As far as the morality of killing vampires, I try to turn this on its head with a short story I recently wrote. In it, I have a hunter pursuing a blood magus (which is a magickian that uses blood magick and almost inevitably corrupts into a vampire). Both the hunter and the blood magus used to be partners in an undead hunting business until the magicker eventually turned to blood magick to get them out of dicey situations.
Although the blood magus believes his old friend is justified morally in pursuing him, he also believes he is mistaken because he has not gone too far into the blood to come out yet.
Anyway, long short story short, it is revealed that the hunter has been paid by some powerful undead to pursue the blood magus and force him to use more and more blood magick. The hunter is very hedonistic and knows that his friend will not kill him until he has progressed over into the vampire level of blood magick, at which point his contract will be over with the powerful undead and he will try actually try to kill the blood magus/vampire.
So here the hunter is deliberately forcing his friend to turn into a vampire before he kills him...although it's not like he has any shred of morality in the first place--he does it all for money.
I may have given away too much of the story in my description. On the surface, the hunter appears to be a moral character and there is little distinction made between a blood magus and a vampire--other than a name--to the reader at first. The story is written to lead the reader to view the blood magus as a bloodthirsty monster and the hunter as a stalwart hero that is forced to hunt down his one-time-friend, with only minor clues that the roles are actually reversed until some monster-like-qualities of the hunter are revealed and some hero-like-qualities of the blood magus are revealed.See I'm not sure that story is applicable here for two reasons:
1. The blood magus isn't actually a vampire yet.
2. The hunter is an amoral jerk anyway, so whether killing a vampire is wrong or not would be for him a drop in the moral bucket. He's got bigger issues morally for that to much matter now.
Like anything, depends on how they're depicted.
I like vampires in: Nosferatu, Dracula, Lost Boys, Vampire Hunter D.
I hate vampires in: Buffy, Twilight.
Twilight set back vampire stories by a thousand years. Meyer wrecked the whole genre for me.
The entire article can be read here.The vampire is one of the strangest and most mysterious beings known on Aua. Partially aether-based, it is a parasite that lodges itself between its host's physical body and its soul, creating the type of being that's commonly referred to as the vampire. These vampires are creatures of the night; they're over-sensitive to light and they feed on blood. They're powerful magic wielders, they don't die of old age and they're almost impossible to get rid of.
Twilight set back vampire stories by a thousand years. Meyer wrecked the whole genre for me.
I disagree Reaver. I think Twilight set back the cultural appetite of teenage girls a thousand years or so (or at least those that succumb to it), but it's kind of like any press is good press.