Fran Hansen

Fran Hansen is a hair and makeup artist from Shrewsbury whose vampire characters in The Sims turn popular culture’s monsters into a medium for moral experimentation and self-understanding. Her digital households reject the assumption that vampirism must mean cruelty: they feed ethically, live with recognisably human problems, and are designed to pursue happiness rather than reproduce violence.

Identity and Background

Fran is presented through her fascination with Sims characters, whose lives she regularly follows and discusses on social media. Her interest became especially distinctive when she began creating vampires who are vegan. The setting is domestic and ordinary—a living room, a computer game, and an elderly cat named Mowzer—yet the imaginative work taking place there reopens fundamental questions about what makes a monster.

Fran is diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder and speaks openly about her continuing mental-health difficulties. When she was younger, she used Sims to run characters through different social situations and observe how they responded, effectively using the game to practise coping with comparable situations herself. The simulation therefore functions as more than entertainment: it offers a space in which social behaviour, consequences, and possible ways of living can be explored at a safe distance.

Rebuilding the Vampire

Fran deliberately changes her vampire characters from murderous monsters into caring and upstanding members of an invisible society. One family operates a vegan veterinary surgery, although its vampire ownership means that the practice opens only after dark. The joke preserves the supernatural premise while redirecting it toward care, service, and interdependence.

Her Sims vampires also possess personal and familial difficulties that are recognisable as human problems. Elven and Strom are sisters based on the Grady twins from The Shining, and they have mother issues linked to having been hissed at during infancy by the person who was supposed to care for them. Yet Fran refuses to turn those traumas into a spectacle of escalating cruelty. Her digital family is not subjected to third-party additions built around murder and mayhem.

Fran explains this preference through a desire for her characters to have “a happy nice life.” The contrast is intentional: she starts with beings whom most people would identify as the bad guys and tries to make them “the good bad guys.” The game’s familiar moral architecture allows her to preserve the category of the vampire while testing whether its inherited moral meaning can be altered.

Sympathy with the Monster

Fran’s interpretation depends on separating monstrous appearance or condition from moral blame. She connects her response to Frankenstein’s monster, who is pursued despite not being responsible for the circumstances that made him what he is. In her account, monsters are created, misunderstood, and judged before others know them; vampires, likewise, “didn’t ask to be vampires” and were changed against their will.

This position complicates the older vampire tradition. Varney in Varney the Vampire becomes sympathetic despite his murderous tendencies because he did not choose to become a creature of the night, struggles against his animal instincts, and ultimately kills himself to escape his eternal fate. Carmilla, by contrast, is emotionally and physically predatory, while later fiction increasingly permits vampires to become heroes, companions, or ethically unconventional figures. Fran’s game-based practice belongs to that later transformation, but it makes the transformation personal: the vampire is not merely softened for a new genre audience, but reconstructed through repeated choices and their consequences.

Ethics, Stigma, and Community

Fran’s vampires also echo the book’s account of the real vampire subculture, where blood drinkers are described as feeding from willing donors, testing blood to prevent disease, and presenting themselves as a responsible social community. That comparison shifts attention from supernatural danger to consent, care, and the management of stigma. In both cases, the supposedly threatening identity is regulated from within rather than left to the assumptions of outsiders.

The broader vampire tradition has often made otherness visible through bodies and desires. Carmilla’s same-sex attraction carried particular force in the nineteenth century because such relationships were socially unacceptable, while vampire stories have also been linked to suspicion of immigrants and outsiders in port cities such as Liverpool. Fran’s digital households answer this history not by denying difference but by asking how difference is interpreted. Her vampires remain vampires; what changes is the moral and social framework around them.

Narrative Significance

Fran’s use of The Sims demonstrates how vampire mythology can become a flexible tool for rehearsing ethical decisions. The game forces choices and displays their consequences, allowing her to examine how characters who begin as presumed villains might be given care, restraint, family bonds, and a good life. Her creative method turns the vampire into a test of labelling: if a creature is judged before its circumstances are understood, the simulation can supply a different set of circumstances and observe what follows.

Her intervention also reflects the continuing expansion of vampire fiction across literature, film, television, music, comics, and games. From the threatening Count Orlok of Nosferatu to openly social vampires seeking equality in True Blood, the genre has repeatedly revised the rules governing nocturnal bloodsuckers. Fran’s vegan vampires extend that revision into an intimate, playable form, making the monster a vehicle for empathy rather than a fixed emblem of evil.