personally I'm a big fan of the moment a vampire gets Embraced being a metaphor for a sudden, irreversible trauma. maybe you thought you knew what it would be like but you couldn't have understood the actual enormity; maybe it was an accident or something completely out of your control. either way this event happens to you and you are changed forever
now your emotions are unstable. your anger is all-consuming, your fear takes your body away from you, and always always always you are a danger to others if you can't control yourself from what you want and need. you can no longer be in the daylight living a typical life, so your social world completely changes and so does the environment. you might be stuck now with cold empty streets and buildings. you might cling to clubs and bars are the only places where you get to be around people living their lives. in some severe cases, you can't even look at yourself anymore, or perhaps the figure in the mirror is someone you don't recognize. your past identity and way of being has been taken away, permanently
you do what you have to in order to survive. and your new way of surviving, the only way you can exist, is something society finds disgusting or fetishizes. it doesn't matter what other people think because it's all you can do anyway. your new "community", those who most understand what you're going through, are themselves traumatized and suffering, in a constant state of victim and perpetrator. maybe they want to help you but maybe they want to use you. maybe you want to be kind but now your very nature makes real consent and honesty difficult, so in some ways you are a user and abuser too
do young vampires think about their last "normal" day? was it perfectly mundane, with no warning that it would be the last one? if they could have that day again, would they try appreciate all the little details like the warmth of the sun and the taste of lunch better this time? or would they try desperately to change their fate and avoid what's coming for them? well. you can't change the past. you can only do what you can with what you have now
