Tag Archives: vampire physiology

I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m honestly curious about your opinion: do you think sunblock would work for vampires? (Silly question, I know, but I love reading your responses on things like this. Also, sorry if you’ve already answered a question similar to this one. ^^”)

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Not a bother at all I LOVE being asked things and I do make an effort to answer bc honestly who wants to read a boring “Yes” or “No” like, no that’s boring bye. And, no, I don’t think I’ve answered this before so here we go…

Some vampires probably could do it with just sunscreen. Part of the difference is whether they can even be conscious during daylight hours. Mostly it’s due to their unique physiology. I could write an essay on this so I’m gonna keep it to 4 vampire types.

1. Meet Joe Black Deacon Frost, vampire from Blade, slathered up in sunscreen:

Well, Blade calls it sunblock, but same thing. It’s working for Frost in this scene (and I think he’s put it in his hair to cover his scalp, too, hence the greasiness), but as he says to Blade, “It’s a start, right? The goal, of course, is to be like you. Daywalker.” (Blade himself is a hybrid vampire so he can go out in the sunlight.) The rest of Frost’s skin is covered up with clothing which may also be treated in some way to protect him but his eyes aren’t protected, they should be affected but maybe it’s only light-sensitivity of the skin in that type of vampire.

For more, hit the jump.

2. This is Adam from Only Lovers Left Alive, getting a burn from sunlight:

Adam and Deacon share the ability to be awake during daylight hours. So it’s possible that Adam could wear sunscreen for protection, but given such a harsh physical reaction to such a small amount of exposure, I wouldn’t think any strength or amount of sunscreen would be strong enough for him, even if he was able to cover every last bit of skin, which would be a real challenge.

3. Louis de Pointe du Lac from movie!IWTV can’t handle the sunlight, but he’s fully conscious, reaching up to try protect himself.

Sunscreen might work for movie!Louis, too, but he would have the same issue as Adam, could he cover enough skin to make it work? I doubt it.

4. Louis and Claudia from book!IWTV fall into the Death Sleep during the day. They cannot be conscious during daylight hours, their physiology prevents it. So sunscreen, or other protective gear, would not work for them.

[fanart by Mangademon333]

The Death Sleep is basically the unconscious state that the Ricean vampires succumb to when their bodies sense the sun rising, and they only break out of it when the sun sets again or they’re under attack. There’s also fanon that they can wake from the Death Sleep during the day when under extreme emotional distress. Even defending themselves in their sleep, they’re not really conscious and only realize what happened when they wake normally. Lestat says in TVL:

And those mortals who did find us during the daylight hours, unless they exposed us to the sun at once, were doomed. For example, outside Palermo [Gabrielle] had slept in a cellar far below an abandoned house, and when she had awakened, her eyes and face were burning as if they had been scalded, and she had in her right hand a mortal, quite dead, who had apparently attempted to disturb her rest.

“He was strangled,” she said, “and my hand was still locked on his throat. And my face had been burned by the little light that leaked down from the opened door.”

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liquorandptsdvarietyshow:

homestuckorbust:

unrealityfreak:

freckledglowcloud:

p0isunn:

earlgreylavenderr:

seeweedmermaid:

willurl:

based on the assumption that human blood can survive in a vampire for about the same amount of time it can in a human body, vampires would only need to feed three or four times a year (red blood cells live about 110 days on average). this would be if they completely drained all their victims.

humans can survive losing up to about 40% of their blood, which means that a vampire pushing their limits with each victim would probably need to feed 12 times a year minimum

so like once a month

Hey guess what else happens once a month involving blood

omg no

Now that’s recycling

“Actually, period blood would be really good for a vampire; it’s incredibly nutritious, because it’s supposed to feed a foetus! And it’s probably the cleanest blood in the human body. It’s sterile.” My wife contributed.

Vampire lesbians

This is an actual scene in Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice. Lestat earns his red wings; everybody comes away happy. 

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(let’s not talk about Dora we don’t talk about Dora, Dora the nun, yes, that nun, who ended up feeding her monthly gift to someone… it was so awkward we don’t talk about Dora)

[VC – Memnoch Shenanigans by Eeba-ism]

in the movie, louis’s eye color changed once he experienced mortal death and became a vampire. Do you think this is a normal occurrence or simply something added for effect for the film?

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*Takes a deep breath* *Tries not to write a lot* *Writes a lot anyway*

I think it was both. Added for effect for the movie but also, their eye color IS enhanced with the Dark Gift. Here look at Louis’s pretty eyes change color:

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First moments as a new vampire would be intense, Vampiring has just been installed into the system and director Neil Jordan probably wanted to make it very clear to the audience that this moment is as significant a moment as birth, and other than seeing the blood dry up and absorb into his face, and now we see the blue veins more prominently, it’s the eyes that really convince us that a change is happening. The eyes are the window to the soul!

In VC, it’s often noted explained at enormous length and exquisitely vivid detail how beautiful Louis’ emerald green eyes are *u* Both before and after turning. 

Short answer is, in canon, the Blood enhances what you already have. The amount of that enhancement varies.

~Hit the jump for 3 Shades of Lestat’s eye color.~

Movie!IWTV does not align with book!IWTV on eye color. It isn’t mentioned in the books that their eye color changes by a particular tonal measurement; the Dark Gift is different for each of them, but what it does do consistently is enhance what the fledgling already had as a mortal. 

For example, Armand has warm brown eyes as a mortal, IIRC, and they take on a golden (or amber) glow when he is turned.

Their eyes brighten and darken at different times in the movie, maybe it’s related to the intensity of their emotional state. I know for a fact that they all (main adult cast, not Claudia or Denis) had at least two shades of contacts in their color: a normal set and a brighter set and of course there may have been times, as with Orlando Bloom in LOTR, that someone forgot to put the contacts in before shooting, that’s human error. 

3 Shades of Lestat’s eye color:

Chastising your idiot child who could’ve finished you both would be intense:

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Finding out that your daughter has polluted her own bed, less intense or intense in a different way? i mean it’s HER bed after all you don’t sleep with her thank goodness:

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Pleased with self for A+ parenting, low intensity:

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Louis doesn’t have scruff! he had time to shave beforehand! Lestat does though, he shaves every morning even if his is barely visible. Here’s a question though, what about the women? cus shaving body hair is a relatively new thing, do the women bother at all with it? (I mean, Gabrielle doesn’t, obviously, but what about the others?)

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I wonder whether Lestat has scruff…

“I could hear Lestat in his room, the sound of water splashing from his pitcher. The faint smell of his cologne came and went like the sound of music from the cafe two doors down from us.” – IWTV

Is he shaving? Is he brushing his fangs? Maybe he does have some scruff. He didn’t mention being freshly shaven before Magnus turns him.

ANYWAY….

The women… I dunno! It’s never mentioned! I’ll open it up to everyone. What do y’all think?

Ok so like, howwwwww …. does your vampire body know to grow your hair back, and to the same length. Like, you talk about vamps cutting their hair and then it grows back, which, ok, whatever, but then how does your body know when to STOP growing it. Like, uh oh, better add a few more inches for Claudia, but Armand only had a bob when he died, can’t go over that. How would it know?

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merciful-death:

I stopped questioning these things many years ago.  I have no idea why it is that way.  It simply is.

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pic of Santiago non-con petting Louis’ hair bc of reasons

I think the vampiric parasite (Amel) analyzes the blueprint of the host’s body when it’s installed and it then immediately uninstalls the features it doesn’t need (e.g. internal reproductive organs). It then starts converting all the organic matter of the host body into its own substance to “perfect it” into the pure supernatural killing machine that it wants to be. 

In that sense, that initial blueprint probably indicates length of hair, beard growth, muscle shape and position, etc., at time of death, and those are elements that the vampiric parasite program respects and wants to maintain as it continues to “update” its host body. It could be detrimental if a vampire shaved its head and then was stuck like that for eternity. The external appearance of the host body will affect its ability to hunt, and thus, preserve itself. It’s in the parasite’s interest for the host to continue to survive so that it can, too.

However, if the vampire had shaved as a mortal before turning, then that would be maintained.

BTW, about nails:

The nail growth part of vampire mythology seems to stem from how corpses tended to shrivel from dessication in their coffins after death, hence, making it appear that their fingernails had grown longer. Although I think hair does continue to grow for a short while after death? I’m not sure. 

Was the notion that dead blood is bad ever dispelled? I was rewatching IWTV [for what feels like the billionth time] and Louis drinks rat’s blood from a wine glass. Isn’t that blood technically dead? Does it not count as dead because it was drained from a beating heart? I’m just not sure if this was ever settled, or if this is me just over analyzing things.

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Hey, not overanalyzing! I love #vampire physiology, and this is a big topic in that. Fortunately, it’s an easy answer. 

No, dead blood is not bad (as in lethally poisonous) to Ricean vampires. It just tastes like nasty old coffee *spits*

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{{Oh Louis, bb, we know, it gets cold so quickly…}}

You’re right that movie!IWTV was not explicit on this, I will explain u a thing based on the movie & canon ;}

The rat blood: is just as drinkable as the whore lady’s blood in the crystal glass later on in the story (the rat is dead, but the lady is still alive, when their blood has been poured into glassware, and in neither scene are the vampires poisoned that way). Blood extracted from a body is not bad in itself, but it cools with the exposure to air, and cold blood tastes bad as I will explain under the cut. When a vampire feeds from the victim directly, there’s no air contact with the blood, and it stays – preferably – hot. More than that, there’s also the entire multi-sensual experience of the act of killing which is way more fun than just the consumption of the nutritional value of the blood. 

Lethal/poisonous blood is not about the blood itself, but is about the moment of death of the victim: What Lestat warns Claudia about in Vampiring: 101 (and he warns Louis in the book, too) is that she must stop drinking before the victim’s heart stops, at least in the beginning, or else the victim could take her down with them in death. That’s more about the soul separating from its body at the moment of death. Older/stronger vampires can keep drinking and slurp the impact of the death down, too.  

Hit the jump for canon stuff, spoilers in there…

In TVL: Lestat goes to Armand in Paris for help after Claudia and Louis try to assassinate him a second time, and Armand throws him in a locked cell with a dead mortal for dinner: 

“Sometime in the dark, I discovered a mortal victim there. But the victim was dead. Cold blood, nauseating blood. The worst kind of feeding, lying on that clammy corpse, sucking up what was left.”

^So clearly dead blood is not bad in the sense of being poisonous, just icky 😛

AR answered the dead blood question at a booksigning ages ago, that dead blood is like “old coffee that’s sat out for awhile. Just distasteful.”

Lestat does say in the movie (and this is probably where the confusion about the supposed lethalness of dead blood comes from, too), “You let me drink *dead* blood?” and it might seem like he means that the deadness of it was the lethally poisonous aspect of it, when in actuality he knows he’s been drugged, it was the absinthe & laudanum combo that drugged him. Still, those drugs are not poisonous to a vampire; he asks to be put in his coffin like a mortal might want to be put to bed, to sleep it off. 

Claudia did it to bring his defenses down so she had a chance at killing him. He couldn’t fend her off in that drugged state.

Who knows why director Neil Jordan didn’t clarify this, and why he had the line 

“You let me drink *dead* blood?” My guess is that he wanted to underscore Claudia’s betrayal, she had made a “peace offering” that was actually a Trojan horse, designed to enter Lestat’s system and weaken him from within. 

Which is really upsetting, especially from a daughter to a father. That moment when she convinces him she wants peace, he looks at her with the most tragic expression, as Amy Nicholson wrote in her book Tom Cruise: Anatomy of an Actor, 

“When Claudia starts her assassination plot by bringing him a human gift, Cruise’s eyes show Lestat’s surprise that someone has finally done something nice for him for the first time in the film… In that moment, we realize that while Lestat is capable of love, he’s never been loved back.”

Anne does often try to change her cannon, but that follows the books. No one mentioned sex until the third book, when Lestat said that male vampires couldn’t…ahem, work that part of their anatomy. Louis mentioned in the first one that the blood exchange of vampires, and the killing of mortals was more intimate than intercourse anyway.

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fyeahgothicromance:

Thank you for clearing that up! I remember Louis mentioning the intimacy thing but I totally forgot about Lestat. I just have a vivid memory of Armand and Daniel in bed and I guess my mind tried to fill in the blanks.

 Honestly, It’s been so long since I’ve read them that I’m starting to wonder what I actually read and what my friends and I headcanon’ed. 

#Your headcanon my vary

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cloudsinvenice:

sheepskeleton:

Does anyone has thoughts on vampires and polar night? do they need to go to sleep if there is no daylight?  

I think if there’s answers anywhere, they’ll be in Blood and Gold, but I’m not sure if she spelled it out re: Thorne… I’m curious about whether staying awake indefinitely would produce the same effects in vampires as in humans. Lestat’s state in QotD suggests that it might – it seems like Akasha flies him around the world keeping pace with the night, and this is part of why he’s so discombobulated. She apparently controls him by – amongst other things – not letting him experience anything but ‘mortal sleep’ for a long time.