifer Aniston to their hair appointments wanting to become this person, studying their looks and gestures and mannerisms, as pathetic as it may seem.
So, it’s not entirely hard to understand why someone would choose to be a vampire. Whereas Mr. Klingon is probably sociable, Mr. Vampire says “screw you humans, I’m a cut above.” There is a whole culture of folks who find something sexually satisfying, dark, and empowering in playacting as a vampire. They, of course, cannot earn invincibility or the other features the fictional character has anymore than the Klingon-pretenders can fly in space.
So, how gratifying is it to be a vampire poser?
They refer to themselves often times as “otherkin” or believing that they have a soul that is nonhuman. I’m sure we can all imagine the set of circumstances in which any nerd or outcast might find this quite exciting to be “special” and “different,” as well as “immortal” in some form; better than the rest of us swine.
These vampires run with a premise that they can gain their powers by the typical drinking of blood, but they also have ones who believe they can psychically drain power from folks (you know, kind of like when ghost hunters complain about drained batteries). More often they use consensual volunteers for blood drinking, but they can also get together in a room with others emanating energy and psychically draining each other, as well as doing it in public places with unsuspecting "victims."
I will admit a fascination with posers and playacting. I’ve personally always wanted to hang with some vampires just to know how to write about the mindset of those who get so deep into a role that they truly believe they are changed. I’d love to make a career of just hanging with the strange fringe and fetish folks. Alternate lifestyles are one of the beautiful features of humans. We are sheep who follow the leader, but occasionally there one some of us who stray from the flock and think they’re horses and pigs. I admit I’ve never had my own category and actually go the other way trying not be pegged, whereas these folks like to be labeled.
In a way, they’re not really anarchists, they’re really conformists if you think about it.
We probably don’t spend our days worrying about vampire wannabes drinking our blood, but the psychic aspects of draining energy does make people uncomfortable. I’ve been asked before if it’s possible for someone to drain your energy. Here’s how I explain it. They cannot steal your energy, but it is entirely possible that you can sense their own energy and feel very bad and very overwhelmed and not know why. When people say “he had a bad aura,” that’s basically what they’re saying. They can certainly make you feel out of sorts, but it’s not because they took your energy, but more because you sensed their aura. The closest I can come to describing it is that as a psychic, although I can access a person's memories, I cannot take their memories from them; I can simply view them and remember that viewing. They still maintain the original memories. So, there's really nothing to fear about psychic vampires running around draining you of your youth. There is no such thing as a human oxidizer.
So far as the vampire culture goes, I’m all for it. If they’re not hurting anyone who doesn’t want to participate, more power to them. I’m not sure I’d want to be part of a culture that defines me so narrowly, but I understand why some people need that sense of power, as well as group to call yourself a part of. We need more odd groups out there, it’s just a shame that most of the counterculture groups feel they have to be underground. Any time you go to a zombie walk or a SciFi convention or the renaissance festival, you can’t help but admire folks who can let loose like that and just be someone else for a time. If we’re lucky, the average citizen only feels it on Halloween, so enjoy it when you can.