#last notes are: god i still REALLY need to polish up vampire lore

[rxttenfish]

SUPER super late. but. please talk to me ab liam de lioncourt for the redesign. he is my <3 and i am literally so content starved AFCHDHDGXG

no worries! you can send me asks about the redesigns at any time - this is very much a long term project for me, as i've been working on it... well over a year, honestly!

likewise, it helps me pace myself and not burn out, since i've been holding onto this ask for a few days because life has been rough. there's a lot to get through still and a lot to still work out, so even though i've been providing big blocks of text, i still consider any redesign other than merfolk to still be in its infancy!

so! vampires!

vampirism as it is, is a magical virus. it's adapted most specifically to humans, but it has made the jump to other mammalian sapients before. the werewolves are the second most common species to be affected other than humans, and catfolk are the third. (i'll probably add more mammalian sapient species in the future, but they'll likely be lower in number than the other two anyways, and werewolves are just genetically the closest to humans).

it's pretty hard-locked to mammals though, normal for a virus to have a preferred host, so merfolk and gorgons are naturally immune, and it requires a living host, so ghosts and resurrected undead are going to also be safe, and it's specifically biological in origin with magic adaptations, so entirely magically constructed species like demons are immune too.

it's passed either from blood-to-blood contact, or through vampire saliva coming in contact with blood. even when infection occurs, the infected person might still simply pass away due to the illness, instead of becoming a new vampire. the likelihood of surviving is somewhat higher among innate/native magic users, as magic's most common role in the body is to bolster the immune system.

now, this is a virus which has magical adaptations to a degree, and when it infects a host that magic starts to be seen. because it follows suit with other viruses in modifying the host to better pass on the virus to something else, be it behaviorally or physically. and, because this is a magical virus, it can do some things that normal viruses just can't do.

namely, it will literally modify the body. the nature of magic means that it picks up on traces of the environment its surrounded by, slightly modifying the magic and how it behaves when it is used - so vampirism will usually end up modifying the host in ways similar to certain animals around them, and especially animals that may have carried it as a vector. mosquitoes, dogs, cats, rats, fleas, leeches, and, yes, bats, are all common, but because magic is weird, the new bodily changes seldom... mesh well together. this is where a large portion of new vampires die, as the virus is basically regurgitating a transformation onto them without consideration as to what the host's anatomy is supposed to be or how it is supposed to function. it has some consistent themes, however, in usually focusing around the mouth and modifying the digestive system to be capable of ingesting blood.

this comes with a new compulsion to try and eat blood. and i do mean compulsion when i say that - while there are certainly vampires that have been impacted in a bad enough way to make eating their usual diet difficult to impossible, most vampires can still eat what they've always been eating! in fact, the virus doesn't ever truly compensate for the shifting nutritional needs, so they'll still need what they've always needed out of what they eat, with the only difference being that now they can digest blood too.

in fact, vampirism is... largely pretty survivable, if the virus itself doesn't kill you. it requires accommodation, and even if there was a cure it would probably kill the vampires to do so (as they need the virus's capacity for magic just to keep their bodies working now), but they're still the same person. most of the time, if they try to eat normal food, they'll feel sick and be disgusted by it, but this occurs on a spectrum, and is capable of getting better over time. similarly, foods that merely look like blood can be a good workaround, not to mention the fact that the virus makes no distinction on animal or person blood. it can get bad if they don't have this understanding and willingness to accommodate, but you could say that about anyone, since desperation seldom makes anyone pleasant.

in fact, there are some... pretty weird interactions between vampirism and the human body, and if a vampire can manage their new needs long-term, then they find that their body has basically forgot how to age or die of old age, and the magic introduced by the virus effectively freezes their body as it was when they were infected. they can still be killed, though, even if their healing factor similarly gets odd, and one of the go-to methods is by removing the head and placing it away from the body.

( this, of course, is based on the old methods of vampire burial, though i don't believe dirt in the mouth would do it)

moving on to liam in particular, i've actually already drawn him before!

however, this was... quite a while ago? before i started really settling on some details for the redesign universe, and making it actually cohesive as a universe with its own rules, so he's very outdated by now.

i think i might actually begin to move away from the bat influences from him? because that has started to bother me- because vampire bats were only known by europeans after they were described in 1810. it doesnt really, then, make a lot of sense for a european vampire that predates things like the columbian exchange to be influenced by their real-life counterparts. of course, bats were still associated with vampires before then, but, remember, so were wolves and owls, both which notably have no version of themselves that solely subsists on blood.

if anything, as i work on him again and slowly begin to fuss over vampires again, i might make him be more evocative of a bat instead of an actual bat, much like what i've done with vera and gorgons or scott and werewolves. i have always had a soft spot for vampires with proboscises ala The Strain, so i might grab something similar, just to further muddy the water with the tooth connection.

otherwise, fairly normal liam? i can say that, since vampirism is magical in origin and is prone to infecting innate/native magic users, that this would bolster someone's internal pool of useable magic, which has some particularly fun implications as it ties back into his history with the coven!

[liquidstar]

If you wouldn’t mind me asking, how did you develop your ocs, the world and the plot? It’s very interesting

I don't mind at all anon! Thank you for taking an interest ;-; as usual though im pretty sleep deprived while I'm typing this so try to excuse any typos lol

In all honesty a lot of it was playing it by ear for me as I figured stuff out, but that’s not to say that I didn’t put a lot of work into the world and the characters! It’s just that inspiration would strike at random times, I’d have an idea, and then I’d polish that idea and fix it up as needed as I went along. And even now I’m not done doing that, I may still change stuff or add stuff or even take stuff away, but ultimately I do think that I’m not going to stray too far from the route I’m currently on!

When inspo first struck for the idea, I was about 16, I saw an opening for a fantasy cartoon and when the character ensemble popped up on screen I thought “that’s so much fun! I wanna do something like that!” but at the time the sole concept was “A group of kids in a fantasy word, they are cool and have powers and adventures” and that was about it. Then one night I got bored and watched Wizards of Waverly Place, and it was the episode where they went to school, and I was like “That would be fun!!! A school!!!” and I started thinking about a school concept.

Originally the school wasn’t for wizards it was just for mythical creatures like vampires and werewolves and all that, but I felt the concept was really similar to Monster High at the end of the day and I honestly didn’t feel like I could compete with the creativity for the monsters on that show, not to mention it made world building more complex but I’m getting ahead of myself. Eventually it just became a magic school for wizards, but I really wasn’t even concerned about being too similar to Harry Potter (despite getting inspo from what was basically a parody of it in WoWP) because though the core concept was pretty similar the stories and characters operated so different that I didn’t feel it would be an issue, if anything it wasn’t Harry Potter I was worried about it being too close to but RWBY, but that’s no longer a concern since that series went in a totally different direction that I thought it would.

A bit of the mythical creature concept did stick around in the form of people that have animal features, that was dropped too also partly due to the RWBY comparison but also because it added a needless layer to the story and proved problematic for worldbuilding. Though some people may still have animal traits it would just be because of their magic. There’s a lot of other stuff that was changed over time too, like some characters' personalities are totally different from when they started!

As for how I came up with the characters, from the get-go I knew I needed to fill a whole class up so I made a list of 16 highschool archetypes, prep jock nerd goth etc. and just sort of build around them from there, but of course a lot of them don’t have anything in common with that archetype anymore it was just a starting point and in some cases a placeholder name.

Here’s the thing about me tho… I’m terrible at naming things! I named my rabbit “stinky” for God’s sake! So I came up with a complicated solution to this issue that ended up being more work for me than if I had just named the characters generic fantasy names with no real meaning behind them… But I wanted meaning!!! I wanted a naming scheme! I don’t remember exactly how I came around to flower symbolism, but after trying out a few other things that didn’t stick I ended up doing that and it was GREAT because I could base their personality traits on the flowers/plants they were named after and it was a great starting point for figuring them out a bit more in-depth.

Then I drew the main 16 for the first time, along with a couple teachers I conceptualized while I was at it. And for a while… That was it! I had other ideas but I just had the main group down and worked on their arcs and backstories and stuff. Eventually the board of characters grew and the list of plants I knew too much about along with it. As I developed them I started to want conflict for the story, so I came up with some (at the time) one-note antagonists that I would later build onto more.

But before I could do that I went back to ponder the lore of the world they live in, how magic works, the most important part being Iris and Crocus’ backstory and if I’m being honest the concept of a school run by a God-figure was inspired by Soul Eater. After I did some basic world building and school building I just had to figure out how this impacted the characters living in it, and I was mostly done with the hard parts.

The last thing for the story in its “early” phases was give it a theme, that theme ended up being the concept of “heirship” which I elaborate a lot more on in another post, but the main point was it’s about what people expect you to be, which is why a bunch of characters are also literally heirs in one way or another, it’s a running motif for them and the first one i fully integrated into the concept of the story and it stuck.

That concept being solidified as important to the story is what I consider the end of the first part of my development for it, from then on I just had to figure out a rough timeline that I would edit as I went on. And I’m by no means done either! I still have a lot I can work on and improve so hopefully it can be a great story one day :) for now I’m still editing that timeline and tuning up anything that needs tuning, I have time!