And this is when you know you've been reading too much urban fantasy

[megwrites]

I've been told I think too much, and I believe it is true. Because I have some burning questions concerning the scientific nature of the whammy* the supernatural.

For instance, if vampires don't breathe, how do they speak?

What bits of the sunlight are so bad for vampires? Could they hop in a tanning bed and be just fine? Is the UV rays, the light in general?

After vampires drink blood, where does it go? If it doesn't go anywhere wouldn't they get bloated like a tick? Do they metabolize it? The implications of this are both staggering and disgusting. Somewhere in my head, there's a story that starts with the line: "He pissed blood every day".

If you're a werewolf and you lose an organ as an animal that you don't possess in human form, does it affect you?

What if you ate something that was poisonous to you as a human, but not as an animal or vice versa. Canines are well documented for their inability to eat chocolate and birds can eat holly berries, but humans can't. Do the contents of your stomach remain constant? Would you kill yourself by eating a huge thing of chocolate just before a full moon?

Not to mention questions of what happens if a werewolf/shapeshifter is pregnant. Especially if they shapeshift into something that's not a mammal.

Can you retain language and consciousness as an animal? Animal brains are often very different in shape, size, and structure from ours. Even close primate relatives don't have our exact brain make up. There are areas of the human brain or structures that don't exist in other creatures. If you do become a complete animal in your animal form, where do your human consciousness and brain patterns go?

Yep. I definitely think too much. And as I'm nearing the end of "Dead Witch Walking", I get the distinct impression that finishing it will hurt less if I stopped confusing the situation with facts.


* This is funnier if you have seen X-Files and remember "Pusher".

Comments

[cericonversion.livejournal.com]

This all gets pretty straightforward if you do the sensible thing and start from the premise that, yes, vampires are supernatural.

Blood gets burned, or some essence in it gets consumed. Sunlight burns because it's the embodiment of a purifying power in the universe; maybe that can be invoked on smaller scales, maybe not, but the search for it could make for an interesting story. (*makes note to self*) Shapeshifting doesn't cost intelligence because the vampire's soul carries its consciousness across forms. This also suggests the possibility of human magicians learning to do the same. (*makes another note*)

As for breath: vampires still have lungs. They can still respire for speech even though they don't need it for oxygenation or the discharge of waste gases.

[fiction-theory.livejournal.com]

This all gets pretty straightforward if you do the sensible thing and start from the premise that, yes, vampires are supernatural.

Well, yeah. If you just say, "Oh, well, they're magic", you can accept a lot of things. And sometimes, for the sake of reading a book or watching a TV show that's otherwise fabulous, I do exactly that.

But every once and a while I really do wonder about these things, because I don't like the idea that some authors/creators of urban fantasy/paranormal works feel like they have no obligation to have any kind of internal logic or to make their worlds and characters make sense.

And that frustrates me sometimes, because I think it gives the genre a bad rap for being very pretty but very dumb - like a lot of the heroines I'm frustrated with.

As for the "they just don't exchange oxygen for C02" answer, I've heard that before and it doesn't satisfy me in the slightest. Because they used that excuse for the Jossverse in explaining why the vampires had breath you could see during filming on cold nights.

And if that is true, then Angel is an idiot. Because at the end of the season 1, when Buffy drowns, Angel turns to Xander to tell him that he CAN'T do CPR because he has no breath.

CPR isn't about giving the person oxygen. If you're breathing into their mouth, you're just keeping air moving at all. Because that's the point.

So, if the "there's air, just no oxygenation" explanation is true and Angel can still press air in and out of his body, then he's an idiot. Because if he can do that, he's perfectly capable of administering CPR. But when the love of his life is laying there, he says, "I can't. I have no breath."

This is what I mean about internal logic. Okay, if vampires push air in and out but don't oxygenate, fine. But they better not say they can't do CPR because that's the authorial equivalent of pissing down my back and telling me it's raining.

[skaldic.livejournal.com]

on Vampires and light -- I've always understood it to be UV -- it's the element that's absent or limited in most artificial light. Which means, of course, that full spectrum lights are an effective deterent.

[fiction-theory.livejournal.com]

Hmm. That's an interesting thing to mull over. Although, I wonder what it means for them that moonlight is just reflected sunlight. I mean, after all, the moon only shines at night because it is reflecting the rays of the sun that hit it.

Although, scientifically, I don't know if the moon reflects UV rays or not. That's something I'll have to look up. Huh.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

Answer A) Magic. A-doy.

Answer B) Write the book where those questions get answered in some way other than Answer A, and I'll buy a copy.

[cericonversion.livejournal.com]

The medicalized approach is done pretty well in Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan's The Strain. There's a lot of genuinely good science, and a lot of very effective (for me, at least) bat-science - stuff that doesn't work in real life, but has a good attitude and wins my engagement and trust.

It is the first book of a trilogy, though, and while it does resolve the first major challenge, leaves a lot for the future, and I don't blame anyone who prefer to wait to see how a whole series goes.

[fiction-theory.livejournal.com]

Answer A) Ha! Reminds me of a Simpsons episode where Lucy Lawless guest starred and she had some rabid fan going around asking her about nitpicky things like "in the first part of the scene in episode 12, season 2, you were riding a chestnut horse, but then in the next part, you are clearly on a palamino. How do you explain that?"

And Lucy Lawless just says, "Any time you see something like that, a wizard did it."

Since The Boy is such a big Simpsons fan, whenever we see something like that on TV or in a book or something where the creators make one of those type of mistakes or don't explain something we say, "Oh, hey, a wizard did it!"


B) One day, perhaps, I will. I gotta finish writing this current draft if it kills me first.

[ladyslvr.livejournal.com]

Various media answer, or attempt to answer, some of these questions.

In the Kitty books, for example, it's established that lycanthropes can't maintain a pregnancy. They can get pregnant, but the zygote is lost as soon as the mother shapeshifts.

In _Being Human_, there's quite a bit of discussion in one episode about werewolf eating habits: namely, that the amount of meat the wolf eats wreaks havoc with the human digestion system for the first several months. Their solution appears to be that the werewolf's body eventually adapts, so even when in human form, the were isn't quite human.

"Nightworld," a series of YA novels by LJ Smith, states that vampires aren't after the blood for food; they're after it for air. Apparently their bodies can't make hemoglobin. So their systems have adapted to strip out the hemoglobin from the intook blood. Presumably the rest is treated as waste, which should mean that the vampires just have to pee a lot.

I can't remember if the Harrison books deal with any of these questions, mostly because I gave up on them very quickly as bad writing in general.

[fiction-theory.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to get hold of the "Being Human" series since I've heard good things about it, but until Netflix has it available, I fear I won't be able to. I'd like to see that.

I'll admit that the Kitty books were better at the internal logic deal that most. I appreciated, for instance, that she says that a person stays the same mass when a wolf, so a 140 pound woman is a 140 pound wolf and invokes the conservation of mass as the reason why. Because it made sense. It didn't force me to forget all I know about science (and living with a forensic scientist, I know so much!).

This is also one of the things that I liked about the Jossverse in the later seasons of Angel. There was an attempt to sort of show that science and magic are married to each other, that the rational exists side by side with the irrational and that sometimes, they are one in the same. Of course their science was bunk sometimes, but at least they tried.


I can't remember if the Harrison books deal with any of these questions, mostly because I gave up on them very quickly as bad writing in general.

You are not wrong about the bad writing. I'm trying my best just to get through the first book and it's been a chore. I don't think they're well written, and the heroine is the embodiment of everything that annoys me about the latest trends in urban fantasy heroines.

She's self-obsessed, too dumb to live, her looks are every Mary Sue I Ever Wrote (the bright red hair that's an oft mentioned feature and the green eyes? Please, Harrison, I did that crap when I was 12), doesn't think before she acts and thinks that's somehow a virtue, doesn't seem to care about the consequences that her actions have on other people, labels herself as good at her job when she's really not, and generally has a hard time acting like a rational adult.

What's sad is that all these heroines would make stunning villains or comic reliefs, but unfortunately, for some reason, they keep getting starring roles.