Love among the damned is a double-edged fang dripping with poison
Here's your daily reminder that Kindred are desperately lonely, delusional creatures with breathtaking anger management issues and a Beast that eventually perverts every positive emotion, every loving or friendly interaction they would otherwise handle somewhat gracefully in their mortal days (because resisting the Beast is like trying to resist gravity when riding a roller-coaster or a water slide, giving in is so much more fun); --
-- who endure in a society ripe with backstabbing, normalised predation and cruelty that dehumanises both Kindred and mortals alike, where kindness is punished and manipulative evil gets rewarded for succeeding; --
-- so is it any wonder that the majority of Embraces happen out of loneliness? Or that Kindred tend to fall passionately in love, hard and fast (and often unwisely) when confronted with genuine emotional warmth, only to screw it up or have that light at the end of the tunnel they so longed to grasp be taken away from them?
And that's the beauty horror of World of Darkness.
The prospect of redemption is dangled in front of you only to be snatched away; the love and companionship you craved is gone through your own toxicity or the machinations of others --- and the average Kindred spends eternity fleeing from their own conscience, so that they don't have to address the fact that predating upon mortals or animals (kine, cattle) to survive is immoral, an end to sustain the addiction of blood, and that the only moral choice the vampire can make is to walk into the sun when dawn breaks.
"In the most basic terms, love is a weakness; a chink in even the most carefully constructed armour. A significant other is precisely the kind of leverage other Kindred wait for."
— Kismet's World of Darkness: Love among the Damned
"What the Damned seldom let on is that they crave meaning and companionship as deeply as we do, perhaps more deeply. Theirs is an existence on the edge of a bottomless pit of despair. A lone Kindred falls victim to the Compulsions of the Beast or is drawn to the flame of self-annihilating depression very easily."
— VtM corebook V5, pg. 197 (chp. Coteries)
"The vampire is the quintessential fiend, for the vampire is so much our own reflection. Vampires feed as we feed, by killing, and through death can feel the same dread, guilt and longing for escape. They are trapped in the same cycle of fast, feast and purge. They, like us, seek redemption, purity and peace. The vampire is the poetic expression of our deepest fears, and the shadow of our most primal urges."
— VtM 2E
"From the Elder's perspective, you've found a source of genuine warmth and light - a genuine connection in your long, lonely existence of paranoid backstabbing. A young, breakable, vulnerable connection. Vampires can't afford to show open affection, in my view, what they love they protect extremely carefully, be that by hiding the connection or putting the valuable under strict guard of some sort. Everything you love is in danger, because your enemies can hurt them to gain an advantage over you (or just hurt you out of pettiness). If you're an elder, and that precious thing is a neonate, then said precious thing is now at high risk of being murdered/tortured/enslaved by other, rival, elder vampires. By loving somebody you paint a target on them."
— OnyxPath, forum post
