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Post by stargazer1682 on Dec 16, 2018 0:58:11 GMT
What sort of population do you think vampires have on Buffy, ballpark figure? When you figure they feed fairly regularly and assuming that unlike say Angel or Spike who, on account of drinking pigs blood and getting their blood from a butch, drinking it by the cup, most vampires go through an entire human each time they feed; probably wasting most of the blood a lot of the time, if they don't drain them completely. Fully grown humans take to reach maturity (though obvious vampires wouldn't care how young their prey was); so if there were a millions upon millions of vampires in the world, it seems likely they would cause a serious drain on the human population just sustaining themselves; never mind their predatory instinct to kill for the simple pleasure of it.
In comparison, there was an estimate 998.3 million cattle in the world in 2017, and 7.4 billion people. I was a little surprised by that number, as I sort of expected the inverse where there'd be more cows than people; kind of for the same reason of maintaining a sufficient supply to the world population. Obviously, i know that not every human on earth even eats meat, let alone every day, but it's still a little surprising. That's roughly 7.4 people to every 1 cow. If the ratio of vampire to human were remotely the same, there would be nearly 55 billion vampires in the world, which seems unlikely; especially considering where not every human consumes beef, virtually every vampire consumes humans. Even a 1/100th of that population size - 550 million vampires in the world, seems like a lot of regular, "mysterious" deaths throughout the world on a pretty regular basis.
I could see it being 50 million or even 5 million, fairly well spread out across the globe; with large clusters on mystical hot-spots, like the hellmouth, where someone has probably taken the initiative to work some mojo so people are more oblivious to what goes bump in the night; and the radiating mystical energies perhaps juice up creatures like vampires.
You would think more of them would favor regions that have more distinctive changes in seasons, where during the winter periods the sun would be frequently overcast; though I suppose the catch-22 is that in colder climates fewer people are just walking around, especially late at night, and the heavy outdoor clothing makes it harder for them to bite through....
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Post by Deleted on Dec 16, 2018 1:36:18 GMT
We know Sunnydale has a population of 38,500 because it's on the sign Spike ran over in his car.
I always figured there were maybe 200 Vamps in town. Most of those kept on the lowdown - not killing people too often but doing stuff like stealing from the blood bank, going to houses like the one Riley hung out at to bite willing victims, etc. Stuff that wouldn't attract the Slayer, basically. Maybe on average about 5-10 new Vamps being created per week, but with Buffy killing the majority of those. If we assume the odd new Vampire isn't immediately Slain, and the odd grown up Vampire is, then the population stays fairly stable.
So that's about 1 Vamp to every 200 people. And that's a much higher than average population, because Sunnydale is on a hellmouth which attracts them all.
So the world average is maybe 1 vamp per 1,000 people. That's about 7.5 million Vampires, worldwide.
That's just my feeling, though.
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Post by stargazer1682 on Dec 16, 2018 2:20:59 GMT
We know Sunnydale has a population of 38,500 because it's on the sign Spike ran over in his car. I always figured there were maybe 200 Vamps in town. Most of those kept on the lowdown - not killing people too often but doing stuff like stealing from the blood bank, going to houses like the one Riley hung out at to bite willing victims, etc. Stuff that wouldn't attract the Slayer, basically. Maybe on average about 5-10 new Vamps being created per week, but with Buffy killing the majority of those. If we assume the odd new Vampire isn't immediately Slain, and the odd grown up Vampire is, then the population stays fairly stable. So that's about 1 Vamp to every 200 people. And that's a much higher than average population, because Sunnydale is on a hellmouth which attracts them all. So the world average is maybe 1 vamp per 1,000 people. That's about 7.5 million Vampires, worldwide. That's just my feeling, though. I think it would be optimistic to say the majority of vampires are laying low; Buffy patrols regularly, and similarly encounters vamps to dust. The blood bank is one thing, but those deliveries, at least the ones the vamps try to steal from, but the vamps can only steal from that so often before raising suspicion, if they're really trying to be inconspicuous. The feeding dens are presumably an outlier; Giles says he hadn't seen one since his Ripper days and was surprise to hear there was one in Sunnydale. On the whole, neither really plays to any strong suit of a vampire, since it requires patience and impulse control; something Giles even says is the common problem with the dens, where there always ends up being someone who goes overboard or who only pretends to play by the rules. |
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Post by Deleted on Dec 16, 2018 2:52:03 GMT
We know Sunnydale has a population of 38,500 because it's on the sign Spike ran over in his car. I always figured there were maybe 200 Vamps in town. Most of those kept on the lowdown - not killing people too often but doing stuff like stealing from the blood bank, going to houses like the one Riley hung out at to bite willing victims, etc. Stuff that wouldn't attract the Slayer, basically. Maybe on average about 5-10 new Vamps being created per week, but with Buffy killing the majority of those. If we assume the odd new Vampire isn't immediately Slain, and the odd grown up Vampire is, then the population stays fairly stable. So that's about 1 Vamp to every 200 people. And that's a much higher than average population, because Sunnydale is on a hellmouth which attracts them all. So the world average is maybe 1 vamp per 1,000 people. That's about 7.5 million Vampires, worldwide. That's just my feeling, though. I think it would be optimistic to say the majority of vampires are laying low; Buffy patrols regularly, and similarly encounters vamps to dust. The blood bank is one thing, but those deliveries, at least the ones the vamps try to steal from, but the vamps can only steal from that so often before raising suspicion, if they're really trying to be inconspicuous. The feeding dens are presumably an outlier; Giles says he hadn't seen one since his Ripper days and was surprise to hear there was one in Sunnydale. On the whole, neither really plays to any strong suit of a vampire, since it requires patience and impulse control; something Giles even says is the common problem with the dens, where there always ends up being someone who goes overboard or who only pretends to play by the rules. Buffy patrols regularly, but most of those patrols are her hanging around the graveyard and killing fresh vamps. After that she mostly takes on vamps in the middle of trying to kill humans. But we have seen vamps who don't appear to draw a lot of attention to themselves. It was years until Buffy even knew there were houses where vamps fed off of willing humans. Even Giles didn't know that was happening in the town. And as Anya put it : "they get cash, hot and cold running blood, and ... they don't leave any corpses behind so they don't get hunted." Likewise it was years before Buffy found out there were bars where vamps and demons hung out. So clearly there IS a population of vamps in the town who deliberately avoid calling attention, including killing people, so that Buffy won't slay them. The question is, what fraction of the vamp population are like that, as opposed to being out to kill all the time? I'd argue that the "kill all the time" vamps simply cannot be large in number, because after a year or two there would be nobody left in the town. Let's say on any average day there's as few as 25 vampires who kill people regularly, and on average each kills say three people a week. That would be 10% of the entire town's population being murdered, every year. By the end of the show in season 7, over two thirds of the town's population would be dead. And that's just the vampires, remember the town has a population of demons and things that kill people as well. The math just doesn't allow for a large population of murdery vampires on an ongoing basis. Either the number of such vamps is very small - 5 or 10, maybe - or even they only kill people every month or so. The only thing that makes sense to me is that there's a fairly small population of vampires. Most of those don't kill and stay off the radar. A handful of bad apples go around killing. Buffy's slayage mostly focuses on those vampires and the newly minuted vamps they create. As she kills them, more come to town. So she has a steady supply of killer vampires to slay, as seen in the show, but there isn't like an unhideable vampire apocalypse going on. |
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