Vampires and billionaires were a thing in the 2010s, objects of fascination and fantasy. This was exemplified by the Twilight and 50 Shades books and movies. Those stories were part of a return to a fascination that we’ve had before, and part of a larger pattern of fetishizing terrifying concentrations of (abusive) power. As has been true previously, the themes that reached the larger zeitgeist were fantasies about some powerful and implicitly dangerous hunk who would obsess over us, sweep us off our feet, and (romantically) ravish us while also offering us impossible financial security. We might also have the personal validation of being able to “fix” the bad boy / billionaire / vampire or make him feel true love for us (they’re kind of the same thing, and they’re evidence that, first, we were right that he wasn’t totally unredeemable, and second, that we were special somehow because he changed for us). The overtones of contagion (and the fear of disease) from earlier vampire crazes still lingered in the background, but they were downplayed in favor of emphasizing the weird power dynamics between a mortal and a mostly-immortal lover.

I don’t think it’s surprising…

…that the power dynamic between a mortal and a vampire so neatly parallels the power dynamic between a regular person and a billionaire. I think the parallel actually reveals a lot about the systemic problems of entrenched power, and offers new options for storytelling. Maybe unsurprisingly, this exploration has echoes of my post about feudalism, cyberpunk nobility, and megacorps. These thoughts brought to you in part by Altered Carbon.

Billionaires and storybook vampires feel tightly interconnected, thematically speaking. It makes sense that E.L. James was able to reskin her vampire fan fiction by making the vampire merely impossibly wealthy. The tools vampires and billionaires have access to aren’t identical, but there sure is a lot of overlap.

Vampires and billionaires both have access to incredible wealth and power, they both have dedicated retainers who will do nearly anything for their boss (or will find someone who will do nearly anything), they both have unparalleled health (whether via vampiric power or extensive access to medical experts) and a relative immunity to consequences and considerations that would crush a mere mortal. The vampire/billionaire can unthinkingly and effortlessly drag a mere mortal into a lifestyle that will utterly ruin that mortal… unless the mortal gains some access to the power of their seducer (or somehow “fixes“ their seducer, as I mentioned above). They are both entrenched power incarnate. I mean, if you thought there was a relationship power disparity when someone making $200,000 a year dates someone making $40,000 a year, billionaires just make that so much worse. Same goes for age gaps, though vampiric ammortality skews things heavily there.

Side note: vampires might seem easy to imagine (I want to suck your blood! Blah!), but billions are hard to understand in context. This explanatory chart is out of date but might help a little bit. If you’re anything like most people, you probably have a hard time internalizing the phenomenal change in scale between hundreds, thousands, millions, and billions.

But this post is about entrenched power, and stagnation, and about how we think of entrenched power in our world and our stories. So let’s jump ahead a little bit:

If you could be immortal, would you?

I am not surprised that life extension research has been supported by the wealthy. People fear death, people are attached to life, and those with the means to try escaping death have been trying for millennia. We’ve got lots of stories about the quest for eternal life.

What would happen if the wealthy could become immortal? What would happen if all the power that the wealthiest people have collected… remained theirs? What if it were never redistributed because they never died? What would happen if all that power could keep pushing the world to better serve itself—the power, and the person with the power—and its needs?

Hot take: that seems bad.

Everybody, everywhere, puts their thumbs on the scales to push the balance of the world in the direction that they want. Some people have more power, and thus more leverage. Corporations, under our current laws, offer a taste of this in present day—witness the way that Disney’s lobbying has reshaped copyright law to better serve its own interests.

Because of that imbalance, it takes many people working in concert to counteract the influence of the powerful. We have previously set up rules to place people on a more even playing field, and to reassure people that their voice cannot simply be drowned out by the more powerful. That’s (generally) what campaign finance reform prior to Citizens United was meant to do. We haven’t yet instituted a way to counteract that influence since the Citizens United ruling.

The problem is, the concentration of power implicitly warps and stagnates the world around us. When the powerful cling to power, the baton is not passed and new power cannot grow. Corporations and capitalists (and vampires) choke out new rivals around them much as a massive tree’s shade starves new saplings near its trunk.

Any time we see stories about vampires (or billionaires), we should ask: how have they been reshaping their world to better suit their needs? What systems are they dismantling, and which are they leaving in place? Which systems are they nudging to serve them, and how?

I think it’s no accident that vampires usually aren’t portrayed as presiding over flourishing and prosperous lands. There may be exceptions, stories about “the good vampire,” but they are the exception that proves the rule. People may live well under a vampiric ruler so long as they don’t cause problems. Anyone who becomes wealthy or powerful or influential enough to be a threat to the vampire must be bought out, dominated, co-opted, or killed; this creates temporary stability at the cost of stagnation and suffering. Vampire stories get that part right—you can see the same pattern in any authoritarian system with no vampires required.

Immortality accentuates the warping and stagnating effects of concentrated power by allowing power to remain concentrated. When the powerful die, there’s at least a soft reset. Their collected wealth (in companies or trusts) might remain powerful, but because companies and trusts are made up of and administered by people those have some possibility of change (or in the case of a trust, usually some kind of set lifespan). If those wealthy enough to afford immortality can cling to their power forever, then they can continue to unbalance the world in their own favor forever.

That’s the kind of stagnation and suppression that feeds desperation and resentment. Much as I think vampire stories are thematically aware (and correct) by not showing the vampire ruling over prosperous people, I think vampire stories are also right in showing the vampire’s fear of and undoing by angry mobs or armed revolution. You can draw a direct line from the extractive nature of vampiric power and the vampire’s fear of the mob, to the extraction- and subjugation-based wealth of antebellum American plantation owners and to those plantation owners’ fear of slave revolts (which were considerably more frequent than I was ever taught in grade school. Those plantation owners might not have been billionaires, but they were the entrenched power of their day.

Now, billionaires and vampires aren’t actually the same. I certainly think that present day billionaires buying out a start-up that threatens their personal source of power is better than a vampire sucking the life from a would-be threat or a slave-owner killing or torturing their slaves. But the warping influence of the vampire’s and the billionaire’s entrenched power remains uncomfortably similar. That’s part of why vampires and billionaires are such good parallels in those romance novels I mentioned at the start. A vampire’s entrenched power isn’t good for society. Nor is a billionaire’s.

Now, #NotAllBillionaires: some billionaires seem to be better than others. They are people, and as with any other person they’re a crapshoot. Some of them seem decent! If I could choose I’d prefer Mackenzie Scott or Melinda French Gates, and I’d take Bill Gates over Elon Musk. But I think we’d probably be better off without billionaires (or vampires) in the first place. I think we’d be better off without immortality too.

I’m not saying you can’t thirst over the billionaires and vampires. I’m just saying I’d like that thirst to remain a fantasy or a bit of role-play, rather than reality.

In the meanwhile, next time I’m writing about concentrated and entrenched power, undying beings, or life-sucking superhumans, I’ve got a useful model to return to. Oh, and I think we’ve probably been missing something from our stories about elves given their long lives. Maybe I’ll write about that another time.