What is the Frontier in Vampire Hunter D?
Earth in 12,090 AD: a western with castles, built by vampires on the ashes of 1999.
The novels are set in the year 12,090 AD, some ten thousand years after a nuclear war in 1999 destroyed human civilisation. The winners were the vampires, called the Nobility, who had foreseen the war, sheltered everything needed to rebuild, and remade the world in their image with science indistinguishable from magic.
Their civilisation perfected itself into stagnation. Their own scientific prophecy told them they had reached their zenith and would fall to humanity, and the fall is the series' present tense: the Nobility decaying in their castles, humans pushing back at the edges, and between them the Frontier, where the Capital's law barely reaches and villages hire hunters like D by the job.
A WORLD BUILT BY VAMPIRES
The Nobility's EarthEngineered monsters
Nearly every creature on the Frontier, werewolves, mutants, things with no names, was genetically built by the Nobility. A handful of true demons, gods, and aliens survived the war on their own.
Humans, edited
The Nobility rewrote humanity itself: fear of vampires woven into the genes, and the memory of vampire weaknesses, garlic, crucifixes, quietly deleted. The prey was designed not to fight back.
Blood, refused
The Nobility's science could synthesise a blood substitute. They preferred the real thing anyway, which is the whole tragedy of their civilisation in one preference.
THE SHAPE OF THE LAND
Capital and FrontierThe Capital
The old civilisation's centre, source of scholarships, technology, and law that fades with distance. Frontier children dream of it the way frontier children always have.
The Frontier proper
Sectors ruled by individual Nobles from castle strongholds, villages of farmers beneath them, and roads patrolled by whatever the villages can afford. D's entire economy.
"Transient guests are we"
The Sacred Ancestor's precept, quoted by D in the first novel: the lawgiver of the vampires understood his kind were guests on the Earth, not its owners. The Frontier is what that understanding looks like after ten thousand years.