#peter watts

St. Valerie & Portia, or the End to Loneliness

Go aspidontus girl go snap that arm

(I know Portia probably doesn’t really look like that texture-wise but it’s hard to make that oily grey spilled paint look pop at my skill level,,,,,,, plus you have more fun drawing Portia pixels on a blobby surface

Prehistoric AU little Valerie doodles.

I think infant Wattsian vampires would probably look & feel less off-putting than adult ones. Watts said something about ancient vampires parasitizing human social groups and making humans give birth to and raise their offsprings like cursed cuckoos and I’ve been thinking about that ever since. My headcanon is that infant/toddler vampires definitely seemed “off” to humans but the difference wasn’t enough to provoke a immediate “kill it with fire” reaction (or an “ewww I’m not breastfeeding that” reaction). Eye difference would have been subtle for the first couple years of life (eye colors change a lot during childhood even for humans). Vasoconstriction noticeable but not so, um, corpse-like. Deciduous teeth probably looked more like human baby teeth but adult teeth would come in early (4-5 yr?) and sharp.

Judging by Valerie’s canonical ability to imitate Janna’s voice and predict the exact things people were going to say (tone and all), watching a baby vampire getting her first words would probably be a horrifying experience. Well, not “kill it with fire” horrifying, but still far from wholesome. Jim Moore said Vampires have idiomatic speech patterns and Val did use a lot of stock phrases (interestingly Jukka didn’t; he felt a lot more…well-socialized) so my headcanon is that they are gestalt language processors.

Since the human retina and visual cortex go through a huge amount of development during infancy & childhood, ancient vampires probably weren’t born with full blown Crucifix Glitches ready to kick in and kill at any moment. Kids tend to have lower seizure threshold as well as less acute visual processing abilities so that could lead to some interesting implications... Another thing is that photosensitive & pattern-sensitive epilepsies in humans usually don’t present until middle childhood to late teens (mediated by many other factors but still).

I really really really hope we’ll get to see more vampire physiology in Omniscience,,,,,,is that an unrealistic expectation? Will I even live long enough to see that book come out??

Wanted to see a Simon Fraser training slideshow with Valerie demonstrating the physiological side effects of Anti-Euclideans. Fixed dilated pupils is the easiest one to spot (just ask Sachita Bhar!)

Comparison of Wattsian vampire and human morphology at 5 yrs old. The vampire kid is, of course, based on Valerie.

Part of an AU where Val is the child of a human mother and a vampire father and grows up in a neolithic human settlement. Her mom is living out her version of the We Need to Talk About Kevin movie in constant terror and confusion. Very Changeling narrative. There’s virtually no intersecting true right angles in Val’s environment, but she still has pattern-sensitive epilepsy and would occasionally have focal seizures when she sees things that come close to a cross or a bunch of near right angles taking up too much of her visual field (fabric patterns, looms, weaved baskets, lattice fence, etc). People couldn’t help but associate her extraordinary abilities with divine power or spiritual possession, and these focal attacks only strengthened the belief.

{I wish the Sacred Disease and mad prophet archetype connection was explored a bit more (or at all) in Echopraxia. I mean we have a Moses type character who suffered repeated seizures and went on to develop almost mythical abilities through the very suffering. Who’s to say Val didn’t have her burning bush moment during one of the Simon Fraser experiments. Also the whole thing about the Crucifix Glitch is that prehistoric vampires usually didn’t survive them in nature once a true generalized seizure set in. Making them suffer dozens (or even hundreds, my headcanon is that Val was extensively involved in crucifix glitch researches) of attacks and bringing them back is going to cause unprecedented changes to their sophisticated brains. I mean hello, seizure induced neuroplasticity? Vampire Geschwind syndrome? Seizure related consolidation? Valerie might have started off as a neurotypical vampire (as neurotypical as a reconstructed vampire can be), but I very much doubt she could still be seen as one after a couple of years in crucifix glitch land.}

Anyway. Neolithic vampire AU kinda inevitable after reading that unhinged (or very hinged) comment on his blog. Now what would our boy Jukka be doing in this setting…Poor Siri would end up getting a trepanation for sure.

Valerie doodles