I’ve always been kind of bugged by the bit in BaG where Marius stays at the bottom of a canal for an hour, because it suggests they don’t need to breathe. I remember seeing something in PL that seemed to refute that, so then I was irritated at having to mentally explain away the BaG reference. I’ll have to go back and see what the PL thing was now…
Yeah same! I remember that part in BaG.
But… if we don’t count PL as canon, then there’s no discrepancy. Well. There MIGHT be. I just can’t remember breathing being specifically mentioned elsewhere.
This is one of those situations where I wish I had vampiric super-fast reading so I could skim the whole damn VC and gather up all the vampire physiology facts. *siiiigh*
//The fact that they don’t need to breathe is early canon stuff. They can bury themselves alive, for goodness’ sake. And wasn’t Mekare in a box underwater? That didn’t exactly have oxygen.
I think they can inhale and exhale, and may need to breathe when they’ve drunk blood in order to oxygenate it, but they can definitely go without breathing for long periods of time.
This is part of why I’m so opposed to attempting to bring “science” into it. There’s nothing scientific about vampire magic. (I do not count PL as canon, but I don’t count most of the later books either.)
//My only suggestion in response to this (which may be a load of crap) is that they can breathe, and may do it reflexively or in order to drink or speak, but they don’t need it in order to continue functioning. As a result, they remain unaffected and do not suffocate or black out from lack of oxygen the way that a human would. Alternatively, you could say that if they breathe to oxygenate the blood they’ve consumed, the contents of the blood is what sustains them. This would render the physical act of inhale/exhale unnecessary because they already have the oxygen content that they require, having already taken it in; their bodies just process it differently because they no longer use the majority of the human body’s major functions in the same way. It could also contribute to how a vampire’s body responds to deprivation of blood; it’s possibly reacting to the lack of oxygen ordinarily used to maintain the body’s stability?
I-want-my-IWTV 