Vampire Academy

For the Moroi, sharing blood is a fraught concept. On one hand, they need blood to live and hold a specific moral code about treating human “feeders” as mere objects. However, feeders are not afforded equivalent status to vampires in their culture, either. As Rose notes, “Feeders were vampire-bite addicts. We accepted that as a part of life, but still looked down on them for it. For anyone else—especially a dhampir—letting a Moroi take blood from you was almost, well, dirty” (68). The fact that Rose and Lissa have shared blood, once it becomes known to St. Vladimir’s gossip mill, therefore shifts from a matter of pragmatism to one of debauchery.

This attitude toward blood-sharing reveals various prejudices in vampire culture, as presented in the novel. The ostensible “acceptance” of feeders, when paired with their low status in the community, indicates the vampires’ disdain for those who have an addiction, even when that addiction is vitally beneficial to vampires and has been created by the vampires themselves. Vampire culture has a taboo regarding the act of mixing the mutual physical pleasure of feeding with the pleasures of sex, suggesting that vampires feel a complicated sense of guilt about embodied pleasures. This taboo suggests the underlying belief that feeding should be for necessity, not enjoyment, and should be entirely separate from sexual activities.

By laying out these strict social parameters around the act of sharing blood, the novel shies away from the longstanding literary connection between vampires and sex without entirely being able to disavow this traditional connection. Part of this discomfort may originate in Rose’s final commentary about what gossip would ensue if it became known that she fed her blood to Lissa. She says that “of course” they never had sex, and she scoffs at the very idea. This attitude implies that part of her fear about being known as a blood-giver comes from the fear of being seen as a lesbian, further implying an anti-gay bias that is not explicit in the novel but is nevertheless underwritten by the text’s insistent focus upon portraying romantic relationships between men and women. There are no LGTBQ+ students at St. Vladimir’s Academy—or at least none that are present in the novel—but all the sexual and romantic encounters between men and women are either coerced or unsatisfying (or both), and many of them contain discussions of blood. Thus, the novel creates the overall impression that vampire society is resolutely sex-negative and anti-pleasure and contains an implicit anti-gay bias.