Most 'romantic' vampire stories are based of of reclusive european nobility, and autism can thrive in a bloodline where social status overrides social oddity
We all joke and make memes here but this is about both classism AND abelism
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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Never age. Can turn into a bat. Typical autistic traits
Autists will also die if a wooden stake is driven through the heart.
As they are also vulnerable to silver bullets, maybe autists are werewolves, too?
I've never seen evidence for either of these claims. How do you know they're true?
I've hunted my fair share of autistic werewolves
But... Garlic bread good. 🥺
Vampires hating garlic is a myth. It's actually like catnip to them.
I’ve long held a hypothesis that a lot of folklore monsters are based on prejudices and stereotypes against behaviorally divergent people. While this post references autism, I feel like the origin of vampire myths are most likely rooted in what are essentially nasty rumors about people that regularly engaged in behaviors that would eventually become associated with OCD (and ironically, I would argue that almost all of the behaviors described in this post besides the sleep schedule one are much more associated with OCD than autism).
For instance, a common OCD thought pattern is being intensely preoccupied with how strangers perceive you, which leads you to engaging in agoraphobic tendencies, which could easily lead to people coming up with wild and cruel speculation about why you might struggle to be outside like everybody else
People with OCD might compulsively avoid certain foods and become intensely distressed if they are exposed to the foods they’re avoiding, like a vampire trying to avoid eating garlic.
Compulsive rituals is another one. This is literally just OCD in the most obvious sense. There’s an old legend that you should bury a vampire in rice because they have to count every single grain any time they find it.
And lastly, another extremely common OCD thought pattern involves being intensely preoccupied with concepts like blasphemy and sacrilege and religious imagery in general, and I think it’s easy to see how that sort of issue can lead to people, especially along time ago thinking that you are some kind of unholy individual.
Huh. I had thought that Vampires were just a metaphor for the nobility. Rich guy who lives in a manor and sucks the life from the common folk to sustain themselves. But I just did some quick searching on that and apparently that’s a (relatively) more recent version of them (1800s), but a version of them existed in earlier Eastern European folklore as basically zombies way before that.
Anyway, I could definitely see a lot of what you’re saying, although from what I can tell, the garlic thing has more to do with medical matters than behavior. The two things I’ve seen are that 1) Garlic is an antiseptic, so it was thought to ward off evil probably because it helped reduce disease. 2) Apparently there is a disease that has garlic intolerance as a symptom. Although it also looks like that’s disputed. It can be hard to nail down stuff like this.
Noble families had high incidence of autism because social standing can override social awkwardness, and wives didn't get to choose their husbands
No, that's specifically Dracula, he lives in a manor because he's Count Dracula :P
Actually, I didn't know about this before I looked into it, but that wasn't the first of it's kind. Apparently that started with a story called "The Vampyre"from 1819. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vampyre
To paraphrase an old meme, vampires don’t hate crucifix explicitly, they’re just allergic to bs.
classic ratheist pivot to shoehorn religion into a discussion of autistic traits in vampires, welcome to my blocklist