european fantasy cultures and how to fit them

[Username17]

That's cool, I'm purposefully trying to push setting expectations to see where some folks may find it's gone to far or others find it's a fresh angle.

The issue is that "there are monster people who are ugly and it's OK - even laudable - to kill them by the dozen" isn't pushing expectations. From Trollocs to Goombas it's basically the defining assumption of lazy writing and always has been even before there were written words.

Orcs as a group of people that it's acceptable to unquestioningly stab in the face isn't "pushing the setting" it's "taking the easy way out" and "basically not even trying."

-Username17

[merxa]

i would start with answering what themes you wish to explore and then build a setting that helps you (and your players) work through such questions in game.

[hyzmarca]

Cham, this logic is bordering on trolling. If there is a set of n classes in a setting, a given nation can have between 2 and n of those classes. Thus multiple nations can represent the full set of n classes without any one nation being wholly representative of those n classes. And since having more nations is a good thing (a fact that I, again, feel no desire to argue about), you obviously do not need just 1 race of white people to represent every class. And for the love of god, arguing about 1 specific topic does not mean I want to argue about another specific topic. To quote: "Don't pretend that context doesn't matter, you disingenuous fuckwit".

Orcs and Greece
One of the first associations people will make with ancient Greece is philosophers, and I don't think Orcs are going to fill that niche particularly well. I would personally prefer to see high elves as ancient Greeks. Naked statues, philosophy, and battlefield tactics all fit within their relevant tropes. Musculature & olympic trials don't fit perfectly, but I can picture that in a way that I can't picture orc philosophers.

I think one problem with Orcs in a setting like this is that a lot of these cultures are going to be defined by different non-combat-related tropes, since they're based off real life. But Orcs are meant to be good at fighting to the exclusion of other things. That leans them heavily towards being a "savage" race, which gets uncomfortable real quick.

I actually think Orc philosophers are a great idea. I think "orcs invented not-Western civilization" is a great idea.

It's a great idea because it plays against type, and playing against type is interesting.

Of course, one of my favorite X-Men characters is Beast. So I think having the big strong guy quote philosophers and poets while beating people up is a good idea.

[Whipstitch]

As has been said it's not even that out of character, it's just that we westerners like to blow smoke up our own assesa bout how fancy pants we've always been. Orc warriors raised on a steady diet of laconic wit and black soup just feels so right.

[...You Lost Me]

I agree that playing against type can be cool, if you have a setting where that particular construction is meant to be given a strong focus. I can imagine a setting where Orkcient Greece is the default origin location for Orcs, and I can imagine the setting succeeding off of that. But if the goal is to make a generic "European fantasy setting", then there are going to be a lot of European cultures that need representation. If many cultures need representation, then each culture only has a small amount of conceptual space to work with. That means setting designers need to typecast their fantasy races. Just about every variety of Orcs comes with a side of "WAAAAARGH", and I don't believe that Ancient Rome/Greece provides enough "WAAAAARGH" to satisfy that requirement.

That probably doesn't resolve our disagreement on Orkcient Greece, but I'm pretty firm in thinking that Orcs need to be somewhere that they can get easily typecast. Also, I think the conversation about Orcs has a lot of branching points, and I want to make my position on orcs clear now that I've had time to mull it over.

Orcs Should Be Playable
It's [CURRENT YEAR] for god's sake. Players like playing as fantasy orcs. The Warcraft universe (at least from WC3 onwards) has shown us how great sympathetic orcs can be when they are handled well, to the point of spawning its own trope for handling orcs. There also enough big name fantasy settings that orcs like PCs for players to recognize it: MtG post-Khans, Elder Scrolls post-Morrowind, HMM post-3e or 5e. IMO Halo 2 did this too with their culture of space orcs brutes, but I'll forgive anyone who doesn't think that counts.

Point being: Audiences are down with orcs being playable, and you should make them playable.

Orc Vikings
I think the primary reason Orkcient Greece is supported by hyzmarca, ogrebattle, etc is because it's novel, and novelty is cool. Since I'm complaining about how it's bad, I'd like to offer an alternative culture for orcs (which you can probably guess by my title).

I don't think it's common to think of orcs as direct standins for a Norse people, but stereotypical sympathetic orc cultures do have some stereotypical viking elements: i.e. valuing physical strength, caring about honor, and bloodlust / combat rage. I would love to see Norse orcs, because I think it's novel enough to draw interest, but the throughlines are also strong enough for players to pick the concept up without additional prompting.

Some other upsides:

• Making orcs into vikings pulls them very far away from uncomfortable representations
• The taglines "Orc Viking" and "Orc Bear-Warrior" are a strong sell to prospective PCs.

Some downsides I can see to this approach:

• Norse cultures are also associated with people who look like Chris Hemsworth, and orcs clearly fail to do that.
• The spoonerism for this is Norcs. Sounds kind of gross.

[Chamomile]

Orcs make great Greco-Roman stand-ins. You could also go Celtic or Viking with them and it would work, and that's just off the top of my head. There are probably other cultures that could work.

But in all cases they cannot be 'da boyz. 40k orks' defining qualities are things like comically poor impulse control that pretty much disqualify you from having a real culture. 40k orks make pretty good villains because whatever obscure English sub-sub-sub-ethnicity they're stereotyping is so rare that most people don't even know they exist and lump them in with English people in general. As a player option, though, they tend towards "everyone's an ork or no one is" because being an ork is disruptive fishmalk bait except when the entire party is full of orks. And even as a non-player option, it is difficult to imagine orks actually being any human culture, although it is easy to imagine their having looted a human culture. You can imagine an ork telling a version of the Norse sagas where they've turned it into a Michael Bay movie, but it's hard to imagine orks telling the actual Norse sagas, what with their emphasis on wise riddle-master Odin and cunning trickster Loki as well as Thor the big warrior guy.

[merxa]

For what's it's worth, hobgoblins, or possibly bugbears, would be a more fitting stand-in for Spartans. Heavily militaristic with a history of enslaving goblins (helots), regimented, organized, cultured.

Then make Athens more hobgoblins that just have largely abandoned the necessities of war, of course slaves ( goblins ) still exist but some goblins are free, own their own slaves, including indebted hobgoblins, some are merchants, and Socrates ( a bugbear) walks around confusing everyone who dares talk to him for any length of time.

Now simulation of ancient greece can most certainly be a campaign upon itself, but as someone mentioned, assassin's Creed just released a Greece edition so I guess that's played out?

I personally don't think so, and you shouldn't care, but the original aspiration of generic Europe lacks focus. Honestly if you tell your players the setting, ' generic middle ages Europe' they'll bring more then enough of their own assumptions. Then just pick a starting location and do whatever.

[Chamomile]

"Ancient Greece but they're orcs" (or hobgoblins) works as a hook in a way that "ancient Greece" by itself does not. Even if it didn't, your setting doesn't have to be your hook. You can jolly well have a hook that's "we're doing an island exploration campaign" and then toss ancient Greece in the background because it fits and it's not important.

[...You Lost Me]

+1 on Hobgoblins as ancient greeks. Hobgoblin tropes line up great with ancient greece, especially in the places that orcs are deficient. Putting hobgoblins / orcs into roman / norse camps respectively gives you Hobgoblin Captains and Orc Chieftans, which is probably what your players were thinking of anyways.

[merxa]

Yeah Romans you could do orcs, orogs, ogres, and the.keep on going to ettins and true Giants, the entire society could even be race blind and just claim to all be not-romans, so you have orcs and giants intermarrying, and the empreror bloodline could be cloud giants, gigas, even Titans depending on your PC level requirements

[Thaluikhain]

That's only a few steps away from doing "Europe, but every nation (we remembered) is some variety of orc-like humanoid". I suggest giants for the British isles, who go round building stone circles.

Though, while I like that idea, might be a bit niche and that "average player" thing comes up again.

[MGuy]

I hadn't decided what orcs were gonna be in my own setting so I don't mind not having them be da boyz from wh40k. In fact I was leaning to have goblins be something like that, at least as far as how the orkz from that setting works. In various pieces of material I've read over the years goblinoids seem to be very fitting for it. They have an instinctual heirarchy, you can find very different shapes among the goblinoid subtype as opposed to tolkienesque orcs who all basically are similar with different skin tones and levels of bulkitude. I like the idea of having several factions that you can just kill and I know far more people who like and are attached to orcs from WoW that I definitely want them playable. Not nearly as many hobgoblin players (literally never had anyone even ask to be a hob in any game I've ruin but ymmv).

Of course I'm not going commercial with anything I'm writing so it fits for me. I like the idea of goblins being the 'feral' stage of their species and then 'growing' more advanced as their tribes get larger or as a result of them feasting regularly on more civilized species.

[OgreBattle]

I actually think Orc philosophers are a great idea. I think "orcs invented not-Western civilization" is a great idea.

It's a great idea because it plays against type, and playing against type is interesting.

Of course, one of my favorite X-Men characters is Beast. So I think having the big strong guy quote philosophers and poets while beating people up is a good idea.

I just really like the image of Green Socrates on his sofa being given the Orc Hurting Juice by the orc citystate elites that hate him

Imagine Pythagorean orcs taking over your village, burning your books and forcing you to do math the pythagorean way or they'll eat you

Platonic Orc high priests can summon the ideal of the perfect foot to step on their foes.

I like how 40k orks are genetically coded to know things, so Pythagorean orks just triangulate perfectly, orks with a perfect understanding of various maths to build their seige engines and knock down your walls, they are coded with an unshakeable world view so Aristotle strain orks will use their perfect logic to determine you are made of meat and meat is food so you are on the menu.

Some of them can live in barrels, where curious human warlords can beseech their wisdom when they're not jerking it


(Diogenes liked to masturbate in public)

Architecture wise "Build it out of stone, HUGE pillars, BIG pillars of stone!!" sounds super orky

[Libertad]

Ogre Battle this is not the appropriate time to incorporate your Boner Meter house rule into our collaborative world-building project.

[Chamomile]

Architecture wise "Build it out of stone, HUGE pillars, BIG pillars of stone!!" sounds super orky

Sure, but that's not how Greek architecture works. Greek pillars aren't Stonehenge-style monolithic slabs, they're precision-sculpted artistry and usually aren't even especially large. Greek and Roman architecture are defined by artistry and mathematical precision (the Greeks more the former and the Romans more the latter), not being humongous.

[Dean]

Here's the thing: words are used to transmit concepts and meaning. If you make your own fantasy setting and make a species of innate geniuses who are born knowing calculus and grow up to be Athenian philosophers and mathematicians it's actually really stupid for you to call those things "Orcs". Nothing is worse than the piles of YA fiction where the main characters are "vampires" except they don't drink blood, aren't immortal, aren't bothered by the sun, and instead have ice and fire magic and angel wings. That shit's trash. If you want to make a new IP race you can just do that. Call them the "Kremere" and then decide interesting reasons they were made to know upper mathematics at birth. With your own IP you can have interesting histories and backstories and hooks and you can just tell your players those things instead of having to use the first half of your conversation having to tell them all the things that AREN'T true that they'd assume would be. Every minute you spend telling players that your elves aren't nature loving and long lived and beautiful is a minute you will never get back and you've gotten nothing in exchange for it.

[Thaluikhain]

Here's the thing: words are used to transmit concepts and meaning. If you make your own fantasy setting and make a species of innate geniuses who are born knowing calculus and grow up to be Athenian philosophers and mathematicians it's actually really stupid for you to call those things "Orcs". Nothing is worse than the piles of YA fiction where the main characters are "vampires" except they don't drink blood, aren't immortal, aren't bothered by the sun, and instead have ice and fire magic and angel wings. That shit's trash. If you want to make a new IP race you can just do that. Call them the "Kremere" and then decide interesting reasons they were made to know upper mathematics at birth. With your own IP you can have interesting histories and backstories and hooks and you can just tell your players those things instead of having to use the first half of your conversation having to tell them all the things that AREN'T true that they'd assume would be. Every minute you spend telling players that your elves aren't nature loving and long lived and beautiful is a minute you will never get back and you've gotten nothing in exchange for it.

Normally I'd tend to agree with that, only Tolkien's orcs were sorta advanced, living in ginormous towers, building extensive highways and with goblins building all sorts of mechanical devices. And innate knowledge is a big part of 40k orks.

Sticking the Greeks in there afterwards is a bit unusual, but I think you could get away with it if you stick enough of the more traditional stuff.

[hyzmarca]

Here's the thing: words are used to transmit concepts and meaning. If you make your own fantasy setting and make a species of innate geniuses who are born knowing calculus and grow up to be Athenian philosophers and mathematicians it's actually really stupid for you to call those things "Orcs". Nothing is worse than the piles of YA fiction where the main characters are "vampires" except they don't drink blood, aren't immortal, aren't bothered by the sun, and instead have ice and fire magic and angel wings. That shit's trash. If you want to make a new IP race you can just do that. Call them the "Kremere" and then decide interesting reasons they were made to know upper mathematics at birth. With your own IP you can have interesting histories and backstories and hooks and you can just tell your players those things instead of having to use the first half of your conversation having to tell them all the things that AREN'T true that they'd assume would be. Every minute you spend telling players that your elves aren't nature loving and long lived and beautiful is a minute you will never get back and you've gotten nothing in exchange for it.

Except that none of those things you mention are actually universal to vampire lore. Drinking blood comes the closest, and even that isn't universal. There are breath vampires and semen vampires and life-force vampires. .

If I just say "Beautiful semen vampires with feathered wings and sunlight immunity" I've transmitted a lot of information in one sentence.

"Greek Philosopher Orcs" also conveys a lot of information. The Orc part tells us that they're green or grey and probably have tusks and are big and strong. The Greek Philosopher part tells us that they're intellectual and participate in naked bare-knuckle MMA for recreation.

[deaddmwalking]

I don't think 'Greek Philosopher Orcs' conveys very much information, despite having been following the conversation closely.

A google image of search might indicate that prominent lower canines is required, but that doesn't even apply to the Tolkien orcs from the movies that show up on the first page. So 'probably tusks'.

'Greek Philosophers' probably implies dressed in togas (even though that was an adaptation of the Greek dress by the Etruscans). But it beggars belief that the entire society would be philosophers without laborers or warriors; in fact, I wouldn't tend to imagine the philosophers of Ancient Greece as their most muscular members of society.

It is fine to set a specific group 'against type', but typically it has to be done in relation to a group that meets the type. If you have 'typical orcs' and you have an atypical philosopher-king society, that could work. But if you're going to say 'orcs aren't like this at all, they're entirely like this instead' then I agree that you're not really getting anything by using the term orc.

While people might disagree about what 'Ancient Greek', 'Philosopher' and 'Orc' mean independently, they're going to be closer to being on the same page than when you mix them. Like, it is not at all clear whether Greek Philosopher Orcs are supposed to be bloodthirsty warmongers or not... The orc part might imply that's true and Alexander did conquer a huge empire and was under the tutelage of Aristotle. So yeah, not clear what that means.

I don't think I know what they look like, I don't know how they organize their society, I don't know what types of interactions they have with other races. Even if saying 'orcs' may create some misconceptions, most people, given no other information, will assume they're a violent race of tribal humanoids that survive primarily by raiding other cultures with little agriculture of their own who value strength and wielding big melee weapons.

Somehow your qualifiers have given me less information than if they were excluded.

[Username17]

I don't think 'Greek Philosopher Orcs' conveys very much information, despite having been following the conversation closely.

I second that. I would say that the statement "Greek Philosopher Orcs" conveys essentially zero information. It doesn't even necessarily indicate that we're in a fantasy setting, because you could make a compelling argument that some of the portrayals of Klingons in Star Trek count as "Greek Philosopher Orcs."

While people might disagree about what 'Ancient Greek', 'Philosopher' and 'Orc' mean independently, they're going to be closer to being on the same page than when you mix them. Like, it is not at all clear whether Greek Philosopher Orcs are supposed to be bloodthirsty warmongers or not...

This goes back to the idea of minimalist prompts we were talking about earlier. When you have a single idea like "Basically Japan" or whatever, there's an infinite number of directions you could reasonably take that. And that's fine. And some of the directions you'd take that are not the directions other people would take that, and that's also fine.

But when you add more qualifiers, the number of directions you could take things doesn't stop being infinite. It's just the chance that the direction you'd take things being unrecognizably different from the direction another person would take them given the same qualifiers goes up considerably and rapidly approaches one hundred percent. Think of it like Family Feud or the British inverse version Pointless - you can probably name some of the common answers to individual questions, but there's a chance you can't or that your answer is just very different from the wisdom of crowds. When you string a number of such questions together, it becomes a virtual certainty that at least a portion of your answer is going to be weirdly different from the other people at the table.

As a creative exercise, multiple discordant qualifiers exist to ccreate improv comedy. Like, that's literally a game on Whose Line Is It Anyway, where the audience calls out some random qualifiers and then the contestants produce humorous scenes by checking all the boxes. It serves no world building value, because it conveys no information. It just puts people in situations where they are asked to make comedic ad hoc declarations.

-Username17

[Dean]

Here's the thing: words are used to transmit concepts and meaning. If you make your own fantasy setting and make a species of innate geniuses who are born knowing calculus and grow up to be Athenian philosophers and mathematicians it's actually really stupid for you to call those things "Orcs". Nothing is worse than the piles of YA fiction where the main characters are "vampires" except they don't drink blood, aren't immortal, aren't bothered by the sun, and instead have ice and fire magic and angel wings. That shit's trash. If you want to make a new IP race you can just do that. Call them the "Kremere" and then decide interesting reasons they were made to know upper mathematics at birth. With your own IP you can have interesting histories and backstories and hooks and you can just tell your players those things instead of having to use the first half of your conversation having to tell them all the things that AREN'T true that they'd assume would be. Every minute you spend telling players that your elves aren't nature loving and long lived and beautiful is a minute you will never get back and you've gotten nothing in exchange for it.

Except that none of those things you mention are actually universal to vampire lore. Drinking blood comes the closest, and even that isn't universal. There are breath vampires and semen vampires and life-force vampires.

Fuck this regurgitated Franktrollman bullshit. No one outside of this board knows or cares about your ability to point to some obscure Liber Vampirica to prove you're technically right when calling something a vampire (or orc) that is utterly unrecognizable to them. No one outside of this board has any clue what you're talking about and in the context of a collaborative roleplaying game if you use words that are intentionally misleading you're wrong and a dick. If you describe something to the people around your table as a vampire and then have to teach them about 4th century Slavic folklore for 8 minutes you are wasting everyone's time and exactly proving my point.

Words only use is to transmit concepts. If you use words with the intent of transmitting none of the concepts associated with that word you are an asshole and probably a shitty writer. Use Orc if you want people to know your creation is like the Orcs in your head when you read that word.

A final note regarding Vampires: The discussion about how there are goat eating spider corpses called "Vampires" has relevance in a game called "Vampire" that already covers the other top tier vampire concepts acceptably. If you are introducing semen sucking smoke monsters AFTER you've introduced Dracula's and Lost Boys and Nosferatu's that's absolutely a good idea. It would be a shitty idea to get people to buy your game or book about vampires and have it all be about spider corpses. Likewise if you had an entire game called "Orc" it would be totally legitimate to make one group of orcs be roman or a group of orcs be geniuses after magical experimentation or a group be fair-skinned or whatever. What's stupid is to tell someone the Orcs in your setting are fair skinned roman geniuses because that's not what words are for.

[DSMatticus]

If you want to make a new IP race you can just do that. Call them the "Kremere" and then decide interesting reasons they were made to know upper mathematics at birth. With your own IP you can have interesting histories and backstories and hooks and you can just tell your players those things instead of having to use the first half of your conversation having to tell them all the things that AREN'T true that they'd assume would be.

Incremental derivation has been fundamental to storytelling since... well, probably since the second story ever told. Culture is consumption and regurgitation; no concept is an island.

Since we're talking about vampires, let's talk about the OG vampire story. Bram Stoker's Dracula is not about crippling social isolation. Bram Stoker's Dracula is not about resolving the ethical dilemma of what it means to prey upon your fellow man as a matter of survival. Bram Stoker's Dracula is not about the alienation of living an immortal life in a world of mortals. Bram Stoker's Dracula is about a superpowered, hedonistic aristocrat who's going to seduce your wife with his evil satanic superpowers. It's not a character introspective. It doesn't have any deep moral. It's not going to make you think. It is a genuinely less philosophically challenging story than most modern children's cartoons; good is good and good comes from god, evil is evil and evil comes from Satan, and you ought to stab evil. Then someone came along ang asked "you know, what if vampires were just people and not generically evil Satan puppets?" Consume Dracula, regurgitate Interview with a Vampire. Incremental derivation. Anne Rice didn't call her vampires 'frobbles' or something stupid like she was making something new; she modified the existing vampire mythos in a simple, obvious way in order to tell a different kind of story.

And since we're talking about orcs, I have to point out that the original orc is literally a humanoid monster purpose-built for evil by Fantasy Satan. We have sympathetic orcs today because (amongst other things) someone at Blizzard said "what if instead of all that, it's just some bizarro society-wide demonic possession thing, and there's a whole arc where some orcs break the curse and free their people and they all become a legitimate hero faction?" Consume Tolkein, regurgitate Warcraft 3. Using the weird inherited memory of 40k orcs to explore philosopher orcs as a concept is a perfectly legitimate and obvious thing to do. The problem isn't "you shouldn't ever write orcs-but-different because then they're not orcs anymore," the problem that there are like two people on the planet who know that 40k orcs have inherited memory; the guy who originally wrote it that way and the guy who maintains the 40k wiki. It's just going to seem very pointless and random to everyone who reads it. "I don't understand what part of the conceptual space we're trying to explore."

Words are in fact used to transmit meaning, but that does not mean words have a single, fully-defined, objective meaning we all share or should share. There is no platonic ideal of an orc carved into the cosmos by Tolkein to which we must adhere closely as possible in our stories. It's a loosely associated set of concepts; individual stories will add and remove elements to and from that set, those stories will leave their marks on the people who read them, and in this way the meaning of the word will expand, or shrink, or drift. That is how it has always worked, that is how it will always work, that is how it should work. Consume. Regurgitate.

[OgreBattle]

Expose babies to the elements so only fit ones are raised, worship a rape Bull, society is maintained by slaves so important people can pontificate and war, physical power is exalted in citystate wide feats of strength, throw heavy rocks as a sport. Orkifying ancient greeks lets you emphasize the parts Disney movies leave out

because white pride politics is fixated on Greek sculpture for their avatars it makes Green Spartans and Athenians even more interesting.

Tolkien straight up said orcs are Mongolians, but 1200’s Chaucer saw Mongolians as exotic wealthy far away elves covered in gold, so Marco Polo went to visit their celestial empire.

Romans then add pro wrestling with swords and vomit to eat more to the mix

[Dean]

Anne Rice didn't call her vampires 'frobbles' or something stupid like she was making something new; she modified the existing vampire mythos in a simple, obvious way in order to tell a different kind of story

All of your examples there were about changes to the internal pathos of a thing. "Vampires but sympathetic" or "Orcs but sympathetic" is not the paradigm shift I think you're selling it as. When you write Wicked that's not the same as telling someone your play is about the Wicked Witch of the West but she's in a fuedal japanese setting and is a ronin instead of a spellcaster. One of those things is using a concept in a new light and the other is confusing the concept. The difference isn't a scientific or philosophically provable quantity it's just demonstrated by one making you have to tell people why the assumptions you gave them are wrong.

I grant you that there's no hard and fast rule for what can and can't be done. Things in the end are judged by whether or not they're good. If you told me you were going to make a story about ninja's but they're also tortoises and also mutant teenagers living in the modern day I'd probably tell you that that was an overfull conceptual space. I will maintain that advice to be generally sensible even if TMNT is very cool. If you made a greek orc story that was very good and had cool hooks and characters and pathos then that's what wins, if it was very good maybe that's even something people would see more of. I can't say greek orcs cannot possibly succeed but what I can say is that it is a good idea to use words that don't require you to spend large amounts of time around a gaming table telling everyone what you -don't- mean instead of just telling them the things you do mean.

The brainy and philosophical elements of ancient greece are at odds enough with the common cultural concepts of orcs that the result is more confusing than clarifying.

[Username17]

Words only use is to transmit concepts. If you use words with the intent of transmitting none of the concepts associated with that word you are an asshole and probably a shitty writer. Use Orc if you want people to know your creation is like the Orcs in your head when you read that word.

Sure. But it's important that every word has a range of concepts that it's associated with. While I'd agree that having Vampires who don't drink blood and aren't immortal and have no trouble with the sun would be a bit of a tough ask, having Vampires that don't do one or two of those things is completely fucking normal.

Like, no one bats a fucking eye about vampires that aren't immortal and run around during the day and just really like to drink blood. When people talk about "vampire animals" none of those creatures live forever or combust in sunlight. We call them vampire animals because they drink blood. Period. Full stop.

And further, as evidenced by shit like the movie Lifeforce, no one gives two shits if your "Vampires" drain life in some way that isn't literally blood. No one gets upset that the Vampire in that movie drains "life force" rather than drinking literal blood. It's still a Vampire, and no one is confused on that point.

But it's also important to note that some Vampires don't parasitize anything at all. Your classic examples would be characters like Count Chocula or Grandpa Munster. They don't eat any part of people. They are called Vampires because they look like Vampires. That is, they have a superficial resemblance to Dracula as played by Bela Lugosi in classic Universal Horror films.

Calling something a "Vampire" conveys one of two points:

• It parasitizes people by draining them in some way (Lifeforce).
• It has superficial signifiers associated with famous Vampires in our culture, whether it actually hurts people at all (Count Chocula).

Now I would agree that if you aren't using the word Vampire to convey either of those pieces of information, you should probably get a new word. But there's obviously an enormous amount of creative leeway that you have with these things. The Vampires in Twilight and Vampire Academy are actually well within the allowable margins of what could be called a "Vampire" and still convey information. We hate those movies because they are terrible, not because they fail to use words in a way that allows them to be understood.

-Username17