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It's not a matter of living status but creature typing.
Fresh corpses contain liters of fresh blood, while Undead contain decontaminated and expired blood
Legit, this became my DM's approach after my dhampir turned to an injured party member who was bleeding profusely and asked, "Are you going to use that?"
Was hoping he could become a full vampire, even without going through the ritual.
Considering the developers put in, like, 5 different contingency plans for in case you lose the Netherstones, it would be kind of cool if you could have Astarion bite Cazador and drink his blood.
I have no idea where (or if) it is explicitly stated in D&D source material, it could be inherited from another fantasy universe, but it seems to be the prevailing thought that the master must be willing to manumit the spawn in the process. They would need a very compelling reason to create a potential competitor, so it does beg the question of how Cazador got Vellioth to allow it.
So, sure, Astarion could physically bite Cazador but as long as Cazador has life left in his body, unless he's willing to bestow the power of a true vampire upon Astarion, it won't change him and once Cazador is well and truly dead it's no longer even possible.
From what I found on the subject, the Spawn is under the effects of a permanent Charm spell if their master establishes contact within the 1st hour of their rising.
While this means that an enslaved spawn would have no desire to try and attack their master, it also hints at the idea that if a spawn manages to evade them for an hour, they could theoretically take the blood by force.
He's already irredeemably evil. Being undead affects more than just your physical body. It also warps your mind. More often than not, earning approval points with Astarion involves you doing blatantly cruel or evil actions, purely because he finds it entertaining to watch others suffer.
During my recent attempt at romancing him (got wiped by Cazador, so had to delete my Honour Mode save), Astarion outright, explicitly states that the only problem he has with Cazador's actions, is that he did them to Astarion.
If circumstances were different, he'd have no problem with his master's sadism.
I suppose a vampire is, by nature, "evil", if for no other reason than that it lives by selfishly taking the life blood from other creatures. Although ... we all eat plants and animals, consuming other life so that we can ourselves live. Does that make us all evil?
Anyway, Astarion is not by nature a *nice* person. There is a path to making him less of a blight upon the world and healing some of the trauma that has been inflicted on him, but it doesn't make him a nice guy. He remains a snarky ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Just one that doesn't go around trying to dominate and use anything and anyone else.
The difference, is that the Undead are created and sustained by Negative / Necrotic energy, which is the antithesis of Positive / Life energy. The very essence of life itself is anathema to their state of being.
Which is why the vast, overwhelming majority of all Undead you find throughout the world seem to universally hate the living. It's not that they've become jaded over however long they've walked the world. It's because hating the living is part of their fundamental nature.
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Adding to that, is the fact about what I said earlier, in that vampirism affects more than just your body. Upon being turned, you develop a sense of emptiness and longing in your soul for the life that was taken from you.
Vampires try to fill this void within themselves, but their undead nature twists and corrupts their efforts into something hedonistic. For example, if a vampire desires love, their undead nature will corrupt that desire into feelings of possessive lust, causing them to assemble a personal harem out of their ever growing list of conquests.
Like, in Buffy a vampire is a demon that has inhabited the soulless body of someone who used to be alive. A Buffy vampire is very much like a BG3 mindflayer -- it remembers who used to be the person who had that body, but it is *not* that person. (Except for a certain rite that can restore the soul of the former person back to its body, and then it is that person again and yet also a demon, which is very psychically painful.)
But in other stories, sometimes a vampire is just someone who has died and, due to either magic or science or some of both, is somehow still walking around. They are *dead* but not dead ("undead") and may be pretty much exactly the same person they used to be except for their condition (and feeding habits).
The whole "burned by the sun" thing (which is not always part of vampire stories) does imply that whatever gives them their motive power is opposed to the normal life-giving power of the sun, and D&D does include that. Also, D&D has a whole class of "undead" that can be "turned" by clerics. And it explicitly has necromancy and necromantic energy.
So yeah, a D&D vampire is sustained by an energy that is the opposite of the energy that sustains most living things, but that doesn't necessarily force them to be "evil" in a moral sense. At least, not any more than any other player character is bound to follow the general racial stereotypes. You can play a "good" githyanki if you want. You could play a "good" vampire if you wanted to do that too. (But I suspect that most people who want to play as a vampire are eager to lean into the evil role-play anyway. The "tortured beautiful creature of the night" thing is pretty boring once you've seen the trope done over and over and over again.)
That said, D&D vampires lean much more toward the "undead curse" side of mythology than the "biological" side, especially with famous vampire lords like Strahd von Zarovich.
Negative energy or not, vampirism tends more towards the spiritual and less towards the "got the vampire virus".
So, it's more about breaking curses - this is why killing the master sets the spawn free.
But, in your games, feel free to bend and twist the specifics all you want - it is, after all, YOUR game, not anyone else's. There's no hard and fast rules when it comes to that stuff.
Acchooally, the two exceptions to the "sentient species get to choose their morality" in D&D are undead and extra-planar creatures such as celestials and fiends. These are creatures who's entire existence is shaped by their state of existence.
Undead are, literally by nature, evil.
The only exception could be mindless animated undead, but it's pretty vague whether such creatures have any kind of will, mind or soul to begin with, so couldn't be properly called "people" - an animated skeleton is just a pile of bones that happens to be swinging a sword at you, right? Or is their some kind of "evil" spirit within it? Certainly not a soul, and definitely not a mind capable of thinking, which is a pre-requisite for moral agency in the first place. An animated undead can't be "evil" because it doesn't make choices, it's little more than an automaton.
Anyway, getting back to Astarion -- the game does not make him "irredeemably evil". Your own choices as you play can lead to him finding some value in being a hero rather than a villain. Or they can double down on his life experience that people are either masters or slaves, and he would rather be a master.