Decay
In season one of True Blood we see Bill nearly die from exposure to sunlight. I estimate that it would take a total of 250 seconds of exposure to kill Bill.
In season two of True Blood we see Godric commit suicide by watching the sun rise. It takes 30 seconds before death.
Why can Bill take more light than Godric? I propose a theory.
It is a well known fact, across nearly all vampire mythos, that the longer a vampire is alive the stronger it will get, and this has been established in True Blood as well. However, I theorize that it is not the vampire getting stronger with age, it is everything that makes a vampire a vampire increasing in intensity. Meaning that as a vampire’s speed and strength increase with age, so do the weaknesses associated with being a vampire (namely, sensitivity to sunlight).
Vampire Bill was 144 years old at the time that he was exposed to sunlight in the last episode of season 1.
Godric was 2100 years old at the time of his death.
Age of vampire (yrs)| 144 | 2100 |
Sun Exposure (sec) to death| 250 | 30 |
Using these data we can extrapolate the age of a vampire if the time until death due to sun exposure is known (and vice versa).
One of the most memorable sun exposure deaths in all of vampire lore is that of Count Orlok (Nosferatu). His time til death was a mere 5 seconds. So where does that put him in number of years?
Approximately 3753 years old.
Just so it’s absolutely clear: Vampires
Unrelated: Extrapolating the age of Nosferatu is harder than you’d think when you got an F in Calculus.
On Appetite
We see it all the time; a woman walking home from work decides to take a shortcut through a dark alley. A shadow flickers past her, she stops—looks around—nothing. She continues walking, though at a faster pace. Just then a flash of movement, a cry for help, a muffled scream, and it’s all over.
The detective arrives at the scene, “What’s the story?”, he asks.
The coroner, still kneeling over the woman’s (now pale) body, speaks.
“She’s been completely drained of blood.”
But there isn’t a trace.
The average human body contains around 5 litres of blood, closer to 4.7 for our female vic over there. Now whether or not the vampire responsible, sucked, sipped, or lapped up the blood from the holes in her neck (which is a topic for another post all together), we assume that he ingested all of it.
Problem is, the human stomach can only hold an absolute max of ~4 litres.
After ~40% of blood loss a person will go into shock and die without treatment, so two litres of blood sucking would be enough to fill a vampire’s stomach and kill its victim.
On to another issue.
As far as I know, no data has been collected as to exactly how the supernatural digestion of blood occurs within a vampire. Or why some vampires seem to be constantly feeding, whether you’ve got an insatiable blood lust or not, if your stomach is literally completely filled, as shown above, by one meal then why do we see in some cases a string of deaths overnight?
Hypothesis
Since we know that, to a vampire, blood is life, and that blood is compromised of very few ingredients (see the Constitution of Normal Blood chart to the left of this page), we can reasonably make the conclusion that very little (or no) digestion is necessary, making the stomach less the part of a biological process and more like just a receptacle for blood.
Now, as we can see in this diagram from wikipedia, the stomach is supplied with blood through two arteries and sits right next to the aorta. If we imagine that one of the physical changes a human undergoes during the transformation into a soulless creature of the night, is that the blood flow to the stomach from the heart reverses. This would allow freshly consumed blood to immediately exit the stomach and flow through the heart and body; and, ipso facto, account for the insatiable blood lust.
The Day Is Always Longer Than The Night
The interesting thing about vampires in the True Blood universe is that they for all intents and purposes *must* go to sleep at dawn; staying up during daylight hours severely weakens them (similar to Vampire Hunter D, vamps), and they get “The Bleeds”. Bill suggested in last weeks episode that his maker, Lorena could only stay awake 2 or 3 full days before becoming weak enough for him to overpower her. This claim is strange considering Lorena is significantly older than Bill, possibly even older than Eric, i.e. >1000 years as suggested in season 2 ep. 6.
The only way that Bill’s comment could be true (assuming he knows what he’s talking about) would be that if True Blood vamps stay up long enough their strength eventually decreases to a base level. If this base level is the strength they possessed as human beings, then Bill would be able to overpower Lorena’s slim build.
Anyway, back to sleeping.
Since vampires wake up at sunset and go to sleep at dawn their days are significantly shorter than a normal humans, who normally wake up sometime after dawn and then stay up until well past sundown. The average time between sunset and sunrise in almost every part of the world is ~10 hours. So vampires, possessing eternal life, spend more of it asleep than regular humans do.
10 waking hours per each 24 hour day comes out to 0.41666666. Meaning that every vampire only spends ~42% of each day awake (or ~58% of each day asleep).
Now lets say that the maximum lifespan for a vampire is about 5000 years (I’m probably being optimistic), at which point the chances of dying some way approach 100%.
5000 years of life at only 42% of actual living comes out to only 2083.33 years. A vampire spends over half their life asleep!
Compare this to the average human being who spends only 33.333% of the time asleep over the course of its life.
