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.

[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.

[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.

[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.