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Apprentice comments on Luminosity (Twilight fanfic) discussion thread - Less Wrong
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Comments (435)
I love the fic. HP:MOR is alternatively brilliant and cringeworthy but this is consistently well-written. And sometimes poignant. Hopefully I'll get around to write a review at some point. For now, just some thoughts on blood.
I would expect Bella to try hard to find ways to satisfy her hunger more satisfactorily. Some things she could plausibly look into:
Since some animals taste better than others, which one tastes best? Do hominids taste any good? Or maybe some predator which vampires might rarely encounter? Killer whales?
Are there any ways to process/cook/spice animal blood so that it tastes less bad?
Is there a way to synthesize a yummy blood substitute? This would be an ambitious research/engineering project but with immortality, you might as well get started.
Are there any ways to obtain human blood which Bella might find ethically satisfactory? Edward used to kill bad guys, maybe that's worth at least thinking about? What about people that are dying anyway? People in a permanent vegitative state? Braindead people?
How about blood donations? Humans can, and frequently do, donate a significant amount of blood without negative effects on their well being. If stealing blood intended for medical purposes is too unethical, then perhaps you could get some human friends to donate yummy blood now and then? I'm sure the world has a lot of vampire fans who would be happy to do that. If the Volturi keep human fan girls around, then maybe there is some realistic way for you to do it too? And if it's hard to get a significant amount of blood then maybe you could at least have enough to indulge on special occasions? Or maybe you could mix a little human blood with a lot of animal blood and get something that tastes significantly better than your normal meal?
Of course there are reasons why none of these ideas might work out (e.g. gorillas might actually taste pretty good but they're rare and somewhat unethical to kill; a bit of human blood now and then might just drive you crazy for more etc.) but Bella is the kind of person I would expect to look into things like this before accepting a life (an eternal life, no less) of unsatiable cravings. We already know that there are fairly obvious things (like drinking water) which her vampire family has never thought of trying so she probably wouldn't just think "someone would have noticed".
Edit: I see the point about donated blood was already raised below and explained away in the way I guessed.
Carnivores taste better than herbivores; omnivores are presumably in between. I implied, although perhaps not strongly enough, that Edward tried a shark; it was more or less in line with predators in general. There's not enough variance to expect there to be a particularly excellent species somewhere. Individual vampires have preferences within animalspace but there's no way to predict what Bella will like best until she's sampled a few kinds.
Nope. It's best straight out of the jugular.
Maybe. Bella's probably going to start something along these lines once she can stand being around human blood - she wants to figure out what there is in human blood that makes it tasty. (Carlisle could start something like this, but while he's a fine character and whatnot, he does not have an experimental mindset, and would be unlikely to give up large chunks of his time to satisfy this interest of Bella's. For example, instead of thinking about what might cause vampire venom to cause turning, and then getting a lot of it directly into Edward's heart when he was administering his first turn, he settled for recreating the bites he himself had received. This, it turns out, made the process unnecessarily drawn out.)
Your other questions have, as you noted, been addressed.
Does the boar's blood taste better because of biochemical similarities between humans and pigs?
No, Bella just happens to like them a bit more than other animals (except, as per latest update, orca whales.) Emmett's favorite is bear and Edward prefers mountain lion.
Thank you, I appreciate the reply. I didn't mean that I was curious about the answers to those questions, as such. My only concern was that I felt it would be in character for Bella to be asking questions like these. And, as your answers imply, I'm sure she will - she's only just turned and the problem would have been less salient to her before.
So, I know this is a long-since obsolete issue, but it really is a good thing for story purposes that none of the Cullens are experimentalists by nature. Hooking up an experimentalist with a precognitive is a balance-destroying arrangement... you get the results of any non-longitudinal experiment you make up your mind to perform, with a direct perception of whether that result is reliable or just a statistical fluke, without actually having to perform it.
Oh, there is a yummy killer whale in the latest update! That was sweet of you.
What's sweet about including the killer whale?
I asked you if killer whales were tasty and then there was a tasty killer whale in the next update. This elicited a small, pleasant emotional reaction in me which I can try to verbalize as follows: "oh, I guess I had a tiny impact on that story I like - it's sweet of Alicorn to interact with her fans in this way".
I thought of the possibility that you had the chapter written already and the whale was a mere coincidence but I thought that was unlikely enough that I could proceed on the assumption that it was not the case.
I'm overexplaining - in my defence it's been my experience that the type of verbosity I am prone to finds a less unwelcome audience on Less Wrong than most other places.
That's interesting - while I don't object on principle to reacting like that to reader comments, and hadn't already written ch. 32, I don't have a memory of consciously choosing to include killer whales because of your question. In my head it looked like I was going, "Well, they're on an island, Bella would rather not hunt close to humans, somebody would probably be annoyed with me if they ate dolphins... what's the range on killer whales? Oh, those things are all over the place, that's what's for dinner." But of course I read your question, and you probably primed me.
I wouldn't say the coincidence was unlikely. The honeymoon location was carried over from canon and in such a setting killer whales are the obvious choice of food. They are more or less carnivorous dolphins. You cannot get too much higher on the "similar to humans and eat a lot of meat" criteria.
But you still have cause to be flattered. Great minds think alike and all that!
She is? I think you just convinced me to have a read!
Well, this Bella is an Alicornist - she's introspective and with a problem-solving mentality. In some ways, this fic is a better sell for Alicornism than HP:MOR (which I also like) is for EY's ideas. For one thing, Bella feels like a perfectly plausible 17 year old girl. She's not a prodigy and doesn't have any active magical abilities. It's easy to identify with her and the fic plausibly shows her as the equal of very powerful supernatural beings, just by virtue of adhering to Alicornism.
I feel like the word for someone who practices my general belief system should be "unicorn".
So mote it be! Bella is not only a sparkly vampire - she is also a unicorn. Take that, Twilight haters!
So if I adopted your beliefs that would mean only virgins could touch me? Sounds like that would lead to a LOT of one night stands! ;)
In the short term, maybe. I suspect one would sooner or later acquire encyclopedic knowledge of what "doesn't count." http://oglaf.com/nightfall/2/ (NSFW)
Might want to tag that NSFW, for the benefit of the three people here who haven't been exposed to Oglaf yet.
"Alicornist?" "Alicornism?" Can we try not to use these sorts of terms?
I meant "Alicornist" as a, perhaps slightly playful, shorthand for "person who adheres to [some important subset of] the ideas of Less Wrong user Alicorn as laid out in her sequence on living luminously". If this terminology is felt to be unclear, offensive or objectionable in some other way, I am certainly willing to not use it again. I'd appreciate an explanation, though.
Well, first off, the terms "luminous" and "luminosity" already exist and serve the same purpose, so it's needlessly confusing to invent new terms that mean the same thing or close to the same thing. Secondly, identifying yourself or others with terms at all is generally undesirable, as it promotes several irrational thought processes. I'm actually in the process of writing a top-level post on this subject, and that has me in focus mode, so apologies if I seem unnecessarily picky.
And they're worse. Specifically they are ingroup jargon with a well known outgroup meaning that looks somewhere between an amusing non-sequitur and arrogant. "You're claiming to glow?"
<Person>ist is at least a recognizable English language template.
Given that "alicorn" is a word, I think "Alicornist" is also ingroup jargon. You'd have to know who I am to understand it. Otherwise it's "do you worship unicorn horns or something?"
It's a word that I had to Google, and I have a medium-large vocabulary. "Luminous" is not. You are third in the search results. I think it would easily be seen as a name.
Don't forget about Google's annoying tendency to give you relevant search results.
Our Alicorn is second, third, sixth, and seventh on the search results for Alicorn here, not counting "in your social circle".