You're a vampire currently alive in the first era where vampires have rights. You've lived through monster hunters, and inquisitions, and attacks from crusaders. And now you're here, alive and well in a 21st century city, able to live some sort ot life openly.
It's weird. Some people say everything's ok now and that vampires have full rights, and you know for a fact that it's not true. Society still is ruled by humans, still privileged for humans, still deeply afraid of vampires and other such creatures. At the same time when people say nothing has gotten better it seems just as untrue. You can do things you never thought you'd be allowed to do. Are people really not able to understand the neuance that progress can have been made, and still need to be made, is that too much for a world where essays have been replaced with posts?
The humans around you don't realize how much like humans in the past they are. They think they accept vampires, because they pity you, but that still means they see you as lesser. Domestic women with their chattering support who still think that it would be the worst fate imaginable to have their child become a vampire. A society that calls itself accepting but still can only understand siring new vampires as am act of violence. A society that says its abolished monster hunters but then has policemen and three letter organizations do the same job. They say you're welcome in this world but threaten you if you don't enter it. Because their society was never built for someone with centuries of personal history, or someone who might have had to kill to survive two hundred years ago, or the family like relationships bound by those who'll never have children and never grow old. It's still hard for most people you know to get blood, still hard to find work if you can't go out at night, and you're still stuck with the knowledge that if you scare the wrong human you'll be treated just as much hostility as you would four hundred years ago. So many humans, mabye not all but too many, act like the kings who tried to make deals with their nations' monsters centuries ago, they call it generosity that they don't kill you, and don't realize that means they think they have a right to kill you.
Meanwhile looking at vampiric social media makes you feel so cold and alone. All humans are treated as evil, even when you've been on the same side as the marginalized of humanity so many times. People argue over if vampires should have solidarity with ghouls or werewolves or other monsters, and if they're more or less privileged then eachother, and who has a right to talk to eachother. There's arguments about what terms who can use, and whose even a real monster. There's argument over age gaps between immortals, and if you're the age you're bitten or the age you currently are (you've always seen yourself as both but that's too much for most of social media). You're considered privileged for passing as human, which you are, your only inhuman traits are fangs and a lack of genitals, but vampires with entirely inhuman appearances are a lot less privileged then you. But when they call you less privileged its always as an accusation, always as some sort of sin the be punished, with the same fervor as the catholics who once hunted you down. There are people on social media who consider themselves vampire affirming Christians, and they're never really vampire affirming. You remember being in person for centuries and there wasn't this individualist sense of fighting, there was a time when you traveled with vampires, some of whom looked less human then you, and you traveled with werewolves because they were hunted too, and you'd travel with humans who were hunted by the same society that hunted you. And it's easy to forget that there's still in person interactions you can have like that, when the glow of a screen pretends to be the entire world.
You had a friend, who traveled with you for centuries, who claimed vampires would never be free, that there was no hope agaisnt humanity's rule. She died in 1819, never having a reason to think otherwise. You wished you could show her this world and prove her wrong, tell her something could be done. You want to hope, you want to believe she'd actually be proven wrong, that she'd say this wasn't just another deal that humanity would one day forget.
It's amazing, you can just wake up now, go to the stores, hang out with friends, with everyone knowing you're a vampire. And despite all the pain past and present, it's amazing you can do that, that you can just wake up and be safe and happy with so many people in history saying that that never would be the case.
