(Content warning: Hypnosis, bondage, neither of those being what you were thinking of, vampirism, polyamory, sort-of romanticizing mental illness, enormous cultural ruses, pandering to submitters [maybe])
This is a new column, where we will be building and detailing a hentai-focused or otherwise lewd culture. We’ll start with the condensed core idea, for those who prefer the short and sweet little nugget they can then build up in their own minds. Then, we’ll go into less necessary details, building up the world and culture and society. And then, at the end, a review from the author, explaining the decisions made and why.
THE SHORT AND SWEET
The Vampire Duchies of Otdykh are known to foreigners as a cold, barren, windswept place, divided up between immortal predators, where all humans are the thralls of a cruel, blood-thirsty master who controls their minds and drinks from their hearts. This is all a ruse. Vampires have the power of hypnosis, not mind control, and cannot force someone to go against their own wishes or alter their thoughts. And they feed from people’s hearts, meaning that even more important than getting people’s blood, is getting those people to LIKE them. Instead of cruel masters, vampires are service tops.
When a band of vampires hungers, they will take a handful of villagers and spirit them away to the vampire castle or manor. The villagers will be hypnotized into a deep, relaxing trance, be bound in restraints (to prevent them wiggling during the blood draining process and causing injury), and then fawned over, having all their needs cared for better than they could do to themselves if they were not bound. In their deep, relaxed hypnotic trance, they are sexually pleasured at whatever pace they find comfortable, or simply massaged if that is their preference. They’re fed opulently, by vampires and vampiresses in sexy Gothic outfits, to keep their body recovering the blood they lose. All the while, they are encouraged to offload any troubles or burdens from their minds to their ‘masters’, who listen attentively and provide support, encouragement, or advice, which sometimes is more effective due to the trance. After a week or so, the villagers are freed from bondage and trance, happier but probably a bit lightheaded, given an excuse note to show their employer, and sent back on their way.
Vampires themselves reproduce through converting other humans into vampires intentionally. Since vampires are so fundamentally insecure, this is not something to be taken on lightly, as it’s kind of like inflicting a mental illness on someone so they can understand you better – for this reason vampires only do it to people who know what it entails, and usually only offer to people who seem insecure anyway. Vampires organize in small bands of 3 to 8, and rely on each other for emotional support much more than tangible service. Everyone in the band is lovers with everyone else, romancing as equals, their presence able to assure one another ‘it’s okay, don’t listen to those thoughts that people don’t like you, because I am here and I prove you are worthy of love.’
DETAILS
Many stories about how terrible vampires are were spread by vampires themselves, for two reasons: to keep their lands from having an influx of people they can’t afford to take care of, and so they don’t feel like people are laughing at them for being wusses. The need to be liked is stronger the closer a person is to a vampire, so for faraway people they will never feed on, it’s okay to be feared instead of liked when the alternative is being a laughingstock. They also spread the story that direct sunlight will kill them – it doesn’t kill them, but it makes them as disoriented and confused as a drunken seven-year-old who just stumbled out of a showing of Eraserhead, which not only makes them vulnerable to being killed by anyone who wants to, it’s humiliating and they don’t want others to see them that way.
Vampires are insecure down to a physiological level: their need for other people to LIKE them, especially the ones they feed on, especially especially those under their ‘control’, is as real as living things’ need for oxygen. Tales of the experience of a newly-risen vampire, overwhelmed with the thirst for the blood of the living? Yeah, that’s because it sounds cooler than an overwhelming wave of “Oh God oh God what if they don’t like me I want them to like me so bad!” Blood from a human who actually likes the vampire is exponentially more fulfilling, physically and psychologically, than any other. Blood from someone who likes you is as filling as, say, a 3-course meal from a restaurant with 3 Michelin Stars, after 2 weeks starving in the desert. Blood from someone who hates or fears you is like trying to chase off heroin withdrawal by huffing paint thinner.
Otdykh vampires pretend – even to their mortal subjects – they are only vassals of a great and secretive Vampire King, and that’s why their polities are merely “duchies”. This is another lie. Yeah, centuries ago they tried to have a Vampire King, but it just didn’t work – the crushing psychological need to have that many people like you is completely overwhelming. The last would-be Vampire King, four hundred years ago, went on a crying jag that lasted a couple weeks, long enough to send him into a torpid sleep that he hasn’t risen from since. The other vampires visit his castle and leave little presents outside his coffin sometimes, in case he’s occasionally poking his head out. Don’t let that give you the idea that vampires are incompetent rulers, though – with smaller groups of vassals, they do very well, responsive to their people’s needs (though keeping odd office hours), and the satisfaction they have after feeding from someone who actually likes them, even from just getting affirmation of their subjects’ appreciation and loyalty, is an elation greater than anything they could experience in their mortal lives. When the first republics arose, there was a treatise by an Otdykh-ian political philosopher decrying it due to the obvious superiority of absolute monarchy at meeting the needs of subjects; this confused the hell out of pretty much everyone else in the world.
Vampires also have a large influence on the culture and art of Otdykh, beyond the fact that vampire artists have a lot more experience at it than the human ones and sort of lead tastes and trends. During their blood-draining spa sessions, they encourage people to write horror stories and create art and architecture in the Gothic style, talking up anyone who has an interest in those genres. Partially, this is to aid their efforts to keep the real nature of vampire rulership a secret. Mostly, it’s because vampires all think horror stories and Gothic art are fucking cool as Hell. After all they do for the human population, and the little they ask in return, people are more than willing to go along with those requests. Those vampires are pretty likable folks, after all! Of course, it’s inevitable, after the invention of mass communications, that the secret gets out eventually. The plan the vampires have come up with is, as soon as the secret gets out, start broadcasting the truth about their feeding sessions, inviting everyone to come and join, in the creepiest tone of voice and most dead-eyed expressions they can manage, and play it off as a “obvious ploy by monsters to trick people into their lair” kinda deal.
The relationships between vampires in their groups are the most important ones they have, as the only people they can relate to as equals, and completely drop all pretense around, and who understand what they are going through. Given every one of them can produce just as much mental anguish as alleviate it, their poly-amorous organization is almost necessary to ensure that SOMEONE has their shit together at any given time.
COMMENTARY
The first installment of this column was originally going to be something completely different, that I realized was just too specific and futa-intensive to be the first installment. Then, on reading the reader submission in response to “Finding My Common Thread I”, I thought to myself, “Yeah, I HAVEN’T seen any hypnosis stuff that isn’t about mind control.” This would be a better choice for the first column – and, plus, it had a guaranteed audience of at least one, who was underserved by the current market!
Since this has to be about a culture, it’s a worldbuilding exercise after all, it can’t just be “a person hypnotizes someone to relax them” – it has to be a culture where it happens often. As the other culture was going to be fantasy-based, and I may want to link them with opportunities to others to contribute to an overall “setting”, fantasy was a good idea here instead of sci-fi. What fantasy creatures can hypnotize people? Naga/lamia, vampires, and mind flayers. Mind flayers are really a D&D thing, naga are supposed to be about crushing power, so that leaves vampires.
So, why do vampires hypnotize people, but not control them? For their benefit. Why are vampires doing things for other people’s benefit? Well, maybe instead of blood, they feed on happiness – so they need to make people happy. They are service tops! Now, vampires who appear powerful but are secretly emotionally vulnerable are always popular, and since this is about not being sinister, I decide “I need people to like me” is a better way to put it than “feeds on happiness”, and I say they need the blood too, to make it more defined and tangible (and throw a bone to anyone with a bloodplay kink). Vampires are associated with Russia and Eastern Europe, so I name the country “Otdykhat”, which Google Translate tells me means “relax” with the connotation of “like what you do at a spa.” Then, about thirty seconds after I post, someone who speaks Russian wakes up in the middle of the night and informs me this is the infinitive verb form, and it should be “Otdykh”, so I fix it hopefully before anyone notices.
Now that we have non-sinister, emotionally vulnerable vampires as service tops, I figure that the rest should be exactly what you expect the aesthetics and associations of vampires to be – misty moors, castles overlooking villages of human subjects, Gothic architecture, all that – but invert expectations about dominance. So, the village ruled by the vampire is run very well, since the vampire cares more about their opinion of him than a human ruler (and I can joke they accidentally invented Moldbug, who thinks it works this way everywhere else). And instead of being an oligarchy at the top, the band of vampires is at the bottom, mutually supporting each other. With that in mind, I cast them as a sort of mentall illness support group, calling to mind comments from people with personality disorders or other such conditions who talk about how amazingly incredibly good it can feel for their specific needs to be met. Hopefully, by tying it to blood consumption (which everyone expects vampires to have) and not making it any specific personality disorder, people who want that dynamic of mentally-ill mutually-supporting polyamory can focus on that primarily, but those who don’t can just see it as “well, it’s pretty much like drinking blood”. I add a bondage element because it goes well with the concept of a “service top” that I see even less than I see service tops: someone who is bound not to make them helpless, but to show they have no need to help themselves. If there is a name for this, I’d love to know it; “power bottom” is definitely not it.
From there, it’s just filling out a couple of details – think of a couple of common things people deal with, and imagine what they do. For a joke I wanted to make in the original Hentaiculture, I was going to say that television had been invented, so I could say that they had telenovelas that were completely fucking bananas. So, if vampires are keeping up appearances of being evil, TV is going to be a problem – I’ll say, they plan to act really obviously like North Korea, so people say “well, that’s an awful attempt at pretending everything is fine”. The old “lying by saying true things in a way that makes people think you’re making it up” trick is always funny to me, so it’s in. Now that I have established they influence culture to keep their secret, specifying they keep everything looking dark and Gothic just because they think that shit looks cool is a character-building dial-back: some of the stuff they do for their Secret Goal, some of it they do because it’s just neat. While dialing back, I see an opportunity to not make it a unified kingdom, and show their system breaking down and failing in a way that doesn’t hurt a lot of people: they are well able to rule small areas, and that is all nice and cool, but they can’t handle having a lot of people under them, so they don’t have Maximal Rulership.
So, did it work? Did you enjoy the vampire duchies, or the format in which they were presented – and what could be done to either to make them better? What sorts of cultures, fetishes, or combinations thereof would you like to see in the future? Please, let us know!
While I do platonically love worldbuilding, the nature (to me, anyway) of broad overviews rather than detailed scenes is to be limited in hotness. It’s got some promise as a foundation on which to build, though.
I’m rather sensitive to repetitive descriptions in erotica, so to me you seem slightly too fond of the word “relax”. Also, I can’t quite place my finger on it, but the piece has a vaguely unpolished feel to it. I mean, that does make sense, since you couldn’t have started writing it longer than a day or two ago, but I thought I’d mention it.
*I’d have used “bottom” rather than “submitter”, but I suppose there’s no point in starting that argument again.
Brinens and Things 