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It would depend on the setting, I'd think.
In an SF setting, then maybe: it could be the chemical qualities of blood that they need.
In a fantasy setting, then probably not: what they need is life taken from another. Blood is simply the material component of that life force.
Kind of bridging the Sci Fi an Fantasy angles, someone could probably come up with an interesting mechanic about how the blood is grown in a lab
Could be that just straight-up blood cultures grown in a vat don't have the necessary life force, but growing some genetically engineered organism that is just a living blood factory, basically a meat bag of bone marrow, circulatory system, and just enough of a nervous system to keep things going checks enough boxes for it to work.
Sort of tangential to lab-grown blood, but maybe there's a little industry preying on the families of brain-dead patients who insist on keeping them on life support and convincing them to move their loved ones mortal vessels into a blood farm when the medical bills start piling up too high. Or desperate women taking dangerous drugs and getting pregnant in hopes of having an anencephalic baby that they can sell to the vampires to make ends meet.
Maybe there was a plague that causes widespread birth defects and millions of babies are being born without any higher brain functions. The church is having an absolute conniption over this, they won't condone aborting them or taking them off of life support, but the only way many can afford to keep these human-shape meat puppets alive is by giving them over to the vampire blood farms, and they're certainly not about to condone anything having to do with those demon-spawn bloodsuckers either.
These are horrible ideas but very intriguing. Thank you for them.
Be careful with that reasoning. If vampires only drink blood for the life force connected to it, it's only a short jump to cum vampires.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
They're called succubi
The movie Lifeforce enters the chat.
Granted it's barely SF, the vampires are barely (see what I did there?) vampires, and it's objectively not a very good movie. But vampires from space sucked the life from people, and it totally rocked.
As a Californian, I was trying to figure out why San Franciscan vampires were able to drink lab blood.
Who said vampires weren’t real?
Now what if you mixed a small amount of body grown blood with lab grown