so we've been thinking a lot about vampires and killcounts recently. what the numbers say versus what they don't tell you about the acts they represent. the vibes, if you will, and the implications thereof.
we'll spare you the scrolling, this does turn into a crossover partway through and it is this guy again. if you want to stick around we are still going to do a great deal of serious character analysis, but fair warning that it is going to end up using someone from a different series with very different tone as a point of comparison, and the conclusion will in fact be "this other vampire is messed up in a new way actually."
okay. disclaimer out of the way. kill counts. numbers. metaphors. there are different styles of vampiric (and human) violence.
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scott's body count, and he'd likely insist that you call it such just to muddy the waters, is undetermined, unstated, unspoken. and honestly, this really does fit him. he's someone who at every turn wants to act like his past actions don't exist and will do everything he can to avoid being seen in light of those actions, taken in context as to what exactly he has historically done with any modicum of power.
scott is the archetypal white ass vampire. he lies and gaslights and emotionally manipulates and outright abuses people without a second thought. the fact that his kill count is unknown makes sense, because he does not care about how his actions have hurt other people. he only cares about what other people can do for him now.
we never learn anything about the people he'd massacred. never know anything about the context, the history, how things got to be this way. all we have is guesses; probably a lot of innocents, a handful of people who tried to kill him and failed, some ritual sacrifices and some at-random peasantry, probably few to nil other nobles. scott, therefore, maintains his spot firmly within vampirism as privilege. he can be forgiven, he never has to apologize, he simply does not experience consequences in the way people with less advantage would.
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owen wears his own massacre like a badge of pride. 2799. to avoid retreading old ground, suffice it to say that we frankly found him heinous far before it was outright confirmed that he'd killed literal children and would do so again. there is only so much apologia you can do when you conceive of a number as representing an actual populace. it's easy to disconnect through distance and through fiction, but...
owen (and it's here we must remind you all we are talking about characters, just in case you forget) is an ecofascist. full stop. he is someone who will not shut up about humans being The Problem and wanting to kill them off to solve this, has wound himself up into a death spiral and is attempting to drag everyone down with him, outright looks someone in the face and says "so what if a few more people have to die if you get to choose who". a lot of these other kill counts are ultimately a little more abstract and metaphorical, ending up less as direct one-to-ones and more general commentary.
owen is a spree shooter. for all intents and purposes, he is completely indistinguishable from the typical profile of someone who walks into a public space and opens fire: a disenfranchised young man who was treated as an outcast, then given access to power and privilege and sought to lash out at the people he viewed as causing these ills by hurting as many of them as possible. he is "sympathetic" in a way, but only so long as you pretend the people he hurt don't exist at all.
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our grasp on cleo is... a little nebulous, we'll admit. somewhere in the realm of 28000 dead, last we'd seen on it? cleo is the stark opposite of a lot of others here; we truly do not think they can be read as anything other than metaphor given the circumstances around their actions.
our personal take is that, if scott is one end of the "vampirism as privilege" equation, cleo is the other; forced to serve as a thrall for years, likely having no agency or ability to break free. vampirism was quite literally weaponized against them in order to put them in a marginalized position. it's a tenuous read, though, and someone with a similar skillset but better understanding of cleo could probably give a far better one with more nuance to it.
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dr. legs is... complicated. there is a certain type of anti-military sentiment that colors a lot of discussion around the bulk of his kill count. we are extremely anti-military as well but there is a bit of a difference between joining the military in the modern day and joining the military during, at the absolute latest, World War I. the style of warmonger remains mostly the same; the nature of the foot soldier doesn't quite fit up as cleanly 1:1.
we know he killed a town of approximately 5500 people; we know he considers the deaths of an additional 813 people to be his fault in one way or another for a total of 6313 dead. it's tempting to chalk up the town that was poisoned into the same category as owen, but these are very different types of violence. the glib way of putting it is that the doc wouldn't write a manifesto first.
the more reasonable take is this: military apologia is a poison, but so is pretending that someone is the sum total of only their bad actions. the military and those who actively glorify its presence are absolutely not to be trusted; veterans do not inherently fall into this category. there are a whole host of people in the real world who do wrong, realize it was wrong, and spend the rest of their lives working to amend that damage as best they can. they deserve no praise, but they do not deserve the same scorn as someone willing to do it all again.
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there is a throughline with all of these known killcounts; they are able to be grounded in some form of reality, whether in a literal or metaphorical sense. they are all fundamentally human acts, they can be interacted with on a level that informs or is informed by real-life theory and beliefs. not all of them are realistic occurrences, but all of them imply realistic ideologies or are somewhat analogous to them.
also, all of this has actually been to say we have no fucking clue what to do with dalekisbored's kill count, and that is why we have been thinking about all of this so goddamn much.
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dalek has a generously estimated kill count of around 400 people, including other vampires. the actual number is unclear and highly variable; progression in the classic Vampirism mod requires a lot of a specific resource that has a 1/3 drop chance. it is tempting to write this off as classic vampiric violence, but there's just one problem that has been driving us up the godsdamned wall this entire time:
mechanically and therefore narratively speaking, everyone dalek "had" to kill by the end of the video was either a vampire or a vampire hunter.
see, that 1/3 drop chance resource is human hearts, which are only dropped by the "hunter" mobs that the mod adds. they're used in a lot of things, but the bulk of that estimated total of kills would go towards gathering them to use in trading up towards one of the best weapons that the mod has to offer. all of this is fine and hand-waveable if you're not coming to that video for serious literary analysis, which most people aren't doing because most people wouldn't be insane enough to try and ground the gonzo logic of an extremely Minecrafty mod that's been around for a solid decade within the confines of the relatively serious and realistic setting Vampires SMP creates.
we are not most people however, so we are struggling. immensely. because within the logic of the setting of Vampires SMP, that kill count of 400 does not resemble a spree killing or a wanton massacre or a literal war crime. because that kill count of 400 mechanically cannot be anything other than someone not only capable of self-defense but actively practiced in it. the bulk of these people are vampire hunters for fuck's sake. there is perhaps literally no way to describe how insane that makes us. this guy is, in context, literally going out of his way to track down and kill vampire hunters specifically for their hearts! he would probably murder innocents if they dropped the items he needed, don't get us wrong, but they don't so he doesn't.
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dalekisbored is the scourge of abolish's employers. he's a madman who goes straight for what is, on a practical level, the most difficult people to kill as a vampire, and he does the vast bulk of that murdering because he wanted a cool sword. nobody looks good in this equation, but also nobody looks realistic either, because this is rather like trying to power-scale a looney tunes character in comparison to random shonen protagonist #305.
we recognize that this is a futile and deeply silly task, but god damn does it compel us anyway. because there is something there with horrifying implications, but it's also something that has zero practical realistic comparisons because "bounty hunter goes out of his way to kill other bounty hunters for their cool stuff" isn't a thing that happens in real life, it's the plot of an action thriller movie lauded far more for its fight scene choreography than for its plot.
there is no good way to wrap this up. what the hell is wrong with him.
in conclusion:
Lord Morcant Thornvale told me a vampire keeps killing all his trained paramilitary employees so i asked him how many vampire hunters he had in that organization and he said if they die he just goes and recruits new ones afterwards so i said it sounds like he's just feeding vampire hunters to that one vampire and then his adopted son started crying.
