Tag Archives: vampire physiology

I wonder, could you ever turn animals into vampire-animals? Like, can you turn a cat? A dog? A lion? O.o

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((When I was 11, I wrote a terrible short fanfic from the POV of a vampire dog which Lestat had turned as an experiment. I don’t remember anything about it except that the dog was pretty happy as a vampire dog… it’s lost to time and space forever. Just thought that might amuse you!))

IDK about vampire animals in other media, I’m sure someone has done it, but IIRC, they’re not in VC canon at all. I don’t know if AR has considered it, with all the implications that follow. Could the world survive packs of vampire dogs and cats? Herds of vampire horses?

Vampire

Lions?

Vampire

Tigers?

Vampire

Bears? Oh my…. Could a vampire chimpanzee (or rat!) turn a human into a vampire? Would it matter if the animal was a herbivore or would it have to be an omnivore, like humans are? If the vampire lab in PL is still running, maybe they’re experimenting on animals. #FIC REQUEST.

In some religions, animals are considered not to have souls at all, or that they lack the same type of soul that humans have. in VC, the soul seems to be a crucial element in anchoring the vampiric spirit to its host body during Dark Gift transfer.

Also, just physiologically, not all infectious diseases are transmittable between animals and humans. For example, humans cannot get Feline AIDS and feline leukemia virus (FeLV) from cats [animalplanet.com]. 

  • Zoonotic diseases: diseases transmitted from animals to humans through media such as air (like influenza) or through bites and saliva (like rabies).

  • Reverse zoonosis: human viruses that infect other animals.

I headcanon that vampirism is not a reverse zoonotic disease.

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[^X by @woutertulp]

Recycling this from a previous answer; It’s funny you mention vampire animals bc the question was raised, when old age finally started to rear its ugly head for Mojo… 

Lestat: What if we could heal him with-

Louis: NO Lestat. No.

Lestat: Just an experiment to-

Louis: We’re not making a vampire dog that’s a crime against nature we have to draw the line somewhere.

Lestat: *pouts*

Louis: *glares*

Lestat: *pouts harder*

Louis: *glares harder*

Lestat: Ok confession time: I already tried to give him a few drops of blood and he was not at all interested. Repulsed really.

Louis: *ragged sigh*

Lestat: It was worth a try!

Louis: Then why were you even asking me?

Lestat: I thought he might prefer yours–

Louis: *slaps Lestat hard across the face and storms out*

I remember hearing about (but not reading) Bunnicula, “a children’s book series written by James Howe, featuring a vampire rabbit that sucks the juice out of vegetables,” but I know that’s not quiiiiite what you were looking for, lol.

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^Lookit the widdle fangs! Bunnicula even has the classic “widow’s peak” hairline in their fur like Dracula *u* and a “cape” in the fur?? I think it’s been adapted to an animated series, too.

Other quotes I found about animal-human disease transmission:

  • “While most feline infectious diseases affect only cats, and most human infectious diseases affect only humans, it is important to be aware that some of these diseases—called zoonotic diseases—can be transmitted between cats and people.” [X]  
  • “The general rule is that viruses have a narrow range of suitable living conditions (ie body temperature, metabolism etc) and are not easily passed between species. There are some exceptions to this, but the common cold is not one of them and you will not pass it on to your cats, it cannot live in their higher body temperature.” [X]

Also relevant is zombie animals. In The Walking Dead, there are no zombie animals, and I found a forum where ppl were discussing it (walkingdeadforums.com), whether it’s true that the original comic artist set the canon for that bc he “does not enjoy drawing animals so much,” or whether there might be a scientific reason for it…. Zombie animals are as equally debatable as vampire animals!

Ok, I don’t know if they cover this in later book but I was curious: what exactly happens to the AR vampires if they don’t sleep in a coffin? Like if they didn’t sleep in a coffin, or underground, or in a grave, etc. but instead in a normal bed? I guess they wouldn’t be able to get “deep vampire sleep-death (you know)” But is it possible? (And this is assuming no sunlight.) I’m really sorry if this sounds stupid. Thanks

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lol no, Ricean vampires don’t actually need to sleep in coffins.

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[Lestat’s about to read Louis the bedtime story “Go the F*ck to Sleep”]

They do sleep in coffins in IWTV, tho, bc what they do need is complete protection from sunlight, and from anyone who might disturb them during the day. NOLA had those huge French windows everywhere, lots of sunshine in every room 😉

The deathsleep takes them and they’re powerless against it; when the sun is up, the vampires are down.

I just realized that in TVL Marius calls Armand ‘Armand’ during the Venice flashback and the discontinuity hit me like a brick in the face

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(It’s this line, right?) “Rise, Armand, we must leave here. They have come!”

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[^I don’t have a pic of Armand from the scene you mentioned, so have Claudia in a library w/ a bunch of studious older dudes who are probably concerned about what an 11 yo is studying for all these hours so late at night]

Armand’s Venice flashback was in Mind-Gift-Vision™ (or whatever you want to call it!), blasting out of Armand at Lestat and Gabrielle like water from a fire hydrant, and Lestat later transcribed it all for us about 200 yrs later. The Mind Gift is not exactly like reading a book; it seems to be more about sharing images, snippets of sound and feeling. Why did Lestat use Armand’s name in that quote and not “Amadeo”? Some ideas:

  • Lestat wrote it 200 years after experiencing it, and yes, vampiric memory is supposed to be perfect, but he also went through a few assassination attempts, so it’s possible that a few brain cells were lost along the way.
  • If Lestat ‘heard’ an “Amadeo,” in the vision, maybe he thought he must have misheard bc he knew Armand as “Armand,” and transcribed the name he knew. 
  • Maybe Armand concealed the name Marius gave him, maybe it was too painful for him to share that information with someone who had just wrecking ball’d his coven like Miley Cyrus in a red velvet tank top & undies.
  • Maybe Armand had been successfully brainwashed to the point of sealing off that name off from his memory after all those years with the Children of Darkness, to remember it after Lestat left Paris at that time.
  • Or it was our usual *~unreliable narrator~* situation, assign the blame to Armand or Lestat 😉
  • … Or, LASTLY, and most likely, it was AR who hadn’t come up with the “Amadeo” part yet. *sighs*

I can understand why discrepancies and discontinuities can be jarring, and people do bash the authors of novels for delivering what the readers see as some kind of inferior product :- 

IMO, I don’t think an author, artist, or musician is obligated to serve to you a complete and perfect story/picture/song, w/ complete and perfect facts. AR has never said that was her intention. Even the Bible has discrepancies. 

Instead of being jarred out of the story, why not make our own headcanons? You can call them “excuses” if you want 😉 Like I just did above. It’s reasonable to assume Armand didn’t want to share that name. It’s reasonable to assume Armand didn’t remember it in that moment, or that Lestat failed to catch that detail, or thought it was incorrect.

Fanworks can criticize but they can also repair what’s confusing, can fill in the interstices of canon (check out this types of fanfic diagram!). You can engage with the material to criticize it, or you can engage with it to repair it, so many ways to engage with canon and, specifically, its discrepancies.

People doing this with fanfic, fanart, and meta-analysis have made the VC so rich! Shared ideas have cured many things that were jarring for me. The missing musician vampire bothered me for so many years, and then, before PL was even a twinkle in AR’s eye, I had at least one strong answer for his disappearance and it gave me a new appreciation for him, for Lestat, for his part in the fabric of the story. 

Your headcanon is up to you. You can enhance canon with it. You have that power. Ask other people for their ideas, they can help, too. 

Now I’m not saying every discrepancy can be explained, but it is somewhat more manageable in the earlier books. I would love to see people do it with the later books! With the larger things… that are harder to explain. 

Hit the jump for more, cut for length.

Some of my favorite art misleads or leaves things out. Here’s, basically, fanart of Jackie O by Al Hirschfeld:

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^She has the slightly cartoonish distortion all around, there are strong gesture lines, there are detailed areas (the necklace, the hair, etc.), there’s her face w/

distorted features, and then there are missing lines. The back of her left arm, most of her right arm, but you as the viewer can fill those in yourself. They’re not drawn but they’re there. 

It’s not a photograph, it’s an artist’s interpretation of his subject, how she occupies space, maybe how she moves through it, her inner spirit.

Idk, not everyone likes Hirschfeld. I’m sure some people do not consider it to be Art. We all have our own experiences and our own ideas of what Art and Beauty and Good Writing are. Fanworks are a form of engagement with Art. 

Since you have all the knowledge, here’s my question: A lot of fanart has the vampires with pointy ears. I don’t really mind that at all, I’m just wondering if there’s something in the books that I missed or in what Anne Rice said in an interview or so that is the origin of that or is it just a fanon thing that developed for some reason?

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*booming voice* YISSS I HAVE ALLLL THE KNOWLEDGE. Lol, no, I’ve just read the books a lot of times and can usually recall this kind of minutiae. ANYONE CAN HAVE THIS POWER if they simply spend an inordinate amount of time reading these books, the meta, the fanfic… ehehehe…. 

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[^Louis would probs not actually make this kind of commentary out loud during movies in public, but he definitely does when watching things w/ the coven privately. Lestat finds it endearing at times and irritating at other times. Also, Louis’s ears almost look pointy here, trick of the light.]

I’d say pointy ears is a fandom thing, I don’t think the ear shape has ever been mentioned in canon. I love it, I find it really charming, whether the ears are really sharpened or just subtly pointy ^_____^

It’s probably influenced by other vampire media, like Nosferatu, and it helps to differentiate the characters as *~preternatural creatures~* in fanart rather than as their mortal selves, which usually don’t have the vampiry embellishments.

Sometimes AR does mention smtg that wasn’t in canon, but we don’t all necessarily accept her additional info. To my knowledge, she hasn’t addressed this, I don’t think she’s offered much re: vampire physiology outside of canon; she usually volunteers/responds more about their sexuality or their current happenings, or their feelings about topics (#Fan questions for Lestat was AR RPing as Lestat, basically!).

We’ve added other little things in fanworks that were never mentioned in canon… for example, Daniel Molloy wears glasses in fanart even after being turned when presumably he wouldn’t need them! That’s probably bc of movie!IWTV bc iirc he doesn’t wear glasses in canon so maybe he’s popped the lenses out and wears them for fashion, like Kevin in the recent Ghostbusters.

Explain to me why vampires cannot drink dead blood, but vampires (which are dead) can still drink the blood of other vampires?

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IDK about other vampires, but I would say that Ricean vampires are not in fact poisoned by dead blood, they can drink it, it’s just very distasteful to them. I’m not going to use all the equivocating language like “may,” and “might,” this is all my very strong opinion on this topic so as always #your headcanon may vary, don’t take it personally if we disagree.

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

The huge difference between dead mortal (human or animal) blood and vampire blood is that the *~vampiric parasite~* in vampire blood keeps them alive/undead. Ricean vampires aren’t 100% dead (though they may poetically feel that way), they are metamorphosed into a supernatural accident. 

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’s incapacitated 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 as well in that drugged state.

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 😛 It must still have some minimal nutritional value since he feeds on it anyway.

Hit the jump for a little more, cut for length.

Lethal/poisonous blood is not about the blood itself, but is about the moment of death of the victim: What movie!Lestat warns Claudia about in Vampiring 101: (and he warns Louis in the book!IWTV) 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. Lestat describes doing it in TVL against his maker’s advice bc of course he goes against his maker’s advice:  

“…and when the blood came it was
pure voluptuousness. In fact, it was so exquisite that I forgot
completely about drawing away before the heart stopped. We were on
our knees in the snow together, and it was a wallop, the life going into
me with the blood. I couldn’t move for a long moment. Hmmm,
broke the rules already, I thought. Am I supposed to die now?
Doesn’t look like that is going to happen. Just this rolling delirium.”

Also worth noting is that when mortals are turned in canon, they describe vampire blood as being extremely delicious, satisfying in more than a physical way: “And it was not merely the dry hissing coil of the thirst that was quenched and dissolved, it was all my craving, all the want and misery and hunger that I had ever known.” – Lestat (TVL). Strong words! AR has equated the Dark Gift to childbirth and I think the act of the fledgling feeding on their maker is very much like an infant at its mother’s breast. That kind of nourishment is physical AND emotional.

Personally, I’ve tasted dead blood very recently, I just had chocolate blood pudding a few days ago at the Feeding Hannibal dinner (with @mferret9​, @sarah-thetrappedcat, and @thatironstring​!) and it was yummy but it does not produce that kind of satisfaction. At least not for me!

I thought that Louis was really weak for a vampire but I was told that he wasn’t. I’m confused because I always remember him being portrayed a physically weak as far as vampires go.

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Well, it depends what part of canon you’re at, and what amount of canon you accept.*  I’m still not entirely sure what my headcanon is w/ his current abilities, but even if you ignore all of canon after IWTV, he’s been a vampire 225 years so he’s stronger just through age if nothing else. 

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He’s also one of the only vampires in canon who has never “gone to ground” (hiding/burying oneself in the ground for an extended period of time in a state of complete or semi-unconsciousness), even though he’s had very good reasons to ;A;

 Armand describes Louis’ lack of powers here in TVA: “…unable to read minds, or to levitate, or to spellbind others except inadvertently, which can be hilarious, an immortal with whom mortals fall in love.”

Just from IWTV and into the later books, yes, Louis is referred to as physically weaker than the other vampires, and he doesn’t exhibit any of the gifts that some other fledglings have in canon (like telepathy, telekinesis). This doesn’t mean he doesn’t have any of these now, but that he hasn’t really exercised them in canon. 

Lestat tells us in TVL: “I never revealed to him half my powers, and with reason, because he shrank in guilt and self-loathing from using even half of his own.”

But he’s still stronger and faster than a mortal. He’s also able to defend himself and kick a lot of ass, so to call him “really weak” is probably an overstatement. What he lacks physically he makes up for mentally, he’s strategic in the way he attacks when he does attack, and he can hold his own against much stronger and older vampires (he took out most of the Theatre des Vampires on his own in IWTV!)

Part of his weakness in comparison to the rest of the coven is the fact that he was Lestat’s 3rd fledgling in such a short period of time after Lestat’s 2nd fledgling (Nicolas). In Ricean vampire physiology, a maker needs to wait a good long while between making fledglings; too much frequency will make subsequent fledglings weaker than they could have been. Plus, even though Lestat had the blood of a much older and stronger vampire when he was turned, Lestat himself was only a decade into vampiring himself. It seems the vampiric spirit discourages the transfer of powers from young vampires to their fledglings. If anyone got the bulk of that power, it was Gabrielle, Lestat’s first.

There is also some speculation that the blood transfer needs to be exchanged more than once (how it was done w/ Louis) to ensure a stronger fledgling. Marius, for example, exchanged blood with his maker multiple times when he was turned.

*Spoilers under the cut.

Louis was upgraded in Merrick, and in PL, he can fly (the Cloud Gift). We don’t know if he has any others now. Maybe we’ll find out in PLROA! He has a significant role in it, according to AR.

Sorry for the spam, but I’ve been binging your archive a bit and I’m wondering, just out of curiosity, how would you go about constructing at least somewhat science-y vampires?

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biologyweeps:

That depends of course on what sort of vampire we’re aiming for. Infectious vampirism would require an infectious agents of course and there I would tend more towards viruses because they do muck around with DNA and protein construction so for physical changes that’d be neat.

At the same time, parasitic infectious a la The Strain are also really tempting, especially because it drifts over into ‘behavioural changes caused by parasites’ which is just hella cool, though I figure that those vampires would be sitting halfway between what we tend to think of as vampires and Umbrella Corp zombies. 

If we’re going with non-infectious vampirism, the field of genetics is wiiiiide open, though personally I’m not a huge fan of the whole ‘super predator’ thing because again, evolution the straight C student. You wouldn’t get twilight-style ‘super attractive/fast/strong’ because frankly one of those would be perfectly sufficient and as we all know, the concept of evolution is to get a ‘good enough’ and that’s it. Look at cheetahs. They’re incredibly speedy, but like sighthounds they’re not terribly strong. They don’t need to be. If you can run your intended prey down and strangle-bite the exhausted gazelle, there’s no need for you to be able to rip it into two parts as well. 

So like, you’re vampires are fabulously hot, chances are it’s a prey lure tactic and they’re not very fast. If you make them poisonous they might not even be very strong. On the other hands, if they’re ugly as sin you’re most likely looking at something that’s doesn’t need to make humans come close it so it probably *is* really speedy and/or strong enough to kill you before you can get away.

So uh yeah basically first you gotta settle on what sort of vampirism you want and then you gotta consider how you’d arrive at that particular kind through evolutionary sensible means (meaning with the last amount of effort). Thankfully nature provides for a lot of inspiration already if you want to wrangle out specific details.